Confusing sign is confusing

Yesterday, a reader e-mailed me a question that was so good I decided to answer it here:

I think your instincts are correct that it would be very jarring for readers to go through a whole 1st person narrative and then suddenly hit a 3rd person chapter that has all different characters and takes place on in a whole different world.

If I saw that in a published book, I would seriously be wondering if it was some colossal screw-up by the publisher, who had accidentally mixed in a chapter from some entirely different book during the printing process. It would be that jarring.

Hence, your instinct not to do it is a good one.

I think the tension you're experiencing stems from creating a genuinely confusing situation in your story but then wanting it somehow to also not be confusing. You're struggling because you're trying to figure out how to have it both ways.

Abandon the struggle

As I wrote about in an article from this past summer, what I always tell writers (especially for first-person stories), is to focus on your protagonist's experience of things.

As you've sketched out the situation, your protagonist has an ability that she doesn't know she has. Apparently, this ability will manifest in the middle of a fight: a stressful, terrifying, chaotic moment in this character's life. You bet your boots that's going to be confusing for her!

Rather than striving to avoid the confusion, the better strategy is to lean into it. Recognize it. Heck, celebrate it.

Leaning in

The heart of leaning-in is simply to confront the confusion head-on. Don't try to hide it. Don't try to deny it. And don't try to explain it away. Acknowledge it fully.

You do that by asking yourself what the character, in that moment, will be thinking and feeling when a bunch of strangers suddenly pop into existence in the middle of her fight sequence.

If I put myself in her shoes, my thoughts would probably go something like this:

• "Aaaagh! Where did those people come from?"
• "Wait. Who are they? How did they even get here? Am I seeing things?"
• "Whose side are they on? Do I need to fight them too?"

(Interestingly, if you think about it for a minute you'll realize that your antagonist's thoughts will probably be almost identical to these, which suggests that both protagonist and antagonist are likely to react similarly to this unexpected development. At least in the initial few seconds.)

Going along for the ride

The situation you have outlined will undeniably be confusing for everyone in the scene, and indeed for the reader too. Naturally enough, as a writer your fear is that readers won't go along with it, and hence the idea of forestalling the confusion by introducing a 3rd person chapter beforehand.

Except here's the thing: readers will happily go along with the confusion so long as they can tell it's all part of your plan.

If your narrative signals to them "Hey, relax! I know this is weird, but just hang on and it'll all make sense in a few pages," then they will not just go along with it, they will positively revel in their own "ooh, I wonder what this is all about and what's going to happen!" experience.

And the way you signal that to them is by leaning into the confusion.

Signaling your plan

The best way I know to reassure readers that you have a plan is to let the characters voice the same questions your readers will be having. I.e. where did those people come from, are they really there, whose side are they on, and so forth.

And since you're doing this in first person, just reflect your POV character's confusion in the narrative. Share her confused thoughts through inner monologue. When you reveal such thoughts to the reader, what you're doing is telling readers "I, the writer, am aware that this is confusing. That's on purpose, or else I wouldn't have this character thinking these confused thoughts at this time. It is all part of my plan."

After all, you literally could not give the character confused thoughts without being aware that she's confused, which in turn implies that you understand the confusing nature of the scene. And since you invented the scene, since you are aware that the scene is confusing, and since you not only left the scene in the book anyway but leaned in to it, readers have no choice but to conclude that it's all on purpose.

This is just a hook that allows readers to relax into the happy state of enjoying wondering what's going to happen. It's lovely, because it gets readers to go along with you while deepening your 1st-person viewpoint through the use of inner monologue.

Inner monologue isn't your only tool, either.

You can also show other characters' confusion through their actions. As we've established, your protagonist and antagonist are likely to have similar immediate thoughts, and thus similar immediate reactions. The natural human thing to do when you're not sure what's going on is to back away to assess things.

So, let both characters back away from the fight until they can figure out what's going on and whether these new people are friend or foe. And there is nothing about showing people's actions that you can't do through your existing 1st-person viewpoint, just like you show everything else. There's no need to break away from your protagonist for that.

And show the new people's confusion, too. Those poor suckers are going be even more confused and terrified. I mean, their whole world just changed! And who knows what they experienced during the act of being pulled from one world to the other? They're more likely to cling to one another for support and mutual protection, and will be eying your protagonist and antagonist as potential threats. So let your protagonist watch them do that. Readers will be able to infer from seeing those actions that the newcomers are also confused.

Lean in to win

If that's what your story shows, following the moment when those new characters come into it, readers will be fine. They'll be confused just like everybody else in the scene, but they'll be fine because you leaned in.

That's all you need. You don't need some whole other chapter with a POV break in order to avoid the confusion. You don't need to avoid the confusion at all. You just need to reassure readers that the confusion is all part of the plan.

Image © Andrew Caballero-Reynolds / AFP

I am Pissed. Off.

I rarely get political on this blog. This is a writing blog, and I aim to keep it that way, even today when I'm going to get political.

The Senate just confirmed drunken party boy and multiply-accused serial sexual assaulter Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court. As Senator Kamala Harris said shortly thereafter:

So, yeah. Along with the people in the photo at the top of this post and millions of others nationwide, I'm pissed off.

Fighting fires

My twitter feed is full of outrage. It is full of calls to remember your will to fight, to volunteer for your local progressive campaigns. To donate to candidates who oppose the Senators who voted for Kavanaugh and all who enable the Trump agenda. And to vote, Vote, VOTE!

