Ask a Published Author: "How do I 'un-blandify' my writing?"

James R. Strickland has been telling stories since before he could read. After making his career in high tech, he took part in National Novel Writing Month, and in 2004, wrote the first draft of Looking Glass, which was published in 2007. He lives in Denver, Colorado.

How do you beef up a very simplistic style of writing? My style feels a tad bland and even boring in places. Most of my friends who read my novel tell me it’s fine, but I think it needs to be un-blandified. How do I remedy this?

There are a couple things that can cause this. First is lack of specificity. At Taos Toolbox, a very good workshop I attended in 2011, Nancy Kress called this White Room Syndrome.

Consider:

"It was night time. He drove his old car, listening to talk radio." It doesn’t give you much to work with as a reader. You could put this guy anywhere in the United States, on any road, in any old car, thinking anything and not change those two sentences.

Consider, instead,

"He was making about 50 on the interstate between Pueblo and Colorado Springs. His Pinto wouldn’t go much faster, wasn’t safe if it did. The Sparkomatic radio in the dash dragged Rush Limbaugh in off the AM airways, noisy and full of static, but the man’s message could be heard."

I’ve given no actual description, but because I’m trading on cultural memes I expect my audience knows, I don’t have to. Sparkomatic spent millions of dollars in the 80s making their name indelibly associated with “Owner of a Lonely Heart". The Pinto’s been a running joke at Ford’s expense for decades, and Rush Limbaugh’s radio show helps set the scene in the nineties to aughties.

Those three elements also set some expectations about the driver, as does the pacing of the sentences, which put emphasis on Rush and his message. Depending on what you want to do with these expectations, you can either use the character as you’ve painted him, or you can contradict those expectations in the following sentences and give the character complexity. Evoking these cultural memes costs research, but it lends flavor and tone. Is this a funny story? Are you making fun of the main character? Is it a violent story? Is something about to happen? All these things are the nerd-knobs you can adjust in that simple paragraph to make your story go. The details tell you important parts of the story and they give you feel, description, and so on.

The other common way stories wind up bland is that the writer gave themselves too much distance from the story and the characters. Stories are about emotions and (usually) bad things happening. If the emotions aren’t there, it’s boring.

In Looking Glass, this was a particular problem for me. There is one scene where the narrator’s entire world has come apart; she’s wrecked her whole life and her quest is at an end. It took me six tries before I got a level of emotion appropriate to the task. (My wife let me know in no uncertain terms that the previous five versions weren’t there yet.)

It’s scary to give characters heart. You have to listen to them scream for what you’ve done to them. My rule of thumb is that if I don’t worry that someone’s going to read the book and say that I really needed medicating, I’m not digging deep enough.

Next week’s head counselor will be Susan Dennard, whose book,  A Darkness Strange and Lovely, hits shelves today! It’s the second in a trilogy blending historical fiction, horror, romance, and mystery .

Ask her your questions here!