Writing in a Nutshell (The Info-Dump)

An information dump is basically a lot of info that the author thinks the reader needs to know quickly in order to advance the novel. In this case, I have compiled a lot of information that I hope will be useful to me as a writer and to others. In this instance, I am an archivist-meets-commentator. Info-dumps, when handled poorly, stall and ruin one's writing. I will try to handle this one well.

Writing Excuses is a podcast I have come to late, but it meshes well with all the writing advice I have heard or read, and these people are actually published. Its advantages are that most of us are better at digesting speech in small quantities than 300 page books on writing. This entry of my blog attempts to make a digestible chunk of advice to us all on writing by summarizing content from various sources.

How to Write a Damn Good Novel by James Frey is a book about writing what Frey terms the Dramatic Novel (as opposed to a literary novel, which in Frey's mind does not necessarily follow conventions of snappy, engaging prose). Frey is a novelist who covers characterization, dialogue, and escalating conflict manifested in various areas of novel writing.

Noah Lukeman is a literary agent. I have read The First Five Pages, A Dash of Style, and The Plot Thickens. Some of them more than once. I have certainly skimmed all of them repeatedly for information.

Out of this brew and my own experience as a reader, I hope to distill advice. The reason I bring myself into this mix is that I feel that to do anything less is plagiarism. If I have no take on the material, I am simply stealing intellectual property without processing any of it.

In short, this represents what academia and wikipedia alike refer to as independent research, the connotation of which is that such research is suspect until scrutinized by a jury of peers. Since I have an aggregate of one reader so far, I suppose the jury of my peers is rather small. Nonetheless, I persist. Scrutiny for this material means trying it out. Trying it out means National Novel Writing Month, in this case.

First off, characterization.

Characterization

Characters are what form the foundation of a novel. Most writers, readers, and critics agree that if characters in a work of fiction are compelling, they reward the reader and the author with compelling actions. Such characters are like the friend one always wants at the party because the person lends a flow and flash to just sitting around the living room.

Such characters do not go quietly into the night when faced with a problem. They may explode or implode brilliantly, or persist. Readers do not care about characters folding laundry (as I am going to go do).

...

Now, as tempting as it is (after folding laundry, calling about a job prospect, writing a cover letter and revising a resume, contemplating lunch, and remembering that I still have more laundry to fold) to wax eloquent about how that ellipsis contained all the events of the last hour and a half, and how I would not use this piece of punctuation to represent such a break in a formal novel, I will continue to discuss characterization (after another laundry-folding interlude).

Readers do not care about characters folding laundry unless it advances the plot, I should say. If a person in on the brink of madness because of the monotony of folding laundry, then each pair of underwear, each bed sheet and towel put in the machine under the watchful eye of a hated manager is riveting because the reader has access to the inner life of the character, not because the act of washing and drying laundry is riveting.

Frey points out that details about a character should relate to how the character will deal with the central conflicts of the novel. If the character is going to snap at his boss, terrorize his family, or perhaps find a sympathetic love interest from a rival laundry service as a result of his work, the reader may care about what the character's job reveals about him.

Frey applies this idea to flashbacks. Readers, in his opinion, care about your interesting characters as they are, not as they were when they liked Barbie or toy soldiers at age 4. If they are going to pick up a gun because they played with soldiers and you can make this connection explicit in their thinking, then toy soldiers are relevant. If she will never marry unless she finds a shallow, handsome Ken, then all those hours spent playing Barbie are meaningful. If you think a serious novel would never have a toy representative of its theme and conflict, look no further than Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye.

Not all characters should be as complex as your main characters. Like the people that appear driving, delivering mail, and inhabiting the world of The Truman Show, some characters only need appear in your work. No depth necessary to the man who is going to hold the door for your main character to walk through into the bank. Now, this character may have an interesting trait, say a quick tongue (i.e. Run, Lola Run), but that's it. He is fairly one-sided. And that's o.k..

Many authors of books/podcasts on writing refer with derision to the "scream." The (usually) female character in a horror movie who is too dumb to turn around and run like h-e-double-hockey-sticks (and is about as cliche as "h-e-double-hockey-sticks"). Even the Most Interesting Man in the World commercial for Halloween makes fun of this character.

Why. Because this character is unbelievably stupid. The moment a normal person hears creaking from the attic accompanied by screams and groans, they may call the police or the priest (depending on what they believe is going on upstairs), but they won't walk in unarmed and unaccompanied without sufficient cause or motivation.

If I put the woman's husband in the room with a killer monster and the nearest police station 25 miles down the road, she might call the police first, then enter the room to face her potential death and try to prevent that of her beloved husband.

