There are fight1 scenes, and then there are fight2 scenes.
We generally think of fight scenes as bar-room brawls; a violent melee in which our hero, looking much the worse for wear, eventually emerges victorious.
The fight scenes I aim to discuss today are of another form entirely: a scene where two people fight, not with swords or fists or pistols, but with words and ideas. An argument, not in the sense of debate, but in the sense of a feud, most often between people who are, were or are about to stop being friends, lovers or family.
Writing a bad fight2 scene is much like writing a good fight1 scene: the dialog is rote and familiar, there's a lot of violence and in the end, only one person walks away.
At first blush, it sounds like all the pieces are there. Exchanges like "I wish I'd never been born," "don't bother coming back," or "I can't believe you would say that to me" are the hallmark of such disputes.
Avoid them.
A rote fight may as well not happen at all. If the best your characters can come up with to fling at each other amounts to "I hate you" and "I hate you more," there's a chance they shouldn't be fighting in the first place. At least, not with words.
A well-written fight is a good deal less paint-by-numbers, since the best fights draw on unique and underplayed elements within the same work. These are the boiling points between characters, where two people are at least somewhat out of control and flinging whatever comes to mind, uninhibited, from their lips.
Every fight is unique, but it's not always as simple as putting the pieces together. When you write a murder mystery, you can lay out clues in whatever order and have the hero slowly unravel the riddle without having to strain your own brain too much in the process.
With a fight, the point is not to win. The point is not to solve the puzzle. The point with a fight is to fray, and that is a good deal more difficult.
If you have an easy time writing an argument between people who otherwise love each other, then either you're a practiced writer, or I'm very sorry. This is one area where the old adage that art is born of pain is unmistakably true: the most compelling fights are the ones mirrored off our own lives. You never know which words can really sting until you see the look on someone's face the moment they escape your lips.
There are three things that will help you design a decent, emotionally-impactive fight: what the characters want, what the characters know, and the knowledge that angry people are stupid.
...Okay, so that last one probably needs some explanation. We'll start there and work our way back.
Angry people are stupid. Really, all people are stupid at some point. We forget where we left our cell phone. We lock ourselves out of our cars. Everyone does it. Normally, in fiction, it's not a fact we play on. If Batman locked himself out of the Batmobile, it would be hilarious, but doesn't necessarily fit the genre.
For the most part, characters get a pass. We assume that they can get by without any of the minor slips and inconveniences of life unless those slips directly assist the plot.
Occasionally, that same notion of error-free living extends into a quarrel, which is exactly where it does not belong. By their very nature, most fights are stupid. If someone has a rational objection and another raises a reasonable obstacle to an otherwise sensible resolution, there's no reason for raised voices and stomping feet.
Which makes it a perfectly peaceful but emotionally dead argument.
A fight generally stems from the decay of patience to the point where an otherwise strong or quiet individual simply snaps, breaking from their everyday equilibrium to briefly become another beast entirely. That is the essence of a fight.
In an argument, people will bring in issues that are emotionally close but rationally unrelated, they will sling senseless salvos in an effort to "win" this arbitrary contest that they themselves may have started. In an argument, people will say things that are untrue, half-true, or no longer true, either because they don't know or simply because their reason is almost fully impaired.
In short, angry people are stupid.
This brings us to our second element: what the characters know. Dramatic irony is a hell of a drug, and one I don't think we can ever overdose on (I have yet to try). If you're looking for a way to boil an irrational argument out of a perfectly logical set of circumstances, remove a piece from what the characters knows.
Allow for assumption and inference. If one lover has seen the other sneaking out late at night, visiting a seedy part of town and going into the apartment of another man, they might leap to the conclusion that they're being cheated on.
If instead the man in the apartment is the second lover's half-brother who tends to their ailing mother in the apartment where they both were raised, a fact the second lover might want to hide for fear someone might think less of his or her humble beginnings, it changes the situation entirely. Which is a wonderful thing to do to a character that has just made himself red in the face from shouting about how he is the "victim."
Better still: once the truth comes out (likely after a top-volume tirade about the supposed illicit tryst), it makes the second lover, momentarily the villain, suddenly sympathetic, turning the tables on the first and opening the doorway to reconciliation while simultaneously giving depth to the second lover's story overall.
Much like with a murder mystery, you the writer know the score, but your characters don't have to. They don't even have to infer very well off the evidence. Depending on the tone, an argument the audience sees coming can be just as good as one that takes them by surprise. Just remember what the characters themselves do and don't know.
Lastly we come to what the characters want. This is at the heart of every argument, and will be where a good bit of the emotion comes from. If a lover feels slighted, that's one thing. If a lover who was on the verge of proposing suddenly feels as if all their trust has been shattered, as if they have been tricked into opening up just to have themselves hurt again, now we're getting somewhere.
Know what the characters want, and don't stop with the current issue: start there.
Take two characters with musical aspirations: one a small-town vocalist with hopes of leaving the dull, dreary, hopelessness of the little rural burg where she grew up, the other a quiet guitarist who left the lights of the big city for fear it would take all the heart out of his music.
The two meet in the middle and begin playing together, content with the rush of the dive-bar-gig life and the small, sincere fame it brings them. One day, a record producer approaches them, asking if they'd like to sign with a label.
For the vocalist, this is her shot. A chance at nationwide notice and the promise of a global tour mean never being mired in the miserable mediocre melancholy of her home town. For the guitarist, this is the very devil he ran from catching up with him, trying to tempt him back into a life full of shallow compliments and one-night friends.
The producer is very clear: he will not take either of them alone, it's both or neither. Whatever they decide, someone is going to be unhappy, not because they don't play well together, but because of where each was headed when they met. The paths that brought them together in the middle are now finally working to tear them apart.
