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More politically minded novelists like to use popular themes of the day in order to make points pro or con. In the charged atmosphere of America today, when almost anything is a cause calling for blind fervor, a writer can feel that a hot-button issue will inject drama into the proceedings. Yet when an issue such as abortion becomes a major character’s crusade, an author may be dismayed by how flat the scenes are. How could that happen, when neighbors in real life are ready to tear out each other’s lawn? The first step in answering that question lies in the spillover from the real world into fiction. Since novels tend to be realistic in order to allay a reader’s disbelief, the views of a flag-waving character may borrow largely from what a reader has learned, possibly ad nauseam, on the news. As the phrase goes, familiarity breeds contempt. As soon as I, as an example, recognize a certain line of cant, I start skimming immediately. I read novels to get away from that stuff. Equally as important is recognizing that the power of any theme correlates with its progressive development. If an issue does not change over the course of the book, there is no dramatic movement. If a character keeps saying the same stuff in every scene, no matter what the content is, a reader will become bored. Yes, we know how you feel, so when is that going to become more interesting? As with any story element, a character needs to begin at Point A and progress to Point Z with a theme. If you wish to write about abortion, for example, you should figure out a starting point and an ending point during the initial outline stage. How do the events inside the novel impact the character’s thinking about the issue? That is the only way a novelist can be original on such a well-worn topic. Framing the matter this way leads to a final and most decisive step: making the issue personal. Only when you focus hard enough on one individual’s travails during the heart-rending course of what to do with an unborn child will you make the reader care. The snap answers you see on the screen will pale to their usual political banality, and you will discover for real why the issue is so contentious. It’s because the experience is so painful. That’s what you should be writing about. Exercise: Contrary to real life, where men arrogate the right to somehow know what an expectant mother is feeling, a male novelist has to work a lot harder. You should read a variety of works, even if you don’t agree with their viewpoints. You should talk to women—your relatives, professional counselors, and/or young teenagers. Then come back and tell us what your heart learned. “It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.” ―Antoine de Saint-Exupéry Copyright @ 2023 John Paine. All rights reserved.
If you have never written a book before, you may be surprised by how many words they eat up. An industry standard for number of words on a double-spaced manuscript page is 250. Simple math then tells you that in order to write a scant 200 pages, you need 50,000 words. You also have to figure that a double-spaced manuscript page will shrink when it is transformed into a book page. You can assume a ratio of manuscript to book pages as 3:2 for long manuscripts, and 4:3 for slim ones. Now let’s stop and apply that to 200 pages. That means your book is going to be 150 pages. That’s a skinny book: its spine will be barely wide enough for the title to be seen on a book shelf. You may object that in this day of Kindle Shorts, the spine width of a physical book doesn’t matter. I am a fan of ebooks, so don’t get me wrong, but you have to ask yourself: is all I ever wanted from my dream an electronic book? Every author I have worked with has expressed a desire to eventually see the book come out in physical form. Nonfiction is the realm in which length is usually the problem. Publishers and most readers are aware of a phenomenon known informally as the “big magazine article.” We’ve all experienced books that really needed to be only 50 pages long, and we end up reading later chapters filled with rewording of the same points over and over. Those are the ones where I personally stop reading each word by Chapter 5 or so, and then skim the later chapters to see if there actually is anything new. You’d be surprised, incidentally, by how many academic books suffer from this same problem of filler. This problem can be addressed at the conception. You can judge how long each chapter will be by writing a paragraph outline for each topic within the chapter. Let’s say you believe each chapter can be 20 pages long. So you need a minimum of 10 chapters. If you had 15 chapters, though, you’d have a 300-page book. Or, if you increased the length of each chapter to 25 pages, you’d have 250 pages. The numbers don’t lie, so be honest with yourself and ask: Do I need to add more topics? Exercise: Let’s say you have a program for the best way to exercise. You deliver an opening pitch to potential clients that wows them every time. You have to realize, however, that the pitch may only amount to 30-40 pages of text. You better start thinking about the other components in the program. Could you recruit the physical therapist to include the exercises she uses with athletes? That’s a chapter. With aging baby boomers? That’s a chapter. Do you have a diet regimen for overweight clients putting too much pressure on their joints? That’s a chapter...and so on. “Books are never finished. They are merely abandoned.” —Oscar Wilde
As an independent editor, I am exposed to a wide variety of fiction. Among first-time novelists are a number who have written nonfiction, such as news articles or professional papers. They are drawn by a subject, such as overcrowded jails in California, and wish to employ such fictional elements as dialogue. Because they are writing the novel only as a hobby, they regard commercial fiction with distaste—they want to remain in the literary province. Yet somewhere along the way they realize that the novel is turning out to be flaccid, lacking narrative drive. They’ve written a bunch of scenes that, they have to admit, may not captivate the average reader. So they add a murder or two, and because they find that adds a nice dose of suspense, the book may gain law enforcement officials, a villain of cartoonish proportions, and perhaps an international chase for the climax sequence. They have wandered into the genre best described as “hodgepodge.” They have not delineated their aims as they would automatically in their own field. If you are writing a paper featuring game theory, for instance, you would stick