Suggestions for great writing

[Storyteller]

1. Don’t overwrite

It’s a general rule that you should leave as much to the reader’s imagination as you can, and this is doubly true for action scenes. The choreography of the fight may be exact in your head but you can’t force readers to see the same thing.

Let them know the outline of the fight and they’ll imagine their own visceral fight scene. Counter as it is to a writer’s instincts, ‘they struggled’ paints a far more vivid picture than describing the exact position of each combatant’s arms.

But if you’re not describing what your characters are doing then how do you communicate the action?

2. Pace

Intensifying the pace of your writing can communicate the immediacy and suddenness of conflict. Short, simple sentences keep the reader on their toes. Fights happen quickly and your description needs to match that. In The Princess Bride, William Goldman writes a brilliant sword fight, and perhaps the most enjoyable fight scene ever put on paper:

The cliffs were very close behind him now.
Inigo continued to retreat; the man in black continued advancing.
Then Inigo countered with the Thibault.
And the man in black blocked it.

Each sentence is short, the written equivalent of a sudden move. Every time a new person takes an action in this passage, Goldman starts a new line, making the reader encounter each attack as a sudden, vital event.

Short, to-the-point sentences are a must for any fight scene but pacing works best when it’s combined with perspective.

3. Perspective

It’s difficult to communicate excitement when you describe something objectively. Hovering around the fight describing the actions of both characters sets a limitation on how gripping the experience can be. The key is to thrust the reader into the thick of the action, and to do that they need to experience the fight through a character.

That’s not to say that you have to suddenly adopt the first person. In Gregory McDonald’s Carioca Fletch, the protagonist attempts to get his bearings as he is set upon by unseen assailants. McDonald mimics this experience for the reader by having longer passages between the single sentences of violence:

Instead of looking who had pushed him, Fletch tried to save himself from falling. The edge of the parade route’s pavement shot out from under him.
Someone pushed him again.
He fell to the right, into the parade.
A foot came up from the pavement and kicked him in the face.

The writing, and thus the reader’s experience of events, conforms to Fletch’s experience: the attempt to right himself interrupted by sudden acts of violence. You can also write to match the perspective of the attacker: there’s something especially brutal about a villain methodically taking an opponent apart.

4. Verbs not adverbs

Fight scenes demand brevity and adverbs are the opposite. Instead of ‘Adam hit him hard in the chest, again and again’ use ‘Adam pounded at his chest’.

The occasional adverb might have its place but you want the punch of the sentence to come with the character’s action, not lagging after it.

There are a few exceptions. Variations on ‘She hit him. Hard’ have currency because they’re purposefully simplistic. They embrace guttural simplicity to communicate that same quality in the action, but this trick only works once before you start sounding like a caveman.

5. Sensory information

Description doesn’t work in fight scenes because thought doesn’t play a big part in immediate, physical situations. What there is plenty of is sensory information. The taste of blood, the ringing in their ears, the ache of their injuries. Evan Hunter wrote fantastically brutal fight scenes by stating a simple, basic physical act and then following it up with evocative sensory information:

He pulled him to his feet, almost tearing the collar… He heard the slight rasp of material ripping.

That description, from his short story collection Barking at Butterflies, adds more physicality to the encounter than any physical description could.

Sensory information is also more relatable to readers. Not everyone has been held up by the collar but everyone has heard fabric tear, has tasted their own blood after an accident. You can summon incredibly detailed information through these minor descriptions: the pull needed to tear a collar is something most people can appreciate, so they understand the violence of the grip without ever consciously considering it.

Not everyone has bled copiously (hopefully most haven’t) but describing a character’s clothing as ‘wet with blood’ matches the unexperienced to a physical sensation the reader can recall.

6. Just the results

The opposite of writing a fight scene, but worth the occasional consideration, is to skip the violence entirely. It depends whether you’re trying to provide action or communicate violence, but for the latter this can be incredibly effective.

Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club isn’t about fight scenes or action, but communicates physical violence fantastically:

I asked Tyler what he wanted me to do.
Tyler said, “I want you to hit me as hard as you can.”

At this point a new chapter begins:

Two screens into my demo to Microsoft, I taste blood… My boss doesn’t know the material, but he won’t let me run the demo with a black eye and half my face swollen from the stitches in my cheek.

Here we don’t get any details of the fight, don’t even have it confirmed that a fight took place, and yet the visceral nature of the missing scene is all the more powerful because of it.

You don’t have to skip the fight completely but remember that you can create a powerful sense of what’s happening by referencing the results. While the reader can’t call to mind the exact experience of the fight on the page, fear of injury is something everyone understands.

7. Detail is a dirty word

The key to getting a fight scene right is learning that detail is a dirty word. Television and movies have taught us that the choreography of a fight is the important thing but different mediums call for different tricks.

The Princess Bride sword fight is riddled with fictional fencing maneuvers and yet reading the scene that doesn’t matter. The pace is so non-stop, the skill and commitment of both characters so well written, that the reader imagines every thrust and parry and accepts them as expert.

