How I Write Fiction: Description (Winter Solstice 2016)

Vanishing Point

As the year of writing essays draws to a close, we end up where we started at Imbolc, writing lines. The goal of description is to lift the fog in the reader’s mind and allow her to see the story. Through it, details emerge that make a story come alive.

By the time I sit down to spin an idea from the magic box into a story, I usually have at least a rough outline of the plot, if only in my head. I have a sense of the world it is set in. I know the main characters. I might even have some snippets of dialog. Description is the glue that binds it all together, the final piece of the puzzle slipped in place. In ways, it is the creation of the story itself.

Like wishes from a magic ring, the best things come in threes. I write stories in three distinct waves or drafts. The first involves getting the ideas down from start to finish unobstructed though sometimes incomplete. The second cleans up the first, filling in any holes, deepening it and making it resonate. The third cuts out the excess to make it flow and polishes it until it shines.

I start the first draft by working in a notebook. Writing longhand slows down any stray thoughts and allows a voice to surface. It focuses my mind on the story as I start to hear that narrative voice in my head. The morning I first sit down with pencil and paper, I try to write out at least a few pages without interruption. I keep writing until the words eventually run out. By then, my mind is buzzing with phrases and descriptions for several more scenes in the outline. I note as many of these as I can.

The downside of writing longhand is the duplication of effort as I then have to type in what I’ve written. When I sit down at the computer, I usually abandon the notebook. Once the voice is set, the story begins to flow by itself. But if I get stuck or discouraged or end up being away from a story for a prolonged period (as happens much too often), I’ll return to the notebook again to see what comes out. It’s a surprisingly effective tool for getting past writer’s block.

Because my hand is slower than my thoughts, writing longhand gives my mind a chance to ruminate just a bit between words as my fingers catch up with the images my muse has conjured. There is something meditative about the process, and more than a bit ironic. By slowing down, I speed up the overall time it takes to write a story down.

Writing longhand also puts effective curbs on my desire to edit while creating. Those two processes should always be kept distinct. Once you start cutting and polishing, you’ll want to do more, which means your mind will have switched from a imaginative mode to a critical one. Those are two separate mental spaces. Once your inner critic kicks in, your muse will flee back to her sanctuary.

Unlike most writing advice I’ve read about first drafts, I don’t just power through mine. Many books will tell you to just keep moving. If you stumble with a question or an unknown, leave it blank, note it and move on. You can revisit it in the next draft.

I don’t work that way. It’s not my process. When I get stuck on some aspect of filling in the plot, or getting a character from A to B, or often even envisioning a location, I almost always address it right then. Small details I note and let go, just not anything central to the overarching storyline.

That’s a dangerous path, but if I don’t solve the problem right away, it will niggle at me and ultimately slow my progress to a crawl. My mind knows something is wrong and can’t keep from worrying it like a polished stone. Perhaps that’s the engineer in me. Or my mind just works step by step, knowing where each foot will fall upon the path before lifting it. Your mileage may vary.

That’s not to say that there isn’t still work to be done after my first draft. There certainly is. It’s just that my first drafts are perhaps more evolved than some others.

In the second draft, I begin to sweat the small details. This is where I try to deepen my arguments by reinforcing both descriptions and the metaphors and symbols underlying them.

Specifically the descriptions of locations. In general, I have to be able to see the places I write about in my mind, large or small, from city streets to individual rooms in individual houses. I have to know exactly where that place is. Some locations are based on my memory of places I’ve been, others on pictures I seen or have in front of me, a few on impressions from other peoples accounts. Many locations end up being fusions of two or three different places.

As an example, the Stack Maze in Interdiction was based on a housing complex called Habitat 67 in Montreal that caught my imagination when I first saw a picture of it in my Art and Architecture textbook in college. I combined that with the container stacks I’d seen in ports and morphed it all with the idea of constructing homes from castoff containers used to ship supplies to a colony.

And just as with characters, place names are important to me. In more than one story, I’ve chosen a location as a setting from a road atlas just because the name itself had some underlying meaning, either as a symbol or a metaphor. As another example, in Aluria’s Tale, the main human character first encounters main genetically modified feline character just outside Roswell, Georgia. Why? Because where better to discover a secret, near alien species hidden by the government than a place called Roswell.

For some stories, I’ll make up place names based on underlying linguistics. So in the Celtic area of the fantasy world surrounding the city of Dirkham, you might run across Mil Tober (literally honey well in Scots Gaelic place name lore) or Dun Aird (high fort). Or, you might cross the River Afon on the ferry at Harper. All of which I hope evokes a particular look and feel even if the reader doesn’t understand the direct meaning, which I almost never call out in the story. Sometimes, as with Scots Gaelic or Welsh place name conventions, readers may subconsciously pick up those naming patterns over time (like caer being a castle or kil being a church).

As I said, I need to be able see each location and scene in my mind, even if I don’t describe it. I need to know if the end table with the open book on it next to the chair in Peacekeeper is round or square or triangular. I need to know whether the chair itself, which is unmentioned, is overstuffed or wing backed or a recliner or just a simple hard-back. While I rarely go into that level of detail, I need to be able to see it in case it ends up being important down the road and it needs to be described. Strange, I know. But again, that’s just the way my mind works. 

By the time I finish the second draft, there should be no questions left unanswered, no matter how minor. And any changes from the first draft, from place names to the content of a character’s pockets to the underlying metaphor of her grandmother’s gold promise ring sewn beneath the beltline of her fatigues as emergency currency should be woven back in from the very beginning. Those metaphors and symbols need to resonate. By the time it’s finished, the second draft should read clean from front to back.

Only once it does I begin the process of crafting and carving the third and final draft from it. Just as with sculpting, the idea here is to remove material and polish what you leave behind.

The goal is strictly editing. It is the process of deciding what needs to be in a story and what is better left out. To a large degree, in fiction less is more. Finding the right balance is what allows prose to shine. 

In general, there are a few items I focus on. One is smoothing the transitions. In many cases description and dialog are stitched together from separate pieces of writing on separate days as, again, that’s how my mid works. So making sure those seams are invisible, if they aren’t already, is my first goal. 

Another area I target for review is where I move the characters around. Many times while writing my mind wants to say a character went from A to B to C to D in a logical progression, where in reality all I need is a scene break between A and D because B and C add nothing to the narrative. Sometimes that scene break serves as a time break as well where going into details of what the character did for the intervening three hours is either unimportant or can be summarized with something like she cleaned her gun and then drove to the rendezvous. 

Next, I dwell on words I might not have been mindful of when the first draft spilled out. At this stage, a quality dictionary and thesaurus are essential. Some words I find should be more precise rather than the general ones I used. In other cases it’s just the opposite, a simpler word will do. Often I’ll look up the meaning of a more exotic word to make sure I’m using it right, even if it’s only through a secondary meaning. Or I’ll peruse the etymology of a word to see if there is a nuance in its history that I want to exploit.

I try to cut out every unnecessary word. Adjectives, adverbs, whole descriptive phrases at times. Sometimes sentences or entire sections. The goal is to make certain the words that remain have the most impact. Sometimes that requires addition rather than subtraction.  As well, I look for places where I reuse the same word or phrase unintentionally within a short space and find an alternative.

Finally, once I think it’s ready, I read the piece aloud, just as I do with an essay or a poem. Here I’m listening for any burrs, any phrases that I consistently stumble over. Or places where I continue to reverse word order from what’s on the page. In both cases, I think my mind is trying to tell me something so I try to heed it.

Only when I get a clean read do I print it out and hand it over to my beta reader for her assessment, critique and editorial comments. And after I address and incorporate her notes, I read the piece one last time on the physical page to make sure I haven’t missed anything. Sadly, I still often do. 

In my experience, a story tends to grow from the first draft to the second and then shrink from the second to the third. But the third draft is almost always longer than the first (unless I’m writing under a strict word limit).

To reiterate, first draft gets the story down. The second draft deepens it. The third draft oils it and makes it hum.

