The Confabulator Cafe

Category: Mechanics

  • Too Many D*cks on the Dance Floor: Doing More with Less

    In my own writing, I don’t usually work with a large cast of characters. I like simple stories that are more or less stripped down to their bare essentials. Whenever I write a scene that has more than two characters, I tend to get worried about whether or not everyone is getting equal billing.

    Has the third wheel gotten enough lines? Do they even have anything to add at this point? Will the reader wonder where they’ve gone if I don’t mention them soon? It’s a point of stress for me that I try to avoid whenever I can.

    That being said, I see absolutely no reason I can’t offer you advice on the topic. Just think about it like someone with agoraphobia giving you tips on how to enjoy the great outdoors. At the very least, it could be entertaining. And, really, what else do you have to do for the next five minutes?

    (Most likely the answer is a lot of other things, but for now let’s pretend your schedule’s wide open.) So buckle up. Here we go.

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  • The Han Solo Effect

    I’m not a very social person. I try to be nice to people, but overall, I have a very small group of friends. It’s hard to maintain a large number of friends and give them all the attention they deserve.

    The same applies to your cast of characters in a work of fiction. Keep them under control. It may seem like a lot of fun to sit and make up characters, but in the end, you risk losing the focus of your story and confusing your reader.

    There is a story about The Stand that I came across in which Stephen King realized his cast of characters had gotten out of hand. His solution was to immediately kill several off. This resulted in the closet bomb scene that you may remember, if you are a fan of the book.

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  • Crowd Control (Week Ending September 15)

    The next time you’re at a party or in a crowded restaurant, try listening to the conversations around you. Usually it all becomes an auditory blur, that can be mimicked by saying “watermelon, cantaloupe, watermelon, cantaloupe” over and over. Now imagine trying to write that dialogue.

    For writers, large casts of characters present some unique problems. Not only is there the very real possibility of over-lapping conversations, there is also what is known in theatre as “blocking” — the movement and positioning of characters on a stage. A writer must know where each character is and what he or she is doing at any particular moment.

    So we’ve asked our writers in the Cafe to share with us their tips. What’s the best way to write dialogue for a crowded room? When is it a good time to give secondary characters a chance to shine? How does one keep crowds of characters from spiraling into chaos?

    We hope you’ll find the advice from our writers helpful. Be sure to leave comments with them if you have any questions or if you’d like to share your own tips.

    Until Next Week,

    The Cafe Management

  • It’s the Triforce of Storytelling

    I’m going to break the fourth wall here for a minute: this week’s topic was hard for me, because it’s hard for me to think of the writing I do as having any sort of technique. I realize how pretentious that sounds. I don’t mean, like, Everything I do is pure a~rt~ or anything like that — nor do I mean it in the self-deprecating (my favorite) way of, nothing I write is any go~od T_T. It’s just that, um, I just write and think about all that other shit later.

    Here I am, two days before my post is supposed to go up (and thus days late from the poor editors POV), with a cup of coffee, and I’m thinking: When I’m writing, how do I try to manipulate my reader?

    And there it is: I want to mess with my reader’s feelings. I want to own my reader for about 30K to 70K words and never ever let them go. I want to make their whole brain go HOORAY or NO NOT AT ALL NOPE or OMG WHY or, maybe sometimes, HMMMMM. I even expect them do it in all caps. If life were Tumblr, I would expect them to need at least three reaction GIFs by the end of my story.

    Now that I think of it that way, oh, of course. I use techniques. Duh.

    It’s still taken me damn near two hours to figure out the rest of this post. The number of failed drafts would utterly boggle you.

    SPN - Writing is Hard
    You can’t mention reaction GIFs without including one. Internet Law.

    I think there are three things I try to do well to keep a reader invested. (Sometimes consciously, sometimes unconsciously.)

    1. World Building
    2. Characters
    3. Structure

    I don’t always do them well, or maybe I don’t always pay attention to what I’m doing, but generally speaking, this is how I do it.

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  • Getting It Out In View

    What you see is not necessarily what you get. The well-dressed man’s brain is filled with realistic though bizarre characters who will get under your skin. Image borrowed from here.