The fight here can be over nearly everything the two know of each other: it may start with a simple discussion of the pros and cons, with the vocalist espousing the fantasy world of rock fame while the guitarist dimly shoots down each myth from personal experience.
The vocalist, still driven by her dreams, might try to dismiss the guitar player's objections as overstated, or "just one man's experience," leaving room for the hope she isn't willing to set aside. The guitarist, thinking he's doing his partner a favor, becomes all the more insistent that she not take the contract.
Compassion becoming controlling is a key theme in many fights. When advice is mistaken for demand, especially when the advice runs contrary to what the character believes (or wants to believe), you have a great friction point to set alight the conflict.
The vocalist becomes angry at the guitar player's insistence, and her dismissal of his claims about the industry become a "bitter" reaction to "washing out." The guitar player, who may or may not have washed out, in turn gets offended at the implication that he can't hack it in the music world.
This becomes a great branch point for the second vein of argument, where the characters depart the main line of discussion and begin fighting about something else entirely. Here, for instance, they may start to fight about tastes in music or start to snipe at one another's musical chops in an effort to "win" the fight.
At last it comes to a head: the vocalist accuses the guitarist of being common, drawing on confessions he may have made to her earlier in the work that his real dream is not to fade into the "pop" scene as just another faceless sound. That does it. The guitar player, seeing an opportunity to walk away, ends the debate with the assertion that, if he's so common, she should have no trouble finding another.
He walks away.
And here is where fights2 differ from fights1 the most: no one wins. The guitar player got the last word, but there's no joy in his exit. The vocalist hurt him the most, but that only brings regret. Fights don't resolve things. Fights break things.
This is what makes them difficult to write: you have to leave things broken.
You have to give the audience time to worry and wonder and fret. You have to give them time to think that the characters might never resolve things, that the relationship (platonic or otherwise) that the audience has come to love might be irreparably shattered.
In short, you have to make them hate you, at least for a little while.
If you don't find yourself having to step away from the computer halfway through writing a key fight, there's a good chance it's not personal enough. If you don't get a sinking feeling in your gut when you go back over the dialog, up the ante. Fights should suck, in the sense that they make us, even as readers, uncomfortable.
This is true even for the good fights. I said before that fights only break things, and that's true, but some things are good to break. An oppressive regime, even if it's just the iron grip of a guilt-wielding parent on their full-grown child, is not something you want to leave intact.
Sometimes, somebody wins.
But even in a good fight, before the walk-away moment, before the surprise victory wherein the hero realizes that the very thing they've been scared to break are the chains holding them to the floor, in that in-between time where it seems like the antagonist might win, you have to make the audience worry. You have to make them wait.
There are all manner of fights out there: bosses and peons, agents and talent, lovers, parents and children, brothers and sisters, friends, neighbors, co-workers, strangers on a bus together. None of them need to be vapid and rote, none of them need to be small, and oddly none of them need to be loud.
But if you want them to have an impact, they do need to hurt, at least a little. And that means hitting below the belt. That means denying your hero common sense and perspective for a time. That means staring at the page, screaming "you idiot!" because you know just how easy a puzzle it is to fix, but you've hidden some of the pieces.
Fighting means being a jerk to your characters, no matter how much you love them.
Having a character writhe and flail over nothing just because the world is inconvenient (or being woefully distraught over something ephemeral like "but my boyfriend the vampire doesn't have a soul, how can we go to heaven together?") is a cheap way to conjure conflict.
A real fight hurts to write, because either someone's wrong and they have every right to be, or no one's wrong but something still got broken in the process. In a real fight, there is no victor, no kind release of death, there are only weapons and the wounds they cause. The worst part, as a writer, is that you have to sit and watch them bleed.
Then, and only then, can you make things right.
----------
1 A physical and often violent contest between two or more parties involving attempts by either side to wound the other
2 An emotional conflict between two or more parties with conflicting goals who are for whatever reason past the point of calm, reasonable discourse
Thursday, May 26, 2011
Thursday, May 19, 2011
Gaps in the Pavement: When Breaks Become Bad
If you've ever tried to write a novel, you know full well that taking time away from the computer is all part of the process. The best of us need short mental breaks throughout the day, the majority of us takes hours, days, or even weeks and months off between writing spurts.
You don't have to go far to find evidence that such breaks are vital, and nothing I say here is going to contradict that. Forcing yourself to write can result in as much or more time editing, or worse, total burn-out, and I don't recommend either. But waiting for a muse (even a task-oriented muse) can still stray into bad-habit territory.
If you wait too long, fading momentum is not your biggest concern.
Deadlines creep up, likely forcing you into a panicked rush that may short-change or completely circumvent the editing process, an oversight that can be much worse than a piece of sloppy, half-done dribble that a discerning audience can easily overlook in favor of otherwise solid writing.
Much like a boxer who stops going to the gym, your work can start to lose its shape when you put the proverbial pen down too long. In the intervening moments, especially when they stretch across periods of unconsciousness, your mind continues to chew the scenes of your work until they've been reduced to a soft gray cud that hardly resembles their original glory.
Perhaps most dangerous of all, as time passes, you have cause to consider other works, other scenes, and just how much you would really rather be doing anything else but finishing this book. That, without a doubt, is the number one killer for most first-time novelist (and 2nd-time and 3rd-time, at the very least).
If you look on the shelves today, you know that quality is not what keeps people from being published. Neither is an original setting, concept or suite of characters at all required. Writing all the way to the end, is. And the more gaps you give yourself, the less likely that end will come.
Now I opened by saying that I would not contradict the verified science that taking breaks is beneficial to the writer's mind. They are an absolute necessity. So is drinking water to someone working outdoors in the summer; it doesn't mean they can't drown.
