Luke Green's Blog - Posts Tagged "writing-skills"

In writing fiction there are, essentially, three separate types of paragraph: description, action and dialogue. The proper use of these paragraphs is one of several essential basics required to write a successful story.

Description is often one of the first things you will do when starting a new story. Granted action and dialogue can be equally strong openings, but description is the most common way to begin a story. Even if it is not used for the opening, it will appear at least near the beginning of every new scene as description is used to set the scene and introduce new characters.

The rhythm of a description paragraph is dependent on the observational skills of the person through whom the object is described. A good observer will typically mean that you will use long but efficient sentences. An unobservant viewer will require you to use short, vague sentences, sometimes with a little out of voice extra information so that the reader has more information than the character. A slow observer will use long, overly wordy sentences that give far too much definition to some parts and hardly any detail to others.

It should be noted that the same character can be all three types of viewer at different times. A character with a typically Sherlock Holmes level of observational skills might become unobservant if they are dealing with a pressing emergency and, as such, information might slip their view. Likewise a normally unobservant character can become extremely skilled in observation when the subject happens to fall upon something they care about. An altered mental state, such as concussion or being drunk, can account for a slow observation.

Group observations deserve some specific discussion. When describe the general view of a group of characters, the resulting description should have something of a scattershot feel. The rhythm might feel uncoordinated or unbalanced depending on how used to working together the group is. Overall, some parts of the scene will be well detailed and others will be vague since you have multiple skill levels of viewer involved. It can be generally useful to consider the group as a whole a single character instead and apply the whole a skill level.

However, note that while the rhythm and voice of the narration are determined by the viewing character or characters, the primary purpose of description is to draw in and inform the reader. As such, there will be a level of information and control involved that the characters themselves do not notice. The controlling melody of the individual instruments, to continue the discussion of rhythm.

Description is the only one of the three paragraphs in which you can stop the progress of time. You are essentially taking a snap shot of a character, place or object and establish it in the mind of the reader. During that point, for the most part, time does not flow.

This means that, theoretically, you can interrupt the story at any time for more description. In practice however, it is best to avoid that.

Description is primarily useful for the following: introducing new items (characters, places, objects) and establishing the status and appearance of items at key points within a scene (beginning, after some actions, end). Once the base description has been established, action and dialogue can lead the reader along quite well.

Description is split by item. If you find yourself describing a new item, then you should have started a new paragraph.

Item is a fluid definition.

A crowd of unimportant people that are more or less part of the setting rather than characters is an item all together and deserves one paragraph, not one paragraph per person.

A minor character that will have significant impact on the current scene will deserve a small paragraph, probably one or two sentences in length. Usually they will mostly be defined by dialogue, action and the reader's own imagination.

Major supporting characters deserve a full paragraph when introduced and will likely be redescribed with greater detail and depth as the story moves along. They are mostly defined by how they view and react to the lead characters however.

For lead characters, each part of the body might be considered a item on itself. You could spend one paragraph on their eyes, another on their hair. Yet more on their mode of dress or how they carry themselves. In addition, they will likely be redescribed many times over the course of the story as the supporting characters will add to the introductory description of this character. It is no joke to say that you can easily go past one thousand words and several paragraphs the first time you describe your lead character.

Description is directional for the sake of the reader. Pick one place to start and move from that place until you finish. If you're describing a room, you can go from the door the character is entering to the back wall, from left to right, top to bottom, center to outside, spiral in or out. Likewise, for a character you start on something small, like their eyes, and zoom out or go from their head to their toes, clothing down to attitude.

Anything so long as you are moving in one discernible direction.

This is true even in cases of group observations where several parts of the scene or person might be witnessed simultaneously. The reason for this is to give the reader a sort of guide rail to following the description.

You do not have to tell them about your starting point or ending point, in fact it is usually common not to do so, however, you need to be clear in your mind where you're starting and where you're ending.

As for what words or starting points to use, that is a matter of style and preference.

