Keith Cronin

About Keith Cronin

Author of the novels ME AGAIN, published by Five Star/Gale; and TONY PARTLY CLOUDY (published under his pen name Nick Rollins), Keith Cronin is a corporate speechwriter and professional rock drummer who has performed and recorded with artists including Bruce Springsteen, Clarence Clemons, and Pat Travers. Keith's fiction has appeared in Carve Magazine, Amarillo Bay, The Scruffy Dog Review, Zinos, and a University of Phoenix management course. A native of South Florida, Keith spends his free time serenading local ducks and squirrels with his ukulele.

I Don’t Believe in Diabetes

April 26, 2019 By Keith Cronin 43 Comments

Please help me perform an experiment. Re-read the title of this post, and ask yourself: What if somebody said those five words – “I don’t believe in diabetes” – to you? What if they followed it up with something like this? “People should just eat less sugar.”

I suspect you might consider that remark insensitive, or stupid, or uninformed, or simply wrong. I also suspect that none of you would ever actually say something like that – particularly to a person diagnosed as being diabetic. After all, it would definitely be insensitive, it would almost certainly be stupid, and it’s clearly ill-informed and wrong, as there is ample medical proof that A) diabetes exists, and B) sugar consumption does not directly cause diabetes.

Let’s try a variation. Consider this statement:

“I don’t believe in depression. People should just cheer up.”

Again, this is something I doubt most people who read posts like this would say, and for the same reasons. At the very least it would be insensitive, and the oversimplified solution it offers is both callous and unhelpful. However, the grim reality is that there ARE some people who would say this – or at least think it. Ask anybody who suffers from depression, and I bet they’ll corroborate this.

Let’s re-cast this sentence one more time, transforming it into something that a fair number of you probably would say:

“I don’t believe in writer’s block.”

I know – this is false equivalence, comparing writer’s block to actual illnesses like diabetes or depression. I’ll address that in a moment. But first let’s explore this premise a bit more. Whether you believe in writer’s block or not, I think you’d have to admit it’s a pretty common punching bag – or punchline – for many writers. Here’s a quick sampling.

Let’s start with Jodi Picoult, who proclaims, “I don’t believe in writer’s block. Most of writer’s block is having too much time on your hands.”

Terry Pratchett apparently has Jodi’s back on this. He’s been quoted as saying, “There’s no such thing as writer’s block. That was invented by people in California who couldn’t write.”

Writing teacher and author Natalie Goldberg says, “I don’t believe in writer’s block. I don’t even think it exists.”

Author Bob Welch calls it “an excuse,” and elaborates that “I don’t believe in writer’s block any more than I believe in ‘plumber’s block’ should the guy fixing my pipes suddenly find the going difficult.”

Continuing with that theme, author Roger Simon, currently the chief political columnist of Politico, drives the stake a little deeper: “Why should I get writer’s block? My father never got truck driver’s block.”

These are all clever, pithy remarks – brimming with confidence and making it pretty clear that writer’s block is just not something that happens to REAL writers.

Um, except for when it does. [Read more…]

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My Ongoing Feud with Billy Joel

January 25, 2019 By Keith Cronin 21 Comments

In the course of my lengthy career as a professional musician, I’ve been fortunate enough to meet – and sometimes perform with – a number of rock stars and celebrities. Most of them have been wonderful to work with. Some of them, significantly less wonderful.

And then there’s Billy Joel. He and I… well, let’s just say that we are not currently on speaking terms.* Not after what he said.

I mean, I can forgive a lot, but not that.

Admittedly, it was a long time ago. 1977, to be precise. But Billy has never taken back what he said – hell, he’s probably said it a thousand times since then. I swear, there’s no apologies with this guy. Not even a hint of remorse. And in my defense, I like to think I’m pretty open-minded and accommodating. But some rifts are just insoluble. Some lines just shouldn’t be crossed.

That’s what happened with Billy. The guy crossed a line with me, and there’s just no going back. Not after he said this:

“I don’t want clever conversation.”

Here’s the thing. As a writer – and as a reader – I DO want clever conversation. In life. In relationships. And especially when it comes to dialogue in fiction.

So today’s rant – er, today’s post, that is – will focus on how to make the conversations your fictional characters have more effective, more engaging, more memorable – in short, more clever.

