How To Write Magical Words: A Writer's Companion Read online

  But under pressure, stress, fear, our minds revert to hindbrain thinking, to images instead of language, and when there is language it’s broken, fractured, repetitive, and carries the rhythm of the speeding heart. (Being part of the first response team in an ER for years has given me an assurance of this.)

  As a writer, I have to show the reader what is happening, what the character is feeling, without telling. Speaking to that hindbrain in us all is one way.

  I once heard an agent say that he could always tell when an English major sent him a book, because the sentences were all so perfect. He was being insulting. For him, perfect sentences were lacking in voice and tone and emotional context, and I’ve thought about that for some time now.

  Perhaps his comment had merit, in part, because perfect, complete sentences speak only to the frontal brain, not the animal brain in each of us. The hindbrain is not poetic. The hindbrain is prey and predator. We have to speak to the total person when we write, and part of us is animal.

  Can it be done with full sentences, even when the character is facing great danger? Yes. Is it easy? Of course not. For a lot of us, language itself is a stumbling-block. For me, short, fractured, broken, splintered language fits with fear. For me, it works.

  The Leading Edge of the Slog

  David B. Coe

  Let’s say we’ve done the prep work, found our voice, and gotten to work on the opening lines and pages. At this point we’ve had some time to get to the meat of the project, to move beyond the opening chapter and really delve into the book. So, how’s it going?

  Hmmmm . . . Not the enthusiastic "It’s going great!" response I was hoping for. I hear some enthusiasm, but I also hear some grumbling. So maybe this would be a good time to chat about writing the vast middle of a novel. We’ll define "the middle" as everything between the end of Chapter 1 and the be-ginning of the climactic chapter. I did say it was a "vast middle," after all . . .

  Defining the middle so broadly, it almost becomes inevitable that this will be the hardest part of the book, the place where you’ll encounter the most problems. And quite often those problems begin to manifest themselves early on. The excitement of the opening is behind you; the payoff of the climax seems miles away. Now it’s all about character growth and narrative flow and pacing. It’s about putting the worldbuilding and background development to practical use. In short, it’s about work. Welcome to the slog.

  I don’t mean to say that this part can’t be fun. Of course it can. But make no mistake: it is difficult, long, at times exhilarating, but at times deeply discouraging. Let’s look at some potential scenarios that you may encounter, and discuss possible solutions.

  Scenario 1: You’re forty pages into your novel. It’s going a bit more slowly than you expected, in part because you’ve found that your plans for the book (whether in the form of a true outline, or merely the collected thoughts you keep in your head) are already falling by the wayside. The novel you envisioned and the novel you’re writing bear little resemblance to one another. It’s as though the characters have conspired against you—an imaginary coup d’etat as it were—and have taken over the book. It’s not that what you’ve got is bad, it’s just not what you thought it would be, and so you’re really not sure anymore where the book is going.

  Solution: Congratulations! That’s great news! Seriously. Keep on doing exactly what you’re doing. I outline. And my outlines rarely remain relevant for more than a few chapters. The fact that your characters are taking over means that they have come alive, that they have become something more than names on a page and collections of traits and bullet points in a history.

  So what’s the point of outlining or of planning a novel? For me, it gives me some guidance at the outset. It points me in the general direction and allows me to set out with some sense of purpose. But writing a book is an organic process, and sometimes that means jettisoning the outline and the plans and following your instincts. And those instincts often manifest themselves through the things your characters do and say. Where is your book headed? Right now that’s a bit uncertain. But have faith in the process and in the characters you’ve created. They will lead you where you need to go. And chances are that when you get there it will be more similar to your envisioned ending than seems possible right now.

  Scenario 2: You’re a hundred pages in and everything seemed to be going fine, but now you’ve hit a wall. The story has dried up on you. You thought there was a book here, but now it seems you were wrong. There’s nothing. No plot, no direction, no reason to be doing this. You were never meant to write. Why the hell didn’t you listen to Mister Gerlach, your high school guidance counselor, when he said that selling insurance was a perfectly legitimate way to make a living? You’ve stuck to the outline for the most part, but now you see that the plot you’d outlined originally is riddled with holes, and the ending won’t work.

  Solution: Okay, first things first. Pour out that cup of coffee and trade it in for a glass of wine. Or brandy. Or single-malt . . . You need to relax. The story is still there; maybe not in the form you thought it would take, but in some other form that is closer to the original than you think. It may be that you’ve taken one false turn that has led you down a path to a narrative cul-de-sac. I often find that when I get stuck it’s because I’ve done just that. I’ve made one narrative choice that has taken me off the path. If I can backtrack to that decision and go in a different direction I can usually solve the problem.

