Sixty second writing tip: melodrama vs real drama

There is a scene in Dan Brown’s The Of Vinci Code (I know what I said) where the protagonists meet the villain ‘Teabing’ and spend most of a chapter on exposition.

While they’re doing it, a pink-eyed assassin is sneaking up on them. I never liked that scene. It was melodrama. You can imagine it in a British music hall skit:

Audience: He’s behind you!

(intruder ducks, ostenatiously, behind a couch).

Baige Gent: (finally looking) Oh no he isn’t!

Audience: Oh yes he is!
(etc).

I suspect Brown had the asssassin turn up because the scene was otherwise a boring “please explain, Professor” data dump. No tension.

The way to make a scene like that dramatic isn’t to have The Bad Guy sneaking up on The Good Guys while they’re pontificating. It’s to throw tension into the interactions of The Good Guys. This is where tension comes from any scene:

1. The character arc of the main protagonist creates it – the dissonance between what they want, and what they need.

2. It is created by dissonance between the differing goals of the characters (given multiple dimension, and the difference between what them wants, and what they need).

3. Drama also comes from some threat to the intended goals of one or more of the main characters, either from the difference between their goal and that of another character – or an actual threat. Think Hemingway and The Old Man And The Sea. Hugely dramatic, all the way, because of the relentless tension created by the interpolation of the sea.

To make these work, you also have to create a character the reader feels for – that they identify with.

The master of tension-by-dialogue was Isaac Asimov, whose books generally consisted of long discussions. But they carried in them all the drama and character development demanded of any novel.

How did he do it? Those rules above, that’s how.

Copyright © Matthew Wright 2012

Writing lessons – amps to 11 with Pink Floyd!

A few years ago She Who Must Be Obeyed and I were sitting quietly at home watching the 483,986th TV re-run of The Sound of Music. It was a hot evening. The windows were open.

Julie Andrews got up to sing. And suddenly the room filled with sound. The anti-Sound Of Music. Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here. Undistorted. In our lounge.

I thought it was the neighbours. But it wasn’t. It was someone four doors down and over the back fence, who wanted to fill the evening air with Messrs Waters, Gilmour, Mason and Wright at planet-engulfing volume.

Impressive. We were 75 metres from source. Yet the whole was crystal clear, balanced, without a skerrick of distortion.

The panel of one of my analog synths… dusty, a bit scratched, but still workable.

Usually, when someone whips amps to 11 all you get is the bass whoomph, which isn’t audible next to the speaker. It’s to do with the way the wave generates.

But not this. I’m talking perfect fidelity. That meant it was a really, really good sound system – set up by someone who knew precisely what they were doing. The secret word might be ‘Perreaux’ (Google it).

And they used this to play Pink Floyd. Sub-zero cool. What made it doubly amazing was the quality. Pink Floyd span the gamut of amplitudes and frequencies. Meaning that not only technically pure sound but also intentional distortion has to be amplified without further distortion, then conveyed over distance. I cannot say how amazing that was, to me at least.  (OK, I’m a geek… hey, it’s the 21st century. Geeks won the war for cool. Get over it.)

Welcome to the machine. We abandoned the Trapp family and went outside. Probably other neighbours hated it. But hey…

All this has a point when it comes to writing. Quality counts. Anybody can whip the amp to 11 – which in the writing sense means splurging out words.

Anybody can write. It’s taught at school, apparently. Can everybody write like Hemingway? Certainly not. And that is the issue. Getting to Hemingway level means evolving skills beyond the point of ‘unconscious incompetence’ into the tortured realms of apprenticeship – of ‘conscious incompetence’, of ‘conscious competence’ – and then ‘unconscious competence’, when writing is second nature.

Possibly all to a soundtrack of Pink Floyd. I like that idea. Do you?

Copyright © Matthew Wright 2013

Sixty second writing tips: writing by layers

One of the techniques I use to get structured written content assembled quickly is to write it in layers.

If you’re daunted by the complexity of what you have to write – be it non-fiction or the complexities of a novel with of its character arcs, plot, dialogue, need for pacing and so forth, try this.

I’ll often start with the skeleton of a chapter or sequence – the main thrust of what I want to say.

Then I’ll go back and add a layer – add nuances to the argument, build points or add detail. It might be a particular type of detail, for instance.