Action is the second sort of paragraph necessary to writing fiction. Unlike description, the moment you start writing action sequences, time is passing in a story. Action usually comes in after description and shows the changes of status and position of a character. The reader uses the previously established description and takes that avatar, to use a computer gaming term, through the manipulations described in your paragraph in order to picture the action of the story.

A majority of your paragraphs are likely to be action of some sort or another.

This does not mean the movie-goer's definition of action. If a character walks across the room to get a glass of milk and yawns half way there, that is action. Any visible motion or physical event classifies as an action.

Action is typically going to have a faster rhythm than description. The slowest action paragraph will still likely read as if it moves faster than the fastest description paragraph. This is to emphasize the fact that things are moving. If description is a snap-shot of status, action is a video.

Action paragraphs are also likely to be shorter, especially in comparison to descriptions of primary story characters or places. The lenth of descriptive paragraphs earlier essentially make it unnecessary to be overly wordy in action sequences.

Just like with description, the way you write action will depend heavily on the perspective that is primarily influencing the narration at the moment.

The perspective of a master martial artist on a fight is going to be a lot calmer and more detailed than that of an accomplished doctor. A narration with the former is likely to involve appropriate terms like "feint", "roundhouse", "riposte" or the like and have a calm, analytical flavor.

A narration influenced by the doctor, meanwhile, is more likely to focus on the injuries induced and be rather vague about what the actual attacks are. The flavor of the narration will tend to be a bit excited and worried. The rhythm is likely to be somewhat faster and more jagged than that of the martial artist's.

Action is separated by decisions.

Everytime a character makes a significant decision, a new paragraph should be started. Similar to the situation with description and items, what constitutes a significant decision is very much dependent on how much you want to emphasize that particular decision.

Coming back to the example of the fight. Unless you want to imply a slow motion feel, you probably don't want to spend a whole paragraph describing each and every move and counter-move of the fight. Instead, the decisions will be points where the fighters choose to take a new tact on the situation: shifts in tactics and approaches.

However, you can stretch out action to describe each motion in painful detail. This will present a sort of sense of tension of some sort. You can describe each foot rising and falling as your character walks to the kitchen and then follow this with a long detailed description of how the character gets out the orange juice and the look of the juice as it pours out of the jug into a clear glass.

Each slowly added detail builds up the tension which you can then release, either slowly or all at once. This can be an alternate way to introduce a new character, being a case of actions speaking louder than description, or it can be a way of building up suspense (either misleading or real) before some surprising event.

Just like with description, the longer you make your paragraphs, the more significant you make that particular action in the eyes of the reader.

The third sort of paragraph necessary to writing fiction is dialogue.


Dialogue is a strange and fragile thing. Except in a few instances, it can't quite stand on its own. There needs to be a little bit of action or dsecription in order to at the very least identify who is speaking. However, too much of either will bury the voice of the character under the voice of the narrator.


Human speech in reality is a cluttered, impromptu and often imprecise. We speak in half-sentences. We walk over each other's words and complete each other's thoughts, sometimes incorrectly.


Compare the dialogue in a TV drama with the dialogue on something akin to the Jerry Springer Show. Or a documentary to a cinematic movie.


The professional actors speak slower than we do naturally and enunciate clearer. They appear to interrupt each other, but in reality, those interruptions are carefully practiced to make sure the character being interrupted gets out the point that the story needs her to. Even people that stutter do so in a way that makes it more or less clear as to what they are trying to say.


In real life, people speak much faster and are often muttering or otherwise speaking unclearly. Interruptions run over the other speaker carelessly or purposefully and often make it hard to understand either person. Accents and speech impediments are much more apparent and problematic.


It is pretty much the same in writing. In some cases an author will want to phonetically write out the dialect or accent of a character, but except in cases where the author wants to make the character's meaning unreadable, the actually accent is toned down so that the words are understandable. In most cases, the accent is only described in the narrative.


Even if two characters are talking over each other, their words are clearly written out for the reader, or at least as much as the writer feels they need to know. In the story, the character's might have trouble understanding each other in the clutter of sounds, but the reader is spared that.


Also, in some cases, dialogue seems to take no time at all to happen. If an author wants a particular point to be made in the middle of a scene, even if something time-dependent is happening during the speech, the author essentially hits a pause button so that the story-relevant points can be made between the characters.


