Different Voices

Your characters suffer from a universal limitation. They all spring from inside you. They tend to sound alike, because you’re the one who is thinking up all the things they are saying. This muddle is exacerbated by the fact that dialogue, while easy to write, is usually the least distinctive element of your narrative. Why is that? In dialogue you need to capture the cadence of the way people speak. Otherwise, conversations can sound artificial, labored. What people say, on paper, usually sounds like what a lot of people might say. 

So, how do you make your characters speak in unique ways? As with other elements of building a compelling character, your difficulty probably stems from the fact that you are writing about them from the outside. They’re all sound like you because you are dictating—the puppet master—how they should talk.

Dialogue needs to be spoken from the inside. Once you grasp that simple principle, separating out voices becomes one more function of creating vivid personalities. Let’s take the example of a boy and girl that have fallen in love in New York City. What are the most outstanding characteristics of the boyfriend? First, let’s say he hails from Ohio. As any Easterner can tell you, people from the Midwest are so nice. He’s lived in New York for three years. Now ask yourself: what are the sorts of things would you talk about when you’ve lived there for (only) three years? 

Now let’s consider the girlfriend. She’s from Brighton Beach in Brooklyn, streetwise but shy. What is her frame of reference? She’s lived in New York all her life, so she’s going to complain about all its irritations. That’s how being cooped up in a city feels. Maybe add in that her conversations are sprinkled with scientific references, because that’s what she studied in school. Maybe she can’t wait for the Science newsletter in the Times to come out on Tuesday. 

Are these two characters going to talk differently? They will if you keep in mind, as you begin every conversation between them, where they’re coming from. Once you get a feel for operating from inside their head, your characters are going to talk to you first—in their own voice. Then just write down what they say.

Exercise: The most straightforward difference between two characters is: one’s an extrovert and the other’s an introvert. How do extroverts talk? You can start with the premise that they do their thinking out loud. They’ll do a lot of announcing. An introvert will tend to stumble more aloud. They will blurt out something, then have to correct themselves halfway through, or want to correct themselves because they are thoughtful enough to desire the right nuance. Try it: listen to people talk, and you’ll see the difference right away.

“Your manuscript is both good and original, but the part that is good is not original and the part that is original is not good.” —Samuel Johnson

Copyright @2025, John Paine

Moving On

Losing at love is a common topic for a romantic plot line. That’s because the fall from a state of bliss creates anguish, which is an ideal way to foment ongoing tension in a character. Remembering the good times makes use of time shifts, a narrative technique that readers enjoy. In many cases, the unhappiness is succeeded by a new attempt at love, and the mistrust engendered by the past partner creates trust issues with the new one. As a plot premise, a broken heart has to be rated as A+.

What works well as a book opens, however, can become depressing, even annoying, as the story ventures forward. Part of the reason is that despair is bleak, and there is only so much of it a reader can take. We already know life sucks; why do you think we’re escaping into a book? Hand in hand with this feeling, a novel usually holds out a reason to hope. There is a way to higher ground, if only the character can find it.

Another reason is stagnation. Once the initial circumstances of the past love affair—the winning ways of the partner, the relief from prior loneliness, the fun escapades shared—are laid out, often over a lengthy course, maybe a few hundred pages, a character can be increasingly seen as running in place. Get over it already. Don’t you see that new guy likes you? Are you blind?

This growing perception is driven by the forward momentum of other characters in the novel. They are getting somewhere in their quests, and thereby they draw a reader’s interest. By contrast, a character still moping becomes a less desirable plot line to follow. With that character, the second verse is the same as the first. And the third. And the fourth . . .

An author often responds to this urgency by cutting down on background scenes, limiting the past thoughts to a paragraph or two before pushing forward into the present. In some ways, this transition period is worse—because that sort of work is distant storytelling. We’re not even getting a fully realized scene anymore. Even if it occurred in the past, at least the reader can immerse themself in it.

A better tack may be to transfer the bitterness caused by the old lover onto the new one. The sourness becomes a distorted prism through which the present is viewed, one that is broken by the growing realization that love rules all, even a new, not as amazing, love. However tempered, it does represent forward progress.

Exercise: Once the original scope of the past love is laid out, over the course of a few scenes, mix in the new love interest. Give the reader some hope, even if the light is all the way at the other end of the tunnel. By halfway through, the past can be intermixed with the present—by the new partner demanding to be taken seriously. 

“I think about you. But I don't say it anymore.” —Marguerite Duras

Copyright @ 2025, John Paine
 

Trolling for Ideas

When you are fully engaged in the art of writing, you never really have any time off. When you are not actively creating, you are researching, observing, or jotting down stray ideas that might help your story. If you have a full-time job, the hours spent there can seem like interruptions—time spent relaxing, by comparison—to the hard work you really want to be doing. All thoughts are possible figments that can be collected when you sit down to write.

One of the most fertile sources of ideas is, not surprisingly, other books. That’s because the acuity of a good writer often reminds you of thoughts you yourself have had before. I should pause to clarify terms. I am a staunch enemy of plagiarism, as is anyone engaged in the book industry and knows how hard writers struggle. The mining of ideas I am suggesting operates at a plane once removed. 

Rather than the written words, or the original juxtaposition of phrases, you need to jot down the concept that struck you. For example, let’s say you’re reading about a young man who, being awkward at parties himself, becomes jealous of his girlfriend for spending too much time enjoying the company of another man at a party. You realize that for your book, such an incident would be perfect for demonstrating the character’s overall decline into paranoia. What’s more, you are struck by how well the author captures not only the initial poisonous simmering at the party, but how the character thinks about it afterward, maybe the next morning, the next evening, and a week later, when they attend another party. Does he in fact say anything to his girlfriend, or is he too ashamed of what he was projecting on her? That alone would indicate the depth of paranoia. At a conceptual level, you see the technique employed, and that becomes a springboard for your original train of narration. 