What’s the big deal with dialogue?

To me, dialogue is the single most powerful way to bring your characters to life. As author, editor and all-around writing guru Sol Stein says in his excellent book How to Grow a Novel, “The minute characters talk, the reader sees them. And we know readers much prefer seeing what’s happening rather than hearing about it through narration.” Stein also points out an additional benefit: “Not to be lightly dismissed are those white spaces on the page created by exchanges of dialogue. They make the reader feel the story is moving fast.”

Dialogue opens up a window for the reader into how a character thinks, how she perceives herself, how she views the world, and often, how she wants the world to view her. As Stephen King observes in his classic On Writing: “What people say often conveys their character to others in ways of which they – the speakers – are completely unaware.”

In addition to providing us a clearer view of a character, dialogue can often leave a lasting impression that is far more powerful than most passages of narrative or description. I often use movies as examples in my WU posts, since more people will be familiar with them, so to help drive home how powerful – and how memorable – good dialogue can be, see if any of these lines ring a bell: [Read more…]

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Bucket List for Writers

October 9, 2018 By Keith Cronin 33 Comments

sometimes you just gotta say bucket — Um, I don’t think this is the kind of bucket they’re talking about…

I believe it’s healthy to have goals. After all, having something to aim for can give us a sense of purpose, and can help us keep our efforts focused. We often hear of “the writer’s journey,” and I think it’s an apt metaphor, because this can turn into a VERY long trip. For those who manage to stay on the path, there are many milestones along the way – along with many hurdles.

While a writer might start out with a single goal (e.g., write the damn book), if that writer is serious about getting published, she might soon find herself adding multiple items to her to-do list. Armed with this list, off she goes on her journey!

And then, reality sets in.

For most – if not all – of us, it soon becomes apparent that this whole writing-and-publishing-a-book thing can take a while. Sometimes quite a while. Given how long it can take to get a writing career off the ground, a writer’s to-do list can start to resemble another list that has become popular in recent years: the “bucket list.”

Note: For those not familiar with the idiom, this is a list of things you want to accomplish before you kick the bucket. (And for those of you not familiar with what “kick the bucket” means, it’s a reference to an ancient – and anatomically challenging – romantic ritual involving a large bucket, three pairs of oversized steel-toed boots, 12 gallons of tapioca pudding, and 23 well-trained riverdancers, preferably double-jointed. Honest.)

For today’s post, I’ve attempted to assemble a typical bucket list for an aspiring writer, based on a combination of my own initial plans, accomplishments to date, and ongoing goals. As my journey has progressed, the items on this list have tended to shift and evolve – if you ask me next week, my list might look quite different. But for today at least, here’s my first stab at a bucket list for writers:

1. Finishing your manuscript

This is huge. Seriously, this could be the only item on your list, and it would still be a MAJOR accomplishment. By completing a manuscript, you’ve done something 99.999999% of the population hasn’t done.

Even more impressive, you’ve done something that probably 98% of the people who ever said “I should write a book” have never gotten around to actually doing. So if you have done it, you should congratulate yourself on a significant accomplishment, and celebrate it in whatever way you see fit. (Caveat: you might want to avoid celebratory activities that require a large bucket, three pairs of oversized steel-toed boots, 12 gallons of tapioca pudding, and 23 well-trained riverdancers – even if they’re double-jointed. I’m just looking out for your safety here.)

2. Signing with an agent

Okay, if you’re self-publishing, this won’t be on your list. But since I started my journey back when stone tablets were still more common than e-books, this represented a well-established rite of passage that I was eager and determined to complete. [Read more…]

If I Knew Then What I Know Now

July 10, 2018 By Keith Cronin 28 Comments

past meets present — The author before and after learning how to use a semicolon

I get approached from time to time by aspiring new writers, asking for advice on how to get started. The longer I’ve been doing this, the harder it gets to answer them. At this point I’ve been in the game nearly 20 years, so how do I condense what I’ve learned into a quick conversation or a brief email? And what if they are interested in a completely different type of writing than the kind that has made me as rich and famous as I currently am? (Hmmm – now that I think about it, that wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing. But I digress…)

So how to advise them? Do I lecture them on the ever-changing industry? Warn them of the dangers of reading the works of Clive Cussler? Or simply hand them a dog-eared copy of The Elements of Style and turn around and run? Depending on who asks, it’s hard to determine which advice would be the most useful.

