Category Archives: Narrative Voice

A guest post by David Jón Fuller.

There are a lot of ways to express conflict through dialogue in a scene, but it can be very effective – and a lot of fun – if it isn’t done openly.

People (and characters) hate conflict. They usually do everything they can to avoid it, unless they’re devoid of empathy. But readers… they love conflict. It makes for great dialogue, exciting scenes, and a plot that keeps moving.

I think, as a writer, it can be easy to fall into placating one or the other of those camps. You want to protect your characters from too much pain, so they work out compromises too often and no one gets hurt. Or, you throw them into the exciting drama of constant conflict, and they will die on that hill before they give in.

The happy middle ground – for characters, your story, and readers – is somewhere in between; and when I’m writing scenes, I follow some basic guidelines that govern how it plays out. These aren’t the only ways to do it, of course, but they’re options to consider.

(Also: one assumption underlying any scene I write is that the characters in it need something from each other. If they didn’t, one or more of them would just leave.)

Characters want different things, but they don’t necessarily say so.

Conflict is more than this:

Character 1: I want the thing!

Character 2: I don’t want you to have the thing!

It’s more often like this:

Character 1: Say, why don’t we go outside and enjoy the warm weather? (The thing I want is hidden in the garage, and I want to get it)

Character 2: No, let’s stay in the living room and play chess! (I’ve already stolen the thing from the garage and I don’t want you to find out)

Give your characters subtext! They don’t have to say what they really want from each other. In fact, I think it’s better if they avoid doing so until they have no other choice.

Characters want different things, but one or both of them don’t realize it.

In a different scenario, things could play out like this:

Character 3: Is there a gas station coming up soon? (My highly contagious stomach flu which I haven’t told you about is acting up and I need a washroom)

Character 4: Don’t worry about that! Even though it says “empty” here, we have plenty of fuel. (If we stop, I’ll be late for my meeting with the loan shark I owe money to)

You can use this to heighten tension, but be careful about confusing the reader. You can make it clear something deeper is going on by showing other details, rather than having the character say anything.

Character 3: (gripping the armrest, sweating, pale, trying to conceal a grimace) Is there a gas station coming up soon?

Character 4: (Checks wristwatch, glancing repeatedly in rear-view mirror) Don’t worry about that! Even though it says “empty” here, we have plenty of fuel.

Characters generally want to avoid revealing deep truths about themselves. They may not know those truths, either.

It would be nice if scenes played out as logically as this:

Character 5: If you leave home, I’ll feel like a failure as a parent! That’s why I’m trying to make you feel like you’re the failure for leaving.

Character 6: If you keep me here, I’ll feel as if I’m not my own person! I need to leave so I can prove to you – and myself — I’m competent and independent.

Even if both characters know what the underlying issue is, they may try to frame it in a way that makes themselves look better:

Character 5: Go ahead and leave – you’ll never make it on your own! (If you leave, I’ll feel like a failure as a parent)

Character 6: If I stay here, I’ll kill myself! Is that what you want? (I need to leave so I can prove to you – and myself – I’m competent and independent)

Try this: whatever the character says, make it the opposite of that they really feel.

Instead of a straight back and forth like this:

Character 7: I’m so attracted to you, despite many reasons I shouldn’t be!

Character 8: You disgust me, but I want to help you!

It could go like this:

Character 7: Get out of here and leave me alone! (I want you to stay, but I’m afraid my attraction will become too strong and you’ll see I actually love you)

Character 8: As soon as you’re done throwing up, I will! (Drunkenness disgusts me but I couldn’t live with myself if you came to harm because I abandoned you)

This is not so much a rule, but it’s a handy tool: Characters generally won’t say what they really, desperately want or need until the climax of the story. It doesn’t have to be a speech, it doesn’t have to be that articulate – but at the climax is where they will be most honest about what they say. If that means they can’t say anything, that’s fine, too. But I generally don’t think the climax is the point at which they will be flip or indifferent – it’s cards-on-the-table time. So when the conflict of the story comes to a head, try to find a way for the characters to declare, or defend, what they love and prize more than anything else. It can be as simple as a single word, like “No.”

If you use any of the above strategies throughout the story leading up to the climax —showing what your characters desperately want but won’t come out and say —having them finally be open about it in the climax can be very powerful.

For examples, think of your favourite books, stories, movies or plays, where the climax was truly electrifying. Consider why that is, and whether the characters are finally revealing something about themselves. I’d bet that very often, that revelation or all-pretenses-abandoned sense of the climactic scene is what gives it its power.

There are other strategies for writing dialogue, but the above approaches are ones I find most useful when throwing characters with different agendas together in a scene.

