Linda Maye Adams's Blog, page 7

The Erosion of Skills Because of Technology

Great Dane Photo © dmussman | Deposit Photos (I saw a Great Dane the other day. MMagnificentaginicent–and huge dog)

All the time, I run into people who seem to have either forgotten how to do something—or never learned how—and expect the technology to do it for them. We’re seeing that show up with Chat GPT. College students think nothing of using it to create a paper instead of learning the writing and research skills. Writers are using it to create entire books so they can flood the market, never mind if the books are any good.

Technology has been eroding skills for some time. We used to know when to go to sleep, but then the technology of lightbulbs allowed us to stay up later. Now we need sleep apps to tell us when to go to sleep, and gurus to explain how to get better sleep.

I’ve been thinking about this as I work through my Depth Curriculum (which needs a better name, since it’s not exactly about Depth). Depth is Dean Wesley Smith’s term for adding setting and the five senses from the character’s opinion. Yet, the earliest reference to this particular skill that I’ve found is in The Writing of Fiction by Edith Wharton, dated 1925 (the original version is available on Google Books for free).

She mentions it in passing, almost as an “of course, you would do this” (it’s a single sentence). Obviously, they didn’t have much in the way of technology. You couldn’t Google what a faraway tropical island like Hawaii looked like, but you could transport the reader with what the character sees: Palm trees with friendly fronds whispering in a gentle cool breeze; the fragrant plumerias with delicate, soft petals; the taste of a sweet, juicy pineapple.

The pulp writers did the same thing. I remember reading Raymond Chandler’s description of the Santa Ana winds of Los Angeles. Having grown up there, it reminded me of home. But someone living in Indiana and reading the same story, they would have a different experience from the tall corn stalks muttering in the breeze they saw every day.

And it’s not taught in many of the craft books available for writers today; in many cases, it’s actively discouraged. There’s a book, published by a New York house, that I’ve found in Barnes and Noble where the writer proclaims that it’s not necessary to do setting or five senses. You’d think that a New York publisher would be invested in getting this kind of thing right so they could sell more books, but noooo…

What changed?

I think it was the introduction of movies and television. I grew up in Los Angeles, and older Hollywood is a fascinating historical topic for me (anything beyond the 1980s, no). Suddenly we could “see” Bali in The Road to Bali, or travel to another planet in Journey to the Seventh Planet or watch Godzilla destroy Tokyo. 

But movies have a big limitation: They can only give us the sense of sight and sound. Even the sweltering heat of a day in Los Angeles could only be conveyed by seeing the character mop sweat or listening to him complain about it. Hollywood tried introducing Smell-O-Vision, but it didn’t get much traction.

I grew up watching movies on TV and came to see the world as if it were a movie. On the writing message boards years back, writers would talk about seeing their novels as movies. I think this view lent itself to losing depth. Some writers focused on only the sight sense, and others stated they didn’t describe anything because they wanted the reader to picture it themselves.

The problem with this thinking is that it undercuts the ability to do characterization, significantly. Characterization is a whole story skill—you need every story part to bring it to life.

Over time, Hollywood’s changed from those early days. Now they use lots of closeups of the actors, rather than long shots that show the setting. It’s a lot easier to cut here and there if the movie runs too long. At one point, I pictured my scenes as a series of close-ups, rather than characters in a place where a skim of clouds marks the sky and the sun is comfortably warm (today’s weather). And, blissfully, no construction banging, drilling, squeaking, and grinding.

Then there are the basic tools of writing, grammar, and spelling. A business writing class I attended years back said that spell checker is actually making us spell more poorly. The grammar checkers may be doing the same thing.

I use ProWritingAid, Grammarly, and PerfectIt to help me find typos. ProWritingAid also helped me identify that I was using a lot of passive voice; I always exited the program and worked on correcting those myself without the tool’s aid. Just the mere identification and working through fixes helped me subconsciously write my sentence structures differently, so I don’t get as many flags. But ProWritingAid seems to have a zero-tolerance policy for it, insisting I change all instances. There are also lots of false audits, things that don’t need to be changed.

However, the programs continue to change as I use them. Now I’m seeing many, many “recommendations.” It tells me I should remove this word (zero tolerance for certain words), or change this word to another one; it doesn’t like the comma where I put it; I’ve had character names that it tells me are wrong and wants to correct to someone’s real name.

But what is this doing to our general writing abilities, not to mention the creative part of that? It’s easy for me to imagine that a writer might look at what the machine is recommending and assume it’s right. And in effect, add another cook to the pot that creates muddled writing. Computer programs don’t understand when you want an intentional pause to a sentence, or that a character might say, “It was freaking huge.” When I use words like that, the tool informs me I should use a better word like “enormous.” While it suggests this is better, it would take out my characterization with the substitution.

New writers always start out asking permission. They see a writer do something cool in a book, they ask other writers for permission. Can I do that? (and may actually be told they can’t.) An AI grammar tool provides another way for them to ask permission instead of letting the creativity fly and see what happens.

Sometimes you want to use a bigger word because that’s part of your author voice. What’s wrong with that?

Hiding Information in Plain Sight

cat touches to the screen of the tablet by paw,creative perspective, the concept of technology for pets

Photo © fantom_rd | Deposit Photos

In the overly generalized writing advice, this is not a topic much talked about anywhere, and certainly not in any detail.

Newer writers think that “hiding information” means omitting it entirely so the reader can’t see it. The most typical one I’ve encountered is in mysteries. The murderer is hidden from us by only appearing on the page a few times, almost in passing. We barely have any characterization to hang an anchor on his name. The result is a disappointing story. Not only do we not have any clues to his identity, but we’re also missing characterization that makes him the killer.

What’s different then?

This is from writer Kurt Steel, 1939, “So You’re Going to Write a Mystery.” Don’t let the date fool you. Reader and publisher preferences go out of date, but craft advice does not.

