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Technique

Secret sauce: tension check

This entry is part 9 of 16 in the series Spilling the secret sauce

THIS is what made the real leap to publishability for me more than any other ingredient in the secret sauce! (Naturally, this will vary from writer to writer and manuscript to manuscript, but it really made a difference for me!)

An actual envelope factory. Love it.I firmly believe that tension is necessary in every scene. That doesn’t mean every scene has to be a nail-biter or a fistfight or an argument—but there does need to be some source of tension, some uncertainty, something to compel the reader to find. out. what. happens.

I use these steps (still!) to figure out if I have that in my scenes and my story.

Step 1: Assess the current tension

I like to use that handy-dandy scene chart to do this! As I mentioned before, for each scene, I list the POV character’s goal. Scene goals aren’t just for the beginning and end of scenes. You can use The goal can be the source of tension—and if there’s no goal, there’s often no tension.

One way to look at this visually is to use a numerical tension rating in your scene chart. In most spreadsheet software, you can create a line graph from that column of data—Kaye Dacus calls this an “EKG” for your story (you know, an electrocardiogram? Like a heartbeat chart?).

Also in the scene chart, I like to devote a column to writing out what the source of tension is supposed to be in the scene. Is it hoping the character achieves the scene goal? Is it the fact that she’s undercover? Is it the romantic tension?

Step 2: Identify problem scenes and sections

While there are also good uses for parallels, scenes with the same character goal are often a sign that the character isn’t making enough progress. While we definitely don’t want to make things easy for our characters, watching a character fail repeatedly at the same thing wears down the suspense. We may begin not to care whether they’re going to succeed or not, unless each scene has high tension—or the character goal can be refined to relate to the specific events, conflict and disaster for that scene.

But probably most important in the EKG are the sections where the tension level doesn’t change or varies only slightly for several scenes in a row. In Writing Mysteries, one writer shared some advice from an editor: “I must not try to keep everything at high pitch all the way through a story. Excitement, if too steady, can be as boring as having nothing at all happening” (109).

Naturally, at the climax of a book, the tension will be quite high, probably for several scenes. But is the tension flat in there? Are there other “plateaus” or “plains”? Does the tension start out much higher than it ends?

If the end isn’t satisfying because it doesn’t match the tension of the rest of the book, don’t lower the suspense! Fix the end!! Change things up in plains and plateaus—if you can, add what looks like a reprieve, or a rest for a little bit before plunging them back into danger, and keep the danger or at least the tension going until as close to the end of the book as you can. Find another source of tension for those wrap up chapters if you have to. (This is where I STILL need work on early drafts!)

Step 3: Fix!

For low tension scenes (in fact, for my “secret sauce” manuscript, I did this for EVERY scene), I look back at that “source of tension” column in my scene chart. I look for ways to incorporate that source of tension more:

  • Refer back to the scene goal. By reminding the readers what the character is after—and showing the growing disparity between her goal and reality—we can draw the reader along through the scene.
  • Remind the reader of the stakes or impending doom.
  • Add or increase an emotional response from the POV character to the source of tension
  • If that’s not possible—say, if the source of tension is something that the reader knows but the POV character doesn’t—have another character highlight or allude to the source of tension
  • Again, if the source of the tension is something that the reader knows that the POV character doesn’t, see if you can add another scene (usually immediately before this one) to remind the reader of the dramatic irony (yay 9th grade English!)
  • Highlight the source of the tension in a few character actions and thoughts throughout the scene. The exact number depends on the length of the scene, but it’s always good to hit on it near the beginning, and at least twice more in an average-length scene (whatever that might be for you).

On the other hand, sometimes that’s just not enough. If the source of tension is non-existent or insufficient, I look for ways to increase the tension, usually by asking myself questions like these:

  • What is the character’s goal for this scene?
  • How can things get worse?
  • How can I raise the stakes?
  • What is the source of conflict in this scene and how can I make the conflict bigger?
  • How can I weave in the antagonist, the plot, a subplot or a character turning point?
  • Who is the worst person who could walk in right now?
  • What would happen if this scene took place somewhere else?
  • What is the character feeling and have I shown it enough on the page?