If you've gone at least a week without writing and there isn't a direct cause (flu, death in the family, new apartment, radiation granted you superpowers, etc), force yourself to sit still for one hour and try to write. Even if it isn't related to the overall work, even if it isn't the next scene, try to write, and if at all possible, try to write something related to the work in question.
If you're lucky, the sheer reminder of routine will let you unplug all the ideas that started welling up during the dry spell of the week prior. If you're average, you'll need more than that to get you going.
If you're 15 minutes into your mandatory writing hour and there's hardly more than "The" on the page, take a step back and pen something you have an easier time with: a brief character bio for the new romantic lead you're about to introduce, a mock personal ad from the same, a treatise on why you chose a straight male artist with a lisp just to buck the stereotype: anything to un-stick your brain.
What you write may never show up in the final work, but don't throw it out. It can give you good perspective later if you feel like you've lost a sense of the character's motivations and voice. It may even become a regular thing.
In Steven Brust's Brokedown Palace, he's dotted little Interludes into the line of the regular story. These 2-5 page sub-chapters are minor fairy tales in and of themselves, and the first few seem completely unrelated to the scene at hand (with perhaps some minor symmetry if you squint just right).
Later, these same interludes begin to suggest a connection between the lineage of the characters and the surreal events of the fable, speaking to darker, mystic origins behind an otherwise typical individual.
What could have started as "de-glue my brain" extemporanea instead led to not only refreshing "breather" chapters between otherwise heavy subject matter, but also to a subtle sub-plot that otherwise might have seemed forced within the context of the rest of the work.
Back to the subject of gaps, if you write with a day job, one week might be a regular outage period for writing. One month, then, should become your warning flag. If your writing pattern is such that you can go an entire year without penning a word, you should probably consider the possibility that writing is simply not your thing, at least at this point in your life.
If all you manage to get out when you realize it's "been too long" again is a short snippet of a scene, interlude, or even just some fun dialog that your characters may never actually use (writing your major characters into a nonsensical bar scene environment, for instance), don't be discouraged. Keeping that fire from going out is what matters most.
Sooner or later, either you'll hit your stride again, or you'll get sick of putting out 1000 words for nothing every other weekend and force yourself to muddle through a more sizable portion. At the very least, it can help you decide sooner if the work you're working on is one you really want to do at all.
If you set it aside with the promise of what it might one day be, it can fester forever in silence. If you actually force yourself to give attention to it on a regular basis, you'll know before too long if it's something you really want to bother with at all.
You don't have to go far to find evidence that such breaks are vital, and nothing I say here is going to contradict that. Forcing yourself to write can result in as much or more time editing, or worse, total burn-out, and I don't recommend either. But waiting for a muse (even a task-oriented muse) can still stray into bad-habit territory.
If you wait too long, fading momentum is not your biggest concern.
Deadlines creep up, likely forcing you into a panicked rush that may short-change or completely circumvent the editing process, an oversight that can be much worse than a piece of sloppy, half-done dribble that a discerning audience can easily overlook in favor of otherwise solid writing.
Much like a boxer who stops going to the gym, your work can start to lose its shape when you put the proverbial pen down too long. In the intervening moments, especially when they stretch across periods of unconsciousness, your mind continues to chew the scenes of your work until they've been reduced to a soft gray cud that hardly resembles their original glory.
Perhaps most dangerous of all, as time passes, you have cause to consider other works, other scenes, and just how much you would really rather be doing anything else but finishing this book. That, without a doubt, is the number one killer for most first-time novelist (and 2nd-time and 3rd-time, at the very least).
If you look on the shelves today, you know that quality is not what keeps people from being published. Neither is an original setting, concept or suite of characters at all required. Writing all the way to the end, is. And the more gaps you give yourself, the less likely that end will come.
Now I opened by saying that I would not contradict the verified science that taking breaks is beneficial to the writer's mind. They are an absolute necessity. So is drinking water to someone working outdoors in the summer; it doesn't mean they can't drown.
If you've gone at least a week without writing and there isn't a direct cause (flu, death in the family, new apartment, radiation granted you superpowers, etc), force yourself to sit still for one hour and try to write. Even if it isn't related to the overall work, even if it isn't the next scene, try to write, and if at all possible, try to write something related to the work in question.
If you're lucky, the sheer reminder of routine will let you unplug all the ideas that started welling up during the dry spell of the week prior. If you're average, you'll need more than that to get you going.
If you're 15 minutes into your mandatory writing hour and there's hardly more than "The" on the page, take a step back and pen something you have an easier time with: a brief character bio for the new romantic lead you're about to introduce, a mock personal ad from the same, a treatise on why you chose a straight male artist with a lisp just to buck the stereotype: anything to un-stick your brain.
What you write may never show up in the final work, but don't throw it out. It can give you good perspective later if you feel like you've lost a sense of the character's motivations and voice. It may even become a regular thing.
In Steven Brust's Brokedown Palace, he's dotted little Interludes into the line of the regular story. These 2-5 page sub-chapters are minor fairy tales in and of themselves, and the first few seem completely unrelated to the scene at hand (with perhaps some minor symmetry if you squint just right).
Later, these same interludes begin to suggest a connection between the lineage of the characters and the surreal events of the fable, speaking to darker, mystic origins behind an otherwise typical individual.
What could have started as "de-glue my brain" extemporanea instead led to not only refreshing "breather" chapters between otherwise heavy subject matter, but also to a subtle sub-plot that otherwise might have seemed forced within the context of the rest of the work.