When you introduce information that you don’t want the reader to see right away, immediately follow it with something big and dramatic. And we’re not talking further down in the scene, but the next line.

It’s a form of magician’s sleight of hand. You’re giving the reader immediacy of plot happening while controlling when they process the clue.

So your protagonist picks up a pocket watch from the desk. It’s a fine-looking watch, and he’s about to open the cover… (This is the clue you want to hide.)

Bang! The door to the room slams open, making him jump back. He drops the pocket watch on the desk and backs up as three men with big guns burst in. (An immediate plot event that the protagonist must deal with now.)

Cycling helps with this because you may have to tighten up the space between the clue and the next event. Or you may have to nip some of the information about the watch to make sure it doesn’t stand out too much. It’s too easy to put too much in, but it shouldn’t be a big change. Maybe one sentence less, or even just a word.

S.S. Van Dine (same issue, “20 Rules for Writing Detective Fiction”) notes if the reader were to reread the story, they would see the clues they hadn’t noticed before.

This way of hiding information in plain sight is very subtle. The reader’s subconscious picks up on it, so it makes for a satisfying read.

Some other ways I think this could be used might include:

The antagonist mildly standing next to an over the top, abrasive celebrity, who rants at the protagonist. (This one’s mine, but I’m thinking I may have picked that up from reading all of J.D. Robb’s books).A list of things. This is one of the ways of concealing information that I’ve seen in modern times; Dean Wesley Smith references it in several of his workshops. We can only keep about three things in our head at one time, so with a list of four, we would lose the second or third item. You could also take Kurt Steel’s advice and add right near the item on the list something more exciting. Like a lost magical key is on the list of items, but the character discovers an antique collectable she’s been looking for absolutely forever.

Of course, to study these in context, read the entire book first so you’re familiar with it. If it’s a mystery, you want to know who the antagonist turns out to be so you can be on the lookout when you go through the book again.

A search also turned one article about hiding information with some intriguing possibilities. Happy reading!

Chapters Vs. Scenes

Golden retriever playing in the pool

Photo ©chendongshan | Deposit Photos

The last month or so, I started what I initially called “Depth Curriculum.” It entailed identifying all the courses on Depth, not only the ones from Dean Wesley Smith (where the term originated) but also from Margie Lawson’s Academy.

In the batch, Author Voice looked like it might hit on Depth, and I started with it. The curriculum immediately turned in a different direction than Depth. I decided to take any courses that it referenced, which included the lecture Stages of a Fiction Writer, Pacing, and now Cliffhangers.

About halfway through the Author Voice class, it asked who my favorite writers were in terms of author voice. Was I writing like them, using similar structures? The structures could be sentence length, word choices, style of chapters, etc.

Answering that question took me on a different path because I was doing some but not all of it.

The first was vocabulary. New writers try to sound literary or knowledgeable, so they pack sentences with larger words because they sound important, not necessarily because it’s the right word. As a result, many writing resources recommend using a thesaurus as little as possible. Others have said to just put in what your subconscious came up with.

But, as a reader, I like occasionally looking up a word I haven’t seen before to see what it means. The authors I like don’t do a lot of it…might be once a chapter or every few chapters.

I started doing this with the second Dice book, Weekend with Superheroes. Just stopping on a word to look it up. Does it mean what I think it does? (in some cases, no.) Is it what I want in the context of the scene?

I’ve also used the word of the day to push myself a little out of my comfort zone. Not a lot. The word has to fit after all.

The second was a bigger change that I had to think about: scenes and chapters. These aren’t discussed a lot anywhere, at least in the context I was looking for. My earliest encounter with scenes was a published writer answering “How long is a scene?” with the assumption we would all magically grok the answer. He said, “How long is a piece of string?”

According to my Google-fu now, it means he didn’t know. I think it would have been better if he hadn’t answered. No advice is better than vague advice.

I’d often lose focus of where I was in the scene and write well past where it probably should have ended, weighing in at 3-5K.

Dean Wesley Smith pointed out that pulp writers, as well as the best-selling writers, tend to stick to around 1,500 words or so, 2,000 if the pacing needs to be slower (such as setting up the information needed). This was easy for me to test out: I typed scenes of best-selling writers and they did hit that range. It’s a comfortable range to read in one sitting.

So that was fine enough. But the definition of a chapter seemed a bit more squirrelly. DWS also says there’s no difference between a chapter and a scene.

Well…now I have to disagree.

Many writers these days tend to do one scene, one chapter. It’s a style probably popularized by James Patterson, though James D. McDonald did it earlier.

It can make a chapter feel like it’s moving at a fast pace.

It can also make a chapter feel superficial.

One writer I read had published a book with over 250 chapters. Many were so short that the publisher started a new chapter on the same page—in a paperback.

As a reader, I was frustrated with the chapters. I’d just start getting engaged in the story and bang! Chapter stopped. Over and over again. I didn’t get much past the first ten chapters (about 15 pages!).

All the writers that I like to read have multiple scenes in most chapters. I think it probably appeals to my intellection to be able to dive into a chapter for longer.

So I tried to research chapters vs. scenes. Not a lot out there.

Here’s my thinking on chapters vs. scenes.

Rule Number 1: Never confuse the reader.

There are lots of ways that could happen. Where a chapter breaks isn’t always intuitive, and it’s hard to see problems because we know the story.

The scenes themselves have to feel like they fit together logically. The endings of each scene and the beginning of the new scene would be impacted by this, as I discovered when I started thinking about what would change if I added multiple scenes in a chapter.

That was because I pictured the reader reading through all the scenes in the chapter, then stopping. I had to go back through and tie them together a little better than I did.

If the next scene changes to a different character’s POV, that’s better off as a new chapter.  If you’re changing from first to third person, definitely switch chapters and hang a lantern on it.

