When Writing Fiction, Be Specific

I have been blogging a lot about short stories, probably because I am writing a collection of my own right now. I am also consulting on the short-story collection of one of my writer friends. Thus, I have some pointers for writers in terms of short stories – and in terms of fiction in general.

Be Specific

I cannot urge this enough. With the short story especially, you have little time to get across a lot of information. You don’t have time to be coy. Just spit it out: What are you talking about, who are you referring to. If you are introducing a character who is the main character's mother, don’t call her something else, like “confidante” the first time we meet her. She might be the main character's confidante, but why not give us more information? Don't just make up a bunch of metaphors that only allude to who she is -- why not just tell us who she is. I know this might seem “on the nose,” but, in a sense, it needs to be. And if this character isn't just the main character's mother, but her step-mother, then please tell us that too, from the get-go. I know a lot of writers want to build a kind of mystery around their characters, surprising the reader later, but unless you are a very experienced writer, this is probably not going to work. State the facts.

Name Your Characters

I know there are writers who have lived on this planet, who are capable of creating these wonderfully dreamy worlds in which characters don’t actually have names but are only spoken of in terms of pronouns and nouns. “She went to the store.” “The girl didn’t like the boy.” I think Marguerite Duras, who is one of my all-time favorite writers, probably did this. But remember, Duras almost won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Most of us are not Duras. So please name your characters. Don’t try to create a wistful story by leaving out the names. It doesn’t make the story wistful, just confusing and vague. Give your characters names! This not only makes it easier for us to sort through the information, especially if there is more than one character with the same gender. “He needed to speak to him about his problem.” Huh? Which guy has the problem? Tell me!

Names also tell us a lot about a character. A character named Tracie has a different personality than one named Sloane, or one named Persephone. Names are important. Names make us relate to the character more when we're reading. We want to sink our teeth into details.

Location

Same thing, writers: be specific. Location can tell us a lot about your characters: what kind of social status they have, what their interests are... Don’t expect readers from different parts of the country (or world) to  comprehend the idiosyncrasies of the boroughs or parts of your city, even if you are writing about New York or Paris. You are still going to need to describe the part of town or the neighborhood in more detail than just stating the place.

And if you are talking about mountains, why not tell us which mountains? Vermont or Colorado or Aspen? Think about the different kind of people who live in those different mountainous places. See how it makes a difference?

The same goes for locations within locations. So your character is sitting in an office. What is the office like? Describe it! Is it an opulent office, or a run-down one? A real-estate agent's office... Well, is this agent successful or not? This isn’t a screenplay. We need description here. You and only you, as the writer, have control over what the reader feels when they read your piece. Why not make it as easy as possible for the reader to understand the world you are trying to create for them?

Jobs and Age

Again, I am advising that you be as descriptive as possible. What kind of job your characters have describe to the reader who they are. Of course, we are not the sum total of our jobs, but let’s say all you do is write that your main character works at a club. We need to know what kind of club it is: a Kiwanis club, a dance club, a country club, a casino?

In terms of ages, think about how things mean different things to people of different ages. The stakes can be raised or lowered by a significant degree, depending on age. A single 20-year-old is different than a single 40-year-old. A married 20-year-old is different than a married 40-year-old. If you don’t come out and state the age, then you need to allude to it – a lot. You need to be very specific. X character is in college. Or she’s just graduated. Or she just recently celebrated her X birthday. 

Relationships

Also, be specific about relationships. A son-in-law picks up his wife’s mom from the airport, and he’s late. Don’t let this just escape us. This is the perfect time to launch into some back story, even if this is a short story. Have the mother- and son-in-law always gotten along? Does Mom approve of him? Does she hate his guts? This is going to determine how she feels about him being late. And don’t let that confrontation escape us either. Let's see it!

Objects

Again, be specific about objects, stuff. If your main character has just packed a lamp because he is moving, what kind of lamp is it? A lava lamp is very different from an antique lamp given to you by your grandmother, which is very different from a lamp purchased at Z Gallerie or one purchased at a thrift shop.

I'll will include more tips later, so stay tuned.

