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In the opening... Show us your main characters, or at least foreshadow them: We might see your heroine's mother getting married, for example. Or we might see a crime committed which will bring in your hero to investigate. Show one or more characters under some kind of appropriate stress. For example, if the hero must perform well under enemy fire in the climax, show him being shot at in Chapter One--and performing badly. If the heroine must resist temptation at the end, show her (or someone else) succumbing to temptation in the beginning. Show us who's the ``good guy,'' who's the ``bad guy.'' That is, in whom should we make an emotional investment? Whose side are we on? Even if the hero is morally repugnant (a hired killer, for example), he should display some trait or attitude we can admire and identify with. The villain can be likable but set on a course we must disapprove. Show what's at stake. Editors and readers want to know this right away. (That's why the blurb on the jacket usually tells us: ``Only one person can save the West/defend the Galactic Empire/defeat the vampires...'')What does the hero stand to gain or lose? What will follow if the villain wins? Establish the setting--where and when the story takes place. Establish the area of conflict . If the setting is the Nanaimo coal mines at the turn of the century, the area of conflict may be relations between miners and owners, or within a family of miners, or within a single miner's personality. Foreshadow the ending. If the hero dies in a blizzard at the end, a few flakes of snow may fall in the first chapter. Set the tone of the story: solemn or excited, humorous or tragic. In the body of the story... Tell your story in scenes, not in exposition. A scene contains a purpose, an obstacle or conflict, and a resolution that tells us something new about the characters and their circumstances. Develop your characters through action and dialogue. Show us, don't tell us, what's going on and why (not He was loud and rude, but ``Get outa my way, you jerk!'' he bellowed.). Include all the elements you need for your conclusion. If everything depends on killing the victim with a shotgun, show us the shotgun long before it goes off. Give your characters adequate motivation for their actions and words. Drama is people doing amazing things for very good reasons. Melodrama is people doing amazing things for bad or nonexistent reasons. Develop the plot as a series of increasingly serious problems. (The heroine escapes the villain in Chapter 5 by fleeing into the snowy mountains; now in Chapter 6 she risks death in an avalanche.) Establish suspense by making solution of the problems uncertain (How will the heroine escape the avalanche and avoid freezing to death in Chapter Seven?). Make solutions of the problems appropriate to the characters (Good thing she took Outward Bound training in Chapter One). In the conclusion... Present a final, crucial conflict when everything gained so far is in danger and could be lost by a single word or deed: this is the climax, which reveals something to your readers (and perhaps to your characters) which has been implicit from the outset but not obvious or predictable. Throughout the story... Remember that nothing in a story happens at random . Why is the heroine's name Sophia? Why is she blind? Why is her dog a black Lab? The easy answer is that you're the God of your novel and that's the way you want things. But if you have a conscious reason for these elements, the story gains in interest because it carries more meaning: For example, ``Sophia'' means ``wisdom'' and the name can provide a cue to the reader. Use image, metaphor and simile with a conscious purpose, not just because a phrase ``sounds good.'' Maintain consistent style, tone, and point of view. Know the conventions of the form you're working in, and break them only when you have a good reason to. For example, if it's conventional for the private eye to be an aggressive, hard-drinking single man, you're going to shake up the reader if your private eye is a yogurt-loving, shy mother of three school-age children. You'll shake up the reader even more if she goes around pistol-whipping people; as a private eye, her behavior will still depend on her personality and limitations. Style: Checklist For Fiction Writers As you begin to develop your outline, and then the actual text of your novel, you can save time and energy by making sure that your writing style requires virtually no copy editing. In the narrative: 1. Do any sentences begin with the words ``There'' or ``It''? They can almost certainly benefit from revision. (Compare: There were three gunmen who had sworn to kill him. It was hard to believe. or: Three gunmen had sworn to kill him. He couldn't believe it.) 2. Are you using passive voice instead of active voice? (Compare: Is passive voice being used?) Put it in active voice! 3. Are you repeating what you've already told your readers? Are you telegraphing your punches? 