A big time shift might signal the need for a new chapter, as well as a significant location shift.

And any action scene should have its own chapter, even if it’s much shorter. Though the writers I like have multiple scenes per chapter, when there was an action scene, it got the starring role, as it should.

What’s your view on chapters? Do you like one scene per chapter or do you want something more?

Why Depth in Fiction is Hard

Image © Ahmed2bsaber@gmail.com | Deposit Photos

This was inspired by Peggy’s comment on my last post:

As for me, I’m a very dry writer when it comes to time and sensory details; I have to make it a point to add it in. Why? Because I write like I live, and I rarely notice light/dark/weather unless it inconveniences me or it’s particularly striking, like a sunset over the mountains, or in a really cloudy sky.

I had a terrible time doing sensory details of any kind when I was first introduced to depth (or deep POV by another name). It was weird because, in the early days of the internet, I said, “You have to do more than say a character entered a bar” and then I promptly ignored what I was saying. Or maybe in my head, I was doing more than what was getting down on paper.

Yet, it’s also actively discouraged in the lower levels of writing. I’m not entirely sure why. Maybe it’s because the people teaching it at that level don’t understand it, and they’re also trying to write actionable steps for the beginners.

Depth does not have actionable steps. While a beginner can try it, it’s also challenging to do.

When I was first introduced to it by Dean Wesley Smith in his Ideas workshop, I struggled a lot with it. He recommends doing the learning and letting your subconscious process it into the story. Mine kept defaulting to none at all.

So I started by making sure in every scene, I hit the setting first. It was painful because I felt like I was rewiring my brain. I’d never been that good at details, and between my day job and trying to write a story, I felt overwhelmed. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I was defaulting to no details because I was getting too much of everything.

But setting was easier than the five senses. Setting, at least, could be anchored at the start of every scene. In a 1,500-word scene, I had to circle back to each sense at least three times.

I felt like I would never get it. Certain senses were particularly problematic. I have allergies, so I lose my sense of smell a lot. Plus there aren’t a lot of good ways to describe smell like you have with the other senses. It feels inadequate to say, “The cool breeze carried the sweet fragrance of tulips to me.” (and that gets two senses in).  I’m less audio-focused, so that’s sometimes a challenge as well.

I approached it rather mechanically at first. It was like, Oh, they’re in a park…what are the names of the trees? I even tried writing down everything I could think of about the setting first because it seemed so difficult to conjure up images that I saw every day.

Or maybe I didn’t see them.

Technology has been eroding our focus ever since we heard the phrase “Got mail?” It’s so bad that business books now have people writing summaries of them—and selling them online. People cannot focus long enough on anything. Technology encourages us to fly through things and keep scrolling. The worst part is that we subconsciously absorb this and bring it to everything else in our lives.

It makes us not pay attention to the world.

And it makes it very challenging to simply notice and absorb details. It’s like eating food without tasting it, or chewing for that matter.

I’ve gotten better at adding the sensory details and the setting. Some of it is practice, but I’ve studied several writers who do it really well, and in different ways from each other. I’ve also cut off a lot of the technology, and it’s helped.

Surprisingly, I’ve gotten better with details, too. Who knew?

A Deep Dive into Time in Fiction

dog in bed resting and sleeping , with newspaper, dreaming in bedroom under the blanket , very tired

Dog photo © damedeeso / Deposit Photos

Time is a writing topic that doesn’t get a lot of discussion. I suppose it’s because it seems like it’s black and white, when it’s anything but.

Time is one of those things we all know, and in many cases instinctively. We connect with it all day long, from seeing the bit of morning sun peaking out from cracks in the blackout curtains to the time we report to work; we might have a meeting at a specific time, or a doctor’s appointment; meals occur at certain times. And, of course, we might tune into our favorite TV show at a specific time and shut off the lights for bed at another time.

Human beings are part of the bigger picture of the world, where the sun rises and sets, and the seasons change…more in some areas than others. When I was in Southern California, there were two seasons, hot and hotter. In Northern Virginia, there is a distinct divide in the seasons. I can mark the passage of seasonal time by walking through a park every day and looking at the leaves growing in the oaks, maples, and birches above me.

In a story’s scene, time can be a specific time listed,  like what James Rollins does in his book. I think his way would leave me pulling out my hair; he takes it down to the minute, like 4:23 AM ET.

But it can also be a reference to the morning, or the weather (which can do double duty on occasion, like a late afternoon August thunderstorm so you get day time, month time, seasonal time, and weather all in one event.

It sounds simple, and yet, it isn’t. Many writers fixate on plot, no doubt because it feels more concrete than other elements of the story, feels more important. But it also lends itself to ignoring how time progresses in the story. I remember trying to figure out how to add a scene that I needed, and yet, I felt like I would have to pry the timeline apart to do so.  Then, I was following the mantra of “Add more plot” that plagues the writing community…and couldn’t step outside of the advice to see that I was causing my own problem.

A novel can happen over 2 days or 20 years. Time can compress, such as building suspense and tension, or stretch out leisurely when the characters and readers need a little downtime. It becomes a vital component of all pacing because of that.

You can also summarize events, which you might do at the validation at the end of a story, or skip over what would be boring to show. Characters driving from point A to point B, for example.  We might move backward in time with a flashback, or a dream, or time travel. My favorite episode of Stargate SG-1 is Window of Opportunity, because it merges time with the characterizations.

Writers are told that flashbacks are evil and should never be used. I think many writers have the image of a flashback like from a 1980s soap opera, where the scene gets fuzzy and we see the characters interacting on screen with an event that happened weeks before (or even more commonly, a “clip show” where the whole episode is flashbacks because they needed to save money like Star Trek The Next Generation’s Shades of Gray).