close to statistics. The world of fiction also has distinctions. Many bookstore browsers are keenly aware of which type of book they would like to read tonight. They may pick Canada by Richard Ford because its central subject of a bank robbery sounds like fun, but they still want a Ford-like reading experience. The same is true at the other end of the scale. If a novel starts with a murder, a mystery reader expects that the culprit has left clues that a competent character can solve, as well as suspects to whom these clues are assigned at regular intervals. If the novel instead veers into a long sequence of whether to award tenure to a professor, that reader’s interest will wane. So the author is left with the worst of both worlds. They end up with a book that does not please literary readers and bores thriller readers. The reason stems from an ignorance of what a literary experience really is. Literary refers not to subject or level of diction, but to the narrator’s depth of penetration into their characters. The narrator offers such a clear, immediate vision that readers are captivated from the onset. They will head wherever such a guide wishes to go, because the depth of the writing reflects the way we all think. Unfortunately for a first-time novelist, this depth of penetration into a character is the finest achievement of any writer. Resorting to devices is not a cure. The only way to literary is the hard, long slog through to a higher clarity of vision. “Writers are always selling somebody out.” —Joan Didion Copyright @ 2023, John Paine
In the headlong charge that engulfs you as you’re writing a novel, you may find that the common sense that governs how you act in real life mysteriously escapes your protagonist or other important character. This applies especially when you are writing a book that is more heavily plotted. You know you want a certain plot turn in the next scene, and you point your point-of-view character toward that target. Or, you know how the story will turn out, so you position the scene so that it builds logically toward the climax. Nothing wrong with that, right? If you don’t inhabit a character fully, you can forget what is perfectly obvious to a reader. Let’s say you have a character who early on says he belongs to a group that opposes a wind farm in a scenic location. Yet months later you write a scene in which he intermingles with those people, and he doesn’t know anyone. That’s because by that time you are focused on a clue that he is supposed to impart to your main character. You forget that the character is very well known by this crowd. That earlier fact is inconvenient for the scene, but you can’t shrug it off. You laid down that parameter. Let’s take another common problem. Your protagonist needs someone with whom to discuss what she has uncovered in a mystery so far. She’s a housewife, not a detective, so when she tells her husband the first time of her curiosity to follow up on clues related to a murder, her better half says, absolutely not. Don’t do something so dangerous. Despite this opposition, she still needs to hash out the developing clues. Think of the issue from your character’s point of view. She can’t use the husband as a sounding board. He has already said he doesn’t want her to play sleuth. Instead, she needs to confide in a third party, say a waiter at a lunch and breakfast café she frequents. You may not only gain a new sounding board, but the added fillip of sexual intrigue as well. These examples can play out in countless different ways. The key is avoiding such blunders is to connect with that character to such a depth that you know what his relationship is to each of the people in each scene. You may find that practicing to think this way means you immerse yourself more fully in the character overall. Exercise: When you review a scene, try to imagine what transpires from the point of view of every active character in the scene. If Sheila is introduced, as a good friend of BFF Lisa’s, what does Sheila know about the protagonist by way of Lisa? What does the protagonist think about Lisa once she learns what Sheila was told? Is she going to confide her next secret to Lisa, or is she going to avoid another embarrassing encounter like this one with Sheila? “A word is not the same with one writer as with another. One tears it from his guts. The other pulls it out of his overcoat pocket.” —Charles Péguy Copyright @ John Paine, 2023
Bad things happen to the best of us. When enough of them happen to you in real life, you may be motivated to write a novel about them, in order to capture the run of bad luck more fully. The logic behind this impulse is impeccable. We all know that a string of obstacles keeps readers entertained. So far, so good. As you write down these incidents, filling out the book, you may find yourself adding in occasional embellishments. You decide that the hero needs a sour-tongued older sister, for instance, even though you’re really writing about a cousin. What really happens to the brother seems, now that you are chronicling it for posterity, not that interesting, so you make up some stuff that makes him shine a little more. Yet all these garnishes to the bowl of truth don’t seem like enough. By the time you finish, you may have a nagging sense of unease that the whole affair isn’t as interesting as you thought it was when you started. This doubt is fortified when you start receiving a pile of rejection slips. What went wrong? You know the story is good: you’ve told it to a number of people and they all were shocked/outraged. Before you start lamenting how unfair life can be, you might want to consider several facts. It helps, for starters, to realize that all novels feature a series of untoward events. Whether they are based on a real story or made up out of thin air doesn’t matter as much as whether the reader can participate vicariously in the incidents. Second, “based on a true story” implies an important step in the novel-making process. Unless you have the writing chops of Norman Mailer, and an extreme “character” like Gary Gilmour, you need to heighten the drama. That usually means exaggerating the qualities of the main character. He can’t be you. The outrage that you felt at the time will probably not transport readers to the same heights. We all know that lawyers are slimy, that the system of justice in this country can be perverted. Isn’t that what happens in every crime drama we read? Above all, you need to remember that readers like main characters who are flamboyant, larger than life. The shit hitting the fan only serves to bring out the provocative attributes they originally brought into the book in all their stinking glory. A good character is always trying to outsmart her opponents, or is so disconnected from reality that she does stuff that makes readers want to scream: “Stop! Cease and desist this instant!” In other words, you can have all the right ingredients, but if you don’t think of your character first, you merely have one more story waiting to be told the right way. “Drama is life with the dull bits cut out.” —Alfred Hitchcock Copyright @ 2023, John Paine