4. Are you using trite phrases, cliches, or deliberately unusual words? You'd better have a very good reason for doing so. 5. Are you terse? Or, alternatively, are you on the other hand expressing and communicating your thoughts and ideas with a perhaps excessive and abundant plethora of gratuitous and surplus verbiage, whose predictably foreseeable end results, needless to say, include as a component part a somewhat repetitious redundancy? 6. Are you grammatically correct? Are spelling and punctuation correct? (This is not mere detail work, but basic craft. Learn standard English or forget about writing novels.) 7. Is the prose fluent, varied in rhythm, and suitable in tone to the type of story you're telling? 8. Are you as narrator intruding on the story through witticisms, editorializing, or self-consciously, inappropriately ``fine'' writing? In the dialogue: 9. Are you punctuating dialogue correctly, so that you neither confuse nor distract your readers? 10. Are your characters speaking naturally, as they would in reality, but more coherently? 11. Does every speech advance the story, revealing something new about the plot or the characters? If not, what is its justification? 12. Are your characters so distinct in their speech--in diction, rhythm, and mannerism--that you rarely need to add ``he said'' or ``she said''? Storyboarding ``Storyboarding'' usually means arranging a sequence of images for a film or commercial. But you can storyboard a novel also, and it can be a helpful way to organize the plot. That's because we don't normally think plot. We have an idea for a story (immigrant boy founds family dynasty in Nevada wilderness) and a random assortment of mental images (encounter with a grizzly bear, wild ride to rescue son from kidnappers, gorgeous blonde swimming nude in icy stream, showdown with eastern gangsters wanting land for casino). How do we get from these fragments to a coherent plot? Writing a letter to yourself may help, but first try this: Take a stack of 3x5 cards and jot down an image or scene on each one, just in the order the ideas occur to you. It might look something like this: Jesse rides into town, confronts Caleb Black about his fraudulent mining-shares deal. Caleb denies everything, threatens to shoot Jesse if he talks about it. When you have five or ten or twenty such cards, lay them out in the sequence you envisage for the story. You certainly don't have a card for each scene in the novel, but you have the scenes that your subconscious seems to want to deal with. You also have numerous gaps. How do you get Jesse from his silver mine in Nevada to the deck of the Titanic? How does Caleb get in touch with the three hired killers from San Francisco? How does Jesse's grandson respond to the first offer from the gangster syndicate that wants to build a casino on the site of the old mine? Now you turn your thoughts to just those gaps, and new ideas occur to you. That means more cards. Maybe some of the new ideas are better than the original ones, so some of the old cards go in the trash. New characters emerge to fulfill functions in the story. Your research into Nevada history suggests still more scenes which might go into this or that part of the novel; still more cards go into your growing deck. The story may eventually end up as a series of flashbacks, but for now stick to straight chronological order. Maybe the whole story occurs during a three-hour siege of a secluded mansion; maybe it stretches across a century and a continent. Whatever the ``real time'' of your story, you may see that the cards clump naturally around certain periods of the plot and you see no need for events to fill in the gaps. That's fine; maybe you've found the natural divisions between chapters or sections of the story. Keep asking yourself why. Why Nevada, why mining, why a gorgeous naked blonde? Don't keep a scene in your storyboard unless you can justify it as a way to dramatize a character's personality, to move the story ahead, to lend verisimilitude. If you absolutely must have a scene in which Jesse's true love Sophia goes skinny dipping in an icy creek and then nearly drowns, what good will the scene do for the story? Once you have at least the main sequence of events clearly mapped out on your cards, you can begin to transfer them to a more manageable synopsis or outline. Ten Points on Plotting 1. Nothing should happen at random. Every element in a story should have significance, whether for verisimilitude, symbolism, or the intended climax. Names, places, actions and events should all be purposeful. To test the significance of an element, ask: Why this place and not another? Why this name and not another? Why this action, this speech, and not others--or none at all? The answers should be: To persuade the reader of the story's plausibility; to convey a message about the theme of the story; to prepare the reader for the climax so that it seems both plausible and in keeping with the theme. 2. Plot stems from character under adversity. A mild-mannered person cannot achieve his goals by an out-of-character action like a violent assault, unless we have prepared the reader for it by revealing a glimpse of some suppressed aspect of his personality that can be plausibly released by stress. And the stress itself must also be plausible, given the circumstances of the story. 