What is your mind doing?

Recently, in the novel I'm currently writing, I needed a song that a 12-year-old character could sing a cappella.  The words weren't especially important, but using lyrics from a published song is fraught with many hoops through which to jump.

So, as others have done, I wrote half a song.  There was a tune in my head, and it has meter and rhyme, but no one will hear the melody.  They will just read the lyrics.  I added additional info, such as the song sounds like Appalachian folk, or old-time folk, so that might help.

It occurs to me that someone reading it will actually have to grab a different gear in that part.  As we read, we have to create the vision, the sound, the scent based on the clues the author provides.  It is yet another step to imagine the music that might go with these lyrics.

I was listening to a story on the radio, and a woman was having her brain activity studied.  The scan showed that while her brain was active while she was signing, it was even more active when she silently imagined she was singing.  

Imagining took more work than the doing!

We see this as well when brains are scanned while people watch a video recording vs. reading the same scene without pictures.  The reading involves more brain activity, probably because the reader has to imagine rather than just see and hear.

Fewer young people read today than a few decades ago, ergo they do less imagining.  These younger generations are wonders at multi-tasking, but deficient in singular focus, compared to members of Gen X, but it seems clear that they likely imagine less. 

I see this as a real shame.  Don't get me wrong, I'm amazed by the next few generations, and I certainly don't fall into the camp of saying they are not motivated or lazy or helpless.  They are none of these things, but they seem to be less imaginative.

Partly because the internet has left little to wonder about, they've seen more by age 8 than I saw by age 14, but also because they haven't done that sort of mental lifting.  We teach persuasive writing, over and over, and neglect fiction writing.  We assign books that have so much in common with the last book we assigned, often with a heavy-handed story, and almost always filled with unrelenting sadness and trauma.  When was the last time a school assigned a novel that was a side-splitting comedy?  

So, they multi-task well, but absorbing instead of imagining.  When we stumble across an artist or voracious reader among them, it's as if we've run into Livingstone in Ujiji.  Again, I'm sure someone will respond with, "Nonsense, kids today read twice the books we did, paint many more paintings, are expert potters, and most have full-sized looms in their bedrooms where they wove their families' blankets."

Shut up.

I already said, I have great admiration for the younger generations, and pointing out a difference in how they think and have thunk is not a condemnation.  I also know that a call for them to "read more" doesn't really make sense, although I'd like to see it.  It would be like a member of Gen Z trying to teach a GenXer to type a story, with music playing and the television on, while texting with a friend.  

We'd say, "Yeah, I could learn to do that.  Why would I want to?"  Just as they would if we said, "Turn off all other distractions, get on your bed, and in silence read for two hours."

Neither generation is better, but an adaptation has occurred.  While there are exceptions, younger people adapted to the new world around us, and also adapted away from imagining things.

I see your Point of View

I mean, what's left to write about this?  I suppose in many ways, it's like teaching the historical event of Washington crossing the Delaware.  It's covered in 5th grade, 8th grade, and 11th grade and yet, still, some people aren't familiar with it.  Maybe there is something left to dig into or reinforce.

When a book is written in 1st person point-of-view (POV), the narrator is a character in the novel, and is using first-person pronouns like "I" or "me" or "my" or "we" or "us"... you get the idea.  This is a fun way to write, because the author can do so much like have an unreliable narrator.  The storyteller is involved, and is thus biased, and may even be trying to deceive the reader. The narrator can even be dead, and telling their story.  The challenge is the author must always be asking, "Would my narrator know this?"  The narrator certainly would not know the thoughts and feelings of others, so the words "seemed to" and "seemingly" come in often.  As in:

"She seemed to be angry with me, but I couldn't be sure."

The narrator can't see someone slipping poison into tea in the next room.  The narrator can't know anything that happened while the narrator was sleeping, unless someone explains it later.  Even with these limits, it can be a fun POV because the reader inhabits the character, although this can be off-putting as well.  First-person character needs to be a bit more sympathetic than others, and by sympathetic, I don't mean the reader has to feel sorry for them, only that the reader would be interested in learning what happens to them.

In 2nd person, the pronouns are "you" and "your" and "yours" and this is incredibly hard to do.  There is no story that the reader is accessing, peeping into, it's in the reader's face.  It is author-to-reader jujitsu, and it is incredibly hard to do well.  Most often, you find this POV in self-help books, e.g. "You need to get in touch with your inner child" and it is rugged to use it in fiction.  A young author from Australia used it particularly well, her name is Bruna Gomes, in her novel How to Disappear, but it is challenging, and honestly, I warn you against it.

In 3rd person limited, some of the constraints from 1st person still apply. The narrator is anonymous.   The pronouns switch to 3rd person, like "he, she" but the reader is only inside the mind of one person, and that's why it's limited.  We the reader can only see inside the mind of a single character throughout the entire book.  None of this:

"Caroline thought that Benjamin was handsome, and Benjamin thought Caroline was a genius."