At a lower level, reading other books can remind you of details that you want to add to scenes. Again, don’t steal what is original, but use the book as you would any other source you research. If the author is writing about dogs, you can seize upon appurtenances that help fill out your possibly vague memory of when you owned a dog. Items such as dirt smearing the dog’s red collar or dried hanks of fur where the dog has wallowed in mud could, if you choose your own wording, describe dogs in dozens of other novels, stories, articles, etc. Just as valuable, you may read a detail that sparks off in your mind a memory of an entirely different detail about your dog, perhaps the way white hair slowly ringed its muzzle as it aged and the way you felt about that.

Remember the reason you’re looking for ideas: to feed more ideas into your book. When you jot down ideas, you’re not leapfrogging off someone else. You know what is in your book, and the idea can relate directly to a scene that you’ve already written. By the same token, I have deliberately rented movies merely to pick off details that relate to a setting, often in the past, that reside in the back of my mind and will not come to the forefront on its own. You are a hunter, so go gather for your book.

Exercise: Keep a pocket notebook or iPad at your side when you read your next novel. When you see a striking idea, stop (if you can resist the author’s narrative pull) and write, in your own words, what that idea sets off in your mind. If you have a scene set in the desert, for instance, it’s useful to have a description of how it feels when a granule of sand gets in your eye. You may not use all of the entries on your list when you are finished, but even if you use a couple, your book is that much richer.

“The way you define yourself as a writer is that you write every time you have a free minute. If you didn't behave that way you would never do anything.” —John Irving

Copyright @2025, John Paine

Just the Right Word

Our minds can be stuck in certain ruts, and we end up using the same words over and over again. I frequently consult a thesaurus because a manuscript I’m editing keeps employing certain common words. While freshness of story concept is an overarching attraction for a reader, freshness of vocabulary can be a subtler but ongoing source of satisfaction. 

I have to admit, I love reviewing an entire horde of possible substitutes for a word. Each has its own shade of meaning. Among the greatest assets of the American Heritage Dictionary are its boxes that parse out, in a sentence apiece, how a list of similar words should be employed. For instance, “bombast” and “claptrap” seem to be roughly equivalent, but the dictionary points out the difference. “Bombast stresses inflation of style but does not always imply insubstantiality of thought,” whereas “Claptrap is insincere, empty speech or writing.” I think most good writers want to make sure that they are using the right shade of meaning.

You need to be careful. though. Often I encounter a word that is approximately correct, but stands out like a sore thumb because it is elevated so far beyond the writer’s usual level of diction. A look at one of Merriam-Webster’s Words of the Day on my homepage shows the wide divergence of common versus fancy. The word was “nimiety,” one that, despite my fair knowledge of vocabulary, had me stumped. It turned out to mean “excess, redundancy.” Synonyms supplied included “overkill,” “plethora,” “superfluity,” “surfeit,” “surplus,” and “preponderance.” If you are writing a thriller in which you have tough guys and molls, the words that will fit your level of diction are going to be “overkill” and “surplus.” A reader of the genre immediately grasps the meaning and moves on. If you are careful, you will find another word at the same level of diction—that will work perfectly.

The other words would be good choices in a more literary work, although I’m still not sure about “nimiety,” unless you like to use three-dollar words that send readers scrambling for the dictionary. (I will note that, oddly enough, in the days when I used to write down every word I didn’t know, I found Henry Miller had the widest range of vocabulary words. Read Black Spring at your peril.) 

Being a wordsmith means knowing your tools. If you are as boundlessly creative as the authors you admire, the bon mot will pop into your fertile brain. Yet if you find yourself annoyed that you’ve picked the same word once again, a thesaurus provides a means by which to free yourself from the rut you’re in. Just think: an entire paragraph of similar words, and maybe even several paragraphs. That can only be described as a pleasure to behold.

Exercise: One reason you are frustrated enough to consult a thesaurus may be that you’re trying too hard. You’re trying to jam that overused word into a sentence. Instead, review the possible synonyms with an open mind. You may discover that an alternate word that you like won’t fit into your existing sentence—but it would if you reconstructed the sentence around the synonym. 

“The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug.” —Mark Twain

Copyright @2025, John Paine

 What Matters

In this poisonous season of American politics, the temptation for a novelist is to capture that lightning in a bottle. Yet when I try to remember any political novel that succeeded, only a stray few, such as All the King’s Men, come to mind. Given all the hatred flying everywhere, how can that possibly be? 

The first, gigantic obstacle facing a writer is freshness. In our 24-hour news cycle, any American who would read a book already knows the issues. Nor do new wrinkles in these long-standing causes tend to develop. When characters spout off the arguments of the religious right, say, a novel reader’s interest immediately dims. Oh, right, that stuff. Aren’t I reading a novel to get away from that stuff? 

The second is politics’ inherent immorality. If a novel has to make sense of our world, how can that be reconciled with a group of individuals whose worth is measured by the opinions of others? Good luck creating a character whose moral fiber waxes and wanes with the circumstances. How much do you think the reader is going to care about that character? 

The third is the problem that fiction in general has in aping real life. The right to an abortion, for example, really matters to women. The course of their life may depend on it. Yet when that issue is raised in a novel, the plot inevitably depends on the personal nature of the decision. That’s because fiction is terrific at laying bare what is in our hearts. What a pregnant character tells her mother will impact me more deeply than what she argues, for all women, on a soapbox. 