A problem that I encounter frequently in the manuscripts I edit is how one-dimensional the protagonist is. That’s why I was so intrigued when I came across a quote the other day that stopped me short: “He was less of an actor than any man I ever saw.” That remark applies so well to a novel’s lead character. You can add depth to a portrayal simply by focusing on the situation she finds herself in. We all have multiple facets in our makeup that we turn off and on at will. I’m not talking about Sybil and her 16 personalities. This observation applies to the way that we assume guises given the situation. You adopt a persona to fit the circumstances. If you’re in a job interview, you’re going to be earnest and likable. If you’re leaving a tedious dinner engagement, you’re going to be cutting and irreverent. Same person but different prompt and different listener. So why can’t you do that with your characters? You want them to be multilayered, with true-to-life texture. The principal way that Sam, say, operates might be: he’s an enthusiastic extrovert. He likes to champion causes, to be with people, to persuade them of his convictions. Yet who is Sam when he is alone on a Sunday morning? How does he cope with the slings and arrows we all endure? When you ask yourself those questions, a different dynamic starts to unfold. Sam might have some deep, dark reasons why he is so affable. If you (1) investigate what they might be for your own knowledge and (2) tell the reader a back story or two, now his confident perch could be much more unsteady. He has to fight to be confident. That deep, dark nature might overthrow the good in him—and then where would the novel be? In other words, you create tension within the character, and that makes the reader nervous. We all fear being exposed for the embarrassing things we’ve done. Better yet, the secret things we’re doing right now, the illicit longings that we have, ones even our partner doesn’t know about. The reader can come to worry that the dark side will usurp the confident side. To create a rising character arc, you can show a series of incidents where the dark side is progressively winning. You know how to do that, of course, because you have identified what that other personality is. Example: Try an experiment. Go to an airport and watch all of the confident types that strut through the terminal. Better yet, sit down in a food court and watch them while they’re eating and checking out other people. What are they afraid of betraying? When you see a furtive look, jot it down and imagine what the back story behind that look is. Better yet, write down a list of possible reasons and then play out the string on each one. Everyone appears to be so confident—because they’re acting. “When a man is wrapped up in himself, he makes a pretty small package.” —John Ruskin Copyright @ 2023, John Paine
At first, the title of this post seems to mean: Go ahead, sell out. After all, Cyril Connolly made the famous remark: “Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self.” Yet I mean something quite different. I frequently enjoin the writers I edit to consider their readers on a given plot point or character turn, according to its believability or difficulty of comprehension. It’s common for an author to get caught up in the world that they are devising. Because the detective they have created is offbeat, for example, they feel that the detective can make decisions, often violent ones, that would get him thrown off any sane police force. So I ask: do you think the reader is going to swallow that? Or, consider a character that is portrayed as acutely shy. She goes to a town meeting, at which you would expect she won’t make a peep. Yet because the plot calls for someone to challenge the town officials, there she is standing up and yelling at them in impassioned harangues. I like tumult as much as any reader, but not if Sheila has to become schizophrenic. Ironically, because readers exist outside the book, thinking of them as you’re writing forces you to burrow more deeply inside your book. You don’t miss obvious points of logic when you concentrate enough to imagine how your flamboyant detective is regarded at the station house by his follow-their-nose brethren. If you’re truly writing from inside Sheila’s head, you know that a huge lump would rise in her throat at the very thought of expressing her feelings in a crowd. This advice extends all the way down to the individual sentence. If you are torturing your prose in order to seem more literary, for instance, I will highlight an instance and query: “Will a reader understand this?” In many cases the sentence in question uses a few fancy words to mask a very ordinary observation, or its structure is inverted in order to accomplish that same purpose. What is your duty to the reader? To come up with original ideas, told in clear language that wows them with the acuity of your insights. Exercise: You take on a reader’s role when you are reviewing material during a later pass. You are slightly removed from the original outpouring, particularly if you haven’t read the material for months. Do you, as the reader, understand what you’re writing? If you don’t, be honest with yourself. Tinker with the point, no matter how much configuring in other parts of the manuscript is required, until you know you’ve nailed it down. “Thank your readers and the critics who praise you, and then ignore them. Write for the most intelligent, wittiest, wisest audience in the universe: Write to please yourself.” —Harlan Ellison
Copyright @ 2023, John Paine