When in doubt, fire up the time machine!

I’ve been binge-watching the old Stargate SG-1 TV series recently, and several of the stories focus on time travel, a concept that has always fascinated me. In a couple of episodes, the main characters manage to pass messages to versions of themselves who are living in a different time.

This got me to thinking: what kind of messages would Current-Day Keith send to Past Keith?

After considering obvious nuggets like “buy stock in Amazon” and “don’t enroll in Trump University,” I started thinking about what I would tell Keith The Writer From The Past (or, KTWFTP). Since SG-1 episodes usually incorporate a ticking clock or some other increasingly urgent complications, I decided to ramp up the pressure, and limit myself to five pieces of advice. Here’s what I came up with to share with the younger (and yes, hairier) Keith.

1. Know your genre – and its conventions.
Probably the biggest – and hardest – lesson I’ve learned as a writer is that genre matters. Historically the genre of a book just wasn’t something I thought or cared about – as a reader or as a writer. But after writing one hard-to-categorize manuscript after another, the first message I would pass on to KTWFTP is to pick a damn genre already. It will make things SO much simpler.

Why? Genre simplifies things by setting expectations. It helps an agent sell your book. It helps a publisher market your book. It helps a reader choose your book.

And if you’re self-publishing, it helps YOU market your book, which is utterly crucial. In an era when anybody can publish anything, you need a way to make your book stand out to your potential readers. [Read more…]

When a Bad Person Makes Good Art

May 8, 2018 By Keith Cronin

I like to think I’m a man of conviction. The kind of man who acts swiftly to right a wrong, who won’t tolerate an injustice, nor support or enable morally questionable behavior. For example, a couple of weeks ago a friend of mine alerted me that somebody had posted a racist sentiment on my Facebook wall. My justice was swift and decisive: I deleted the post and unfriended the person who posted it, despite the fact that we were former coworkers who had been friends for 20 years. My buddy who had alerted me was surprised by the speed and severity of my response. “Damn,” he observed, “KC doesn’t mess around.” I’ll admit, seeing his reaction made me feel kind of good – and maybe a little smug. Nope, I thought, KC does NOT mess around.

But here’s the thing.

Actually, the first sentence in my opening paragraph was carefully worded. And the key phrase in it is “like to think.” Because as much as I may want to pat myself on the back, the truth is that quashing a racist sentiment on social media is not a very hard thing to justify, nor is it particularly praiseworthy. I suspect most decent people wouldn’t tolerate racist language on their Facebook walls. But what about something a little less directly impactful?

I mean, this was a racist statement, and it was posted on MY wall. Clearly that was not to be tolerated. But what do I do when I find out – after the fact – that the person who wrote a song I like is a racist? Or that an actor I admire has a history of spousal abuse? Or that a novelist I enjoy actually murdered somebody? Where do I draw the line?

It’s a question that’s coming up more and more these days. In the past year, we’ve begun to see a flood of bad behavior by popular artists – particularly male artists – being exposed. The #MeToo movement is shedding some much-needed light on a long history of indefensibly bad behavior by powerful males in the arts, who have been using sex, gender and power to dominate and/or manipulate – and in some cases, flat-out ruin – careers and lives.

One by one we’re seeing artistic icons being toppled. Louis CK. Bill Cosby. Harvey Turdstein (okay, I might have gotten the spelling wrong on that one). Many of us are relishing the experience of witnessing this sea change. It’s high time, we think, as we watch Roman Polanksi ousted from the Oscars academy. Good riddance, we think, as Kevin Spacey is dropped from his TV series. Yes, it feels kind of good, a rare glimpse of karma in action.

But it also leaves each of us with a challenge. Specifically, once we’ve identified an artist as being a not-so-good person, what do we do about that artist’s body of work? [Read more…]

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Shakespeare in Space – with Lasers!