Of course, each of these drafts may well encompass more than a single iteration of their own. I don’t tend to work that way, but many writers talk about multiple, sometimes double digit drafts just to get their stories where they want them. As I mentioned, I tend to worry over each aspect as it comes up so I don’t have to redo work. In the end, the time of our journeys may be much the same. Many paths, one mountain.

As I said at the onset, the goal of description is to lift the fog in the reader’s mind and allow her to see the story. Images should form in her head. She should believe the places the characters move through could be real. She should feel as though the world continues to shift behind the falling curtain even when there is no character there to witness the evolution. The characters themselves should seem like real people to her, friends, enemies or simply interesting strangers in a coffee shop. They should have ticks and nuances that anchor them but not so heavily as to weigh them down.

The moment you lift that fog for her, when she tells you she can read the names of the boats in the marina as she passed each on the dock, that she can hear the conspiratorial whispers of your characters in one of the cabins over the gentle lap of waves and the distant, intermittent fog horn, that she can smell the sea mixed with death and diesel and the scent stale fish, that she can feel the veil of mist open the pores on her face even as it departs and taste the salt as its lingering tears run to the corners of her mouth, then and only then can you can officially call yourself a writer.

But even then, your journey has only just begun.

© 2016 Edward P. Morgan III 

How I Write Fiction: Dialog (Samhain 2016)

Eye Contact

Long before stories were written, they were spoken. So you would think writing dialog would come as easily as talking. For many authors, it does not. Dialog is consistently mentioned as one of the hardest aspects of the craft for a writer to master. Why?

Well, there’s a dirty little secret underlying dialog. It isn’t really the way people talk at all. It’s a graceful illusion, a shorthand for the way people actually speak. It’s convenient stand-in, a body-double. A doppelganger.

Don’t believe me? Listen to how people actually talk to one another. I mean really listen. People pause, they stumble, they interrupt, they insert random asides. They er, they uhm, they use the wrong words, they leave sentences dangling without completing them. In general, they use a shorthand that relies on the others in the conversation to interpret what they really mean, more so if their co-conversationalist is well-known like a friend or family. If you want a really good example of this, listen to only one half of someone’s telephone conversation.

Yes, people are lazy even in the way they speak. It’s an evolutionary advantage. Never use more energy than you absolutely have to. Save it for something important like survival.

A writer cannot survive by being lazy. The last thing a writer wants is for her readers to have to infer what her characters really mean, what they are really trying to say. So mimicking speech is unlikely what she wants to do if she wants to be clearly understood. No one wants to slog through an unedited transcript of an actual conversation.

Learning to listen to the way people talk is a lot like learning to draw. First, you have to train your mind to see what’s really in front of it, not the symbolic shorthand it uses to quickly categorize items it sees everyday to save time. Don’t believe me, picture a chair, quick, right now. Odds are you just pictured something like a simple, straight-back chair without arms or even a padded seat. Whatever it was, compare it to the chair in your office, the chair in your living room, the chair at your dining room table, the chairs in your twelve-step program. Chances are they look nothing alike other than in the most basic, symbolic ways. They both have backs, they both have seats, they both have four legs (or maybe five with wheels). In order to draw one of those real chairs, you must cast that symbolic one aside and actually see the unique chair in front of you. Otherwise, your mind will continue to try and force that symbolic chair into your drawing which will mar the results. It’s the same with faces, or shoes, or anything other common item you want to draw.

And it’s the same with listening to people in conversation. Your mind filters out the ers and uhms, the pauses and stumbles, the wrong word choices and interruptions you don’t always know you make. But only after you learn to hear what’s really there can you capture the essence underneath.

What a writer wants to do is make her readers think she’s captured authentic speech, at least the way people hear it in their heads. People are very good at filtering out those odd little speech ticks and filling in what’s missing. A good dialog writer captures what comes out the other side of that black box in people’s heads. What they think they hear, not what is actually said. And if you only employ the front-end filter, you’ll end up with perfectly acceptable dialog. Kind of like listening to the neutral Ohio or California accent of a newscaster, it works well if the main point of your dialog is to convey information and emotion. Master that alone and your dialog will be generally well received. For many applications, that’s enough.

But if you want to use dialog to reinforce a character, there are further choices to be made. The first, just like writing in first person, is finding the voice of that particular character. For me, a great deal of that revolves around word choice.

First, a quick aside about phonetic spelling to reinforce a character or his accent. This used to be quite common. I still run across it now and then. I don’t favor it and never really have. Mainly because I find it very difficult to read and slow to sort out. If I do it at all, it tends to be once with one or two words (or an explanation in exposition) to set the example then let it go.

Colloquial or regional speech is different, though here again, I try to be careful. While a few choice words can immediately set where you are (say “wicked” around Boston, or “y’all” in the South), it’s easy to overdo it and have it sound like a parody (or worse, an offensive stereotype, cuz). There are more subtle constructions, phrasing and patterns of speech that tend to lend better affect. In the South, phrases like “God love her” or calling someone Mister Edward (for me), or Miss Karen (for my wife), depending on the speaker and the context. And that’s before you get into the alternate regional choices of words for things like cola, soda and pop. The best thing to do again is listen and mimic what you hear, lightly. Like salt or Tabasco, a little flavor goes a long way. 

Perhaps best way to illustrate that is with foreign accents. Many non-native English speakers tend to initially speak English based on the rules of their native language. Where English tends to construct its sentences in the order of subject-verb-object, other languages do not. Welsh prefers verb-subject-object. As does Hebrew. That construction sounds odd to an English speaker because of the word order (which may explain why the Bible has a particular cadence at times like, “spoke God to Moses” rather than “God spoke to Moses”). It’s the same with languages that don’t use articles (a, an, the), languages that put the adjective after the object, languages that don’t use contractions, languages that have gendered nouns, and a host of other features you might hear if you listen.

As an example, having a character not use contractions can make him sound formal or authoritative or foreign depending on the context of the other word choices around that tick. 

Word choice and phrasing can vary depending gender, too. As I’ve read it, part of gender speech patterns are socially derived, but perhaps an equal part are evolutionary. They are a bit tough to pull apart. In broad strokes, there are different patterns to male and female communication evoked by word choice and style. That’s not to say all men or all women speak in a particular way, just that there are tendencies a writer can exploit or reverse for either resonance or effect. Having a female character speak with a distinctly male style might make her strong in some reader’s eyes or come off as a bitch in others. Just as having a male speak in a female style can make him seem either empathetic and charismatic or weak and effeminate, depending as much on the reader as the writer. Or they might not notice at all.

Another aspect of word choice that is more unique to English derives from its history. For many words, we have a choice of two equally weighted synonyms, one that derives from Old English, another that derives from Norman-French (from the days of the Norman Conquest). We use most interchangeably but there is sometimes a subtle difference between them. Old English words tend to have more impact (often, though not always, they tend to be shorter). Norman-French words tend to soften the impact (and sometimes tend to be longer). An example might be cunning (Old English) and guile (Old French). Cunning has a meaner, more raw connotation to me, where guile comes off as more artfully manipulative. Compare your reaction to weird (Old English) and strange (Old French). Or freedom (Old English) and liberty (Old French via Latin).

It’s the same with Old English and Latin directly. As an extreme example (because of variants in recent news stories), think of the words vagina (Latin) and cunt (Middle English). Or fornicate (Latin) and fuck (Old English, or just old). One of each pair probably sounds more jarring and profane to your ear. If your character is educated, of a certain status or a certain morality, she might prefer one over the other. And, yes, many of our English curse words come down from Old English (bitch is another but bastard isn’t). That alone should demonstrate their power.

Which segues to a broader point about profanity. It’s not something I avoid if it fits the character, but it’s also not something I throw in gratuitously. It can be an effective tool in revealing character, by its absence as well as its presence. Consider a soldier who does not curse like the others in a hard-bitten company. That might say he is naïve. Or innocent. Or religious. Or aristocratic (so not acceptable language). None of which you have to call out but all of which might resonate with other word choices to reinforce the trait. But the same word of caution: profanity, like most other aspects of dialog, is very easy to overdo.

