The Pencil Place

Whether you’re a fan of The Highlander, Doctor Who, Dune, or the Lord of the Rings, one of the things you have done as a reader or viewer is to suspend your disbelief.  This may be overlooking the fact that the effects are cheesey, the dialog is stilted, or the story is being projected on a two-dimensional screen in front of you.

The fastest way (in my opinion) to absolutely screw up that suspension of disbelief is to use convenient cliches (including euphemisms) or inappropriate labels when dealing with far-away places or distant times (past or future).  These are the sometimes subtle anachronisms that drive me to distraction.  If you’re asking me to read a story about some other place and some other when, then please cut all ties to modern English, Americanisms, and verbal expressions.  The more I’m reminded of earth, the more it sounds just like my next door neighbor, the less I’m going to believe your premise.

I often read and critique the drafts of younger writers, just as sort of a hobby, as time permits.  Listed below are some of the things I’ve pointed out as potential areas of a richer reading experience.

Cliches and Euphemisms

Vocabulary is a wonderful tool. Reliance on cliche’d expressions and euphemisms is simply a crutch.  The hard part is knowing sometimes that a phrase you’ve just used is actually something to be avoided.  I had trouble with this idea until I found four books by Charles Earle Funk: Horse-Feathers & Other Curious Words, Heavens to Betsy! & Other Curious Sayings, Thereby Hangs a Tale – Stories of Curious Word Origins, and A Hog on Ice & Other Curious Expressions. Another reference that was helpful is The Dictionary of Cliches by James Rogers. You don’t have to memorize these volumes, but it pays many dividends to be familiar with the contents so that you can weed these phrases out of your writing.  I also appreciate a good giggle on a rainy day over how silly some of these expressions really are.  Unless your story is not so far in the future, is about an Earth colony, and there is a reason they are all using antiquated references, please kill these phrases.

Earthbound Measures: Calendars and Time

If you’re about to suffer a bombardment of Zorgothian satellite energy weapons, why would you choose to have it happen on a Thursday?  Did they also have a god named Thor who swung a hammer and had a day of the week named after him?  The same goes for March, July, and December (and so on).  I would be far more entertained if something were to happen on the 23rd after Marketmoon, at six dawns before the equinox, or on the next twelvemeet.  If I’m exploring a new world in my mind, a calendar is one of the primary areas I focus on. If the calendar works, then much of the rest of the story has something concrete to use as a backbone.

The same can be said for seven-day weeks, years approximately 365 days (or twelve months) long, or four distinct seasons instead of maybe, three seasons? Or six or something?  Just because Earth is stuck in a slot, going around Sol at a certain speed does NOT mean that any other populated worlds must do likewise.

The same can be said for reckoning time.  What does 2:00 PM really mean on your world? And why? Why is there not a 19:00 that is still mid morning?  Even in a higher technology world, I would rather read about a character checking a water clock, waiting for a shadow to reach a position, or checking to see how many electrons remain to be counted before the sensor changes modes.

Why would the concept of an “hour” mean the same thing to Chewbacca and to Duncan MacLeod?

On a side note, I’m amazed at how many times the sun comes up at 6:00 every morning, with no reliance on seasons, latitudes, altitude, or the actual odds of every day being the same length.  Maybe on a world where there is no tilt from the axis at the equator, but that leads to a lot of interesting differences.

Earthbound Measures: Weights and Measures

While you may use pound, ounce, kilogram, mile or meter, these terms really miss an opportunity to inform about your environment.  Rather than tedious definitions of any terms you might create, please show us how much that measurement matters.

- It was only a halfstone of pottery, but when she dropped it on the stone floor, the noise of the crash was heard throughout the plaza.

- The merchant rubbed his chin. “It’s about seven rides from here to the bridge, provided the weather holds. Then it’s three rides from the bridge to the town gates.”

- The zitibugs were smaller than the width of a finger, maybe about three crans long.

- She carefully measured the remaining water.  Only five drinks left!  She sadly dropped the cup back into the bag and shouldered her burden.

Currency

Don’t get me started.  Just TRY to find something a little more evocative than “credits” in the future, please.  Please?  Thanks.  An entire monetary system with exchange rates would be a bonus.