Back to the subject of gaps, if you write with a day job, one week might be a regular outage period for writing. One month, then, should become your warning flag. If your writing pattern is such that you can go an entire year without penning a word, you should probably consider the possibility that writing is simply not your thing, at least at this point in your life.
If all you manage to get out when you realize it's "been too long" again is a short snippet of a scene, interlude, or even just some fun dialog that your characters may never actually use (writing your major characters into a nonsensical bar scene environment, for instance), don't be discouraged. Keeping that fire from going out is what matters most.
Sooner or later, either you'll hit your stride again, or you'll get sick of putting out 1000 words for nothing every other weekend and force yourself to muddle through a more sizable portion. At the very least, it can help you decide sooner if the work you're working on is one you really want to do at all.
If you set it aside with the promise of what it might one day be, it can fester forever in silence. If you actually force yourself to give attention to it on a regular basis, you'll know before too long if it's something you really want to bother with at all.
Sunday, May 15, 2011
Simply Beautiful
Those who've seen me write (which, I suppose, now includes all of you) know that I often oscillate without warning from a highly academic syllable selection and the self-important stylings of archaic narration to the brisk, refreshing feeling of simple words and simple structures.
That is not an accident.
It's an illusion that big words make for better writing. There's an incredible amount of impact hiding between the scant letters of simple words. The notion of accessibility (making sure you're understood by a wider audience) is only a fringe benefit; the real power of simple words and simple sentence structure is the sense of hard, fixed immediacy that we naturally associate with such speech.
This stretches back onto the discussion of voice: in text, no one can hear you speak. Shaping a scene or the tone of your words involves entirely different tricks in English than the typical tonal variance we're used to with verbal communication. Sarcasm is one of the clearest examples of just how different and difficult text can make the act of meaning-conveyance.
The fuller discussion of voice covers an entire discipline, but in one of its less-visited corners lives the discussion over "what reading level am I aiming for?"
It's fairly common knowledge that journalists aim for lower reading levels (3rd to 5th grade, typically). A journalist is interested in maximum accessibility. They want anyone walking past a newspaper stand to be able to understand the letters in large, bold print across the top of the page.
Another reason is space: headlines can only use so many words, and the thought of multiple clauses is right out. Much like Twitter, the medium forces a journalist to pare down what they might want to write into short, simple words and phrases.
But there is a third reason: a headline is meant to have maximum impact. Consider the sentence "Dewey defeats Truman;" grammatically, a complete sentence, but arguably as threadbare as they come. Yet it makes a spectacular (if inaccurate) headline. Three words: subject, verb, object. We know in an instant the outcome of the future of the American world, and there isn't even an adjective at play.
That is the power of simplicity.
Simplicity has a naturally higher impact. The quickness of it, the frankness of it hits our minds with greater force, like the dense, compacted core of an exploded star. In a sentence of five words, every word gains a greater significance. Each word gains a stress, and that leads to greater emotional effect as they stamp themselves one by one into the reader's memory.
It's a natural habit of the mind to iambicize most human speech. We alternate stressed and unstressed words the same way we do syllables unless something deliberately interrupts the flow.
Try saying aloud: "I went to town today," and listen to where the down-beats fall. "i WENT to TOWN toDAY." Likewise: "I hardly think it's time to talk of death" may sound more like "i HARDly THINK it's TIME to TALK of DEATH."
Those stresses are key, because in a larger sentence, they naturally start to fade. We crave completion, so any long sentence gets largely passed over while we digest at a high level the whole of its meaning. Only then do we re-read it to appreciate the scenic beauty of its flow.
The more complex the sentence, the more obscure the words chosen, the greater the chance for skimming. We start to see clauses as syllables unto themselves, "zooming out" the stressed/unstressed pattern until entire phrases and sentences might fall in the "unstressed" pile. Yet even long sentences can keep a reader's attention on first pass if they make sure not to interrupt their own flow.
Consider the following:
"The town was desolate: a broken husk of a once-great beast laid bare to rot in the fading sun, its inhabitants little more than scavenger insects scrambling across the blanch-white bones of a forgotten corpse, searching in vain for the scraps that might keep them from turning into corpses themselves."
Four clauses and a tiny bit of run-on at the end, but from a literary perspective, perfectly valid. Count the number of words in the above sentence that strike you as "high level" or difficult to understand. There is all manner of temptation to use them; to extend the sense of poetry on this grisly metaphor and torque it into something wholly unpalatable, but clearly, they're unnecessary to convey the imagery you intended.
Still, the sheer length of the description causes the mind to wander out of focus, to skim several words together and bundle them into an overall image. Not a bad thing in the sense of accessibility and meaning-conveyance, but it doesn't have a high impact, just a slow and ambient sense of dread or reverence for this ghost-like town.
Consider instead the first four words of the entire thing: "The town was desolate." Everything that follows is little more than one conjoined adjective for those four words. We know instantly, right from the start, the state of this town. The phrase has all the information and impact of the entire paragraph in four short words.
To further the emphasis, we might change "desolate" to "dead," further extending the metaphor to follow. Think about the stresses on that phrase: "the TOWN is DEAD." Two words: "Town." "Dead." There is your entire sentence broken down into eight little letters that will stick in a reader's mind whenever the town comes up.
With all this emphasis on concise, immediate speech, I want to take a moment to stress that this is not a better-than debate: long, florid prose is by no means invalid or less valuable. There is no shortage of evidence for this in nearly any book you pick up off nearly any shelf. I stress short, clear structure today because it is too often undervalued or written off as "childish."
If you consider simple words "childish" or easy to do, I recommend you try your hand at fitting an entire plot into six of them and see if you get anything even remotely as powerful as:
"For sale: baby shoes. Never worn."