We are swarmed by the Disney culture all around us. Sensual icons of a society that worships adolescence spring out at us at multiple points every day. Our screens abound with swaggering heroes a moment’s provocation away from mayhem. Amid all these swirls of promises we dare not achieve in real life, I am not surprised when I receive fiction submissions that display a great deal of intelligence shackled to a plot that glorifies our pop leanings. The one aspect flies high. The other, as we all know, is down low. I don’t believe that literary and mass market books exist in two separate marketplaces. A reader who chooses a schlock book at an airport kiosk may want only light reading in between snoozing on a plane. Yet that same person, once she reaches her vacation destination, digs into the Annie Proulx stories that have been patiently waiting on her bookshelf. Same reader, capable of enjoying both books. I also believe that in the hands of certain authors, such as John Le Carré, or certain books, like The Names by Don DeLillo, that a successful blend of the two can be attained. What I find objectionable is the assumption that pop plot elements can be narrated in an intellectual fashion. Acts of sex and violence have the most force when they are narrated directly. If the narration is contained to a high degree within the lead character’s mind, a certain amount of abstraction is welcome. An ironic point of view can cast a new light on marital sex, for instance. An act of violence told within a matrix of larger causes and effects in the character’s life—how did I end up in this dark alley, anyway?—can provide a new slant on the usual round of punches. The skill required to elevate the narration to this level, however, is well beyond most writers. The more common linkage stems from an author’s desire to marry high-flown style with common elements that he believes will help the book sell. The writing may have panache, but the narration tends to stray beyond a single enveloping point of view. We jump into the head of a police lieutenant, say, who perforce must continue the same intellectual thoughts—and no police lieutenants have any truck with such nonsense in their profession. Murder or other criminal acts are too serious for abstraction. Even worse, I frequently find that the intelligent author fails to do basic research on such lowly matters as police procedure. Watching the nightly blather on TV is supposed to suffice. Schlock novels are written by intelligent people whose aspirations fly only so high. The thoughts of their players rarely rise above quotidian concerns, even when they are revealing character. You can’t have your cake and eat it too. If you are smarter than the average bear, you probably should approach common concerns from the inside. Flopping over on cue to scriptwriting mode will just lead to a mishmash. “Only a person with a Best Seller mind can write Best Sellers.” —Aldous Huxley Copyright @ 2021, John Paine
I become involved in certain books in their opening stages, and that preliminary process can entail teasing out from an author what in fact they have to say. I wish above all to see if the book has enough unique or fresh angles to make it stand out from the pack. I query how the author’s base of information is going to break down into chapters. During that latter process I also am trying to discover if the author has assembled enough information or designed enough plot lines to fill up a book. If you have never written a book before, you may be surprised by how many words they eat up. An industry standard for number of words on a double-spaced manuscript page is 250. Simple math then tells you that in order to write 200 pages, you need 50,000 words. That is a common minimum for a nonfiction submission, and a novelist may learn that publishers aren’t interested in what could be considered a novella. You also have to figure that a double-spaced manuscript page will shrink when it is transformed into a book page. A book designer can do wonders with either compressing or inflating a manuscript, but you can assume a ratio of manuscript to book pages as 3:2 for long manuscripts, and 4:3 for slim ones. Now let’s stop and apply that to 200 pages. That means your book is going to be 150 pages. That’s a skinny book, with barely enough width of its spine to be seen on a book shelf. Even if the designer layers the page with white space, making the ratio 1:1, 200 pages is still slim. You may object that in this day of Kindle Shorts, the spine width of a physical book doesn’t matter. I am a fan of ebooks, so don’t get me wrong, but you have to ask yourself: is all I ever wanted from my dream an electronic book? Every author I have worked with expresses a desire, even if they are going the indie ebook route, to eventually see the book come out in physical form. Since nonfiction is the realm in which girth is more often the problem, I’ll address that in this post. (Expanding a novel is an easier task, because you can always layer in another main character or a few more twists.) Publishers and most readers are aware of a phenomenon known informally as the “big magazine article.” We’ve all experienced books that really needed to be only 50 pages long, and we end up reading later chapters filled with rewording of the same points over and over. Those are the ones where I check out by Chapter 5 or so, and then skim the later chapters to see if there actually is anything new. You’d be surprised, incidentally, by how many academic books suffer from this same problem of filler. Not all residents of the ivory tower can astonish us every time out. This problem can be addressed at the conception. You can judge how long each chapter is going to be by writing a paragraph outline for each topic within the chapter. Let’s say you believe each chapter can be 20 pages long. So you need a minimum of 10 chapters. If you had 15 chapters, though, you’d have a 300-page book. Or, if you increased the length of each chapter to 25 pages, you’d have 250 pages. The numbers don’t lie, so be honest with yourself and ask: Do I need to make the concept larger? Exercise: Let’s say you have a program for the best way to exercise. You deliver an opening pitch to potential clients that wows them every time. You have to realize, however, that the pitch may only amount to 30-40 pages of text. You better start thinking about the other components in the program. Could you recruit the physical therapist to include the exercises she uses with athletes? That’s a chapter. With aging baby boomers? That’s a chapter. Do you have a diet regimen for overweight clients putting too much pressure on their joints? That’s a chapter . . . and so on. “Books are never finished. They are merely abandoned.” —Oscar Wilde Copyright @ 2023, John Paine
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 prompt a sentence that is provocative and interesting. After you’re done, you just take out the “quite” or “rather”—and everything else still sparkles. I run the Find function on occasion, 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 my 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 phrase, 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 @ 2023, John Paine