Write around the physical actions, set the mood and write the sounds, smells, tastes and feel of combat, and your reader will tap into the visual heritage that was formally working against you to picture their own kick-ass fight scenes.

[Storyteller]

Creating good dialogue is hard work. It takes practice and patience but once you’ve mastered it, your credibility as an author will improve tremendously. Not to mention you will also pass the Literary Agent litmus test with flying colors.

So what does trigger a literary agent’s “weak dialogue” alarm? Here are 6 useful dialogue tips to help you avoid that formidable slush pile.

1. No explanation necessary

You are a lovely person and because of this, you make extra sure that your readers understand what your characters are saying. Consider the following:

“That is fantastic news,” he said happily.

Look right to you? If it does, you have just fallen into a very common trap. In this example, you are actually telling you readers twice about your character’s feelings. “That is fantastic news” clearly conveys happiness, so why use the adverb “happily” to reiterate this?

Explaining your dialogue can alienate and sometimes frustrate your readers. They are intelligent enough to understand what is going on so don’t patronize them by highlighting the obvious.

Doing this also prevents your readers from getting to know your characters on a deeper, more personal level. If you tell them that your character did something happily, all they will know is that your character was happy which means nothing. Consider the following:

“I can’t believe it!” she said.

In this example, I have not given the dialogue any explanation which has achieved two things. Firstly, it has tightened up my dialogue so that the focus is now on what is being said rather than how it is being said (more on this later). Secondly, readers are encouraged to imagine my character’s surprise which inadvertently helps them get closer to my character.

If you find that your dialogue does need explanation, then frankly, something is wrong with your dialogue.

2. Banish those pesky “ly” adverbs

More often than not, writers attempt to break the monotony of using the word said by replacing it with “ly” adverbs (happily, sadly, angrily). Writers tend to use “ly” adverbs to smuggle emotion into their dialogue and by doing this, they are actually smuggling in unnecessary explanation. A powerful dialogue conveys emotion through what is being said rather than how it is being said. If your character is sad, it is your responsibility to show this sadness and to show what there is about your character that makes him/her sad. Consider the following:

Marcy dabbed at the tear trailing down her cheek.

“I don’t think I can keep going,” she said.

Here I have showed the reader that Marcy is sad and have used dialogue to convey her emotion. Had I added, “she said sadly” at the end of the dialogue, this would have instantly removed any chance for my readers to connect with Marcy.

3. Keep your dialogue transparent

If you have written a powerful dialogue, the last thing you want to do is draw attention away from it. Explanations and “ly” adverbs disrupt the flow of your dialogue as they jump out at the reader and signal, if only for a second, that you are hard at work behind the scenes.

Now you may not like this, but the verb said should be your go-to verb when writing dialogue. Said is a very unusual word primarily because we interpret it in a very mechanical way. In fact, when we see the word said, we simply gloss over it as if it were no more than a comma or a full stop.

Its unassuming presence allows readers to focus on what your characters are saying rather than how they are saying it.

4. Become a student of conversation

Coffee shops, bars and restaurants are alive with people talking, laughing and sharing stories. I have been known to while away many Saturday mornings in my local coffee shop, jotting down conversation topics that are bandied around from table to table. I unabashedly pay attention to gestures, tones, facial expressions and reactions as these snippets from real life can help me write compelling and believable dialogue.

Conversation is not merely an exchange of words. Oh no, we also use body language to get our message across so it goes without saying that this needs to be captured in your dialogue. Consider the following:

“You lied to me,” said Tara.

“We did it to protect you,” said John.

Roger stepped toward Tara and reached for her hand. “We didn’t want you to get hurt—”

Tara pushed his hand away and turned away from them. “I thought I could trust both of you”.

In this exchange, I have broken up the dialogue with a bit of physical action. On the one hand, using action to move the dialogue along satisfies my inner creative writer as I am not overusing the word said in this passage. On the other hand, the action makes my dialogue much more convincing.

A Note of Caution: Using action to make your dialogue more interesting is a useful technique however you must be careful not to overuse it as it can become very distracting for readers.

5. If it serves no purpose, it has to go!

Writers often fall into the trap of providing too much detail in their dialogue. Yes, you want to be as realistic as possible, but you do need to strike a balance between realism and giving your dialogue purpose. Remember, dialogue helps to move the story along, give depth and meaning to characters and to convey information. If your dialogue does not serve any purpose, it has to go. Consider the following:

“I saw John in the park the other day,” said Mike.

“Oh did you,” said Mary. “How is he doing?”

“He has a new job. He has flexible working hours so he has lots more free time,” said Mike.

“Well good for him,” said Mary. “Do you know what he wants to do with his free time?”

“No, I meant to ask him that,” said Mike.

This exchange between Mary and Mike is not only labored and downright boring, but it also serves no purpose at all. The reader is told nothing new about any of the characters and the story just got a little more tedious because of it.

6. Read it out loud

Reading your dialogue out loud is your secret weapon and the quickest way to identify problem areas. It will throw up any issues relating to pace, punctuation and flow.

When you are reading out loud, take note of where you stumble or where you are pausing unnaturally. Fix this. Take note of accidental rhymes or closely repeated words and edit them.