In that observation lies the crux of the matter. Why does Robert Penn Warren’s novel succeed? One reason is the venality of Huey Long, to be sure. Far more energy is directed, however, in uncovering what makes him venal. That suggests that politics succeeds in novels only when it is made personal. My advice? Turn on the TV and shout to your heart’s content. But when you sit down to write, enter your own sphere.

Exercise: The core of a good political novel, as with any novel, is formed of a small cast of characters whose actions impinge on each other personally. If the president and his wife have a long-running battle that is featured every fifth scene, the reader will be moved because of the personal acrimony. When laying out a plot, start there: what can two characters fight about?

“If voting changed anything, they'd make it illegal.” —Emma Goldman

Copyright @ 2025 John Paine. All rights reserved.

Idiom or Cliché?

Editing comprises a number of skills, but these can be broken down to two basic levels: grammar and intuition. When I say grammar, I’m not talking about strict rules but commonsense principles, along the guidelines of Strunk and White. The same flexibility is even more marked in the second level of editing, as any writer knows. You use intuition to spark a fresher take on the idea written down, or to decide if a sentence is clear to someone else, like your reader.

One type of usage that is instantly recognizable is the cliché. We use them all the time when we’re speaking. They are a form of shorthand for an idea that might need to be explained. Anyone knows what “the ball is in your court” means, even if they don’t play tennis. Clichés can also be used as humor, since the idea that a cliché conveys can be used as a clever association or an ironic counterpart. In other words, the reason that clichés persist, despite our common scorn, is because they are useful. 

Unfortunately, they can also be a lazy form of writing. I see them often employed in manuscripts that are written in haste. You are writing, trying to get ideas out, and a cliché springs to mind. They are easy to grab, mentally, and they may very well convey what you mean. Depending on the writer, they may actually be more succinctly phrased than the surrounding material. Their kernel-like clarity is why they were retained in common speech originally.

Yet a cliché is also a borrowed piece of text. To me, that is the greatest sin. If you look at the quotation that ends this post, you’ll see exactly what I mean. You are trying to express yourself. You and no one else. You know about all those other books on all those shelves, and you are carving out a new legacy. So why would you want to clutter up your prose with the ideas of someone else?

One other factor to consider is the fatigue a reader experiences. The weariness felt from encountering the familiar enervates your prose. The reader experiences a subtle reaction: oh, a cliché. That’s sort of boring. You add up enough of them, and the reader comes to feel that your book isn’t special or original at all. You’re always taking shortcuts.

Before this becomes a blanket condemnation, the way you expected an editor would go, we should return to the idea of idioms used in speech. You do want your dialogue to be natural, and people do use clichés a lot. If you were to turn a common phrase into some tortured construction just to avoid using a cliché, it would sound artificial. If you are selective enough, a cliché will subside in usage to its proper place: a minor, idiomatic tool in your arsenal. 

Exercise: Comb your latest draft for clichés. Where are they being used? Unless the point of view voice is so chatty that the narrative seems but an extension of dialogue, you might want to limit them to dialogue. Even then, could one character be more given to using them? How about someone very smart but so unoriginal that their intelligence only extends to spouting a wider variety of clichés?

“Originality does not consist in saying what no one has ever said before, but in saying exactly what you think yourself.” —James F. Stephan

Copyright @ 2025, John Paine

Who’s Leading the Expedition?

Readers pick up a novel expecting to go on a journey. Some authors explore the fringes of civilization, like Annie Proulx, while others burrow into the fringes of the city, like Jonathan Lethem. The exotic is examined in order to uncover the universal. This principle holds true across the entire spectrum of fiction, from commercial to literary.

When you are plotting out who will be taking this journey where, you should consider certain poles: bizarre vs. normal. If everyone wears magenta and cyan dashes in their hair, the reader is inhabiting the equivalent of a Star Wars bar. If everyone says weird stuff that sprays out from their fragmented personality, the reader may feel barred from entry; they're too ordinary to understand. Someone in the proceedings has to ground the narrative so that the reader can participate.

That leads to the first choice. Is your protagonist a swashbuckler or a victim? The world that is explored can seem new because of the way it is viewed. The narrative voice displays idiosyncrasies that turn the quotidian into an object that deserves a fresh look. If the hero is pushing the envelope, unexpected secrets are revealed because she forces them open. She wants to embrace the unknown, in other words. As she actively breaks down walls, the other characters around her serve the function of the reader: oh no, don’t do that.

If your lead is a victim, he is swept into a world beyond his ken. Usually, another major character wields the sledgehammer against the walls while the hero cringes at the thundering crashes. He blunders into discoveries and is displeased by what he finds. In this case, the reader understands him perfectly: I shy away from loud noises too. Even so, that character can’t be everyman. He must have some screw loose to want to keep staggering forward beside that sledgehammer guy.

Now let’s return to the person holding the pen. What intrigues you? What type of character can you write about? How do you envision the protagonist changing during the course of the book? 

What you decide helps to determine the unfamiliar places and customs of the novelistic journey. If you want to explore the intersection of solar panels and the Navajo, that’s fine, but how can you make that matter to the reader? Who embodies tradition and who wants to despoil the desert for the better good? If you figure that out before you start, you’ll have a lot easier time demarcating the route you’ll take.

Exercise: When you are laying out a list of character traits, remember that everything is relative. A person who has fixed habits can also long to wander free at some unknown time in the future. A person who finds shaving dull still doesn’t want to stink on the subway. When you mix and match, you find the ways that characters can push and pull each other.