Constellations

Get the stars right.  There is NO reason to believe that the stars will line up anywhere else in the universe so that they are given names just like ours for the constellations.  The constellations from the Earth point of view are a two-dimensional representation of a vast three-dimensional chunk of space that spans uncounted light years. If you have a constellation named Taurus, well bully for you!  On the other hand I’m just as likely to snort at the idea and charge.

Religion

A lot of the labels that you may end up putting on things like months, hours, distances and so on were probably derived from religious ideas unless your planet has no spirituality or religious thought.  If you do some thinking and reading about the impact of religion on our own society (and I don’t mean just the obvious wars and other conflicts) you will find a great wealth of things we take for granted that are based in superstition or religious thoughts.  Tuesday for instance, named after a Celtic (okay, Old English) deity.

Alternately, perhaps things in your world were named in fours after the four elements.  Or maybe your world has seven elements, or only three.

What I’m asking you to do is to finish making your world.  I feel strongly that it should be more than just a random sky color, some random critters and plants, and otherwise just a place for your characters to run amok.  The more it seems like its own place and time, the more I’m going to enjoy reading.

I’m getting a divorce from myself. Trust me, it’s a happy tale, and is the only way forward from here.

It’s along story, but I’ll try not to trigger your inner TL,DR alarms.  It all boils down to a simple observation – I need a different kind of space for exploration and creativity than I do for editing / revising / publishing.  When I try to write completely from a digital starting point, I end up playing games, surfing, or just staring at a blank monitor.  I’ve not had a really good creative thought in my head in months, which in writer’s terms is nearly a lifetime of being stranded on a desert island with nothing to read.

For the past few ages, I’ve haunted coffeeshops, restaurants, or any place that wouldn’t kick me out.  I would spread some stuff out on the table, have some java and start playing with ideas.  Or I just watch people for character nuances I can use later.  However, there are usually enough distractions to keep me from really zoning in on any particular ideas. When I’m wrestling with the early seeds of an idea, the fertile ground I need is a flat space where I can spread out. I’ve known this since childhood when I took over entire corners of the living room floors with papers.  I end up doing charts, maps, doodles, and linking ideas in huge dashes or lines zotted bits of color.  When I get enough of the idea dashed around, then I can move to a more digital format and start sculpting the words into something a little more coherent.

So how did I divorce myself?

I bought a desk at a consignment shop a few years ago (Goodwill? Maybe.) and glossed it up – a nice happy red.  The Red Desk was going to be the centerpiece of my home office – the downstairs edition.  For less than $50 (for desk, paint and hardware) I had a writer’s zone in the middle of everything.  Sadly, it was in the way. It sucked up far too much floorspace for the amount of use it invoked.  I dragged it upstairs and shoved it into a corner of my office where it quietly and patiently waited for something to do.  I wanted to use it, but hey – everything is digital now, right?  What can it do that my Mac can’t do?  It collected the flotsam that should have been tossed.

I spent this past weekend hauling out bags of accumulated trash, painting the backside of the desk a chocolatey brown, and rotated it so that I could actually have a view out my window.  It is stocked up now with forgotten colored pencils, highlighters, markers, graph paper, a small candle holder; and all of the accouterments that help me scrawl the bits that keep floating around my head into some sort of less-than-vague thoughts.

The newly purposed red desk

I still use the digital side of my office for committing the story into the inevitably larger chunks of 1s and 0s, editing, reviewing, posting, commenting, audio books and audio mixing, and publishing.  The id goes over to the red desk to play, and the ego gets behind the monitor and fixes the poor beast’s grammar and improves on the ideas.  There’s a dotted yellow line down the middle of the room in my mind – as clear as if I had painted one on the floor.

The great divide

Why two desks in one small room?  What is the measurable benefit?  Well I’ve decided the story I’m been trying to tell is really a modern/futuristic thriller, not a high fantasy slugfest, and an entire Pandora’s box of possibilities is already ajar.  I have a new set of characters, a setting that is appropriately disconcerting, and the making of a plot that I can actually manage.

Getting reorganized isn’t a bitch.  It is both a luxury and a requirement.

I’ve had a long flirtation with writing implements and papers. If I just don’t like the pen or the paper, I may as well play Solitaire because I won’t get anything significant done.  Yeah, I might be able to write a little, but I might as well toss it sooner rather than later.