Nope.  You can't write that in 3rd person limited.

Neither can you do that with 3rd person multiple.  In 3rd person multiple, you have all the same rules as 3rd person limited, but you switch which mind the reader can see into, usually at chapter breaks, otherwise the reader will become confused.  

A chapter where we can see only Caroline's thoughts and actions, and then a chapter where we can see only Benjamin's thoughts and actions.  This can be a lot of fun to write and to read, because as the reader we know the thoughts of the characters, but they do not know each other's thoughts, and we can see the Three's Company-esque misunderstandings coming a mile away, or we can be tense because we are aware of the trap the other character is walking into.  With three characters, each getting a turn each chapter, a nice braided story can occur, and the three characters needn't be living in the same century, or even on the same planet.  The trick is tying it all together, the braiding, but it can be great fun to write, and three 90-page stories combine for a nice 270-page novel.

That brings me to 3rd person omniscient.  My initial advice- don't do it.  Leave that POV to God.  It's a POV where the reader can hear the thoughts and see the actions of every character in the same scene.  It's takes much of the narrative tension out of the story, like a police detective's court testimony, it's virtually impossible to do well, and no one likes a know-it-all anyway.

Remember that, except in 3rd-person omniscient (again, don't use it), if the POV is through a character who becomes unconscious, asleep, or dead-dead (not Lovely Bones dead), the character and thus the reader cannot know what is happening.  Once you learn this, you'll spot it happening as a glaring error.

The movie Groundhog Day is TERRIFIC.  I love it, but it makes this gaff once.  Bill Murray's character, though whose POV we have been experiencing everything, is dead in the morgue, and his colleagues from the TV station go and identify his remains.  He is dead and insensate. We have been in his POV the entire time, and suddenly we're in someone else's.  Maybe the coroner's, maybe the woman's?  Who knows?  It's jarring.  If you watch the movie with me, when we get to that very short scene, you'll hear me say, "POV issue" every time.  I know it annoys people, but I can't help it.

Once you learn these things, it's not as if spotting these errors is like being a middle-school hall monitor, saying, "You broke the rules!"  It's more like watching a puppet show, and the marionette's strings suddenly shift from invisible wires into 1-inch black rope.  

I don't want to sit and watch a great movie, or read a wonderful book, or even go to a decent puppet show, and suddenly get slapped in the face with POV issues that yank me out of the story.

Pick one of the POVs above (not 3rd-person omni, and I caution you against 2nd-person) and carefully stick to it.  Breaking the rules is always a choice, but you won't look clever.  You'll only look like you didn't know the rules.  

What's the point?

Everyone can write whatever they want.
One might write for the pure enjoyment of writing, without any need for others to read it.  A writer may write with the sole intent of earning money by selling their work.  Writing can be therapeutic.  
The books might be designed to do nothing but entertain the reader, with nothing substantial to think about afterwards.  Novels may also have themes- something for the reader to examine during AND after the reading, such as loneliness, self-awareness, desire, redemption, culture, community, wealth, appearance, hypocrisy, forgiveness, or countless others.  These might even be combined.
Often, I believe, that a novelist will write a novel without being conscious of the theme, but the writer runs the risk of being all over the place, with a disjointed story. 
Because of this risk, I think it's best for authors to stake out a theme before they write.  They do not have to be a slave to it, nor do they have to plot out the entire story in advance.  Pantsers and plotters alike can choose a theme and then let it guide them. Even if authors have a story gel in their minds before they select themes, they might try to identify the theme of the story they've captured, and let it guide them as they wrestle the story from brains to pages.  
Authors know they've done this when they are asked, "What is your novel about?" and they are able to answer with a theme instead of characters and plot points.  

Q: What's your book about?
A: Growth, self-awareness, and redemption.

If an author cannot immediately do this, because they hadn't considered it, it might even be fun to spend time thinking about the book and discovering what the theme is.

Writing Badly

I was once married to a brilliant singer, and while we were on our way from our apartment in Pacific Grove to Carmel-by-the-Sea, we were listening to a Beach Boys cassette tape.  As we drove along, we were singing, and of course she was hitting every note.  I was missing one here and there, but she was kind, and found something nice to say like, "Nice breath control."