Dialogue falls between action and description on rhythm and overlaps with both of them. In some cases dialogue is short, single syyllable exclamations. In other cases, they're long, slow and sonorous lectures or monologues.


Dialogue is not really separated on anything uniform except where the person speaking changes. When a speaker changes, the paragraph changes and that is almost always a given. If you put two separate characters speaking on the same line of a page, then the readers will get somewhat confused as to who is saying what. If that is your intention, then fine. However, it will stop the pace of reading for many people and make them stop and try to figure out what is going on.


However, when you have one particular character speaking for a long time, you might want to break up their dialogue before someone else takes over speaking.


If you want to show case someone who rambles on and on without pausing for breath except rarely, then you are likely to only separate out dialogue when that speaker is stopped in their speech, or else the narrative lets them run on without highlighting specific words any longer.


If you want to address the urgency of a situation, you will tend to stop most of your dialogue with short single sentences and sometimes not even that much. This emphasizes that the characters are too busy to both form and express complex thoughts.


For my part, I like to separate the paragraphs at the point I envision a character taking a breath, if I have one person taling for an extended time. I will break up the monologue with descriptive and action paragraphs to show the speakers expression or small gestures as he talks, and spread out the dialogue between those paragraphs.


If you feel that the narrative voice needs to have more than half a sentence that is basically just an identifier for who is talking and their tone of voice, then I usually try to split that off into a new paragraph and come back to the dialogue afterwards.


Think of the narrative as another character, even if it is third person. You don't want two characters speaking at the same time in the same paragraph. It confuses the reader and muddles a lot of the personality of the speaking character.


That is what I meant by dialogue being fragile. If you try to combine it with too much of the narrative, then the words of the character are lost. Even if the reader knows what they are, they're buried under the Narrator's accompanying explanation. Separating out the narration from the dialogue lets the reader "chunk" the information of one paragraph and keep it separate from the rest.


Dialogue is very useful in a story as it lets the author give information and make points without relying on the narrator's voice to do it all. There are certainly stories that are told entirely by the narrator, with no real specific dialogue, but dialogue allows the personality of the character to shine through.


Word choice and grammar structure are very important tools to defining the way a character thinks.


Think of the malapropisms in Shakespeare plays were a foolish character will use long and impressive sounding words, but do so in such a way that they quite clearly have no understanding of what the words mean or how they are supposed to be used. Or think of the worldly wise cowboy in Westerns who express complex thoughts and philosophies with simple, small words carefully chosen. Or the nerd who uses impressively technical jargon and describes things very exactly or precisely.


Providing the reader with information and glimpses at the speaker's personality, those are the main purposes for dialogue in a story.

In the course of a story you are going to refer to each character several times, however, you do not want to be repeated "Luke said" or "Luke wrote" or "Luke did whatever" over and over again. The repetition of the name would get grating on the reader and it has the character of an inexpert speaker.


Think about how people talk in real life. When we encounter someone that simply repeats the name over and over again when labeling who is doing what, we get irritated at hearing "Luke", or whatever name is being used, incessantly. It becomes like a drum beat where we can mark the time by the use of that name.


Some times you want to give that impression of the same word repeated over and over again as it can add to tension in some cases. However, used too often and it simply becomes annoying.


English has a built in solution for this problem in the form of pronouns, but even in that case, you've switched from one distinctive beating sound to two. Instead of beating the same drum over and over, you're now switching between two drums, or, more likely, you'll beat one drum frequently and occasionally switch over to the other at dramatic points.


In that case the drum beat sounds like "Luke he he he he he Luke he he he he he Luke he he he he he..." and so on.


The solution is simply: you need to give the characters, especially important characters, more than the one name.


By this, I don't simply mean to give the same character a bunch of given names, but that each character should have several short descriptive phrases that specifically meant to indicate them.


These names can come from different combinations of their given name, based on occupation, descriptive phrases, titles, nicknames given to them by other characters or anything else.






