Entries Tagged 'fiction' ↓

Writer #1: If you ask me, word choice is everything.

Writer #2: You couldn’t be more wrong. Diction is everything.

So I’m writing what may or may not be a love scene. There’s definitely a good looking young woman with no clothes on. There’s definitely a young man admiring this young lady and her nakedness. But halfway through I’ve encountered a rare problem: too many breasts. If it was first person from this randy young fellow’s perspective I could just use any slang a teenager would use seeing his first live and in-person ta-ta’s. But no, it’s a third person narrative so I’m just writing breasts over and over again. Too poetic (milky swell of womanhood, say) isn’t right, the kid’s not that slick. Heaving bosoms are right out. She’s not even wearing a bodice to rip. Boobies is always fun but it’s a little too juvinile even for my young lovers. I personally don’t have a problem with titties but it has just a hint of X-rated that doesn’t feel right on the page. But breast just feels so…boring. It’s what most people say when they’re too shy to say knockers. It’s almost clinical really, just short of mammaries. How many breasts can a paragraph have before it starts to sound redundant? Why can’t the kid at least try to look somewhere else? I mean their nice knockers but come on. She could put on a shirt or something too. She knows the dude is checking out her chi-chi’s. Damn teenagers anyway. Show some restraint.

Hooters. Rack. Naughty Pillows.

Maybe I can just get ‘em a room.

I recently experienced the self-inflicted misfortune of watching two similarly styled films based on video games: Hitman & Max Payne

Each featured an array of decent acting talent (not A-list, but well above C-list). Each was also pretty well shot and offered some interesting visual effects. But each was also severely lacking in the story department. Now, I will say that I have not played the games that begat the films. It is likely that the screenwriters were both constrained by and propped up by the stories that are presented in-game. The projects were probably little more than work for hire and neither was able to be pulled up to rise above that ignominious start. In retrospect, only Max Payne really had any chance of engaging me as a viewer since the characters appeared to have some unmined depths.

I don’t even need all of the digits on one hand to count the satisfying (for me) movie ventures that fall into this genre - Mortal Kombat & Lara Croft: Tomb Raider. And Mortal Kombat was more of a nostalgia win, since it was based on a game that I actually enjoyed playing.

Looking ahead, I only see two films in this space that might have a chance to break the mold. One is Alice, based on the American McGee game title. If the film makers (and more importantly, the screenwriter) can capture the deliciously twisted vision of this game, I will be impressed. The other is Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, but only because the game designer, Jordan Mechner, based the game on old movies to begin with. Still, it will require more than flashy swordplay to hold my attention for ninety plus minutes. That’s right, it’s going to take a story.

This week, a student of mine gave me the latest issue of National Geographic which features an article about a church in Sicily that contains the remains of nearly 2000 mummified corpses. While the photographs of these centuries-old priests and parishioners were repulsively intriguing, one portion of text jumped out at me:

“A number of bodies are still kept in their elaborate coffins. Gingerly, I lift a heavy lid that may have not been moved for over a century and peer inside. The air seems to escape with a thick sigh, and the smell grabs the back of my throat—not a rotten smell but the odor of beef tea and the clogging aroma of dry mold and fine, powdery layers of human dust. It’s a smell that is dramatically unforgettable, the tincture of silence and sadness, the scent of repeated prayer heard from a distance, or of remorse and regret, a smell that’s both repellent and intimately familiar. Something sensed for the first time, but also with a strange and compelling sense of déjà vu.”

Wow! Although I’ve never encountered the realities of death and decay on a level like this, the descriptive power of these lines transports me to a place that is worlds away from my own experience, and for a brief moment, I gain a sense of what it must have been like to peer into the abyss of this author’s mortality. Such is the power of words, and as a writer, I am both intrigued and intimidated by lines that capture the essence of an experience as poignantly and profoundly as these do for me.

