Ten things I don’t know about writing
In honor of Scalzi’s “No, actually, your teenage writing does suck” (and follow-up on constantly distancing yourself from suck), and Justine’s post on rewriting and learning from criticism, a meme.
Ten things I don’t know:
- How to describe with all five senses.
- How to get a character across a room.
- How to have your protagonist learn something without having another character talk about it for six pages. (Failing that: How to get characters talking without sitting them down at a table and serving drinks.)
- How to write about happy people.
- How to capture the arc of a relationship — the dynamics of a friendship, or a love affair, or a lifelong hatred, or a family. (I read in Gwenda’s interview with Bennett Madison that Mr. Madson’s next book is “about the very bloody rise and fall of a teenage friendship,” and that scares the daylights out of me.)
- How to write a scene when you don’t know what should happen in it, only what it should accomplish.
- How to write a scene when you don’t know what it should accomplish, only what should happen in it.
- How to measure progress when word count doesn’t tell you anything.
- How to plot a multi-layered conspiracy theory without it turning into the stupid middle hour of Pirates of the Carribbean 3 where the characters all take turns betraying one another but in the end none of their betrayals has any consequences because the (static!) character relationships trump everything else.
- How to make the story on the page as good as the one in your head.
June 19th, 2007 at 9:20 pm
#1. Easy. Character enters a new place: what’s the range of experience?
#2. Easy. Character walks/runs/flies/is thrown/teleports across the room.
#3. Trickier. Dramatize, don’t summarize: show them doing something that says they haven’t got it, then show them doing something that says they have.
#4. Impossible. If everyone’s happy, there’s no story.
#5. See #3.
#6. Fuck, yeah.
#7. Ditto.
#8. Huh? Or maybe, are things changing? Then don’t sweat it.
#9. Write that shit in the first draft, then cut it. Or change the ending.
#10. Impossible. But sometimes you can make it as good in someone else’s head as it is in yours.
June 20th, 2007 at 1:12 am
Regarding #4, to be fair, David didn’t say writing everybody as happy, just writing happy people in general. But the answer to that is, make them happy, but make them supporting characters. There their happiness won’t impede the plot.
June 20th, 2007 at 2:49 am
Jon, true. Ensemble casts are very useful, ’cause some folks can be happy while others are miserable.
It is a sad truth that happiness impedes plot. Even in, or especially in, comedy.
I left out something in #2: motivation. If there’s no reason to cross the room, leave ‘em in one place and cut to the next scene. On screen and on the page, action for the sake of action is boring.
David, apologies if I’m taking the list too seriously. ‘Cause, yeah, they’re all sumbitches.
June 20th, 2007 at 4:17 am
Hah! No. 2 breaks my brain worse than anything else in the world. What was that Kingsley Amis quote? Something about what a bugger it is getting them out of the pub and into the cab? Amen to that.
But all of it is hard. In the good way.
June 20th, 2007 at 9:25 am
Will, I’ll take all the good advice I can get!
June 20th, 2007 at 3:10 pm
David, don’t encourage me!
Okay, #6 and #7? Think about who is most affected in the scene, or who should be. Whenever you’re stuck on plot, think about characters, because the plot usually balks when you’re trying to get the characters to do something that’s wrong for them.
June 21st, 2007 at 3:25 pm
The meme version of this comments thread.
peaceMatt
June 23rd, 2007 at 4:02 pm
That’s an interesting list. I’m particularly in awe of people who have a firm grasp on #1. One of my big goals is to learn how to describe tastes and smells in inventive ways. You know, without constantly calling them “acrid” or “earthy.”