  Sometimes though, the problem is more fundamental. Sometimes I’ll plot things one way only to realize once I’m into the book that the plot points don’t all line up. My impulse is to panic, but once I calm down I can usually see that the problem can be fixed. Look at your major plot points, the big events that lead you from the set-up to the conclusion. Which ones don’t work? Chances are most of them still do. Your job is to find the few that don’t and change them. Yes, you need to fix this, but no, it doesn’t mean that your book is crap or that Mister Gerlach was right . . .

  Scenario 3: Everything is going just the way you planned. You’re making great progress and it’s all good. No problems at all.

  Solution: [Hysterical laughter] I’m sorry. I couldn’t resist. Cracks me up every time. This never, ever happens. Let’s move on.

  Scenario 4: You’re pretty much on course with your original plans, and the plotting does seem to be holding up. But the book lacks something—sparkle, punch, that breathtaking excitement you were hoping for. Whatever you call it, it’s not there. What seemed like a thrilling idea seems to be turning into a somewhat pedestrian story and while you think the climax will be good, you’re still far enough from it to fear that you won’t hold your reader’s attention long enough to get there.

  Solution: Yeah, we’ve all experienced this one, too. Sometimes a story that looked great in planning falls flat. That doesn’t mean the book is destined to fail. But it does mean that you need to shake things up. You don’t want to introduce action for the sake of action—no Apple Cart scenes, as Faith would put it. You need to keep the narrative moving forward. One solution might be to introduce a new character—a love interest, a second villain, a sidekick. Someone who complicates things in such a way as to create more conflict and action. Or you can take someone away. When was the last time you killed a character? Has it been too long? Start sharpening the knives… Or you can make a small change with huge ramifications. I had this problem with the original version of the book I’m working on now. So I changed the villain’s gender from male to female. Totally changed the book and the tension level, introducing a sexual dynamic to her battles with my protagonist. What can you change to shake up your book?

  Of course, this is not a comprehensive list of possible scenarios. But it’s a good place to start.

  §§§

  A.J. Hartley

  For what it’s worth, I find that when I run into versions of these "second act problems" it’s because my character’s conscious goals aren’t clear enough. The story
loses urgency because my characters are getting passive and I need to rethink what exactly they are supposed to be doing and why.

  David B. Coe

  A.J., that’s great advice, and something I don’t do nearly enough. We should be asking ourselves again and again, what our characters are doing and how it relates to their needs/goals/purpose. As soon as we lose sight of those things, of course the narrative will begin to languish.

  Mark Wise

  I am a little #1 and mostly #4. I think I know what I need to add tension and spice to the book, but I am driven to write forward rather than go back to Page 1 and make changes. I am someone who wants to write a rough draft regardless of the quality, then go back and make the required changes.

  Is that a good way to write or am I shooting myself in the foot by not stopping and fixing the problems?

  David B. Coe

  Mark, our usual caveat is "There is no right way to do this; different approaches work well for different people." But my answer to your question would be an emphatic NO. You are not shooting yourself in the foot. You’re doing exactly what you should be doing. Get the book finished. Don’t retreat into rewrites. There is nothing that can’t be fixed later once you see how the entire project has turned out. I didn’t always feel this way. But I do now, based on years of experience. Move forward, my friend. And then go back to fix. Make sure to jot down notes to yourself so that you remember the changes you intend to make, but then keep going.

  Getting Started . . . Again

  C.E Murphy

  A few days ago someone asked a pretty good question on my regular blog, and I thought I’d bring it over here to answer:

  "Do you find it difficult to stop writing your current work, and then pick it back up the next day? I realize that a writer writes, and must write if they want to get paid, but is picking a story "back up" the next day something you had to learn? If so, I’d love to know how."

  If I’m lucky enough to find it hard to stop writing, I usually don’t until I’ve achieved a phenomenal word-count. Most of the time that doesn’t happen.

  There are a bunch of tricks to picking a story back up. I know people who re-read the previous day’s work, doing edits and revisions before moving on to the new day’s work. I do a little of that, especially if it’s been a while since I’ve worked on something (I’ll usually re-read the whole thing then). I also know people who will stop in the middle of a sentence so they’ve got something they know how to finish, which gets them writing right away. (That doesn’t work for me. I just forget what I was going to write!)

  I do like to stop when I know exactly what the next scene needs to do. That gives me a place to pick up. I’ll sometimes leave myself a note in the manuscript so I don’t forget what I think needs to happen.

  In an ideal situation, the book I’m writing is so compelling that I basically can’t wait to start writing every day, so sitting down and getting started isn’t a chore. That doesn’t happen very often and it’s one of the reasons I took Solitaire off my writing computer: it’s usually much easier to start playing games than it is to start writing.

  What are some other tricks to getting back to the keyboard? Anybody got other clever ideas?