The power of simplicity is that it shifts the tone of voice on the written page. It breaks up the pattern and flow to wake up the mind and disrupt its natural routine for rote analysis, like tapping on the brakes while speeding down the highway to jar yourself awake as you make the long drive home late at night.
Interspersing a single short phrase (in which every word gains its own stress purely by constituting a larger percentage of the sentence as a whole) immediately before or after a lengthy, poetic description or dialog is thus that much more powerful because of the tonal difference from the words and phrasings around it.
Consider the first two paragraphs of this very post: one a long, ambling sentence with no shortage of complex words whose muddled syllables make for an even, diffuse stress across the entire paragraph, and one short, immediate phrase on a line all its own, glaring at the reader through all the empty white space around it and daring anyone to challenge its place on the page. In short:
Don't discount simplicity.
That is not an accident.
It's an illusion that big words make for better writing. There's an incredible amount of impact hiding between the scant letters of simple words. The notion of accessibility (making sure you're understood by a wider audience) is only a fringe benefit; the real power of simple words and simple sentence structure is the sense of hard, fixed immediacy that we naturally associate with such speech.
This stretches back onto the discussion of voice: in text, no one can hear you speak. Shaping a scene or the tone of your words involves entirely different tricks in English than the typical tonal variance we're used to with verbal communication. Sarcasm is one of the clearest examples of just how different and difficult text can make the act of meaning-conveyance.
The fuller discussion of voice covers an entire discipline, but in one of its less-visited corners lives the discussion over "what reading level am I aiming for?"
It's fairly common knowledge that journalists aim for lower reading levels (3rd to 5th grade, typically). A journalist is interested in maximum accessibility. They want anyone walking past a newspaper stand to be able to understand the letters in large, bold print across the top of the page.
Another reason is space: headlines can only use so many words, and the thought of multiple clauses is right out. Much like Twitter, the medium forces a journalist to pare down what they might want to write into short, simple words and phrases.
But there is a third reason: a headline is meant to have maximum impact. Consider the sentence "Dewey defeats Truman;" grammatically, a complete sentence, but arguably as threadbare as they come. Yet it makes a spectacular (if inaccurate) headline. Three words: subject, verb, object. We know in an instant the outcome of the future of the American world, and there isn't even an adjective at play.
That is the power of simplicity.
Simplicity has a naturally higher impact. The quickness of it, the frankness of it hits our minds with greater force, like the dense, compacted core of an exploded star. In a sentence of five words, every word gains a greater significance. Each word gains a stress, and that leads to greater emotional effect as they stamp themselves one by one into the reader's memory.
It's a natural habit of the mind to iambicize most human speech. We alternate stressed and unstressed words the same way we do syllables unless something deliberately interrupts the flow.
Try saying aloud: "I went to town today," and listen to where the down-beats fall. "i WENT to TOWN toDAY." Likewise: "I hardly think it's time to talk of death" may sound more like "i HARDly THINK it's TIME to TALK of DEATH."
Those stresses are key, because in a larger sentence, they naturally start to fade. We crave completion, so any long sentence gets largely passed over while we digest at a high level the whole of its meaning. Only then do we re-read it to appreciate the scenic beauty of its flow.
The more complex the sentence, the more obscure the words chosen, the greater the chance for skimming. We start to see clauses as syllables unto themselves, "zooming out" the stressed/unstressed pattern until entire phrases and sentences might fall in the "unstressed" pile. Yet even long sentences can keep a reader's attention on first pass if they make sure not to interrupt their own flow.
Consider the following:
"The town was desolate: a broken husk of a once-great beast laid bare to rot in the fading sun, its inhabitants little more than scavenger insects scrambling across the blanch-white bones of a forgotten corpse, searching in vain for the scraps that might keep them from turning into corpses themselves."
Four clauses and a tiny bit of run-on at the end, but from a literary perspective, perfectly valid. Count the number of words in the above sentence that strike you as "high level" or difficult to understand. There is all manner of temptation to use them; to extend the sense of poetry on this grisly metaphor and torque it into something wholly unpalatable, but clearly, they're unnecessary to convey the imagery you intended.
Still, the sheer length of the description causes the mind to wander out of focus, to skim several words together and bundle them into an overall image. Not a bad thing in the sense of accessibility and meaning-conveyance, but it doesn't have a high impact, just a slow and ambient sense of dread or reverence for this ghost-like town.
Consider instead the first four words of the entire thing: "The town was desolate." Everything that follows is little more than one conjoined adjective for those four words. We know instantly, right from the start, the state of this town. The phrase has all the information and impact of the entire paragraph in four short words.
To further the emphasis, we might change "desolate" to "dead," further extending the metaphor to follow. Think about the stresses on that phrase: "the TOWN is DEAD." Two words: "Town." "Dead." There is your entire sentence broken down into eight little letters that will stick in a reader's mind whenever the town comes up.
With all this emphasis on concise, immediate speech, I want to take a moment to stress that this is not a better-than debate: long, florid prose is by no means invalid or less valuable. There is no shortage of evidence for this in nearly any book you pick up off nearly any shelf. I stress short, clear structure today because it is too often undervalued or written off as "childish."
If you consider simple words "childish" or easy to do, I recommend you try your hand at fitting an entire plot into six of them and see if you get anything even remotely as powerful as:
"For sale: baby shoes. Never worn."
The power of simplicity is that it shifts the tone of voice on the written page. It breaks up the pattern and flow to wake up the mind and disrupt its natural routine for rote analysis, like tapping on the brakes while speeding down the highway to jar yourself awake as you make the long drive home late at night.
Interspersing a single short phrase (in which every word gains its own stress purely by constituting a larger percentage of the sentence as a whole) immediately before or after a lengthy, poetic description or dialog is thus that much more powerful because of the tonal difference from the words and phrasings around it.