February 13, 2018 By Keith Cronin

I recently stumbled onto an online discussion about animated films, where somebody referred to The Lion King as having been inspired by Shakespeare’s classic play Hamlet. That was news to me, and it made me think about other films that I had belatedly learned were inspired by Shakespeare plays, such as 10 Things I Hate About You (The Taming of the Shrew) or My Own Private Idaho (Henry IV and Henry V).

This in turn got me thinking about how little I actually knew about Shakespeare. True confession: until about four months ago, my Shakespearian awareness was largely limited to a 1966 episode from season 3 of Gilligan’s Island, where the castaways perform a musical adaptation of Hamlet for a famous movie producer currently stranded on their island (hey, it could happen). Behold, in all its glory:

Boning up on the Bard

While I’ll admit that episode is fondly etched into my cultural DNA (yes, I’m deep), I realized I needed something more. After all, now that I am supposed to be a Serious Writer (said with the appropriately furrowed brow, and the sincere intent to someday purchase a tweed blazer with leather elbow patches), this scarcity of SSC (Shakespearian Street Cred) seemed inexcusable. So I took advantage of some recent time off from the DDG (dreaded day gig) to remedy this gap in my cultural literacy, and went off to my local library to load up on books and DVDs. I tend to be a total-immersion kind of guy when I develop a new interest, so the next several weeks were all Shakespeare, all the time. The results were illuminating. First, there was the fundamental question:

Just how big a deal is this guy?

Pretty darn big, as I was soon to learn. As literary critic and expert on all things Shakespearian Harold Bloom observes in the forward of Susannah Carson‘s book, Living with Shakespeare: Essays by Writers, Actors, and Directors, Shakespeare is “the most widely read author in English; his Complete Works are second in popularity only to the Bible.” (Take that, James Patterson! Suck it, Clive Cussler! But I digress…)

Okay, so the guy’s a best-seller. But Shakespeare’s impact is broader and more profound than the sheer size of his readership, as Bloom elaborates:

We live in Shakespeare’s world, which is to say that we live in a literary, theatrical, cultural, and even psychological world fine-tuned for us by Shakespeare. Had he never lived, we would have bumbled along well enough, but he did live, and he did write, and those works were printed, and read, and performed, and passed on, and read some more, and performed some more, and emulated, and assimilated, and quoted, and so on. So that now, four hundred years later, we continue to read and perform and emulate his work so thoroughly and passionately that it’s difficult to conceive who we would be – as a culture, as ourselves – had Shakespeare never existed.”

Those are some powerful claims, and worthy of further examination. [Read more…]

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Getting Ugly

August 8, 2017 By Keith Cronin

My freshman year in college, I lived in a large dormitory. It was a tough year, because I was bullied relentlessly by two other freshmen, one of whom was my roommate. While his assaults were verbal, the other guy, who lived down the hall, was far more threatening to me, with the hint of violence always looming behind his taunts. This guy – I’ll call him Jake – was a street-hardened bully from a rough part of northern Indiana, and I knew I didn’t stand a chance against him in a fight.

So I took the abuse. For months on end.

I found solace in my studies, attending what was then the largest music school in the world, so I could disappear into my musical world for most of the day. But eventually, I’d always have to go home.

One night I returned to my dorm to find Jake standing in front of my door, barring my entrance. He greeted me with the obscene nickname he and his buddy had come up with for me, which they found every possible occasion to use, often humiliating me in front of my friends and classmates. As I approached, he bobbed and lunged at me, daring me to try to get past him and open the door.

For some reason, on that particular day, I’d had enough.

Without thinking, I grabbed Jake’s head in both hands, and slammed his head against the door. Then we stood, staring at each other. Jake was speechless, his wide-eyed expression making me think he was probably feeling more surprise than pain. Whatever the combination, it did the trick. After a long moment, Jake walked away without a word.

But a weird thing happened once I got inside my room. In what should a been a triumphant Hollywood moment, I instead found myself feeling nauseated. While I’d been in the inevitable scrape or two as a teen, this was by far the most violent move I’d ever made against somebody. And now the thought of it was making me feel physically ill. And what was even weirder: I felt incredibly guilty. Even though that punk completely deserved what he got.