“An exotic birthplace on its own is not informative of anything.” —Italo Calvino

Copyright @ 2025, John Paine

What Is Sardonic

Criminal law is a good background if you want to become a novelist. These lawyers work in a field that probes crimes, especially murder, a rich source of storytelling tension. They deal with the seamy underbelly of society, both criminals and cops, which provide antisocial models for characters. They have to do a lot of reading and writing in their profession, and skill in writing is gained through the practice of writing. So why isn’t the world flooded with lawyer novelists?

I believe the answer, ironically, is judgment. Not so much in the usual equation of an author’s ego vs. talent, although lawyers as a rule have a mighty good opinion of themselves. I mean more in terms of sitting in judgment. After all, many lawyers aspire to be judges, to perch high on the bench and pronounce on the unfortunates that flow in and out of the courtroom.

That lofty distance can be married with a lawyer’s hard-bitten view of humanity. That produces a narrative that is sardonic in tone: can you believe someone would be so . . . ? This viewpoint can be humorous, often of the slight-smile category, and the story can ring with authenticity. So what is the drawback?
 
The culprit is the ironic distance. Such a perspective is to be expected from someone who long ago adopted a shell to protect themselves from the violence and indignities of the criminal life. Yet because a character is only as deep as the emotions the author inserts, that distance is a form of self-protection. Like a criminal client, a character remains “out there,” to be remarked upon. The author can hide their own passions from the reader.

You cannot become the next Michael Connelly without realizing that he creates terrific characters. The sardonic tone is voiced from within those characters. Passion is a better first stage for a writer. Devise a character willing to jump into the fray beyond all decorum or even decency you’ve ever seen in a courthouse. The polished veneer can be added after connecting with the animal inside. What an aspiring writer might find is they will penetrate that long-adopted shell to find their younger, passionate self. 

Exercise: When first scheming a plot, set all of your old experiences aside. That stuff can be realistic filler you insert later. Think of outrageous crimes, with braided leads that lead to a number of characters. Some are obvious early on to the reader, and some are deeply hidden. If you want to use your own past cases, you probably will need to turn the amp on them up to 10 and then keep shrieking.

“A lawyer is a person who writes a 10,000-word document and calls it a ‘brief.’”      —Franz Kafka

Copyright @ 2025 John Paine. All rights reserved.

What Use Are Children?

In adult fiction, the appearance of any character under the age of 12 ushers in a special set of problems. To start, it is hard for them to control a point of view because a kid’s perception of the world is confined to the limited amount they know. Such immaturity can be charming—and even compelling in the hands of an excellent writer—but it is hard to take cute affirmations seriously. I too once wanted to play baseball in the major leagues, and look where that road went—perverted by the world of books!

Their lack of what adults would consider common sense curtails their ability to impact a plot. In the crudest terms, it is hard to believe a child would cynically mow down a villain, or even conceive of why that would be a good idea. A child is a poor choice for any romantic involvement. Most adults in a room will not take the advice of a child about what to do next. The old adage about being seen but not heard applies here, but in this case it’s impacting where your story can go.  

A third limitation extends beyond the mind into the practical world of getting things done. A child cannot drive a car, arrange for a business lunch, or make an assignation. They cannot slip payoffs, organize sophisticated conspiracies, or any other of a dozen interesting plot turns. You might derive tension from the fear that a child will bungle the job, but that begs the question of: why did the adult think it was a good idea in the first place? 

That’s why the best use for a child is often as a victim. The same helplessness that hinders their ability to direct a plot works in their favor when it comes to sympathy. Readers understand that children are at the mercy of an evil adult, since that happens all too often in real life. “Go to your room!” is only a benign expression of this total power. Thoughts of a child lost in the woods, or stowed away in an attic, are among the primal fears that a parent has.

A child alone as a protagonist is a bad idea, but pairing up an older child with an adult, on the other hand, can provide some real zest to a novel. If you imagine a wisecracking pubescent from Southern California, you can immediately see the sort of flavor that could be added. The adult is still on hand to drive the plot forward.

Exercise: Review your manuscript for any action involving a child. Is the kid causing the action, or is the event acting on them? If it is the former, make sure the child can really carry that dramatic weight. If the premise seems phony, see if you can either make the child’s success an accident, or add an adult to the proceedings.

“Adults are just outdated children.” —Dr. Seuss

Copyright @ 2025, John Paine
 

Not Your Views

The novelty of writing a novel places a beginner at one end of an uncertain bridge. The act of imagining you’re someone else means that you cross an unseen divide in an unknown direction. In the end you are supposed to achieve the merger of author and character. 

How well this is accomplished is affected by a primary quality that all authors need to possess: a big ego. You wouldn’t be writing if you didn’t think, on some level, you have a fantastic gift to offer. Yet a big ego entails being full of yourself, and that may not fill up your characters as much as allow you to do what you’d do normally—proclaim your beliefs. In this case, not at a cocktail party but to a reading audience.

The intrusion of an author into the narrative occurs most often when a character provides their opinion on what’s going on. It’s supposed to be a deeper dive, into the mind of the character. What I see with regularity, however, is this type of thinking: The character is really me; I can spout off about anything I want. So some pet insight about race relations, or what have you, goes in the book. Not only that, but in order to limn in all of the nuances of your complex position, the harangue can go on for a page or more. The book stops short. The reader starts to nod off. Worst of all, the “speech” may not align with the character’s actions in other parts of the book.

Giving political opinions is the lowest dive, in this humble editor’s opinion. I won’t go into how tired I am of elections that help the army protect the rich. Instead I’ll merely point out that no nonfiction opinion breaks your fictional spell faster than a rant about politics. Plus, a reader may not read the book until several years after it is written. Will anyone care less about your Trump/Biden impersonator then? 

