craft of writing

Inspired to Emulation—Or Preparing to Jump

February 8, 2019 By David Corbett 20 Comments

Leap of Faith–Krabi Thailand (Photo Credit: Christopher Johnson)

One curious consequence of writing a book on writing is the inescapable sense of humility that descends during the process. (I’m under deadline this week for my next book on craft, this one titled The Compass of Character. I’ll discuss it at greater length in the weeks to come, but for now I’m simply invoking it as my excellent and not-to-be-questioned excuse for a relatively brief post today.)

As a teacher and author of writing guides, I’m obliged to present techniques and strategies for successful fiction. Techniques and strategies, however, require a generalized idea of how to go about things. Concepts such as character arc and three-act structure and backstory exploration inevitably conjure guidelines that demand attention if not strict adherence.

This how-to approach can become trivialized into “Five Ways to Make Your Characters Jump Off the Page!” It can also be maddeningly vague because the only rule is there are no rules.

The Rule of No Rules is especially on my mind of late. While collecting examples for the guidelines I discuss in my book, I was inevitably made aware of how any novel worthy of being called good, let alone great, somehow squirms out of the stranglehold of accepted convention like a slimy piglet.

Whether the author was simply following her instincts or observing a carefully constructed plan—usually based on turning some accepted idea of how to write on its head—the truly remarkable books I have used to illustrate certain points all too often reveal themselves to be not just illustrative but sneakily subversive of what I’m trying to say.

This may simply be a reflection of another accepted truth, that the best stories give readers what they want in a way they don’t expect. This in turn echoes another truth, that stories should be both impeccably logical and yet surprising. And yet how does one teach that? How does one teach: Follow the path to the cliff’s edge, then jump?

[Read more…]

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Thought Triggers: The Chekhov’s Gun of Writing Tricks

July 19, 2017 By Annie Neugebauer

An experience most of us are familiar with: You’ve just bought something new, whether it be a car, a backpack, a sports jersey with a particular player’s number, or even a new brand of reading glasses, and though you found it independently and thought it was fairly unique at the time, now you’re seeing it everywhere.

Has everyone else decided to buy this thing at the same time as you? Hive mind? Have you prompted a rash of popularity? No, of course not. It’s simply that now that you’ve taken particular notice of this item, your mind is primed for it. Had you bought a different car make or a different jersey number, that’s the item you’d be noticing all over the place. The item hasn’t become more prevalent; you’ve simply become more predisposed to notice it.

In a study called “Disgust, creatureliness and the accessibility of death-related thoughts,” by Cathy R. Cox, Jamie L. Goldenberg, Tom Pyszczynski, and David Weise, experimenters found that people primed with disgusting pictures were more likely to draw upon death-related thoughts than participants primed by neutral pictures. For example, those first shown images of a bloody finger and a dirty toilet were more likely to finish the words SK_ _ _ and COFF_ _ as SKULL and COFFIN than those shown images of a book and a chair, who were more likely to finish them as SKILL and COFFEE. In other words, disgusting images prompt thoughts of death, which causes people to more readily fill in the blanks with death-related ideas.

Intriguing connection between death and disgust aside (horror writers, meet me in the comments!) (for the interested, the nonfiction book That’s Disgusting by Rachel Herz is a nice starting place), this outcome seems to enforce the instinctual knowledge most people have: that our thoughts can be guided or prompted by specific images, words, and associations. I think of these things as “thought triggers.” How, then, can writers use this quirk of the human brain to our advantage, and can it ever become a detriment to our work? [Read more…]

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Raise a Question, Earn the Backstory

July 13, 2017 By Kathryn Craft

As avid readers, writers have an intuitive sense of when to include backstory. Their efforts, however, can come across as either boring (in the case of info dump), laughable (in the case of random irrelevance), or disruptive (in the case of backstory delivered too soon).

Clearly, these reactions are not ideal. What’s going wrong?

In each case just mentioned, the backstory inclusion is driven by the author’s goal to deliver information and not, as it should be in every scene, driven by the demands of the protagonist’s story.

The purpose of backstory is to motivate your characters for the actions they take in the current story. Unless something from the past had a powerful influence on the way the characters are acting now, you’ll be hard-pressed to defend the relevance of its inclusion. In fact, you may not have the chance to try—you may already have lost your reader.