I’d never been a very aggressive or violent guy. By nature, I’m conflict-averse. (This is perhaps not a great trait for a fiction writer, since conflict is our stock-in-trade. But I digress…) Now I had learned in a visceral way that violence really just wasn’t in my nature. This was a surprising revelation to me, given how much I liked violent, action-packed movies and books. It was quite confounding: here was this bully who had tormented me for months, and now I found myself debating whether to go find the guy and apologize? Seriously, what the hell was going on? [Read more…]

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In Which a White Guy Talks about Cultural Appropriation

May 9, 2017 By Keith Cronin

DISCLAIMER: The views presented in today’s post do not necessarily reflect those of Writer Unboxed or its other contributors. They are solely the opinions of the author of this post, and should not be read while flossing, practicing goat yoga, or ghost-writing a book for James Patterson.

Last September – before being eclipsed by our current all Trump, all the time zeitgeist – a flurry of conversations erupted across the internet focusing on cultural appropriation. Fanning the flames of this topic was a keynote speech best-selling author Lionel Shriver gave at the 2016 Brisbane Writers Festival. Regardless of where you stand on cultural appropriation, it’s well worth reading the text of her whole speech.

Taking the stage wearing a sombrero, Ms. Shriver quickly made it clear where she stood, lashing out at political correctness and flat-out dismissing the concept of cultural appropriation – particularly when writing fiction. She cited a recent incident where some college students were excoriated on social media for a cruel and hurtful act of “ethnic stereotyping” – because they had been photographed wearing miniature sombreros at a tequila-themed birthday party.

Ms. Shriver observed, “The moral of the sombrero scandals is clear: you’re not supposed to try on other people’s hats. Yet that’s what we’re paid to do, isn’t it? Step into other people’s shoes, and try on their hats.” She went on to offer numerous examples of important books that would not have been written if the authors hadn’t dared to explore experiences or cultures other than their own:

“If Dalton Trumbo had been scared off of describing being trapped in a body with no arms, legs, or face because he was not personally disabled – because he had not been through a World War I maiming himself and therefore had no right to ‘appropriate’ the isolation of a paraplegic – we wouldn’t have the haunting 1938 classic, Johnny Got His Gun.”

A disrespectful vocation

In her speech, Ms. Shriver pushed back – hard – against the notion of writers being somehow morally restricted to writing only stories that are “implicitly ours to tell.” Instead, she maintained that “any story you can make yours is yours to tell, and trying to push the boundaries of the author’s personal experience is part of a fiction writer’s job.” Taking her defense a step further, she said:

“This is a disrespectful vocation by its nature – prying, voyeuristic, kleptomaniacal, and presumptuous. And that is fiction writing at its best. When Truman Capote wrote from the perspective of condemned murderers from a lower economic class than his own, he had some gall. But writing fiction takes gall.”

Stating her hope that the concept of cultural appropriation is just “a passing fad,” Ms. Shriver worried that if writers restrict their work to only what they have directly experienced, “all that’s left is memoir.”

I agree – in theory – with much of what Ms. Shriver said. But it soon became clear that plenty of people didn’t… [Read more…]

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If You Don’t Have Anything Nice to Say

February 14, 2017 By Keith Cronin

I’ve been an avid Amazon shopper since the mid-90s. It started with books, but as we moved into the 21st century it’s come to where I now buy everything from groceries to musical instruments from this Seattle-based behemoth. From the start, one of the biggest differentiating features Amazon offered was its user reviews. I have found those reviews absolutely invaluable in making informed purchasing decisions, and I’m not aware of any other online retailer with a more comprehensive or helpful body of user reviews.

I like to think of myself as a give-something-back guy (in addition to being ruggedly handsome, of course), so I’ve made an effort to post reviews of products about which I had passionate opinions – either positive or negative. The vast majority of reviews I’ve posted have been positive, because I want to champion products that I think more people should be aware of. But over the years I’ll admit there have been a handful of products I’ve felt the need to publicly slam. Today’s post is about one such slamming.

Half a dozen years ago (which sounds nowhere as cool as “four score and seven years ago,” but I wasn’t around back then, and neither was Amazon; nor were Presidents tweeting about women’s clothing lines – but I digress…), I became aware of a new book that was making a lot of waves. It approached a popular topic by using an extended metaphor in what appeared to be a very clever way. Most of its reviews were positive, and I was intrigued enough to want to read it. So, being a lifelong cheapskate, I did what I usually do when I am interested in a book by an author whose work I’ve never read: I looked for it at my public library. They had it, I checked it out, and we were off to the races.

