Withholding information just to mess with your readers doesn’t work. If the character would know something, the reader should know it, particularly if you write in first person or deep-dive third person.

In general, all the major information needs to be revealed by about the three-quarter point of the story. This is the second plot point, and is when the hero learns the last major reveal that launches them into the final showdown, giving them the drive to commit everything in their final attempt to win. That doesn’t mean we can’t have twists and turns and creative solutions, but if your story hinges on a bombshell getting dropped in the final chapter that fundamentally changes everything, chances are the approach will fail.

It’s possible, but tricky. Like other rules – know it before you try to break it. Only by understanding the principles can you twist them.

For example, one movie that worked very well was Sixth Sense. The main character didn’t know he was a ghost until the end. That changed everything about the story. It was a gimmick that worked because of brilliant execution. Unfortunately, once we know the gimmick, the story loses much of its power. The Sixth Sense is fantastic to watch once, or maybe twice. I don’t think I know anyone who has watched it more than that.

Some new writers think they need to withhold information to create suspense, to prepare for a big reveal. Suspense is important, but that’s not the way to do it. Holding back information that the reader should know through the normal flow of the story is a cheap trick and readers find it offensive. It insults their intelligence and it’s poor writing.

The author needs to find a better way.

A new writer might have characters avoid questions that they would naturally want to ask, questions that would force important truths to come out. By not asking those questions, they can withhold the information. This doesn’t work because the readers are asking themselves those questions and they’ll think either your protagonist is an idiot for not asking them, or that you as the author are insulting their intelligence.

Another mistake is for a new writer to try skipping the reveal, but allude to it. “Jane then told Bill something that shattered the foundation of everything he’d ever known. Life would never be the same.”

Well, what was that truth? If we’re in Bill’s head, we need to know it too, or you’ve broken the deep-dive you’ve established. We need consistency, or we drive readers out of the story.

So why not choose to structure their POV so we don’t do a deep-dive into the character’s head? In this way we can keep secrets, right?

Maybe. But that deep dive is a huge draw for readers. By creating distance between the reader and the character, it’s harder for readers to connect and empathize and root for the character. You risk your greatest emotional payoff that way. The approach can work for the right story, if the author has the skill to pull it off.

But we can’t tell the reader everything too soon, right? It would rob the final showdown much of its punch. You’re right, but it’s a point that has to be approached with caution. We create suspense with structure, not with gimmicks.

Some ways to deal with the issue:

1. Find a believable way to keep the information secret. For example, in The Maze Runner, the characters suffer amnesia and one of the biggest challenges they face is to learn about their past. As those bits and pieces are regained, both the characters and the readers learn more, and the stakes grow.

2. It’s all right to have the hero put some pieces together and say, “I have a plan.” And cut the scene. This is pretty common, and if done right, can be very effective. The reader knows enough to feel connected with the ongoing story without feeling blocked or deprived, and they can still enjoy the surprise twists and cleverness of their characters. Just make sure to launch right into the plan, or the readers will expect to hear about that plan.

3. Reveal the secret to the readers, but not the hero, through other characters. If the protagonist is in the dark, but it’s important that the readers know something that’s known by other characters, this can actually help create effective tension. The readers see the problems the protagonist is having and wonder when and how they’re going to learn the secret, and how that truth will affect them.

4. Use misdirection. Mystery novels do this a lot. They’ll focus on the clues that seem to be most important, while the tiny details the characters and readers mostly ignored become key elements at the end.

5. Be creative. For example, in a fantasy series with a magic system, readers gain a sense of how the magic system usually works. Depending on how rigidly defined the magic system is, this plays into how much it can be used to solve the ultimate problems. Suddenly revealing an entirely new aspect to magic and using it to abruptly win is an insult to readers and a trick I personally detest. However, the heroes can use their magic in creative ways that the reader probably hasn’t considered – taking the principles to the extremes. You’ve still established a foundation to build on, and it makes sense once readers consider the possibility, but you still get to enjoy the surprise/cleverness factor. Brandon Sanderson is famous for doing this. His recent YA fantasy novel, Steelheart is a great example.

6. Study your favorite authors, look at how they create suspense and weave the truths into the story.

7. Lastly, have fun with it. You want to suck your readers in, create believable tension, and seal them to your hero and the seemingly insurmountable challenges they’re facing. When your hero puts all the clues together and devises that clever solution, readers will love it and return to that story again and again.