But then, on the topic of missing notes, she said something I hadn't considered before. She pointed out that it took considerable talent to intentionally miss every single note, because you'd have to know what the right note was, and then assiduously avoid it, while singing another note, preferably a real clunker.  She was right.  Try it sometime.
The same can be true of writing.  One of my grad school mentors was a terrific Maine author and playwright named Mike Kimball, and he once wrote a humorous story about squirrels, intentionally missing every note when it came to writing craft.  
The room was filled at the reading, mostly MFA students and faculty, and we hadn't recovered from the last belly laugh before the next came.  He crushed it.  Most of the clunkers were because the prose was so over the top, and so repetitive in its repeating of what had already been said...plus throw in rodent love...
Anyway, there is an event called the Bulwer-Lytton fiction contest which is looking to award a small prize for the worst opening line.  Known to many as the "Dark and Stormy Night" contest, it's run by San Jose State University, and writers attempt to miss all the notes while crafting a horrible opener, and then submit it.
The contest is named for the novelist Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, author of the well known first line, "It was a dark and stormy night," from his 1830 novel Paul Clifford. Snoopy, when he was crafting his novel, often used it. 
The whole of that stinker of an opener goes, "It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents, except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness."
P-U, but the contest attracts over ten thousand entrants annually, and has been broken into subcats like mystery, romance, western, YA, etc.  
There comes a point when one more stroke of the brush diminishes the painting.  Bulwer-Lytton took a roller to his painting in the opening line.  
It's important to be detail-oriented when writing, but in my opinion it's hugely important to be economical as well, and to trust the reader for Heaven's sake.  Let the reader do some of the work, which sounds like a fortune cookie at a writing seminar, but it's true.  
For fun, here are some of the winners and runners-up from a recent Bulwer-Lytton contest:

2020 Grand Prize - Lisa Kluber, San Francisco, CA

Her Dear John missive flapped unambiguously in the windy breeze, hanging like a pizza menu on the doorknob of my mind.

2020 Crime & Detective category winner - Yale Abrams, Santa Rosa, CA

When she walked into my office on that bleak December day, she was like a breath of fresh air in a coal mine; she made my canary sing.

2020 Romance category winner - Julie Winspear, Washington D.C.

In Gertrude’s experience lovemaking was always bittersweet, or at least it had been until one fateful night when Chaz, the seductive man behind the concession stand blessed her with the salty-sweet bliss reminiscent of both true romance and quality kettle corn.

2020 Historical Fiction category winner- Edward Covolo, Menlo Park, CA

When Sir John of York fought in the crusades, he killed many Saracens with great dispatch, and was likened unto a whirling dervish of steel and Christian might—minus the dizziness from constantly spinning in a circle, and the fact that he was on a horse that couldn't do that.

Here's my advice.  Just write, in as natural a voice as you can.  Don't try to sound like someone you once heard, but you were reading, so it was the voice in your head, or one of them, with words being put in its mouth by another writer.  

Relax, and write.

Describing Characters, Revealing Characters

Sometimes writing workshops/seminars/whatevers sound like you've found yourself trapped in some hoity-toity cult of writers trying to sound deep, speaking author-speak in the most exclusionary way.

Advice like, "Don't simply tell us about the character, allow it to be a revelatory, transcendent-but-earthy experiencing of the character's inner..."  ack, I'm gagging and can type no more.

As always, I'm just sharing my thing.  It could be wrong and awful, who knows, but it's how I do it.  My first rule when introducing the reader to a character is to avoid being corny if I can help it.  Worse than corny is cheesy.  I'm not sure why the connection to food in those expressions, but I try to avoid them both.  Not in real life, though, because cheese is magic. 

While many say that describing a character's attire is a great way to give insight into the nature of the person, their societal status, their likes/wants/personality...I generally try to avoid it.  There are some exceptions, in my opinion, but describing an entire outfit as if the readers might want to order it for themselves is tedious.  It takes me out of the story, and I suddenly feel like I'm trapped in the author's living room, the author's voice drowning out the story.

I have to side with Mr. King on this one, and say that the less said about the character's clothing, the better.  Some clothing items I don't mind?  A hat with a sports team logo, shoes with stiletto heels, a crown, wellies.., these are examples of minor additions that do a lot of work.  But "he was wearing a tux, Tom Ford, with structured shoulders and a swooping shawl lapel" takes a lot of space and does so little, except insert the author's voice into the story with all the finesse of a bandsaw cutting through sheet metal.

I mean, leaving clothes out of it, in Twilight, the author never even describes the Bella kid, except to say she's bad at volleyball.  Bella is our vehicle in the story, and if you describe her clothes, height, weight, hair color, nose shape, eyes, teeth, etc...every item you add you make it more difficult to slip into the character's skin.

Those of you who curled a lip at genre fiction, no matter how much more money she's made than you, we can find the same sorts of examples in literary fiction as well.  I've never been a fan of The Great Gatsby. Yeah, I said it, and yeah the book outsells my books, so what.  But here's the thing...Daisy is such a 2-dimensional character that the most we really know about her is what she's wearing, and that she is an affront to feminism everywhere.  