Janice Hardy also offers a list of things to look at to help make your scenes matter (and there’s some overlap, but I wrote out my mental list before reading her post):

  • What is your protag doing?
  • Where does this scene take place (setting)?
  • Who else is in the scene?
  • Where structurally does this scene take place (act one, midpoint, act two, etc)?
  • What happens right before this scene?
  • What happens right after this scene?
  • What’s your theme?
  • What are the stakes?

Sometimes, it’s less the scene itself and more the context it’s in—either the spikes in your EKG are too sharp, or you’ve got a major plateau. My critique partner, Emily Gray Clawson, wrote a great post on keeping up the tension in your story by switching between types of tension or storylines.

Finally, I have a whole series on Tension, Suspense and Surprise with 35 pages on the importance of those elements in your story—and dozens of ways to fix them if they’re off—now available as a free PDF.

What do you think? Have you checked your tension lately? How do you fix low-tension scenes?

Photo credits: tension envelopes—Chris Murphy; question mark—Alexander Drachmann; high-tension wires—Redvers

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Technique

Secret sauce: motivating and manipulating your characters

This entry is part 10 of 16 in the series Spilling the secret sauce

You know your writerly friends (some of them are you guys) who say of their characters, “I can’t write; Jimmy’s rebelling. He won’t go to Angela’s”? This isn’t something I’ve struggled with a whole lot, but that might be because I have no problem manipulating my characters to get what I want.

I think author/former literary agent Nathan Bransford says it well:


And this [characters coming alive and taking the story in another direction] can really help out a story – while obviously the characters are only alive insasmuch as they’re in the author’s (living) head, this may be a way of expressing that the author is being true to the logic of a situation. The author has a sense of the character, and it’s important that the character’s actions are logically consistent.

At the same time, I always find it curious to hear authors so completely in thrall to their worlds and characters, and I start wondering, “Wait a second, who’s in charge here?”

Hint: the author.

Manipulating your characters with motivation

I try not to over outline, but I usually know (or figure out during the course of a scene or sequence) what my characters need to do next, either for themselves or for the external plot. This isn’t to say it’s always easy to “make” them do that, or to make the jump—I do sometimes stop and say, “Now, why would s/he do that? What would motivate him to do that?” (Or “how can I make him do that, or want to do that?”)

I’m not the only one who believes in character manipulation through motivation. In Scene & Structure, Jack Bickham gives a great example of how character motivation can move a character into place on a scene level:

In one of my recent novels published under a pseudonym which I don’t want to reveal, my heroine at one crucial turning point must decide to visit the room of a sick person in the retirement center where the heroine works. She has just learned at the end of a scene that the resident is more ill than she had imagined; but there are both a doctor and a nurse on duty, and there seemed to me at first to be no emotional or logical reason for my very-busy heroine to drop everything and fall even further behind in her pressing work to pay a visit when such good care is already available. But that was exactly what my plot plans required that she somehow logically do. (56)

Breaking in here to add: note the emphasis on doing this logically. We can’t drag our characters around like marionettes! We have to find something within our characters to motivate them to act how we want—or we need to add something external to prompt them back into our plot. Now, back to Jack:

It took considerable doing on my part to have my heroine feel terribly shocked to learn how serious the illness might be . . . then review her fine relationship with the sick person . .. then realize that good care was being provided . . . but then decide that she would never be able to work efficiently this day as long as she remained so worried and preoccupied, and that she owed it to herself — to make herself feel more at ease about the illness — to make a brief visit to the sick person’s room and reassure herself that the sick friend did not appear at death’s door. Only in this way, she decided, would she have enough peace of mind to return to her overloaded work schedule and try to get caught up.

In this way I was able to build logic into a key turning point of the story and make my heroine’s immediate cessation of regular work, and visit to the sick room, believable. But none of this would have been possible if I hadn’t put myself into my character’s feelings and thoughts. (56)

To be clear: I have had characters “tell” me things—back stories, histories, twists that can affect and enrich the plot. I’ve had their inner conflicts develop into major interpersonal conflicts over the course of the story. I do sometimes let the plot take a different route that better suits my characters, but the final destination doesn’t change.

But more importantly, as I put more emphasis on figuring out what motivates my characters, what makes them tick, I not only know how to manipulate them better to still accomplish the purposes of the plot (if not the exact scenes I was planning), but I know the characters themselves better, making them more well-rounded and realistic.