As is slang, which can be even more fraught with danger. True youthful slang ages and morphs at lightning speed. Words that sound hip and edgy today can totes sound outdated and overused literally overnight.

Also note that the same person tends to speak in different ways depending on their audience. They might choose different words or phrases when talking to their wife, their children, their coworkers, or the cashier at the grocery store, never mind giving a formal address or being dead drunk in a bar. In other languages, this trait can be even more pronounced with separate words, endings or forms used to address subordinates, peers or superiors. The trick in fiction, if you choose to represent the way we casually do this in English, is to somehow keep the character consistent.

Which brings up tag lines, phrases a character repeats like a touchstone to establish and reinforce who they are. I’ve used them at times to anchor a character, especially in stories within a series. But, again, a light touch or you risk being read as a Simpsons parody. Doh!

All of which is a very weighted way to say that your word choice can reinforce your character. Educated, common, urban, rural, formal, casual, foreign, regional, all of these can be represented without resorting to phonetics. A writer’s word choices can resonate with a reader even if they don’t consciously understand why.

Beyond word choice, the essence of what a character says (or doesn’t say) is critically important. Why are they speaking? Does the content sound natural or artificial? More importantly, is the conversation necessary? Is it furthering the plot or revealing and developing character, or is it extraneous? Do these things need to be said at all? The answer, at least for me, can be more of an art than a science.

With the exception of using dialog as exposition (having a character deliver information to reader by talking to another character). Think of the data dumps in science fiction, massive chunks of exposition disguised as dialog used to convey either the science or the setting. Basically, if you could add the words “as you know” to a piece of dialog and it doesn’t sound out of place then you’ve drifted into exposition. And just deleting those words won’t change that. Unless it’s subtle and well done, it sounds clunky or stilted. Unless there’s no other good choice, it might be best to say it outside of dialog.

This leads into a final touch point about dialog: attributions. For the most part, I find “said” covers most of what I need. He said, she said. While there are times that other verbs would work (yelled, droned, drawled, whispered), said is reliable, generally inconspicuous and inoffensive. While, for the most part, using very specific verbs is a hallmark of good writing, in attributions they can scream for attention where you don’t really want it. Or they can come off as redundant if your word choice makes it clear a character was, say, being sarcastic, dude. So I find said to be my go-to. Usually but not always without an adverb. Said quietly and whispered are almost but not quite interchangeable. Though, like many things in writing, it’s a style choice you can make work if you want to.

Attribution also lends to another subtle shading of dialog, pacing. Where you put that he said, she said in a sentence, or whether you do at all (with two people in conversation, I find I only occasionally need to re-anchor who’s speaking), breaks up the speech pattern and can add a short pause that you don’t always have to call out. It also gives you a chance to move characters around the scene as they speak, which implies other, perhaps longer pauses. It can illustrate that a character is distracted, or thinking as he examines something in the scenery you might want to draw attention to, say as he picks up and reads the spine of a book before he answers a question.

As well, it gives you a chance to intersperse a few non-verbal cues (head shakes, sighs, frowns, furrows, gestures, glares, grunts, sidelong glances) that comprise a huge portion of human communication.

So how can you tell if you’ve succeeded? The easiest way for me is by reading my dialog aloud. I focus on a few questions. First, do I run out of breath trying to get a sentence out? If I don’t find easy, natural breaks, it’s unlikely a real person wouldn’t say it the way I’ve written it. Second, are there words or phrases I consistently trip over? If so, they likely need to be smoothed and revised. Especially to remove any unintentional rhyming or alliteration. Third, does it sound like something I might hear on television, or in a movie or a play? A good trick is to pick a couple favorite actors and imagine them doing a reading with the lines. If it comes out sounding like a B-movie they’d probably try to purge from their IMDB listings, there might still be work to do.

Which circles back to the key point of dialog. Listening. That’s what dialog is all about, capturing what you hear in words yet stylizing it to make it flow smoothly in the reader’s ear. Perfecting it requires practice and patience. But when you get it right, it sounds like an exercise in creative eavesdropping, which is what your readers really want

© 2016 Edward P. Morgan III

How I Write Fiction: Characters (Fall Equinox 2016)

Frog King

My goal in creating characters is to make them feel like real people to the reader. People who move purposefully and realistically through the world I’ve built. People readers would want to have a conversation with, maybe invite over for a party, or cross the street to avoid. 

This weekend, I read some advice from a writer. In two of his fourteen points, he mentioned characters. In one he said that all characters incorporate a piece of the writer. In the other that characters aren’t the author’s alter-egos. While seemingly contradictory, both of these are true in ways. And both can be a bit untrue. They are bound together in the way that a writer makes a character feel like a well-rounded person. For me, that’s based on bringing personal experience and insight to the table.

For each character you write, you have to find a point of empathy, a point of resonance, to make that character believable. One way to do this is to reach within yourself to find that grain or seed that could sprout into the trait your character exhibits to make s/he seem genuine, whether positive or negative. We all have those traits within us, at least to some degree. It’s just a matter of whether we allow them to emerge. As a writer, you have to be willing to explore those traits within yourself honestly. Otherwise, your characters come out flat and one-dimensional.

One way I try to create believable character traits, which is similar but not quite the same, is to listen to the people around me. To actually listen to their beliefs, their internal logic, their struggles. To use empathy as I attempt to understand.

People are interesting. Whenever I can, I talk to individuals one-on-one. In isolation, without an audience to perform for, without other friends around to maintain a façade for, without potential partners to impress, people sometimes let down their guard and tell you the truth. They let you peer very quickly behind the veil and see who they really are. Sometimes it happens after a drink or two, sometimes late at night or early in the morning, sometimes just spontaneously. But at one point or another, most people want someone to hear their story. They want someone to understand. If you listen in that moment, you can learn a lot about motivation and human nature.

Motivation. That tends to be the key to characters for me. There are a couple ways characters can work in fiction. One way is to have them serve the narrative by creating each to fill a need. Sometimes they start with an archetype or a role, a personality trait, a goal or motivation. Starting with an archetype can be useful because they resonate with readers. Readers understand them with a quick glance. The trick is to move beyond a mere archetype and create a flesh and blood character with his or her own desires.

Which leads to the second way to approach characters. Instead of having them serve the narrative, you can have them drive the narrative through their goals and motivation. I end up using a combination of the two. I spend a lot of time thinking about characters, about what they would do in a given situation rather than what I want or need them to do. About how they feel and how that might drive them. That often requires crawling deep into their psyches.

Oddly, for me, that doesn’t always mean coming up with an in-depth background or description. Some writers recommend unearthing a ton of personal details about characters, down to childhood memories so nuanced they might not know them about their spouse, all before they get started. I tend to approach it from the opposite direction. I start with a sketch of a character and unearth those details as I go along, as the narrative unfolds. Then I note them for future reference. For me, that helps curb the urge to over-develop a character then wedge those details I’ve spent weeks constructing into the story.

One aspect of characters I don’t spend much if any time on is their appearance. In many of my stories, physical details tend to be sparse. Usually, I start with gender (because it determines pronouns). Unless some detail reinforces the character or narrative, I try to leave it to the reader’s imagination. Things like height and weight, hair, skin and eyes, and physical attractiveness are often up for grabs. Sometimes I’ll mention a character’s eyes are green or ice blue or a color that shifts from grey to green to amber depending on the light for connotations they bring or the picture they paint beyond a physical description. Or, say, in the case of Gigi Gagnant that she had one breast surgically removed to show her fellow LOW OrbIT Marines she was as tough as any male. An Amazon.

Otherwise, I’m not sure I see the point in a lot of description. Readers fill in physical details in a way that suits them, according to their own internal archetypes. And I, for one, am tired of reading about gorgeous heroes and heroines with rippling muscles and flowing locks who sound as though they were ripped from the cover of a 70’s romance novel. So I favor a silhouette rather than a portrait.

