Regardless of what genre you're writing, diction is a daily decision. The elaboration or the precision of the words you choose, or the order of the words on the page all contribute towards setting the tone of the work. I touched on this a little on my last post on tone.
I think you need imagination in order to employ diction, a different sort of imagination than the one you use to generate plot. You know how they say you need to imagine success in order to reach it? That's what I'm referring to here. For me, there are contemporary and retrograde imagination. Neither is difficult to achieve so long as you keep an eye one yourself to avoid straying off course.
Contemporary imagination is that whole "imagine your success" thing. Imagine that you've got a copy of your novel from the future. What details would the future you include in the text? What word flow? How much humor? How much drama? Aim for the near future too. 40-Year-Old Mario or 50-Year-Old Mario will have experiences that I can't possibly imagine right now. On the other hand, 30-Year-Old Mario is just around the corner.
Put another way, your style of writing changes gradually over time. If you've got any lingering scraps from your grade school days, you'll see what I mean. The difference is like night and day. My writing five years ago as an undergrad wasn't as sharp as it is now, and my writing now isn't as sharp as it will be five years in the future. True, some elements of style will still be there after a relatively short amount of time, but you may also drop some bad habits and pick up some new ones.
Retrograde imagination is another matter. With this, I'm putting myself in the shoes of another time period altogether. Right now, in addition to the alien invasion novel, I'm working on a story that spans the 1890s to the 1910s. Not only that, but I'm also writing in the voices of the characters of that time. It's totally anachronistic to have a character walk into a room and say, "Yo, yo! Wassup?" Even people from that time period don't quite speak the same way anymore. Besse Cooper (at 115, she's the oldest living person at the time of this writing) doesn't speak today the same way she did when she was a little girl and William McKinley was assassinated in 1901.
The only way to anticipate and imagine how people of a certain time period might write or speak is to expose yourself to the literature of that time period. If I want to write with a 19th century flavor, I need to read the Mark Twain's, the Joseph Conrad's, and the Mary Shelley's. If I want to write in a very BC fashion, I need to read Homer and Virgil. Like contemporary imagination, you're trying to tune your mental ear to a voice; however, it's not precisely your voice. If I were to write a direct sequel to The Invisible Man, I would read through the original, and then, as I'm writing, I would ask myself, "How would H.G. Wells write this?" And then I would ask what I would do as a writer.
The goal here is to try and stay true to yourself while fitting into a certain mold. I suppose actors doing period films run into the same obstacles.
Here's a little something to get us started. I'm going to give you guys two sentences and I want you to take a moment to think about how they're similar and how they're different. Do this before reading on. No cheating. Well, okay, you can peek, but don't get caught.
First sentence: "Robert and Allison consummated their new marriage in the powder room of the house."
Second sentence: "As soon as they said 'I do', Bobby and Ally fucked each others brains out in the bathroom."
Ready to move on? You sure? Okay.
They're both the same sentence in that they both relate the same information -- a newlywed couple having sex. What separates them is tone. The first sentence is pretty G-rated, while the second is something you hear for a more adult audience.
Tone makes for a massive part of the writing experience. The tone of a piece can change from draft to draft and project to project, but with enough time, a writer's use of tone will cultivate to such an extent that a unique style is born identified with that particular writer.
What goes into tone? A large part of it has to do with the mood you're trying to convey to the read about the subject you're writing, and what goes into this mood is a combination of word choice, imagery, grammar and word order, detail or lack of it, and sentence length.
Let's look at word choice. In the two sentences, I have the words "consummate" and "fuck". Both mean the same thing because they relate to sex. Which word would you likely see in a Jane Austen story? Actually, you could see both because they have their origins in the early-1500's, but "fuck" is considered vulgar rather than "consummate", and because vulgarity relates to a more common social class (vulgarity and obscenity are not the same thing, mind you), it can give a piece more range with prospective readers.
Word choice also has an impact on imagery. Now, while "fuck" is a vulgar word, it's also an obscene one. When I hear about a couple consummating their marriage, I think of peaches-and-cream lovemaking, that really gentle and romantic variety. When I hear that Bobby and Ally are fucking, I imagine that they're going at it like animals. This is an example of how word choice alters the mental image a reader has when exposed to a piece.
Grammar and word order are, I believe, matters left to writers on a case by case basis. "Will cut through the ham with a sharp knife." sounds better than, "With a sharp knife, Will cut through the ham." I think Stephen King had a similar example in On Writing. My rule of thumb is this: the most important piece of information in a sentence ought to come first. What we need to know in this sentence is that Will is cutting a ham. The knife and its sharpness are minor details. On the other hand, if this was a scene in an operating room -- "With the scalpel, Will made an incision just above the kneecap." -- I would put the prepositional phrase first because, while we generally know what goes on in an operating room, the scalpel helps sharpen and clarify the scene for us.