About David Jón Fuller:

David Jón Fuller is a writer whose fiction has appeared in Long Hidden: Speculative Fiction From the Margins of History; Tesseracts 18: Wrestling With Gods; Kneeling in the Silver Light: Stories From the Great War; and in the upcoming anthology Accessing The Future. He lives in Winnipeg, and as time allows, blogs at www.davidjonfuller.com.

Head Hopping – the Forbidden POV

March 27, 2015

Ace Jordyn

Ace Jordyn Character Craft & Skills Narrative Voice POV Writing Tools 7 Comments

Want to start a passionate debate? Just mention head hopping.

When I started writing, I bravely went to my first writing workshop. I was berated for head hopping between two characters in one scene. I was devastated. What had I done wrong? More importantly, why had I thought I could do this? I was too scared, too naive to defend the ‘rule’ I had broken.

But, what exactly, is head hopping?

It’s about using multiple points of view. It isn’t third person omniscient point of view (POV) where the omniscient narrator can peer into anyone’s head anytime. An omniscient narrator maintains a god-like distance, giving a more objective rather than a subjective telling. The story is told in the narrator’s voice who doesn’t word thoughts and feelings in the characters’ voices. It isn’t a story told in close third person which has multiple viewpoints where the view point changes only when scenes change. When this happens, the scene is written using that character’s voice.

Head Hopping occurs when the POV within a scene skips from one character to another within that scene. Unlike the omniscient narrator, the voice changes and is unique to each character. Let’s look at an example:

Stuart swirled the wine in his glass, sniffed it then set it on the table. He loved Rothchild’s Merlot but it was impossible to enjoy when Carrie was in the midst of a mood. He’d have to settle the matter, then they could enjoy their evening.
“We don’t need a dog yet,” he said. Darned nuisance they are, always needing to be walked, he thought.
“But they’re so cute,” Carrie insisted. She was tired of going for walks alone when Stuart worked late at the office. A puppy would get her out of the house and she’d meet more people. “And don’t you want to be happy?”
The waiter hesitated before coming to the table. He hated serving arguing couples because they tended not to tip well.

Three heads in one scene. If you don’t mind head hopping, you’ll find the different points of view entertaining. If you don’t like it, you’d likely prefer a root canal.

Handled clumsily (as in this example), it looks like the Stuart is psychic, for how can he know what everyone else sees or thinks? That’s the main problem with it for the point of view character loses the ability to read the other character’s cues such as body language and actions.

Do we need to know what everyone thinks? If the information isn’t germane to moving the plot along, is it important? In the example, do we need to know what the waiter thinks? It may be important if it compels Stuart to react in the moment, but how can Stuart react when he hasn’t been allowed to see the waiter’s reaction? Here’s a version staying in Stuart’s point of view:

Stuart swirled the wine in his glass, sniffed it then set it on the table. He loved Rothchild’s Merlot but it was impossible to enjoy when Carrie was in a mood. He’d have to settle the matter and then they could enjoy their evening.
“We don’t need a dog yet Carrie,” he said. “Maybe later?” He glanced toward the waiter and caught his eye. Maybe Carrie would be more reasonable once they ordered.
“But they’re so cute,” Carrie insisted.
Stuart shook his head, saw the waiter hesitate and glared at him. What was it with this fellow? The waiter hurried to the table with a cheat sheet in hand while fumbling for the pen in his pocket.
“What would you like, sir?” he asked.
“Ladies first,” Stuart snapped.
Carrie’s eyes danced and before she looked to her menu, a slight grin appeared. Why did she find shoddy service so amusing? Stuart tapped his fingers on the white linen signaling for her to order.
“Ma’am?”
“Oh yes,” Carrie ran her finger down the page of entrees while Stuart drummed his fingers into the table. The waiter’s eyes darted to Stuart and back to Carrie. “The Chicken Kiev,” she finally said.
The waiter’s Adam’s apple bobbed, sweat formed on his brow. “We’re out of that,” he squeaked.
Stuart’s fingers drummed louder.
“Chicken Marsala?”
“I’m afraid–”
Stuart snorted. “What kind of a place is this if you can’t give a lady what she wants?”
“I want a puppy.”
The spilled Merlot was a sea of red flowing toward Carrie.

By choosing not to head hop, I found the scene easier to write, to escalate tension using the simple formula of action-reaction-action. This is the key difference: head hopping doesn’t allow a reader to get fully submerged in the story. By and large, stories with head hopping tend to feel more shallow because the author can’t go deep into any character’s head beyond a thought about something. Yet, the technique is used and very successfully by a few authors such as MC Beaton, Nora Roberts, Alexander McCall Smith and others. Sometimes we don’t want to be or need to be fully submerged in a point of view. Sometimes, we just want the story told, the clues laid out, to know the entire landscape without feeling the grass tickle our toes.