Flashbacks themselves don’t have to be a physical scene taking place in the past. They can show up as a few paragraphs or more of a character remembering something that happened to them, such as Kieri in the Paladin series remembering and discussing with other characters about being a slave when he was a child. In that case, time is both in the present and the past as the character remembers his past and applies his present experience, accumulated from the years in between, to it. Time is complicated!

Backstory itself cannot happen without some element of time, and this is probably more intuitive to most writers. Less intuitive, and likely so because of the discouragement of doing any kind of description, is how time applies to the setting in every scene. Dave Farland has said to include some form of light in every scene. This doesn’t have to be the sun rising; it can be the velvet darkness of a night when the moon is in full shadow, or that moment of absolute quiet at about 2 AM when it seems darker and colder than it should be (something I always experienced on guard duty when I was in the Army!).

With only taking a minimalist view of setting details, it suddenly becomes too easy to end up with a character going to school every day, even on the weekends; or having a character experience more events than a single twenty-four hours can handle. I had problems with one book that took place over two days because the author didn’t anchor it well in the time. When she finally mentioned in the story that it had only been two days—3/4s through—it threw me out because I had been picturing something different. With a lack of it, some readers will fill in their own, but others will simply put down the book without understanding why.

When I write, I’ll put a placeholder of the month and day in the story, since that will influence the weather (i.e., what the character is wearing) and other setting details, such as tulips blooming in late March/early April. Then I’ll add to that placeholder what day of the week it is, since that also has its own details, like rush hour during the week, or barbeques on the weekend. Finally, I add to my placeholder the hardest thing; thinking about the duration of the scene.  That’s surprisingly hard to think about, but it helps keep the time happening in the story in perspective.

How do you deal with time in your story?

DYI Studying Fiction Writing

Striped kitten with book and eyeglasses lying on white bed. Clever cute little domestic cat. Education and back to school.

Photo by KuzinaNatali | Deposit Photos

One of the skills that few discuss is how to study fiction writing. Most tend to gravitate back to what they learned in school, or probably their MFA degree (the goal of which is not to teach you how to write professionally, but to teach writing).

That “study” shows up in writing circles as writers squint line by line at a book—usually a best-selling writer—and pick out what they think are flaws like lint.

Most flaws are perceived. The writers look at lint like grammar and punctuation and how sentences are structured. They think, because the writer put a comma there and it wasn’t exactly grammatically correct according to their English teacher, then that book is a failure. I suppose this might stem from our school culture of being graded.

From there, the writers often veer off, mistaking personal preference for flaws. For example, I picked up Twilight, but couldn’t get past the first page. I also had the same reaction when I tried to reread Nancy Drew several years ago, a series that I enjoyed when I was growing up.  But they were books for a very specific audience and I wasn’t it any longer.

This personal preference viewpoint often turns into foaming at the mouth and anger: How dare this writer become a best seller with so many flaws? (Often with the not-so-subtle emphasis, “How dare they get published with these huge problems while I can’t be published.”).

It also can turn reading—something that should be enjoyable—into a bad experience. Suddenly everything looks terrible and there’s no joy in what inspired us to write in the first place. I fell into this myself, believing that the quality of books had gone downhill. When I found some old books from when I “thought” writing was better, I read them to prove my point.

Instead, I discovered how I was reading was the problem.

Studying fiction writing is NOT about looking for flaws. You might learn something from identifying flaws, but you won’t learn much that will make you better.

Studying fiction writing is about identifying a skill you want to know more about and working out how the other writer did it.

I was surprised searching online to see what other writers were saying about how to do it. Turned out, not much. Most recommended studying by reading the generic craft books or focusing on plot. Some recommended simply read, read, read.

Not much about how, or even what you would do with it.

The first thing I did when I discovered the impact of how I was reading was to pick up a roller-coaster bestseller, The DaVinci Code. I read it through, then asked myself what drew readers to it. While I’ve seen discussions about how Dan Brown ended each scene on a hook, I don’t think that was all. He plugged into myths and legends that we all are drawn to. But he also picked up on a public wave of disgruntlement at church secrets that was starting to show up in the news. Cryptic mysteries were far more interesting than the real-life events with denials and coverups.

The DaVinci Code was bumped out of top-selling by the Harry Potter series, which also had writers foaming about the dialogue tags and other flaws. No one noticed how J.K. Rowling hid information in plain sight.

But how would you be able to start seeing the craft to study?

The first step is to read the book. It should be a book that you want to read and think you might enjoy. Not a book you feel like you’re “supposed” to read (it will feel like it’s a chore. Did you enjoy assigned books in school?)

You want to read the entire book because the familiarity will help you when you reread it for studying. If it’s a series, you may want to read more of the books first. I did this with J.D. Robb’s In Depth series (I was hardcore; I read the entire series over 6 months. There are 55 books. But now, after rereading them, I have a better understanding of tags simply because I saw them over and over).

Now pick a skill the author used that you want to study. Begin rereading. You may want to mark up the book.

For J.D. Robb, I went back to the first book, Naked in Depth. I wanted to figure out how to include food—the sense of taste—more in my books. So I marked every time food or drink occurred, which was a lot. Characters not only gulp coffee, they talk about food, they smell it, it’s part of the setting as they’re driving around. It’s even part of the characterization and sometimes the characters argue over it.

Then, since I had read the book and knew who the murderer was, I hunted down his first appearance so I could see how he came into the story. Did he do something to flag himself to the main character? This is often fairly subtle, but they’re enough I pick up on it so I’m not surprised about the reveal but trying to figure out how I missed it. I’ve read other mysteries where the author didn’t understand that and gave very little page time to the murderer to “hide” it from the reader.

After that, I read Golden in Death, to see how to do a prologue where the character dies. A friend always has trouble with the character who dies in the opening chapter because she bonds with them. That might not be her reading, but how the writer wrote it. There is a very subtle shift in how the scene is written that puts a little distance in. (I also wanted to learn how to do prologues because all those writers say, “Don’t do prologues!”)

