Tag Archives: readers

Don’t Touch that Dialect!

As you write your fiction, should you have your characters speaking in dialect? By this I mean the purposeful misspelling of words in a phonetic manner to indicate how your character is speaking them.

The study of dialect is fascinating and, as a fiction writer, you should be familiar with the dialect used by your characters. But the question is whether to indicate some or all of the character’s word pronunciations to the reader phonetically.

One good reason for doing so is to show authenticity. Writing in dialect gives readers a great feel for the character, since you’re depicting the speech as it would really be. Also, the use of dialect allows you to distinguish characters from each other. If each character has a distinctive way of pronouncing words, that’s a help to the reader in telling them apart.

There are significant dangers in using dialect in your writing, though. First, it can slow down the reading process. Readers get annoyed having to stumble over your strangely-spelled words. Worse, they can get confused if you do a clumsy job of it and they have to stop and puzzle out what a character is supposed to be saying.

Worse still, you can offend a reader. These days, offended readers might not merely chuck your book, they can post scathing reviews which can really cut down on sales.

There are degrees of offense, of course. And attitudes change with time.  Just after Mark Twain wrote Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, readers were more put off by its crude and mildly obscene language. Now the main criticisms involve its depiction of the black slave character, Jim. In fact, it’s hard to even read the book these days because it comes off as racist by today’s standards. It helps, just a little, to realize that Jim is, in fact, a noble character. And ennobling, in the sense that he forces Huck to struggle with the values of the society he lives in.

Jar Jar BinksHowever, a worse example of offending an audience with dialect is Jar Jar Binks in some of the Star Wars movies.  Since Jar Jar is an alien, (a Gungan), writer and director George Lucas could have gotten creative and invented a new and distinctive dialect. Instead he chose to give this character a dialect nearly identical to that of Jamaican English. To aggravate the offense, he made Jar Jar a comic relief character, bumbling and rather stupid.

Getting back to the question of whether to use dialect in your writing, I suggest you use it sparingly, while being sensitive to the problems of confusing or offending your readership. There are other ways to convey the distinctiveness of a character other than dialect. These include word choice, grammar, idioms, slang, gestures and other actions, and clothing choice. I think writer Jennifer Jensen has some great advice on dialect here.

The story in which I used dialect to the greatest degree is “The Six Hundred Dollar Man.”  Only you readers can decide if the cowboy dialect of 1870 Wyoming was rendered well in that story by—

                                                           Poseidon’s Scribe

July 21, 2013Permalink

Does Blogging Help Your Writing?

If you’re thinking of starting up a blog as a way to improve the quality of your fiction writing, I’m here to tell you—blogging will have just as much effect on your golf swing.

Hamlet blogMy answer is different if you write non-fiction.  Well-written blogs are like essays, with the same structure and purpose.  The skills needed are the same.

For fiction writers, there’s very little in common between your stories and your blog posts.  The talents you develop doing one won’t translate well to the other.

It’s even possible for blogging to worsen your fiction writing.  Certainly it’s cutting into your productivity, at least.  Each precious minute spent blogging is sixty seconds lost and unavailable for writing fiction.

Also, let’s say you become an expert in all the aspects of blogging, able to craft persuasive, short essays with well-researched facts, finely structured arguments, and logical conclusions.  It’s possible for that ‘lecturing voice’ to worm its way into your fiction, and you don’t want that.

Am I telling you, the beginning fiction writer, not to blog?  No, I’m just helping you set expectations; blogging won’t make your fiction better.  But there are several valid reasons for fiction authors to blog:

  • It helps enforce schedule discipline, and to associate deadlines with writing.  This is only true if you post to your blog on a regular basis.  Whether you write fiction or non-fiction, getting to ‘The End’ is important.
  • It’s a form of self-education.  When I come across an idea for a future blog entry, I add it to my list, (which is quite long now).  When I look to see what topic is scheduled for any particular week, I find it generally involves a bit of research.  So while blogging about the craft of writing, I’m coming across knowledge I can use.
  • The best reason for a fiction writer like you to blog, though, is to build your platform, increase your web presence, and connect with readers.