3. Each character has an urgent personal agenda. Too much is at stake to abandon that agenda without good reason. We may not share the character's urgency, but we should be able to see why he cares so much about what he's doing. A character who acts without real motivation is by definition melodramatic, doing outrageous things for the sake of the thrill it gives the reader--not because it makes sense for the character to do so. 4. The plot of a story is the synthesis of the plots of its individual characters. Each character has a personal agenda, modified by conflict or concordance with the agendas of others. The villain doesn't get everything his way, any more than the hero does; each keeps thwarting the other, who must then improvise under pressure. If the hero is moving northwest, and the villain is moving northeast, the plot carries them both more or less due north--at least until one or the other gains some advantage. 5. The plot ``begins'' long before the story. The story itself should begin at the latest possible moment before the climax, at a point when events take a decisive and irreversible turn. We may learn later, through flashbacks, exposition, or inference, about events occurring before the beginning of the story. 6. Foreshadow all important elements. The first part of a story is a kind of prophecy; the second part fulfills the prophecy. Any important character, location, object should be foreshadowed early in the story. The deus ex machina is unacceptable; you can't pull a rabbit out of your hat to rescue your hero. But you can't telegraph your punch either--your readers don't want to see what's coming, especially if your characters seem too dumb to see it. The trick is to put the plot element into your story without making the reader excessively aware of its importance. Chance and coincidence, in particular, require careful preparation if they are going to influence the plot. 7. Keep in mind the kind of story you're telling. Any story is about the relationship of an individual to society. A comic story describes an isolated individual achieving social integration either by being accepted into an existing society or by forming his own. This integration is often symbolized by a wedding or feast. A tragic story describes an integrated individual who becomes isolated; death is simply a symbol of this isolation. The plot should keep us in some degree of suspense about what kind of story we're reading. Even if we know it's a comedy, the precise nature of the comic climax should come as a surprise. If we know the hero is doomed, his downfall should stem from a factor we know about but have not given sufficient weight to. 8. Ironic plots subvert their surface meanings. Here, an ordinarily desirable goal appears very unattractive to us: the hero marries, but chooses the wrong girl and turns his story into a tragedy. Or the hero may die, but gains some improvement in social acceptance as a result--by becoming a martyr or social savior, for example. 9. The hero must eventually take charge of events. In any plot the hero is passive for a time, reacting to events. At some point he must try to take charge. This is the counterthrust, when the story goes into high gear. In some cases we may have a series of thrusts and counterthrusts; in the opening stages of the plot, the counterthrust helps define the hero's character and puts him in position for more serious conflicts (and counterthrusts) later in the story. You could even say that every scene presents the hero with a problem; his response is his counterthrust. In the larger structure of the plot, the counterthrust often comes after the hero's original plan of action has failed; he has learned some hard lessons and now he will apply them as he approaches the climax of the story. 10. Plot dramatizes character. If all literature is the story of the quest for identity, then plot is the roadmap of that quest. Every event, every response, should reveal (to us if not to them) some aspect of the characters' identities. Plot elements dramatize characters' identities by providing opportunities to be brave or cowardly, stupid or brilliant, generous or mean. These opportunities come in the form of severe stress, appropriate to the kind of story you're telling. A plot element used for its own sake--a fistfight, a sexual encounter, an ominous warning--is a needless burden to the story if it does not illuminate the characters involved. Conversely, the reader will not believe any character trait that you have not dramatized through a plot device. The Story Synopsis The story synopsis or outline can take many forms; it has no rigid format. But the synopsis, like the manuscript, should be double-spaced and highly legible, with frequent paragraphing. Some synopses cover the whole story, while others supplement a portion of completed manuscript and presuppose the reader's familiarity with that portion. If you have broken your novel into chapters, that's a useful way to divide your synopsis also. You may find, however, that what you thought would fit into one chapter will expand into two or three. The major element of the synopsis, and sometimes the only element, is the narrative. •Usually in present tense: •Names and describes major characters: •Summarizes major events in the story: •Indicates