My secret sauce example: motivation and characterization

For me, my character motivation revelation came at a high level. Originally, I wrote a novel where the heroine was . . . well, kinda wishy-washy. Halfway through the book, I decided/discovered (I forget; it’s been four and a half years!) that she was an ex-cop. Wishy-washy + ex-LEO, no matter how long she’s been off the force, do not = a character that makes sense.

Finally, I let go of the wishy-washier side of her nature. I changed her motivations throughout the book. Instead of being frightened by the villains, she was trying to protect other people from them. Instead of backing down, she stood up and she fought. Instead of keeping quiet, she kept dangerous secrets for the sake of others.

This changed a whole lot about her, but the plot actions of the story were largely (though not totally) the same. She became a character not to be pitied, but someone you’d want on your side in a fight—and her motivations and her character as a whole finally made sense.

And, yep, this is a change I made in the book that went from rejection to offer!

What do you think? How do you manipulate your characters’ motivations?

Photo credit: Robert V; marionettes—Eugene Wei

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Technique

Secret sauce: emotion

This entry is part 11 of 16 in the series Spilling the secret sauce

Emotion is vital to fiction. Without emotion, our books can read like bad history textbooks: a log of who did what, where, and when. Some history stories are moving enough to catch our imagination, but those are rare.

If we want our readers to care about our stories—our characters—we have to grab our readers (and our characters) by the emotions.

This is something I’ve had to work hard on in my fiction. I’ve usually run under the assumption that my readers could infer how my character felt. Until I got that dreaded feedback: “This scene drags. It’s boring.”

Boring? Boring?! I thought. Can’t you see the emotional turmoil she must be in? The moral dilemma this puts her in?

Um, no, they couldn’t—because I didn’t put it in there. For all they could tell, the character didn’t care. She was impassively watching the scene unfold, or participating without any trouble. Setting up a situation just isn’t enough: you have to show how that situation affects the character as it unfolds, or we’ll have to assume it’s not.

Compare:

Andrica grabbed the rope with both hands. She stared at the ground thirty feet below her. Her palms slipped a little.

She looked up. Above her, footsteps echoed across the rooftop she’d jumped from. They were going to come after her any minute.

But she could get out of this. She had to. She just needed to think.

No, she needed to act.

She’s in a pretty precarious situation—but do we really care about the outcome?

Andrica grabbed the rope with both hands. Her heart beat in her throat, but the thrill of triumph quickly faded. She dared to peek at the ground below. It should have been only thirty feet down, but her vision swirled dizzyingly. Her stomach plummeted and her clammy palms slipped a fraction of an inch.

She willed herself to look up. Above her, footsteps echoed across the rooftop she’d jumped from. They were going to come after her any minute. Adrenaline sang in her veins, making coherent thought impossible.

But she could get out of this. This time, she had to. Andrica forced a deep breath into her lungs. She just needed to think.

No, Aryn needed her—he needed his mother. She had to act. Now.

Now, not only do we watch what she experiences, but we know what she feels. And if the author does it right, we feel what she feels. And that‘s the way to creating powerful characters and stories.

More emotion resources

I can’t even begin to scratch the surface of getting emotions right in fiction. My top eight reads on emotion in fiction, from blog posts to books:

Even more resources on emotion!

Emotion is how we get into our readers’ hearts. Emotion can take our book from “well written” to “captivating.” We read for an experience, and emotion is the best way to convey that experience. In fact, it is the experience.

What do you think? How do you like your emotion in fiction? Come share!

Photo by Steve Ventress

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Technique

Secret sauce: the obsession with being a “writer”

This entry is part 12 of 16 in the series Spilling the secret sauce

I’m probably not the only one who for some strange reason envisioned himself or herself the author of the Next Great American Novel. Literary fiction is the only “real” type of writing, right?

(Um, no! Duh! Somehow, I still fall into this trap sometimes!)

So, sometimes . . . as “me active compensatory feature” (thank you, Ringo), I’d try maybe just a little too hard to sound like a “real” writer. You know the symptoms, right?