Writing is an art that wells up from the unconscious, and that places it within the realm of grand currents we struggle to control. Signs of the id’s enormous power are everywhere, such as all the people who deny climate change on ideological grounds. What moves great rafts of people stems, as Tolstoy held, from what stirs each one of us. The same mindless drift abroad in the land afflicts the poor writer who has been unable to sit down with their manuscript for days. Authors face a dam inside their mind every time they sit down at their desk. We erect that dam for our own protection, in order to prevent running out to a movie theater with a semi-automatic weapon. Yet that barrier also hides the treasures that we labor to put out onto the page. It doesn’t make sense that we cannot penetrate that barrier at will. So many other things we do, such as guiding our children to be good, seem to flow right out of the pipe. So it is not surprising that we turn away from our own futility. We can tackle some other task that we might even be able to accomplish before the end of time. An author might be likened to a small mill set up on a large river. We are posed to capture its great flow of possibilities, if only we could corral that tide to spin in our wheel and grind our corn into perfect sentences. What happens most of the time, however, is that we are too timid to face the onslaught. We understand the mechanism, because the gears make logical sense. We keep inside our tawdry little house and let the majestic river sweep past. So what are you supposed to do? Do what you do best. Dig in your heels, don’t give in. You have to devise a logical plan to tap the flow. The only way to make the wheel spin is to expose that wheel to the river’s current. When the wheel creaks from the load, oil the gears to make it run more smoothly. As that happens, you become more proficient at understanding the ebbs and flows of your subconscious. You cannot always expect to perform on demand. One morning you wake up feeling great—but the wall is firm and your efforts at penetration result in a trickle. The next morning you feel like crap—but the writing flows out effortlessly. The important point is, you are a conscientious miller. You keep to the task, day in and day out. And pretty soon the world that you can break into sensible little pieces becomes less attractive than the castles you create in your own mind. “Inspiration is wonderful when it happens, but the writer must develop an approach for the rest of the time.” —Leonard Bernstein Copyright @ 2023, John Paine
One problem that older storytellers face is that the days they remember most fondly are in the past. The main reason that is a problem is the familiarity of much recent history. For example, a story about Vietnam protesters or civil rights pioneers may well be stirring, but readers have read or watched countless variants of that same tale. Have you really turned up new ground with your premise? If not, you may be writing for a very select group of readers—i.e., family members and friends willing to indulge you. A second major obstacle lies in the very nature of an older person’s telling old stories. In terms of plot structure, a novel needs to push forward into the future, because that is where the changes in a drama occur. Anytime a novel dwells too much in the past, the book comes to a standstill. Readers sit around waiting while the author rambles on about those days of yore with Bud and Nick and fighting forest fires. To the writer, those days may be the main reason they started the book in the first place. Yet too many back stories tell the reader that the character’s present must not be important to the novel. A third consideration is the chosen age of the main characters. Most authors like to write about characters that are younger. They recognize that a 70-year-old hero attempting to be Don Juan may instead prompt the question: did he remember to take his Viagra? Yet younger generations have their own lingo, their own expectations, that an author must study, the way you would do research into any less familiar subject. You may still like rock ‘n’ roll, but Paul McCartney is ancient. Your memories of a character who talks that way will produce an oddly old-fashioned Peter Pan. All of these pointers lead in the same direction. To be a storyteller, you need to reach beyond yourself for stories. Sure, include some interesting tales from your past, but only as a minor complement to this brand-new story concocted from your imagination. Then you’ll really find yourself enthralled. Exercise: Start any novel with the premise: the main character is not-me. That way you can free yourself immediately of personal clutter that readers will prefer you left private. How is not-me in trouble? How many personal details can I enumerate that aren’t like me at all? Now that character will be more interesting, not only to the reader—but to you. “If you would not be forgotten as soon as you are dead, either write things worth reading or do things worth writing.” —Benjamin Franklin Copyright @ 2023, John Paine
In a world filled with workshops and writing coaches, I am frequently beset with the outcomes of what may have begun as sage advice. Avoid adverbs like the plague. Don’t ever use the word “said.” Forms of the verb “to be” should always be replaced with an active verb. One of the more baleful results comes about from the dictum to paint a textual picture. While I am an advocate of the telling detail, what usually emerges from the fair cabin hideaway is a profusion of details about common pursuits. It is not enough to write: “She walked down the street.” Details are added to create greater accuracy: “She walked down the sidewalk on the side of the street.” Now, I ask you, how is the second version superior to the first? As a reader, we assume that people walk down sidewalks and sidewalks are located to the side of a street. So yes, the setting is more detailed, but the added details are wasting our time. Let’s return to the phrase “telling detail.” That means: what sets the sidewalk apart from others? It could be a “cracked sidewalk,” in which case you might add that the town where your hero lives saw its heyday in the 1970s, before the crankcase plant was shut down. That would tell me something. The character could be walking not on the sidewalk but in the road, a popular suburban practice (especially with baby strollers) that separates the younger generation from the less free older one. Adding details in writing can be likened to adding details to an anecdote told at a party. If the storyteller is explaining why she was an hour late—an hour late!