An aspect of characters I do tend to dwell on is their name. Names are important symbols to me. One of the first references I bought when I started writing was a baby name book. Before I settle on the name of a main character, I pore over its meaning and origin. Often, there is level to their name that most readers won’t get, but that grounds me in the character. Take Gigi Gagnant again. Her full first name is Griselda which means “grey battle-maiden.” Gagnant is French for “winner.”  Aside from the direct meanings, the Grey winner aspect of her name hasn’t come out yet in the stories I’ve written with her (but did in stories which have played out in the game she started in, which I one day hope to write). Another example is Nick Michaels. His name is more Anglicization and allusion. His name evokes his personality. Nick, Niccolo. Michaels, Machiavelli.

Now before you start to drive yourself crazy looking for hidden meanings in all the character names I’ve used, consider that I also created a random name generator fed by the first and last names of international soccer players from several men’s and women’s World Cups. Often, I’ll have it spit out a dozen or so names and just mix and match the one I like best. Or if a piece is historical or set in a specific geographic location, I’ll research common names from that area and time. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.

One of the first lessons you hear as a writer is to write what you know. A word of caution, do not do that with characters. Making recognizable characters out people in your life is a very risky proposition. People are unlikely to see themselves the way you see them, even if you think your portrayal is flattering.

I think of many of the characters I write as people I almost knew. They are inspired more by interesting attitudes, beliefs and background details I’ve run across than actual people cut from whole cloth. Most are an amalgam of elements of various individuals I’ve met, which I see as fair game. The same goes for making characters just another facet of myself. How I see myself (or would like to see myself) is just one more element thrown into the mix. But I am not my characters, nor are their attitudes and beliefs a shadow play of mine. Except where they are. If you can’t guess which is which, then I am probably doing my job.

So where else do inspirations for characters come from? Well, for me, some come from non-player characters in various games I’ve run or played, characters who developed their own personality and history over time. In “Slow Tuesday Night” I used lines from two songs as inspirations for two minor characters. I’ve used impressions from mythology and dreams. I’ve used people I’ve seen in various locations and made up quick stories about. Plus the back stories of people I know or have met, as well as my own. Pretty much all of my experience gets fed into the hopper.

More than once, I’ve based characters on the personalities of our various cats, past and present. Watching them interact, especially when we’ve been a multi-cat household, has provided a ton of inspiration. Their personalities may be more subtle but they definitely come through if you pay attention. The best fiction example is "Chosen". Bast/Beth is based on a cat named Sandy, which is even more apparent in Aluria’s Tale where she first appeared. As an exercise, I used to make up dialog of what the cats might be thinking or saying if they could talk, as I did with Nyala in "Winter Solstice 2011 (from Nyala)".

And that to me is the most import aspect of character, establishing their voice and their point of view. That’s where characters spring to life and become memorable, more so than by any unique physical descriptions or tics I’ve seen used. The easiest way I’ve found to establish a voice for a particular character is to start writing for that character in the first person, even if I don’t intend the piece to be from that perspective. If nothing else, it helps in generating the way the character speaks. But I’ll get into that more in the next essay on Dialog.

Mostly, for me, creating characters is an accretive process that begins with World Building. Understanding the world a character lives in gives me the best leg up on who they are. Their history within that world tells me the problems and prejudices they have faced and the likely ways they will react. Which gets back to letting the characters drive the narrative, at least to a degree. As you saw in the essay on Plot, I’m pretty much a top-down organizer. But plotting just notes the destinations, the places you want to see on a vacation. Characters determine the route you use to get there, sometimes scenic, sometimes direct. And sometimes, they detour to interesting destinations all their own.

Like most people I’ve met, my characters start as blank slates whose development is influenced by their experiences. But like most of us, the longer they’ve been around, the more they tend to get hemmed in by the patterns of their thoughts and their previous decisions. And the longer I’ve known them, the more comfortable I get in gauging exactly what they might do, where their virtues and flaws might lead them. How they might struggle with and solve their problems.

And that, if I can capture it, is what I think makes them real.  

© 2016 Edward P. Morgan III

How I Write Fiction: Plot (Lughnasa 2016)

Lost Ball

To any new profession you bring with you the existing experiences from whatever you’ve done before. You drag these experiences around hoping one day they might prove useful again. You analyze them, adapt them and mutate them to see if they fit or work with what you are doing now. Sometimes this leads to novel applications.

As many of you know, before I started Noddfa Imaginings, I designed software for a large-scale (at the time) communication system. I didn’t have full formal training as a software engineer. Before I was offered that opportunity, I was a systems engineer on the same project. Needs changed so I adapted. Just as I had to again when I switched career tracks to become a writer.

When I started writing full-time, one of the first projects I tackled was a novel. Being a reformed engineer, I bought a book to teach me how. I’d read others on the writing craft, in a creative writing course in college along with other for pleasure. This book devoted itself more to a step-by-step structuring of my writing time itself. For plot, this book favored the 3-Act Play.  It’s a pretty common format. You’ll often see is used as the example for the Hero Cycle.

As the title of this essay suggests, I plan to talk about how I approach plot, hopefully in a way you haven’t heard a thousand times before. I’ll try to anchor it with the 3-Act Play structure because I like it and it’s pretty universal.

Plotting, like software design, like writing itself, is a discipline. It also tends to be an iterative process, at least for many writers. So I like to organize it into the four stages of structured design methodology: preliminary design, detailed design, code and unit test (writing scenes or chapters) and integration.

I use some flavor of this approach whether I’m writing a short story (mine tend to be long) or a novel. The only thing that varies is the depth or formality with which I invoke each stage.

Before I start the preliminary design, I usually have a set of requirements. In writing that translates into the question I’m trying to answer, the character change I’m trying to evoke. There may be other requirements I’ve already hashed out for a piece, things like a character I want to use, a setting, a genre, a tone or theme, a specific background idea I want to weave in, sometimes even snippets of dialog. Almost anything from the Magic Box. Your requirements are anything you want to see in the story. More specifically, anything that might affect your plot, or the solutions to plotting problems as they crop up.

Unlike designing software, my requirements aren’t hard and fast. They are just guidelines and preferences. I am free to change those requirements as I go along. If for some reason I find my science fiction story would work better as fantasy, that my plotting obstacle is better overcome with a spell instead of science, I can change that. But I almost never change my central question or the arc of my central character’s change.

To give you a brief example, when I started Aluria’s Tale, I had a handful of requirements. The central question was: why would a woman sacrifice her life for someone else, someone she’d never met. That also served as the change I wanted to evoke in my main character, that she would go from a neutral observer of events to an active participant whose life was at risk. As add-on details, I knew it was going to be post-apocalypse, specifically built around the world I’d created for an role-playing game I’d run. The main character was going to be loosely patterned on an NPC I’d created. That there was going to be a two-track plot between her and a CuFF (genetically modified, intelligent cat) whose life she was going to save. I had a few other background details I wanted to weave in from notes I’d taken on a research trip of the area in which it was set, north Georgia and North Carolina. With that in hand, I was ready to begin.

The 3-Act Play breaks down into several key scenes. Opening Scene, Plot Point 1 (Decision), Midpoint, Plot Point 2 (Reversal), Catharsis and Closing Scene. All with a rising tension until the Catharsis where it quickly falls off into the denouement. That’s all based on Aristotle’s incline.

In preliminary plot design, my goal is to identify these scenes. Not in complete or unrelenting detail, just with a road map of how critical events will unfold. What’s the hook (opening scene)? What’s the decision that sucks the main character in, that means s/he can’t turn back (Plot Point 1)? Where does the change in the character begin, the point where the journey is no longer pointed outward but returning home (midpoint)? What is the reversal that complicates the character’s journey, forcing her to recommit irrevocably to her choice in her darkest hour (Plot Point 2)? What happens in that climatic moment where the conflict is resolved (catharsis)? How do I wrap it up and ease the reader back out (closing scene)?