These things matter. They really do.

And they are all so very NOW.

I feel such an incredible weight of responsibility to do my part to help save my country, as I am sure so many of my readers must also feel.

In such a climate, how can we write? How can we find the space within our minds to create fiction? How can we justify--even if only to ourselves--taking the time to write when so many other things demand our pressing and immediate attention?

How did we get here?

We may well ask how things came to be in such a state. How did our country come to this?

Ask ten people and you'll get ten answers, but here's mine:

We came to this through a deficit of empathy. A massive, widespread inability to think about how other people feel by (let's not pussyfoot around it) mainly white people, and mainly white men.

That's how we came to be here.

Because people who bother to think about how other people feel don't do what the Senate just did.

Because people who bother to think about how other people feel don't force themselves on women at parties.

Because people who bother to think about how other people feel don't vilify immigrants who just want a better place to live than where they came from.

Think of your own dozen horrible things from the past couple of years, and I promise you, every one of them eventually comes down to a failure of empathy. A failure to give a shit about how other people feel.

What is writing?

But you know who does bother to think about how other people feel? You know who goes out of their way to think about how other people feel? You know who makes such a special effort at it that they invent whole other imaginary people just so they can do more thinking about how other people feel?

Writers. That's who.

You can't write a compelling and believable story if you don't understand how the people in it would feel about everything, and therefore, how they would act. What would matter to them. Why they would do the things they do.

Done well, writing is nothing more than an exercise in the deepest empathy.

So is reading.

When we read, we have to form mental models about the characters in the story. (Something I have talked about before: here, here, here.)

As readers, we track what each character knows, what they like, what they believe, what their goals are, what plans they're pursing, etc. And as new events happen in the story, we use those mental models to anticipate how the characters is going to feel.

It's the same thing. Reading is also an exercise in empathy.

From the perspective of the necessary mental-modeling that reading demands, this may seem obvious. Still, that didn't stop several researchers in 2013 from testing the question and concluding that, yes, reading does improve empathy.

How can we write?

I know. The world is screaming at you right now to do a zillion other things besides write. It's screaming at me, too.

But I've always been a fan of treating root causes rather than just symptoms. You can spend all your time fighting the world's many immediate fires, and you will accomplish some good, but remember that each and every one of those fires is just a symptom of the empathy-deficit root cause.

So write. As much as it's your duty to help fight the immediate fires, as a writer it is also your rather more unique duty to help heal the root cause beneath it all.

Write, both to maintain your own empathy for others and to help build that skill in our readers.

Because holy shit, if the world needs anything right now it's more empathy.

A good hook will pull your reader down deep

I've touched on the subject of hooks a few times in this blog (here, here, here), but I haven't talked about what a hook is or how stupidly simple it is to create one.

Here's the "what" part--spoiler alert, it ain't rocket science--a hook is just anything that makes readers curious about something.

A relevant anecdote

A few years ago I was teaching writing to the 5th graders in my son's class, and I wanted to impress upon them the power their readers' curiosity gives them, so I read them this little vignette:

The kids went instantly and furiously out of their minds.

"What's in the booooox?"

That's all they wanted to know. They begged. They pleaded. They were incensed that I would dare stop at that point. They had to know what was in the box.

Which was a problem, because I had no idea. I hadn't written any more than that opening vignette. The answer wasn't relevant to what I was trying to teach them, but not having the answer just about derailed my entire lesson plan because they absolutely could not let go of that question.

Which proved my whole point: make a reader curious about something, and they will do anything up to and including reading your whole story. Or, as George R.R. Martin can tell you, writing to the author directly to ask for answers to questions that sequels are supposed to provide.

Hooking the reader is easy

My little vignette took 142 words to hook a class of 5th graders, but you can hook a reader much faster. For example, the following floated across my twitter feed this morning:

Do you see what she did there? I was on the verge of letting this tweet gloss right by in the stream until Ms. Seargent left it hanging on her looking out the window.

Then I had to click and read the whole thread. Which I highly encourage you to do (here's the whole thread), as the thread is something of a master-class in creating hook after hook to keep readers invested and build up our desire to see how the whole thing turns out.

I don't imagine this was an accident, either. Click through to her profile, and you'll see that Chloe Sargeant is a writer and journalist. She knows how to use hooks. Case in point.

Curiosity is a stunningly powerful tool

What's in the box? What's out the window? The answers don't matter nearly so much as the power the questions have to compel your readers through your story. I could have put anything in the box. Anything could have been out that window. Either way, readers were hooked.

And it's so easy to do. I did it in 142 words. Sargeant did it in 50.

In the end, the only way I was able to continue my lesson was to promise to write the rest of the story. It took another 7000 words to reveal what was in the box. Sargeant took 14 more tweets to finish her story.

And in both cases, our respective audiences were rapt with attention, all because of the stupidly simple trick of making readers curious from the beginning.

Power positions: A verbal spotlight to direct readers' attention

This is not an article about how you write. This is an article about where you put the things you write in order to give them the greatest impact.

Just like in real estate, location matters. And whether we're talking about sentences, scenes, or whole series, some postions in text have an inherent power to amplify the impact of whatever is in them.

The idea is to put the most important stuff into these "power positions" where it can hit readers hardest.

The different positions

There are only three positions you need to care about:

• beginnings
• middles
• endings

I know, mind-blowing, right? The fact that these are the positions is hardly magical. Yet, for all it's simplicity, this is a very powerful idea for how you think about your text.