Sounding “writerly”

I absolutely love how author/former literary agent Nathan Bransford defined the difference between writing and being writerly (emphasis mine):

Writers describe. They illuminate and clarify. When you’re writing you’re painting the proverbial picture in the proverbial reader’s head.

When you’re being writerly, your writing is making things less clear with clever word play.

It isn’t just contrived sentence structure or imagery that hurts you. Diction—word choice—can be used to look like a “good” writer. Instead, you just end up sounding writerly. Or as agent Ann Collette tweeted in her Today’s Twelve roundup of queries:

And what does that mean? Ann elaborated a little:

Get it? Get it?

The “right” word

Just knowing the “right” word doesn’t necessary make it the right word (tautology FTW!). When we look up an obscure term for our research in our setting, it might be right in the sense that it describes it accurately—but even if it’s right in that sense, if your audience doesn’t know the term, it won’t help them visualize it. Then is it “right”?

In a day of instant information, readers really do put down books to look stuff up. I even documented a time I did that here on the blog: a novel I was reading named an obscure medical device, as if that would be enough for us to picture it being used as a weapon. It was not, I opined, the right word because I couldn’t visualize the pivotal weapon throughout the scene and, frustrated, put the book down to hop on the Internet. (And being me, it was some time before I got back to it, most likely.)

As a writer, I went through this with the word “inveigle” in one manuscript (okay, since we’re confessing: I’ve been through it a lot in pretty much every manuscript, but this is one of those stories). I found it in a thesaurus and the definition looked right.

I decided to ignore the fact that pretty much everyone I had read it—intelligent, college-educated people who really like me—tripped over that word and pointed it out. It was Capital-R-Right and nobody was going to convince me otherwise. After all, isn’t reading how we grow our vocabularies? Didn’t I see, like, one blog comment once where someone said they liked a book to teach them some new words??

If the logic sounds tenuous, it was. Finally, after yet another friend mentioned that word, I went on a hunt for that word in the wild. This is something you should always do with new words. (Google, how I love you.)

And what did I find? It seemed to have a connotation I definitely didn’t want there. It hurt, but I cut that word—because it wasn’t as right as I thought. And since then, I’ve cut a few more words that might send readers running for their dictionaries—because I don’t want to pull them out of the story, but mostly because they weren’t in the characters’ voices anyway.

Not being writerly

Fortunately, Nathan Bransford also offers guidelines on avoiding “writerliness.”

Whenever you’re unsure about including a metaphor or an evocative description, ask yourself: Does this make the scene clearer? Or am I including it because it’s clever/original/was fun to write?

Different writers have different tastes, but count me down in camp clarity.

Me too. That isn’t to say your writing, even in genre fiction, shouldn’t be clever, original or fun to write. Of course it should! But again, if it becomes harder for the reader to understand, take a hard look at the passage.

The right word, phrase, or image:

  • is clear!
  • has the right definition (denotation)—real editors absolutely DO use dictionaries, even when they don’t really doubt the definition or usage.
  • is as vivid, powerful and succinct as the context needs
  • carries the right connotation
  • is right for the character’s voice
  • is right for the genre/book: you absolutely can have “art prose” in “genre fiction,” but it must be consistent with the tone, subject, character, etc.—and it needs to be consistent through that book (or POV)
  • is right for the general reader, carrying him or her along with the story instead of pulling him/her out

You can get away with breaking maaaybe one of those axioms with a word or phrase, and even then, you shouldn’t do that too frequently—so choose carefully. And remember that every time your reader has to set your book down to look up an obscure term or reread a sentence to try to picture what you’re writing, there’s a better and better chance that he won’t continue reading, frustrated that you keep talking over his head.

Make your reader forget that he’s staring at black marks on a page and get him visualizing your story instead!

What do you think? What’s “writerly” to you?

Photo credits: quill—Charles Stanford; dictionary—Harry

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Mechanics

Secret sauce: those stinking participial phrases

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This entry is part 13 of 16 in the series Spilling the secret sauce

Okay, so participial phrases at the beginning of sentences have become one of my pet peeves. I don’t mind them when they’re well done, but unless you’re pretty handy with a clause, you might want to avoid them. This might seem like just one of those silly arbitrary rules that are just made up to help us prove we’ve read up on the latest so-called rules for writing, which will change in another ten years.