Those who love head hopping know to expect it. If you chose to write this way, ask yourself if you can build a following who will love and expect it. If it works for you – do it! But do it well or you’ll be dismissed as an amateur who doesn’t know the craft.

Doing it well means making sure that the signals as to whose head we’re in are clear, that the emotional experience for the reader is retained as is suspension of disbelief. If the reader is jarred out of the story and forced to reread to get their bearings, the writing has failed. Drama and tension must continue to build. Provide seamless transitions and ensure the head hopping moves the scene along.

As it turns out, I’m not a head hopping writer and it isn’t employed in the YA fantasy writing I do. But I read a lot of mystery and when I find it, I’m willing to head hop for the sake of the story. It’s fun, amusing and even an easy read when done well. It’s a cinematic way of telling a story where I don’t need to or even want to get deeply involved with the characters. I enjoy the clues and the bird’s eye view while the sleuth solves the mystery.

Struggling to Define Love

February 16, 2015

fictorians

Character Craft & Skills Guest Posts Narrative Voice POV Reflection Self-Awareness The Writing Life Tropes & Archetypes Writing Tools 4 Comments

A guest post by Stephan McLeroy.

Acid bubbled in my gut as I stared down at Jamie from the front door of my double-wide.

“Pat, come on, just let me in, just for a second.”

I took hold of the screen door’s aluminum frame and gripped it for support. The urge to look away so I could think through things for a moment itched at my eyes. But I didn’t. Jamie’d seen through my bullshit yesterday. Now I had to at least seem resolute as I made my choice: would I let us be together, or would I keep running the safe play.

“Damnit, Jamie, why can’t you just cut your losses and get the hell outta town.” I said, my voice stumbling over every syllable.

Jamie moved up onto the first step below the screen door. The rubber of Converse high-tops scraped against the sandpaper laminate, shaving away the edges of composure. Bright eyes, the color of pool table felt, stared at me with an understanding that called my bluff.

“Pat, come on, this isn’t cards here, I’m tryin’ to show you that you can have something better, something real, and I’m willing to work through all that baggage you got, but you haveta stop pushin’ me away.”

Without warning, I felt my sinuses tighten up, and fluid fill my eyes. I started to close the screen door, but Jamie had mounted the second step. Long, rough fingers slid over my hand and I felt my tight grip on the aluminum melt to butter. I tried to inhale, ready to make some excuse neither of us wanted to hear, but the air caught in my mouth as Jamie pressed against me. A river flowed through me, washing away the fear, the doubt, crashing through the calloused sphere I’d worked around myself. I’d loved and lost, loved and been hurt, but all of a sudden, with Jamie’s soft lips pressed against mine, it all didn’t matter anymore.

Whew! I hope that was as fun for you to read as it was for me to write. Love is fantastic isn’t it? For me, I’ve always been keenly interested in the subject. It’s incredibly challenging to try and define love for others, but the task is extremely important when writing love relationships between characters. When it comes to love, however, there is one thing you can always count on: Everyone’s version is unique.

Let’s go back to the little scene I wrote above. You might have noticed I kept the two characters gender neutral. For fun, I let three friends read the scene and then asked them two things. First, I asked them what gender the two characters were. As you might have guessed, the genders of the characters changed with the gender of the friend being asked. Then I asked them to describe Pat’s relationship with love prior to the events of the scene. All three agreed that Pat, whether they were male or female, had been hurt and, as a result, had developed a fear-based relationship with love.

Now, don’t get me wrong, gender is a major source for experiences we utilize while building our individual definition of love. We use experiences to decide what we associate with love. For some that love feeling could come from a sense of security, for others, it’s centered on unconditional trust. Then you have other people who associate love with something specific like height or weight or how obsessed the person is with the band Gwar. A definition of love for any given person can be associated with almost anything. This can create great differences between two love definitions, but it can also allow for some similarities as well. We empathize with friends and connect with stories of love gained and lost because the love definitions we encounter resemble ours. However, at some point, deep down, these definitions will all diverge from your own.

Okay, let’s get back to your characters. As with real people, each of your characters will have been formed by their unique experiences; their current and former relationships create the patterns for how they love someone. With this in mind, you’re going to have to define love for them. Then the problems arise: how do we define someone else’s love without having lived through every single moment in their lives that could have affected their love definition? Ah, the glorious struggle of character development. I’ve found that dealing with this problem is often quite similar to dealing with other character development issues. For each writer it might be different, for me, however, it came back to that idea of people with similar life experiences. Who do I know that would be able to empathize with a character I have no shared experiences with?