The rankings of power

Due to the realities of human attention and how people process information, these three positions are not equal:

Endings are the most powerful, beginnings are next, while middles have the least power.

To see why, let's take it from the reader's perspective as they make their way through a piece of text.

At the beginning, the reader is orienting themselves towards what they're encountering. They're paying a fair amount of attention because everything is new and unfamiliar. They have to build some mental scaffolding in order to take in the rest of the text. The contents of the beginning are what allow them to do that. The beginning demands attention, which gives this position its power.

Once the reader is well into the material, their brains slide into cruise-control as they take in one piece of information after another and fit them onto the scaffolding they already built. In the middle, each piece is less powerful because it is "just another piece" contributing to the overall picture that your text is building in the reader's mind.

This is not to say that the middle pieces aren't important, just that by being in the middle they have less power to impact the reader.

Finally, readers hit the ending. By then, their mental picture is almost complete save for whatever key piece you've held for last. Readers have been circling around that picture for some time, watching it develop as the pieces come in. Their anticipation is at its highest. They are waiting for the last bit that will complete the picture and snap everything into focus.

When they get it, two important things happen which together give the ending its enormous power-potential. One, the reader finally has the full picture and can at last understand what everything has been building up to. Two, since there's nothing left to add, the reader has nothing to focus on but that final picture. At least for a moment, the final picture occupies their whole mind.

And if the freshest bit of that final picture is something really juicy, you better believe it'll hit readers hard.

Positions at scale

This concept of power positions applies at all scales of writing:

• Sentences
• Paragraphs
• Scenes
• Chapters
• Stories
• Series

All of those things have beginnings, middles, and endings, and the power of each power position is directly proportional to how big the scale is.

The ending power position of a scene, being made up of paragraphs, has more power than the ending of any individual paragraph. Likewise, the ending of a chapter outweighs the ending of an individual scene, and so forth.

Larger chunks have had more material leading up to their endings, so naturally they can deliver a bigger punch when the end comes.

Or perhaps it is that these things add up. The end of a chapter is also the end of a scene, paragraph, and sentence.

What goes where

With all that in mind, we can draw some rough guidelines about what kind of material works best in each position.

Beginnings: Put your most important bits of mental scaffolding here. At whole-story scope, for example, this is where you give readers the critical facts about your story's world. If something about your story's world is different from ours in some surprising or particularly consequential way, the beginning is the most powerful place to deploy that fact. Such a fact will get readers brains spinning about the potential ramifications of the fact, and will enable the reader to understand new facts in their proper context.

Middles: At whatever scale, the middle is where all of your important building blocks go. Stuff readers need to know, stuff that moves the story along, but may not be particularly amazing or highly emotional. At paragraph scale, for example, middles are where you build the argument the paragraph is making. Think back to your school days when you learned about paragraph structure: topic sentence, supporting points, conclusion. That same model applies in fiction. The beginning of the paragraph is the topic sentence giving us a mental scaffold for what the paragraph is about, after which the middle delivers whatever supporting points lead up to the conclusion.

Endings: Being the most powerful, you save your best stuff for here. Big plot revelations and strong emotional statements work particularly well in ending power positions.

A small-scale example

Let's look at how to leverage power points to make the most out of a single sentence.

Suppose the situation is that it's my birthday, my partner has cooked a nice birthday dinner, and that we ate steak and potatoes. Four pieces to play with: birthday, partner cooking, dinner, steak, and potatoes.

Oblivious to power positions, one might write it like this:

Sure, all the information is in there. But the sentence makes poor use of its two most powerful spots. The beginning power position has "potatoes" in it, which at least to my ear is not the most exciting piece of food in the list. The ending has "for me". All the best bits are buried in the middle. The sentence has no life.

A birthday is a big event in one's year, and gives emotional context to everything else. That puts it at the beginning.

The partner cooking is a supporting statement because it establishes a warm emotional tone and because it creates anticipation for the food itself.

This leaves the food for the end. This works because after reading the middle of the sentence, readers want to know what the big meal was. That's the sentence's "big reveal," snapping the whole picture into focus.

But what order does the food go in? Do we want "steak and potatoes" or "potatoes and steak?" Since this is my hypothetical birthday we're talking about, the steak is the best part. It belongs at the very end of the sentence, in the strongest power position.

Putting everything in power-position order, we get this:

This may only be a small-scale example, but I think you'll agree making judicious use of power positions gives the whole sentence a whole lot more impact.

Power positions are like spotlights

And just like spotlights on a stage, they focus readers' attention.

But these spotlights are fixed in place. You cannot aim them. Readers will give more attention to whatever's in the beginning and whatever's at the end.

Your job is to be smart about what goes in them.

Words to live by

(I hope this post is useful for everybody, but I'll just say up front: white writers, this is for you.)

This weekend is the 2018 PNWA Writers Conference, which is pretty much the highlight of my writing year. Well, that and NaNoWriMo.

In one of yesterday's sessions, the presenter suggested that a good way to make your dialogue more vivid was to make judicious use of phonetic spelling for characters with an accent or a noticeable dialect.

I well understand the impulse. Dialects and accents are fun. They're quite musical and beautiful to listen to. They can be very evocative elements of your setting. The thing is, when you write phonetic dialogue you implicitly devalue the speech of those characters relative to the speech of supposedly "unaccented" characters.