More Tips for Building Character

I am in the midst of designing a new class for Your Plot Thickens Writing Workshops that will touch on how to build stronger characters throughout your novel or screenplay. Some of the tips that I will be teaching in this class are:

1) What is your character’s voice? I advise you begin to speak as that character speaks. You can do this in your head or actually out-loud. I also want to know how she moves, walks, sits or eats dinner? What does she do when she first gets up in the morning? Then, what are her steps for getting ready for bed? A lot of screenplays that are heavily character-driven will even begin by showing what the main character does when they wake up first thing in the morning. Two movies that come to mind right now are Sideways and Stranger Than Fiction. Basically, what are your character's rules for living her life?

2) What is related to what your character's voice is, obviously, is what her dialogue is like? Does she speak the same way to everyone? I assume that she will have a different way of speaking to her parents, than she does with her children, than she does with her significant other. And how does she speak with people out in the world? Is she polite or impolite when she goes to order her morning coffee? Finally, does she have any special catch phrases? Does she use a lot of slang? These will be important issues when writing how your character actually converses.

3) Also, I would like to how your character might create her own obstacles. This is related to her flaw, of course. But does she leave her room really messy, and thus she can't find her car keys, which leads her to be late for work or school each day? Or is she the ultimate neat-freak, and thus she neglects her husband or children because all she ever does is spend the whole day cleaning the house?

If You Are Going to Bomb, Bomb Big

If you are going to bomb, bomb big. This is the old acting adage. What it means it that, when acting, you should make bold, decisive choices and then stick to them. Commit! Because even if you make the wrong choice, if you commit to it, if you own it, you might just be able to get away with it. In my opinion, the same goes with writing.

Writing is good when it is truthful – when it has energy, rhythm. In other words, when it is alive – human – when the words are infused with personality. In order to do this, writers must take risks. They must take risks with the kinds of characters they choose and what part of their own psyche they access when writing about these characters or even in the first person. Don’t pussy-foot around issues. Confront them. Be truthful. If you are going to talk about your first bisexual relationship, then explain it in all its lurid details. If you are going to describe what it was like growing up with an alcoholic father, don’t allude to events: describe them vividly. Above all, show, don’t tell! As with any art form, truthful writing is real writing. It connects with the reader. If you are adopting the voice of another character, then do so boldly. Don’t worry about making that character a little over the top. It’s better that she be too loud than too drab and boring. This is one tip for punching up an otherwise boring piece of writing: adopt a voice, go on a rant, create a quirky persona in your head. You will see how the writing comes alive. All in all, when writing, be sure to always choose a distinct voice. This often takes a bit of practice. In fact, it might take a lot of practice to find your true, real voice. But once you do, this will give your writing the mark of originality. Think of your favorite writers: they don’t just sound like everyone else, right? They don’t just write about the same boring things. And if they do write about something terribly prosaic, then they approach it in a very original way. Their voice shines; it is vivid. But all they have done is make the bold decision to be different, to show their true originality that each of us is born with. A challenge for us all….

When in Doubt, Ditch the First 100 Pages of Your Novel

I have gotten a lot of advice about the importance of condensing your first act. Why? Because, as writers, we tend to write voluminous first acts, thinking that we need to explain everything, provide so much backstory. But you know what that does? It makes your screenplay really boring. Why? Because while you're doing all that explaining, your characters aren't living. What I mean by that is that they aren't acting. They aren't making the important choices necessary for them to change. And you probably aren't paying off the premise of the script either, which promises what we are going to see once your main character is changing -- those funny or dramatic setpieces -- and instead we remain too long in what Christopher Vogler calls "the ordinary world." So the advice I've heard is to make your first act short. If you can tell all you need to tell in 5-10 pages, wonderful! Scripts these days tend to be no longer than 110 pages, and that means you need to leave a lot of other pages open to the development of story -- not backstory.

I have come into this problem recently with the novel I am writing. I have so much set-up. And trust me, I love the set-up I've written, all 100 pages of it. Yeah, 100 pages of set-up for act one! But unless I'm planning on writing a novel that is 500 pages (which I'm not), then I need to cut a lot of that. I don't want to, of course, because I love what I've written. But something tells me that I am going to have to "kill my darlings" one of these days, whether I like it or not.

As I've explained in a past blog entry, I highly recommend working on your ending first, before you plod through so many pages of your second act. This will help you know exactly what you need to have in that first act -- all the essentials. It has also, for me at least, shed light on ways that I can cut those glorious first 100 pages I've spent so much time on polishing and thus jump into the action of act two even more quickly.