Fiction Faux Pas

March 6, 2015

fictorians

A guest post by Marta Sprout.

You know the feeling. You, the writer of a magnificent novel, stare at yet another rejection notice, which you promptly shred into confetti and promise to use as tinder in your fireplace the next time the wind-chill sags below freezing.

So what’s wrong? Why can’t editors and agents see the brilliance of your story? The simple answer might be fiction faux pas. Here are a few of the red flags that make editors roll their eyes and grab for that nasty form letter faster than you type nope:

The overuse of names in dialog.
Dialog tags that go beyond said or asked.
Too many modifying adverbs.
Holy Moly! There be too many exclamation points here!!!!!!

You work hard to tell a ripping good tale and to present exciting dialog. Knowing what not to do is only part of the equation. What we need is to understand why something doesn’t work and how to fix it. Let’s take a look at what works and what doesn’t:

What would you think if you read a line of dialog that went something like this…

“Enough, Rebecca!!!” he yelled, angrily.

Oh good grief…Referee flags are flying like a brawl on the goal line. Let’s look closer.

There is nothing wrong with using names in dialog, unless you go overboard and make your characters sound stilted and awkward.

“Ben, I can’t stay here any longer.”

“Well, why not, Sarah?”

“Because, Ben, this is where it happened.” (Bum, bum, bum…bum)

The overuse of names can easily sound like newbie theater students trying to be uber-dramatic or like characters telling each other what they already know for the sake of the reader’s enlightenment.

“Well, Elizabeth. We’ve been married for twenty years and have three fine sons.”

(I’m thinking Lizzy already knows this.)

Another reason too many names don’t work is because they act like speed bumps and interrupt the flow of the conversation. Never interrupt dialog unless three guys with machine guns show up.

What about those modifying adverbs? On page 673 of Under the Dome Stephen King wrote: “Glinda,” the girl said faintly. If he can do it, why can’t you? Beyond the fact that he has sold over 350 million copies, even he uses modifying adverbs very sparingly. Verbal exchanges pop NOT when you tell the reader that she spoke angrily, boldly, emphatically, hesitantly, sadly, or joyously, but when you put the full force of those EMOTIONS into her words. Compare these lines:

“You don’t listen,” she said angrily.
“What is wrong with you? You never listen to me,” she said.
Sarah smacked the silverware drawer shut. “What’s wrong with you? You never listen to me.”

In the first line, can you see how the character’s voice is so flat that the author has to tell us the character’s emotional state? The second line is better. We don’t need to be told that she’s hacked off because we can hear the anger rippling in her voice. In the third version, we are getting the emotion in her voice and we see and hear the snap of her gestures when she slams the drawer shut. The point here is that great dialog oozes action, emotions, and your characters’ own distinctive voices. Remember that in any conversation there are two expressions happening simultaneously: the verbal exchange and the body language, which can be even more telling. For example:

Richard launched out of his seat, towering over Sarah. “Do you love me?”

She stared at her lap and continued picking at her red nail polish.

“Answer the damned question.”

Sarah slouched in her seat and yawned. “Yeah,” she said without looking up.

Is Richard going to believe her? Not likely with that body language.

What about alternative dialog tags such as: he screamed, yelled, offered, replied, commented, snorted, bellowed, whimpered, etc? Here’s where the problem lies. Remember that some conventions in writing are done purely for the sake of clarification:

I love eating my dog and my grandmother (yuck) vs. I love eating, my dog, and my grandmother.

Like punctuation, dialog tags are purely for clarity and are meant to be invisible. They aren’t part of the dialog nor are they prose. To avoid repetition it makes sense that we’d be tempted to use something other than said. But trust me on this one, a reader’s eye will glide right over said and asked and remain focused right where you want it–on the conversation.

So, does that mean you will never see “he screamed” in the work of a bestselling author? Nope.

On page 180 of Tripwire, Lee Child wrote: “Get down,” Reacher shouted. If Lee Child can use these type of tags, why can’t you? You can, just do it in moderation and only when nothing else will do. Hint: they work best when showing a voice’s volume.

Speaking of punctuation. Exclamation points work only in extreme situations of utter desperation. Not so much when they crop up in every other line of dialog! Sometimes in multiples!!!!! Unless you write wonderful comic books, use them like hot Sriracha sauce–only when the situation requires a fierce punch. Remember those editors, whom you are trying to impress? They see the liberal use of exclamation points as sure signs of an amateur, which you’re not.