Let's look at Lucretia from Bystander. The following phrases are used to describe Lucretia in the first book, though in some cases only once or twice.


Lucretia, Lu, parolee peak, silver-haired peak, silver-haired young woman, librarian, ex-con, bystander, Kimono, young peak, older peak and the hostess.



In addition, her variety of names give me some quick ways to remind my readers of parts of her character in the course of the story. This reminder can be either appropriate or inappropriate to the situation.


For example, I might want to suddenly remind the reader in the middle of a sequence that Lucretia's day job is that of a librarian. If I use this while she's fighting or running for her life in some sort of fight or crisis, then it instantly places the image of her shelving books on top of the current scene. That's a somewhat disjointed image that makes for a bit of amusement on the part of the reader.


Of course, the action-librarian has become something of a common trope of late, so it doesn't any longer have the sort of impact it used to.


Occupational names have some problem when you are dealing with characters who share occupations. Looking back at Bystander again, I often use "the mercenary" to describe Robles, Kali and their underlings. However, names have to be exclusive to a particular character within the scene. If I call Jason "the mercenary" then I cannot also use that term for anybody else in the same scene or else I risk confusing identities.


In Bystander's case, I simply shift to other titles. Kali or Robles can both become "ex-goddess", Sightseer is the "sniper" and Isaiah is the "drone master". When Kali and Robles are in the same scene, then I could have refered to them as the "templar goddess" and the "ascended goddess" respectively, however, the need did not present itself, so that might come later.


Also note which names each character uses for each other.


Lucretia calls most people by their last names if she knows it. However, she often calls Robles "Sergeant" the way the others do and she calls Novac "the Old Man", also like the other mercenaries do. She calls Sightseer by his given first name, "Eldon" however. All three of these exceptions are indicative of how she feels about the characters. Robles and Novac are rather parental figures, while she wants to be closer to Sightseer.


Also note that most of the people who are friendly with Lucretia end up calling her "Lu" rather than Lucretia. The villains refer to her by names meant to objectify her such as "bystander" and "Kimono".


Of more note is the exchange between Kali and Robles when the latter reveals her presence to the former. Kali refers to Robles by her codename, "Tlazolteotl", while Robles calls Kali by her rank and family name, "Sergeant Jasthi."


This shows that Kali has become more than a little unhinged by what she has been facing since becoming a goddess and has started to associate with the implications of the codename and abandoning her old name. Robles, meanwhile, is still firmly grounded in reality and her normal, birth identity. There use of the others' unprefered names shows an attempt by each to impose their paradigm of thought on the other.


Kali is identifying Robles as a goddess, a mythical figure, while Robles is reminding Kali that they're just people.


Note that the more important a character, the more names and labels that they are likely to have. However, also note that the number of names increases when you have the same character being described from multiple different perspectives.


Lucretia is not only the main character of the story, she is the title character. The world revolves around her from a literary point of view, other things are going on in the world, but the story focuses on the things that affect her.


Bystander shows the perspectives of several different people and how they view her. She is described alternately by herself, Robles, Grant, Sightseer, Novac, Kali, Jason, Isaiah, Det Assaf and Det Park. Since each of these characters sees her slightly different, they each use different terms when referring to her and thus a multitude of names are born.


By comparison, the Greenwater novels are mostly told from the perspectives of Tennel Grimbeck and Runya Sulemar. In addition, the world is much less centered on these two than it is that they are somewhat placed at the center of it. As a result, the other characters, when they get their perspectives, are not so focused on the two main characters. As such, both characters have fewer names than Lucretia due to this more focused perspective in the story.


In the end, a simple drum beat pattern is okay for a short story with few characters, but the longer and more complex the story, the more notes you want to play with. You might end up with enough names where it is a better analogy to compare to a piano or xylophone, but do remember, that there is one name that you want to use for every scene that a character appears in.


Their given name. The name that most completely defines them in the terms of the story.