The book started strong. Really strong. I was digging it, and loving the metaphoric architecture the author had created. (And, truth be told, starting to feel the pangs of envy I inevitably experience whenever I encounter a writer who seems to have more game than me.)

But then something happened. The book started to fall apart. The story became tedious and petty, the architecture more and more contrived and gimmicky (which I wasn’t sure was actually a word, but my spellchecker isn’t raising any eyebrows over it. If spellcheckers have eyebrows, that is. Which would mean they’d also need to have eyes. Possibly even noses, for sniffing out grammatical stinkiness – a word over which my spellchecker *did* raise an eyebrow. But I digress again…).

In short, the book turned into a major disappointment. Yet it was selling like hotcakes, with mostly positive reviews. So I did what I felt needed to be done, out of my duty to the clientele of the store from which I buy all my books (and all my ukulele strings, and all my smoked oysters, and all my toothpaste, and, and, and…) – I logged into Amazon and reviewed the book, sharing my candid opinion of the author’s work.

More succinctly, I trashed it. [Read more…]

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Seeing a Story through New Eyes

November 8, 2016 By Keith Cronin

At the time this post is published, I’ll be at the Writer Unboxed UnCon in Salem, MA, where I’ll be leading a discussion on the impact of language on storytelling. So it seems appropriate to post something along the same lines, particularly given the interesting experience I had just prior to drafting this piece.

My daughter’s 30th birthday was several days ago, and as I prepared to shop for birthday presents, I asked a couple of female friends for book recommendations. One of those recommendations surprised me: The Velveteen Rabbit, the classic children’s book by Margery Williams.

The friend who recommended it – an educated and extremely intelligent woman who’s probably in her late thirties – said that she re-reads the book several times a year. I told her I had read it (or had it read to me) as a child, but couldn’t remember reading it as an adult. (Crap. This means I probably never read it to my daughter. Bad parenting, Keith. Bad parenting.)

My friend remarked that she had never read it as a child, but had discovered the book as an adult, and it remained one of her favorites. Intrigued, I bought an inexpensive ebook version of it, and read it in probably 15-20 minutes. It was a fascinating experience.

Getting reacquainted with a classic

First of all, I totally did not remember the story. I mean, I remember liking it as a kid, and had some vague recollection about it revolving around a toy that becomes shabby and worn, but I couldn’t recall any more details than that. So I was surprised multiple times by where the story went, including its conclusion (fear not – no spoilers).

Next, I was surprised that for a short book intended for children, the language is actually very adult, with a hint of subtly satirical humor that would have sailed right over my head as a child.

For a long time he lived in the toy cupboard or on the nursery floor, and no one thought very much about him. He was naturally shy, and being only made of velveteen, some of the more expensive toys quite snubbed him. The mechanical toys were very superior, and looked down upon every one else; they were full of modern ideas, and pretended they were real. The model boat, who had lived through two seasons and lost most of his paint, caught the tone from them and never missed an opportunity of referring to his rigging in technical terms. The Rabbit could not claim to be a model of anything, for he didn’t know that real rabbits existed; he thought they were all stuffed with sawdust like himself, and he understood that sawdust was quite out-of-date and should never be mentioned in modern circles. Even Timothy, the jointed wooden lion, who was made by the disabled soldiers, and should have had broader views, put on airs and pretended he was connected with Government.

I’m sure his kind of sophistication in a children’s book made it much more easy for parents to endure when being asked to read the story aloud for the umpteenth time. In that respect, I think Ms. Williams’ book set an example that we see widely adopted today in the CGI-animated movies we see from Pixar and Disney. [Read more…]

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Actively Defending the Passive Voice

August 9, 2016 By Keith Cronin

As writers, we are told about many rules we’re supposed to follow. Avoid adverbs. Don’t start with a prologue. Eschew the passive voice. Don’t use words like “eschew.” On the off chance that someone does say “eschew,” say “gesundheit!”