But present participial phrases are not just a magical hoop editors want us to jump through to prove that we’re familiar with industry bywords. It’s mainly an issue of grammar (and to a lesser extent, style, but that’s because they’re overused). Complaining about strictures against present participial phrases is almost like complaining about commas. There are correct places and times for using commas, and incorrect ones, and I suspect that most of the time, if we carefully look at a book, we’ll see that most of the commas are used right and perhaps not as often as we thought.

I really came to understand this by reading the posts on present participial phrases at EditTorrent, a blog by two editors. But if you don’t feel like clicking through, I’m happy to summarize the anti-present participial phrase arguments.

First, to clarify, these are not gerunds. Gerunds are typically not a problem. Gerunds are the -ing form (present participle) of the verb used as a noun:

I enjoy writing.
Writing is fun.

For the most part, this isn’t going to be a problem in a sentence, since they’re on the rare side. (I.e. beginning each sentence with a gerund would also be a problem, especially in the midst of too many present participial phrases, but the occasional correct usage of a gerund isn’t going to hurt anybody.)

What we’re talking about here are present participial phrases:

Running to the door, I called out my son’s name.
Writing out the prescription, the doctor didn’t bother looking up.

I think you can probably see how this is already becoming a problem.

Now that we’ve got that straight, on to the primary argument: Present participial phrases are, to put it mildly, evil.

The vast majority of the time in amateur usage, these phrases appear too often, are often misused, create other grammatical problems, don’t reflect how real people think—and I’m just getting started.

A: Present participial phrases are overused, especially by amateur writers.

Not to say that any of us here are amateurs, but too many present participial phrases are a mark of an amateur. Frankly, more than one per page (YES, per page) jumps out at me. Three on a page don’t just jump; they scream. People who aren’t really aware of this grammatical construct can inadvertently begin almost every other sentence with a present participial phrase. Seriously. I’ve critiqued *good* writers who still almost made my eyes bleed. This happens exceedingly rarely in the published books I read.

Important note: this standard seems to be very different for UK & Canadian publishers. Whatevs. TMMV.

B: Present participial phrases are frequently misused.

The grammatical construct of a present participial phrase at the beginning of the sentence ALWAYS means that the action in that phrase and the action in the main part of the sentence are simultaneous. Always. (There’s sometimes a bit more leeway when the present participial phrase appears after the main part of the sentence, though technically speaking there shouldn’t be.)

So, these would be not only grammatically incorrect, but physically impossible:

Chomping down on her food, she stuck her tongue out. (Ouch.)
Sneezing, he sang an aria.

However, there are lots of things you can do simultaneously:

Smiling, she walked down the aisle.

An important note here is that reading is a very linear activity—we read one word and then the next—and these phrases can make it easy to misunderstand or just slow us down as we try to figure out the order of the actions and picture them. This is so important it could warrant its own letter, but I don’t think I really need to explain this more.

C: Present participial phrases frequently cause misplaced modifiers.

The action or state described in a present participial phrase must ALWAYS describe/be done by the subject of the sentence. If not, you get a misplaced/dangling modifier:

Running to the car, the cat darted between his ankles.

The only grammatically correct way to understand this sentence is that the CAT was running to the car. At best, this sentence is ambiguous—we really can’t assume that it means the man was running. If I want to say the man was running to the car and the cat darted between his ankles, I’d be much safer to say THAT.

Walking down the street, a bat bit the man on the thumb.

Grammatically speaking, this sentence says a bat was walking down the street and bit a man on the thumb. Paraphrased from a famously bad police report.

D: If we’re supposed to be writing in our character’s thoughts and minds, present participial phrases would appear sparingly at best.

People rarely think that way. Really, think about how you think. Okay, generally we think in pictures, but when you do use words, is that how your thoughts go? If we’re seeking to replicate our characters’ voices and internal thoughts, then, would they use them?

Varying sentence structure isn’t a good enough reason for these either. As editor/author Alicia Rasley points out, varying sentences isn’t an end to itself: it’s an intermediate goal to create a smooth read.

Since these constructions do stick out if used incorrectly or awkwardly or too frequently, and so many first drafts contain so many present participial phrases that you can’t construe their usage as actually varying the default sentence structure anyway. Again, important enough to get its own letter, but I don’t want to beat you over the head with this.

