TECH: kick your drama into high gear

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Original Posting 5 Jan 2013

Another moldy oldie? Yes, Writer's Digest, August 1996, pages 27 to 29, have an article by William Noble with the title, "Kick Your Drama Into High Gear." It's all about conflict. How do you get readers excited about your story? Well, dramatic impact is what you're looking for.

"You know what conflict is: confrontation. Tension building between characters or their environment or both. But conflict grows through drama. When drama develops well, you have allowed for stronger action and suspense."

Action and suspense are what make up the sense of drama. Heart ringing suspense, wonder, and revelation. Action. Effective drama leads to riveting conflict which develops solid action and suspense.

Conflict means that the narrator is in trouble and there's an antagonist breathing down their neck. Then the question is do you want action or suspense. Action means going with the physical side of things. Suspense usually means a little more waiting, wondering just when will things start happening?

The core of conflict is drama. The idea is to show readers what's happening. Touch the reader, give them a mental image, sweep them into the story, give them a chance to root for someone.

Start with trouble.

So what's the first thing you need to do? Well, you gotta have trouble. Conflict. Sure, someone wants something, someone has a goal, but the drama comes from conflict. Trouble. Give the characters trouble, put blocks in their way, make sure that nothing comes easily. But conflict isn't just for plotting, trouble also brings out character. How a character responds to and resolves the problems shows us just exactly who they are.

What about suspense? Well, get someone in trouble, then make us wait to find out what happens. You get suspense automatically. Don't let the trouble be resolved too fast. That's all that suspense is, really. Delayed resolution.

Add lights, camera, and active, active, active writing.

The next one sounds simple, but it's just active voice. Keep your images vivid, your action direct, your language simple, and make sure you write active voice. It's not just language, it's also looking at who is acting, who's doing things all the time.

Use the present tense.

This is a piece of advice that William Noble gives that I have to admit I don't think I agree with. Yes, the present tense involves readers and makes them feel an urgency. However, by and large the convention is that fiction is written in the past tense. Take a look at your genre. See what most of the things are written in. Then decide whether you're going to use the past tense or the present tense.

Write with images.

Dramatic, colorful, three-dimensional images are better than just words on the page. Use words that build images and bolster drama. "We want to plant images in the reader's mind, three-dimensional word pictures that rivet attention. We want snapping, crackling writing."

Appeal to all the senses.

Images are not just what you see. They can also appeal to smell, taste, hearing, touch. Make the reader feel as if they are right there in the middle of everything. Make it vivid, let the reader be involved in everything that's going on. "We also transform the readers' mental pictures into virtual reality, so the reading experience is more consuming because now all the senses are at work ."

How do we do this? Think in images, don't settle for clichés, and make it appeal to our senses. Images, senses, and excitement.

"Action and suspense are the culmination of drama buildup, and conflict is the thread that ties the package together."

Get your characters in trouble, use active language to show us what's happening, mix well with suspense, and make those images come alive in your reader's mind. Kick that drama into high gear, and watch your writing take off.

TECH: Murdering Your Darlings!

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Original posting 10 January 2013

The sheets are turning brown, so it must be time to summarize this. Writer's Digest, July 1995, pages 30 and 31 have an article by James Patrick Kelly with the title "Murder Your Darlings". The little headline under that title says, "Beware of having your story with extra characters, plot twists or words. To keep readers turning pages, you must tighten your prose. Here's how."

Kelly starts by pointing out that we fall in love with our own words. And that's fine, except that you're doing revision, "you must harden your heart, sharpen the ax and murder your darlings." But you really need to focus on the ones that are just ornaments, and aren't doing any work. He admits that some people like to try to fix problems by adding material. However, Kelly suggests that staying focused and cutting out paragraphs or even pages is more likely to help.

Next, Kelly reminds us that he's going to give some specific suggestions, but you really need to develop your own skill, not just follow a checklist. It's got to be almost an instinct for cutting, built up through practice. One of the ways that he tackles it is that he starts every writing day by paring and revising the work that he did the day before. Also, with a working draft in hand, he looks at two different stages, revision and deletion. In revision, his focus is on making sure that everything is there that needs to be there, plot, character, setting, theme. He looks for logic flaws and continuity breaks, and checks the spelling. Then in deletion, he's trimming.

How much trimming should you do? Kelly recommends 10%. So a 20 page draft should shrink down to 18 pages. What all are you going to cut?

1. Adjectives and adverbs! At the sentence level look for unnecessary modifiers. Make sure you use strong verbs.
2. Clumsy entrances and exits. Don't spend a lot of time getting your characters on stage or offstage.
3. Unnecessary scene or time switches. Always ask "Is this trip necessary?"
4. Overpopulation. Remember, your story should not be the clown car in the circus, with an incredible number of people popping out of it. You want the readers to care about your main characters, so they have to be able to see them. Keep your cast tight.
5. Overdramatization. Sometimes you can just tell the reader what is happening, without trying to build up a whole dramatic revelation.
6. Arriving early and staying late? No, stories should start in the middle of the action, and quit when they're done. A good story starts on page 1. And when it's time to leave, they leave!

Kelly recommends a couple of tricks to help you identify where you need to cut. First, read your draft aloud. There's a good chance that you can hear yourself getting interested or bored. Guess what needs to be cut. That's right, no room for boredom in your stories. Second, get a second opinion. It's amazing how someone else can pinpoint our problems for us.

He ends with the advice "Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it -- wholeheartedly -- and delete it before sending your manuscripts to press." Or "Murder your darlings."

So, what is on your revision list to watch out for? What are your hot spots? How did you find out that these were problem areas, how do you detect them, and what do you do about them? Go ahead, make up your own list!

Sharpen those stakes!

EXERCISE: And your problem is...

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Original posting 12 January 2013

Okay. We haven't done one of these in a while, so...

Pick a number from one to five. Got it? No, eight is not one to five. Now, got it?

All right. You have chosen:

1. During lunch, a valued client make some offensive racist remarks. Do you make an issue of it?

2. You are having an affair and don't feel like going to work. Do you phone in sick?

3. You are an adoption worker. A native child has been living happily with a white family for three years. Now his relatives want to take him back to the reservation. Do you let them? (You may want to ignore the question of whether an adoption worker actually has a choice in the matter -- or you may want to make your story about that!)

4. Your name sounds foreign and is difficult to pronounce. Your clients and superiors are always stumbling over it. Do you change it?

5. Your company is bidding on a contract. Your price is good but you will take a week longer than your competitors. The customer asks. Do you tell him the truth?

Simple, right? Start out by sketching in the details. Who are these people? Who are "you?" Where is this taking place. Now, sketch the scene where you really face the problem, and... Make a decision. Take action of some kind, and then follow it through. What happens when you face down that racist customer? Phone in sick because you want to spend time on your affair? Make someone unhappy with an adoption? Get that court order changing your name to Smythe? Look the customer in the eye and ...

Right. Tell us the story of someone facing this little dilemma, and what they choose to do. And what happens next.

As usual, feel free to adjust the issue, plot, characters, and scenery to suit. Although I'm not sure that complaining about glittery vampires really counts as a racist remark...

Write!