Detail or lack of detail. Again, I prefer to leave this up to the writer. It depends on how much you'd like to leave to the reader's imagination. Going back to the sentences about Robert and Allison, we don't need to go into detail about how their having sex because that's something best left to the imagination unless we were reading erotica (I'll deal with erotica and sex scenes another time, you horny bastards).
Finally, there's sentence length. Cormac McCarthy's The Road is an interesting blend of short and long sentences. The dialogue between the man and the boy is short and to the point, and each one says only a handful of words at a time. McCarthy allows longer sentences in his description of things, but even then he often chops his sentences up. Here's a passage as an example:
"Beyond a crossroads in that wilderness they began to come upon the possessions of travelers abandoned in the road years ago. Boxes and bags. Everything melted and black. Old plastic suitcases curled shapeless in the heat."
McCarthy could have merged all of these sentences into one, but by breaking them up, he helps to relate the tone of The Road to the reader in a subconscious way, a tone that tells the reader that time is very short for the man and the boy, that the world is slowly dying, and that what we are really left with are just flashes of the past.
I began the new alien invasion novel this week, and it startled me how quickly and easily I was able to get into the swing of things. There was no blank page phobia.
Let me back up and explain a bit. Blank page phobia is that feeling of hesitation when you begin a new project. You've got the blank page staring at you - a vast, empty white space - and you've got to somehow turn it into something unique. Your own expectations can get in the way too. I have a vivid memory of one story where I'd finish the first day's work, check to find that I had about five or six pages, and then felt discouraged. Novels don't clock in at five or six pages. Of course, they also don't get finished on the first day either.
Overcoming blank page phobia is the product of time and experience. I think the reason I began this new book without it is because I developed a rhythm for my writing process in the failed series. I write a vignette each day, and I'll write notes for it the night before: where it's set, what the weather's like, a sequence of events that needs to be completed (or at least I'll use that to guide me through the piece). Then, the next day when it's go time, I sit down at write away. It doesn't all get done in one sitting, of course, but the goal is to finish that vignette by the end of the day.
Establishing a rhythm may be helpful to you as well if you find yourself struggling to be productive. Also remember that a lot of that productivity is mental. No, a novel isn't a few pages long, but don't worry about that when you're doing your day's writing. Just worry about getting through your five or six pages.
It's hard for me to believe that it's been almost two weeks since my last post, but in those two weeks, I've amassed a large amount of notes for the new alien invasion novel. The aliens themselves are completely different, and so is the way the story will unfold. Now that the background work is done, I'm focusing on the storytelling aspects.
I did give honest thought to recycling some of the characters from the last attempt at the novel. Some of you may have projects of your own that don't last long, but you like certain characters so much that you want to salvage them. I felt that way myself when I began this new project. However, I don't think it's something you can or should do.
Those characters that you fall in love with are, whether consciously or subconsciously, tailored to particular stories and situations. I'll give you an example. In my last novel attempt, I had a character who was in the Israeli army. She was pint-sized and took crap from no one. I liked her, and wanted to keep her around, but her upbringing in Israel results in a different character than if she were raised in the United States where this second shot at the novel is entirely focused.
Could I have saved certain parts of her character? Possibly, but not without difficulty. When you detail characters to a certain degree, all of their traits and personality quirks become glued together as a whole, and pulling them apart results in fracturing. So my advice to you is that if you want to rescue your characters from a failed project from the paper shredder, don't. It's like chasing a woman who doesn't love you. You can't put the pieces back together.
Also, I would suggest that you don't even hold on to the names of the characters. I didn't think this would be a big deal, but then I began to catch myself trying to resurrect old characters into new ones.
Just start from scratch, folks. That's really the best advice I can give sometimes. Take what you've learned about making characters and apply those lessons towards the goal of making new ones.
This is not the easiest post to write.
I've given up on my alien invasion novel. You know, the one I've referred to again and again? Yeah, that one. Before I continue, understand that this decision was not made lightly. I got the idea for a series (this novel was to be the first installment) in July of 2009 and began writing it three months later. So to say that I'm putting down nearly three years of work is never something I do on a whim.
My novel changed a lot in the last three years, and so did the concept of the series to follow. Not all of those changes have been things that I wanted to do, but felt compelled to do. Certain issues of character took the plot of the greater whole in completely different directions. The logistics of other plot points crumbled apart. Ultimately, I've come to the decision that writing a series was not written into my life's script. A stand-alone book, I think I can do, and I've got ideas aplenty. But dedicating so much time to a series of an undetermined length, something that grew beyond my control like Frankenstein's monster, that is something that truly goes against the grain of my character.