When you inject your personal opinions into a novel, you’re showing how far across that bridge to your character you still have to go. The character can’t be you, or the book would be boring. It’s hard work to create someone that captivates a reader. So, get over yourself. Make sure that what the character thinks is really clever and unique.

Exercise: Review the manuscript solely for a selected character’s thoughts. When you locate each one, stop and consider: What have I written about them so far? Does all of that line up with the thought here? Even better, ask yourself: how could I make this thought add to what I’ve already portrayed about them?

“Too often we enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought.” 
—John F. Kennedy 

Copyright @ 2025, John Paine
 

Rich Hands in a Poor Garden

One of the advantages of writing a series revolving around the same core cast is the growing richness of the portrayals. A large part of writing any novel consists of discovering what the lead characters are like. How fully a mature version emerges can determine how well the book as a whole succeeds. That advanced knowledge of a character can then be transferred to a second book and those after that.

What cannot be carried over is a fresh plot. While you were tinkering around with the characters in that first book, you were also discovering how the story would develop. That organic process may have worked well the first time around, but it likely will not in later iterations. Why is that?

When you have a variety of players, you’re inclined to find things for them to do. A scene may be devised for the sidekick to the hero, for instance, because he’s so peculiar in that wonderful way. Plus, you decide to give him a spouse in order to mine his peculiarity even further. This process is repeated for a number of major characters, giving them scenes in a regular rotation. 

Pretty soon, though, you’ll discover a distressing development. Writing for all of your beloved characters has a centrifugal effect on the novel as a whole. They’re spinning out into their separate orbits. Yes, you may have started with a compelling main plot, but it is proving too thin a reed to support so many wayward events.

The process of tinkering to discover new plot developments needs to be outlined more fully before you start page 1. Each of the major characters—at whatever level of importance you decide—needs to participate in a plot line that progresses each time toward her individual goal. If you want to give a character a spouse, that’s fine, but first determine how that marital combination can produce or finesse obstacles for the character. 

Once your notes show concrete advances that each main character will take, now examine the whole. How can the separate plot lines intersect, and at which points in the novel does that happen? The later the intersection, the more important the plot. What you’ll discover by laying out the skeins separately is which characters truly deserve to lead the next book.

Exercise: If you have already written a follow-up book, draw up a list for each major character. Go through each scene and write down in a sentence or two what plot advance the scene made. When you’re done, look at the list and ask yourself: how much did each scene move the character’s story forward? Most of the time that will tell you how much she should be featured and how many scenes should be cut.

“A man may be so much of everything that he is nothing of anything.” —Samuel Johnson

Copyright @ 2025, John Paine

Walk About

Ever since Archimedes stepped into a bathtub, humankind has been looking for eureka moments. Nowhere is that search as ceaseless as in the world of literature. A book contains so many sentences, and you want them all to sparkle. That’s why a large proportion of the edits an author makes on a draft consists of switching around a phrase, or substituting a fresh vocabulary word, or a dozen other changes to make a sentence more polished.

The creation of a story comes out an agonizing dribble at a time, and it’s easy to become discouraged. Minutes upon minutes can pass while you stare at a page, knowing that brilliance is burgeoning somewhere in the back of your mind—but not a single blessed thought will come out. 

In these cases, it helps to be hyperactive. A person who cannot sit still will do what an author who is stuck requires so badly: they get up. While I’ve never found that pacing about, hand in chin, does much good, I do know that when I stop forcing the issue, metaphorically beating my head against the screen, good ideas come to me.

You can make this a deliberate part of your routine. You get up to stick the half-drunk coffee in the microwave. While the half minute of heating up ticks off, you may find that a snatch of an idea comes to you. If you have been absorbed in what to write next, that unbidden snatch may be what you wanted. This technique works for any sort of roaming activity, be it making lunch, folding clothes, going to the loo, or, well, taking a bath. You have allowed yourself to relax, and your subconscious responds: “Now that you’re not thinking about it . . .”

Little by little, those ambulations around the house can produce hundreds of clear-cut ideas that you can stud into your story. You won’t experience eureka if you’re not looking at all, but you can make it a steady practice. So, the next time you’re feeling really stupid and inadequate, give yourself a break. Literally, go smell the flowers.

Exercise: Once a stray thought comes to you, you then have to write it down. Trust me: with all the thoughts that pass through your mind while roaming about, you can so easily forget it. Make sure you carry your mobile phone with you. If Siri is not at hand, you must act the fool and keep repeating the phrase in your mind, or on your lips, until you return to the keyboard. 

“It is not easy to convey, unless one has experienced it, the dramatic feeling of sudden enlightenment that floods the mind when the right idea finally clicks into place.” —Francis Crick

Copyright @ 2025, John Paine

When Telling Helps Showing

Show, don’t tell is a hoary maxim in storytelling, but how exactly you are supposed to do that? I read both fiction and nonfiction in which numerous interesting incidents are related, but very few scenes or sections bear much relation to their neighbors. Upon talking to the authors, I invariably learn that they had been advised to show, not tell, and that explained the absence of any thematic material binding the pieces together. The book is all knees and elbows without any sinew.

You want to show a person or character involved in an event. That type of writing provides vivid, up-close details that readers can use to imagine themselves in the person’s shoes. That vicarious involvement is one of reading’s greatest pleasures. Telling about that same incident, on the other hand, places a filter between the reader and the experience. The author is relating secondhand news—“as told by.” 