Also, trying to write with somebody else’s pen or a borrowed bit of paper is like wearing somebody else’s underwear or using a strange toothbrush.  It just is not natural!  The media has to fit the message. I can’t write a novel on a chalkboard any more than I can put a dictionary on the back of a postage stamp.

About a hundred years ago, I was working in the broadcast industry during my college years. In those days there was a news machine in the hallway (or several) with rolls of paper inside.  When it was time to clear the machine and sort through the material, the paper was ripped off along a clear plastic edge and then further ripped between stories.  I used to liberate the bitter ends of the rolls of paper, and I gathered them in my dorm.  I taped the ends of the rolls together to make one really huge roll of paper.  I hung this roll of paper on the back of my typewriter when I was feeling somewhat manic about writing, and I could go for miles (well, feet anyway) at a time without reloading my typewriter with paper.  This was not the writing that would win the Pulitzer prize.  This was me just exploring my own creativity or dashing out a draft for a paper due in a few hours that needed to be retyped anyway onto regular paper.  I found the process to be fairly efficient compared to miles of liquid paper, retyping pages, and making rather a larger mess than I had to.

Part of my collegiate experience was keeping a journal. In those days it was a spiral bound notebook, and I had to turn it in for review by one of my writing instructors.  I write quickly by hand, almost in a code, and it can be difficult to read. Yes, these journals were also crap-filled but they did help me explore my thoughts a little more slowly and methodically than dashing things out on the everlasting gobstopper roll of newsprint.

I’ve tried fountain pens, felt-tip pens, ballpoint pens of all sorts. With a few exceptions, I really don’t like pens.  I fell in love with mechanical pencils instead.  A mechanical pencil does not need gravity, ink, time to dry, and the carbon lines do not smear very much.  Plus the eraser is a bonus.

I find that there is something in actually writing something by hand first that cements the ideas a little better for me. Plus, I find that when I’m drafting an early stage of a work, I NEED to doodle.  I draw little pictures in the margins, bits of maps to explain to myself how things are oriented, and I literally connect dots between thoughts.  There is no “doodle” function in Microsoft Word, in iWorks Pages, or in Open Office.  I know because I’ve searched in vain.  When I’m exploring an idea I don’t even really like lines on the paper because an occasional sentence may need to run down an edge, or a parenthetical thought may need to be skritched on.  Yeah, skritched.  Especially if I’m trying to get a bit of poetry right or a more sentimental narrative.

I’m convinced that sometimes you must slow down a little and write things by hand.  Would Thomas Jefferson have been as eloquent writing the Declaration of Independence if he were constrained to 140 characters at a time?  No.  Instead, he had the luxury of dipping his pen every few words. This gives an added bit of time for crafting what must be said instead of just blurting out something.  Perhaps today’s youth, on the other hand, are so tied into the digital world that this isn’t going to be an issue for them, and it is a conundrum for old fogies such as myself.

So, at the urging of a friend, I’ve returned to journaling.  I ordered two Moleskine journals and I’m going to see how that goes.  I’ve not really been on a creative streak for quite some time – both due to pressures on this side of the keyboard that keep dragging me back into reality, and a lack of anything to say.  Yes, they are rather a bit expensive for doodles and thoughts, but it is also a reminder to make the time count.  Wasted pages is wasted money and wasted time.  Get focused! Stay focused! Keep writing!

I also find wonderfully coincidental that I find this blog entry today as I’m writing this post [via Rachelle Gardner on Twitter]. I’ll be looking for more by Christa Allen.  Her post is about journaling, and she mentions Natalie Goldberg, who has gotten me out of more creativity jams than anybody else on the planet through her books.  Writing Down the Bones and the Wild Mind are highly recommended – you can find them in the same volume on Amazon.

Sometimes you have to step outside to change your mind about something.

Sometimes you have to take a walk.

Sometimes I have to go someplace entirely different.

Adrian Lark, founder of Mars3D.com, has created a virtual ‘flyover’ video of the martian landscape using image data collected by NASA’s HiRISE (High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment), the most powerful camera ever sent into space.

The stunning animation shows Mars’s southwest Candor Chasma.

