Tag: fiction writing

Yikici’s Character & Voice Experiment

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If you already know what’s going on, skip to “My Entry.” Otherwise, read on!

This piece is part of a game devised by Voice Week writer Yikici. Yikici had a theory that if you gave two writers the same character sketch and told them to write some dialogue for that character–without letting either writer see what the other had written–that their pieces would still be similar; the voice of the character would shine through.

She tested this by providing setting, background, and situation, then having her participating writers create two characters, and write a 200-300 word dialogue between them. Each writer would then send the character sketches to another participant, who would write another dialogue based on the same characters. She graciously invited me to join in on the last round–and I didn’t even have to write character sketches!

Yikici gave us this:

Setting:  A small quiet village approx 200 miles from the nearest city adorned with thatched cottages and surrounded by vast empty fields.  Not much happens here, except for their festival –the festival of colour, this happens once a year; tourists and families from afar visit, no one misses this event.  This is the highlight of the year for the villagers; they prepare for this the whole year.

The Dialogue Prompts:

  • No children live in the village.
  • A child hides in a barn and stays after the festivities.
  • Your character(s) interacts with the child.
  • The child has a secret.
  • Add a surprise of your own -in keeping with your character(s) profile.

I got character sketches from veteran InMonster Billie Jo. Click here to see the character sketches and the dialogue she wrote.

Yikici will be posting her thoughts, contrasts, and comparisons over the next couple of weeks. Catch up, keep up and offer your own opinions on her blog.

My Entry:

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“Need any help?”

Hank looked up from packing up his unsold wooden animals to see the redheaded festival organiser bouncing on her heels.

“Haven’t you been here since dawn? You should go home. Get some rest.”

“Oh, I couldn’t possibly sleep for the next twelve hours, at least. I just get so excited about the festival. And being in charge this year, it’s even worse!” she laughed. “What do you call that?”

“An Iberian Lynx.”

“Beautiful. How do you think it went?”

“What?”

“The festival of course. Was it as magical as ever?”

Hank sighed. “What flower is this that greets the morn, its hues from Heaven so freshly born? With burning star and flaming band it kindles all the sunset land.”

She gaped at him. “Did you write that?”

“It’s Oliver Wendell Holmes.”

“Oh. Your name is…Hank, isn’t it?”

“That’s right.”

“I’m Lucy Hale.”

“Honored to make your acquaintance, Miss Hale.”

“So it went well then? The festival?”

“Beautifully.”

She smiled—she had a beautiful smile—and insisted on helping him carry the packed crates to his wagon in the barn. He was just turning to retrieve his horse when Lucy grabbed his arm.

“What’s that?”

Hank followed her gaze to a shadowed hole, from whence came a rustling noise.

“Probably just a rat…” he said, but just then, a much larger shape emerged.

It was a little boy.

The boy froze, as surprised to see them as they were to see him.

“Is…” Lucy whispered, “Is that…?”

“It’s a child,” Hank supplied. Lucy had probably never seen one.

The boy dashed for the door, but Hank was quicker, getting a hold of both the boy’s arms.

“Hey, now,” he said gently. “I won’t hurt you.”

Lucy knelt and inspected the boy’s face and fingers with wonder. “He’s so small!”

“Children generally are, yes. Where did you come from?” he asked the boy.

The boy glared at him and held his mouth shut.

“What are we going to do? Should we turn him in?”

“We can’t. Don’t you know what they’ll do to him?”

“But it isn’t his fault. Surely someone can make them see reason. My father—”

“No one can make them see reason.”

“But surely—”

“Believe me. I know.”

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How to control people’s thoughts with words

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Photo by David O'Driscoll

Photo by David O’Driscoll

I’m almost afraid to publish this post.

It feels like passing out a loaded gun to every random stranger that passes by.

In the wrong hands it could be very dangerous.

But when I think about it, it’s already in the wrong hands. The hands of con artists and cult leaders and politicians. And there is no way to take that power from them except to make everyone else aware of it.

Have you ever thought—I mean really thought—about the power of language? Most of us take it for granted. Not only as a tool to tell our families we love them, or to ask where the bathroom is, or to get anything done at all, but as the only way to transmit complex ideas.