—in picking up Henry from practice, we don’t necessarily want to learn the details about how late her own mother used to be, or the old jalopy she used to drive, or commentary about women of that generation. The listener is likely to experience the mental equivalent of tapping her toe. Details of the written sort operate the same way. We don’t want to know that the character opened the car door, slid into the bucket seat, put the key in the ignition, cranked the engine, and then put the lever in reverse. All that stuff could be skipped. What I want to know is: did she nearly back out into a passing car? Why didn’t she look that way? Does that indicate something about her mental state because of a terrible thing that just happened? What tends to be forgotten once beyond the hallowed precincts of writing advice givers is the best advice you’ll ever be given. Use details to define character. You want to get inside your hero’s head? Make his world revolve around him. Everything that helps us to know him better is a detail worth including. “Have something to say, and say it as clearly as you can. That is the only secret.” —Matthew Arnold Copyright @ 2023, John Paine
The reasoning behind show, don’t tell is straightforward. A reader identifies with a character, and so he wants to participate in that character’s life. Through acts a character enables that participation. If you merely told the reader about what the character did, in a narrative summary, the reader is left on the outside looking in. Yet showing and telling are more symbiotic than the austere formula suggests. For instance, I am constantly asking authors to follow up a piece of action with the character’s reaction to what happened. What did she feel about that? Some authors are puzzled by this advice. Aren’t I telling the reader rather than showing her? So, let’s define terms. Telling is a shortcut, like indirect prose. You use it to reveal information of a lesser sort, not worth writing a full scene about it. For instance, to help the reader understand why Emma is feeling sad about the impending death of her two-year relationship, she relates a narrative summary about seeing a text of Brad’s on his phone, flirting with an office mate. The text is vibrant and funny the way he hasn’t been with Emma in weeks. It’s no big deal, really, so Emma runs through her feelings in a summary paragraph. It’s just another nail in the coffin, and telling handles the job efficiently. On the other hand, if Emma then told the reader about her break-up with Brad—rather than writing out a full scene showing the break-up—you’re violating the rule. We want to participate in that plot turn, especially if Emma and Brad have been together for any length of time during the book. The more scenes they have together, the more an author needs to show them breaking up. As a reader, I want to know what Emma says when she holds up the stiff underwear for him to explain. I don’t want a report about it. Show me the dirty linen. Then I can participate. I can be shocked, dismayed, or whatever you want the payoff to be. Now let’s return to a character’s reaction to a plot event. If you tell the reader what the character is feeling, you’re not violating the principle. You’re already inside the scene showing the action. You’re inside the character’s mind. The emotion contained in the character’s reaction has a direct effect on what happens next. Showing and telling interlock, the way everything in good writing works together. Exercise: Review your manuscript for the way you’re handling different plot events. Do you see any narrative summaries that, now you know how the book turns out, might want to be converted into full-fledged scenes? Do you feel time is dragging in any full-length scenes that now don’t have that much bearing on what happens later? Calibrate plot weight on the show-tell balance scale.
Telling a novel in a distinctive style is both the most difficult and necessary job a writer undertakes. If the prose has a certain flair, readers are caught up in it. Literary agents and editors look for that swagger first and foremost. For them, unique should define not only the story but the storytelling. If you are like most beginning writers, you may well wonder how you can achieve such a style. When you write out a sentence, it looks flat, like reportage. That approach is fine for explicating plot, because you do need to figure out how the story unfolds. Yet that initial thrust should be regarded as only a phase. You have moved around the chess pieces like so; now, how do wooden figures gain full life? You need to experiment. If you’re only writing one way, and that way keeps you at a reporter’s distance from the point-of-view character, you need to break free of yourself. How do you do that practically? You write the same material from different points of view. Let’s pick one example to demonstrate the rule. Assume the heroine’s favorite aunt is dying from a long-term illness. In order to connect with the heroine in a meaningful fashion, try two opposing approaches. In the first, the heroine is close to the aunt in the later stages of her terminal condition. What is involved in that disease, such as medical equipment, and how does the character feel seeing her aunt subjected to it? You could write about a dialysis treatment, for instance. Sure, you can describe the soulless flashes of the monitor lights, but the exercise is focused on feelings. If the character feels disgust toward a procedure, what is the follow-up emotion? Compassion or I’m never coming here again? Explain to the reader why she feels that way. Go ahead and keep nattering about that position, justifying it, examining the alternatives, comparing it to other experiences she’s had with the aunt. Why can’t we just go back to that time? Now write about the experience from the point of view that the heroine has drifted apart from her aunt over the years. The physical condition she finds vaguely horrible, but their halcyon days together have long passed anyway. Now place her in the doctor’s office as he explains what happens during dialysis. Is she ever going through those double doors, beyond which she sees the machines? If not, how does she justify that to herself? How does she talk to the doctor, defending her decision not to do that? Again, don’t worry about how well the doctor explains the treatment. What is the heroine thinking? Exercise: Once you have tried those two exercises, now flip the script. The distant niece is stuck in the room next to the machine, and the close one is listening to the doctor’s prefatory remarks. You are finding out, through making decisions for the character, how you want to tell the story.