I don’t always, or even usually, tackle these key scenes in order. Often the opening dictates the closing or vice versa. Sometimes they mirror one another, which is a common writer’s trick. Those are often the two I take on first. Sometimes it’s the catharsis because I can picture that climax in my mind and know everything else will build toward it. Usually from there, I fill in Plot Points 1 and 2. Almost always the midpoint comes last. 

In any order these are the impact scenes, the scenes that tell the bulk of the story. They are anchor points for the readers and characters. They deserve the most attention, requiring the most iterations to ensure they’re telling the story I want to tell. They also provide the central structure for beginning, middle and end.

Beginning, middle and end. I can’t stress that enough. Unless you are an experimental post-modernist (and maybe even then), that is the purpose of a plot, to tell a story. A sequence of events that form a structured, tailored narrative. While there can be some satisfaction (and success) in telling a winding, never-ending story, it becomes easy there to allow your central question or character change to drift off into mushy nothingness, entertainment for entertainment’s sake alone not to make a point.

From those key scene, I often sketch out the rest of the plot, filling how to get from point A to point B. Not the detail, just the broad brushstrokes. Not a formal outline like most of us had to do for term papers in high school. All I really want to capture is what my mind is thinking so I can move forward certain I know where I’m going. That’s important to me.

Next, I usually begin detailed design. Where preliminary design is focused on the laying out the entire story structure, even in scant detail, detailed design extends plotting down to individual chapters or scenes. For me in fiction, it’s critical to have a roadmap before I pick up a pen. 

This process is similar to the overall story outline above just in a microcosm with finer detail. What is the purpose of the scene or chapter? Where does it begin, where does it end? What vital things happen in between?  What facets of the character or situation are revealed? What new obstacles are encountered and which old ones are overcome? What character decisions will lead to further obstacles in their future?

Those last few are where some of the iterative nature of plotting comes out. This is still a process of discovery. I don’t hold it all in my head at once. Sometimes the solutions to problems, the character’s or the author’s, require revisiting a previous scene or chapter to reinforce or properly set them up. Sometimes previous motivations fall apart and need to be rethought. Or sometimes they are just improved upon. New obstacles and the decisions leading to them need to be noted forward.

Again, for me, this is similar to an outline of where I need to go and things I need to remember before I start writing. It’s jotting down on paper the notes buzzing around in my head.

I don’t do this for every chapter or scene all at once, or even necessarily in order. Depending on the piece and my mood, I might start with the keys scenes again, maybe sketching out one or all. More often now, I take chapters or scenes in order because it makes better sense to my brain. I’ll design one chapter then write it before moving on to the next.

But plotting doesn’t end with these outlines. Nor are the decisions necessarily cast in stone. The purpose of these design elements is to anticipate problems and minimize rewriting, not to serve as a rigid GPS roadmap to be followed even if it drives me off a cliff. I stick to the outline I’ve laid out until I find some unanticipated snag, some bit of construction or a detour that wasn’t highlighted, some mismarked route or underdeveloped road I mistook.

Just like when I was designing software, at times the implications of some decisions aren’t revealed until I am deep in the trenches and have a view from the ground. In those cases, decisions need to be rethought. As well, at times better, more elegant solutions occur to me once I’ve become immersed in a character or scene. Often, new chapters or scenes that weren’t in the initial outline suggest themselves as I move forward. All that gets back noted onto the master plan.

Though, hopefully if I’ve done my job right, these aren’t massive and complete redesigns accompanied by an overflowing wastebasket of crumpled paper. Thankfully, I’ve almost never had that happen. But I can’t anticipate everything. Nor do I believe I should try. There is something to be said for maintaining some organic evolution of the story.

The final stage of plotting comes once I have the first draft in hand. There are times during the writing process where I’ll make a note to revisit some element of plot so I can continue moving forward while I’m in a flow. I don’t do it often, though other writers highly recommend it. It will just niggle at me until I resolve it, which throws most everything off.

Regardless, once I do the first full read-through, almost inevitably I’ll find some piece of plot that needs to be reworked or reinforced. Often, it’s inserting a bit of foreshadowing. Or remembering to weave the threads of decision that didn’t become obvious until later chapters into earlier ones. That can be something as simple as realizing my main character used a piece of fishing line and an empty shotgun shell to MacGyver her way out of a situation but that I never mentioned her having them before. There, I try not to just figure out where she got them or when, but also to point out once or twice that she has them or kept them for some seemingly organic reason. In other cases, it’s reinforcing the character consistency of a critical decision that doesn’t come until later. Every now and then, that reinforcement requires a new scene or chapter or a new perspective to bring it out. That’s the integration phase, making sure all the pieces of the plot play seamlessly together.

In each phase, each iteration, I focus on the key scenes again to make sure they are the most highly polished, that they create the most impact. As well they serve as touchstones to make sure the plot is holding up, that I haven’t drifted off into some dead-end loop or dropped a stitch that could unravel the whole piece without realizing it. Either is easier to do than you might think.

Most of my time plotting comes in the preliminary and detailed design phases so that whatever plotting happens while I’m writing or editing is minimal. To some writers, this feels a whole lot like not getting much done, not having much to show for a bunch of time other than scraps of notes and a timeline in their head. Like they are just sitting around daydreaming rather than writing. While I sometimes feel the same, this approach allows me to shift my focus to the words that craft the characters, descriptions and dialog once I start writing or typing. Plot becomes one less thing to worry about though it never completely leaves my mind. Plotting after the first draft is complete is generally a smallest slice of the pie chart, or at least I think it should be for me.

Of course, mine is not the final word. There are as many ways to approach plotting as there are writing in general. Some writers will tell you they plot out everything in minute detail before they ever fire up their word processor. Others just wing it with a vague idea and see how events unfold. Either way is valid if it resonates with you, with your habits, personality and style. As long as you can make it work.

Plotting, like writing, is an art not a science. In the end you need to find a method that does what it needs to do for you consistently. Even if it’s based on a somewhat obscure software design standard. 

 © 2016 Edward P. Morgan III

How I Write Fiction: World Building (Summer Solstice 2016)

Young

As most of you know, I am an old role-playing gamer.  When I first started writing, I repeatedly read in articles and books that this was a disadvantage. What makes a good game doesn’t make good fiction I was told. Gamers write with a particular style that comes off as amateurish they said. Both can be true but both can also be inaccurate.

Thankfully, that particular bias has slackened some in the intervening years as gaming (and geekdom in general) has become more accepted. Yes, writing and gaming are two different things, as are writing and designing software. But as you’ll see here and at Lughnasa, it’s where each overlaps the other that you sometimes gain unexpected synergy.

The particular strength of role-playing games is the world in which they are set. Now, here you have to be careful. Most role-playing games come with their own milieu straight out of the box, or the books as the case may be. You need to be extremely cautious before you claim someone else’s setting and history as your own, even if you heavily modify it. Unless you are writing fan fiction, it is inappropriate to use, say, a rendition of Tolkien’s Middle Earth as your setting. Homages, impressions and rippled reflections are one thing. Tolkien based much of his own world on various folklore and mythology. Wholesale adoption is quite another. Don’t do it.

Fortunately, this has never been much of an issue for me. Since I began running games, I much preferred creating my own worlds to the pre-generated campaigns that supplemented most systems. For me they lacked the depth and resonance I desired. That resonance is a critical element. Without it, I can’t see the world I’m moving characters through. If I can’t see it, I will have a hard time describing it to others in a way in which they feel like the world is real and they feel like they are really in it. And that’s what both writing and role-playing are all about, a shared vision or experience. One is just more participatory than the other.

Most of what I’m going to talk about applies to longer works or a series of stories that share a setting. For shorter, one-off pieces, world building often resembles simple setting and background research that serves the narrative by reinforcing theme and tone. As I mentioned in the last essay on Ideas, that setting can come from almost anywhere. I tend to use analogs to real places or scenarios I’ve read about in the news. National Geographic is a great resource for that. As is almost any in-depth news source. As well, PBS’s Nature provides great fodder for interesting species and behavioral traits.