Consider the first two paragraphs of this very post: one a long, ambling sentence with no shortage of complex words whose muddled syllables make for an even, diffuse stress across the entire paragraph, and one short, immediate phrase on a line all its own, glaring at the reader through all the empty white space around it and daring anyone to challenge its place on the page. In short:
Don't discount simplicity.
Friday, May 6, 2011
How to Expose Yourself: Three Different Takes on Backstory
Anyone who's ever sat through death-by-PowerPoint knows that having endless gobs of faceless information unceremoniously crammed into your brain makes a handy sleep aid in a pinch. Suffice it to say, it's unlikely to be something you'd like to find yourself doing in a novel intended for the entertainment or enrichment of others.
And yet so many authors do.
Exposition is almost uniformly more fun to write than it is to read. The proportions of this particular discrepancy are frighteningly disparate: the more the author enjoys writing it, generally the less fun it is to read, likely because it keeps going long past the point where the reader stops caring.
That is because the writer's brain is threatening to explode. Don't be too quick to judge: you don't know what you're capable of writing until there's more within your mind than you can reasonably jot down in the time it takes for it to vanish forever into nothing.
It's a classic case of "curse this mortal shell and its slow-typing fingers."
Exposition tends to be where this all comes to a head. I'm not talking about the simple, subtle quirks of a given character's past that crop up from time to time throughout the work, I'm talking about the oppressively-thick preface wherein many authors metamorphose into somewhat narcissistic scholars of their own particular world.
Imagine, if you will, someone who has just seen the greatest movie they believe they will ever see. They love this film, they love the people who made it, right down to the best boy grip, and most of all, they love telling other people how much they love it. But no matter their devotion, their retelling rarely amounts to more than "and then it turns out his father is the angel of death! How ironic is that?"
(We'll get into the use of "irony" later. There isn't enough Internet for that discussion here.)
The point is that many authors are precisely like this fabled fanboy: they want to tell you everything about this world, they want to tell you all the various and intricate pieces that they have researched and/or designed and how neatly they all ricochet into a veritable kaleidoscope of beautiful interactions.
And they want to tell you all about it right now.
For a writer, the preface is generally an afterthought. It's the piece you add in when your test readers go "huh?" and ask a million questions about why the governor had to sentence the hero to have his hands cut off for writing in public, because you didn't make clear that in this world, literature is a sin and knowledge is a coveted possession of the aristocracy.
The preface or similar narrative blurbs serve to fill in the cracks. It creates a tepid baseline from which your reader can begin to interpret the world. It focuses the lens, so to speak. It's also an extremely dangerous tool in the wrong hands.
Much like PowerPoint.
The trouble with exposition is not knowing what to include, but where to stop, where to leave the gaps that will whet your reader's appetite for mystery and let your story unfold its own surprises without leaving your audience in a total fog.
But we'll get to that in a moment.
Personally, you could write a text book (and many authors seem to attempt exactly that) and still have it come off well if you give it the proper wrapping. If you're going to do early exposition, especially as a preface, then the how is easily twice as important as the what.
Voice.
In a preface, there is no dialog, no setting, nothing on which to build...but there is a character. Your narrator needn't (arguably, shouldn't) be a faceless self-insertion dully doling out the details on the world into which your reader is considering plunging themselves.
Like a lecture on economic theory, voice makes the difference between rampant somnolence and rapt attention. Give your "narrator" his or her own linguistic quirks to spice up the otherwise bland explanations of what ought to be a compelling world.
Kitsch gimmicks like a pirate's overdone "Arrrr's" are generally too much too soon, but that's not to say they're out of the question. If your chief antagonist is a serpent-blooded priest with a speech impediment, doubling or tripling a few S's within the initial narrative gives it an entirely new perspective than a faceless regurgitator.
Having one of your characters do the initial, out-of-sequence exposition offers an opportunity for warped perspective and half-truths that give your reader a false sense of understanding; one that can be broken to great effect later in the work when the plot or the hero violates this seeming "rule."
That said, be careful of which character you pick: a hero introducing his own story often looks narcissistic, as does an introduction by a romantic lead. If there's a character (living or dead) within the work who is already something of a historian, loremaster or scholar, it can be a wonderful introduction to their craft. Alternatively, bards and storytellers, gurus and wise men make spectacular selections.
As do villains.
But beyond simply re-skinning a base monologue, it can be much more fluid to map exposition over familiar elements of our own world as they exist within the work. Newsprint is a campy selection, but I have recently seen it done to spectacular effect, so don't rule anything out.
A character walking a lonely street with posters detailing the backdrop of the setting is one popular method in both film and fiction: the character themself is busy with their regular morning routine, paying no mind to the immediate world around him and the quite-obvious signs that hint at what happened in the days, months or years before.
Like a large impact crater with a green "Now Entering Chicago" sign hanging at an odd angle nearby.
The character's own dismissal can be of chief importance here: as an element of the world, it's unlikely they'll be as aware of the shocking implications of these all-too-familiar features of their world, which brings home exactly how long the situation has been like it is, or how terrifying it is that no one seems to realize how bad it all is.
Another popular method, and arguably one of the best depending on the nature of your hero, is to have the hero themselves be a complete neophyte to the setting in question. The examples abound in urban fantasy, where "normal" people suddenly find themselves in supernatural circumstances (see: Harry Potter) and have to adjust quickly to an entirely new set of rules, giving the audience themselves a necessary cross-section of a new and different setting.
The two methods of in-line exposition can be combined to great effect, with an unaffected denizen of the new setting calmly leading a wide-eyed newcomer through an average day-in-the-life without understanding why the latter is so blown away by the perfectly reasonable concept of flying sheep.
