Writing is hard. 

Presumably, if you’re following along with these writing tip entries, you’ve taken a stab at the process yourself and already know what I mean. If you haven’t, I encourage you to go and give it a try. Our inspirational stories and authors make the process look so effortless and simple. But there’s a lot to juggle and a lot that can go wrong. I mean, I didn’t get to thirty-one blog entries on an easy to accomplish task. 

However, if you’ve tried writing, there’s another truthism that is obvious on its face:

We do this because we enjoy it.

That’s right. All writers actually like writing. It’s really the only reason we put up with this exhausting, complex, taxing and overly complicated art form. Especially for most of us, it’s a passion hobby. If we didn’t have the drive and the self-gratification from doing this, we would quit. Talk to just about anyone and they’ll tell you they have a story they’d love to write themselves. But it takes a certain tenacity and joy to actually cross the finish line.

So we all start on the same foot. We come to the art with hope, idealism and enthusiasm. Then, there is a crossroads. Either you face the initial challenges of writing and continue or you give up on the enterprise. Those of us that push on are rewarded with the exhilaration of self-expression and creation. 

And yet, the more we explore this skill, the easier it can be to get lost in the weeds of doing it well. 

So today’s tip is to try and keep that initial joy and fun in your heart. 

What do I mean by this? Well, you really need to focus your writing on what you like. Yes, I’ve got a lot of tips and suggestions on how you can make compelling characters, gripping conflicts and exciting scenes. There’s a bevy of advice out there from other writers on what you should and should not do. But, above all, you should have fun with this. 

Because if writing starts to become a chore, it shows. If you’re penning a whole chapter on some tawdry exposition that you’re only putting in because you have to, it’s going to bleed into the page. Worse, if you start chasing genres, stories and themes that don’t excite you, you’re going to struggle to excite your readers. 

I see this quite frequently in the stories I edit. I’ll come across bland dialogue or even paragraphs of dry prose. Often it’s describing mundane actions or providing generic context for a character’s whereabouts or actions. It feels like the author felt they needed to put it in and so they banged out a paragraph or chapter to provide this explanation. 

And it’s boring. It lacks the enthusiasm compared to the parts that really compelled the writer. Readers aren’t picking up books to be bored. If you can’t stir any emotion in yourself when writing a passage, how do you expect to do so for your fans?

Which isn’t to say that these contextual passages aren’t necessary. I’m sure some artists hate drawing backgrounds. But they’re probably needed for most paintings. Or maybe a visual artist really hates feet. However, you can’t hide those forever in your work. People will notice. 

Instead, you should try and make these obligatory passages interesting to you. Is there some way you can present or contrive the exposition that amuses or entertains you? Rather than present a long series of sequential actions to explain how your character got from point A to point B, maybe you could condense that information to a conversation? I love writing dialogue, so I’d much prefer to have my character complain about the trials of travelling and booking an expensive hotel rather than just sticking that journey into some dry prose. Especially if I can make their audience react to that information in an interesting or amusing way. Perhaps my main character is griping about her accommodations to a rather unimpressed concierge who really just wants to have the conversation end so they can go on break? That opens up moments to poke fun at travelling instead of just listing that my protagonist went through security, waited in line to board the plane, had a long trip in the air, then had to wait for her bags, flag a taxi and finally check in to her booking. 

On the flip side, if you hate dialogue writing but love composing poetic prose, recontextualise that whole journey in a poem. Perhaps you can create a whimsical short chapter focused on the emotions your protagonist goes through trudging through this mundane process wholly oblivious to how miraculous modern travel truly is. Humans have conquered the skies and here our protagonist is whining about lack of snacks on an airplane and poor exchange rates for their homeland’s currency!

Whatever it is you do, make sure you have fun with it. The very first audience for your story is yourself. And if you aren’t enjoying it, the odds someone else will are pretty slim. So make sure you make something that instills pride in yourself. Something you’d be happy to point at and tell others, “Yes, I made this!”

So, when you’ve got some chapter or passage to insert into your narrative simply for context or exposition, ask yourself:

Am I enjoying writing this section? If not, what about it do I find boring?