It can take a whole book to explain one concept, but assign a name to that concept within the book, and you create a shortcut. Then, if a person has read that book, you can speak one word that conjures up an entire world in their mind.

Quixotic is a simpler example; in Don Quixote, Cervantes (albeit unintentionally) created a word which combined two previously separate ideas: chivalrous and foolish.

Back in 1948, “big brother” meant nothing but “older male sibling.” Then Orwell came out with 1984 and more than 60 years later, we still use the phrase to mean an all-seeing, all-powerful totalitarian government.

Or take the word hnau from C.S. Lewis’s Out of the Silent Planet, used to differentiate between animals and intelligent lifeforms in a universe where humans are not the only intelligent lifeforms. That’s an inadequate explanation, because the distinction involves far more than intelligence, or even spirit or soul—you’ll have to read the book to understand it.

Point: words are more than labels. Words are the means of wrapping big ideas in small packages, so we can hand them off to each other almost effortlessly.Collapsible concepts. Portable philosophy.

This is possibly one of the most powerful things on earth. Why?

Because you can use it to change the way people think.

Take a simple example. Consider the difference between the synonyms said and claimed. “Bob said he saw Linda at the store,” is neutral. But change it to “Bob claimed he saw Linda at the store,” and suddenly you doubt Bob’s honesty.

Or go the opposite direction and put “Bob confirmed he saw Linda at the store,” and suddenly the statement is fact.

Now apply it to one of our portable philosophies. Say there’s been a break-in at your condominium and the homeowners’ association votes to put up security cameras in all the corridors, so they can monitor who goes in and out of every condo. The cameras go up and everyone feels a lot safer. Then somebody graffitis “BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU” on the wall beneath one camera. Suddenly you’re conjuring up images of emotionless masses in jumpsuits being presided over by a giant television screen that never shuts off. Suddenly you’re worried a little less about security and a little more about privacy. And the next time someone proposes a measure “for added security,” you’re a little slower to agree. You might flat-out oppose it.

Why does it take a whole book to explain?

It only took me six words to define Big Brother at the beginning of this post. So why aren’t we creating collapsible concepts left and right? Because it has to be more than a label. If we’re going to remember it later, it needs to strike a chord with us. It takes the emotional journey of Winston Smith to solidify Big Brother in our minds. That’s the power of stories.

Of course, chances are, you knew what Big Brother meant even if you haven’t read 1984—even if it never “struck a chord” with you. That’s because it struck a chord with so many other people that it became iconic. That’s the power of storieson a world-changing scale.

Obviously, this doesn’t happen every time anybody writes a book.

But it can happen.

Remember that next time you’re reading a dystopian novel, or watching the news, or starting a new paragraph in your WIP. Listen carefully—and write even more carefully.

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Learn about something even more dangerous: the death of words.

 Read more about mind control here.

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Show Don’t Tell: prove it

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Telling is claiming. Showing is proving.

Even acknowledging what I said in my last post on Show, Don’t Tell, the fact remains: when it comes to character development, “show don’t tell” translates to “actions speak louder than words.” And it’s especially important with our main characters.

For instance, I can tell you that my hero is brave and kind, but humble—but you have no reason to believe me.

I can tell you that my villain is brilliant but evil and unspeakably cruel—but you have no reason to believe me.

I can tell you that my heroine is gentle and naïve yet strong—but you have absolutely no reason to believe me.

I have made several claims, but they are nothing but opinion at best, hearsay at second best, and outright lies at the worst. I haven’t given you any proof.

The actions are the proof.

Prove bravery by making that hero scared out of his mind as he rides into battle or stands up to the bully. Prove his kindness and humility as he pretends to prefer to stand on the subway when he’s really giving up his seat to an elderly man. Show the growth of his character by upping the stakes and changing his behavior as the story progresses. What he runs from in the first chapter, make him charge at in the final chapter. What he hides from the people closest to him early on, make him bare to the world at the climax.

Prove the intelligence of your villain by making him a chess champion or a con artist or a troubled child whose parents locked him in the library to punish him. If he is a business man destroying the competing mom-and-pop store, he shouldn’t just outsell them; he should soil their reputation and win the loyalty of their customers, and know all the legal loopholes to get himself off scot-free. He should outsmart both your readers and your hero throughout the story, and when he is defeated in the end it shouldn’t be because he made a stupid mistake. Prove evil and cruelty by making him abuse an old man, a little girl, his wife. Have him murder his best friend or his brother.