Now I’m currently rereading Elizabeth Moon’s Paladin series, which comes in two parts and a prequel. The first three books were written more than 20 years ago. Then she wrote the prequels. About 2010 timeframe, she wrote the rest of the series, as if there hadn’t been a break in time (though her skills had improved).

The series is one long book that becomes more intricate as it unwinds toward the end. I’d don’t think I’d want to write an epic fantasy, but I enjoyed all the different stories and characters.

I went back to the first book, knowing what was going to happen as the series progresses. As a result, I’m picking out subtle bits of information that come into play later (in some cases, much later) in the story. There are a lot of little things that get mentioned in passing that show up later in the series. Or a passing character that appears unimportant…now.

Another method of study is to take an opening chapter of a novel and work through it, sentence by sentence, and rewrite it the way you think it should be. It’s intimidating, but it forces you to start asking why the author did this instead of that. I did that on Naked in Death. I’m still working out what I thought about the process. That’s okay, too. Sometimes the learning is so deep that it takes a long time to process it.

You can also follow an artist’s practice. Whenever I visit the National Art Gallery in downtown DC, there’s always an artist with an easel duplicating one of the masters like Renoir or Sargent. They’re practicing the strokes, and other skills like color choice with this. You can do this by typing up a scene from a book. It puts you at ground level with the words.

I used it for one of James Patterson’s books. He’s a master at pacing, so I wanted to see something pretty basic: Were his paragraphs any longer than what I was doing? The answer was no. I discovered that he often put a higher emotion near the end of the paragraphs.

I also did this for one of Michael Connelly’s books to question the discussion on scene length. During the pulp era, Lester Dent, a prolific writer under many pen names, wrote about scene length: 1500 words. But when the topic came up on message boards, most writers noted their scenes were at 3K. When mine ran that long, I’d lost my focus and started rambling as I tried to figure out how to end it.

But 1500 words? The scenes in books felt so much longer when I read them.

The first scene in that book hit at 2K, but it was an important, information-packed scene that launched the rest of the story. So I typed in the next few and discovered those all hit right around 1500 words.

Everything you try here is information, whether it’s highlighting a particular sense or typing out what someone else wrote. And it’s so much better for learning than nitpicking punctuation.

Do you have any other study methods for fiction?

A Deep Dive into Naming Characters

Portrait of a labrador retriever holding a telephone with mouth. Because, well, cute dug.

The term deep dive is a business term, used to describe an in-depth discussion of a topic. The naming of characters needs a deep dive because it’s such an important aspect of characterization. Yet, everyone talks about it superficially, if at all.

Sometimes writers come up with weird rules like never naming a character with a name ending in S. To me, that one is particularly silly because my last name ends in S. I’ve never had a problem with punctuating my name!

Most commonly, a lot of writers discuss it like they’re naming children. They roam the baby books, looking at the meaning of the names, and picking a name because it has a particular meaning. They assume, somehow, that the reader will pick up on this meaning as part of the characterization.

Characterization is a challenging skill to learn. But picking names by meaning won’t help as much as it seems. The reader is not likely to know the meaning of the name. Maybe if it’s their name, though I couldn’t tell you what mine means. And there’s no guarantee from one baby resource to another that they have the same definition.

Besides, just because the name has this particular meaning doesn’t mean it’s a good name for you to use in the story. For example, Baldwin means “bold/brave friend.” But, while the meaning suggests a sidekick, it doesn’t suggest a character who would run into battle.

The character is also not a child. This is a person in the story who has to be able to make their mark. Their name is the very first identifying tag, or label, for the reader. A tag is a kind of shortcut for the reader so they instantly know who the character is even if they haven’t seen him for a while.

Hollywood uses a lot of tags, most of which are terrible cliches and stereotypes. Bad guys, or heavies, have a certain look. But they work for the strict time limit film and TV impose in quickly establishing for the audience to identify the characters.  

In J.D. Robb’s In Death series, Eve Dallas is the main character and has a lot of tags. She’s a police detective, has whiskey-colored eyes, takes her shower at 101 degrees, and drives like a maniac. And this only a few of them that have evolved over this long series. But her name is the first, and most obvious, tag.

When I took Holly Lisle’s How to Revise Your Novel in 2010, she described character names as a promise to the reader. She developed her system of identifying potential problems with character names because she hung too much of a lantern on a character she viewed as unimportant.

Then, it was an interesting way for me to think about character names. She assigned points, depending on the number of names a single character had.

It made me look at my more minor characters. You know, the walk-ons. I was giving them more emphasis, curiously, than my major characters. Not sure why I did it like that. Naming characters is definitely about balance, though a points system like the above doesn’t make up for balancing all the character and story elements so the reader knows instinctively this guy isn’t hanging around.

In J.D. Robb’s Golden in Death, the story opens with a character with a first and last name, and a title. Yet, for this three-point name (the title is another point), we will know from how the character is handled in the scene that he is going to die.

Still, a name as a promise carries weight. If you write a romance novel, both your male and female character names should carry a romantic promise. Calling the male character Adolf doesn’t have much of an alluring romantic promise. I’ve read some romances that had me scratching my head at the choice of the female character.

If you’re writing an action-packed thriller, you won’t want a mousey sort of name for your lead character. That wouldn’t work in a mystery either. And I don’t know about you, but I was frustrated by fantasy in the 1980s—names were apostrophed to death or sounded like they’d been picked out of a hat. Readers need to be able to pronounce the name, not stumble over every time it turns up.

(Aside: I got so disgusted with the fantasy novel names that I wrote a story with names plucked from a baby name book. The first reader rejected it for the names! It was a fair rejection. I should have at least made sure they all came from the same origin ).