Once you have written out the incident, however, that doesn’t mean your job is finished. Now you need to provide context. Sometimes that can be accomplished by linking two thematically related incidents back to back. But most times you need to provide bridgework that provides the linkage. For example, an argument Cal just had with his wife will not seem connected in the reader’s mind with the argument he had with his mother 200 pages earlier unless you remind the reader. 

Many other times you need to provide framing. Whether through an author’s reflections or a character’s thoughts, you give an overview that explains why what we are about to read or have just read is brought up at all. A doctor fails to saves a patient, for example, and in the next scene she learns a lesson in compassionate healing. How are you supposed to convey that unless she thinks about the lesson she learned? With such a device, you now have given the reader the sense of how this incident fits within your larger picture.

Exercise: Pick out an incident in your manuscript. After reading it, do you know how it relates to the rest of the book? Of course you do. Write down that reason, in a sentence or a paragraph, depending how much explanation you think is needed. Try placing that explanation, from the lead character’s point of view, at the end of the incident. Does it fit there? Would it, or part of it, fit better at the beginning? Could you break up the explanation into pieces and fit them in throughout the incident—from inside the mind of the character?

“Don't say the old lady screamed—bring her on and let her scream.” —Mark Twain

Copyright @ John Paine, 2025

Fulfilling Expectations

An author setting out in a new genre like fantasy can be delighted by the riches that it offers. Many authors dream of writing a tale populated by dragons, snarling or friendly. Hero worship, depending on the author being emulated, can be an instructive practice for a beginning writer. My own first (unpublished) novel was a fantasy, and its hero bore perhaps a slavish resemblance to Bilbo Baggins.

I mention that because I also brought an unfortunate ignorance to the writing experience. The Hobbit was the only fantasy I had ever read, since my literary tastes back then ran more toward Heart of Darkness. Devising unexpected surprises for the reader—a boulder that contains a door!—was terrific fun to write. It was not until later, when I began to edit fantasies, that I realized the cardinal error I had made.

The gambits I had employed were too timid for the genre. While I was being quasi-realistic about how such things could possibly happen, a Michael Moorcock was making giant leaps in credulity. The attitude of such a writer is: screw you if you don’t want to go along for the ride. You’re not my audience.

The cautious approach shows its unstubbled chin to the reader right away. That’s because, feeling that throwing up unbelievable stuff in the reader’s face will cause them to put the book down, the author does not introduce standard genre elements early. A hundred pages can pass before there is any whiff of magic. The writer may instead present copious research into the mythology from which the fantasy is drawn, such as ancient Ireland. The thought is: I’ll get the reader primed for the fantastic stuff that’s coming next.

The problem is, readers of the genre are hoping that stuff happens on page 1. If they have to wait too long before any cool stuff happens, that book is going back on the shelf. Why is that book called a fantasy? they wonder. 

That error is compounded by not adding more magic consistently. If you have read the other books in the genre, you’d know that you’d better come up with fresh ideas. Dragons are so passé, even comic ones. The other authors in the genre have produced X and Y and Z; what do you got to top that? 

Exercise: Before you even start, amass pages upon pages of details of what the world you are creating looks like. You should know 100 magic twists and where they’re located. If you’re borrowing a basic concept from someone else, how can you recast it to make it your own? You should already be able to walk through your kingdom—from the inside of the character—before writing the first line.

“All cartoon characters and fables must be exaggeration, caricatures. It is the very nature of fantasy and fable.” —Walt Disney

Copyright @ 2025, John Paine

Second Time Around

An author’s first novel often represents the union of several gleaming factors. The writing shows precision in word choices, because so much time has been spent evaluating each sentence. The characters have true depth, because stops and starts as the book develops winnows out those who are less compelling. Most important of all, the book has a good concept. A subject struck a nerve at the very beginning, and the fleshing out of that topic proves how solid it was.

Where authors can fall short is the selection of the sophomore effort. Part of the problem is fatigue. So much effort was expended on the first book that a writer finds that, like Atlas, supporting one world feels like quite enough. To start from scratch and spend hundreds of new hours is a daunting prospect. At least the first time around, you had no idea how long it would take.

Juxtaposed to the weariness is your knowledge that you are a much better writer. In the latter stages of revision for the first book you likely found that the words you composed flowed out of your head faster. You were using certain techniques, like converting the most interesting word in a sentence into an active verb. So you want to put all that hard-earned training to work.

A first impulse with many writers is to pen a sequel. After all, you know the characters of the first book so well. Yet this is where so many writing journeys fall short. The concept for the second book may come to seem pallid compared to the first. Ten, twenty, maybe fifty pages into the new book, you find yourself losing interest. It just isn’t grabbing you, pulling you onward, the same as the first one.

That’s why, no matter which concept you choose, the first consideration needs to be how excited you are by it. Better writing skills employed on a less compelling central idea is a pointless exercise. You might as well perform black belt moves on a mannequin. 

How do you find good concepts? While some authors are bursting with great ideas—when will I find the time to write them all out?—most of us have to be more patient. You can move the process along by staying mentally sharp when you read news articles. Would that disaster in Dallas fit with the core characters you have in mind? Like many other gifts of the Muse, that ever elusive minx, you may find that by actively seeking, the perfect idea blindsides you unexpectedly.

Exercise: Context can provide the basic shape in which to fit the concept. Draw up a few pages of notes about 3-4 main characters you’d like to explore (whether from past books or not). In particular, what sorts of relationships between them would you like to develop? Now you have laid the tinder that can be sparked.

