From bestselling author Dave Farland:

For the past two posts, I’ve been speaking about how to get “zoned in,” to reach that mental state where your writing time is the most productive and where the quality of your work is at its highest. I spoke about the importance of getting rid of all external and internal distractions, and I suggested that you need to move into your writing zone slowly, often by performing writing exercises. Now comes the third step:

Step 3: Play. Shakespeare once said “The play is the thing.” I think that he understood that playing with words, with ideas, with characters in opposition—brainstorming as he wrote—that was the key to writing well.

. . . .

[W]hen you’re writing, you very often have a bunch of characters in conflict, but as you begin to write, you find that one of them feels more fascinating to you, more genuine and real than the others.

New writers will often complain at that point that a secondary character has “taken over” the story, yet I sometimes wonder if they haven’t really just “found” the true story, the one that feels deepest and most important to them. Many times I’ve found that the author in such cases is writing about a heroic character that is larger than life. The protagonist feels hokey and shallow. It’s when the writer begins exploring a minor character that the tale comes to life for them.

. . . .

So as you play, you begin to discover the story that you most want to tell. Characters come alive, and you find yourself envisioning scenes that you never intended to include in your tale. Fresh new themes suggest themselves, and that requires even further departure from your original plans.

In short, it is not until we begin playing in the woods of our subconscious that we can find ourselves lost in them.

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The subconscious mind, which resides in the right hemisphere of the brain in most people, spends a great deal of time trying to make sense of emotional issues. It’s constantly trying to help us resolve issues related to frightening images, powerful sexual urges, or unkind words. It tries to alert us to dangers that the conscious mind is too preoccupied to deal with. That’s what happens in humans. We have two brains connected with a little bundle of fibers, and so each of the brains works somewhat independently. As artists, we’re trying to tap into the reservoir of wisdom locked in the creative part of our mind. But that can’t happen if we’re feeling stressed, if our subconscious is trying to deal with other issues. If it’s already working overtime, you’re not going to be able to get much out of it.

Link to the rest at David Farland

From Ruth Harris on Anne R. Allen’s Blog:

Social, cultural, and political history are powerful tools no writer should ignore.

• John Le Carré used the Cold War, the Berlin Wall and the real-life unmasking of a double agent to create a compelling setting in The Spy Who Came In From the Cold.
• Isabel Allende’s The House Of The Spirits, a family saga partially inspired by the PInochet dictatorship, is set against decades of political and social upheaval in post-colonial Chile.
• Alexander Solzhenitsyn drew on his experiences in the forced-labor camps of the Soviet prison system to create world wide bestsellers in One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and The Gulag Archipelago.

However, writers do not need vast cultural and political disruptions to write powerful fiction readers can relate to. Ordinary, everyday details add enormous power to fiction and bring your story to life.

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Characters need to be firmly anchored in a specific time and place. Even sci-fi and fantasy need social, cultural and political specifics to engage the reader. George Orwell’s 1984, Margaret Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale and JK Rowling’s Harry Potter draw their power from their authors’ ability to create credible details of an invented world.

If you research and then judiciously set up the specifics of time and place, you will expand and enrich your fiction. Invoking the relevant cultural, political and social details will draw your reader into recognizable settings against which your characters can act out their dilemmas, frustrations and successes.

You shouldn’t give your reader a history lesson—that’s Doris Kearns Goodwin’s job—but you do want to give your characters a relatable world in which to live. Your characters can be—and should be—shaped by the attitudes of whatever period you choose to write about.

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Are you writing about a period in which people feel positive about the future and confident about their prospects? Or are your characters coping with the Depression of the Thirties or the financial crisis or downsizing of the recent past and present? How they think and feel and what they do to deal with opportunity (or lack thereof) offers a potent way to explore and expand the inner and outer lives of the people you’re writing about.

Link to the rest at Anne R. Allen’s Blog

From author James Scott Bell:

I’ve been on record for a long time stating that this new digital age is like the pulp era, only with more opportunity and potentially better pay. But it requires a certain kind of writer. One like Erle Stanley Gardner (1889 – 1970).

