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My Musings

On Writing: Words and Characterization

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On Writing: Words and Characterization

by Reed James

 

It should come as no surprise that words are very important to a writer. English is a rich language, and that gives writers a lot of tools when it comes to their writings. Often we have two, three, or even more words that can convey almost the same meaning, with only minor differences in the shades of their meeting. Since words are our tools, we should get to know them well, keeping them sharp and choosing the right word for the write task.

Take ‘yell’, ‘shout’, and ‘cry’. They all pretty much mean the same thing: to exclaim. But yell has connotations of anger and rebuke, shout gives the feeling that the character is trying to be heard over another noise or over distance, and cry adds a feeling of pain or sadness or even passion to what the character exclaims.

7585568394_486de2d363_oThis is very important when it comes to characterization. Depending on your writing style, you could be employing first person or third person limited POVs, where the narrator either is your character or the narrator lives in the mind of the character. This is less important in normal third person narrative, where the narrator is omniscient and can flit in and out of character’s minds for brief moments. Different characters will think with different words, and when you’re writing their POV you need to demonstrate that. An uneducated person isn’t going to use large, scientific, or obscure words and is more likely to use slang and simple words. A prudish person isn’t like to use harsh swear words like ‘fuck’ or ‘shit’, and may use euphemisms like ‘fudge’ or ‘shoot’. A religious person may not use the Lord’s name in vain. Regional dialect will crop up, changing the patterns of speech. Even with an omniscient narrator your characters will still speak, and their speech should reflect who they are. Maybe its punctuated with obscenities, maybe their given over to verbose speech in an effort to prove how intelligent they are, maybe they use a lot of technical jargon.

The protagonist of my upcoming erotica ‘My Test Drive Lover’ is a lesbian. She’s working at a dealership selling Ferraris. My own inclination is to use the word ‘salesmen’ to describe her job. I’m a man and often don’t think about such gender issues (I know, a failing on my part), but Aurora is not a man, and she certainly wouldn’t be one to use a gender specific title when the gender neutral ‘salesperson’ is available. That’s an important thing as a writer; you have to be prepared to step out of your own experiences and into someone else’s. You have to try and imagine not just how they would act, but how they would speak and think, changing your own language to match theirs like a chameleon changing his skin to blend into the background. And you do that by mastering your words.

And mastering your words takes practice. I’m not perfect. I make grammar mistakes all the time. I bet there’s going to be one or two in this article that I’ll completely miss when I edited this. That’s life; you’re only human. But you have to strive and practice. If you don’t care enough to understand your tools—your words—then your audience will pick up on that. So read up on grammar. When you have a question, look it up on the internet or ask someone’s opinion. Writing is a craft and, like all crafts, it takes practice to hone and maintain. Your writing will only benefit from this.

Here’s a couple of sites I use when I have questions:
Merriam-Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary: The go to dictionary for American English. They have a free site, but their unabridged dictionary costs about $30 dollars a year, and they add new words to it all the time.
Grammar Monster: Short and quick rules.
Your Dictionary: A nice, ordered site for looking up rules.
Grammar Girl: She has a great article on what to look for while editing.

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My Musings

On Writing: Chapters

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Note Taking

by Reed James

A book is nothing more than a collection of scenes woven together for a narrative purpose. How these scenes are organized, paced, and divided into chapters greatly affects both the tone and the flow of the novel. Figuring out how to choose where your chapter breaks are can be one of the toughest decisions. There is a lot of advice out there, but what’s right for you and your work?

Short chapters can give an sense of urgency, propelling the story. Long chapters can give a story a sense of weight, a slow fire slowly bringing the kettle to a boil. The pacing of your scenes and chapters is so very important. So how do you make that decision? Some people live by the 5k rule. Studies show that most readers have about a half-hour to read before bed and prefer to stop at the end of a chapter. 5K words is what the average person reads in a half-hour. But is that the right way?

A chapter needs to have its own life and purpose. It’s there to accomplish a task. When I write a chapter, I have a mini-theme and story I want this chapter to convey and it will be as long or as short as it needs to be to get the job done. Perhaps its an action chapter, or maybe it’s setup where I’m weaving several characters to the verge of collusion. The most important thing is to be true to the story your telling. If it’s a fast paced thriller, use short chapters, if it’s a long epic, stretch it out a bit. I’ve seen a chapter that’s 190 pages long in the hardback edition. It was a single battle, the chapter seemed to never end, making me feel the exhausting, unending brutality that the characters felt. I have seen other chapters that were but a single sentence of even a single word. A word so important, so profound to the story, the author gives it such weight by having it exist as a single chapter.

What’s really important, once you have your pacing, is how you end the chapter. While most readers may want chapters to let them take a break, you should ended it so they’re wanting more. When people say a book is a page turner, they mean that at the end of every chapter was a cliffhanger that made the itch to find out what happened next. “Just one more chapter,” becomes the mantra. It doesn’t have to a life or death cliffhanger, but maybe it’s a question asked, a sudden twist, an unexpected character showing up, or a character breaking down on the verge of being crushed under the weight of their problems. Keep them reading. That’s really the most important thing.

If you were wondering about the 190 page chapter, ‘A Memory of Light’ by Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson. I’m blanking on a one word chapter that I’ve read. I feel it was a Steven King novel. Google is failing me in this regard. The only one I can find is ‘Misery’ and I never read that one.

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My Musings

On Writing: Taking Notes

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Note Taking

by Reed James

Organization is so very important when it comes to writing. You may think writing is easy. You just sit down and let your fingers fly across the keyboard. But if you really want to write something meaningful (I know, a guy who writes smut is talking about writing something with meaning) you need to take notes.

Have an outline to guide you as you write. It doesn’t have to be super detailed, that’s really up to your own tastes, but you need something down to give direction, to know where your characters are going, what challenges they’ll face, and how experience will change them. I prefer to outline the major points of the story and then see where inspiration takes me as I journey to those points.

Next you should keep notes. If you have a character, say a minor cop that likes to chew a specific brand of tobacco, you should write that down in your notes. You may never even plan on using the character, but down the road you just may realize you need him/her to fulfill some part in your story and you’ll want those notes to keep the character traits consistent. Believe me, someone will spot the discrepancy. Keep notes on everything, descriptions of characters, of places, mannerisms, ticks, fears, relationships. If you do this from beginning, it will save you headaches down the road.

Have a system to find your notes. The most detailed notes in the world will not help you if you can’t locate the information. Whether you write your notes down and keep them in a filing cabinet or you have them as files on your computer, have a system. Use subfolders, consistent file naming, or whatever method you want, just be able to find those notes when you need them.

Do not rely on your memory. If you haven’t written a character in a while, you’re liable to grow fuzzy on some the details. Read your notes, that’s why you wrote them down to begin with. You’re only human and human memory is mutable. It changes, shifts, distorts with time. Maybe you’re that rare person that can hold all those details in your head. Good for you. But I bet the vast majority of us (yes us, I have made this very sin before) just are not capable of doing that.

Readers love consistency. It shows that you care enough to put hard work into your writing. So do the best you can, be the best you can. Whether your writing a novel exploring the myriad aspects of the human spirit or smut, put your all into it. It may be what separates you from the thousands of other writers out there.

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