There are some reasons not to use a given name. If you want to conceal the identity of a person in a scene for a time, then it is a good idea not to use their names until you want them revealed. However, you'll want to have some clues as to who they are, and giving hints of a descriptive name is good for that.
Bystander
Greenwater Part One: Leaving Home
Greenwater Part 2: Setting the Board

Writing is one of those things where there are numerous rules put out by a variety of different people. Some of the rules sound very specific, others are very broad. Depending on which authors or editors whose advice you read, they can even be contradictory. When you start out, you don't know any of these rules except some basic ideas of sequencing and he said/she said. As you progress, you learn more and more rules to follow.

Follow those rules until you can make them.

That sounds rather strange, and I'm aware of that, but it really is the case and the reasoning is very simple. It is very analogous to the instructions to little kids to "color within the lines."

The rules from the writers that come before you are basically simplified versions of procedures and advice those other writers have discovered for themselves.

When you first start out, you don't have much understanding of why you should. As far as you know, it's just an arbitrary rule that was put into place for no particular reason. This causes a very high temptation for to see the rules as a meaningless limitation that exists because the people that made them only accept a narrow-minded view of what is and is not "good" literature. You'll feel very tempted to say that a particular choice is not a mistake but really a function of your style.

However, those rules do exist for reasons and simply breaking them for the sake of breaking them is not a function of style unless you understand the reason the rule exists to begin with.

Most writing rules have to do with the impression given most readers when you break or follow a rule.

For example "never begin the sentence with 'And'" which is something I sometimes do a little bit too much.

Most of the time, if you see "and" starting a sentence it has an amateurish feel to it. Basically, it seems as if you forgot to say something and so are now trying to shoehorn the statement in. A number of readers will get annoyed or turned off by this.

It distracts from your story when people are turned off by a word choice or grammar issue. When the reader stops looking at your story and starts looking at the technique and grammar instead, you have a problem.

He walked to the store. And then he bought the milk. And then it rained. And then he got lost.

However, "and" can sometimes be used with a sentence in order to give an impression of an after thought or frustration. The same sequence above, with some basic flavoring text can be made acceptable.

The young man walked to the store to buy the milk. And, joy of joys, it started raining while he was in the story. And that, of course, made him get lost on the way home. And that was the start of a very bad day.

And now it sounds like the narrator is irritated and rolling their eyes and shaking their head in frustration. The implication that something was forgotten is still there, but you are now making use of it for the narrator's character rather than actually suffering from it. Though this example would still need polishing to be really acceptable.

Also note that the "and" above gives the beginning of that paragraph the character of a sweeping conclusion to a sequence.

As I said, the temptation is to not follow the rules because you don't understand them and it feels restrictive. However, the truth of the matter is that you follow the rules BECAUSE you don't understand them.

Once you understand the rules, for the most part you'll find yourself following them because, lo and behold, most of the time they work better. However, at about this time, you will start discovering truisms that you never were told before. As you come to understand the rules, you will start to see more rules. This is basically what happens as your sense for reader response becomes more attuned.

You start making your own rules.

Once you've gotten to this stage, you'll know that the rules of writing put out by most people are basically advice that's true probably 90% of the time, to throw out an arbitrarily chosen statistic.

And when you come to know that, you'll come to know when the rule can be broken without breaking your story.

Note that the above "and" beginning the sentence gives that the character of a private aside to the reader, as if the narrator leaned over and whispered something on the sly.

Most people take a dim view of stereotypes and assume that it is a bad thing to design a character to fit a stereotype or archetype. The assumption is that making use of a stereotype means making cookie-cutter, low dimensional characters or, worse, that you are giving in to unfair perceptions of different groups.


This view operates under the perception that a character can only fit one particular stereotype at a time.


Stereotypes exist because, for one reason or another, at one point in time, they were true. These are an example of inferential thinking. Inference, as adverse deduction, takes into account similar situations or individuals that have existed in the past and looks for common patterns. They then make the guess that those patterns would be true in the situation or individual you are currently looking at.


This is how profiling works.


If you look at most of the stories of love and romance involving the Knights of the Round Table or a samurai, then you will find that the pattern is that most of those stories are tragic in nature. Following that pattern, one can reasonably assume that any love story involving Arthurian knights or samurai will result in a sad ending somehow.