Okay, maybe not all of those are well-established rules, but the first few definitely are. And I have a problem with rules like these (to be fair, I have a lot of problems, as some of you likely have guessed). But today I’m going to write about the problem I have with one rule in particular: the one that says we should eschew (gesundheit!) the passive voice.

What it is (and what it ain’t)

First of all, what is the passive voice? It’s a way of constructing sentences where the subject has the action done to it, rather than performing the action. For example:

The treaty was signed by the two generals.
The most awesome post ever was written by Keith.
The egret was eaten by the alligator.

In each case, the action happened TO the subject of the sentence (treaty, post, egret).

By contrast, here are the same three sentences cast in the active voice:

The two generals signed the treaty.
Keith wrote the most awesome post ever.
The alligator ate the egret (and then sang, “Egrets? I’ve had a few,” in a surprisingly good Sinatra impression).

In each of these active-voice examples, the subject of the sentence (the generals, Keith, the alligator) is performing the action. Both sets of sentences say the same thing, but conventional wisdom maintains that the ones written in the active voice are stronger and more vigorous. If that increased strength and vigor is not immediately apparent, let’s find some better examples.

The boy closed the door.
The door was closed by the boy.

or, even worse:

I think most of us would agree the second sentence is pretty weak in both of those examples. If nothing else, the first sentences are definitely cleaner. So these are situations where the passive voice probably is the weaker choice. Similarly, there are plenty of instances where too much use of the passive voice can really de-energize – and often de-personalize – your writing.

So why am I opposed to the no-passive rule? First and foremost, because many people mistakenly tag sentences as passive that actually are not. Over the years that I’ve spent interacting with writers both online and in person, I’ve seen a lot of misunderstanding of what the passive voice is – and what it isn’t. So let’s take a quick quiz to see how well we understand this passive thing. [Read more…]

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Take Your Reader to Another World

May 10, 2016 By Keith Cronin

Donald Maass’ inspiring post last week showed us how we can tap into vivid personal memories to add new levels of delight (AKA “pixie dust”) to our storytelling. Later that week, Kathryn Craft’s wonderful post delved into how we can use setting to reinforce the emotional state of our characters. Today I’m going to look at some ways to use aspects of both of these approaches, with the goal of taking your readers to a world they’ve never seen – but you have.

Lessons from a loudmouth

Several years ago I stumbled across an indie film called Loudmouth Soup. The film is small in scope, focusing on a Hollywood dinner party attended by seven characters who come from various levels of the food chain within the film industry. Everybody has come to the party with an agenda (some hidden, some not so much), and a tense and often passive-aggressive dance slowly unfolds over drinks and dinner.

A few things make this film unusual. First, it was shot entirely in one night. Second, and probably most unusual, it had no script. (I know some writers who will hate this idea, but please, bear with me.) Instead, the director briefed the actors on their characters’ individual backstories, and then gave each character a set of goals, and then told them to basically do whatever they had to do to achieve them, while the cameras rolled. All the players were experienced Hollywood actors, so the director was calling on them to draw on their “insider” knowledge of those familiar shark-infested waters, and basically act like actors at a Hollywood dinner party.

Oh, and all while drinking heavily. The party may have been imaginary, but the drinks they served were real. So we get to watch a group of actors slowly getting drunk, playing the part of actors slowly getting drunk. Definitely a “meta” moment in filmmaking.

I enjoyed Loudmouth Soup, but I wouldn’t go so far as to call it a great movie (although I agree with much of this five-star review). I’ll admit, the unusual way the movie was made is probably its most interesting facet. If you haven’t lived in L.A. and/or been involved in the entertainment industry, much of the film might be a bit too “inside baseball” to be compelling.

But I have lived in L.A., where it seems everybody has an agenda, everybody is playing an angle, and everybody – from bank teller to studio executive – wants to be somewhere else on the food chain other than where they are right now. And that is exactly what these actors captured so well. Their knowledge of the film business allowed them to truly OWN the world in which the story was set.

For 96 minutes, those seven increasingly drunken actors whisked me back to L.A. and all its best and worst characteristics. I’ve seen few movies that evoked such a specific time and/or place so vividly – and so quickly.

So that’s what I want to look at today: how can we take our readers to a world we know intimately, and make it come to life for them? Here are a few ways – you can likely come up with even more. [Read more…]

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