Writing is much more than a list of rules. It’s an art form. You can write anything–if it works. Language is fluid. Ever-changing. There was a time when we didn’t use punctuation or standardized spelling. Word usage evolves. If I had called you nice in 1285, you would have slapped me for calling you stupid. Back in the day of movies such as The Sound of Music, gay meant light-hearted or carefree. Lite is commonly used for the word light. Any form of written language from novels to nonfiction, blurbs to bumper stickers will BTW continue to change. The trick for a novelist is to tell a story that people will remember.

Good luck and keep writing.

About Marta Sprout:

Marta Sprout is an award-winning author. The Saturday Evening Post published her short story, The Latte Alliance, in their anthology “Best Short Stories of 2014 from The Great American Fiction Contest.” Her essays and articles have been published in newspapers and major magazines such as Antiques Magazine. Known for her thrillers, Marta writes full time, assists the Corpus Christi Police Department on crime-scene scenarios, and enjoys kiteboarding, scuba diving, and snow skiing.

Info-dumping

March 5, 2015

fictorians

Craft & Skills The Writing Life Tropes & Archetypes Writing Tools 1 Comment

A guest post by Doug Dandridge.

Rule of Writing: Thou Shalt Avoid Info-dumps.

I remember when I first started writing and saw this rule, along with some gut busting examples, such as the “As you know” cliché. You know, the conversation between people who both know what the information is, like “as you know, Fred, the matter-antimatter engines work when the two substances annihilate each other, releasing energy.” This conversation is on the face of it nothing more than an attempt to let the reader know how the engines create energy, and is a dialogue that would never really occur between two engineers. The suggested method was to work the information into the story, such as:

“We’re getting an energy spike,” said Fred. “Turn down the antimatter feed.”

The rule works well in most cases, as you can get the background out there without boring or unrealistic conversations, or, even worse in the perception of the rule makers, the long essay that interrupts the story. But is it always necessary to do such? Why not just put it out there?

Not to name names, but there are successful writers out there who info-dump throughout their stories, and they sell lots of stories to lots of fans, in bestselling numbers. I have heard it said of one of these writers that he can get away with it because he is, well, who he is. I tend to agree to that, to a point.

In the first four books of my Exodus series I took great pains to avoid info-dumps, working in scenes that really had little purpose but to get information about background or tech out there for the reader. With book five I started doing some info-dumps of my own, only a short paragraph here and there, and heard nothing negative back from my fans.

Now, as a military science fiction writer, I have many scenes in my books that are narrative only, though filled with action. Missiles flying through space don’t have viewpoints. It seems to make more sense writing in narrative in these circumstances, maybe interspersing some viewpoints of the people on-board to get the emotional impact.

As I have continued developing I have actually expanded my info-dumps, though I still try to keep them in the here and now. For example, from my latest book:

The heightened luminosity of the star, millions of times normal, would continue to shine through the system for months, first increasing over several weeks, then dropping off. The remaining mass of the stellar body, still over five times that of Sol, first moved out with the explosion, then fell back in as gravity re-exerted its force. It heated up to millions of degrees as the pressure increased to almost unbelievable levels, slowing the collapse. But collapse was inevitable, and the matter continued to press inward, first turning the five Sol mass into a ball of neutrons that would normally be the ultimate fate of matter, there being no space between the particles to speak of. This mass was fated to an even more bizarre end, as it crushed past the neutron stage and continued to collapse, gravity rising to the point where even light no longer possessed the velocity to escape. The mass pinched off from the universe into a self-contained bubble of space-time, and a new black hole was born.

Another way to info-dump is with an opening passage. In my story, Goliath, which appeared in Kevin J Anderson’s Five By Five Three, I open the story (at the suggestion of Kevin) with a long passage filling in the details of the conflict the story takes place in. One reviewer commented that it seemed like the opening of a Star Wars movie (just as Kevin said), and was effective in that it made way for the rest of the story to concentrate on the action.

Like most rules of writing, eschewing info-dumps should be taken as a suggestion, not as an absolute. I, too, get bored as hell reading three complete pages about some kind of industry that leads into yet another info-dump about some related topic. I turn into a skimmer at that point, trying to fight through the passage to get back to the enjoyment. But they still have their place, if done properly. Which means not in page after page of basically technical babble, but judicious narrative that fills in the informational gaps in the story. Too many stories devolve into bouts of pure confusion as action takes place and conversation advances, and no reader has enough background information to guess what is actually going on. The story becomes an author-written intelligence test, seeking to prove the puzzle solving ability of the reader. At that point the story had ceased to be enjoyment, ceased to become escape. And those are the stories that people don’t want to spend their time and money on.