Blog if you want to, but don’t go into it thinking it’ll make your fiction better.  For those of you who disagree, that’s what the comment feature is for.  Please comment and let your views be known to the world and to—

                                                          Poseidon’s Scribe 

June 2, 2013Permalink

Tightening the Screws

Today I’m discussing why and how writers increase conflict in their stories.  Long-term fans of this site with keen memories will recall that I promised to get to this topic in a previous blog entry.  Far be it from me to let you down.

Conflict is a necessary part of all stories and it’s a good idea to ramp up the level of conflict as your story proceeds, both to hold your reader’s interest by building tension, and to subject your protagonist to a progressively more difficult test of character, forcing him or her to confront inner fears or character flaws.

220px-Jurassic_Park_posterLet’s look at a couple of examples.  In the 1993 movie “Jurassic Park,” directed by Steven Spielberg and based on a novel of the same name by Michael Crichton, we see a gradual step-up in conflict.  The central protagonist, Dr. Alan Grant, is persuaded to leave a paleontological dig to conduct a review of a theme park.  Once there he is awed that the park engineers have re-created living dinosaurs.  He is put in close contact with children, which he dislikes.  When part of the park’s security system is deactivated, a Tyrannosaurus attacks the group.  Grant and the children must spend the night in the park, with predatory dinosaurs on the loose.  They encounter cunning Velociraptors, and finally both Velociraptors and the Tyrannosaurus.

Fiddler_on_the_roof_posterConflict need not be physical, or even dangerous.  In the 1964 musical “Fiddler on the Roof,” with music by Jerry Bock and lyrics by Sheldon Harnick, the conflict is of a different nature but also increases.  The village milkman, Tevye, must first contend with the fact that his eldest daughter has chosen her own husband against tradition and his wishes.  Then his second daughter likewise makes her own marital match, but with a political and cultural radical.  Later his third daughter seeks to marry outside the Jewish faith.  Finally, on orders from the Tsar, Russian authorities expel the Jewish villagers from their town.

Notice how, in each case, the author chooses plot events that begin with small conflicts and then escalates, figuratively tightening thumbscrew devicethe screws as with the medieval torture device, progressively challenging the characters with more taxing situations.  Just as the protagonist resolves or comes to terms with one disaster, a worse one occurs.  Moreover, the nature of the conflicts is such that they strike at a character flaw.  In Dr. Grant’s case, it’s his dislike of children.  In Tevye’s case, it’s his over-reliance on tradition.  The protagonists are forced to grapple with their own weakness and try to overcome it.

It’s sad, in a way, that writers must put their characters through the torture of increasing conflict intensity, just for the sake of reader enjoyment.  But as long as the characters stay imaginary, it’s all legal, so ease your mind about that.  You’re welcome to comment on this topic of increasing the level of conflict.  I’ll return now to my Work in Progress (WIP).  Please don’t mind any screams you might hear as the screws get tightened by—

                                                      Poseidon’s Scribe

May 5, 2013Permalink

Describing Your Characters’ Feelings

How are your characters feeling?  It’s important for your readers to know.  I’ve written an earlier post about conveying a character’s thoughts, and another one about facial expressions, but it’s time to tackle emotions.

For this blog post I’m going to regard ‘feelings,’ ’emotions,’ and ‘moods’ as being synonymous, even though neuroscientists draw distinctions between these terms.

Emotions are part of the human experience, and seem to result from how we’re hard-wired, what our individual background has been, and a recent external or internal stimulus.  Since we all have emotions in the real world, the characters in your fiction must have them too, to make them convincing.