What is the most important part of this section? Is there another way I can share that information that would be more entertaining?

And, above all else, am I having fun?

So, if you’ve read my previous posts, you already know my bias towards strong characterisation. I personally believe that stories are all about us. Well, not us specifically. Probably not a lot of people that care about you or me. But we’re innately interested in the lives, trials and tribulations of others. And the more fleshed out we can make those others, the more realised and believable, the more our readership will care about our fictitious others. 

But I get it, it’s hard. No one is born with the ability to make interesting characters. And there’s a lot of one-dimensional, stock characters floating around in the fiction which we may consume, enjoy or wish to emulate.

So today, we’re going to do something different and discuss a few techniques for taking our character creation to the next level. 

Let’s discuss homework.

These are not, by any means, tried and tested techniques. These are just things that I did on my own. Honestly, this first technique was my personal trick for developing my characters and it served two functions. One, it helped me to create a “mind space” for me to understand that individual’s perspective (who should have a different outlook than my own otherwise we’re just making Mary Sues). Two, it helped me procrastinate. No wait, it helped me to cure writer’s block. 

That’s the one. 

What I did was I created “character sketches.” No, these weren’t actual drawings – my art ability is dreadful. These were simple little scenes that highlighted the soul of my fictitious individual. It was a moment to really capture who that character was. So, for the Red Sabre series, I knew I wanted a right hand man to my protagonist. Since this was set in a wild west setting, I was intrigued by the gambler archetype. Thus, I wrote a little scene of him “stealing” on a casino paddle boat. These aren’t particularly long – just a few pages – but they’re meant to make the character the highlight and to play to their unique strengths. These little sketches were not meant to be part of the story I was writing, so there wasn’t any concern for quality. My only goal was to get their personality down. 

The sketches helped keep ideas fresh too. I could take moments to explore my world and characters that wouldn’t ever be seen. And in a few cases, something from a sketch would end up being referenced in the main story as the person spoke of their background – providing a sense of history that can often be missing in writing. 

Another trick I used was I would base characters on people in my life. It’s easy to get a sense for how a fictitious person will react in strange and novel circumstances by imagining how your friends or family would behave in those circumstances. Obviously, we don’t know for certain how, say, our aunt might react to a bloody necromancer ritual but I think this taps into the inherent imaginative play that it’s a pretty intuitive method for creating early characterisation. Make a character based on your best friend and then walk them through some of the challenges and trials of your story and you’ll start seeing your character behave in ways that you wouldn’t. 

A short exercise you can do is write a brief description of a character’s room. Our bedrooms can reveal a lot about our personality. Our choice of wall decorations (or lack there of), how we keep our dirty and clean clothes or what items are prioritised and put on display? What’s sitting in the waste basket? You can do a sort of cinematic panning of the space from the doorway. This also helps to develop some descriptive skills and give a simple perspective as we follow. Try to go into as much detail as possible. Don’t just describe the bed as either messy or made. What’s on it? How many pillows? What’s the colour of the bedsheets or blanket? Is there anything peculiar? Crumbs? An open book? An interdimensional imp? The benefit of this exercise is you may even come up with some descriptive prose that will be beneficial to your story as well. Protagonists going to their private quarters is a pretty common scene, after all.

The last exercise is one I did way back in high school when I took a creative writing course. This one was similar to the room description but it was focused on the character themself. For this technique, you write a description of the character out on the street during a “normal” day. What a normal day, or even what street they’re on, will naturally change based on the character you’re focusing on. However, most of the prose should be directed to how the character looks. What are they wearing? How’s their hair? Are they holding anything? This specific high school exercise also required us to include three personal items in the character’s pockets with one being “unusual.” How you defined unusual will naturally help differentiate the character from yourself. Since that character probably thinks it’s entirely normal to have a little mummified maggot on a chain in their pocket. But how did they come to have this unusual item and why are they carrying it around?