I think all writers struggle at times to give shape to their characters’ experiences, although some authors appear to do it so effortlessly. For example, take a look at Charles Frazier’s depiction of the Confederate hospital in the opening pages of his novel, Cold Mountain:

“At the first gesture of morning, flies began stirring. Inman’s eyes and the long wound at his neck drew them, and the sound of their wings and the touch of their feet were soon more potent than a yardful of roosters in rousing a man to wake. So he came to yet one more day in the hospital ward. He flapped the flies away with his hands and looked across the foot of his bed to an open triple-hung window.”

Or watch how Frazier relays the details of Inman’s battle wound:

“At the hospital, the doctors looked at him and said there was not much they could do…They gave him but a gray rag and a little basin to clean his own wound…But mainly the wound had wanted to clean itself. Before it had started scabbing, it spit out a number of things: a collar button and a piece of wool collar from the shirt he had been wearing when he was hit, a shard of soft gray metal as big as a quarter dollar piece, and unaccountably, something that closely resembled a peach pit. That last he set on the nightstand and studied for some days. He could never settle his mind on whether it was a part of him or not.”

I read lines like this and I wonder how anyone could describe that scene better than he has just done. Likewise, witness James Joyce’s description of Stephen Dedalus’ encounter with a young girl in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Those familiar with the novel will recall that this is a transformative moment for Dedalus as the young, would-be priest decides to turn his back on a religious vocation and instead devote his life to artistic pursuits.

“A girl stood before him in midstream: alone and still, gazing out to sea. She seemed like one whom magic had changed into the likeness of a strange and beautiful seabird. Her long slender bare legs were delicate as a crane’s and pure save where an emerald trail of seaweed had fashioned itself as a sign upon the flesh. Her thighs, fuller and softhued as ivory, were barred almost to the hips where the white fringes of her drawers were like feathering of soft white down. Her slate-blue skirts were kilted boldly about her waist and dovetailed behind her. Her bosom was as a bird’s, soft and slight, slight and soft as the breast of some dark-plumaged dove. But her long fair hair was girlish, and touched the wonder of mortal beauty, her face.”

Or consider how another Irishman, Frank McCourt, depicts the people of Limerick as they seek refuge from the rain in his memoir Angela’s Ashes:

“The rain dampened the city from the Feast of the Circumcision to New Year’s Eve. It created a cacophony of hacking coughs, bronchial rattles, asthmatic wheezes, consumptive croaks. It turned noses into fountains, lungs into bacterial sponges…From October to April the walls of Limerick glistened with the damp. Clothes never dried: tweed and woolen coats housed living things, sometimes sprouted mysterious vegetations. In pubs, steam rose from the damp bodies and garments to be inhaled with cigarette and pipe smoke laced with the stale fumes of spilled stout and whiskey and tinged with the odor of piss wafting in from the outdoor jakes where many a man puked up his week’s wages.”

These authors all display an amazing knack for bringing their scenes to life, and it’s fun to allow their words to transport us into their worlds, both real and imagined. Other times, it’s interesting to see an author searching desperately for just the right words to convey an experience. For example, witness John Wesley Powell’s description of the Southwestern landscape in his 1895 travelogue, The Exploration of the Colorado River and Its Canyons:

“The landscape everywhere, away from the river, is of rock—cliffs of rock, tables of rock, plateaus of rock, terraces of rock, crags of rock—ten thousand strangely carved forms; rocks everywhere, and no vegetation, no soil, no sand. In long, gentle curves the river winds about these rocks…When thinking of these rocks one must not conceive of piles of boulders or heaps of fragments, but of a whole land of naked rock, with giant forms carved on it: cathedral-shaped buttes, towering hundreds or thousands of feet, cliffs that cannot be scaled, and canyon walls that shrink the river into insignificance, with vast, hollow domes and tall pinnacles and shafts set on the verge overhead; and all highly colored—buff, gray, red, brown, and chocolate—never lichened, never moss-covered, but bare, and often polished.”