I just complicated her motivation, though. Something is actually at stake for her. She won't walk away. If she is merely curious, then nothing is compelling her to enter the attic, while everything else about the situation would compel her to run away.

The modified scream is in conflict with the desire of the monster to eat her husband. She wants to save her husband from bloody dismemberment and being eaten.

Now, conflicts can occur between more serious characters. Say several friends are applying for the same job. They all enjoy hanging out, have been best friends like their parents before them. All the sudden, they want the same thing and compete.

Or, imagine two dating people that want different things: he wants no kids and is happy dating, but she wants 7 kids and marriage. All their friends tell them they are the perfect couple and their families are hinting strongly that they aren't getting any younger. You have lots of conflict and reasons why at least one of the characters won't walk away from it all. She needs him to marry; he wants to be with her because she is a fun person to be with. Life would be boring without her. Is that enough to drive him to marry, or not?

Characters that want the same or different things can compete and conflict.

Conflict

What does conflict look like. As a departure point, I lean again on Frey, who claims that conflict is escalating tension played out in the attack-counterattack interactions of characters.

Conflict reveals what characters are like. If Dorothy and company hadn't gone up against the Wicked Witch, Scarecrow would not have found his brains, nor the Cowardly Lion his courage, nor the Tin Man his heart, nor Dorothy her home, nor Toto his faithfulness to Dorothy. What, after all, are courage, intelligence, heart, and faithfulness without concrete circumstances in which to they are demonstrated. They are nonsense words. But, when we see them in action, we see what makes up the abstraction "home" for Dorothy. The fact that the characters in Oz have real-world equivalents that Dorothy identifies on and around her family farm indicates that in real life, courage, intelligence, faithfulness, and heart are hidden in ordinary people. Lukeman and Frey both reference the concept that a story should have an identifiable premise. For the Wizard of Oz, I believe the premise is the following: leaving home leads to a better understanding of what the virtues of home are.

Lukeman expands this idea and claims that characters have a premise or journey. Dorothy, in my example, moves from naivete to understanding, as do some of the characters around her. Parallel or inverted journeys add depth to a work when used well, according to Lukeman.

Dorothy's transformation (journey) as a character both mirrors the journeys of her friends and contrasts with them. In order for Dorothy to find home, she must leave Oz, leave her friends. In order for her friends to find themselves and what they desire most, they must reunite with Dorothy by rescuing her from the Wicked Witch. All the characters seek to find their hearts' desires and so they travel together to see the Wizard of Oz. Apparently, they have a united purpose. Ultimately, however, there is no such thing as a Great and Powerful Wizard of Oz. There are only Witches, good or bad, that influence the characters' journeys. The characters journeys lead to the (potentially) moving conclusion where Dorothy has journeyed as far as she can with her friends.

In order to understand the attack-counterattack of characters, read Frey's book. I will not discuss it here since he does a much better job of illuminating what he meant by conflict, particularly in dialogue. My main ambition here was to clarify what I feel is an important technique that stems from Frey's and Lukeman's observations, that of characters showing the reader/viewer who they are and who they are becoming by what they do.

I had intended to discuss dialogue, suspense, and viewpoint in this post, but I feel I have taxed myself in writing this and thus my readers will probably need to digest this.

For writing purposes, I apply the principle to writing advice that I do to the rules of language or the rules of a board game: I learn them and review them until they are internalized.

Think of any type of game (card, video, board, strategy, sport) that you know how to play well. If you thought about it, you could probably explain how to play the game. But knowing is different than explaining. When you know how to play the game, you have the rules inside you. Similar to knowing how to speak your native language. You know how to speak it without hauling out a grammar book and diagramming the sentence you are about to say.

You speak your native language all the time. So what.

Exactly. Your mind was geared toward learning the rules of speaking and the formation of sounds of your native language and did so almost automatically, barring certain language learning difficulties. Writing and spelling, however are not automatically learned. Soon, however, a person can internalize the basics of writing and spelling in their native language with appropriate training.

Learning a skill and becoming masterful at it takes time. I will not enter into the debate about whether genius is created or born. I told my English students that writing well can be learned, and I guess I will end with that. Practice writing, learn about how to write well, and spend time actually writing and you will learn how to write. Writing can be learned. If you remove one of these components, I believe your writing will suffer.

By all means, fulfill your obligations. Do not risk your livelihood and happiness, no matter how many zany, depressed-yet-successful, impoverished authors your friends cite as role models. I will say that every writing book I have read, without fail, has claimed that every human being has some time to pursue the activities that are important to them. Lukeman cites a person who wrote on toilet paper in prison. Listen to the Writing Excuses podcast to hear them address excuses.

I'm done for now. Spent. If you want inspiration or advice, read the books, listen to the podcasts.