Inference, however, is not one hundred percent accurate. As stated, it operates based on information about similar situations, not the situation that is in front of you currently. It will often be correct, especially if the information leading up to the inference is up to date.


A good example of inferential failure comes from a TV movie where Sherlock Holmes wakes up after being preserved for a hundred years. He tries to prove his skill in deduction (actually inference) by looking around the room and making guesses based on various things he sees around the room. However, his framework of understanding is so far out of date that he is fairly inaccurate and in fact makes a statement that we would consider racially bigoted that was not a cliche in his original time.


Inferences are in essence guidelines for understanding a situation. Profiles again are the same thing, they are a broad range of traits and behaviors that statistically match together. Another comparison is the search areas defined on maps. The more elements you know of, the smaller an area you have to focus on.


In the same case, stereotypes narrow down a character, defining them so that the readers can understand them.


If you have only one stereotype to deal with, you have a huge range of a characters that fit that stereotype and thus the character resembles a large number of other characters. They are bland and boring, not because they are over-defined, but because they are underdefined.


A more unique character fits a large number of stereotypes and with each trope, stereotype and archetype you add, the narrower and more unique the character appears and the more interesting.


In addition, stereotypes give you a guideline to understand what a reader will expect from a specific character, and when you know what the reader expects, you can have an easier time leading them to specific conclusions.


In addition, it allows you to mix concepts that usually aren't seen mixed. When you do that, you force a reader to think harder about a character in order to find the place where those two concepts intersect.


For example, Runya Sulemar from the Greenwater is first introduced in one of the prologues (and thus not posted for view here). I initially describe her in the process of performing a ritual cleansing and establishing her as a lost, young and religious person. I only reveal that she is serpentile from the waist down after establishing her as a holy and faithful person.


In this case, I have presented two stereotypes that normally conflict with each other: snakes and holy knights.


There is a narrow intersection where that works, involving Asian style concepts on the snake: guardianship and wisdom, both of which fit in well with the concepts of the holy warrior. When I later show Runya using stealthy tactics and attacking from silence to eliminate enemies before they notice her, that fits in with the tactics of a snake. As such, even though it is not normal for a paladin-style character to stab someone in the back, it is acceptable for her since she's established as a snake earlier.


Another example, Lucretia from Bystander is superstrong, supertough and with super-reflexes. Normally, that would also mean that she is good in a fight, however, Lucretia is worthless in a fight. I essentially apply to her the stereotype of an untrained street kid who spends most of their time running and talking tough but with no real fighting skills.


Again, two conflicting stereotypes with a very narrow space of intersection.


Take a look at any character sheet on TVtropes.org and you will find that a lot of characters fit a large number of tropes. The more unique the character, the more tropes and stereotypes they fit within.


Despite this, the readership will generally define your characters only on one or two of the most obvious stereotypes, or else insist that they don't fit the normal stereotypes. However, they will still at least subconsciously expect the characters to follow the standard patterns of the connected stereotypes.


This means that if you understand the standard patterns, you can deviate from them at appropriate points to make the readers pay more attention to what is going on.
Bystander
Greenwater Part One: Leaving Home
Greenwater Part 2: Setting the Board

Predictability, very much like stereotypes, has a bad reputation amongst readers and writers alike. To most people, predictable is the same thing as boring. They want, or say they want, unpredictable stories that end in ways that they did not expect whatsoever.


"I did not see that coming."


That is one of the phrases that most people connect with a story that is well-written and surprising.


It is something of a misdirection.


Stories are not truly unpredictable. The closest sorts of stories that can be called unpredictable are things like Looney Toons, Monty Python and Alice In Wonderland. However, even in this case, the apparent randomness is expected by the viewers and readers. Same with such humorous works as Discworld, with its mountain of puns.


The unpredictability of these stories is, itself, predictable. It is well within your expectations in dealing with such things.


True unpredictability is very easy to achieve. If you decide, out of the blue, to introduce an entirely new character in the last pages of the story in order to solve all the problems, you've just done something unpredictable.


Mystery novel enthusiasts the world over can tell you how popular that sort of thing is.