I had to go digging for it, but there is another thread over here describing how alien worlds might actually exist, and whether or not they may be useful in fiction descriptions.  Some of it is far fetched, but some if it may be useful.  If you’re on a ringed planet, did you know that the rings may alter their angle against the sun at different times of the year so that you may be in the shadow of the rings for half a year or so?  This is why you don’t go sunbathing on Saturn.

Character creation.  Some people love it, and some writers struggle with it.  Remember this: the most excellent plot in the world, if it has no characters, is just an outline.  A really good character study is a good read all by itself.

Most writers that I’ve mentored, taught, or reviewed seem to have an outside-in view of how to write a character.  The character description in an email might read something like…

He has a little limp because he was injured in a fishing accident and nearly drowned when he was a kid.  He has a really sharp white streak through is hair on one side – just because he was born that way and folks think he’s either blessed or cursed.  He’s nearly 6′ tall, and weighs about 200 lbs.  He likes to wear boots, and has a dog named Sam.  He is easily upset and some people say he has a nasty temper.

Great.  But what is the man really like?  I usually get blank stares when I ask this.  Look, you can’t judge a book by its cover, so why should I judge a character by a physical description?  It tells me nothing about what he is inclined to do in any given situation, except somehow he might be hotheaded. Maybe.

Peel the skin off the onion.  What kinds of reactions do people display in every culture, every language, every book you’ve ever read?  There are universal constants you need to know about your character.  What are his thoughts on politics? If he hears people discussing political questions is he more likely to roll his eyes and keep walking, or is he going to go on a meandering rant in an effort to try to persuade the people talking?  What are his thoughts on religion?  Is he really claustrophobic, or does he just say that in order to get out of doing stuff he doesn’t want to do? Why is it that he is described as a nobleman, yet he swears like a sailor (and how did that happen?)?  Why?  When?  It’s all in the backstory, whether it needs to be expressed in the story you’re writing or not.

Another approach is to play it by the numbers.  Literally.  Some writers have attempted to write based on dice rolls as if they were playing a roll playing game (Dungeons and Dragons, and any other of the similar RPG nature).  Is he going to turn left and try to find his friend, or is he going to go back to his room and order in a dinner?  *dice roll*  He goes back to get dinner.  Why?  *dice roll*  Uhhh, I dunno.  With a method like this you end up with a random series of misadventures, but decidedly not a plot.  No thanks.

My approach to character development is inside-out.  When I start considering a character, I literally put part of myself directly into the middle of an unfamiliar situation.  You might call it daydreaming.  I call it the act of just letting my id off its leash.  Yeah, my id.  Save your ego for the editing phase.  Look it up (*footnote).

Let’s say I’m having a frustrated day.  I may explore that a little bit and decide that I’m feeling angry, for instance. I let myself ponder what adventures an alter-ego angry guy would do.  Why he’d start off pounding a half-bottle of whisky and then rolling downtown to see the mayor, that’s what he would do.  And then he would try to get into that radio station to talk some sense into that disc jockey that just won’t shut up.  And then he would go back to his hovel and print up lots of fliers on his computer (lots of them!), and then to hand these to everybody who hesitates just a moment too long on the sidewalk.  Hell yeah, in front of City Hall, of course!

Ah, good. Angry guy has an agenda.  What does he look like?  Well, he’s just pounded a fifth, so he isn’t ready for ballroom dancing.  He may walk with a limp because he bruised his leg last weekend when he got tased by a cop.  His left boot also has an orthotic in it because it straightens out his leg a little better – but all it seems to do is to make his foot hurt, which makes him even angrier.  He has a shock of white hair down the left side of his scalp because he used a chemical accidentally instead of a shampoo when he was a child.  He hasn’t been able to trust shampoo since, unless he bought it himself.  He’s been wearing the same blue jeans since Thursday because he can’t remember to buy laundry detergent when he walks by the store.

I really like angry guy.  Now all I have to do find something for him to see in the mirror so I can draw the rest of his face, and figure out the rest of his crash pad.  I think I’ll call him Mitch.  For me, Mitch is a nemonic for ‘itch’, which is clearly what angry guy can’t quite scratch. Maybe he’s going to sober up long enough to run for governor.  That might be entertaining!  What has he done that he regrets?  Probably nothing. What has he done that will not help him get elected?  Oh, plenty….