To conclude:

Okay, maybe present participial phrases aren’t exactly evil, but just like commas, but we have to be VERY careful about how we use them (or we’ll end up with something ungrammatical or bizarre) and very judicious about when we use them.

In my opinion (formed by the careful tutelage of the editors I mentioned above), the best use of a participial phrase is for something that describes the state of the subject of the sentence, NOT an action:

Hoping she wasn’t too late, she dashed into the room.

Her emotional state in this sentence is one of hoping.

Yes, sometimes published and unpublished authors use present participial phrases. I invite you to find a book published in your target market or by your target publisher, flip to any page and count the number of sentences that begin with present participial phrases. I was amazed when I did this: books that were decades old or only a few months both yielded very few.

What do you think? How often do you really use present participial phrases? What did you find when you opened a book in your target market? Come share!

Photo by Bird Eye

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Technique

Secret sauce: stuffing too much into one sentence

2 Comments
This entry is part 14 of 16 in the series Spilling the secret sauce

Once upon a time, I must have held a subconscious belief that a “real” writer made their sentences work two and three times as hard. That’s probably true in a way—each action of a story, each scene and maybe each sentence can accomplish more than one thing.

But instead, I took that to mean that the more complex a sentence, the better. I think the problematic present participial phrases we looked at last week can be a symptom of the same problem: trying to stuff too much into one sentence. (And also, trying to sound writerly.)

Learning my lesson

I’ve long been an avid reader of the blog edittorrent, run by editors Theresa Stevens and Alicia Rasley. Almost four years ago, they asked for victims volunteers for on-the-blog edits, and I signed up with a short sample, a few sentences that were giving some of my beta readers problems.

And Alicia told me exactly why (emphasis added):

Don’t make your reader work so hard to figure out what you’re getting at. Try writing it plainly first, to make sure you’re getting it across, then embellish. But really, I think you’re trying to do too much for one paragraph. This might not have bothered me in two paragraphs or three, if you took your time and really explored what was happening . . . . If that’s too attenuated, see what’s important to keep and make sure everything is clear.

Yes, sentences should work hard for us as writers and serve several purposes. But there’s a limit to how much you can pack into a sentence or paragraph and still be intelligible to readers.

Another really important point here is that dense (= packed) writing isn’t always better. Sometimes it makes the reader feel dense (= stupid). If something is really important to the story action or the character, often that weight should be matched by the amount of real estate that event gets.

Or as Alicia put it,

If it’s worth stating, . . . it’s worth developing or exemplifying or showing. . . .

I know I’m always saying, “Take it slow.” But don’t try to compress too much.

Now, if it had just been me, I probably would have dismissed this advice as a general principle, applying it only to this passage and skipping merrily along with my writing life. However, it seemed to me that one of the recurring themes in Alicia’s awesome line editing series was to slow down and draw out the implications and impact of events in our writing, really showcasing our characters.

Applying the special sauce

These sample edits were done on a passage of 4 sentences:

How must the buildings that were so familiar she hardly noticed them look to Father O’Leary? Three years ago, she compared the Gothic chapel, its stone façade flanked by blazing maples in a carpet of lawn, to her parents’ church in city center. At the time, St. Adelaide seemed a suburban oasis; three weeks ago she was disabused of that notion.

“I’m sure it’ll get to feelin’ like home soon enough,” she murmured.

Along with other excellent feedback from Alicia & Theresa and other commentators, the passage in question eventually grew—the first paragraph (three sentences) expanded into three paragraphs (eight sentences):

He scanned the whole scene, as if surveying the squat brick school, the rectory, the Gothic chapel’s stone façade flanked by blazing maples in a carpet of lawn. The dismay in his expression dissolved with his satisfied nod. St. Adelaide must seem like a suburban oasis to him.

Three weeks ago, Molly had been disabused of that notion. Now the idyllic scene carried a sinister undertone so strong she couldn’t bear to look at it anymore. She hadn’t even noticed when the maples turned red.

Father O’Leary sighed and looked to her. How could she tell him the truth and shatter his illusion? “It’ll get to feelin’ like home soon enough,” she murmured.