the story's point of view: •Contains virtually no dialogue: A background section sometimes precedes the synopsis itself, especially if the story's context requires some explanation. (This seems especially true of science fiction, fantasy, and historical novels, where the plot may hinge on unfamiliar story elements.) Otherwise, such explanation simply crops up where required in the synopsis. How long should a synopsis be? Most Literary Agents and Publishers have specific guidelines for this, but two or three pages is commonplace. Should you stick to your synopsis? Not necessarily. It's there to help you and your editor, not to dictate the whole story. Like the itinerary of a foreign tour, it should give you a sense of direction and purpose while leaving you free to explore interesting byways; it should also give you a quick return to the main road if the byway turns into a dead end. Understanding Genre: Notes on the Thriller ``Genre'' simply means a kind of literature (usually fiction) dealing with a particular topic, setting, or issue. Even so-called ``mainstream'' fiction has its genres: the coming-of-age story, for example. In the last few decades, genre in North America has come to mean types of fiction that are commercially successful because they are predictable treatments of familiar material: the Regency romance, the hard-boiled detective novel, the space opera. Some readers, writers and critics dismiss such fiction precisely because of its predictability, and they're often right to do so. But even the humblest hackwork requires a certain level of craft, and that means you must understand your genre's conventions if you are going to succeed--and especially if you are going to convey your message by tinkering with those conventions. For our purposes, a ``convention'' is an understanding between writer and reader about certain details of the story. For example, we don't need to know the history of the Mexican-American War to understand why a youth from Ohio is punching cattle in Texas in 1871. We don't need to understand the post-Einstein physics that permits faster-than-light travel and the establishment of interstellar empires. And we agree that the heroine of a Regency romance should be heterosexual, unmarried, and unlikely to solve her problems through learning karate. As a novice writer, you should understand your genre's conventions consciously, not just as things you take for granted that help make a good yarn. In this, you're like an apprentice cook who can't just uncritically love the taste of tomato soup; you have to know what ingredients make it taste that way, and use them with some calculation. So it might be useful for you, in one of your letters to yourself about your novel, to write out your own understanding and appreciation of the form you're working in. I found this was especially helpful with a couple of my early books, which fell into the genre of the natural-disaster thriller. Your genre analysis doesn't have to be in essay form; it just has to identify the key elements of the genre as you understand them, and that in turn should lead to ideas about how to tinker with the genre's conventions. And that, in turn, should make your story more interesting than a slavish imitation of your favorite author. As an example, here are typical views about the thriller: 1. The thriller portrays persons confronting problems they can't solve by recourse to established institutions and agencies; calling 911, or a psychiatrist, won't help matters in the slightest. 2. The problems not only threaten the characters' physical and mental safety, they threaten to bring down the society they live in: their families, their communities, their nations. This is what is at stake in the story, and should appear as soon as possible. 3. The solution to the characters' problems usually involves some degree of violence, illegality, technical expertise, and dramatic action, but not more than we can plausibly expect from people of the kind we have chosen to portray. 4. The political thriller portrays characters who must go outside their society if they are to save it, and the characters therefore acquire a certain ironic quality. They must be at least as skilled and ruthless as their adversaries, yet motivated by values we can understand and admire even if we don't share them. 5. The disaster thriller portrays characters who are either isolated from their society or who risk such isolation if they fail. That is, either they will die or their society will fall (or both) if they do not accomplish their goals. In the novel of natural disaster, the disaster comes early and the issue is who will survive and how. In the novel of man-made disaster, the issue is how (or whether) the characters will prevent the disaster. 6. The characters must be highly plausible and complex; where they seem grotesque or two-dimensional, we must give some valid reason for these qualities. They must have adequate motives for the extreme and risky actions they take, and they must respond to events with plausible human reactions. Those reactions should spring from what we know of the characters' personalities, and should throw new light on those personalities. 