    I recently finished a book by the crime writer Jim Thompson. If his name is unfamiliar to you, you may have seen one of the films of one of his books: The Getaway, The Grifters or The Killer Inside Me. Or maybe you saw his scripts filmed by Stanley Kubrick: The Killing or Paths of Glory. Or maybe this is the first time you’re hearing about him.

    His stories are peopled with characters who are so twisted, so damaged that one cannot turn away from the story. It’s like each person he’s writing is such a train wreck that to not look is impossible. Pop. 1280 is the most twisted thing I’ve read since The Killer Inside Me. In Killer, you’re as involved as the main character in every depraved act that’s committed, complicit in the crimes. The same is true in 1280, but he adds a layer of racism that’s beyond uncomfortable and it’s even uncomfortable in the mind of the narrator.

    Each book, written in first person, puts the reader deep inside a main character’s insidious brain squirming with creeping tendrils of evil and malice disguised as rational thought. It’s unnerving, to say the least. I couldn’t stop reading. I had to know what was going to happen next.

    Dropping compelling characters into bizarre circumstances is certainly one way to keep me engaged in a story and Pop. 1280 is a master class in how to do it. Each chapter ends not just on a cliffhanger, but with the expectation that while that may be a nice place to stop you’d better not. If you do — well, let’s just say that no matter what you think might happen next it won’t hold a candle to what does happen. It’s not the shock value that kept me reading, it was that the darker the places his characters went the more it made sense. He drew me deeply into those parts of my psyche that I don’t often go. (more…)

  • Structural Integrity

    For what I do, one of the challenges it to prevent the reader from flipping though pages. If the reader is flipping pages, searching for an elusive bit of information, then my document structure has failed.

    You can tell a story different ways. If you are looking at a sequence or procedure, then you probably want to organize your document chronologically. But if I’m trying to describe a situation, I prefer an inverted pyramid structure. Start with the wider picture, then drill down into specific details. Each section can have an independent internal structure as well.

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  • If they don’t stumble, trip them

    I’ve tried lots of structural things to keep the reader moving through the story. The first and easiest place to start is with mechanics. Things like cliffhanger chapter endings, ominous foreshadowing, alternating storylines, out-of-order plot sequencing. I’ve read lots of good books that use similar techniques, and to great effect. For my own writing, I’ve found that all of these techniques work, at least to a point.

    But none of them are particularly good substitutes for simply writing a compelling plot.

    So, how do you write a compelling plot?

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  • One Good Turn

    Go for the unexpected.

    This week’s question is tough. Telling you what I do to keep readers turning the page assumes two things—first, that people do feel compelled to turn the pages of what I write, and second, that I actually do things intentionally to make that happen.

    I don’t have a big enough ego (yet) to be sure of either of those things. All I can tell you is what I try to do:

    • Go for the unexpected. If the story seems to be travelling in a straight line, swerve to the left or right and throw in something bizarre. In my books, this often translates to a lovesick satyr on the doorstep, a unicorn with a skin rash and no virgins around to treat the wounds, or a gremlin waylaying my heroine and dragging her off to break up a fight between his brothers in the tool shed.
    • Drop a bomb at the end of the chapter. Blow something up. Have someone unexpected show up and say something weird, threatening, or ominous. Toss the main character over the side of a ship into shark-infested waters. Have the ex-husband show up and bang on the restaurant window while the main character is on a date. (more…)

  • Just Write Awesomely

    So many nights I’ve sat down to read a chapter or two of a book before bed, only to find myself still unable to put the book down at 2am or later. One of my goals as a writer is to write a book like that someday: a book someone is so into that he or she just can’t stop turning pages.

    I’m still learning different techniques to do this, but here are some of the things I’ve tried so far – things I’ve gleaned from the books I can’t put down, and things that have worked in some of my own novels.

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  • Engage!

    LOGO advertisement
    Good headline, great design, clever copy and a bold logo make for an engaging advertisement.

    Reading is not a passive form of entertainment like watching television or movies. To get people to read your story, you have to connect with them on a number of levels. In marketing, we talk about engaging the customer.

    Engagement can come from a variety of sources: a catchy headline, a beautiful picture, clever copy, or a memorable logo. Chances are, when a consumer is engaged by an ad it’s the result of several things working together.

    Writing a creative piece — whether it’s a short story or a novel — challenges the writer to engage readers using only words. And, as in marketing, it’s not just one thing that engages readers.

    It’s how well everything works together.

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