To answer this question, I revisited some of my favorite fiction for characters I felt would have connected in the ways I was struggling to define. Not for a mirror but for a frame of reference. More importantly, I began talking to the people around me. At first, my intentions were to go about this wholesale; I intentionally went to people who either grew up in extremely different cultural environments or had very different love relationships from myself. I found that having these conversations expanded my view of what could mold love into definitions completely different than mine. Although I couldn’t experience the feelings associated with those different kinds of love, I could at least begin to see how my characters could begin to form their own love definition.

Love is a tricky thing to nail down in the real world and in fiction. Your definition will be different than anyone else’s, including your characters. If you choose to speak with other people about defining love, consider how the elements of their experiences could help to frame the ways in which your characters love. By reaching outside your own personal frame of reference, you can, in a way, ‘experience’ many definitions of love; perhaps foreign to you, but perfect for your character.

Stephan McLeroy is a historical urban fantasy writer based out of the San Francisco Bay area. He is currently working on a new novel, The Adventures of Lockwood and Blackfox. If you’d like to hear more of his thoughts on things like writing and Elder Fashion Cocktails, check out his blog:http://stephanmcleroy.com/

Examinations and Bindings

February 12, 2015

Travis Heermann

Character Horror Narrative Voice The Writing Life 2 Comments

“Examine love always, and binding,” was what Jack Ketchum told our Odyssey Writing Workshop class in the summer of 2009.

This may still be some of the best writing advice I’ve ever gotten.

If you don’t know Jack Ketchum, he’s best known as a horror writer, author of the The Girl Next Door (one of the most harrowing novels I’ve ever encountered). All of Ketchum’s monsters are the human kind, because they are more terrifying than any werewolf or vampire, for the simple fact that they could be living down the street.

The particular way that he made that statement above was intended to lodge in our brains. He had to explain a little so that we got the fullness of it.

In its quintessence, it means that love should be at the center of everything we write, but not necessarily in the romantic sense. Relationships coming together, coming apart. Love of life (or death, or some other obsession). Examining the bonds that hold us together, the bonds that come unraveled despite our best efforts, the bonds we cut. Pushing one’s characters to the limit, to see how far they will go to pursue, preserve, or shatter those bonds. Characters are driven by their connections to other characters.

In my own work, love is at the heart of my Ronin Trilogy, a historical fantasy story set in 13th-century Japan. A young, masterless samurai saves the life of a noble maiden, they fall in love, and their worlds are shattered again and again by this bond. She is betrothed to another. Our hero is cast out to wander again, penniless and bereft. When they encounter each other again in Book 3, the circumstances are as tragic and unavoidable as the love they share, a love that can never be consummated again–on pain of death.

Ketchum said something else that had a huge impact on me in his essay “Splat Goes the Hero: Visceral Horror,” published in the most excellent handbook On Writing Horror. He quoted one of my favorite film directors, Akira Kurosawa: “The role of the artist is to not look away.” In fact, we dare not flinch if we want our work to make an impact on the reader. When I read slush stories or critique stories from my writing group, what is often missing from mediocre stories is the deep-down pulsing heart, the passion, the pathos that really makes the reader care about what happens. The hard part about exploring this stuff is that to do so, we have to draw upon our own experiences, dredge up things that we don’t really want to feel again. We have to go there.

Revisiting all those old heartbreaks can be fodder for some truly visceral writing. It does give me a modicum of satisfaction when I draw upon personal experience for my fiction and I get to turn what might have been really negative experiences into a published story. I can rewrite bits and pieces of my own history, perhaps by saying the right thing this time, or finding closure with a woman who broke my heart into a million pieces, or just harnessing some unrequited love and floating it out into the universe on a bed of fiction. But again, I have to be willing to go there. I have to constantly ask myself in every story, have I flinched? Have I looked away at the last moment to avoid the deepest, darkest heart of the story?

Examining love always, and binding, is the heart of being an artist, of creating authentically.

All of us here at the Fictorians are independent artists and we hope that you will support our efforts by buying our work. The way publishing is changing, it is more important than ever that people directly support the artists and authors they enjoy.

This month, I am asking for help in bringing a story fifteen years in the making to an exciting, epic conclusion. I am running a Kickstarter campaign from now until February 24, 2015, to fund the publication of Book 3 in my Ronin Trilogy, Spirit of the Ronin. Please visit the campaign on Kickstarter here and consider supporting it.