(*) One of the best books ever for developing male characters is Iron John – A Book About Men, by Robert Bly.  The allegedly educated sophisticates will pooh pooh the book, saying that the Ego and Id are discredited psychological constructs.  Balderhockey!  This book is a goldmine for jumpstarting a writer’s creativity.  Read the book, and release your id.

Yeah, really.

No, this isn’t a weather-related rant.

I gathered up my emergency writing kit and headed for the coffee shop today. I’ve been waiting to hear good news about a job I nearly have but might be miles away from actually landing.  I don’t do ‘patience’ very well sometimes.

My emergency writing kit is a large padded black fake-leather pad folio thingy with a zipper around lots of paper and two pens and two mechanical pencils.  I drink coffee and doodle, either trying to connect dots or create new dots. I doodle maps, I write character sketches. I draw character sketches. I throw down outrageous ideas for plot lines, or characters, or settings.

Sometimes I eavesdrop on other people in the restaurant. Sometimes I just let my Id off his leash to go see what’s in the neighborhood in my mind.  At least I wasn’t in the house, between snow storms, waiting for a phone call.

Among the populated pages was the ominous title, THE DEAD WAR.  I paused. It had a line through it where it had been retitled THE CONSPIRACY OF THE DEAD. There were a few hasty notes from my last session, which evidently had been some time ago.  I remembered the story arc, and I had finished some chapters and posted it online where it had received some pretty good comments by readers.  It seems like only yesterday that I stopped working on it. I guess in some part of my brain I keep going back there and noodling around with the odds and ends of where I left off.

So when I got back to broadband land, I went back to the site where I had posted my material.  It’s a high fantasy adventure tale that boils down to… well it’s a zombie story (without using that word in the narrative).  The last entry is dated 2006, and I was taken back by that.  It cannot have been four years? Okay, maybe it was then.  The site was still up anyway, and that was a relief. There had been some really major changes in the layout, and some welcome upgrades. But four years since I had really tackled a fiction project head on.  Ouch.  Six lonely chapters.

So I re-read what I had scribbled what seemed so long ago.  Yes, some of it was really quite interesting.  Some of it was dreadfully rushed.  Some of it was just a skeleton, lacking any thought but enough to get the reader from point A to point B.  But the characters were compelling, the plot was unexpected, and the comments were really good.

It shouldn’t take four years to go back around to revisit a project and evaluate if it is worth keeping around. The last four years have been fairly tough for me for many reasons, but that shouldn’t be an excuse.

Had I kept with it, I may have sold it.  But I can’t second guess myself on that now.  If I had kept with it, I also would not have the other projects going that I think may be of more long term value for readers.

So I’ll keep it around. Some day, when I get my legs back under myself, I just might move forward with it yet again.  I’ve done worse things with my time.  Those four years gave me enough distance from it to be truly objective about the content and a new perspective on where I had been wrestling pointlessly with plot devices that may or may not be useful.

He leaned over his unfinished dinner, and said, “You don’t love me. You never did really love me.”

She took a sip of wine, perhaps to have a moment to think, then she said, “Well, yes I did. I don’t know how it all ended, but I just don’t any longer.”

“I would say” he said, “it was about the time you met Roger on the trip to New York!”

He said. She said. I find the writing life is much breezier without ever using that verb.  If I find myself reading a section that is a verbal pingpong match with the verb “said” as the paddle, I just lose interest. It sits there like last week’s sudoku puzzle, that still somehow is missing some 7s.

And I go father than that. Many writers try to spice up their dialog by using different verbs.  I really wish they wouldn’t. Instead of a pingpong match with predictable rhythms, it becomes a tangled mass of fancier words that often just don’t fit.

• Replied
• Retorted
• Rebuffed
• Taunted
• Spat

You get the idea.  Writing is always better when you show instead of tell.  In the admittedly poor sample I started this blog entry with, the characters are (undoubtedly) having a lively discussion, but it reads like a snip from a newscast or some dry experimental recipe.  Instead, please show me what the characters are doing, and how they are reacting. In the right context, I’ll know which character says what without the crutches of he said, or she said.

He leaned over his unfinished dinner, stabbing the dirty end of a fork out over the table. “You don’t love me. You never did really love me.”  John awkwardly stabbed the fork into the apple turnover that he wasn’t really eating anyway. The handle slowly sank to one side.