In the days of yore, before this cavernous century yawned open, writers employed one of two choices of narrative attack: first-person or third-person. The attempts to mingle the two made clear distinctions, such as those containing letters. The advantage of the first-person voice lies in its direct approach to the reader. The obstacle is that everything that happens must be experienced by one person. If you are writing an action-oriented book, characterization is not as vital. The point of view narrating suspenseful events does not change that much from first-person to third-person. So it was only a matter of time before an author decided to dispense with the formalities. One character would own the first-person voice and the others would be third-person. Yet you should be aware that such an approach puts every character other than the one owning the first-person voice at a distinct disadvantage. A reader naturally wants to be with the character whose storytelling is most vibrant. All the others are relegated to the second rank automatically. For that reason I am wary of the first-person, third-person strategy, but I’m not a purist. You can use easy fixes. Say Emily is the first-person narrator, and you want to tell a long story from another point of view, call her Joan. You could, at the end of the chapters prior to the first Joan chapters, explicitly tell the reader that Joan started telling Emily her story. Once you establish a narrative rhythm of any sort, a reader will go along. So after the first few times, she could simply jump from first-person to third-person chapters without a handing-off device. Not every novel can be handled as deftly. I edit books in which the first-person narrator has no way of knowing what the third-person is doing. If you decide to use this approach, you need to be cognizant of the discomfort caused every time the story switches between voices. Your best course is to use longer scenes. That way each voice has enough time to gain its own command over the reader. After all, readers enjoy both types of writing. But don’t force us to stand with one foot on unequal planes, bobbing back and forth. You’re just calling attention to the strategy’s deficiencies. Exercise: I wince when I see the first-person point of view violated for only a few paragraphs. I feel like I was riding happily in a narrative flow until the author rudely yanked me out of the stream for some third-person yammering—and then dumped me back in. Is the disruption in the rhythm you have created really worth the scant material in those paragraphs? This is one lazy-writer shortcut to be avoided at all costs.
On first blush, the difference between the I-voice and the omniscient voice appears to be a wide gulf. As with any aspect of storytelling, however, the approaches are bent toward some degree of union according to the dictates of each individual writer. If you grow comfortable with a character, you may come to see that the differences are barely distinguishable. You may choose that character to carry the entire narrative burden for you. This is known as third-person limited narration. A hallmark of this style is how deeply inside a character’s thoughts the author probes. If Meghan launches into a full paragraph of how distressed she is after learning her father is gay and leaving the home, the pronoun “she” is virtually the same as the pronoun “I.” The two can appear interchangeably throughout the text, depending on how distinctive an author wants the thoughts to be. Indeed, when authors are not getting inside a character’s head sufficiently, I enjoin them to write a passage initially in the first-person voice, then convert it to third- later. A find-and-replace of “I am” to “she is” may accomplish fifty percent of the conversion in one stroke. This process can be worked in reverse as well. This technique exposes times when the author’s hand is too heavy. When I read a sentence like “She thought her father was suffering from the workaholic ethos of his law partners,” I think, “Try pulling that off with ‘I thought . . .’” That narrative distance shows one of the primary pitfalls of the third-person limited voice. It is so easy for an author to make anything he wants to write into a character’s thoughts. This leads to the cardinal sin of telling rather than showing. The key to stopping such laziness is to avoid all telling of plot events and secondhand commentary within interior passages. Once the thoughts are divorced from exposition, they are free to roam where a person’s mind will. In the example above, for example, maybe she tells of one Sunday when she went into work with her father, only to be stranded for hours in a conference room. How did she feel with nothing to do, thinking about all the fun things she could be doing? Where the author best intrudes is in summary work. You want to cover minor scene setting quickly, or want to denote a lapse in time. You pull back from the character’s intense gaze in order to avoid wasting the reader’s time during a bridge between scenes. Exercise: Review the manuscript looking for interior monologues. If you are explicating plot, even of events that have already happened, stop to consider whether it should be converted into an action scene. Is it important enough for such treatment? If not, see if you can convert it into her feeling or opinion about the event.