Now, I'm not going to make up excuses for myself, and I'm not going to waste your time with the minute details of all the problems I've come up against in the process. What I will say, especially to the writers among my audience, is this: if you have a project that falls apart, DO NOT consider it time misspent. It is a massive learning experience, that's what a dead project is. I've spent a couple of years working on this novel, but it wasn't spent sitting on my ass doing nothing. I've learned a lot about my writing style, my voice, my revision techniques. I've picked up certain skills and habits that I will take with me as I move on to writing the next story, and you should too with whatever it is you're working on.
Yes, in the short term, it does suck, particularly when you look at all your drafts collected, all the paper and ink used and the long hours that went into it all. You look at that physical manifestation and think that you've made some pretty big mistakes somewhere along the road.
But if I'm not able to encourage you to learn from your experiences, then maybe a more established name can. Alan Moore once said, "How good am I as a writer compared to these guys that I like reading? And you think, 'Actually, I'm rubbish,' and so you try to make yourself a little bit better. And, if you're honest with yourself, not over-critical -- there's no point in looking everything you do and saying that's rubbish and tearing it up -- but if you can at least be honest and say, 'Yeah, this has got some bits in it that are good. I could have done better with these bits. This is not as good as so-and-so who I admire would have done it. Next time, this is going to be better.' And you just try to make each thing you do a little bit smarter, a little bit more sophisticated than the thing you did before. Eventually, people will notice."
I don't know if anyone else has done this before, but the idea popped in my head and it seemed to work out pretty nicely.
After cutting out a few characters from my alien invasion novel, I knew that there were gaps in the story waiting to be filled. Sometimes, a couple of months of story time would pass by without anything happening. With some characters, several months of story time would pass before the book returned to them.
Having so much time to spare doesn't work for me, not with my fiction. After cutting out the weakest characters, I asked myself where could I put in new scenes that give us more character development and narrative.
Now, I'm a visual learner, so I can't just write up a timeline. I have to see where the characters are in the story. Enter Microsoft Excel.
Here's what I did...
In the leftmost column (Column A), I marked down the story time in weekly intervals from the beginning to the end. If your story is shorter, say a couple of months, you may want to give more focus and do daily intervals. If it's longer and spans a couple of years, weeks are the way to go because while a month is roughly thirty days, a week is exactly seven days. Don't worry about taking up a lot of space with your timeline chart. This is a visual aid. It's not meant to be printed.
At the top of the subsequent columns (B, C, D, etc.), type the names of each of your viewpoint characters. Now, with each character, go down the column and mark which weeks in your story's timeline they appear in. Don't worry about getting the specific day down (unless, as I said, it's a shorter time scale). Just approximate where in the timeline each one appears.
When this is done, go through your chart and highlight those weeks in which no characters appear at all. Highlighting will make the gaps stand out and allow you to, at a glance, see how much space you've got to work with. From there, you use your best judgement. If you see a three-month gap at the end of a year, ask yourself which characters you'd like to devote some of that time towards. It may be a few. It may be all of them.
If you have weeks marked down where certain characters appear, try to find a space for characters you've neglected. I did this with one of my characters a few times because he would have otherwise not been too noticeable in the final piece.
That's the ultimate goal of the timeline chart. It's a tool to help ensure that you and your readers are frequently touching base with your characters so that none of them accidentally get thrown off to the side of the road, and it's to make sure that you make efficient use of the time scale of your story.
My alien invasion novel is an ensemble piece. That is, there's a group of main characters, each no more or less important than the others. This is a great way to give your story range. A single character cannot see and do everything, so there are others to take his place. However, you have to be careful not to saturate your story with too many main characters, as I've come to learn this week.
The novel had fourteen main characters. Fourteen different story threads. I opened the book by introducing each character at the same moment in time on a particular day. This is called simultaneous storytelling and it's impossible to do in more than an illusionary way. Each character's introduction has to be given a page at a time and by the time I was done with the last one, the opening of my novel was about seventy pages.
The solution is simple: sometimes you have to cut the fat. The best way to do this is to look got characters that seem to be holding you back, characters that don't really contribute to the overall story or don't develop in any significant way. In Harry Turtledove's Colonization series, the character of Rance Auerbach who is on the run from aliens while smuggling narcotics. I've heard that Rance is an example of redemption in Turtledove's story, but I think the main backdrop of the series is the escalating tensions between humans and aliens, something that Rance doesn't really contribute towards. If I were to take Turtledove's Colonization series and re-write it my own way, I'd get rid of Rance entirely.
The advantage of omitting such wasteful characters goes beyond just removing obstacles to the flow of your story. Doing so also frees up valuable page space that can be devoted to the more critical characters. When I screened out my weak characters, reducing the cast from fourteen to ten, I found that I had cut ninety-two pages! Those pages can be used to clarify certain points or to return to characters that have too long of a break between scenes. Fewer characters also means less complications for the reader. They won't have to struggle to remember so many people.
How many viewpoint characters should you have? My rule of thumb is no more than ten. That should give you enough range to cover many different areas of your story while keeping things manageable.