You can almost feel the tough, one-armed explorer groping for the perfect combination of nouns and adjectives to help render a tiny glimpse of this vast and virtually indescribable landscape. Now anyone who has seen the Grand Canyon will likely agree that, even as skilled as his descriptions are, Powell still comes up a bit short. But his attempt is certainly better than most, and at the very least, you have to admire his courage for trying. Ultimately, that’s all any writer can do, and like Powell, we must forge ahead and give our best efforts despite the nagging fear that we may fail.

Those of us who enjoy reading and writing often return to our favorite passages from our favorite books simply to enjoy the scenes once again or, perhaps at some level, we hope to somehow absorb a portion of the talent reflected in those sentences. Great descriptions refresh and inspire us, and like thirsty pilgrims drinking water from a well, they sustain our creative souls. If we are lucky, perhaps we will find the right words to transport readers into those worlds crafted deep inside our own imaginations.

Plot is not Story. Plot is a tool that can help you with your story. It might help quite a bit. But it might not. It might even hurt. Who remembers learning all the ‘versus’ categories in school? The Most Dangerous Game…Man vs Man. The Old Man and the Sea…Man vs Nature. The Lady or the Tiger…Man vs Doors? Whatever. I’m still not sure what those categories were supposed to teach us about literature. What about The Call of the Wild? I might ask the main character’s a freakin dog. Ummm…my teacher might reply…It’s still Man vs Nature, the dog really stands for man. Yeah, I might have said back, but every step the dog makes takes him closer and closer to nature, not versus nature. Then my teacher might ignore me because she might have to admit that the versus categories, even broader than plot categories, are pretty much meaningless and have no effect whatsoever in how good the story is.

Plot is neither good nor bad it’s just a tool. Learn it quickly and move on to something better, more fun, and more interesting. Your characters. If you can write a good character, plot will become meaningless. People remember the characters, not the plot. Ask someone what Raiders of the Lost Ark is about. They might say it’s an Adventure Plot. They might say it’s an Underdog Plot, or a Quest plot, or even Man vs. Man. But more likely it will be some version of this-”This dude, Indiana Jones, is a professor of archaeology. He wears a fedora and leather jacket and carries a whip and he looks for lost artifacts and he’s trying to find the Ark of the Covenant before the Nazi’s do. Oh yeah it takes place in the ’30’s. So, you know, there’s Nazis.” It’s about this guy, it’s about these two young girls, it’s about a freakin sled dog. Always the character first and what happens to them or what they do second. Something to think about.

What do the following character names have in common?

Maria Archer
Hollis Rivers
Ester Stringer
Robert Mueller, Director of the FBI

OK, so that last one doesn’t really fit with my topic, but all of these started out the day in my email spam folder. I have been harvesting character names from this source for quite some time. The names gathered in this fashion satisfy three of my basic requirements for stock character names: they are random, they are plentiful and they are believable.

For main characters, names are often chosen to signify some aspect of the character, but for the rest of the characters that inhabit a story’s world, I usually find that I would prefer not to have any additional baggage come along for the ride. Even if you, as the writer, simulate a random sampling for your names, you will more than likely subconciously return to the same names again and again. True randomness should be free from control and nothing says out of control like the typical spam folder. As far as plentiful, I usually receive a couple dozen spam emails per day and at least half of them have proper names in the from address.

Which brings us to the last requirement: believability. Spam emails, by their very nature are designed to get the recipient to open them. One way that this is accomplished is by making it appear as though the email is coming from somebody that the recipient knows or thinks they might know. Now, sometimes the spammers go off the rails and send out some truly whacky combinations. These can be great when you are featuring a unique character that really needs a unique name to match.

I know there are plenty of character name generators available on the internet, but with this technique, you don’t have to go out of your way to find a name. A quick scan of your spam folder should provide a usable name, allowing you to stay in the writing groove.

And speaking of main characters and the careful crafting of their names, I have a funny story to relate. A couple of years back, I was working on a NaNoWriMo novel and chose the name Crash Bandicoot for my protagonist (not from the spam folder, mind you). I meant to go back and “fix” his name, but after a dozen pages, it just kind of stuck, especially when another character kept referring to him as “Crashy”.