Just to be clear what we're talking about, it's stuff like this:

How does this devalue anybody?

Ever since Samuel Johnson invented the modern English dictionary in 1755, we've had a notion of a correct spelling for words. And along with those spellings comes the idea that there is also a correct way to pronounce them.

So what does it say when some of your characters get to speak with the standard, approved spellings, while other have their words mangled into different forms for the sake of dialect?

It says that the people with the standard spellings are speaking correctly, while the phonetically marked group are incorrect. Their words may be just as understandable and equally profound, yet by mangling the spellings the author implicitly marks them as incorrect and thus inferior.

Further, making that textual distinction between the speech of different characters also separates the people into groups. It conveys that Clara is other relative to Miss Lawson. And since the rest of the narrative (the non-dialogue parts) will use standard, approved spellings, this ends up implying that:

• The author/narrator is in the same group as Miss Lawson,
• The reader, by being expected to recognize which spellings are standard and which are not, understands and recognizes those groupings,
• But poor Clara isn't in the "good" group. Cuz she don' talk right, ya know?

The difference in spellings conveys the majority/minority status of the characters, while the standard-ness of the spellings of the surrounding narration assert that the majority group is the superior one.

At least for now, we live in an anglo-centric culture where whiteness and its many associations are taken as the default. Consequently, the use of phonetic spellings puts a white lens on the writing: If Miss Lawson is white (which I'll bet money you assumed even without me saying so), then there is no need to write her dialogue using phonetic spellings because whiteness the default in our culture. Her dialogue is not marked, therefore she's the default, therefore she's white.

Yet we somehow need to point out Clara's non-whiteness literally every time she speaks? Why? Isn't that kind of racist?

Yes. Yes it is.

But Mark Twain did it!

Yeah, he did. And he probably should have checked his privilege before doing so. He should have considered the implications of how he used dialect in his stories.

Just because Twain did it does not mean you should. Society has evolved considerably since the mid-1800s, and thank goodness for it. You, who have the considerable privilege of living in 2018, have an obligation to be more civilized than Mark Twain was.

Or, if you do not accept the obligation, you must at least accept that if you choose not to be more civilized, people have every right to call you out on it.

Even white folks have accents and dialects

I put "unaccented" in quotes back at the top of this article because the whole concept of anybody not having an accent is bogus from the get-go.

Like it or not, you have an accent. You speak some specific dialect of your native tongue. Everyone does. But like the proverbial fish unaware of its water, we don't pay attention to our own accents and dialects. We've heard them so much we no longer hear them, as it were. We hear other people's, particularly if they're from some foreign land or if they're not a native English speaker, but we don't hear our own.

Back in high school, at the beginning of the semester, our Public Speaking teacher wrote this on the board:

We were all quite confused, until he pointed out that this is how, in practice of casual speech, the questions "Did you eat yet?" and "No, did you?" are actually pronounced.

Or, I should say, this is how white people will often pronounce those things. Ny white, male Public Speaking teacher never said that he was portraying white speech on the board. He didn't have to. He never questioned. It was the default.

White folks say "gonna" instead of "going to." We say "could of" as a rapid-speech rendering of "could have," and dozens more such things anyone could probably name.

So if we're supposedly being honest about people's dialects, Miss Lawson's dialogue should probably have been spelled with "dahning room," "pahlished," and "silvuh" in order to convey a sense of Southern drawl. She has a dialect just as much as Clara does. So why point out one but not the other?

Does that mean I can't write with dialect at all?

No. It just means you ought to do it in a way that is respectful to everybody. It means you ought to at least treat everybody equally in your stories.

Either write Clara's with dictionary spellings, or write Miss Lawson's dialect phonetically too.

And if your brain bristles ever so slightly over the notion of writing "dahning room" and "silvuh," good. That means you get it, and you understand why the first of those two options is the better one.

Whatever you do, be fair. Be equal. Take the white lens off of your writing. Becuase just as standard spellings code Miss Lawson as white and and non-standard ones code Clara as other, they also code Miss Lawson as proper and Clara as improper.

Hell, we even call it "proper English," don't we? Think about that.

You don't even need phonetic spellings

Truth is, you can convey dialect just as strongly through careful word choice, word order, idioms, and variations of grammatical structures.

If you want to do dialect, go right ahead. It does portray your characters better. But use respectful tools to do the job instead of lazy, unintentionally-racist phonetic spellings.

Who says?

The implicit question--and the one that privileged people never ask--is who gets to say what's correct?

Well, we all know the answer to that. It was the dictionary writers who standardized our spellings, and they were all old white guys back in the day. White guys who (if we take the contents of their dictionaries as evidence) never gave a thought to people with dialects and accents different to their own. They were white, they were men, so they just assumed they had every right to define what was correct for themselves and everybody else.

They assumed, in other words, that they had the right to define their dialect as superior, and everybody else's as implicitly inferior.

Arrogant? Oh, absolutely. And you know why: that was the water they swam in but never questioned.

If you only write your POC characters phonetically, you not only buy into that same view of default white privilege but push it at your readers, too. And think about this: if that's the view your writing is pushing, what does that say to any people of color who happen to read your book? What does it say to the reader who feels that they are part of Clara's group? Nothing kind, that's for sure.

This is 2018. Is that really what you want to do?

Special thanks to Dhonielle Clayton who first made me aware of my own unquestioned privilege and made me a better person for it.