Then I’ll go back again – and add another layer, like ‘colour’.

About this time I’ll often re-style it around the more complex nature of the content.

I guess the analogy is similar to sculpture or painting – you start with the broadest strokes covering the whole canvas, then go back and detail it in sequence.

It’s the inverse of the method by which you totally finish one part before moving on to the other. The advantage is that it gives you that structural overview from the outset.

Does this work for you? Have you ever tried this approach before?

Copyright © Matthew Wright 2013

Sixty second writing tips: writing in the style of…

One of the hardest things writers face – even if everything else is on par – is that last detail of the art; the style. The actual choice of words.

These are what clothe the skeleton of structure, of content; they give a particular feel to the writing. It is the style –the choice and pattern of words – that makes a particular passage an author’s own.

Mastering style – having control of the words – is as important as any other aspect of writing. It’s also remarkably difficult to master.

So try this. One of the ways music composition is taught is to write something ‘in the style of…’ – forcing the  student to figure out just what composers such as Rachmaninov, Debussy, Bach and so forth actually did in order to get their characteristic sounds. (Last year, I watched 70s prog-rock icon and all round British comedian and musician Rick Wakeman play, live, a string of nursery rhymes “in the style of” these composers. Cool.)

It works for writing, too. Try it.  Pick your favourite author. Look at the way they’ve assembled the words – at the pacing, the vocabulary, the organisation of the sentences, the tone. Make notes. Then try it yourself. It’ll be slow at first, lots of trial and error – but after a while you’ll be able to write ‘in the style of…’

I’m not suggesting such pastiches should become your real style. You have to find your own voice. But working out how other people have done it takes you a long way towards doing that – and towards discovering a good deal more, often by surprise, about how others have done it.

Do you ever try writing ‘in the style of…’?

Copyright © Matthew Wright 2013

Write it now, part 12: disentangling that idea splurge

Over the past few weeks we’ve been exploring the way writing is structured, with an ever-closer focus.

My account of the ‘musket wars’, published by Penguin in 2011, was pretty hard to structure – took a lot of re-working via the ‘shuffle the pages’ technique – to get a lot of simultaneous social concepts into a single readable thread.

This last post on structure takes us to the deepest level – the way paragraphs and sentences are arranged.

One of the biggest problems most writers have to face is translating the way we actually think and imagine things – which is usually as a ‘simultaneous picture’ – into writing, which is a single linear thread.

It’s failure to tackle this problem, I think, that produces non-fiction in which half the side-points are relegated to footnotes. And fiction riddled with flash-backs.

The key to the problem is deconstruction – being able to take that ‘simultaneity’ of ideas and fit them together in linear form. What comes first? The approach we looked at last time – ‘organising principle’ – works at this level too.

The best starting point is that old adage of starting big and moving on to detail. Say you’re describing a scene from a character’s viewpoint. Their first impression will always be the big picture, moving on to the details as they notice them. The nature of how they notice those details may be a reflection of their character – remembering that fiction is a way of taking readers on an emotional journey.

It’s often harder in non-fiction, where the organising principle may not be chronology, but a theme or idea. Different components have equal weighting in the big picture – making it difficult to figure out which one might come first. But, again, organising principles help.

The key point to bear in mind for all writing – non-fiction and fiction alike – is that it is taking the reader on an emotional journey. And sometimes, the nature of that journey can itself become a device for ordering the content.

Next –  look at some of the nitty gritty of novel writing, genre content and other stuff.

Copyright © Matthew Wright 2013

Coming up this week: more sixty second writing tips, inspirations, geekery – and a spot of history.

Write it now: part 11, introducing the organising principle

In the last few weeks we’ve been exploring the ways writing is structured. Last week we looked at large-scale structure – the big-aim content defined by log-line or thesis.

This week we’re moving on to how that is done – the detail of how these over-arching ideas are translated into written content, chapter by chapter or – if it is a short piece – paragraph by paragraph.

Like the over-arching structure, the broader content starts with a single sentence or phrase, which we might for convenience call the ‘organising principle’.

This principle tells you what to include when translating that over-arching idea into a longer work – what’s relevant to the thesis or logline, and what isn’t.  It also offers ways of organising the argument – or the character arc – or the theme and idea.