Listen to what you are saying and who is saying it. Do the words match the character? If your character is an uneducated gangster from the hood, make sure he sounds like it.

It is impossible to read a bad sentence without flinching or stumbling along the way so make sure you dedicate some time to reading your dialogue out loud.

[Storyteller]

To really give your story justice and your protagonist’s achievements real value, creating a strong opponent is essential.

This is true for the antagonist in your world that your are running for the players!!!

Let’s have a look at how this can be accomplished.

1. Give your antagonist a past

You will probably spend hours researching and thinking about the character traits and history of your protagonist to really give “him” dimension. After all, the protagonist is who drives the story and his creation is most likely what inspired the story to start with. But it is just as important to give as much time and devotion to the antagonist.

Think of it psychologically: there’s a reason why we all behave in certain ways, why we judge a situation or react differently to how others might. Our histories give shape to who we are. Thus, if you are aiming to create a respectable, three dimensional antagonist, he or she should have a solid history that motivates that bad or opposing behavior.

You will find many variations of the motivation that might drive an antagonist—greed, anger, ignorance, insanity, prejudice, fear, heartbreak, honor, even excessive goodness that is piously counteractive.

Finding example back stories that would inspire any one of these wouldn’t be too difficult and I “shan’t sport with your intelligence” or time by expounding on these. But I would say, make the back story plausible. The Goldfingers and Dr Evils of this world are all very well in their place, but if you’re aiming to write a serious, believable plot, make that back story compelling and make it possible.

A useful tool: I recommend spending some time looking at the story from the antagonist’s point of view, almost as if you were to write the story with the positions reversed. By doing this you would need to give time and thought to creating effective and believable characteristics for your antagonist and a deliciously juicy history that made him the person that is worthy of opposing your hero. You will also find you discover new traits about your antagonist that you had not previously thought of, or a hole in their arc that would need filling.

2. What if your antagonist doesn’t actually know they’re the antagonist?

Journalism 1-0-1: objectivity. Present both sides of the story.

Okay, so this is slightly tricky when you have created the story from a certain perspective, with a particular character in the position of The Hero. But pretend for a moment you, a neutral observer, are reporting on an epic battle between opposing sides and, being the world-class, unbiased journalist, you would be interviewing both parties.

In doing this, you will notice something interesting—the hero doesn’t know he is the hero and the bad guy doesn’t know he is the bad guy. More intriguing still, your antagonist actually thinks he’s the protagonist.

Both sides believe their cause is the just one and both act with conviction, so write both sides with conviction.

Present the antagonist’s story from his point of view and don’t distort or weaken it in favor of the hero. That is the easy way out. If the antagonist’s story and his defence of it are strong, then the protagonist’s success in defeating him is all the more glorious.

3. “Antagonist” doesn’t necessarily mean “bad guy”

There is this idea that “antagonist” automatically means “bad guy”. It doesn’t. The Oxford English Dictionary defines it thus:

One who contends with another in an athletic contest, a battle, or struggle for the mastery; an opponent, an adversary.

Nowhere do you see “bad”, “evil”, “bald and cat-loving”.

Therefore it is quite acceptable to have a likeable antagonist. You might even create sympathy for him by means of an emotional back story, forced into a situation which makes him react in a way he wouldn’t normally. Or perhaps he is someone who makes the wrong decisions, but is not intentionally unkind.

If you look at Willoughby in Sense and Sensibility, he does love Marianne, but his situation and his poor choices drive him to hurt her.

To turn the notion completely on its head, the “antagonist” doesn’t have to mean the “bad” in the situation at all. You may well be writing the story from the point of view of the bad guy, that is, your protagonist is the bad egg in the plot, the criminal on the run, and his antagonist a detective of moral and honor. This would certainly make for an interesting read and test the loyalties of your readers.

Sympathizing with the antagonist makes the story more interesting and—brace yourself—it will make readers really think about the message you are trying to deliver.

4. Don’t let the antagonist overshadow the protagonist

However you decide to cast your antagonist—the respectable character in the story, likeable in a good way, like the detective, or a character so gloriously evil, with such brilliant one-liners, that the reader looks forward to each encounter with him—don’t fall out of love with your protagonist.

Make sure your antagonist is not so colorful that he makes the protagonist look gray. The protagonist is the main event—don’t let him or her be overshadowed.

Of course, I would encourage flexibility. If, as you are writing, you discover that actually the antagonist is the more interesting character, think about reversing the roles and writing from a different perspective, if you feel your message can still be effectively delivered.

5. Keep the players guessing

Here’s a question: why make it obvious who the antagonist is? As the writer, you will have created that back story and will be able to weave it in subtly, so when the time comes for the antagonist to be revealed, the reader will be able to look back with satisfaction at the clues that are now so clear.

Wouldn’t it be more interesting and alluring to the reader if it is not quite clear who is on who’s side? You might even create a Professor Snape type diversion—a character who has the appearance of an antagonist, but actually…

The underlying message is make sure you give your hero a worthy opponent and make the “fight” interesting—world championship boxing ring standard, not a petty school ground punch-up.