Anything you do in a story must be either fitting within the framework of what has come before, or establishing the framework for what will come afterwards. Everything in fiction is defined, and the further in the story you get, the more defined that story becomes.


Unpredictability renders such definitions null and void and ruin the consistency of the story.


However, you still want that appearance of unpredictability. You want to be surprising.


You do not want the reader to see "it" coming.


Surprising, however, is not the same unpredictable. You can work with the definition of the world in order to achieve surprise.


When you reach your surprise, or your twist, you want the reader to immediately agree that the sequence makes sense. You want them to have evidence from earlier parts of the story that points to exactly what you just decided to show them.


This is what we call foreshadowing.


You leave clues strung throughout a story that imply a specific end or result. The closer an event is to occurring, the more frequent and obvious you want your foreshadowing to be, but you want to start foreshadowing in small, occasional ways for any major event you have decided on as soon as you have decided it.


At the best, you want this foreshadowing to be so minor that nobody notices it until they've reached the end and all those clues click into place. You want the foreshadowing of minor events in a story combine to foreshadow the greater events.


You want to have enough clues in the storyline that someone who reads your book or story can possibly figure out what is coming, but in a way that few people will piece it together. The same clue, for instance, can foreshadow many different things coming in the longer story.


Also note that only the reader requires this subconscious level of predictability. The characters in your story do not need to be able to predict the ending of the story. In fact, very often, it is better if they can't predict the ending.


Some of the evidence that readers will be using to predict your story, subconsciously or unconsciously, include knowledge of cliches, tropes and stereotypes. As such, you should be well educated about such things. It is best to be aware of these rather than let these guide your story entirely, but a lack of awareness of these trends is likely to ruin your surprises.


Some people like to make use of red herrings, clues that lead the reader off in entirely the wrong direction. For my own style, I do not prefer to deliberately create truly extraneous and misleading clues. Instead, I prefer to have clues that can be read in more than one way. To me, it is best if the reader creates their own red herrings rather than for me to give them a primrose path leading off in the wrong direction.

A lot of fiction can be called larger than life. The Rule of Cool is repetitively invoked in all manner of stories. This is why the star-fighters in Star Wars make strange whining sounds and action heroes can outrun explosions. This is why characters in movies and TV shows seem like they're experts in just about everything. This is why the characters in romance movies can so flawlessly express themselves. Fiction, even realistic fiction that says it sticks firmly within what is possible in real life, still seems to stick strongly to the mantra "I reject your reality and substitute my own!"


However, you should not simply reject reality when making your stories. The first thing you should do when writing a scene and desiring to make something "cool" is to do the research as to the reality of the subject. If you don't know precisely what is or is not possible or realistic, then you increase the risk of breaking the willing suspension of disbelief.


There is a big difference between someone who did not do the research and someone who studied the subject and decided to ignore reality anyway.


For example, in Bystander, I have a couple of instances where I've let reality take a break. Robles BASE jumping in "Shake Ups" is probably ridiculously difficult in real life, but I decided to have her pull it off with really no issue simply because it was cool. Likewise, Lucretia herself, as a superstrong individual with better than human reflexes, should be a bit more effective in a fight than she is, but I've ignored some of that because it is more interesting if she is bad in a fight.


The audience can accept a lot of changes from reality without blinking, but the level of tolerance is different from person to person and subject to subject.


My brother once picked up a game book detailing modern weapons and flipped to the section on mortars. I was then treated to a thirty minute frothing at the mouth lecture about how inaccurate the mortar section was. Among other things, I was assured that three shots a minute was a ridiculously slow rate that would mark any crew as incompetent. I was also assured that the kill radius of the mortar rounds was about ten times larger than what the book suggested it was,


A story can easily survive a handful of those, however, if every reader is making the same observations, then you have made a mistake. Understanding the reality behind certain things is the best defense against that. If you understand the reality, then your choices to reject it are likely to be made in ways that support the story rather than counter it.

Bystander

Consistency is a big part of any story, if you are not consistent then people are going to quickly get fed up with your story as it becomes harder and harder to relate things.