That said, I do also realize how important it is for writers to spend the time writing those first pages of their screenplay or novel during the early days of your work's conception. A lot of times, it can work as an exercise in helping you to determine the tone of the work, as well as figure out your character's voices and their dynamics. If you do have to cut a lot of those pages, though (and you probably will), you might consider seeing how you can retool some of those scenes to make them work as part of new scenes in the second act, or as flash-back throughout the second act. (Although if this is a screenplay, not too much flashback, please.)

Finding Your Hook

I spent a lot of years as a magazine writer. In the same way that your article for a magazine needs a hook, so does your story. What is that interesting thing that makes your story different and therefore why should people read it? Are you looking at a subject in a new and different way? One example of this is the plethora of vampire stories out there. But as long as you are coming at the subject of vampires in a new way, you can still make a new and interesting story out of it. (Although if you want to write a screenplay or a TV series, I would advise you at this point not to write about vampires… Sure, the genre is popular, but even if you come up with a new take on it at this point, it’s kind of been done to death. Uh, no pun intended.)

Anyhow, back to you hook... Once you know what your hook is, I advise you to brainstorm scenes (even if this is a novel) that pay off the premise of your hook. For example, if your story is about a countrygirl who moves to the city for the first time (yes, this is an old, rote story, but bear with me), you would want to show scenes in which the ramifications of her moving would be shown and also how her country-ness is juxtaposed against the backdrop of the city and vice-versa. You get the picture. Just brainstorm as many combinations as you can think of that you can make into scenes and incorporate into your plot.

One of the ways that scenes for your screenplay or novel can be created is through your main character's fatal flaw. Once you decide what your character’s fatal flaw is, you can brainstorm a bunch of scenes in which we see her committing this “mistake”. Of course, if you abide by the tenets of story structure, we should be seeing some kind of a progression, meaning that, throughout the course of the story, your main character should be getting over her flaw, at least to some extent. Even if in the end you decide that she doesn’t finally conquer her “misbehavior,”  then we need to have seen her grow and change throughout the course of the story.

Your Main Character's Fatal Flaw

You should always look at your main character's fatal flaw as the major building block of your story. And, as such, it is her flaw that should inform every scene of your story. 

First and foremost, you need to make sure you are not writing what your main character's flaw is in a "tell-tell" fashion. You need to be showing HOW her flaw manifests itself as an obstacle in her life. You need to establish this flaw in the first pages of your story. Then, throughout the course of the story, this flaw needs to be revisited constantly. What I mean by this is that if your main character's flaw is that she is too submissive with her husband, for example, then it's your job to brainstorm ways in which to show her not standing up for herself -- and we need to see this throughout the story. Then, at the end of your story, she needs to be getting over this misbehavior in some fashion -- unless your story is a tragedy. (In tragedies, the main character never gets over their flaw.) Or if you main character suffers from, for example, commitment phobia -- as many do in romantic comedies -- then you need to brainstorm scenes in which this is happening and place them throughout the story. Of course, as the story progresses, she should be overcoming this flaw, only to revert back to it at the low point (e.g. the "all is lost" moment). Ultimately, however, she needs to get over the flaw at the end. Christopher Vogel asks us to think of flaw as an addiction. Often times people must relapse into their bad habits before they are able to really put them behind them for good. But back to flaw... If you story is a comedy, then these flaws need to manifest in humorous ways. If it's a drama, then the flaw needs to create pathos or suspense. You get the idea.

When In Doubt: Write Your Ending First

I am currently writing a novel and am finding myself very lost. Sound familiar? I've written about 120 pages just for the first act! I'm well into the second act. I've got the third act mapped out. But I'm still losing steam as I become confused by all the plot twists and characters. So what am I doing? Writing my ending first. Sounds counter-intuitive, right? But it's not. See, if you know what is going to happen at the end of your story, then this helps you fill in all the blanks as to what should lead up to this.

Of course, I don't quite have as much "inspiration" as I did for the first act, when everything was new. I am worrying about whether the story is good enough, if the ending is weird (read: jarring). So instead of letting fear and writer's block bog me down, I doing something I did last night in the writer's group I attend: I am concentrating on writing just the setting, really fleshing out what the scenes look and feel like where my main character will be experiencing the last tense moments of her story.

So what did we learn here: If you get stuck, concentrate on writing your ending. And if you have trouble doing that, don't become stuck in the dynamics of the characters or even how the chapter should begin. (I for one know that I always want my chapters to begin with a bang!) Just write concentrate on setting, the description of what it looks and feels like in that/those scenes.