That said, in-line exposition is not without its pitfalls: not only can such scenes draw out longer than any preface, they can seem unreasonable within the context of the work. In addition, subtlety and symbols rely heavily on the reader's preconceptions, which can lead to confusion without a more specific explanation.
Sometimes, the best way to say it is simply, with just enough literary flair to keep it interesting. Such tidbits should be short (no more than a page or two at the most) to avoid overloading the reader, but they can save you miles of text spent weaving awkward patterns around a "subtle" implication of the same basic, well-known information about the world.
Naturally, many works, even in fantasy and science fiction, have no need for a preface. Exposition is easily done piece by piece within the context of a work without it showing up in lump sums early on and risking choking the readership. But, depending on your level of departure from normalcy (or the obscurity of your subject matter), they can be invaluable to keeping your readership engaged rather than scratching their collective heads.
Just be careful it doesn't turn into a dissertation.
A good rule of thumb is this: imagine your entire preface (if it takes the form of one) is being read to you by someone you do not know in an empty subway car on your ride home late at night. At about the point where you would seriously consider getting up and walking to the next car even if the speaker is still openly addressing you because the discomfort of staying far outweighs the need to be polite, it's probably time to stop.
If instead you're using an in-line, backdrop exposition, think of it instead like following a stranger's directions while driving to a friend's new house late at night. By the time you'd be so sick of empty country back roads that you turn around and head home (or at least back towards some place with streetlights) before you start hearing the banjos playing, it's time to take a break and let your hero breathe.
As to which method works best, take a long look at your world. Write down the elements of the setting that you want the reader to know up front, the framework that you can then subtly hint at later through social or environmental departures from the norm. Outline only, there's no need for in-depth details, since you yourself already know them.
Out to the right of each, try to write at least one symbol, object or scene that could highlight it without having to state it openly (or a scene that might lead a newcomer to address the weirdness directly). If there are any gaps, consider a preface. If you can't easily draw a line through the symbols you've collected, or if you find yourself repeating the same rote over and over again, consider a preface instead.
If, however, the elements you're looking to grant fit into a neat pattern such that they might all be found on the same street, or in the headlines of the local paper, or even collected in a brief TV news segment without seeming too disjoint, an in-line exposition may be a smoother, more welcome exposure to the same information without having to step outside the current of the work to explain it.
There is a balance between textbook and total mystery, and it's often closer to the textbook side than we as writers would like to believe. The lines between the elements of your work will always be clearer to you than they are to total strangers, even total strangers who think much the way you do. If all else fails, err on the side of too much information.
Or, ideally, undercut the information entirely to something only the later part of the book reveals, and then have your test readership tell you at exactly what point they got so lost that they had to set the book aside. The gaps will start to fill themselves in from there. It's sort of like taking a flute well out of tune to find the proper pitch again.
Of course, if a second flute player shows up, you'll just have to shoot one of them.
Getting your reader the information they need up front doesn't have to be a chore for either of you. Just make sure to treat it like part of the story, even if it seems like it's standing alone. Every bit of text between the covers has a voice whether you put one there intentionally or not. If yours sounds like your 3rd-grade math teacher, the effects are likely to be the same, no matter how interesting the world you're talking about is.
And yet so many authors do.
Exposition is almost uniformly more fun to write than it is to read. The proportions of this particular discrepancy are frighteningly disparate: the more the author enjoys writing it, generally the less fun it is to read, likely because it keeps going long past the point where the reader stops caring.
That is because the writer's brain is threatening to explode. Don't be too quick to judge: you don't know what you're capable of writing until there's more within your mind than you can reasonably jot down in the time it takes for it to vanish forever into nothing.
It's a classic case of "curse this mortal shell and its slow-typing fingers."
Exposition tends to be where this all comes to a head. I'm not talking about the simple, subtle quirks of a given character's past that crop up from time to time throughout the work, I'm talking about the oppressively-thick preface wherein many authors metamorphose into somewhat narcissistic scholars of their own particular world.
Imagine, if you will, someone who has just seen the greatest movie they believe they will ever see. They love this film, they love the people who made it, right down to the best boy grip, and most of all, they love telling other people how much they love it. But no matter their devotion, their retelling rarely amounts to more than "and then it turns out his father is the angel of death! How ironic is that?"
(We'll get into the use of "irony" later. There isn't enough Internet for that discussion here.)
The point is that many authors are precisely like this fabled fanboy: they want to tell you everything about this world, they want to tell you all the various and intricate pieces that they have researched and/or designed and how neatly they all ricochet into a veritable kaleidoscope of beautiful interactions.
And they want to tell you all about it right now.
For a writer, the preface is generally an afterthought. It's the piece you add in when your test readers go "huh?" and ask a million questions about why the governor had to sentence the hero to have his hands cut off for writing in public, because you didn't make clear that in this world, literature is a sin and knowledge is a coveted possession of the aristocracy.
The preface or similar narrative blurbs serve to fill in the cracks. It creates a tepid baseline from which your reader can begin to interpret the world. It focuses the lens, so to speak. It's also an extremely dangerous tool in the wrong hands.
Much like PowerPoint.
The trouble with exposition is not knowing what to include, but where to stop, where to leave the gaps that will whet your reader's appetite for mystery and let your story unfold its own surprises without leaving your audience in a total fog.
But we'll get to that in a moment.
Personally, you could write a text book (and many authors seem to attempt exactly that) and still have it come off well if you give it the proper wrapping. If you're going to do early exposition, especially as a preface, then the how is easily twice as important as the what.
Voice.
In a preface, there is no dialog, no setting, nothing on which to build...but there is a character. Your narrator needn't (arguably, shouldn't) be a faceless self-insertion dully doling out the details on the world into which your reader is considering plunging themselves.