Those answers are fun little prompts to start get the creative juices flowing and help to crystalise a picture of your people as entities separate from your thoughts, beliefs and biases. I recommend every starting writer to try these techniques with their protagonist. And, anytime you start writing a character you just aren’t fully getting, it’s perfect to fall back on these techniques to help you out. I still do it from time to time if there’s a character in my story that’s giving me trouble letting me into their “head space.”

And you never feel guilty for not hitting your normal word count goals if you’re spending them on homework, right?

Let’s talk about theme.

I know, some of you are probably rolling your eyes. I know when I had to do literature study in school, most of the time was spent trying to find what nonsense the author really meant when they put that peg leg on the not-a-pirate lesbian. And the teacher sat up there with her educational text deducting markings if you failed to understand that the mewling lamb was a stand-in for Jesus. I think it’s the English Teacher’s job to specifically make reading as unenjoyable as possible

On the other hand, maybe you hear the word theme from the perspective of the writer and your palms get sweaty. You shift awkwardly on your chair, furtively glancing around at the other people in the room. You don’t really sit down and pen out a theme for your book. How can you? You’ve got to focus on the setting, characters, pacing, conflict, repetition, description, word count, chapter length, title and… phew, I’m already feeling overwhelmed. 

I think there’s a dirty little secret to themes that your literature studies doesn’t want you to know: it’s mostly made up nonsense. 

But it’s not entirely made up nonsense. 

And that’s the catch, really. I don’t believe authors spend a great deal of time concerned about theme. Though, certainly as other aspects of writing come easier you’ll free up more mental bandwidth capable of devoting time to it. And, certainly, having control of your theme will make your writing even stronger. But how can you not purposefully put something in but still have it there?

The answer is simple – we’re humans and not random text generators. Before we even sit down and set pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard), we’ve already got a lot of preconceived notions, ideas, beliefs, perspectives and truths. Prior to creating our fictitious worlds, we’ve already formed some idea of the world we inhabit. And these beliefs are going to filter into our writing. Sometimes intentionally. Oftentimes accidentally. 

A lot of the time, this is harmless and unavoidable. I mean, how many stories have characters that love reading? It stands to reason that if you want to write, you’re probably a fan of books and literacy. Thus, naturally, your characters are going to put a higher value on that skill than others. When these biases align with the rest of your readership’s views, they go by completely unnoticed. Most of our biases are pretty invisible to our readers. 

But not all of them are. And if we aren’t aware of our biases and how it can shape our work, we may end up creating a theme to our story that is unintentional. It may even be off-putting to those who you want to read your book! Thus, it’s important to try and keep an eye out for our themes even if we’re not sitting down and consciously writing them into our story. An outline doesn’t have to have “Chapter 10 is where I rail against the inhumanity of the homeless” for that to crop up. 

However, we’re still responsible for whatever seeps in.

I’ve railed against Name of the Wind before, but for those with the stomach or appetite, I encourage you to read the text with an eye for the portrayal of women in the story. It’s quite likely you won’t have noticed the misogynistic undertones that seep through the text on your first read. But if you pay attention to who Patrick Rothfuss choses to highlight, describe and characterise, you’ll notice that there’s a large gender imbalance. Even more, all the women are contextualised within the story to how they can sexually gratify the male characters which the story is so focused on. It comes up in humorous moments where Kvothe will have a touching moment with his mother only for his father to swoop in to remind the reader that the two of them have a very active and very healthy sex life. But even when Kvothe goes to school and is harassed by the mean teacher (who I can’t even bother remembering the name of anymore), you’ll start to notice that the teacher insults Kvothe for his tardiness but he insults the female student for being a harlot. 

Now, do I think Patrick Rothfuss intentionally penned a misogynistic story? No. I mean, it’s possible. I’ve never met the man. But given how incidental a lot of the work is, it feels to me to be entirely unconscious. Whatever beliefs Rothfuss possesses, and I’m not making any grand claim to what those are, they somehow manifested in a pretty glaring sexual objectification of all the women in his story. 

And, frankly, I don’t think most of us want our writing to do that. 