Which maybe was intentional, because all the women in that novel are basically furniture that the men, portrayed as much smarter and more decisive, fight over.  Daisy is a clothes rack with a two-color floor-length gown, with a collar like flower petals, and she wears white gloves. F-Scott-F even describes her earrings as large and flower-shaped, but there is no real understanding of who she IS.

You know the whole "show don't tell" thing? When it comes to revealing a character to the reader, I think listening is better than seeing.  What a character SAYS is far more important than what they look like, clothing, body, etc.  It's just as true as it is in real life.

Give the characters stuff to say that reveal who they are.  Then we get to hear the character's voice, instead of the author's voice, and we'll get to know them.

Some writing stuff

Okay, some stuff I’ve picked up along the way. Some people will disagree, some people will sigh because they knew it all already, but I’ll throw this out there anyway.

Your “search” or “find” function in whatever word processor you use can be a super asset when trying to improve your writing. First, do a search for the word “very” and get rid of every instance of it. The word “very” is an indicator that your descriptor is too weak. Instead of writing “very hungry” you should be using something like “famished.” You get the picture.

I know there are those that think ALL adverbs are evil, but that’s arbitrary and I don’t believe in rules without exceptions. Except for the “very” thing- of that rule, I am very sure…um, I mean, I’m certain.

Don’t begin a book, story, or even a scene with a line of dialogue. Yes, it has built-in questions for the reader, such as “Who is speaking?” and “To whom is he or she speaking?” Still, don’t do it. It’s not against some set of rules carved into the oak of knowledge or anything; it’s just powerfully uncool. Like openings or endings built around dreams.

Oh right, don’t open with a sequence, get the reader all interested and then reveal that it was all a dream. The reader, if already drawn in, will be disappointed. If not drawn in, will wonder why she should give you a second chance. Further, if you are older than 12 years old and I have to explain why “…and it was all a dream!” is a terrible ending, perhaps you should take up some hobby other than writing.

Exclamation points or marks should not appear in anything you write except within dialogue, and one of the damn things is enough. This!!! is not any louder than this! An exclamation mark is used SPARINGLY to indicate that a character has shouted, if we can’t get it from context. One other thing…don’t combine them with question marks. That looks as stupid as a question mark combined with a period. Don’t you think.?

Employ no cavalry characters. What I mean is you cannot resolve the problem(s) faced by your characters by introducing someone new at the end who solves everything. Deus ex machina and Deus ex historia and stuff like that. Your reader will be trying to solve the problems and predict the outcome, in order to feel smart, but if you finish the puzzle with pieces the reader did not have, that will make the reader feel cheated. Reveal a truth? Yes. Reveal a new character who saves the day? No. No new characters after the first 2/3rds of the story or book.

Mikey K taught me that dialogue that begins with “Yes” or “No” is on the nose and he is right. For example:

John asked, “Are you hungry?”

Mary said, “Yes. I could eat.”

Is stronger when written as:

John asked, “Are you hungry?”

Mary said, “I could eat.”

If you would argue that the original form is how people actually talk, you are confusing transcribing conversations with writing dialogue. They are two different tasks. Also, when attributing dialogue, just use “said” and “asked.” Avoid these sorts of things:

John sighed, “Are you tired?”

Mary growled, “I have a toothache.”

I suppose it would be okay to use “whispered,” but only once.

Watch out with accents. They become tedious in a holy hurry.

Lise said, “Me der, I want go to de ‘ospital in one h-our.”

That’s too much. Try this:

Lise said, “Me there, I want go to the ‘ospital in one hour.”

That’s enough to let the reader know that the speaker has an accent. Maybe one sentence could be really heavily accented, but then afterward you can just drop small reminders into the line.

In general, don’t worry too much about grammar, but understand that it does change the meanings of what you write. Even teachers are now instructing students that the Oxford comma is no longer needed, but it does change the meaning. Compare these two:

I went to Hollywood and met Leonardo DiCaprio, a plumber and a bed-wetter.

I went to Hollywood and met Leonardo DiCaprio, a plumber, and a bed-wetter.

In the former, I met one actor with a sideline job and a nocturnal problem. In the latter, I met three people. Learning this sort of thing in the younger years would be far more important than learning how to write in cursive.

So, don’t get too hung up on grammar. End sentences in prepositions and start them with conjunctions if you like, and understand that grammar conveys a tone and may confuse meaning. But do what you want to.

Next thing, round out your characters. A single dad raising a little girl, we see him brushing her hair in the morning before school, is a nice character. A crack dealer working a dangerous neighborhood, we see him beat the snot out of someone who tried to rob him, is a solid character. However, combine those two, and now you’re cooking.

Last bit is an oldie but a goodie. Even when you’re alone, or maybe especially when you’re alone, proofread your work aloud. You’ll find SO much more that needs fixing that way than doing that work silently.

Okay, that’s enough for now. Go write something.