Whether there are six basic emotions, as depicted by Dr. Paul Ekman…

Emotions

…or eight as pictured by Dr. Robert Plutchik…

591px-Plutchik-wheel.svg…writers just need to know there are many emotions, and characters can feel them in combinations and in various intensities.

As a writer, it’s your job to convey these emotions to the reader with clarity and accuracy.  There shouldn’t be a doubt in the reader’s mind about what a character is feeling.

How do you do that?  Here are some guidelines to follow:

  • Make sure the emotion is appropriate.  Remember, it’s based on a character’s background, but is also a response to a recent stimulus.
  • Show the emotion through the character’s actions:  speech (not only what is said, but word choice and tone of voice), facial expressions, hand motions, or body posture.
  • Show the emotion by describing the character’s thoughts or mental state.
  • Use metaphors and similes, but shun clichés.
  • In certain situations (fast action scenes, very short fiction, or if applicable to a minor character or sub-plot), just tell the character’s emotion.  This is not as effective as other methods and indicates amateurish writing  if used too often.

If you get stuck trying to portray a character’s emotion in words, one technique that might help is to recall a time when you had that feeling yourself.  See if you can draw on that memory and maybe even recreate the emotional state within yourself.  If you can conjure up within yourself the same emotion your character is feeling, you stand a good chance of finding words to describe it.

There are some helpful websites that list adjectives useful in describing emotions, notably this one and this one.  But I caution against an over-reliance on such adjectives.  It’s more effective to show emotions through a character’s actions or by describing what’s going on inside the character’s mind.

How did this blog post make you feel?  Are you now confident you can convey a character’s feelings in a more precise way?  I welcome comments from you on this topic; in fact few things in life bring greater joy and serenity to—

                                                      Poseidon’s Scribe

April 21, 2013Permalink

Details,Details…

When I said I’d blog about choosing details wisely in writing fiction, I meant it; I just didn’t say how soon I’d get around to it!  Writers often have to describe scenes, characters, or objects in their stories.  Which details do they choose to mention, and why?

First let’s examine some of the things writers try to accomplish in their descriptions:

  • First and foremost, create an image in the reader’s mind
  • Convey the mood and theme of the story
  • Show the attitude, personality, and mood of the point-of-view character
  • Foreshadow a later event
  • Illustrate connections to, or separations from, other scenes, characters, or objects in the story

That seems like a lot to accomplish, a lot of baggage to weigh down a few words.  Partly for that reason, in books written in the Nineteenth Century and earlier, descriptions were long and tedious.  Writers weren’t as selective about details; they threw them all in.  Today’s readers won’t stand for that, so as a modern writer you’ll have to keep your descriptions brief.

Say you’re writing about something or someone and you want to convey the image to the reader’s mind.  How do you choose the details?  Here are some guidelines:

1.  Three is a magic number, as far as the number of details to pick.  Don’t stray too far from it either way.

2.  Specific details beat general ones every time.

3.  Nouns and verbs are better than adjectives, and adjectives are better than adverbs.

4.  Consider using a mind map to mentally play with all the details you can think of, then select the few that best serve your purposes.

5.  You don’t have to gather all the details together in one place, in one solid paragraph.  You can sprinkle some of them around later in the scene; that helps break up the narration and keeps the image fresh in the reader’s mind.

Here’s an exercise you can do to improve your skills in selecting details for your descriptions.  Pick something to describe–the scene out your window, a movie or TV character, a household object.  Now create a mind map filled with key words about your chosen thing.  Next write two description paragraphs, one in a happy mood and one in a sad mood.  Write two more paragraphs, each as if narrated by characters with opposite personalities.  Write another one that contrasts your chosen thing with some other.  Just as no two witnesses describe a traffic accident the same way, using the same details, there are innumerable ways to describe anything.

Let’s analyze how George Orwell described the scene outside a character’s window at the beginning of his novel, 1984.