Now, theme is a hard knot to untangle, especially if we don’t have the self-reflection to know our personal biases. But that is where some of those literature study skills come in. It helps, when going through your editing, to ask yourself a number of pointed questions about character motivation, intention and the general focus of the text. Even more, it really helps to get other perspectives to look at your story. And to ask those people if there’s anything that stands out to them. 

The problem arises, of course, is that most people aren’t literature students and probably fall into that first camp at the top of the post. And it can be an awfully difficult issue to properly examine. But just because it’s hard, doesn’t mean we shouldn’t at least try to be conscientious of the messages we’re putting out. Ultimately, it rests on us as authors to be responsible for the themes we put into our stories. And we may stumble in our efforts but if we attempt to do our best from the outset, we can only improve as we grow more skilled.

So, when we’re looking at our book, we should ask ourselves:

What are the themes of my story?

What do the implications of my major character’s decisions and actions mean in a greater context?Am I touching on sensitive topics? Have I done so intentionally? Can I ask someone who is impacted by that topic to look it over for potential pitfalls I may havefallen into?

There is an old writing adage that simply states “Show – don’t tell.” When I was a beginning author, this advice always seemed strange to me. How do you show something in writing? In essence, prose is the art of telling. I’d pondered this quandary for many nights and never reached a satisfactory conclusion. Since I had not been given this advice directly, I could never ask for clarification. 

So I wrote and experimented and went about my life. It wasn’t until much later in my writing career that I began to understand this adage. And a lot of my understanding derived from editing other people’s work. See, part of my own writing struggles was that I lacked things like this very blog. I learned from trying on my own. I don’t bring attention to my self-taught skills to be boastful. On the contrary, I spent more time inventing the wheel when I could have simply been shown the round damn thing early on so I could focus on other techniques.

But one of the few pitfalls I managed to avoid fairly early is the dreaded Info Dump. This style of expository prose is a pretty big writing no-no. But it can be something that isn’t the easiest to properly define. Readers know when an info dump is happening but a writer might be struggling with wondering how to communicate the information inside the dump without it being such a slog for the reader. 

And that’s really the crux of the issue of the info dump. It’s not enjoyable to read. It’s like you’re gripped by the narrative when the story slams on the brakes in order to crack open an encyclopedia to list off a bevy of bland, flairless facts. Which, I get it. Providing context, especially in speculative fiction where you truly can’t rely on your reader having an intuitive understanding of how your world works, is difficult. When fantasy worlds are built around novel magics and systems, you know you need to convey a basic foundation so your reader can understand what your characters are talking about.

Least, of course, your characters end up literally telling the info dump in robotic dialogue! 

But where does the line between info dumping and world building get drawn? And how can you tell if you’ve provided too much context or too little? Readers hate when things are left vague, details consciously or accidentally omitted. And, as I mentioned at the start, I don’t have any hard answers. I learned from feeling it out myself and, as unhelpful as it is, a fair amount of that will come down to editing and finding on your re-reads where description drags too much or the situation is far too vaguely defined. Part of this will be dependent on the genre and expectations for your novel. 

However, I didn’t start this blog to leave you aspiring authors helpless. One trick I’ve learned is to interweave your context and descriptions into the action. I’ve mentioned before that dialogue itself is an action technique that provides interest and energy to your prose. There is no reason that context and world building can’t be the same.

My key advice is this: don’t break away from the your characters to drop paragraphs of text that does not involve them. If you have important information, try to work it into interactions between the characters in your story. Don’t have any of them “retreat into their head” to reminisce or think about the context you’re providing. Instead, work those details in using a manner that allows your characters to act and react to this information. 

This give and take action will add dynamism to the passage. You can then shade the information from each character’s perspective, adding colour and layer to those details. Not everyone will view a subject the same way, after all. Their own feelings can change the veracity of the world details you are providing. And nothing gives you more opportunity for character interaction than someone being wrong about their opinions! Correcting or arguing with them over those very details will give you ample opportunity to express to the reader the really important facets of the topic which you want to make public knowledge.

And your reader won’t even realise that they’re basically just getting a history, science, natural philosophy or technology lecture. 