Crazy eyes, man.

I've said several times that I learn something new about writing from every book I edit for a client. What I haven't said as often as I should, though, is that I learn a lot from reading published books as well.

Last night, I encountered a pretty sweet technique in a mystery novel for making the most out of a plot reveal. Let me walk you through how it worked, with various details changed to avoid any spoilers should you ever happen to read that book.

The Setup

At that point in the story, the main character had a bunch of hunches about what's going on, who's clean and who's dirty, but hasn't found the proverbial smoking gun yet.

Beginning the Reveal

To kick things off, the protagonist goes to a public park where he expects some of his suspects to be present. He doesn't have any specific goal in mind, but is just there to see what else he can learn. When he arrives, he sees a potential suspect who he has not been able to interview yet, and who he wasn't expecting to see.

Observing from afar, he sees one of his other suspects hand this person a fat envelope. Ooh, looks like a payoff!

(Note that in "show, don't tell" terms, the contents of the envelope are not revealed. In fact, the author resisted the temptation to say anything about what was in the envelope. By leaving the question hanging and letting readers watch what happens next, he convinces readers to convince themselves that it's a payoff.)

Pumping it Up

Ok, so here's the part that caught my attention once the whole reveal was done:

A payoff is interesting, and of course the hero wants to ask the payee about it. So when the guy gets up to leave, our hero follows for a little chat. The guy claims to have been fired from the employ of the same suspect who just gave him the envelope, and is moving out of town.

The hero then sees the guy get into--well, let's just say a very nice car--and drive off. Unexpected, yeah? So he decides to follow.

He tails nice-car-guy out of town, down the highway, and into a truck stop where--instead of getting gas as might be expected--the guy pulls around in back of the truck stop's diner.

An SUV pulls up alongside. Windows roll down, and nice-car-guy hands the same envelope over into the other car. Aha! Nice-car-guy isn't really the payee after all!

But that's not the big reveal, becuase now we have a new question: who's in the SUV?

Well, follow the money, right? So our hero now tails the SUV back onto the highway, off onto a side-road that we recognize from earlier in the story, and all the way to a nondescript house.

The Reveal

Peering through a window a few minutes later, the hero sees that the guy in the SUV was--wait for it--a government official who he was pretty sure was dirty and deeply involved in the crime.

And what is the guy doing? He's removing fat stacks of cash from the envelope.

We suspected for a long time, but now we know. This dude is definitely dirty, and we know who paid him off. That's the big reveal.

The Technique Breakdown

Let's boil that down into something we can apply more generally.

To start with, the author has a Big Reveal they want to deliver to the reader. We've all faced that situation.

The most straightforward way to do it would have been for the cop to have gone to the park to receive the payoff directly from the other suspect in the park.

But that would have felt a little too pat, yeah? It would (speaking of manuscripts that taught me something) be a bit too conveniently coincidental for the hero to go to this park and just happen to see Big Suspect #1 paying off Big Suspect #2?

So instead, the author found a way to break the reveal into two parts--the envelope, and the recipient--and to separate those two parts by a good four or five pages of tailing cars.

This does three excellent things for the story.

One, it lets readers stew in their questions for a while--is it really a payoff? Who's the recipient--before discovering the truth. So when the Big Reveal finally comes, we're good and ready for it.

Two, it makes the protagonist work for the answer. Now, instead of feeling like a lucky break because he decided to go to that park, we feel like the hero well and truly earned that bit of knowledge.

And three, it creates a mini-reveal in the middle. By introducing that separation, the author needed a mechanism for bridging the two parts: nice car guy, who we initially suspected was getting paid off, but then turned out to be just an intermediary. Thus, he's a red herring, and so, the truck stop moment where we discover that he's not the true payee is its own mini-reveal that raises our anticipation for the big one.

Make Readers Wait

Waiting is anticipation, and anticipation makes the ultimate reveal feel bigger and juicier than it otherwise would.

So, stretch out your reveals:

• Split the reveal into a smaller part and a bigger part.
• Use the smaller part as a teaser and the larger part as the reward at the end.
• Separate the two parts by delivering each part at a different location.
• Find a method by which you can connect the two parts, and which your protagonist can follow.
• Make the hero work to follow the connection from start to finish.

As writers, I think sometimes we are hampered by what we already know about our stories. You know who the bad guys are. You know where the bodies are buried. You know what the clues are and where they are to be found.

And because you know all that stuff, it's very easy for your mind to create a short, direct, un-dramatic scene which delivers the reveal to your heroes and your readers, so you can get on with the next bit of the story.

But don't. Hold back a bit. Recognize the revelation for the pivotal moment that it is, and do some extra work to make the most of it.

© 2001, Warner Brothers

An enormous part of novel-writing turns out to be an information management job.

You have to manage the information your characters have, how information passes between characters, and what information you give to readers.

It's your story, so you might think you can give information to readers however and whenever you like. But this is not so. Turns out, readers have some expectations--and quite reasonable ones--as to when you will deliver certain kinds of information to them. When your story doesn't live up to these unwritten rules, readers will object.

Why do readers have these rules?

Think about what readers do while they're reading. When you're reading, I'm sure you do it, too.

You read, taking in descriptions and characters names. You learn who the characters are and how they all relate to one another. You figure out who are the heroes and villains. You learn about what the characters can do, what resources they have at their disposal, and all that other stuff.