“Creativity and insight almost always involve an experience of acute pattern recognition: the eureka moment in which we perceive the interconnection between disparate concepts or ideas to reveal something new.  —Jason Silva

Copyright @ 2025, John Paine

Plucking and Choosing

As a person who worked for years with a sharp pencil, I tend to trust my instincts more than word-processing aids, but that is only a personal preference. Tools such as Find can be a godsend for a careful author. I have a mental clicker that keeps track of common mistakes such as overused words and expressions. Yet an author has a harder time seeing these, because the repetitions represent the way you spark the power to generate other words used in those sentences.  In other words, certain ways of phrasing a sentence puts you in your wheelhouse for expressing a new idea. So, an author should use “quite” and “rather” qualifiers if they help you get out a sentence that is provocative and interesting. After you’re done, you just delete the “quite” or “rather”—and everything else still sparkles.

I run the Find function when my intuition tells me that too much repetition is at play, and I sometimes have been shocked by the results. I knew characters were doing a certain amount of staring at each other, but 148 times? A person could get eye strain from that. That’s where another computer aid comes in. 

I use a dashboard thesaurus often, flicking the screen over to study possible alternatives. After all, I’m in the business of keeping the vocabulary in a manuscript fresh. On occasion I find that none of the synonyms really will work, but nine times out of ten I spy another word at the same level of diction that I know very well—and will work perfectly. You use Find, flick to the dashboard (or however you like to set up your thesaurus), and presto: nice word substitution. 

You can also run a global search on trickier items of redundancy. One phrase I look for often is “as if” or “as though.” This sort of sentence construction has valuable uses, but when I see it repeatedly, I usually feel that the prose in general is getting snarled in complex sentences. Again, writing depends on how an author thinks. If you naturally compose complex sentences, using “as though” is a natural extension of unspooling a thought. Many readers, especially nowadays, don’t think that way, however. What I tend to do is delete the connector, and separate the sentence in two. Most of the time, removing the connecting clause does not require any further editing. But you have removed a tangle.

What I really wish for—if Santa would like to join the world of computer editing—is a search function that would identify how many participial phrases are used in a manuscript. Again, I am not an enemy of them, but I do know that many such phrases are stronger when they become an independent sentence. But if you try to look up “ing,” you will be frustrated. The suffix is used too often for other purposes. If robots can clean my house, how come they can’t look for a comma followed by a participle?

Exercise: If while reviewing your manuscript, you feel a tic that you’ve seen that usage before, stop. You have, almost for sure. Type the word or phrase into your Find window and see how many times it is used throughout the manuscript. You’ll likely gulp at the number. Then spend a few minutes looking up synonyms, not only for that word, but for similar words. Start jumping through the search and adding fresh vocabulary.

“I have written—often several times—every word I have ever published.”
—Vladimir Nabokov

Copyright @ 2025, John Paine

The Early Morning Ghost

Writers are lucky that the human species does not wake up instantly. Instead, we lounge in bed, even after the alarm goes off. In those minutes before fully awakening, thoughts about your story can come to you. Like a cyclone, a ball of thoughts about a scene can spin out of the nether regions. Soon enough, you find yourself trying to lock down the ineffable so that you can include it in the book.

What ends up happening, unless you possess a preternatural ability to access your subconscious, is that you concretize only a small portion, maybe a paragraph. Lying in bed, you keep repeating the words, over and over, until you remember them well enough that you can jump up, rush to your desk, and record them. Repeating also helps you to judge whether you really have discovered a bon mot. Many times the thoughts tumbling inside your head can glow because the general direction seems so promising. When you actually pull one of the lumps out into plain view, you may find that it is really dross. That realization may occur while you’re still in bed, when you write it down, or when you review it later, thinking you were so damned smart and . . .  wazzz this thing?

Once you have written down your eureka thought, don’t set it aside and go off for breakfast. Dwell with it awhile longer. You may not be able to recapture the glowing whorl, but you may be able to tack on thoughts to what you have. What are the possible consequences of that sentence or two you wrote down? 

Let’s say the line is: “She didn’t mind that he wasn’t smooth, that his chin scratched her. She was pleased he had tried at all.” What do you know about that woman character? Does this new thought turn up a new trait of hers you hadn’t considered? Bear in mind that you don’t have to write follow-on text. You could simply make a note about her in her character-notes file: I want her also to be like “that.”

When you dwell in the pursuit of what pulled you out of bed, you may find, while drinking a cup of coffee to keep waking up, that you are tingling with the promise of a good writing session to come. Maybe the page you write that morning is more pedestrian than your eureka sentence, but it still a page of writing you put down on paper. Especially if you had been building up to a new breakthrough over the past few days, the one thought bursts open a dam of other thoughts. Brilliance doesn’t only come in spurts. Once you have material down where you can work with it, you can rewrite until that entire page shines as well.

“The only thing worth writing about is the human heart in conflict with itself.”          ― William Faulkner

Copyright @ 2025 John Paine. All rights reserved.

Keeping Pace

Writing is an endeavor prone to mood swings. This is hardly surprising when you consider that you’re engaged in tapping into your subconscious. One morning you wake up and your head feels clear, like you could see for miles. Another day you wake up and feel fog crowding in around your eyes.

These up-and-down swings occur on a longer cycle as well. You may miss an entire weekend because you’re away, and all that next week you remain AWOL. You’re just not feeling the usual urge. Or, the evening you plan to get back into the story, your brother calls about Thanksgiving plans. By the time you hang up, you have barely a half hour left before going to bed.

A more pernicious effect on writing can occur from external forces. Your job goes through a demanding phase. You wake up early to get an early train to get to work early, because you know a pile is waiting on your desk. Depending on how long the rush period at work is, you can find you haven’t written all week, maybe even more. If you had been in a groove, settling down every day or so with the story, you’re left facing the ruins of that happy stretch.