7. The protagonist's goal is to save or restore a threatened society; it is rarely to create a whole new society. In this sense, the thriller is usually politically conservative, though irony may subvert that conservatism. 8. At the outset the protagonist only reacts to events; at some point, however, he or she embarks on the counterthrust, an attempt to take charge and overcome circumstances. 9. The progress of the protagonist is from ignorance to knowledge, accomplished through a series of increasingly intense and important conflicts. These lead to a climactic conflict and the resolution of the story. 10. With the climax the protagonist attains self-knowledge as well as understanding of his or her circumstances (or at least we attain such knowledge). This knowledge may well create a whole new perspective on the story's events and the characters' values: A murder may turn out to have been futile, or loyalty may have been betrayed. We should prepare for these insights early in the novel, so that the protagonist's change and development are logical and believable. Narrative Voice Someone in your story has to tell us that Jeff pulled out his gun, that Samantha smiled at the tall stranger, that daylight was breaking over the valley. That someone is the narrator or ``author's persona.'' The author's persona of a fictional narrative can help or hinder the success of the story. Which persona you adopt depends on what kind of story you are trying to tell, and what kind of emotional atmosphere works best for the story. The persona develops from the personality and attitude of the narrator, which are expressed by the narrator's choice of words and incidents. These in turn depend on the point of view of the story. First-person point of view is usually subjective: we learn the narrator's thoughts, feelings, and reactions to events. In first-person objective, however, the narrator tells us only what people said and did, without comment. Other first-person modes include: •the observer-narrator, outside the main story (examples: Mr. Lockwood in Wuthering Heights, Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby) •detached autobiography (narrator looking back on long-past events) •multiple narrators (first-person accounts by several characters) •interior monologue (narrator recounts the story as a memory; stream of consciousness is an extreme form of this narrative) •dramatic monologue (narrator tells story out loud without major interruption) •letters or diary (narrator writes down events as they happen) If the point of view is first-person, questions about the persona are simple: the character narrating the story has a particular personality and attitude, which is plausibly expressed by the way he or she describes events. The second-person mode is rare: You knocked on the door. You went inside. Very few writers feel the need for it, and still fewer use it effectively. If the point of view is third-person limited, persona again depends on the single character through whose eyes we witness the story. You may go inside the character's mind and tell us how that character thinks and feels, or you may describe outside events in terms the character would use. Readers like this point of view because they know whom to ``invest'' in or identify with. In third-person objective, we have no entry to anyone's thoughts or feelings. The author simply describes, without emotion or editorializing, what the characters say and do. The author's persona here is almost non-existent. Readers may be unsure whose fate they should care about, but it can be very powerful precisely because it invites the reader to supply the emotion that the persona does not. This is the persona of Icelandic sagas, which inspired not only Ernest Hemingway but a whole generation of ``hard-boiled'' writers. If the point of view is third-person omniscient, however, the author's persona can develop in any of several directions. 1. ``Episodically limited.'' Whoever is the point of view for a particular scene determines the persona. An archbishop sees and describes events from his particular point of view, while a pickpocket does so quite differently. So the narrator, in a scene from the archbishop's point of view, has a persona quite different from that of the pickpocket: a different vocabulary, a different set of values, a different set of priorities. (As a general rule, point of view should not change during a scene. So if an archbishop is the point of view in a scene involving him and a pickpocket, we shouldn't suddenly switch to the pickpocket's point of view until we've resolved the scene and moved on to another scene.) 2. ``Occasional interruptor.'' The author intervenes from time to time to supply necessary information, but otherwise stays in the background. The dialogue, thoughts and behavior of the characters supply all other information the reader needs. 