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Gardner is best know as the creator of Perry Mason. When he hit on that character and that formula, he was set for life. But what most people don’t know is how hard he worked to get there. He was a practicing lawyer in the 1920s, and was looking for a way to make money on the side. Writing for the exploding market in detective and crime fiction seemed promising.

He set out to do it the only way he knew how––full speed ahead. His output was, as he described it later, “man killing.” One hundred thousand words a month. A month. Over a million words a year, for at least ten years. (And much of it while he was still practicing law).

He did manage to sell some stories, but not enough to please him. Then one day he realized he did not know how to plot. His stories were merely “event combinations.”

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[I]n 1933, came The Case of the Velvet Claws and the introduction of Perry Mason. There was no looking back. At one time Gardner was listed in theGuinness Book of World Records as the bestselling author who ever lived.

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So how do you self-publish fiction successfully? Learn the following lessons from Erle Stanley Gardner.

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1. Treat it like a job

For Gardner and other successful pulpsters, writing was a job, especially during the Depression. They had to eat. They didn’t have time to sit around the coffee bar ruminating about theories of literature. They actually had to produce stories, lots of them. They studied the markets (and wrote in popular genres, like detective and Western) and pounded the keys of their manual typewriters. Gardner was a two-finger typist and had to put adhesive tape on his tips because they would start to bleed. (This is one reason he later turned to dictating his stories, having them transcribed by a team of secretaries).

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2. Treat it like a craft

When Gardner kept getting rejection slips that said “plot too thin,” he knew he had to learn how to do it. After much study he said he “began to realize that a story plot was composed of component parts, just as an automobile is.” He began to build stories, not just make them up on the fly. He made a list of parts and turned those into “plot wheels” which was a way of coming up with innumerable combinations. He was able, with this system, to come up with a complete story idea in thirty seconds.

Link to the rest at The Kill Zone

From author and former writing professor Dave Farland:

In case you haven’t noticed over the past few years, I talk a lot about storytelling—about the parts of stories—inciting incidents, character arcs, climaxes, and so on. I also talk about writing as a profession, but I don’t talk much about the art of composing beautiful, lyrical sentences. There are some good reasons for this.

First of all, I think that there are those who can teach it better than I. When I was studying at the university level, I had some wonderful poets and professors to learn from. Nearly all of them had a strong literary bent. By this I mean that they were writing stories for magazines like The New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, or The Southern Review—the most popular of the literary magazines. They were adept at teaching things like style, voice, and description.

Yet none of them wrote genre literature. None of them were writing thrillers or romances or science fiction. Which brings me to my second reason for not wanting to teach these skills: I’ve long been interested in trying to understand the things that my teachers couldn’t tell me about.

What my teachers didn’t teach was story structure. In fact, at the time that I was going to college, I literally could not find a single book on how to plot a novel. A couple came out just as I was ready to publish my first, but storytelling seemed a mystery to me.

. . . .

You see, the literary reaction against formed stories that took place in the early 1900s made it unpopular to teach things like “How to Plot a Novel” in college courses. Part of the problem was that my professors had never learned it themselves. There were those in academia who insisted that life is a random series of events, and if we write formed stories, we’re sort of perpetuating an absurd lie. Ultimately, if life is meaningless, then we can’t make sense of it.

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I want to emphasize something: a great plot doesn’t make a great story. Over the years in Hollywood I’ve seen a lot of scripts with promising tag lines. Yet very often, the dialog was only adequate, or characters weren’t fleshed out, or the descriptions were just pedestrian.

Link to the rest at David Farland

From author and regular visitor J.M. Ney-Grimm:

What makes a good opening? How does a writer engage the strong interest of her reader?

Writing stories is an art. In a sense, there are as many good opening structures as there are good stories. Every story’s first few paragraphs are unique to that story.

However…you knew there’d be a “however,” didn’t you?