Let’s start with a basic truism: a reader desires to merge with the point-of-view character. We participate vicariously through that person’s actions and thoughts. During the course of a scene that process deepens. If you then jump to another person’s thoughts during the scene, though, the process is truncated. The reader is confused: why am I switching away? I liked being inside that point-of-view character’s head. If you are just starting off as a writer, you should be concerned for a more systemic reason. Writing in the omniscient voice is, frankly, much easier than writing in the I-voice. You can report about what the characters are doing rather than telling the story from within. The head hopping is just the most obvious indicator of how far away from inhabiting the character you are. You should be pushing yourself. Try limiting the number of points of view within a manuscript to roughly 3-4 tops. That way you get the multiple experiences, but all are viewed through a specific character’s prism. The reader can dig in with each one, even if she doesn’t like, say, the villain’s point of view. That revulsion then forces yourself to create a villain that the reader can understand, at least on some level—one with more complexity. Omniscient doesn’t mean lightweight. If you look at a great novel with multiple points of view like War and Peace, you will see that you empathize with each lead character, even though flighty Natasha couldn’t be more different from philosophical Pierre. That’s the bar you should set for yourself. You won’t achieve as much depth as you would with a single protagonist, but the reader is still wading in with each one right up to his neck. Exercise: Examine the individual scenes in your manuscript. One character should rule the proceedings. This extends not only to actual thoughts but more subtle mental states as well. For example, “She wanted to consider . . .” is an interior state. You should make sure that any act of volition from a secondary character is indicated by physical means.
We all use shortcuts in writing. When we perceive a topic to be of lesser interest, we summarize it, treating it like a minor building block of the story. One way to do that is using indirect quotes. By not putting what is said into dialogue, you are relegating it to a passing mention. Indirect storytelling can, however, also be a sign of inexperience. It is much easier to report on a scene than inhabit the characters involved in it and tell it from the inside. Plus, we are all influenced by what we read, and a veteran writer often uses indirect speech—because she knows which pieces don’t merit more attention. Yet we may not realize the distinction when we sit down to write ourselves. I’ll use a running example to show how relative weights should be assigned. “He told Annie he would be working late” works well in the context of a businessman engaged in an elaborate fantasy about an upcoming dinner with a sexy new client. In his mind at the time, making that tired excuse to his wife is an insignificant matter, and so it should be told that way. Indirect is the wrong approach, though, when a plot event is crucial. Let’s say that later the husband has to tell his wife he had sex with the sexy client. That same indirect storytelling—“He confessed to Annie that he slept with the new client, and she broke down crying”—is utterly the worst way to engage the reader. What he tells her is not minor anymore. It may make or break his marriage. For that reason, the reader’s emotions will be deeply engaged if the scene is told in full, with dialogue throughout. I should point out one other aspect of indirect storytelling. It can be a way for an author to shield himself from truths he’d rather not face. Writing is a process of exposing yourself. An author who writes about a cheating husband may in real life be faithful to his wife. So the indirect approach may be the author shying away from a subject that makes him uncomfortable. His wife, after all, may well be the first reader of the manuscript he’s writing. A large factor in determining dramatic importance is whether an action is being performed by the scene’s point-of-view character. Direct quotes increase the immediacy of prose, raising your major characters to more prominence. Indirect quotes tend to lower them. So when a plot event is attached to someone the reader knows, crack open the nut and show what’s inside. Exercise: If you decide that a passage should be heightened more by dialogue, you don’t have to write out an entire conversation. Sometimes a few lines of exchanged dialogue will provide the proper emphasis. If it needs more than that, add thoughts. In other words, you can calibrate how much you zoom in.
A novel told through a wide assortment of characters allows the author greater scope to explore where the novel’s plot lines take him. Yet invariably I as a reader end up feeling less involved with the proceedings. I just can’t put my emotional stock in so many characters. To clarify, I am discussing a continuous narrative, not broken into Roshomon-like parts wherein each character discusses the same events from different points of view. I will point out several basic problems with the ensemble approach. First and foremost, it virtually guarantees that the story will be slighter in impact. How could it not? As a reader, rather than immersing yourself in one point of view, allowing that person to take over your own thought processes, you are jumping from one person’s head to another. I can make that switch with maybe one or two other characters, but even then I’m hoping that the protagonist will govern most of the scenes. Like any reader, I form a loyalty to the person who dominates the proceedings. Second, an ensemble cast demands strong plotting. If character and plot are regarded as two ends on a balance scale, the more you feed into one, the less will be allotted for the other. If you are using a variety of characters to tell a story, that means that you are paying more attention to plot. The reader won’t delve as deeply into the characters, so the concomitant result is that more plot events are needed to entertain us. Third, setting up an ensemble cast will likely confuse readers during the opening segment of the book. We are looking for a story thread to follow, and if we keep on meeting new people, that thread is obscured by all the bustling about. Once a reader feels her emotions are being pulled in too many directions, she may put the book down. The inherent emotional slightness of a tale told by an ensemble cast needs to be factored into your calculations when devising the initial outline. You need compelling plot events that consume your multiple characters. Further, you should avoid assigning really good material to a character the reader doesn't know well enough to care about. Otherwise, the book may be relegated to the label: busy but not good. Exercise: Review the manuscript with a single character’s name in your global search window. Find which scenes he inhabits and write down what he does in a list of single-sentence entries. If he governs any scenes early on, the reader is given a signal to regard him as more important. Yet what happens to him later? If he is crowded aside by later developments to other characters, haven’t you left the reader hanging? Why did they spend so much time with that guy if he’s just going to drop out of the book?
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