These lulls separate those for whom writing is an avocation from those for whom it is a vocation. But that’s okay. You don’t want to give up your day job to chase a unicorn. What you can do is make a promise to yourself that you will take advantage of the good swings.

A book is like a huge boulder you are rolling. The more your shoulder stays in contact with it, the harder you push when you are rolling it, the more progress you will make. You have to think ahead, deciding to dedicate the next block of time you will have free to writing. If that means both mornings of the next weekend, put it down on your calendar on Wednesday night. Two long blocks of red—9:00 to 12:00 (red for passion, your passion). Intent counts. That’s what keeps those gaps in the range of days, not weeks.

Exercise: Don’t make promises you won’t keep, though. If you put down Sat-Sun 9:00-12:00 for every weekend on a repeat cycle, guess what’s going to happen? You’re going to miss some of those dates. You’ll start clicking off that block before you even reach the weekend, and that will become a habit. Focus on this week, not on months of vague promises.

“Exercise the writing muscle every day, even if it is only a letter, notes, a title list, a character sketch, a journal entry. Writers are like dancers, like athletes. Without that exercise, the muscles seize up.” —Jane Yolen

Copyright @ 2025, John Paine

 

Reaction Fits the Action

Amid the sins an author fears—bland characters, bungled story lines, bad writing—the worst is: boredom. At the base of the worry is the knowledge that many writers’ lives are dull. You merely need to think how much time they spend in silence in front of a screen, and the reason for the gnawing anxiety is self-evident.

The response takes a variety of forms, and one of them is amping up what isn’t that exciting to begin with. This sin seems to stem from a conflict between an author trying to be realistic and their trying to be entertaining. In this version, a modern-day Thor does not shoot lightning bolts but blows out a house’s electric box. The inhabitants still have a right to be  startled. But if they are running around screaming in the dark for a protracted length of time, the reader is left wondering: why doesn’t someone go down and flip the circuit breakers back on?

That right there—the reader’s response—needs to be an author’s guide. Determining how they will respond is not difficult. Any writer knows that if they let a part of the manuscript to sit for a while, possibly months, they will feel more neutral when they review it. If you sense that the reaction is out of bounds, you very likely are not alone.

The chief offenders in this regard are a character’s thoughts. While you can take some license—the character may be more unstable than normal individuals—you have to remember that the reader wants to participate vicariously in the story, and a character’s thoughts are one of the main avenues to do that. If the reader feels that the character is making much ado out of nothing, the bond between reader and character is frayed. When it happens enough times, the reader gives up on the character—and most likely the book.

That’s why you should try to keep the thoughts restricted to the gravity of the plot advance. If your character’s father has a history of yelling at the main character, she most likely is inured to it. Bye, Dad, I can’t talk to you right now. You would have to devise a novel circumstance, such as Mom lying in a heap on the kitchen floor, with Dad standing shell-shocked nearby, to engender true rage. In other words, change the plotting, not the reaction. Make the story more exciting, and the chorus will amplify the clamor.

Exercise: Comb through the manuscript, focusing only on characters’ reactions to events. Judge how well the dramatic weight of the one corresponds to the other. Earlier in a book, you want less dramatic material, so you can build to the better stuff later. In that case, modulate exuberant reactions. Later on, though, you may have to do the opposite: ramp up the action.

“To every action there is always opposed an equal reaction.” —Isaac Newton

Copyright @ 2025, John Paine

Tricks to Bind Narrative to a Character

Authors writing a plot-driven book will rightfully claim that they do not have time for lengthy character explorations. Such work slows down the book’s pacing. Yet this approach also runs the risk of creating characters so ill-defined, they’re cartoon cutouts. The question for this author is: how do I create memorable characters in quick strokes? Here are a few tips:

First of all, your character has a memory. Let’s use a running example of an Ebola-like outbreak in a war-torn country in Africa. Let’s further posit that the protagonist is an American doctor trying to save patients. She arrives at a stricken village, and you provide a paragraph of description that fills in the harrowing details. All of this writing is exterior: that is, it could be described by anyone. So how do you make it an individual experience?

One way is to compare it to other outbreaks she has experienced. A doctor involved in infectious diseases usually is familiar with numerous types of these diseases. If she has served in other humanitarian crises, she would assess this one in terms of the previous ones. In other words, you’re using her memory to bind all of the sensory material in that descriptive paragraph to her.

Another trick is to put yourself in the character’s shoes at the moment she is experiencing action. Let’s say our doctor (we’ll switch to a man) steps out of his Jeep and approaches the door to what appears to be the village clinic. Again, you have a paragraph of description of approaching the closed door. Again, the writing is all exterior. How do you make it personal?

Ask the questions your character would ask. Start with: What does he fear is waiting on the other side of the closed door? That’s why you wrote all that descriptive stuff, isn’t it? You want to induce trepidation in the reader. So stick it inside the mind of the protagonist. Monkey see (the character), monkey do (the reader).

A third trick is to use description itself, only calibrated to the character. Let’s say the protagonist thinks she recognizes another doctor from back home, only he’s lying on one of the fetid clinic beds. You describe her first impressions, from a distance. Then, as she gets closer, she provides more pinpoint descriptions that she recognizes. All descriptions, but your character controls the focus.

Exercise: Here’s one more trick. If you have any emotional material at all, judge how impersonal it is. For example, when the woman doctor recognizes her friend:  “She experienced a rush of anxiety.” Do you mean: “She was terribly worried about him”? Try to use warmth in the emotional descriptions rather than accurately cataloging the state. You’re not using more words; you’re choosing the right words.

“Pain and suffering are always inevitable for a large intelligence and a deep heart.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Copyright @ 2025, John Paine