There is a structure that consistently hooks most readers’ attention. This “hook opening” won’t be right for every story, but it serves many of them well.

A character with a problem in a setting.

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There’s also one more critical element.

My teacher recounts how that critical element made all the difference for him. Decades ago, when he was first starting out and before he incorporated this key element, he received nothing but form rejections from publishers. After…he received personal letters for his rejections and…a beginning stream of acceptances! That’s how important this is.

What is it?

Ground your reader in what your character is seeing, hearing, touching, smelling, and tasting. Make your opening rich with sensory detail. Your reader will feel like she or he is there, chilled by the breeze, smelling cinnamon, tasting vanilla, hearing chapel bells, and watching the cavalry thunder over the hill crest.

Touch on all five senses in the first three paragraphs and continue to mention them every 500 words.

Link to the rest at J.M. Ney-Grimm

From author Linda Gray on Write of Passage:

The dark side is not only for two-dimensional villains and vampires. It’s part of everyone in real life who has lived more than a couple of years. To express that in a character—whether villain or hero—to tap into the power that comes from showing truths about the character’s deepest self, and thereby creating a complex, conflicted character, is one of the biggest challenges writers face. Why? Well, there are probably lots of answers to that particular question, but I’m going to suggest that it’s because our “deepest self,” warts and all,  is something most people are uncomfortable examining, much less expressing for public consumption.

. . . .

The most riveting characters in literature are the deeply conflicted ones—the ones who are driven to behave in certain ways that go against the grain of what they know to be upright and good, for example. Anti-heroes are classic examples of that type of inner conflict. Think Scarlett O’Hara in Gone With the Wind and Rick of Rick’s Café Americain in Casablanca. 

At least Scarlett and Rick get a chance for redemption at the end of their stories. But then there’s the even more complex character, the dark tragic hero who honest-to-god believes himself to be someone who strives to do what’s noble (and makes sure the world sees him that way), but is, in fact, driven by lower orders of need and desire.

Link to the rest at Write of Passage

From NYT best-selling author and former writing professor, Dave Farland:

Recently I wrote about the importance of creating powerful emotions in stories, but with that comes a caution: don’t get maudlin. Here are a couple of rules.

1) Protagonists don’t cry. If your protagonist does cry, then it frees the audience so that they don’t have to. Hence, if you’re trying to draw genuine tears from a reader, your characters shouldn’t be crying.

2) Let the emotion come naturally. Many authors will begin to fall into “purple prose” when they want to elicit emotion, and so they write in heightened, flowery images. Don’t. If you say something like, “In that moment, his love for her erupted like crocuses, touched by the sun after a long winter,” you’re working too hard.

Nor do you need to talk about an emotion that a scene elicits in the protagonist. In fact, be wary about even naming an emotion. For example, your protagonist sees a dead body, and you want to have her reel away in horror. So your first impulse might be to say, “She gagged and reeled away in horror.” But all you have to do is create the dead body—using sight, smell, touch—and then have her reel away. We shouldn’t need the words “in horror.”

So simply create the scene as completely as you can and let the emotion arise naturally from the incident.

Link to the rest at David Farland

From author and former writing professor, Dave Farland:

A few years ago, a young man won a short story competition for Reader’s Digest—two years in a row. This was a remarkable accomplishment, given the size of the contests. When asked how he had done it, the writer responded with something like, “It’s easy. The story that makes them cry the most, wins!”

He’s right. I’ve spoken to many an editor who will admit that the story that has the strongest emotional payoff is the most likely to be chosen for publication or for awards. You see, a tale should not be judged “objectively.” It’s meant to be a subjective experience, to arouse emotions.

Yet as writers we are often trained to back away from situations that honestly elicit tears. We don’t want to be accused of being maudlin.