Take Bill Bryson’s recent book At Home, which is about domestic lifestyles and how they’ve changed through time. To do that, he takes the reader on a tour of his own house, room by room, exploring its history. The organising principle is the fact that he is doing it room-by-room, in sequence. He doesn’t do it floor by floor, or cover dozens of houses, house by house – he’s doing it room by room, in a single house.

This is very distinctive, and through it Bryson efficiently tells us a much broader story. That combination of content and organising principle is what gives the book its angle – and sets it apart from every other book on housing and lifestyles.

That’s true of fiction, too. Take Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind In The Willows, for instance. The theme is Grahame’s take on the nature of different classes in his Edwardian-era society – especially the working classes (Rat), the bourgeoise (Mole),  and the nobility (Mr Toad). The key logline is Toad’s character arc – ‘Mr Toad, through a series of adventures, is taught by his friends how to be a reformed character.’ However, Grahame’s organising principle is episodic; Toad’s character arc – and the subsidiary arc of Mole – unfolds through a succession of self-contained short stories (actually, I believe, starting life as letters to his son).

So – the ‘logline’ tells you what you are doing. The ‘organising principle’ tells you how to do it. It’s plannable too, and means novellists don’t end up barking up the wrong tree or following dead-end plot lines that fail to advance the story. And non-fiction writers get to achieve what are often elusive in that genre – relevance and angle.

Copyright © Matthew Wright 2013

Coming up: the real Moon hoax, translating simultaneous ideas into linear writing; sixty second writing tips – and more. Watch this space.

Sixty second writing tips: coining the right name

Some time after The Lord of The Rings was published, J. R. R. Tolkien fielded a letter from Sam Gamgee. A real Sam Gamgee.

It wasn’t surprising. Tolkien – a philologist –  mined English convention for his Shire and Hobbit names. Another was Peregrin Took – the first name is known, though Steve Peregrin Took wasn’t born with it – his real name was Stephen Ross Porter.

A few authors deliberately use real names. I’m thinking George McDonald Fraser, whose Flashman stories were riddled with real historical figures doing real things. Fun stuff.

Occasionally authors add a real name for other purposes, like the time Michael Crichton included a critic as one of his incidental bad-guys.

My tips? I think that…

1. If you’re writing fantasy, it’s important to have names that sound ‘real’ together – not random collections of syllables kludged up on the spot. Make lists before you start.

2. If the story is set in the present, it has to be a name that won’t leave anybody with the same name offended. One book I read included an unlikeable US Secretary of State named (wait for it…) ”Trachea”. Little risk of lawsuit there. Lawsuit? Sure. Your bad guy turns out to have the same name as a genuine individual you weren’t aware of. It’s happened.

3. Coined names that reflect characteristics can work if done judiciously. J K Rowling is a master of it.

Do these tips work for you? Have you ever had trouble creating names for characters? And how have you got around it?

 Copyright © Matthew Wright 2013

Coming up this weekend: ‘write it now’ – pantsing vs structure; and fun with comets.

Write it now, part 8: structure is everything in writing

I posted last week about the ‘inverted pyramid’ method for drawing readers into your work. One of the best tips I ever learned.

It introduces an important point. Structure is everything when it comes to writing.  Everything. Over the next few posts I’m going to outline some of the key ways of making that structure happen – to any scale, in whatever you’re writing.

To me, structure is one of the two key mechanical skills that let writers convey the emotion they have in mind to the reader. The other is ‘stylistic colour’, but I’ll get on to that later.

Structure applies at all levels of writing, from the structure of your sentences and paragraphs – which help you grab the reader and convey the essential emotion that is at the heart of all writing – to the over-arching structure of your entire work. In more detail, these are:

1. Sentence structure.
From a grammatical perspective, sentences need certain things in order to work, and they have to be in certain places. But beyond that, sentence structure is one of the key ways a writer defines their own style. It’s like a signature.

2.  Paragraph structure.
Beyond the immediate level of sentences we find paragraphs; it is at this wider level that the content of the material starts to get more important. Is it in the right order to convey the idea in the right way? That’s as true of non-fiction writing – which presents an argument – as it is of fiction, where the characters are unrolled for the reader across paragraphs rather than sentences.

3. Over-arching structure.
Every piece of writing, however short or long – must have an over-arching structure – the classic ‘beginning, middle and end’. There is more to it than that, of course. The over-arching structure has to lead the reader through an experience. In a novel it is the character arc, interlinked with the plot. In non-fiction it is an argument. It should be possible to write down that key structure in a sentence or two, irrespective of how long the written material is – up to and including epic novels.