3. ``Editorial commentator.'' The author's persona has a distinct attitude toward the story's characters and events, and frequently comments on them. The editorial commentator may be a character in the story, often with a name, but is usually at some distance from the main events; in some cases, we may even have an editorial commentator reporting the narrative of someone else about events involving still other people. The editorial commentator is not always reliable; he or she may lie to us, or misunderstand the true significance of events. Third-person omniscient gives you the most freedom to develop the story, and it works especially well in stories with complex plots or large settings where we must use multiple viewpoints to tell the story. It can, however, cause the reader to feel uncertain about whom to identify with in the story. If you are going to skip from one point of view to another, start doing so early in the story, before the reader has fully identified with the original point of view. The author's persona can influence the reader's reaction by helping the reader to feel close to or distant from the characters. Three major hazards arise from careless use of the persona: 1. Sentimentality. The author's editorial rhetoric tries to evoke an emotional response that the story's events cannot evoke by themselves--something like a cheerleader trying to win applause for a team that doesn't deserve it. A particular problem for the ``editorial commentator.'' 2. Mannerism. The author's persona seems more important than the story itself, and the author keeps reminding us of his or her presence through stylistic flamboyance, quirks of diction, or outright editorializing about the characters and events of the story. Also a problem for the editorial commentator. However, if the point of view is first person, and the narrator is a person given to stylistic flamboyance, quirks of diction, and so on, then the problem disappears; the persona is simply that of a rather egotistical individual who likes to show off. 3. Frigidity. The persona's excessive objectivity trivializes the events of the story, suggesting that the characters' problems need not be taken seriously: a particular hazard for ``hardboiled'' fiction in the objective mode, whether first person or third person. Verb tense can also affect the narrative style of the story. Most stories use the past tense: I knocked on the door. She pulled out her gun. This is usually quite adequate although flashbacks can cause awkwardness: I had knocked on the door. She had pulled out her gun. A little of that goes a long way. Be careful to stay consistently in one verb tense unless your narrator is a person who might switch tenses: So I went to see my probation officer, and she tells me I can't hang out with my old buddies no more. Some writers achieve a kind of immediacy through use of the present tense: I knock on the door. She pulls out her gun. We don't feel anyone knows the outcome of events because they are occurring as we read, in ``real time.'' Some writers also enjoy the present tense because it seems ``arty'' or experimental. But most readers of genre fiction don't enjoy the present tense, so editors are often reluctant to let their authors use it. I learned that the hard way by using present tense in my first novel, The Empire of Time; it was enough to keep the manuscript in editorial limbo for months, and the final offer to publish was contingent on changing to past tense. Guess how long I agonized over that artistic decision! Constructing a Scene The basic unit of fiction is not the sentence or the paragraph, but the scene. Every scene in a story has both a verbal and a nonverbal content. The verbal content may be a young man fervently courting a girl, or the President of the United States deciding whether to go ahead with a nuclear attack on a biological-warfare research center. The nonverbal content appears in the way you present the scene: You want your reader to think that the young man is touchingly awkward, or obnoxiously crude; that the president is a shallow twerp or a deeply sensitive man facing a terrible decision. In effect, you are like an attorney presenting a case to the jury: You supply the evidence, and the jury supplies the verdict. If you tell us that the young man is touchingly awkward, we may well disbelieve you. But if you show us his awkward behavior, and we say, ``Aw, the poor lunk!''--then your scene has succeeded. Every scene presents a problem of some kind for one or more characters, and shows us how the characters deal with that problem. That, in turn, shows us something about the characters and moves the story ahead. Here's an exercise I've found useful with my fiction-writing students. I give them about 30 minutes to take the following elements to construct a scene that dramatizes the elements and leads to a decisive resolution: 1. A taxi and public-transit strike that's completely tied up downtown traffic 2. Donald Benson, a 35-year-old businessman: male chauvinist, aggressive personality, with business troubles Helene Williams, his 22-year-old secretary: insecure in her new job, able to make friends easily, knows the city well. 3. The need to get Donald to a hotel out at the airport to make a crucial presentation to a potential investor from Los Angeles; the investor will be flying out in four hours. Give yourself half an hour to write such a scene, so that the reader will finish it knowing all this information. I predict you'll be amazed at how quickly you can produce the scene, and at how it leads logically to another scene. The key is *knowing what you want to show your reader about your characters and their problems.