I agreed that this event was important enough to give it more real estate in the book—but it’s not like I devoted an entire chapter to this. Just a few more sentences here made the passage clearer and gave it greater emotional impact.

Note that I decided the reference to the past (three years ago) was not actually worth including, since it distracted from the present—it wasn’t important enough to explore, and thus it probably wasn’t important enough to include.

What do you think? Have you ever overstuffed your sentences? Come share!

Photo credits: overstuffed beef ravioli—George Hatcher; red maple—Rudolf Ammann; both via Flickr/Creative Commons

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Technique

Secret sauce: filter words

This entry is part 15 of 16 in the series Spilling the secret sauce

When you see a building under construction, your eyes are naturally drawn not to the building, but to the latticework of metal encasing its facade. In writing, the same attention to certain words and phrases—in this case “head words”—creates the same effect.

Sometimes we use phrases like “he thought” or “she knew” to reinforce the POV character’s connection with the thoughts in narration. But instead of drawing our readers’ attention to the character’s thoughts, too many of these phrases can draw attention to that scaffolding—the words that encase the character’s thoughts. Remember the example we used early on of watching a character looking out the window versus seeing the view ourselves?

This passage from the otherwise excellent Scene & Structure by Jack Bickham exemplifies the thinking behind this problem:

Failure to use constructions that show viewpoint is quite common, and, we can be thankful easy to fix. . . .

Consider the following statements:

The cold wind blew harder.
A gunshot rang out.
It was terrifying.

These are fine observations, but in none of them do we know where the viewpoint is. Ordinarily you should recast such statements to emphasize the viewpoint, thus:


She felt the cold wind blow harder.
He heard a gunshot ring out.
It was terrifying, she thought. Or:
Terror crept through her.(89)

I can’t say whether it’s just publishing trends or the version of deep POV that’s au courant, but today, publishing trends have moved far, far away from his “fixes” (other than the last one, of course). Today, such “scaffold fixes” smack of telling instead of showing.

Showing versus telling

By emphasizing the viewpoint character in these sentences, we are doing exactly what Bickham wants us to—show the viewpoint. However, we’re telling what that character is seeing/feeling/hearing.

The question readers should be asking upon reading a sentence like Bickham’s first examples isn’t “Who’s seeing/feeling/hearing this?” It’s “What’s next?”

Naturally, these examples are pretty much begging for this kind of scaffolding—because they’re in isolation. If you start your scene with a sentence like any of these (without a clear POV, that is), then yes, readers could be confused whose POV you’re in. You must establish the viewpoint character early on—but not by telling.

The cold wind blew harder and Jack flipped up the collar of his coat. He hated the winter.
A gunshot rang out. Maria flung herself under the nearest car before the terror could even register.

If you establish the POV at the beginning of the scene, and continue to show your character’s thoughts throughout the scene, simple declarations and observations of the world around him don’t require you, the author, to tell us that the POV character is the one seeing/feeling/tasting, etc. Cutting back the unnecessary scaffolding lets the elegant architecture of the sights and senses of your story shine through.

Sometimes, however, these head words are absolutely necessary: they can add important shades of meaning. “She realized he was wrong” is different from “she knew he was wrong,” “she thought he was wrong” and “he was wrong.” Use head words when they add necessary shades of meaning, and take them out when they don’t. (One of my biggest pet peeves: “wonder.” I will almost always recommend writing “How would he survive?” instead of “She wondered how he would survive.”)

What do you think? Do you notice “scaffolding” or head words when you’re reading? Do you try to avoid them while writing? Or do you see them as a useful tool to establish viewpoint?

Photo credits: scaffolding—Paula Navarro; Colosseum—Hannah Di Yanni

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Technique

The Secret Sauce Wrap

This entry is part 16 of 16 in the series Spilling the secret sauce

secret sauce smallOur “secret sauce” is everything it takes to make a manuscript publishable (for me, anyway). Over the last several months, I’ve gone through more than a dozen techniques in-depth that I believe took my writing from rejected to accepted, everything from the structure of the whole story to building a better sentence.

I’ve been looking forward to this Secret Sauce series for a long time, but now it’s come to an end. But just look at all we’ve covered this year!

I hope to add this series to my free writing guides soon. In the mean time, I’m open to suggestions for another writing series!

Free Writing Guides

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