Lawrence Block devotes an entire chapter to naming characters in his book Telling Lies for Fun and Profit. He notes to avoid common names because they won’t be memorable to the reader. If you think about it, you’ve probably never seen a character named Smith, Johnson, Miller, or Brown. Probably not Adams either!

Certain first names also might be a little too ordinary…John, Jane, Bob. Real people have these names, but they don’t particularly stand out for a character.

Common names are particularly problematic if the rest of the characterization is flat. I read a historical novel about pre-Special Forces, set during World War II. There were three main characters (a problem in itself, but that’s for another time). Two started with the same letter. None of the names were particularly memorable, and neither were the characters. Every time the author switched scenes, I had to think, “This is the guy who hates his father,” or whatever I was trying to associate with that character.

So character names should be a little extraordinary. Your main character’s name should be the most extraordinary. After all, you don’t want a minor character’s name outshining your main character!

The actual name should say something about your character without veering into cutesy or obvious. This is harder than it sounds. I like Buffy the Vampire Slayer. It was a lot of fun having a character with a name that sounds like an airhead. But I’m not sure it would have worked as well as a novel (I’m referring to that instead of a TV series since I know there are TV tie-ins). The name would be with the reader much longer than an hour-long show since reader time can vary quite a bit.

Adding to the problem of picking names is that some types of novels lend themselves to a lot of characters. If you write an epic fantasy or a thriller, you may have over a hundred names. (And don’t get me started on cast lists. If the author has to provide character lists to help the reader, they haven’t done tags or characterization well.)

If you read the J.D. Robb series, the author has such a large, floating cast that she used a name twice. I’m pretty sure this was an accident, but she fixed it in a fun way. One is Detective Carmichael and the other is Uniform Carmichael—and that’s how the characters refer to them. This reminded me of when I was in the Army at Fort Lewis. We had two men named Shipley; one was a sergeant (E-5) and quite tall. The other was a staff sergeant (E-6) and shorter than me. It wouldn’t have been a good idea to refer to them as the short Shipley and the tall Shipley, so they became, “Sergeant Shipley E-6 type” and “Sergeant Shipley E-5 type.”

Wen Spencer recommended—many years ago—on her blog to make a list of the alphabet and use that to avoid duplicating names in letters of the alphabet, as well as duplication like the one above. I thought this was confusing at best because all your characters will have first and last names, and it’s easy to start second-guessing.

Yet, I can also see how it would flag other types of problems. In one book (one of the original versions of Rogue God), I had three characters with similar-sounding names. Two were in the same letter family, and one was in a different letter family but sounded like one of the other two names. Ugh.

But if you have a novel with a huge cast, you’ll run out of letters pretty fast. Besides, there are some letters that if you use them, careful thought should be given to that name. Q, for example, is not a common letter to start any name, so it’s going to stand out more.

So I started with a basic rule of thumb:

No one poaches on the main character’s name.

After that, you can do things like make sure that if you do have ones in the same letter family:

They don’t sound alike (i.e. Jake and Jack)They don’t look alike visually on the page (which Jake and Jack do)They aren’t in the same scenes as the other name.Hang other tags on them early and every time they appear on the scene to anchor the reader.  So mention the guy running his hand through his red hair or his rumpled suit (that’s a tag for Feeney in J.D. Robb).

Finding names is always a challenge, though. I used to get baby name books, but they’ve gotten bloated with every name possible. Most of them probably aren’t good for fiction. Judging from what I see when I read, most names stay with a far more narrow standard.

Then there’s last names. I find those hard to find. People have recommended using a phone book, but again too many choices, many not appropriate. Besides, who gets a phone book anymore?

But we all run across names everywhere. Might be in the credits of an old TV show. I attended a virtual conference and looked at the names of the participants. That’s how I named Gunnery Sergeant Bullmaster. That was a first name, but I thought it was a perfect last name for a Marine (ooh-rah!).

So a name bank is a great way to store random names you run across. You can have separate categories for first names, last names, and even pet names. That’ll work in a spreadsheet, or a Word document. Even index cards. I keep mine in The Brain (which is becoming something incredibly useful).

Avoid any names that are words you might use in your novel. This is just a good practice because if you decided to change “Reed” to “Marotta” (as I did in Crying Planet), you may find unexpected search and replace results in the middle of words. I’m always about not making extra work for myself, and this was a pain to fix!

It can be a lot of fun collecting names. What’s been your pet peeves for how writers name their characters?

Characterization Live from My Brain

Image © tatkuptsova } Deposit Photos

I’ve struggled over the years with taking notes on my various writing classes. No one tells you how other than generally pointing in the direction of what we did in school. But note-taking has also taken off, partially because of Zettelkasten. One person wrote about it as if all you needed to do was assemble lots of notes and the articles would write themselves.

I think a lot of people misunderstand what good notes are.

They aren’t about simply collecting information and then magic happens. If you are having trouble coming up with ideas, a junk drawer of random information ain’t going to help.

They are about deliberately choosing what you want to save and writing it out yourself (not copying it with Evernote).  It’s possible the less you save, the better your notes might be because now you’ve gotten to the important stuff.

I found a tool called TheBrain and have been enjoying playing with it for my notes. It’s a mind-mapping tool (and does have a free option, though it’s not obvious). I started going through my various writing classes and blog posts, originally done in Evernote and later in Obsidian. It surprised me how many notes I took and how much didn’t make the cut when I started choosing more deliberately.

These are the ones I pulled on characterization and characters.

Make your characters complex, not your plot.

This comes from Kevin Eikenberry and was mind-blowing for me. Plot is easy to describe step-by-step, so the books I read in the 80s focus on this, not on characterization. This resulted in me adding more and more plot on a project that ran too short in an attempt to shore it up. Suddenly I could keep the events relatively simple and focus on something more fun!