* Once you know that, everything else follows pretty easily. So consider what's going on in your own story. What do you want your reader to think about your heroine? That she's shy but determined? That she thinks no man could ever love her? That she's perceptive about other women but baffled by men? Whatever those traits may be, you should be able to think of logical, plausible events that could force her to show them to us. In some cases, your plot will give you some automatic scenes. If your heroine is flying from New York to Frankfurt, maybe her seatmate is an attractive man who studiously ignores her; maybe the German customs people give her a hard time but she insists on her rights; maybe the heroine sees the attractive man greeted by a woman he seems to dote on even though the perceptive heroine can see the woman despises him. And so on. How long should a scene be? Long enough to make its point. A scene may run to just a sentence or two, or it may take up 20 pages. When it ends, we should know more about the characters involved, and their problems should have increased. This doesn't mean endlessly increasing gloom, but it means that even a success only clears the way for a more stressful scene to come. The hero may disarm the terrorist bomb in the daycare center, but the resulting publicity will make him a marked man; now the terrorists will try to kill him or his loved ones. How many characters should take part in a scene? As few as possible. Even a debate in Congress isn't going to involve every last representative. Here's a tip in this connection: If your plot demands a fairly large cast--for example, your protagonist is the commanding officer of an infantry platoon, or the headmistress of a girls' school--don't introduce a whole mob of characters at once. Bring in your protagonist first, in a scene that demonstrates the character's key traits (courage, leadership, self-hatred, whatever). Then bring in each of the supporting characters in a scene that lets him or her display key traits as well, while deepening our understanding of the protagonist and moving the plot along. This way we build up interest in the story by building up interest in the varied and complex characters. Tolkien does it in The Lord of the Rings; Kurosawa does it in Seven Samurai. Learn from the old masters! Show And Tell: Which Is Better? Novice writers (and some professionals) often fall into the trap of ``expositing'' information instead of presenting it dramatically. Sometimes exposition is inevitable, or even desirable. Lloyd Abbey, in his brilliant SF novel The Last Whales, gives us exactly one line of human dialogue; his characters, all being whales, can't speak to one another, so the narrator must tell us what they think and do. Gabriel Garca Marquez can also write superb exposition for page after page. Most of us ordinary mortals, however, need to dramatize our characters and their feelings. Otherwise our readers will tire of our editorials. Character In Fiction Plausible, complex characters are crucial to successful storytelling. You can develop them in several ways. 1. Concreteness. They have specific homes, possessions, medical histories, tastes in furniture, political opinions. Apart from creating verisimilitude, these concrete aspects of the characters should convey information about the story: does the hero smoke Marlboros because he's a rugged outdoorsman, or because that's the brand smoked by men of his social background, or just because you do? 2. Symbolic association. You can express a character's nature metaphorically through objects or settings (a rusty sword, an apple orchard in bloom, a violent thunderstorm). These may not be perfectly understandable to the reader at first (or to the writer!), but they seem subconsciously right. Symbolic associations can be consciously ``archetypal'' (see Northrop Frye), linking the character to similar characters in literature. Or you may use symbols in some private system which the reader may or may not consciously grasp. Characters' names can form symbolic associations, though this practice has become less popular in modern fiction except in comic or ironic writing. 3. Speech. The character's speech (both content and manner) helps to evoke personality: shy and reticent, aggressive and frank, coy, humorous. Both content and manner of speech should accurately reflect the character's social and ethnic background without stereotyping. If a character ``speaks prose,'' his or her background should justify that rather artificial manner. If a character is inarticulate, that in itself should convey something. 4. Behavior. From table manners to performance in hand-to-hand combat, each new example of behavior should be consistent with what we already know of the character, yet it should reveal some new aspect of personality. Behavior under different forms of stress should be especially revealing. 5. Motivation. The characters should have good and sufficient reasons for their actions, and should carry those actions out with plausible skills. If we don't believe characters would do what the author tells us they do, the story fails. 