About Doug Dandridge:

Doug Dandridge is a Florida native, Army veteran and ex-professional college student who spent way too much time in the halls of academia. He has worked as a psychotherapist, drug counselor, and, most recently, for the Florida Department of Children and Families. An early reader of Heinlein, Howard, Moorcock and Asimov, he has always had a love for the fantastic in books ad movies. Doug started submitting science fiction and fantasy in 1997 and collected over fur hundred rejection letters. In December of 2011 he put up his first self-publishing efforts online. Since then he had sold over 100,000 copies of his work, and has ranked in the top five on Amazon Space Opera and Military Science Fiction multiple times. He quit his day job in March 2013, and has since made a successful career as a self-published author.

Write What You Know

March 4, 2015

Guy Anthony De Marco

Craft & Skills Guy Anthony De Marco 2 Comments

One of the most mentioned writing rule is to write what you know. It’s also one of the most misunderstood rules for authors.

If writers were to follow this rule blindly, whole genres would be swept from the literary world. Science Fiction? Since there’s no way to accurately predict the future at this time, nobody could write novels like Dune or the Foundation series. Fantasy? Magic doesn’t exist in this plane of existence, so Harry Potter and Game of Thrones are gone. Mysteries would only be written by law enforcement personnel and thrillers would be penned by spies (who would then lose their jobs because people would know what they did when they went to a book signing.)

A better way to look at this “rule” is to write what you can extrapolate, learn, or research, and to do it as accurately as possible.

If you’re writing a weird western tale, you need to be reasonably accurate. Having someone draw a semi-automatic pistol with a 13 round clip during a gunfight will not go over well with the western crowd, unless you’ve already established the story as a time-travel or alternate history version. You’d have to understand the weapons of the period. If a character in 1844 drew his Colt Dragoon Revolver, you’d lose some of your readers who know Dragoons were used by civilians from 1848-1860. It took me less than two minutes to research that firearm by looking at Wikipedia for “old west guns”, then picking one from the list at the bottom.

Now let’s turn our attention to a less “concrete” situation — having a character lose a family member. If you are fortunate enough to have never dealt with the death of a loved one, it’s difficult to imagine the hurt and loss. Trying to write about something so personal in a manner that will evoke emotion from your readers is a tricky thing to do when you have never experienced it in real life.

So, how can you “write what you know” when you really don’t know? Try one of these possibilities:

Read. Pick up a book that you’ve read before if it has a similar incident and you remember it as an emotional story. Analyze how they evoked different emotions and incorporate some of the techniques in your novel.
Talk. Find someone who’s willing to talk to you about how it felt to lose a loved one.
Be resourceful. Use your imagination to convince yourself you’ve lost the most important person in your life. You’ll be able to understand some of the feelings that your characters are going through.

Another angle folks take on the “write what you know” rule is to stick with writing only one genre. Poppycock, in my opinion. Experiment and write in different genres. Break that rule, and break it often. By expanding your writing abilities, and bringing different skillsets to bear, all of your stories will be more interesting.

Go dabble in horror, then ramp up the tension with a spy novel. Whatever you like to read, give yourself the opportunity to try writing it. Start with short stories, and if you end up enjoying the genre, dig in and write a novel. Even if there are stories you don’t normally read, such as historical novels or romance, try picking up some of them and give it a chance. You might find a new way to make your money disappear at the bookstore. At the very least, you can pick up some writing chops and add in better romantic elements into your military sci-fi novels.

So go ahead. Break this rule. Nobody will know, and I promise not to tell anyone unless you write a runaway bestselling novel.

About the Author:

Guy Anthony De Marco is a speculative fiction author; a Graphic Novel Bram Stoker Award^®; winner of the HWA Silver Hammer Award; a prolific short story and flash fiction crafter; a novelist; an invisible man with superhero powers; a game writer (Sojourner Tales modules, Interface Zero 2.0 core team, D&D modules); and a coffee addict. One of these is false.

A writer since 1977, Guy is a member of the following organizations: SFWA, WWA, SFPA, IAMTW, ASCAP, RMFW, NCW, HWA. He hopes to collect the rest of the letters of the alphabet one day. Additional information can be found at Wikipedia, GuyAndTonya.com, and GuyAnthonyDeMarco.com.