Plot doesn’t hold readers in a book. It’s character.

This is from Dean Wesley Smith. It piggybacks off what Kevin Eikenberry says. Many writers ask questions like “Are you plot-focused or character-focused?” or “Do you start with plot or characters?” Since plot consists of the events in a story (definitions, people, please!) in the story, you can’t have plot unless you have characters first. If you just throw a bunch of mannequin characters in with a series of action scenes, readers will go “Meh.” Hollywood’s already done this enough!

“The best characters live on the page because the author thinks of them as people. If you think of their ‘arc,’ you’re thinking of them as words on the page.”

This quote is from Kristine Kathryn Rusch on character arcs. Whenever writers on message boards asked “What’s your character arc?” it mystified me. They started talking about defining how the character changed. And I kept thinking that doing that felt wrong, kind of mechanical. The character arc thinking comes out of MFAs and came in with those books in the 1980s.  If you read Dwight V. Swain’s Creating Characters: How to Build Story People, he doesn’t talk about arcs. Mr. Swain is one of the original sources. Jack Bickham built off him, Deborah Chester off Bickham, and Jim Butcher off Deborah Chester.

Character worksheets don’t create characterization

I’m pretty sure this was in a comment on Dean Wesley Smith’s blog by Kristine Kathryn Rusch. In college, I ran across my first character worksheet in a textbook. I remember looking through it, puzzled, trying to understand how identifying a character’s favorite color or—yikes!—their flaw developed the character.  It was like all those books in the 1980s advocating outlining—except you were outlining a character. And again, very mechanical.  Then again, characterization is very hard to do, especially with the way books today are teaching outlining. Description is a key foundation for characterization and needs to be done using the character’s viewpoint. Instead, it’s often done in exercises independently of the character, and then writers are told to do description in “drips and drabs” because it’s boring. Well, yeah, if you don’t use the character’s viewpoint to describe, it would be boring.

All of these are simple sentences, and yet very complex thinking on a topic that’s often dumbed down.

Any burning writing topics you want me to dig out some of these on? Let me know.

Origins of the Plotter Vs. Pantser Debate

Young woman holding cat and old book, close-up

Photo © belchonock | Deposit Photos

If you search for the phrase “Plotter vs. Pantser” on Google, you’ll turn up a lot of blog posts with some form of that title. All of them will follow a typical pattern of describing pantsing (usually pejoratively) as “writing by the seat of the pants.” The author will express puzzlement at this method, then proceed to explain how they outline in an authoritative tone.

Often the authors of these posts are also new writers…people who might not have finished a novel. You get a different discussion from a long-term writer. They’ll tell you that their method is the better choice, as Jonathan Maberry did at Superstars (outlining), and as Dean Wesley Smith does on his blog (no outline).

There’s such a sense of frustration from writers who don’t outline in the “prescribed manner” that they have all kinds of different labels for the halfway in-between like “plantser.” Others try to get rid of the uncomplimentary “pantser” with phrases like discovery writer or gardener or organic (I dunno. My food is organic. My writing never came with pesticides). James Scott Bell, who writes many books on the topic, calls the two sides, Outline People (OP) and Non-Outline People (NOP). Dean Wesley Smith calls it “Writing into the Dark,” or WITD.

I think the term “pantser” came from a putdown at some point during the early internet days and it stuck. There’s an implied putdown when you pair with “plotter,” as if the pantser writer doesn’t have any plot (seriously, people, learn the definitions of plot!). I started reading craft books in the 1970s and I never heard the term until I got online.

Because, until that point, it didn’t exist, or matter.

If a pantser visits a message board or associates with other writers, they are always pressured to outline. I believe it’s for no other reason than that it makes the other writers feel more comfortable. I could probably count pantsers as the nerds of fiction writing.

But why is outlining so dominant in everything?

It wasn’t always. Dean Wesley Smith says it originated in schools. I’m in the “Well…” zone. If it originated in schools, then outlines would be the more traditional format with the roman numerals. But they’re not.

A significant event happened in the 1980s. We got computers, which made writing a lot easier. Until that point, if you want to write a novel, you had to use a typewriter. Suddenly every one’s dreams of writing fiction because a little more possible by eliminating a barrier.

Writers quickly followed with lots of books on how to write. Some of these were written by people who had earned an MFA (which, by the way, does not teach you how to write; it teaches you how to teach writing). Many others were written by non-fiction writers without any fiction experience. I think that one or two of these writers wrote a hugely popular book and everyone else just regurgitated the information. At the time, I started looking at author bios after I started seeing the cookie-cutter feel of these books.

In-depth books like Jack Bickham’s Scene and Structure faded into the background. You can still get it today, but it’s not a list of instructions, You have to read it, stop and think about it, maybe try what you learned out, then return to read some more.

The new writers coming in simply wanted someone to tell them how to write a book. The book authors found that it was much easier to explain how to outline. That could be discussed step-by-step, and better still, the book authors routinely did outlines as part of non-fiction.

Pantsing a book? It’s hard to offer instruction. Dean Wesley Smith and Harvey Stanborough both say to just type the next word. And I’m going, “Well…” because that never quite worked for me. It made me feel like I was doing something wrong.

And what if you had problems making your process work? No instruction existed.

Meanwhile, everyone was jumping on the outlining bandwagon, eager to cash in this sudden demand. Writer’s Digest and The Writer both added articles on outlining, or some form of craft instruction involved outlining.

Then the internet lit up writing. Suddenly writers could discuss among themselves how to write. Early on it was fun to talk about it, and no one cared about how you wrote. But as more people dived into writing novels, they brought with them now nearly 10-15 years of writing books about how to outline.

They could not see another way to write because no one had been teaching it.

Add to it the rise of developmental editors who also reinforced outlining, likely because it made explaining some skills easier.