I’ve seen the value of drawing tears myself. With my novel In the Company of Angels, when I was having my editors read it, I got several calls from my final editors. These were people that I was paying, and they both pleaded for more time to finish the edit because they were “crying too hard to see the page.” The problem was, they weren’t even near the end. So I watched my wife; sure enough, I kept her crying continually during most of the last 140 pages. I don’t think that it was coincidental that the novel won the Whitney Award for Best Novel of the Year, when competing against many other fine books. The story that makes ‘em cry the most, wins.

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You will notice that at the “climax” of a story, very often we have a “reversal,” a moment where it appears that the villain has won, but where the protagonist finds a way to turn the tables and pull victory from the jaws of defeat. I used to wonder why those reversals felt so necessary, until it struck me: a good reversal multiplies the number of tears that the reader must release. We may cry tears of frustration, shared agony, dread, relief, and joy—all within a few pages. When that happens, we as readers feel cleansed inside.

Link to the rest at David Farland

From Ruth Harris on Anne R. Allen’s Blog:

Before there was The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo and Lisbeth Salander, there was Smilla Qaavigaaq Jaspersen, the heroine of a novel called Smilla’s Sense of Snow by Peter Hoeg. Smilla is part Inuit and lives in Copenhagen.

According to the flap copy of the FSG edition, “she is thirty-seven, single, childless, moody, and she refuses to fit in.” She is complex, thorny, obstinate, blunt, fearless, she loves clothes and, when required, she can—and does—kick ass. Like Lisbeth—who’s a talented computer jock—Smilla has her tech side and sees the beauty in mathematics.
Thinking about these two “difficult” women—Lisbeth and Smilla—I began to realize that the “difficult,” unconventional female character, like Joseph Campbell’s Hero With A Thousand Faces, appears in fiction again and again in different guises.

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Jane Tennison, the DI in television’s Prime Suspect, played by Hellen Mirren, is a “woman of a certain age” as they say in France. Her love life is on the gritty side, she drinks too much, she can be flinty—not flirtatious. The men she works with give her a hard time and she isn’t shy about pushing back.

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Ellen Ripley. Sigourney Weaver as Ripley, the warrant officer inAlien, is courageous, authoritative and has no personal life that we know of. She’s a sci-fi heroine who must rely on her own guts, brains and fearlessness.

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Mrs. Danvers, the creepy housekeeper with no first name inRebecca, is dedicated to her dead employer, the first Mrs. Maxim de Winter. She is intimidating, manipulative and willing to drive the second Mrs. DeWinter to suicide.

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The “difficult” female character can—and will—do the shocking, the unexpected and, as a consequence, will give your story an immediate jolt of energy. She is the character who doesn’t fit the mold. She is the boss (M), the beginner (Clarice Starling), the domestic employee (Mrs. Danvers).

2. The “difficult” female character will live in the “wrong” neighborhood, drink too much, have sex with the “wrong” partners—all good ways to add sizzle and wow! plot twists.

Link to the rest at Anne R. Allen’s Blog

From The Other Side of the Story:

World building can be a tough job. The more complex the world, the harder it can be to convey that world to the reader without going into a lot of infodumping and backstory.

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When you have a complex world, how do you get the reader on board without losing them? 

1. Determine the critical elements of that world 

The rule of three is a handy helper. Readers notice things mentioned three times, and three details is easy for them to remember. Fewer details can be forgotten, more can overwhelm.

Pick the three most critical elements of your world that readers need to know to understand how your world works. But you don’t want justany three details. Try picking details that hit the key elements: setting, character, and conflict. Something physical about the world, something critical about the character, something that shows the inherent conflict of the world.

. . . .

2. Find a situation that captures the essence of your world 

Once you determine what elements you need, design a situation where you get to use all three. Something that will show that setting, allow the protagonist to use or display that trait, and involves the conflict of the novel.

Since all scenes need a goal and stakes, odds are it’ll be something where your protagonist’s trait is either causing them trouble or is what gets them out of trouble. (“trouble” is used loosely here. Just look for something to move the story forward through conflict). That moment where the world they live in suddenly hits a bump.

Link to the rest at The Other Side of the Story and thanks to Bridget for the tip.