Outside, even through the shut window-pane, the world looked cold. Down in the street little eddies of wind were whirling dust and torn paper into spirals, and though the sun was shining and the sky a harsh blue, big_brother_is_watching_you_by_teabladezz-d20dgysthere seemed to be no colour in anything, except the posters that were plastered everywhere. The black moustachio’d face gazed down from every commanding corner. There was one on the house-front immediately opposite. BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU, the caption said, while the dark eyes looked deep into Winston’s own. Down at street level another poster, torn at one corner, flapped fitfully in the wind, alternately covering and uncovering the single word INGSOC. In the far distance a helicopter skimmed down between the roofs…

In addition to giving a concrete image, this certainly conveys mood and theme, and also foreshadows.   I like the contrast between nature (shining sun, blue sky) and man-made items (torn paper, poster flapping, commanding corners).  Well-chosen details.

More practice will increase your skills at picking details to include.  Leave me a detailed comment if you got something out of this blog post.  Knowing the devil is in the details, I’m—

                                                            Poseidon’s Scribe

February 9, 2013Permalink

Giving and Receiving…Critiques

‘Tis the season for giving and receiving, so I thought I’d discuss critiques of fiction manuscripts.  Last time I did so, I said I’d let you know how to give and receive critiques.  My critique group meeting 2experience is based solely on twenty years of being in small, amateur, face-to-face critique groups; not writing workshops, classes, or online critique groups; so the following advice is tuned to that sort of critique.

First of all, to give the critique, keep the following points in mind:

  • Read the submitted manuscript straight through once, and just note where you were “thrown out of the story” for some reason.  Jot down why and come back to those points later.
  • Re-read the manuscript again. You could mark some of the grammar or spelling problems, but don’t concentrate on those.  The author wants you to find the bigger stuff.
  • Where there are stand-out positives (“Eyeball kicks” in TCL parlance) note those and praise the author.  The word critique should not have solely negative connotations.  A positive comment from you could keep the author from later deleting a really good description, metaphor, or turn of phrase.
  • Be clear and specific in the comments you write; avoid ambiguity.
  • Look for the following story elements and comment if they’re not present or they’re weak:

1.  Strong opening or hook

2.  Compelling, multi-dimensional, non-stereotypical protagonist with human flaws

3.  A problem or conflict for the protagonist to resolve

4.  Worthy secondary characters, different from the protagonist, who do not steal the show

5.  Vivid settings, not overly described

6.  Consistent and appropriate point of view

7.  Appropriate dialogue that moves the plot and breaks up narration

8.  Narration that shows and doesn’t tell.

9.  A plot that builds in a logical way, events stemming from actions that stem from understandable motivations

10.  A story structure complete with Aristotle’s Prostasis, Epitasis, and Catastrophe (beginning, middle, and end)

11.  Appeals to all five senses

12.  Active sentence structure, using passive only when appropriate

13.  Appropriate symbolism, metaphors, similes

14.  A building of tension as the protagonist’s situation worsens, followed by brief relaxing of tension before building again

15.  An appropriate resolution of the conflict, without deus ex machina, resulting from the striving of the protagonist, and indicative of a change in the protagonist

  • If your group shares comments verbally, do so in a helpful, humble way.

You think all that sounds pretty difficult?  Ha!  It’s much harder to receive a critique.  When doing so, here are the considerations:

  • Submit your work early enough to allow sufficient time for thorough critiques.  Be considerate of your group members’ time.
  • While being critiqued, sit there and take it.  No comments.  No defensiveness.  Just listen to the honest comments of a person who not only represents many potential readers, but who wants you to get published.

So, when it comes to critiques, is it better to give than to receive?  In contrast to most gifts, it’s harder to receive them, but it’s still a toss-up which is better overall.  But perhaps both are just a bit easier for you to deal with now, thanks to this post by—

                                                      Poseidon’s Scribe

December 30, 2012Permalink

Sorry, New Rule. You Can’t Do That!