Amidst this, the pantsers were looking for help writing in a world that suddenly wasn’t friendly to it. If they asked for help on message boards, they were told to outline, or given advice that couldn’t be followed without outlining.  Or they were told “Pantser stories are always a mess,” “Pantsers never finish,” or “Pantsers need lots of revision.” Many thought pantsers couldn’t get story structure without outlining.

Dean Wesley Smith added his book Writing Into the Dark for writing without outlining. The outliners read his reverse outlining, sneer, and say, “He’s not pantsing. He‘s outlining.” But WITD factions took a stance, practicing a more extreme version of pantsing. Likely this was an outgrowth of all the anti-pantsing reactions from the outliners. I had some of it myself at one point because I was tired of people treating me like I was stupid and informing me that my process couldn’t possibly work.

The people who can’t outline have never had much of a voice because of this dynamic. The WITD crowd states to just “write the next word.” That leaves me out because it doesn’t work exactly that way for me. I have to think a little (or a lot) about what I’m going to write.  But I also can’t map out beats or plot points as others recommend because either 1) I’ll feel like I puzzled out the story already and won’t write it or 2) I’ll aim at the plot points and shut out my creativity.

I also often have to stop and figure out what the setting looks like so I can write the scene. Now my creative side nudges me when I miss some of the details because they tie in later in the story. I keep a punch list as I’m writing—that goes against WITD as well. I use it for little things like “Decide on names for hotel conference rooms” or “Need another word for X.” Then I’ll mark it in all caps in the scene. It doesn’t stay in there long…only until the next day or two. But I’m such high input that if I jumped off to do the research, I’d end up in a rabbit hole and not return to the writing.

Others have to know the ending, like Michael Connelly (he writes about it in The Gods of Guilt).  Some outliners can outline, then change the direction of the outline as they write. Others need an incredible amount of detail in their outlines. A friend, Jennifer Brinn, needs the character’s background to write the story.

All a little different.

Plotter vs. Pantser. It’s not either/or. It’s not what this guru says absolutely works. It’s only about what works for you.

And it’ll look different from everyone else.

Is Fiction Writing Getting Worse?

Cardigan Welsh Corgi wearing glasses and looking at laptop ps 10

Adorable Corgi © pvl0707 | Deposit Photos

This post is inspired by a comment by Peggy on The Fallacy of the Best Seller. She wrote about a best selling author she’d read for years. The author had been pretty good, but now seemed to be phoning it in.

So, is the overall quality of fiction better or declining?

Thanks to social media, it is in decline. It might even get worse.

I’ve been reading a rather horrifying book called Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention–and How to Think Deeply Again. The author navigates through the complex issue of what social media and smartphones are doing to our ability to focus.

While there are some things we can do, a lot of the recommendations (i.e., turn off your notifications, ditch your phone) are blaming the victim. Social media companies find ways to manipulate us and pull us in. According to Becca Syme, little things like making a decision to scroll to the next page cause decision fatigue.

And it’s tough because we get bombarded with it everywhere. I have notifications turned off on my work Outlook, but the program makes sure I know I have unopened emails by displaying the number of them. Can’t turn that off. Teams flashes at me incessantly when I have a message, encouraging me to drop what I’m doing to see what the message is.

This is destroying our ability to focus.

Focus for writers is important across two fronts.

The first is reading.

We get ideas from reading, though you may not always know exactly where they come from. You might read something in a non-fiction book a year ago, or even ten years ago, and your brain puts together a new idea after reading a novel.

Yet, as I check out the business books at work, it seems like there’s a feeling of desperation in the books on how to be creative and come up with ideas.

As writers, we also learn how to write by reading. We absorb story—and even non-fiction can be a story, though it depends on the book. While you can learn some techniques by reading craft books, these are also at a basic level. More advanced skills are primarily learned from studying writers who do those skills well.

But with focus being consumed by our technology, books aren’t holding people’s attention. At a big university, the professor discovered the students barely had the focus for a short book.

You can also see this in business books published by major houses. Common complaints from reviewers are that the books feel like blog posts—at premium prices! I reviewed one of these, given a hardback copy. The publisher had to adjust the book formatting with more spacing between lines, along with an executive summary up front in each chapter and another summary at the end of the chapter.

There’s also a big industry of writers summarizing business books.  Some are 40 pages, while others are as little as 8 pages. They’re made to be skimmed. Like a blog post online.

Non-fiction writers are having trouble pulling on enough knowledge to create content for their books. That goes back to the lack of focus.

The second issue with focus is interruptions.

Writers report jumping online, hitting Twitter or Facebook or whatever for “a few minutes” and then three hours later they surface, having never done the writing.

People make it about discipline. That “blame the victim” mentality. Sure you can turn off some of the technology, or do as Dean Wesley Smith recommends: have a writing dedicated computer.

But it’s a bandage fix at best because the technology wants you engaged with them.  I came back to my computer after Windows, Adobe, and Firefox did an update. Firefox decided I needed an icon installed on my taskbar. I removed it, as I’ve done every time I have an update from them.  Adobe decided I needed an icon on my desktop and added it with their update. I removed it, as I’ve also done before.

And Windows? I noticed there was a tiny panda in my taskbar as part of the search field (it was International Panda Day. Today was some kind of environmental one). If I click in the search box, a window pops up to tell me about pandas and provide links for me to investigate. That change caused me to turn off this feature entirely. (Note the order the instructions are presented. This setting came turned on, but turning it off is not the first option.)

My desktop (the icon next to Word at the bottom is Atticus, my writing program. The icon is a Boston Terrier). I had to remove the search bar because the icon changed daily, and I could see it while I was writing. Intentionally distracting.

Exactly how do you write a novel beyond a sentence at a time when technology wants you to visit it?

What’s the panda you’re turning off?

Panda © kennytong | Deposit Photos