A lot of people might point to George Lucas when thinking of examples of inconsistency. However, George's arbitrary decision to change some things in the Star Wars universe is not really a very major example of this situation.


A much better example is Heroes, the TV show that everybody loved on the first season and which got progressively less buyable from the second season onward. It became quickly apparent that they were tacking on consequences and ramifications to the powers as time went on. I could go on forever with the number of times they suddenly up and decided to add something without regard to previous developments.


In fact, the link above has already done it for me.


So I will go on.


If you are not consistent, then you are continually pulling the rug out from under your readers. They will eventually get fed up with being pushed around and given no clear guidelines as to what they can or cannot expect.


This doesn't mean that you can't have some inconsistancy, however, any inconsistancy has to have it's own consistancy. There has to be a reason that the inconsistancy exists and preferably, someone in the story should comment on it to confirm to the reader that, yes, something is not right here. You do not need to explain the reason for the inconsistancy, which gets into something I'll write later, but you yourself need to understand that it is there.


A good example of this is Lucretia from Bystander. Her levels of strength and toughness have so far appeared to be what my brother described as "as high as she needs it to be." In fact, what she does in Shake Ups doesn't work with pure strength regardless of how strong she is.


Robles comments on the fact that things don't add up. Lucretia herself, upon listening to the news on the radio is confused as to how she accomplished that. A certain person gets so freaked out over the implications of what Lucretia is that they abandon all reason and logic and simple goes on a berserk attempt to kill her.


All three of those tell the reader that there's something funky about Lucretia and thus makes her inconsistant level of power a consistant part of the world setting. They won't be uncomfortable when, in one scene, Lucretia is getting a black eye from gun fire and, in the next scene, surviving something that might be worthy of Nanoha Takamichi.

Bystander

Okay, you will see me wax philosophic and start to delve into deep and meaningful stuff here and there all over my blog in places. I might even start delving into what I consider to be the big philosophical meanings and metaphors of my various works. Said discussions might get fairly complex, deep and insightful.


Most of them are things I come up with after the fact of writing the story and are more ways for me to analyze myself than to analyze my work.


I am a huge fan of JRR Tolkien and in particular, I am a firm believer in his concept of applicability. I had come to pretty much the same conclusion before I'd ever heard the term before.


Basically, to me, meaning does not belong to the writer but the reader, and thus might be the thing that most makes me dislike George Lucas's recent ret-cons of his most famous works.


George Lucas commented that a work is always unfinished and there is always more to add to it, more to change and to make it perfect. He is correct in that, but he then went on to disregard the people that knew the story as being unimportant since he was the creator and it was only his vision that mattered.


Let's be clear on this.


Once you write something and let it out into the public, it will take on a life of its own and it is no longer yours. You will own the commercial rights, probably, but the story itself now belongs to anybody who reads it. Once you have published it, you should do everything you can to avoid changing what you have already put out save for clear errors in grammar and printing.


It is sheer arrogance to tell someone that their interpretation of your story is wrong.


You don't know what their life is like, and you can't know what images will provoke what responses in a particular individual. You can make a reasonable guess based on the fact that most people in a particular culture will respond the same way to the same symbols, but there are always outliers.


And those meanings change in a particular person.


Ranma 1/2 and the various things inflicted on Ranma by his father as training were hilarious to me when I was a teenager.


Then I became a teacher.


Even before that, you can see a fair amount of my developing dislike of Genma Saotome in pretty much any of my stories, but especially in Genma's Journal and Lost Innocence. Just upon becoming a teacher who taught a large variety of ages and was turning somewhat protective of my students, the concept of someone doing that to any kid, much less their own, drives me bananas.


I try not to think about it too much so that I can still enjoy the comedy.


In the end, to me, the best way to get the heart of who and what you are into a story is to write a story that you would enjoy reading, that you would buy for pleasure. All the work you do to define the characters and make the story into something fun and enjoyable will call on the essence of who and what you are.


Your personality and true beliefs will move into the story whether you want it or not.


And to me, a story is much more effective when it encourages the reader to fill in some of the blanks themselves and, even better, to make their own stories.