You pull all that information into your mind in order to do one thing: build a coherent mental model of what's going on in the story.

This model is pretty important. As a reader, it is your basis for making inferences about how the characters are feeling and what they're thinking. It's how you anticipate fights that might happen, shocking discoveries that might be made, etc. And when characters do stuff and make choices, that model is the basis on which you judge whether those actions are plausible, sensible, or whether the character is making a mistake.

For readers to be genuinely engaged in your story, they need to be able to infer, anticipate, and judge. That's what your brain is busy doing when you're reading a book you can't put down. That's why it's fun, because the story is giving you lots of stuff to think about.

Of course, this mental model is not static. Readers also track every new piece of information so their mental model stays up-to-date with changes in the story.

What are the rules?

The rules, then, are fairly simple. In fact, there's really just one rule:

The whole point of this rule is that readers have a fair-play expectation that the story won't hold out on them. That they will at least have a chance to anticipate whatever twists or revelations you throw at them. Whether they do or don't is on them, but they deserve (and rightfully so) a fair chance to try.

This rule doesn't apply to immaterial facts--e.g. the color of the couch in the room where the body was found or whatever--but it does apply to anything that relates to the plot. The acid test for whether a piece of information is materially important is this: If you changed the fact in question, would anything else in the storyline be forced to change? If yes, then you have to find a way to present the information before readers would need it.

Does this mean you can't surprise your readers?

(Spoilers for Harry Potter follow. I will be as non-specific as I can, but if you have somehow not yet read the full HP series, you may want to skip down to the next section of this post.)

This is the obvious writer-centric objection. If you have to tell readers everything up-front, how are you ever supposed to surprise them with a good twist?

The secret is in how and when you deliver the information. The best way to do it without tipping your hand as to the importance of the information is to deliver it early, and in some scene where that information can masquerade as being immaterial.

The most fabulous example of this I can think of is from Harry Potter.

The resolution of the entire seven-book conflict between Harry and Voldemort comes down to an obscure fact about wands. Namely, that "the wand chooses the wizard."

Now, ask yourself where did J.K. Rowling deliver this piece of critically important information? Notin book seven, right before the final showdown, and definitely not in book seven after the showdown had concluded, as an explanation for the showdown's outcome.

No. Rowling delivered this piece of materially important information at the absolute first possible opportunity: way back in book one when Harry is acquiring his wand along with his other school supplies. In that scene, the wandmaker offhandedly comments that the wand chooses the wizard. But in that scene, it feels immaterial. It masquerades as just another weird aspect of wizarding life Harry is discovering, on par with how owls deliver mail and that the bank is run by goblins.

We read it, we tuck it away somewhere in the depths of our mental model, and then we forget about it for the next six and three quarters books, until wham! Rowling slams us with the critical importance of this fact--that we knew all along but hadn't paid any attention to--at the moment when that fact is most relevant.

That's how your surprise your readers.

And we can't be mad about it, either. We cannot cry foul play, because she told us about the wands, fair and square, right in the beginning. It was in our mental model all along, giving us the chance to anticipate what might happen in the final showdown.

Don't hold out on us

The writer's critical sin of information management is thus not delivering all the materially important information ahead of time. If you deliver it right at the moment where it matters, readers cry foul because they feel like you're changing the model on them right at the last second in order to jerk the plot around however you want it to go. Sometimes you'll hear that referred to as "deus ex machina" plotting. If you deliver the information after it matters, they cry foul too, because in both cases you have denied the reader the chance to infer, anticipate, and judge.

And remember, that's where the fun is. Ultimately, readers object to withheld information because it ruins their fun.

Thoroughly Unlikeable. Utterly Watchable

Most of the time, we writers prefer to work with relatable characters who are easy for readers to like.

Still, some awfully interesting stories can be written around protagonists who are very unlikable indeed.

The question is, how do you write a terribly flawed, generally unlikable character and yet still get readers to invest in the character and the story, and to root for them? Here are four things that help:

Give us something good amid the bad

Your character can be an outright jerk. A complete asshole. And yet, if there's something about the character that's good--no matter how deeply buried it may be--if readers can see that thing then they have something to hold on to.

The character of Dr. House is a fabulous example of that. The man dishes out verbal abuse to anyone and everyone within earshot, and yet we can still root for him to succeed because he is very, very good at his job. He diagnoses the impossible cases and saves people's lives.

That's a good thing, and we can root for it. Episode to episode, we're rooting for him to succeed in the medical mystery of the week. We can see that because of his skills, the world is a better place with him in it than without.

Rooting for him on that level gives the show time to build a slow, careful character arc for him until he's ready to start becoming a better person, at which point we can root for that, too.

(It's debatable whether House ever actually became a better person, but that's ok. Drama lives in failure, and we at least got to see him try from time to time.)

A skill or talent, as in House's case often works well, but you could make it something else. Imagine a character who is an abrasive jerk to everyone he knows, but then when nobody's looking, he does random acts of anonymous charity in such a way that he's sure nobody can ever blame him for being nice. It would be easy to root for that character, because we know there's good in him somewhere.

Give us a tragic backstory

We can root for someone if we know that there's some reason why they're so unlikable, and if that reason wasn't their fault.

House, again, shines. Though the show does not reveal what it was for some time, we can tell that something happened to House in the past. Something bad. Something that has left him with so much pain inside that he has responded by turning into a bitter SOB.