She took a sip of wine, perhaps to have a moment to think. She slowly nodded her head, letting her curls lightly bob along the sides of her face. “Well, yes I did. I don’t know how it all ended, but I just don’t any longer.”

John leaned back and jutted his chin out for a moment as if thinking.  ”I would say,” he leaned forward and pointed an accusing finger across the table. “It was about the time you met Roger on the trip to New York!”

It’s still some shabby dialog, and here it is without the context of any story. But at least I’ve dressed it up a little.  In my last several fiction projects, I’ve tried to remove all of the little helper verbs in dialog.

I have to thank @kmweiland for getting me noodling along these lines again. Her tweet was asking just this question, as a question of the day.

My response (in more than 140 characters this time) is that a really well considered character study can still be a really fascinating read.  I love writing back stories for people I see randomly in restaurants or in the stores.

Why is he limping? Why does that kid seem sick?  Geez, how MANY bags of potato chips do you really need?   When you ask yourself those questions, there are two things to do – either ask them out loud (which may garner some funny looks) or write them down and come up with your own fictional rationale for what’s going on a little later.

A really good plot on the other hand, is really just an outline.  It might be a wonderful plot, never before seen by the mind of man, glistening with new promises of movies or maybe a broadway production.  But without characters to develop, the plot is just… a framework.  It’s the skeleton of the story without any of the meat.

So, I think it is sort of like a sandwich. The bread holds the good stuff inside.  That’s the plot.  It’s full of promise, but you really don’t want to taste just the bread.  Sure, there are different flavors of bread and I love them all – but that’s not enough to make me sit up and take notice.  Well, unless it’s fresh out of the oven, but that’s a different story.  The good stuff is inside. The characters.  And it is how those characters react to the plot (which must be somewhere in the mayo and mustard layers) that a really good sandwich is formed.

Yeah. I’m hungry. Sorry about that.  But I like my analogy. =D

I found my old recipe card in a book under my chair.  It’s a card that I refer to sometimes when I need to color outside of the lines.

Take some card stock or paper and list the following motivations.  Add any others that come to mind.

• Vengeance
• Catastrophe
• Love / Hate
• Chase
• Grief / Loss
• Rebellion
• Survival / Deliverance / Escape
• Discovery / Quest
• Betrayal
• Persecution
• Rivalry
• Ambition
• Sacrifice
• Metamorphosis / Maturation

Now, rip the paper up into strips with one entry on each strip and plop them into a hat.  The next step is to create a set of “Spice” ideas.  Add new spice ingredients as you think of them.

• Deception
• Criminal Activity
• Profit / Loss
• Un-natural or unwelcome affection
• Making amends
• Suspicion
• Conspiracy
• Suicide
• Honor / Dishonor
• Searching
• Lost / Found

Again, rip the paper up into strips and put these spices into a different hat.

Now what? Well, of course you guessed it.  Now draw one plot element and one spice element from each hat.  Then spend ten minutes pondering how to mash the elements together into a story, and write down a bare bones plot outline.

Yeah, it might not be what you needed.  But I often find randomness to be a great creativity boost.  Just what would a Chase story have in common with Making amends?  I don’t know, so you’ll have to tell me.

I have a 3×5 card with the above motivations on one side and spices on the reverse.  It keeps me guessing about what the possibilities are out there. And as a writer, it’s all about possibilities, isn’t it?

Let me know if it helps you out!

“Allright. It’s four in the morning, I have a screwdriver, and something is either dead or gonna die!”

Have you ever had one of those nights? I had been up a time or two in the night jiggling handles and checking plumbing parts, but the running water noise was both getting worse and keeping me awake. The float valve had become too tired, and I had to coax it back into working order. It’s okay for now, but it will probably need replacement soon enough.

What I had said to myself kept ringing in my head when I went back to sleep, and somehow the idea of killing a noisy Professor Plumber with a screwdriver in the bathroom took hold. I’ve been in “Clue” mode all day. And another thought came around with it – too many times the protagonist in a story has too easy a time of it in the story.

I think of the Bourne Identity for instance – sure he is awesomely skilled as a spy and assassin. But nothing ever goes really wrong. Maybe I’m just too skeptical, but sometimes I’m pulling for the hero to have a leg cramp just to shut his pious pie hole up for a few pages.

Right now: I’m in the study with a computer, killing time. What have you killed today?