Like a lecture on economic theory, voice makes the difference between rampant somnolence and rapt attention. Give your "narrator" his or her own linguistic quirks to spice up the otherwise bland explanations of what ought to be a compelling world.
Kitsch gimmicks like a pirate's overdone "Arrrr's" are generally too much too soon, but that's not to say they're out of the question. If your chief antagonist is a serpent-blooded priest with a speech impediment, doubling or tripling a few S's within the initial narrative gives it an entirely new perspective than a faceless regurgitator.
Having one of your characters do the initial, out-of-sequence exposition offers an opportunity for warped perspective and half-truths that give your reader a false sense of understanding; one that can be broken to great effect later in the work when the plot or the hero violates this seeming "rule."
That said, be careful of which character you pick: a hero introducing his own story often looks narcissistic, as does an introduction by a romantic lead. If there's a character (living or dead) within the work who is already something of a historian, loremaster or scholar, it can be a wonderful introduction to their craft. Alternatively, bards and storytellers, gurus and wise men make spectacular selections.
As do villains.
But beyond simply re-skinning a base monologue, it can be much more fluid to map exposition over familiar elements of our own world as they exist within the work. Newsprint is a campy selection, but I have recently seen it done to spectacular effect, so don't rule anything out.
A character walking a lonely street with posters detailing the backdrop of the setting is one popular method in both film and fiction: the character themself is busy with their regular morning routine, paying no mind to the immediate world around him and the quite-obvious signs that hint at what happened in the days, months or years before.
Like a large impact crater with a green "Now Entering Chicago" sign hanging at an odd angle nearby.
The character's own dismissal can be of chief importance here: as an element of the world, it's unlikely they'll be as aware of the shocking implications of these all-too-familiar features of their world, which brings home exactly how long the situation has been like it is, or how terrifying it is that no one seems to realize how bad it all is.
Another popular method, and arguably one of the best depending on the nature of your hero, is to have the hero themselves be a complete neophyte to the setting in question. The examples abound in urban fantasy, where "normal" people suddenly find themselves in supernatural circumstances (see: Harry Potter) and have to adjust quickly to an entirely new set of rules, giving the audience themselves a necessary cross-section of a new and different setting.
The two methods of in-line exposition can be combined to great effect, with an unaffected denizen of the new setting calmly leading a wide-eyed newcomer through an average day-in-the-life without understanding why the latter is so blown away by the perfectly reasonable concept of flying sheep.
That said, in-line exposition is not without its pitfalls: not only can such scenes draw out longer than any preface, they can seem unreasonable within the context of the work. In addition, subtlety and symbols rely heavily on the reader's preconceptions, which can lead to confusion without a more specific explanation.
Sometimes, the best way to say it is simply, with just enough literary flair to keep it interesting. Such tidbits should be short (no more than a page or two at the most) to avoid overloading the reader, but they can save you miles of text spent weaving awkward patterns around a "subtle" implication of the same basic, well-known information about the world.
Naturally, many works, even in fantasy and science fiction, have no need for a preface. Exposition is easily done piece by piece within the context of a work without it showing up in lump sums early on and risking choking the readership. But, depending on your level of departure from normalcy (or the obscurity of your subject matter), they can be invaluable to keeping your readership engaged rather than scratching their collective heads.
Just be careful it doesn't turn into a dissertation.
A good rule of thumb is this: imagine your entire preface (if it takes the form of one) is being read to you by someone you do not know in an empty subway car on your ride home late at night. At about the point where you would seriously consider getting up and walking to the next car even if the speaker is still openly addressing you because the discomfort of staying far outweighs the need to be polite, it's probably time to stop.
If instead you're using an in-line, backdrop exposition, think of it instead like following a stranger's directions while driving to a friend's new house late at night. By the time you'd be so sick of empty country back roads that you turn around and head home (or at least back towards some place with streetlights) before you start hearing the banjos playing, it's time to take a break and let your hero breathe.
As to which method works best, take a long look at your world. Write down the elements of the setting that you want the reader to know up front, the framework that you can then subtly hint at later through social or environmental departures from the norm. Outline only, there's no need for in-depth details, since you yourself already know them.
Out to the right of each, try to write at least one symbol, object or scene that could highlight it without having to state it openly (or a scene that might lead a newcomer to address the weirdness directly). If there are any gaps, consider a preface. If you can't easily draw a line through the symbols you've collected, or if you find yourself repeating the same rote over and over again, consider a preface instead.
If, however, the elements you're looking to grant fit into a neat pattern such that they might all be found on the same street, or in the headlines of the local paper, or even collected in a brief TV news segment without seeming too disjoint, an in-line exposition may be a smoother, more welcome exposure to the same information without having to step outside the current of the work to explain it.
There is a balance between textbook and total mystery, and it's often closer to the textbook side than we as writers would like to believe. The lines between the elements of your work will always be clearer to you than they are to total strangers, even total strangers who think much the way you do. If all else fails, err on the side of too much information.
Or, ideally, undercut the information entirely to something only the later part of the book reveals, and then have your test readership tell you at exactly what point they got so lost that they had to set the book aside. The gaps will start to fill themselves in from there. It's sort of like taking a flute well out of tune to find the proper pitch again.
Of course, if a second flute player shows up, you'll just have to shoot one of them.
Getting your reader the information they need up front doesn't have to be a chore for either of you. Just make sure to treat it like part of the story, even if it seems like it's standing alone. Every bit of text between the covers has a voice whether you put one there intentionally or not. If yours sounds like your 3rd-grade math teacher, the effects are likely to be the same, no matter how interesting the world you're talking about is.
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