We can feel sorry for him--pity him, even--and on that basis root for him to someday face those demons and overcome them.

Give us self-awareness

There is a vast difference between a jerk who has no idea that he's a jerk (especially the ones who labor under the belief that they're actually super-awesome likeable people), and a jerk who knows he's a jerk.

The first guy will make a lousy protagonist because he has no idea that there's even anything about himself that could be improved--he thinks he's awesome as-is! Hence, there is no realistic hope for change, and thus nothing for readers to root for.

But the self-aware jerk? Well, he knows he needs to change. And that knowledge is a source of hope that he will change, both for readers and for himself. That knowledge allows readers to watch every situation he's in with an anticipation that maybe this is the moment when he'll start to change. Make a different choice. Act differently. And that hope is enough for the character to function as a protagonist.

Give us dreams and goals

Just about the hardest thing to root for is a character who shows zero motivation or inclination towards anything. A character who is just static in their lives.

But, give us an unlikable character who wants something--especially if that goal is something positive we can relate to, even if we can't relate to the person themselves--and suddenly we have a basis for determining success and failure of the character's plans, and once again, something to root for.

Show us that the character envisions a better future, because that equals direction rather than aimlessness.

A character we don't like who also has no direction is just a recipe for 250 pages of more stuff we don't like. But a character we don't like who does have a direction, is a signal that something better is coming.

Give us effort

And finally, give us effort.

Goals and dreams are great, but if the character never works for them then once again, what do we have to root for? What good is a dream if you never act on it?

I come back to the four-part mantra for what a story is:

A story is

• Characters,
• Taking actions,
• In pursuit of their goals,
• Despite obstacles and opposition.

The "Taking actions" part is really important. So show us the character's efforts to make those dreams happen, and we'll have no problem rooting for them.

Note, the character's efforts need not be successful. Success is just a bonus. Even if the character fails and suffers consequences, the efforts show us that they're trying and allows us to root for them.

Talented or Dedicated?

If you've been around writers you've probably heard somebody say, in a particularly pep-talky tone of voice, "oh, anybody can write a novel." Or, "If I can do it, so can you."

It's true, but rarely does anyone talk about why. Followers of this blog will know that I'm all about the why of writing, so let's dig in to why anybody really can write a novel.

Skill versus talent

The older I get, the less I find myself believing in natural-born talent. And conversely, the more I find myself believing in learnable skills. This applies to everything from tying your shoes to writing novels.

I wish I had understood this 35 years ago, but that's life.

When I was in high school, I tried to write. I could manage short stories (though on the short-end of those, even) before I would have exhausted whatever epic sci-fi or fantasy idea my teenaged brain had come up with.

Try as I might, I just couldn't break out of that mold. I wanted to write novels. You know, real stories. But every time, I would simultaneously hit that two or three page mark and the end of the story. I couldn't understand how the real writers sustained a story, not for just two or three pages, but for three hundred.

After a while, I decided it must just be a knack. A talent you were either born with or weren't, and evidently I wasn't. So I stopped writing.

Twenty years passed before I tried it again. In the meantime I had heard about this whole show, don't tell idea. And this time, I did not run out of story until--miracle of miracles!--just about 300 pages.

That manuscript was still many learnable skills away from being good, but by my teen-self's metrics, it was a real story.

What happened?

Learnable skills

What I discovered was length is not a function of talent, but was a byproduct of applying "show, don't tell," which was learnable.

Later, I found that every part of writing a novel is learnable. Story structure is learnable. Scene crafting is learnable. Dialogue is learnable, as are dozens and dozens of other skills, tricks, and tips in the world of writing novels.

Maybe you're just starting out in writing. Maybe you've been writing for years but feel like you can't quite break through to where you want to be. Wherever you are today, everything in the gap between where you are and where you want to be is a learnable skill.

None of it is pure, natural-born talent.

I know this from the many novels I have critiqued for my clients.

Along the way, I've seen that everybody has strengths and weaknesses. This person is good at descriptions, but has trouble with believable character motivations. That person's plot is really tight, but boy do they write run-on sentences.

The issues abound. Weak verbs. Passive protagonists. Overuse of "and" as a go-to conjunction. I've seen those and many dozens of other issues in people's writing.

Whenever I hit such an issue for the first time, my job is to explain what the issue is, why it's a problem, how to identify it, and how to fix it. My job is to figure out the pattern behind that particular bit of writing craft so my client can learn it.

That is, I have to turn what looks like talent into a learnable skill.

So far, after nearly ten years of developmentally editing, I have never encountered a writing craft issue that wasn't learnable.

Which means talent is a myth, and that believing the writers you admire are naturally talented is a self-defeating proposition.

Talent is nothing. Dedication is everything.

Anybody really can write a novel. I will even go so far as to say that anybody can write a good novel.

I don't promise it will be easy, only that there's no magic talent to it. Because if everything in novel writing is learnable, then the only thing standing between you and writing a good novel is the work necessary to learn those skills, and the dedication to doing that work.

You have to study the craft. You have to recognize that you will be stronger in some areas and weaker in others. You have to discover what your specific weaknesses are so you can address them. The world is full of resources to help you do that.

But if you dedicate yourself to those things, you can learn to write a novel. You can learn what your writing voice sounds like, and develop your style to a level every bit as good (or in many cases better) than other published writers.

Don't believe in talent. Believe instead in learnable skills and dedication. I wish I'd understood that before losing twenty years to a myth.