That’s not to say that shorter pieces don’t need any world building. Science fiction and fantasy, and all their related offspring from post-apocalypse to horror to cyberpunk to alternate history, require fundamental, up-front decisions about how the world works.

In fantasy, these decisions include things like whether there is magic, how strong or subtle it is and how it works, whether there are other races such as elves and dwarves, and the level of mundane technology which could range from Neolithic to Renaissance (or well beyond).

In science fiction, the decisions include the level of technology (especially whether there is faster than light travel), the extent of space exploration from solar system to galaxy wide, and whether there are other sentient alien species.

Post-apocalypse mirrors both of these with level of surviving technology, plus what caused the apocalypse and how long ago. As well as environmental impacts on things like climate, extinctions, mutations and hazards.

(I’m going to stop with those three because for each I have examples.)

Even in mainstream fiction there are world building choices to be made, from place (real or imagined) to time (past, present or future). Depending on the piece, you could add backdrop to this in form of history, institutions and real-world characters (historically accurate, speculative or alternate).

It’s in longer pieces and series that world building comes into its own by anchoring the story into a consistent, believable setting. Consistent is the operative word here. As humans, we are very good at recognizing patterns. We key on them so much that we often invent them where they do not exist. And nothing gets a reader to unsuspend her disbelief more quickly than glaring inconsistency, whether in character or in setting.

For larger, richer, more expansive fictional worlds, you might layer in decisions on politics, history, religion, trade, culture, celebrities, recurring characters, nations/factions, natural environment, etc. Anything that is important to you and serves the narrative of the stories.

That sounds like a lot already. So where to start?

I have three up-front pieces of advice.

First, your best bet for developing a world you want to use long term is slow accretion. If you try to do everything at once you will find it overwhelming. Like Athena popping fully formed from Zeus’s head, trying to hash through everything in one throw is likely to give you a migraine.

Which leads to second, remember a manufacturing technique called Just-in-Time. In the case of writing this means if you don’t need it, don’t bother with it right now. So if your fantasy story doesn’t deal with religion or the gods, don’t worry about them. It leaves you more flexibility later.

The caveat to this is that if your fantasy character likes to say things like “by the light of the ancient gods” or walks past their temples on the way to the market or notes one of their bishops in an audience with the queen, you need to at least sketch out who the deities are and what they stand for even if it’s not in-depth.

That brings me to third, and perhaps most important, keep it all organized in a way you can find it when you need to reference it. For each major game campaign I’ve run (one fantasy, one science fiction and one post-apocalypse), I have a three ring binder and/or set of accordion files filled with information and notes. Each of them has tabs for some of the various subjects I listed above. I’ve taken to organizing novels and short story series the same way, mainly because I lean heavily on these game worlds I previously created. I know them, am comfortable with them and can see them in my mind. Most I’ve dealt with so long and thought about so much that they are like walking around in the neighborhood I grew up in.

So how do I approach world building? First, as I said above, I lay down the fundamental decisions for the specific world I’m working with.

In the case of the post-apocalypse world I used as the basis for Aluria’s Tale (a novel), I made the decision that the fall came from a nuclear war, specifically a counterforce strike because I had read a Scientific American article on it. The timeline was five years later. The setting was real-world based, mostly from the mountains of North Carolina down through Georgia. The only unique environmental factor, other than the climate cooling, was the existence of sentient, intelligent races of genetically modified cats and dogs created by the military before the fall (the focus of “Chosen”). The date, though never specifically stated, was roughly present day.

In the case of the fantasy world I am currently using as the basis for Amnesia (a novel), I decided it was loosely based on medieval Europe in the thirteenth century (high Middle Ages). Elves, dwarves and goblins races all exist, though they are more subtle in appearance than in traditional fantasy. Magic was powerful but not prevalent.

Finally, in the case of the science fiction setting I use in the LOW OrbIT series of Abrami’s Sister and Memory Block (plus “Warren”, “Interdiction” and “A Star in the East”), I decided to base the worlds on the seventy-five closest star systems because I had an astronomy book that listed their characteristics and coordinates. Technology was high but not godlike. FTL existed. And the same species of intelligent cats and dogs exist as in the post-apocalypse world, plus other alien races.

The next fundamental step for me is a map. I love maps. I can’t live without them, from the highest overview to the most detailed room layouts. If I haven’t been to a place and seen it with my own eyes, I can expand a map into three dimensions in my mind.

For the fantasy world, Karen and I created a joint map for a world we shared just after college. She drew it up by hand. The primary city I use for a setting, Dirkham, has a core map created from old city geomorphs I’ve had forever, plus a secondary custom map of the surrounding area. For other cities and villages, I adapted a map of any quirky, interesting place I’ve been. Ellicot City in Maryland; Old Hyde Park in Tampa; Auchindrain in Scotland. For many castles and abbeys I use the small guidebooks with layouts we picked up in Wales.

The post-apocalypse world was the easiest. First and foremost, I use a road atlas (convenient as it can be marked up). I marked where strikes fell (or missed) and their fallout, as well as for marking communities and for road navigation (pre-Google Maps). Targeting was based on a map in a Scientific American article on counterforce strikes which showed the type and rough location of targets combined with two books that contained more extensive target lists. Added to that were state topo map atlases and Dept. of Interior topo quads. As I drove through the area, I picked up local paper folding maps of various places we explored up. Now I mostly rely on electronic versions. Down a level from there, I also have a book of interior layouts for houses.

With the science fiction world, first I translated a set of 3D coordinate for the closest stars onto a 2D map with their distance off the plane, marking the stars by name and spectrum. Then I generated a spreadsheet which calculated the distances between each star. In the FTL model I used, ships could only transit so far per jump. So for each system, I could reference what other systems can be reached by certain jump capabilities. That also outlined trade routes and backwaters. The rest of the science fiction world, like the fantasy world, relied on adaptation of existing maps. As an example, airport layouts make great analogs for starports. Conveniently, you can find any number of them in the giveaway airline magazines airlines used to stuff into the seat pockets.

From there, I began fleshing out each setting. Though because these were game worlds first, in some cases I did a lot more up front organization and construction than most writers will ever need to. Partly because it was necessary, mostly because I enjoy it. While a number of decisions I outline appear to be deterministically top down, you can also start from the bottom up without much problem.

For the post-apocalypse setting, I outlined a number of regional governments loosely based on a pop culture sociology book I read many, many years ago. I sketched out each, then focused on the two I would use the most, one centered in Dahlonega, Georgia, another based out of Green Bank, West Virginia. I sprinkled in a number of odd and interesting places I’d run across in my reading, like an underwater research station off the Florida Keys (that I linked up with a Trident submarine). I also layered in some background history that led to the fall, plus climate changes and what species had gone extinct.

For the fantasy world, we drew up political, racial and trade route overlays for the world map (old school cartography), along with what areas generated what trade goods. I added what deities were worshiped in which areas, using a combination of Celtic, Norse, limited Egyptian (Bast and Set) and an adaptation of Zoroastrian monotheism. All underpinned by old, no longer worshiped Roman gods. In Dirkham and a few of the surrounding towns and villages, I noted a number of each building on the map then added street and district names. For each number I created an entry for the type of shop (based on a guide to prevalence medieval businesses), along with a bit of background and history for each district, including conflicts between ethnic groups. 

LOW Orbit space probably required the most up-front work. I set up a program to generate planetary systems for each of the seventy-five star systems. Then a second program randomly rolled up a thumbnail sketch of each planet’s environment, political structure and technology level based on its star. I generated a page for each which went into a binder. I spent days naming each, keeping the names simple. Then I overlaid a political structure based on four types of colonies: LOW OrbiT, national government, corporate and Fringe. I outlined the systems each colonized based on certain desirability factors and political pull. I generated a couple historical instances of conflict between them (the AI War, the Green Revolution) with brief timelines and systems affected, plus sketched out a number of in-game references to brands and pop culture.

After that in each case my world building came down to organization and slow accretion, sometimes over the course of years. As much as I like an overview of the larger picture for broader context, I fleshed out whole areas and ideas because characters focused on them (JIT). The same happens as I write stories. 