  §§§

  David B. Coe

  My grad school advisor recommended the stop-in-the-middle-of-the-sentence thing, but it doesn’t really work for me, either. I tried it when I was working on my dissertation, but fiction is a different beast. I try to stop on the cusp of something I’m eager to write, that I know will come easily, like a scene I’ve visualized a hundred times already. Some-times, though, I stop at a place that proves to be a better stopping point than it is a starting point the following day. In those cases, it’s simply a matter of putting my butt in the chair and slogging through those first paragraphs.

  And for the record, I had to take solitaire and Spider off my machine as well.

  The End Game

  David B. Coe

  Writing a novel takes a while, and every writer works at a different pace. That’s why this essay isn’t called "Finishing Your Novel" or "The End" or something of that sort.

  It’s called "The End Game," because even if you’re only a third of the way done with your book, it’s never too early to start thinking about how you’re going to tie off loose ends and build to that stunning climax. We give you a lot of "writing is like . . ." analogies here at Magical Words, and I’m about to give you a few more. Baseball fans: Writing is like pitching. When a major league pitcher goes through the batting order the first time, he doesn’t just look for ways to get batters out. He also tries to set up the next at bat and the one after that by showing certain pitches and holding others in reserve. Chess players: When a master plays, there is more to each move than a grab for momentary strategic advantage. A great player plans her attacks three or four or five moves in advance. She lays the groundwork for a series of moves, and (she hopes) for eventual victory.

  The writing end game is not so different from any of these. Even if you’re a seat-of-the-pants writer, you still need to lay a foundation for your narrative progression. "But," you say, "as writers, we don’t want to give away too much to our readers." And you’re right. Like pitching or playing chess, the end game in writing is not just about setting up the climax, it’s also about misdirection, about keeping readers somewhat off balance.

  My goal for the endings of my books is for my readers to say "Oh!" and then "Of course!" In other words, I want them to be surprised, but I also want them to be able to go back over the book and see that I left clues along the way, and that the surprise ending wasn’t just something I made up on the fly. Why? Because when it comes right down to it, readers love to be surprised, but they don’t like to be manipulated or deceived.

  Of course, it’s not just about the actual ending; it’s also about the build-up, that ratcheting of the tension that makes a good book so much fun to read. That’s part of the end game as well, and it, too, needs to begin early in the book.

  Let me give a couple of examples from my WIP, hopefully without giving away any spoilers. One of my subplots, established fairly early in the book, is actually a red herring of sorts, something that later serves to misdirect my readers as they try to figure out who my villain is and what s/he is up to. I planned it that way from the start and worked those clues into the story at intervals to keep my readers guessing. But at another point I realized midway through the book that I needed to have my hero do something dark and painful in order for him to survive a particularly difficult encounter with said villain. I hadn’t realized this until the midpoint of the book. And so I had to go back through the early chapters of the book and plant the seeds for this very emotional moment. The clues I planted were subtle—early on they will seem like throwaways to my readers—but they are crucial to the impact of the plot point in question.

  My point is this: you don’t have to use a book outline to work on the end game of your novel. There is no reason why you can’t surprise yourself when you finally figure out that perfect ending. But when revising, you might need to go back and add a few lines here and there to set it up. This is the advantage we have over the baseball pitcher and the chess player. We get to amend and adjust.

  The important thing to remember about the end game is that, contrary to what many non-writers believe, writing is, in fact, an interactive art form. The interaction may come later, after the creative product is finished, but that doesn’t make it any less real to our readers. They want to play along. They want to have a chance at figuring things out. Recently Misty commented on a book she was reading that disappointed her because it was too predictable. She had figured out where it was going and though she hoped she was wrong, she wasn’t. There’s a lesson there, obviously: you don’t want your set up to be so heavy-handed that you telegraph the ending. But there’s a second lesson as well: Misty was playing the game, trying to figure out the mystery. She didn’t want to finish the book and say, "Yup, saw that coming." At the same time
, though, I’m guessing that she also didn’t want to finish it and say "He cheated! There is no way the story could end that way!"

  The end game is a balancing act. Yes, a good ending surprises, but it also satisfies. Play the end game right, and you should manage to do both. You may not get it right on the first try, and this is where beta readers come in. Your first draft might give away too much; your second might be too opaque. Be patient. The end game is one of the hardest parts about writing a book. It’s also the most gratifying once you get it right.

  §§§

  Stuart Jaffe

  Another sports analogy for you—pool. A good pool player will think ahead several steps, so that when he hits the cue ball he will a) sink the shot, b) put the proper spin on the cue ball so that it will roll to the best location to make the next shot easy and c) (with a true expert) have picked the best next shot so that he can easily set up the third, fourth, and fifth shot. The end game is always on the mind of the pool player to the extent that if he cannot make a shot, he will make sure to place the cue ball in the worst position for his opponent. Of course, in writing we don’t get to "punt" when things go bad—but then again, we kind of do because we can go back and fix problems so that we’re not in the bad situations later.

  L. Jagi Lamplighter