Dueling Brains

Part 1 and part 2 of this series talked a lot about what scenes are, what they need, and how they work. That information is useful and even necessary, but does not address the actual how of writing scenes that:

• engage your readers,
• portray settings and actions vividly,
• achieve your story goals, and
• link smoothly together.

In this concluding installment of the series, we're going to fix that by looking at the mental process of taking your knowledge of what you want the scene to be and discovering what words to actually write.

Scene writing requires two brains

Of course, I do not mean two actual brains crammed inside your one skull. But I don't mean the left-brain/right-brain duality we hear about so often.

Rather, I mean that writing scenes requires the dual efforts of your organizer brain and your experiencer brain.

Meet your organizer brain

Your organizer brain lives in the world of facts and information. This is the part of your mind that keeps track of the knowledge you already have about what you want the scene to be. This is the brain that knows where and when the scene must take place, who's there, what's supposed to happen, what deal is supposed to be negotiated. In short, this brain knows where the scene is supposed to start and end and roughly how it will make that journey.

Organizer brains tend to want to cut to the chase. They're not interested in frilly details. Novels written solely by organizer brains tend to be heavily oriented towards summaries (i.e. telling) rather than vivid, engaging writing (showing), as explored in the recent show, don't tell series on this blog.

Meet your experiencer brain

Your experiencer brain lives in the world of imagination and the senses. It is the tactile, sensual part of your mind that cares about sights and sounds, smells, the texture of the bark on the trees and the soft crunch of pine needles underfoot. This is the brain that evokes the experience of being in a place, doing things or watching things happen.

Experiencer brains want to linger, savoring every bit of juice a scene or even just a moment has to offer. Novels written solely by experiencer brains tend to be richly evocative, yet terribly slowly-paced and without much of a coherent storyline.

Writing scenes

Fortunately, both brains' strengths and weaknesses complement each other perfectly. If you can engage both brains while you write, keeping their relative contributions balanced, you will create scenes that achieve the four bullet-points listed at the top of this article.

Organizer brain directs the scene, telling experiencer brain what's going on, transitioning from one moment to the next, being mindful of everything the scene needs both structurally and in terms of content. Experiencer brain evokes the sights and sounds of being in that scene and watching everything your organizer brain says should be happening. You-the-writer then put simply put those imaginings into words.

As Experiencer does its job, it will run into vague spots where Organizer's notes didn't have enough information. It can then pose those questions for Organizer to make a decision about. As Experiencer gets carried away with details, Organizer can rein it in and keep everything on track.

The two brains go back and forth, taking turns directing and imagining, until the scene is concluded.

Two brains in action

The best way I know of explaining how that process actually works is to present an example of writing a scene, as a dialogue between these two brains.

I'll use the example from last week, a group of people going into the woods on some sort of escapade. In this dialogue, Organizer is on the left, while Experiencer is on the right.

Ok, let's get this scene started. Addie arrives at the turn-out on the road, with Sean and Emily. It's pretty late in the evening. Ok, go.

Right. So, I'm seeing a dusty road--wait, is it dusty? You didn't tell me whether it was paved or not.

Uh, better be paved. Otherwise, it would be weird that Addie has been here before and knows where to pull over.

Got it. Paved road in the middle of the woods at night. How about this:

Good. I like the bit about the stars. It's dark, so let's make this harder because nobody thought to bring a flashlight. Later it'll get pretty cold, so give me some foreshadowing of that as a looming problem. And we need to get them moving into the woods towards where Addie saw the guy with the duffel bag.

Dark and cold. Ok. I'm seeing maybe some shivering for the cold thing. But you know what, if I was there, I would totally use my phone for some light, even though I doubt it would help all that much.

Nice. Ok, now give me some general wandering in the woods stuff, so that it sounds like around half an hour has passed, and then have them see something sticking out from behind a tree.

What is it?

No spoilers. I'll tell you when they get there. Now, get busy doing your thing.

Fine. So, crunchy junk underfoot. Maybe some creepy wind in the trees. Animal sounds. And if Sean has the light but Addie is leading, then he'll be casting big shadows in front of himself. A half hour is a while, though. I'd be wondering if Addie knows where he's going. Some bickering is sure to follow.

Hold up. We don't need a digression about the indigenous wildlife. That's not what the scene is about. Lose the bears, and let's move on with the bickering. That sounded good.

Sigh. Aye aye, cap'n.

Ok, now will you tell me what's behind the tree?

Mmm... no.

What!? You promised, you big tease!

Yeah, but the deal is done. They've concluded the deal about whether Addie is leading them on a wild goose chase, and thus whether the others will keep following him. And besides, you gave me a great hook ending there, so the scene's over.

But I wanna know what's behind the tree! C'mon, is it the duffel bag?

Now you're just talking like a reader, which only proves my point. We should end here because now you have a new question in mind, which itself serves as the lead-out by making you pretty sure where the next scene is going to pick up.

Hmpf. Spoilsport.

Well, we could always just write the next scene. I mean, if you really want to...

Conclusion

That's how you write scenes. Let your inner organizer and experiencer take turns directing and imagining your way through the events. Let your experiencer raise red-flags about issues the organizer hasn't thought enough about yet. Let your organizer rein in the experiencer's excesses, keeping everything on track and well-paced.

It takes two brains to write a scene. Fortunately, both of them already live inside your writer's head, and with a little bit of practice you'll have them working together like a team.