In the original Star Trek TV series, there’s an episode where Captain Kirk invents a card game called Fizzbin in which he makes up the rules as he goes along.  The comic strip Calvin and Hobbes featured a game called Calvinball which may never be played by the same rules twice.

If you’re a writer of fiction, you might consider yourself to be playing such a game, too.  According to W. Somerset Maugham, “There are three rules for writing the novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.”  With apologies to the famous novelist, I’d say the game has too many rules to memorize and they change with time, according to the tastes of readers.  Only by playing the game well can you can make money selling books.

You might try to emulate great writers of the past and imitate their writing styles, in an effort to achieve success.  Bad idea.  The rules were different in their time.  Let’s cover some of those former rules.

1.  Take all the time you need to create a vivid description, to ‘paint’  with words.  Writers of the 19th Century and earlier used extensive portrayals to convey the appearance of a scene or character, multi-paragraph descriptions abounding in adjectives.  That worked well in an era without movies or TV, but readers won’t wade through such long-winded descriptions today.

2.  Adverbs exist for a reason; use them.  Authors once used adverbs with abandon. Adverbs modify adjectives or verbs and often end in ‘ly’ like ‘crazily.’  These days it’s considered lazy to use too many adverbs, a sign you didn’t take time to select a powerful enough verb.

3.  Demonstrate your skill as an author in your narrative paragraphs; dialogue only interferes with that.  At one time, fiction was mostly narration, with occasional dialogue.  We’re now in an age of character-driven stories, and readers want characters to talk more.  No long, boring narrative paragraphs, and less narration overall.

4.  Incorporate a rather dull character who needs everything explained to him (even things he already knows); that’s a clever way to explain things to the reader. There was an era when authors could use this technique even if it strained the conversation a bit.  These days, that’s no longer tolerated and there’s even a term for it–As You Know, Bob or AYKB.  AYKB’s are tempting, an easy trap to fall into even if you make every effort to avoid them.

5.  Bring the narrator in as an entity the reader can trust, as one who helps foreshadow future events.  In a bygone past, writers could have the narrator speak directly to the reader.  And now, Gentle Reader, let us discover what Annabel must be thinking about this latest development.  That voice could be used to foreshadow future events in an ominous tone.  Little did Frank know, but his secure life would soon be altered forever.  Understand, it’s still okay to use foreshadowing, but do it with subtlety, and not with the narrator speaking to the reader.  Today that’s referred to as narrative intrusion.

6.  Find clever new ways to express your ideas.  As centuries of writers did this, many of the word combinations they used were so good the first time, they got used again, and re-used many times over.  And became clichés.  Now you don’t get to use those clichés, unless you add some twist on them.  Go think of your own clever word combo that might become a future cliché.  This rule didn’t change, but sorry, you can’t use the same tired clichés.

7.  Ease into your story by introducing the reader to the setting, time period, and major characters before any action occurs.  Readers in those times had nothing to compete with books for entertainment, and had the time to curl up near the fire and read a cozy story by its light.  Times are different.  You must grab your reader by the throat with a first sentence or paragraph that demands attention.  It’s called a hook, and stories without a good one stay un-bought.

So, are you up for a game like Fizzbin or Calvinball?  May the best writer win!  Unfortunately, the game’s rules aren’t known by you or—

                                                                    Poseidon’s Scribe

 

November 25, 2012Permalink

Conveying a Sense of Wonder

One of the things that drew me into fiction as a child was the sense of wonder I experienced when reading certain fiction, notably that of Jules Verne, Arthur C. Clarke and later science fiction writers.  The question is, how does a writer evoke that in readers?

First, let’s try to define it.  The book Brave New Words: The Oxford Dictionary of Science Fiction defines it this way:  “a feeling of awakening or awe triggered by an expansion of one’s awareness of what is possible or by confrontation with the vastness of space and time, as brought on by reading science fiction.”