6. Change. Characters should respond to their experiences by changing--or by working hard to avoid changing. As they seek to carry out their agendas, run into conflicts, fail or succeed, and confront new problems, they will not stay the same people. If a character seems the same at the end of a story as at the beginning, the reader at least should be changed and be aware of whatever factors kept the character from growing and developing. ``Let's Talk About Dialogue,'' He Pontificated Dialogue has to sound like speech, but it can't be a mere transcript; most people don't speak precisely or concisely enough to serve the writer's needs. Good dialogue has several functions: •To convey exposition: to tell us, through the conversations of the characters, what we need to know to make sense of the story. •To convey character: to show us what kinds of people we're dealing with. •To convey a sense of place and time: to evoke the speech patterns, vocabulary and rhythms of specific kinds of people. •To develop conflict: to show how some people use language to dominate others, or fail to do so. Each of these functions has its hazards. Expository dialogue can be dreadful: ``We'll be in Vancouver in thirty minutes,'' the flight attendant said. ``It's Canada's biggest west coast city, with a population of over a million in the metropolitan area.'' Dialogue can convey character, but the writer may bog down in chatter that doesn't advance the story. ``When I was a kid,'' said Julie, ``I had a stuffed bear named Julius. He was a sweet old thing, and whenever I was upset I'd howl for him.'' (Unless Julie is going to howl for Julius when her husband leaves her, this kind of remark is pointless.) Dialogue that conveys a specific place and time can become exaggerated and stereotyped: ``Pretty hot ootside, eh?'' remarked Sergeant Renfrew of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. ``Good day to get oot of the hoose and oot on the saltchuck, eh? Catch us a couple of skookum salmon, eh?'' Dialogue that develops conflict has to do so while also conveying exposition, portraying character, and staying true to the time and place: ``Gadzooks,'' said Sergeant Renfrew as he dismounted from his motorcycle. ``Wouldst please present thy driver's licence and registration, madam?'' ``Eat hot lead, copper!'' snarled Sister Mary Agnes as she drew the .45 from within her habit. Some Dialogue Hazards to Avoid: •Too much faithfulness to speech: ``Um, uh, y'know, geez, well, like, well.'' •Unusual spellings: ``Yeah,'' not ``Yeh'' or ``Yea'' or ``Ya.'' •Too much use of ``he said,'' ``she said.'' •Too much variation: ``he averred,'' ``she riposted'' •Dialect exaggeration: ``Lawsy, Miz Scahlut, us's wuhkin' jes' as fas' as us kin.'' •Excessive direct address: ``Tell me, Marshall, your opinion of Vanessa.'' ``I hate her, Roger.'' ``Why is that, Marshall?'' ``She bullies everyone, Roger.'' Some Dialogue Conventions to Consider: Each new speaker requires a new paragraph, properly indented and set off by quotation marks. ``Use double quotations,'' the novelist ordered, ``and remember to place commas and periods inside those quotation marks.'' ``If a speaker goes on for more than one paragraph,'' the count responded in his heavy Transylvanian accent, ``do not close off the quotation marks at the end of the first paragraph. ``Simply place quotation marks at the beginning of the next paragraph, and carry on to the end of the quotation.'' Use ``he said'' expressions only when you must, to avoid confusion about who's speaking. You can signal increasing tension by moving from ``he said'' to ``he snapped,'' to ``he snarled,'' to ``he bellowed furiously.'' But the dialogue itself should convey that changing mood, and make such comments needless. Action as well as speech is a part of dialogue. We expect to know when the speakers pause, where they're looking, what they're doing with their hands, how they respond to one another. The characters' speech becomes just one aspect of their interactions; sometimes their words are all we need, but sometimes we definitely need more. This is especially true when you're trying to convey a conflict between what your characters say and what they feel: their nonverbal messages are going to be far more reliable than their spoken words. Speak your dialogue out loud; if it doesn't sound natural, or contains unexpected rhymes and rhythms, revise it. Rely on rhythm and vocabulary, not phonetic spelling, to convey accent or dialect. If you are giving us your characters' exact unspoken thoughts, use italics. If you are paraphrasing those thoughts, use regular Roman type): Now what does she want? he asked himself. Isn't she ever satisfied? Marshall wondered what she wanted now. She was never satisfied. If you plan to give us a long passage of inner monologue, however, consider the discomfort of having to read line after line of italic print. If you wish to emphasize a word in a line of italics, use Roman: Isn't she ever satisfied? Patrick Dent Dent Publishing http://www.dent-publishing.com The Internet's Only Shopping Mall for Book Lovers The Book You Want at the Price You Want - Every Time Featuring our new, covert ops thriller, Execution of Justice
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