In the post-apocalypse setting, I slowly filled in places the characters visited. This included several research trips (two to Waycross, GA where “there is absolutely no reason to be bored”). For Aluria’s Tale specifically, my wife and I took driving trip down the Blue Ridge Parkway from Boone to Asheville, then surface roads into N. Georgia, hitting all the places my characters would visit. Along the way I picked up pamphlets, jotted notes, sketched maps for ambush sites and formed basic impressions of various cities and locations. All of this went into files. Combined with details I’d generated for the local government during the game campaign, suddenly I had a rich world I could see and understood. I refine it with notes each time we revisit the area (as recently as 2014).

Over time in the fantasy setting, I marked all the Celtic areas with the names used within the native Celtic languages (such as Cymru for the Welsh area). In the notebooks for the cities and towns, I noted each business name, the proprietor’s name and any other details as they came up. I also noted the locations of ruins, secret fords and magic wells on the larger map. As well, I kept single page monthly calendars of events as I ran the campaign which formed a timeline for background for Amnesia. Various ideas got fleshed out further because of the players’ interactions (I ended up generating a lot of specifics on Bast and Ahura Mazda for players of characters who were priests of each). Others locations remain somewhat dark, foggy, waiting to be explored. Here be dragons.

Finally, in the LOW OrbIT setting, I kept a set of detailed timeline notes in a notebook as the game ran over the course of years. Various planets the players visited (and revisited) got fleshed out farther, including with names of celebrities, officials, bureaucrats and other personalities. I noted various places used in adventures, such as the Stack Maze and the Chaosium on Anarchy. Some of their interactions and encounters formed the backbone of the planet’s history. Most continued to spin implications in my mind even after the players moved on.  As well, my wife kept her own set of players’ notes (which have been invaluable for filling in the holes in mine) and sent out weekly summary emails of their progress. As I’ve written stories in this setting, I’ve noted characters names and any timeline details both at the bottom of the story itself and in separate files so I can find them later for consistency. I’ve more formally typed up and modified a number of histories and background details for various systems in the three-ring binder because that’s where I’m used to finding them.

Of course, you don’t have to use binders or accordion files with dividers. You can use something as simple as index cards and a box (similar to the magic box I discussed the previous essay on Ideas only dedicated to the world itself). I’ve done this for games with tabs for events, history, characters, governments, etc. It really is whatever works for you, to whatever level of detail you find useful. But organization is the key.

By now, I’m sure a number of you are saying, well that’s all well and good, but I’m not a gamer and don’t really want to be. Which is probably a good life choice on your part. Most of laying out the basics for a world doesn’t require you to be (though if you are, it may be a leg up through practice). They only require you to ask questions about the world you are designing, note the answers and organize them.

Since I no longer game much in the past decade, I’ve found a way to refine various aspects of a world even without players forcing me to as they interact with it. All you need is someone you can bounce the ideas off of who will listen and ask questions to clarify when they don’t understand. I’ve done this with my wife on various stories to great effect. I’ve found that trying to put world building or plot elements into words for her forces me to think about them more deeply. My mind forms better connections because she asks unexpected questions that hadn’t occurred to me.

I would only caution that you be careful not to use someone who likes to take things over as a sounding board. You want someone who wants to explore and understand rather than someone who tries to layer in their own ideas. Of course, this should also be someone you trust not to poach your ideas for themselves (unless you don’t care).

To give you an example, late in the LOW OrbIT game, we added a new player who wanted to play an alien. Years before I had sketched out 6-8 alien races but hadn’t developed them fully because the other players weren’t interested and the campaign didn’t require it. So I laid out what I had for him. He was attracted to a race called Whinglings, a tri-symmetric, arboreal race with three appendages (two arms and a tail) and three eyes that specialized in bio-engineering. Before we did any formal character generation, he sat and asked me questions about the race. Why were they called Whinglings (because of an annoying grinding sound they make with their teeth to relieve stress). How do they move on starships (using special loops retrofitted into the companionways). Are their tails prehensile (yes, they can hang from them and use them to hold items like a clumsy off-hand). What is the hierarchy of their society (matriarchal). Most of these I answered on the fly and noted for future reference. I learned more about Whinglings in two hours answering his questions than I would have in two days just thinking about them on my own. He didn’t care what the answers were particularly. He was just hungry to know more. We ended up doing the same for a race of genetically modified humans called the Uberlords later in that game. That is the type of individual you want.

All of this is a continually ongoing process. As I write various stories, I fill in details of each world. I know more now about the history of the Green Revolution from writing the Abrami’s Sister series than I ever did while running the game. In the fantasy setting, I am currently exploring the implications of a brief yet total loss of magic the players caused but did not experience because they were stranded in a spectral tower at the time. I fleshed out more of the psychology and sociology of the CuFFs (intelligent cats) in “Chosen” based on a few lines from Aluria’s Tale (in which I had fleshed out even more than was in the game). And there are still whole aspects of each I have barely begun to explore.

As well, since I’ve been writing, I’ve occasionally run across a piece of background or history in a world setting from an associated game that I’d lifted from somewhere else out of quick necessity, or just because I thought it was cool. All of those instances have had to be completely reworked and rewritten to make them uniquely my own before I use them in writing. Which, by the way, feels much more satisfying and integral once it’s done. Thankfully, none have been overarching threads that unravel very much.

Building a rich, resonant, complex world can be a slow but rewarding process. Over time, you’ll find it becomes as comfortable as a favorite pair of jeans, or that leather jacket you’ve owned for a decade. You’ll know all the creases, all the folds, and have great stories for all the stains that give it character. Just be aware that some of those offhand scratches you put on it in that first story may unravel and fray into wear spots if you don’t give them much thought. But depending on your temperament and sense of style, that, too, might be a perfect fit. 

© 2016 Edward P. Morgan III

How I Write Fiction: Ideas (Beltane 2016)

Cat on a Hot Tile Roof

So you want to be a writer? Many are called, few are chosen. But even if you’re not touched by some strange muse, there things you can do to prepare should that dark fairy never tap your shoulder.

One of the first questions most writers get is: where do you come up with your ideas? Many beginning writers find this to be the hardest part, uncovering interesting or intriguing subjects to write about. For me, this is one of the easiest parts and always has been. Other aspects of the writing process plague me to no end but I always have more ideas than I could ever use.

I can’t say exactly where they come from. The Greeks had a different grammatical construction than English. Instead of saying I had an idea as we tend to in American English, they said, an idea occurred to me. That small syntactic change captures more of how the creative process really works.

If that’s all the advice I have to offer, this will be a very short and not particularly useful essay. Lucky for you, I do have a few more practical lessons I’ve learned.

First, for me, ideas come from exposure to new ideas, whether they are about people, places, situations or strange details. Different people get inspirations from different sources, but mostly, it seems to me, it comes down to a willingness to explore. Read omnivorously, from books to articles to poetry, science to literature to pop culture. If you’re more visual, watch documentaries, TED Talks and YouTube. Listen to anyone, trying to understand their point of view even if you disagree with them. Write down what your internal monologue has say. Take notes on your dreams. Pay attention to song lyrics. Reflect on experiences from your past. Be open to it all.

I have several wells I constantly draw from for ideas. PBS is a good one for me, mostly Nature and Nova. National Geographic used to be another before they began changing their style and focus. The New York Times because of the way they bring stories to life. But many other news sources will do, especially if you can tailor stories to your tastes and interests like on My Yahoo (don’t judge), Feedly or Google News, even Apple News. Ideas come to me in anything from philosophy lectures to snippets of overheard conversations to word origins in the dictionary to old gaming scenarios I’ve run. Sometimes just weird observations and extrapolations. If you get a thrill of excitement or a little chill down your back as you think about it, you know you are on the right track.