Although often associated with science fiction, that emotion needn’t be.  Rachel Carson’s book The Sense of Wonder was about sharing a love of nature with a child.

I like the associate with childhood.  To children the natural world is new, and they experience that sense of wonder more often.  Then it fades as we age and it takes more than mere nature to astonish us.  Here’s an example of that fading-with-adulthood phenomenon.  How many times have you heard the finale of the William Tell Overture (the Lone Ranger theme) by Gioachino Rossini?  Ho hum, right?  But do you remember the thrill of that first time you heard it?  Can you image what audiences of 1829 felt the first time that finale ever played, anywhere?

Up until Jules Verne and authors who followed him, adults most often experienced the sense of wonder in religious contexts, or in fantasy literature.  Through his writing Verne showed the world what engineers and scientists of the time were bringing about—a better understanding of the natural world, and the amazing things man might do to achieve his ends.  Verne showed readers something new and vast, and it had nothing to do with God or dragons, but with people.

Arthur C. Clarke was another science fiction author who captured the sense of wonder better than most.  He carried the science far beyond Verne did, and showed a future humanity achieving, through engineering, the capabilities of gods or wizards.  It was Clarke who said, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

For writers seeking to induce the sense of wonder in their readers, then, how do you do it?  I think there are four elements involved:

  • A “thing” that is new in some way, or an old thing in a new context
  • A powerful description of that thing, emphasizing its newness
  • One or more characters confronting the thing
  • A depiction of the awe felt by one or more of the characters.  How does the thing make the character feel?  Again, you’re striving to recreate in words the amazement a child feels for something new.

If you do this well, if your characters are compelling, if the thing is truly worthy of awe and you’ve described it and your characters’ impressions well, then your readers will feel the wonder of it right along with the characters.

In my fiction, I strive to create this sense of wonder, most often in association with technology.  Many of my stories are historical, so the characters see something outside their experience, but not necessarily beyond that of modern readers.  I confront my characters with such things as a flying trireme, a clockwork lion, a giant mechanical elephant, a steam-powered oared galley in the 1st Century, and steam-powered human limbs (coming soon).

Is there anything to this “sense of wonder” stuff, in your opinion?  Have you experienced that feeling from reading fiction?  Have you tried writing it into your fiction?  Leave a comment and let me know.  Wondering about the answer to these and other questions, I’m—

                                                           Poseidon’s Scribe

November 18, 2012Permalink

The Modular Author

I’ve written before about the conflict between the way readers want authors to be, and the way authors’ muses want them to be.  Now I’ll carry those thoughts forward to conclusion.

As a reminder, readers want you (as an author) to be consistent in genre and style so when they pick up one of your books, they know what they’re getting and aren’t surprised.  On the other hand, writers’ muses are creative and get bored with sameness; they’re always seeking something new and different; it’s always possible for an author’s ideas to run dry, and that’s another reason for writing in several genres.

There’s a conflict, a disconnect, between the desires of the people in each camp.  I think it’s a little much to expect readers to change.  They’re the customer, after all, and the customer is always right.

One possible answer is the use of pen names, also called nom de plumes or pseudonyms.  There are many other reasons you might use one, but we’ll just discuss one today.  The idea is to create a persona, an alter ego, another version of yourself.   The author going by that fictitious name is a specialist in a particular genre, a specific type of story.  That’s that persona’s brand.

A downside of pen names these days results from (1) our lives being recorded on the Internet to a great degree, and (2) readers’ desire to know their favorite authors in as personal a way as possible.  Those facts make it difficult to prevent people from finding out the real author behind the pen name.  Authors these days are expected to have their own websites, with their picture and a list of future appearances; some of those things might be difficult for a nom de plume to pull off.  Further, curious and persistent readers even go to the extent of analyzing writing to determine if two apparently different authors are really one person.