So when you’re looking to flesh out important contextual information for your reader, ask yourself:

Does the presentation of this information break from the general flow of the passage? 

Am I retreating from the current action into a memory or character’s internal thoughts?

Can I present this information that will allow my characters to act on it? Or react to it?

Let’s step away from my preachy “Don’t do this!” style blog and put up some more writing tips. Why? Because I’m running out of topics until Kait sends me some more stuff to edit. Which naturally leads to blog entries. There’s nothing more inspiring than field work, right?

Anyway, if you’re as allergic to attribution tags as I am (and really, more people probably should), then today’s rambling is an interesting. For a brief explanation, attribution tags are those little notations written by dialogue to make clear who is talking. It’s all the “he said, she said” stuff. It’s kind of the written version of white noise. People don’t really notice them. And, honestly, one of the first lessons you’ll get as a writer is to cut down on the cutesy uncommon attributions. Most people skim past the little devils, using them to just figure out who is saying what. 

So having Sally constantly shifting moods from exclaimed, to cried, hollered, erupted, bursted, balled, bellowed, purred, whispered, bemoaned, declared, sobbed, whistled, interjected, excused, implied, grunted, chirped, recited and what not can be really distracting. Most times, you’re better off just having “Sally said.” 

Course, my personal preference is to cut those little tags altogether. I strive to have the dialogue carry the speaker’s identity on its own. Course, this can only get you so far and it is certainly a style choice. 

But today we’re going to focus on just one little attribution tag specifically:

Lied.

See, lying in fiction is a bit tricky. Your reader is primed to take you at your word. Since, as the author, your word is kind of final on the matter. Even in real world fiction, what we state as the writer is primed to be set as an absolute truth. As such, getting people to lie is really tricky. 

Naturally, the easiest way to make clear that someone is speaking falsehoods is to just outright state it. This is a clear sentence after all: “I saw a pig fly yesterday,” Tom lied. Granted, it’s kind of plain. And if you have a person habitually lying it can get kind of annoying, as the reader, to constantly see Tom’s statements tagged as such. 

It also takes some of the fun out of dialogue. But if you don’t make clear that a person, how do you communicate that to the reader?

There’s a few tricks you can use. For one, you can make their statements blatantly contradict something that has already occurred. This can clue the reader in that the person speaking isn’t on the up-and-up. This tactic, of course, has some pitfalls. For one, the contradiction with past events may confuse the reader. Or, worse, they may think that information presented earlier was unreliable. 

Another way to catch a person in a contradiction is to have someone point out their law in response to their statements. If Tom claims that he saw pigs flying yesterday but Joseph turns to him and says, “I was with you yesterday and I didn’t see no flying pigs!” then Tom’s going to have some explaining to do. This works well if the lie is part of the action for that scene itself since it brings the tension of a character’s dishonesty to the forefront. 

A different tact is to raise another character’s doubts over the lie later. This can either be after the conversation or when that character discovers something that contradicts the statement. This technique is particularly effective if the lie is to serve some greater mystery. “Strange, Tom claimed to have seen flying pigs yesterday but all the animals at the farm where he works had been slaughtered last week.” This, coupled with reminding the reader of Tom’s prior falsehood, helps to establish doubt in the reader’s mind. 

These techniques, naturally, are useful if you’re writing a mystery since they heighten the sense of intrigue. But mysteries don’t only benefit from delaying a character’s duplicitous nature. Fantasy stories often have a hidden villain who is working against the protagonist while simultaneously pretending to assist them. You can seed the eventual reveal with little moments of incongruency or doubt that reward the attentive but also lay the foundation for the eventual dramatic climax. 

So, when you’re looking to write a character telling a lie, ask yourself:

Have I made clear that this character is not speaking the truth? If not, how am I going to make this clear later?

Does revealing a character’s lie now serve the best dramatic purpose or can this information be slowly undermined and properly revealed at a more emotional moment?

Do I have too many attribution tags? Can my writing be cleaned up by using more ‘said’ in place of other words?