I’ll be following these up in the next few posts. Meanwhile, though, what’s your take on structure? Do you break structure down in these ways? How do you make structure work for you?

Copyright © Matthew Wright 2013

 Next time: why seat-of-the-pants writing is bad for beginners. Tomorrow: Russell Crowe’s UFO,  and why it’s rubbish.

Write it now: part 7, the inverted writing pyramid

It’s funny where some great writing tips can come from. I learned one of my best years ago from Richard Adler, then a Professor of English at the University of Montana.

He was in New Zealand on a Fulbright scholarship and gave a talk about essay writing to my honours class. Up to that point, nobody had taught the class anything about how to write – it was an assumed skill that went with the university territory. Unlike most of my fellow students, I’d done multiple courses on writing, including fiction. I felt secure in my 21-year old notion that I knew everything there was to know. What could he tell the class in 50 minutes that I didn’t already know?

Actually, everything. The guy was a genius. Everything he said was new, sensible, and important. Starting with the opening point.

‘Start broad,’ he said , ‘then work down to the specific.’

He taught me a lot about writing. Also about the perils of unconscious incompetence – when you know so little you don’t know how little you know.

Adler’s tip was deceptively simple -and said it all. Writing is all about structure, and THAT is the way to start with the right structure. First off, every time. It’s also known as the ‘inverted pyramid’ approach. Journalists get taught the same thing. It works for just about every type of writing. It first hooks the reader with the big picture, and then draws them deeper into the material.

It still has to be done right. If you start broad in a novel, for instance, it doesn’t mean bogging the readers down with miles of expository back-story.  Try looking at the thing of broadest importance ot your lead character, instead.

The problem – with novels and every other kind of writing – is working out that big picture. Breaking the material into components may not be enough – you also have to identify the organising principle. What is the if-then structure? Sometimes it isn’t obvious.

There’s also another trick to the process, which Adler didn’t tell me – but which I’ve learned since.

The way to hook readers in early sentences, in any style of writing, is by adding a flourish – a narrative detail – to that broad start. Otherwise the broad exposition is liable to be boring. That seems counter-intuitive in a way – a detail, just when you should be looking at the widest picture.

Imagine an artists’ rendition of a sunset sky, all dark velvet with an orange horizon. Potentially dull – but then add Venus, the evening star. A sparkle. A detail. It doesn’t reduce the broad sweep of the picture but it adds a point of attention without disturbing the broad intent of what the artist is doing – creating the sunset mood.

Writing’s like that. Open the piece you’re writing broad, sure – but add that sparkle to punctuate the mood.

What do you figure?

And have you ever had an eye-opener experience like the one I had, way back in George Orwell’s favourite year?

 Copyright © Matthew Wright 2013

Coming up this week: Was going to do UFO’s and big rigs - but Dennis Tito’s come up with a space-type plan that’s even dumber. Check out my take on it tomorrow. Inspirations moves to Wednesday, this time exploring why music and writing are the same thing; and more writing tips and ‘write it now’ posts.

Sixty second writing tips: the three sorts of editing

Editing is as much a skill as writing. It’s one authors have to master – and it’s also a specialty of its own. Done properly, editing can require at least as much time as it takes to draft the original piece. There are three main types:

1. Revision editing
This is, I think, what authors usually mean by ‘editing’. It involves re-thinking the draft text – pondering it, adjusting words, and deciding how to re-cast if necessary.

2. Proof editing
Somebody other than the author reads the finished MS for sense, meaning, consistencies, grammatical accuracy, and offers corrections. It’s demanding; the proof-editor has to be skilled enough at writing to offer fixes in sympathy with the author’s own style. Some publishers also put the book out for fact-checking, a separate process again, at this stage.

3. Line editing
This is the final step before publication. The work is carefully read, ideally by somebody who has never seen it before, for ‘literals’ – literal typographical mistakes, missed full stops, bad spaces and so forth.  Usually this is done twice. The ideal process involves two people; one reads aloud, the other cross-checks what they hear against the proof.

How much time do you usually allocate for editing? Do you break it down into a system? How do you tackle this one?

Copyright © 2013 Matthew Wright