But to dismiss these disadvantages for a moment, are we headed for an end state where most authors actually have multiple names, several personas, each cranking out stories according to his or her particular brand?  That would seem to please both authors and readers.  This was foreseen, in a way, by Alvin Toffler in his 1970 book Future Shock.  After observing the increasing number and amount of temporary, throw-away material products, Toffler introduced the concept of the “Modular Man,” a disposable person.  In the future, all people would form several personas, try them out, and discard them as they please.

Is the literary world now reaching Toffler’s future?  What if you created a separate name under which you wrote romances, another name for horror, and one more for science fiction.  For each name, there would be a website for which you wrote blogs and connected with curious readers by e-mail.  Perhaps with some photo manipulation you could get away with posting pictures of these ‘virtual authors.’  Some of them might be male, others female–in fact all of them might be the opposite gender from your real one.  Each one could write stories and blog entries in a different style according to their various personalities.

Difficult?  As a fiction author, you’re used to creating multiple and varied people.  The only difference here is you’re not creating characters in stories; you’re creating other versions of yourself, where each version is an author.  One or more of those versions could be quite outrageous, edgy, and controversial.  Why not?

As of today (so far as you know) I have not plunged into that future/present to any significant extent.  I’m sure others already have.  As for the one who signs my blog entries, that’s really a job title, not a name.  It is my attempt at an alternate persona, my nod at creating a modular author.  Leave a comment and let me know if you would like to have a portfolio of alternate writing personas, if you do it already, and how many such modular authors you maintain.  Though it’s not really me, but kind of is, I’m—

                                                     Poseidon’s Scribe

 

October 21, 2012Permalink

Character, Plot, or Setting—Which Comes First?

Today’s question is about whether story-writers think about characters, plot, or setting when they first conceive the idea for a story.  If you’ve written fiction, or thought about doing so, which did you start with?

Of these three story elements, perhaps character is most important to the reader.  For readers, vivid and interesting characters linger in the memory long after plot or setting details fade.  Some writers form a complete mental image of one or more characters, and then wonder what to have them do, and where to have them do it.

For other authors, the first image is of a setting.  The scenery is sharp and distinct in their minds.  Perhaps they have a photograph or painting to inspire them, and they decide to craft a tale around that image.  Some story contests use pictures to prompt stories.

Still others think of the action or story-line or basic situation first.  Only after that do they wonder what sort of people should take those actions and where the events should take place.

The image is my attempt to illustrate some of the possibilities graphically.

I’m talking here only about the initial impetus for the story.  That’s not what the readers reads.  In the end, the story must form a complete, coherent, integral whole.  Characters, plot, and setting should fit together and complement each other.  This is especially true of characters and plot.  In a sense, plot and character determine each other.  In a well-written tale, those are the only characters for which the plot makes sense, and vice versa.  You can’t take any characters at random and fit them in any situation.

I doubt there is any right answer to my question about which element writers should think of first.  I’d be shocked to learn if the greatest writers all started with the same element, but I suspect we’ll never know.

I considered the question with respect to my own short stories, and thought at first I had some stories in each category.  Then I reflected on each tale one by one and discovered I had thought of plot first in almost every case.  There were three stories in which the plot immediately determined the characters.  In “Alexander’s Odyssey” and “The Wind-Sphere Ship,” the characters were historical or mythological figures.  In the case of “The Steam Elephant,” my sequel to a pair of Jules Verne novels, the characters had been established by Verne.

The single exception to my usual practice of dreaming up a plot first is my story, “Against All Gods,” and I must admit I thought of the setting first there.  I’d wanted to set a story aboard a trireme for some time, and also the Wonders of the Ancient World, so I started with those and conjured up a plot and characters to fit those settings.

Not that it matters to readers, who only see your finished product, but which do you think of first—characters, plot, or setting?  Let me know by leaving a comment.  It’s a question of interest to—

                                                            Poseidon’s Scribe

 

 

October 14, 2012Permalink