The key isn’t necessarily where you get your ideas. You will learn where, when and what rituals and sources best generate them for you over time. The important part is being in a position to capture the inspiration when it comes. And it will almost always come in the most inconvenient place at the most inconvenient time. Trust me. Sometimes it’s when your mind is quiet, like just before you drop off to sleep or just after you wake up from a dream. Other times when your mind is half asleep moving through a well-worn routine, like when you’re in the shower or brushing your teeth. Other times when it’s distracted and slightly bored, like driving back and forth to work. And yet other times it’s in the middle of something stimulating, like a movie, a concert, a party or an intense conversation over dinner.

That means in each of those situations, you have to have a way to capture the idea as it comes. It doesn’t have to be fancy or even long but it does have to happen right then. You will think, of course I’ll remember this. It’s so striking. It raised the hair on the back of my neck. It resonated so deeply I could never forget.

And nine out of ten times, you’ll be wrong. The idea will vanish before you know it, usually in a puff of greasy green smoke, laughing as it goes, never to be seen or heard from again except to taunt you from the shadows of regret.

I run pretty old school in how I capture ideas, using pencil and paper. My personal belief is that no writer should be without a pad and writing implement at all times. Like a doctor’s little black bag of old, it should be there when you need it. In fact, I have several. I have a 3 x 5 pad in a black leather case that fits comfortably in either a shirt or back pants pocket that I carry anytime I leave the house (with a mechanical pencil clipped in a pocket or on my collar). I have a larger 5 x 7 notebook in a suede case with a loop that holds a mechanical pencil just inside. I have a lighted index card clipboard by the bed with an attached pen. I have a note cube by the computer, along with more mechanical pencils than any sane person could ever need in a coffee cup. I have a notepad and pencil in the car. Then, of course, I have a number of 8.5 x 11 notebooks that I use for specific projects or stories as I work my way through them.

What you use doesn’t matter as long as you always have it. Karen takes notes on her smart phone when she needs to. A former college roommate uses a digital mini-recorder he carries everywhere and transcribes at the end of the day. I’ve heard of writers hanging waterproof whiteboards in the shower because that’s where they get their best ideas. It’s like a photographer always carrying a camera, or an artist with a sketch pad. You get the picture.

But I would strongly advocate carrying an actual pad and pen/pencil as a backup. Something that doesn’t need batteries or charging or even much light to use. Legal pads, post-it notes, free promo notepads you get in the mail or from hotels, anything will do. The dullest pencil has a better memory than the sharpest mind, or the most expensive drained device.

Capturing ideas doesn’t end the process for me. Next I organize them. I used to keep a hodge-podge of notes paper-clipped together (I still do in a letter slot on my desk for things other than writing). A few years ago when I was running low on inspiration and had some time to kill, I created the magic box. Probably one of the best things I’ve ever done for my writing.

The magic box is an inlaid wood storage box for index cards I received as a present years ago. It sits within easy reach on my desk, right by the monitor. Inside, I created tabs for sets of different index cards, including: Story Ideas, Background, Details, Aliens, Names, and Lines (separate from but similar to the lines I discussed in How I Write Poetry), plus some unique tabs for larger projects. I recently added another tab for cards I’d already used in stories to I could keep track.

Next, I went through all my carry-around notebooks and Dragon*Con lectures, all my big notebooks, all my memo pad and all my miscellaneous scraps of notes. I circled each idea and checked it off once I’d transferred it to a white index card with as much information as I could remember along with its source if I had one (many didn’t). On each card I wrote the header for one of the tabs and whether it was science fiction, fantasy or something else. Sometimes there was a title, sometimes not. Sometimes I didn’t even remember writing them. Yet some of those ideas still gave me chills when I reread them which is a pretty spooky feeling.

If an idea spanned more than an inspiration (more than an index card), I typed it up on the computer and stored it in a separate folder system under Writing. There I have folders for working poetry, drafts for essays, drafts for short stories, and tree structures for various novels. All that is backed up, sometimes in two different places (I almost lost a prime drive and a backup to the same lightning hit in 2010).

Now when I get an idea, I just run into the office, pull out a card, jot it down and file it away. No fuss, no muss.

Of course, there are many other ways to organize your ideas. Some writers keep dedicated idea notebooks they occasionally peruse when they’re low on inspiration. Others use iPad apps or computer software that create digital index cards capable of being linked together (just like I did for term papers back in school). Some people rely on physical or computer file folders and old-fashioned wetware memory. Still others use pushpins and cork boards, or magnetic white boards, or post-it notes and walls. Or three ring binders and five-subject school notebooks with pocket folders. I’m sure there’s more. It’s all about what works for you.

The final piece to this puzzle is using your ideas. When I sit down to write a story, I start with the magic box. If I’m uncertain what to work on next, I pick out the story ideas that most excite me at the moment then cull them down until I finally settle on one. Then I go through the other categories to see if any other background, details, names or lines seem to layer in. Those are the first things I type in when I open a new working document for a story. Often as I’m writing, I reference the source (if I noted it). I research more of it as necessary. But I’ll go over more of that in the next essay on World Building.

To give you some examples, when we were watching PBS’s Nature regularly (back when we had cable and a DVR), I kept a notebook by my chair. I filled it with ideas for aliens just based on the weird, fantastic creatures on this planet and their behaviors we don’t often see. That netted about fifty cards over 2-3 years.

Glancing through the magic box, I find one idea from a philosophy lecture on the ship of Theseus (among others), two from a set of physics lectures on the nature of time, one from a Black Sabbath song title, one from a military history book on the ancient Greeks, one from Machiavelli, one from an American Experience on TB, one from a one-a-day cat calendar, one from the meaning of a chemical symbol on the periodic table, one from a New York Times article on the Bosnian Civil War, one from a human interest piece on the Romanian soccer coach during a World Cup, one from a book on modern agriculture, one from a Nat Geo article on viruses and immunity, one from an info box at an Egyptian museum exhibit, one from a Nova called Magnetic Storm (among others), one from a Nature on Botswana (among others), one from a word history in the American Heritage Dictionary, one from an experience of driving in Puerto Rico, another from a language experience aboard ship, one from an article on US strategic reserves on Native American lands, one from a PBS series on India, and two what-if tangents from popular movies. And that’s just a fraction of the cards therein.

As far as using them, I incorporated three cards in TimeVirus, one in the Memory Block series, one in Underground Science, one in Mindwipe, one in Time Lock, one in Pearl, two in Battalion 4-P, and one in The Ritual. And those are only after I started keeping track. Almost every story I’ve written has an idea or detail from one of my old notebooks, or some distantly remembered piece of information I read in a book or magazine.

One of the best exercises I’ve run across for inspiration uses something like Flickr (or really any photo sharing site, or search engine, or even a book if you’re truly old school). On My Yahoo (again, don’t judge), there is a module for Flickr that has two settings, one called Featured, the other called Explore. The second is the one I like better. It gives you six usually pretty striking photographs with rollover titles if you want them. (Or you can find it on Flickr’s main page). You can click on the photo for a larger version. One of those six photos is likely to speak to you in some way.

Regardless, every day (or whenever you feel you need it), choose one of those photos to start making up a story. Photos are just a snapshot in time. Ask yourself: What came before? What came after? What is that person or creature thinking? How did they get there? What are they really doing?

Or you can play the classic writer’s game of what if. Take the picture with this essay. What if that cat is as intelligent as you are? What if it could talk to you? What if it’s an alien observer? What if it’s a spy? What if it is the prophet of its goddess? What if it was the only witness to a murder? What if it’s secretly a little girl’s familiar? Keep asking as you dig deeper into each scenario. Before you know it, you’ll outline the contours of something special.

I have this recurring fantasy that one day I’ll clear out the magic box by writing a story for everything inside. And a recurring nightmare that I’ll never get another worthwhile idea. That fear and fantasy are just opposite sides of the same coin. The ideas will keep coming if you let them. You’ll never catch up and they’ll never go away.

The only key is to make sure that you remember them so you can find them when you need them. Even if you never use them all, they keep your creative machinery well-oiled. And that’s not an inconsequential step in calling yourself a writer.


© 2016 Edward P. Morgan III