Accept these cold, hard facts about backstory

The reader approaches your novel with an interest in your character’s history that is idle to nil. During your opening, the reader’s primary goal is to orient to the frame of the story you want to tell, and will simply accept what you tell her on page one as being the current state of things. It is up to you to generate interest in the protagonist’s history.
“Because I wrote it and it’s interesting” is not a standard of relevant inclusion. You might want to include your character’s entire personal history because you took the time to write it, but you were doing so to start to get a sense of your character. In your novel, that character will pop to life through only those backstory inclusions that will motivate the story you want to tell.
Every time you switch to a backstory scene you stand the chance of jarring readers from the fictive dream, which will invite them to set down your book. It’s up to you to ease the transition.

One mad skill will address all three of these issues, and I’m shocked that more writers don’t use it. [Read more…]

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Talecraft

April 15, 2016 By Lance Schaubert

Hernan Pinera — By Flickr’s Hernán Piñera

You don’t write with your keyboard. You don’t write with your pen or your hands. You don’t write with your typewriter, your chisel, your audio transcriber, your fancy new app, gadget, or journal.

Most people find this strange since, for instance, the field goal kicker for the St. Louis Rams kicks primarily with his leg.

But not the storyteller. “Writing” is one of those rare more-than-actions for our more-than-physical world.

See this is the problem with most journalism about fiction writers. Journalists try so hard in interviews to get the story behind the story, to “see through” fiction rather than using fiction as a tool through which to see. They insult those of us who have spent years fantasizing and imagining and crafting another world from scratch. As Terry Pratchett would say, Fiction is a minor province in the world of Fantasy, not the other way around. Even the most Woolf-esque, heady literary fiction is fantasizing and, if it’s not, it’s little more than memoir.

That’s not to slight memoir.

That’s simply saying we fiction writers do something that nonfiction writers do not do.

We craft tales from scratch.

Recently at a writers’ enclave in Massachusetts, I considered leading a session in which I confiscated the phones, computers, typewriters, pens, and paper of every attendee. We would then take a simple writing prompt for a fairy tale or mythology and would write it together. Aloud. Without any recording device to bear witness. Then we’d retell the story, start to finish, patching it together. Then we’d elect a delegate—the best of us—to tell our community’s tale from start to finish.

And then we’d write our own longhand versions. [Read more…]

Time Travel Done Right: Weaving Memories into a Storyline

September 27, 2015 By Guest

Please welcome Nina Schuyler to Writer Unboxed. Nina is the author of The Translator, which won the 2014 Next Generation Indie Book Award for General Fiction and was shortlisted for the William Saroyan International Writing Prize. Her novel The Painting was nominated for a Northern California Book Award and named a Best Book by the San Francisco Chronicle. Nina teaches creative writing at the University of San Francisco.

The Translator involved weaving memories into the present story line. I wanted to get underneath the advice—“use memories or the past to advance the story”—and figure out the effective ways to use the past to enhance the story.

Connect with Nina on Facebook and on Twitter.

Time Travel Done Right: Weaving Memories into a Storyline

Keep the present action going. Don’t include the past at all. Include it, but don’t put it there. Or there. Or there.

There’s an abundance of writing advice, regarding the past and the use of memories in fiction. Some of it is contradictory, most of it confusing, because well-regarded writers often use memories to create rich and compelling stories.

By including memories, you can heighten tension by raising the stakes, dramatize a character’s change, complicate motivation, and create subtext to guide the reader to the heart of the story.

Raise the Stakes

In Joseph O’Neil’s wonderful novel, Netherland, Hans van den Broek’s wife has taken their child and moved back to London, leaving him alone in New York City. Hans discovers a cricket bat in the trunk of a taxi cab, and the driver, seeing Hans’ interest, invites him to play.

[pullquote]By including memories, you can heighten tension by raising the stakes, dramatize a character’s change, complicate motivation, and create subtext to guide the reader to the heart of the story.[/pullquote]

If the scene ended there, the act of playing cricket might be viewed as a way to distract the narrator from his troubles. But the present action causes Hans to remember his boyhood in Holland, where he lived alone with his mother. As a boy, Hans fell in love with cricket. It provided surrogate fathers, and there, in his memories, he sees his mother on the sidelines, watching him, supporting him.

“From September through April I played football, proudly wearing the club’s black shirt and black shorts bought at the sporting goods store on Fahrenheitstraat; and from May through August I played cricket. I loved both sports equally; but by my midteens, cricket had claimed its first place.”

And then, “It was her (his mother) habit to unfold a portable chair by the western sightscreen and sit there for hours, grading homework and occasionally looking up to follow the game.”

The stakes are raised—what can be gained, what can be lost—by including these memories of his boyhood; the reader understands that Hans is depending on cricket, not only as a distraction, but also to help him through this difficult time.

Character Change

By including a memory, a writer can convey a change in character. In my novel, The Translator, my protagonist, Hanne Schubert encounters Moto, an unemployed Noh actor [Read more…]