Prove the gentleness of your heroine by making her go out of her way to set a mouse free instead of killing it. Prove her naivety by having her trust the villain when he says he’s trying to turn his life around. And prove her strength by making her fight her own battle; she’s the one digging up legal proof of the villain’s guilt while the hero is out sparring with his lackeys in alley ways. Or she’s the queen trying to stifle a political coup while the king is away at war.

If there is any character trait you want to convey, give that character something that tests that area. Give them a chance to show who they are. Make a patient man wait years for his girlfriend to say yes to a ring. Make a determined woman who has just escaped slavery face poverty and discrimination and sickness before she finds her happiness.

Then, your readers will not only believe that your hero is brave, your villain is evil, and your heroine is strong—they will argue with you if you try to tell them otherwise. That is the power of Show, Don’t Tell.

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Read more!

How to get rid of background exposition

How to “show” in description

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NaNoWriMo and manuscript formatting: videos!

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It occured to me this week that my How to Format Your Manuscript post would have been much easier to understand in video form. So I made a video! The sound is a little tinny, but still understandable:

Got questions? Got ideas for other instructional videos? Leave them in the comments!

And for all you NaNoWriMo warriors, here’s a music video from italktosnakes dedicated to the November challenge:

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Show Don’t Tell: If you must tell, have something to show for it

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Continuing the series on Show, Don’t Tell.

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I have this awful habit of writing little narrative “character sketches” devoid of dialogue or action; simply summarizing the personalities of my heroes. I was all set to write a post about how to avoid this—with the “actions speak louder than words” approach I touched on in this post—but Wednesday morning, Mark Twain changed my mind.

I had settled in to read a little Huck Finn for twenty minutes while I ate breakfast. And there—yes, really—was a character sketch.

This naturally gave me second thoughts on the contents of this blog post. But as I kept reading, I realized my initial thoughts weren’t wrong—just a bit simplistic. Because here’s the thing: to show, you have to tell.

After all, we’re not making picture books here. All we have are words. What can you do with words besides tell? The trick is to figure out what you want to show, and then use telling to do it.

Example!

Here’s a little of what Huck, our first person narrator, says in his character sketch:

Col. Grangerfield was a gentleman, you see. He was a gentleman all over; and so was his family. He was well born, as the saying is, and that’s worth as much in a man as it is in a horse, so the Widow Douglas said, and nobody ever denied that she was of the first aristocracy in our town; and pap he always said it, too, although he warn’t no more quality than a mud-cat, himself…

…There warn’t no frivolishness about him, not a bit, and he warn’t ever loud. He was as kind as he could be—you could feel that, you know, and so you had confidence. Sometimes he smiled, and it was good to see, but when he straightened himself up like a liberty-pole, and the lightning began to flicker out from under his eyebrows you wanted to climb a tree first, and find out what the matter was afterwards. He didn’t ever have to tell anybody to mind their manners—everybody was always good mannered where he was.

All telling. Telling in a perfectly charming way, but telling nonetheless. Note, however, that he’s not telling us anything important. This character doesn’t last more than a chapter or two. So why the time spent on him?

Because by telling about Grangerfield, Twain is showing much more:

Society of the time: Huck’s mention of “well born,” and of the opinions of his father and the Widow Douglas—characters on completely opposite ends of the personality and status spectrum—shows us something about the beliefs of the time.

Huck’s character: we learn what a kind, decent person Huck thinks Grangerfield is. We later discover the family is feuding (pointlessly, as you’d expect) with a neighbor family. When a Grangerfield girl runs away to marry a boy from the rival family, the feud escalates into a bloody battle. Rather than changing his mind about the family, Huck blames himself for their deaths, as he had unwittingly helped deliver a message between the two lovers.

So this little bit of telling about a minor character actually serves to show us a lot about our main character.

The takeaway? If you find you must “tell” something, stop and ask yourself what that telling shows. What are your words indirectly illustrating? If it shows only what it tells, rewrite.

But if by telling a little, you show a lot—you’re good!

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