Before I begin writing or formulating a scenario from which the story begins (the inciting incident), I dedicate hours thinking about who the characters are. I like to think of characters as people who lived entire lives or some variation of it if they’re young. I meet my characters right before the inciting incident to see them as they are, unchanged. This has helped me kick-start countless stories and, by the end of this article, you will be able to apply this process as well!

Location

Perhaps the most important element in this process is the location in which you choose to meet your characters. Some of my characters are trapped in places they cannot escape. I never meet them in those places—dejected places that put unnecessary stress on the mind.

Instead, I free the characters so that I might meet them as they were prior to the inciting incident. Neutral ground—outdoor restaurants patios or amongst the crowd on the Santa Monica pier—is where I prefer to meet my characters. Finding what places are most comfortable for you and your characters is essential. If your comfort place is a cabin in the woods, coated with snow, then take your character and yourself there; if it’s a gloomy 16th-century castle or deserted island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, then to each their own. But make sure your characters are also comfortable because they are people too and, sometimes, they are dissimilar to us. Make sure the place is not too overtly distracting either, as you need your character’s full, undivided attention and vice versa. Once the neutral ground is established, you and your characters will be relaxed and open enough to chat.

Things to Ask when Talking with Your Characters

Before jumping into what to say, I’d like to stress that you should try to avoid speaking with more than a single character at a time. Unless, of course, your mind is trained enough to speak with more, you should avoid mental strain as much as possible. This process could be hugely rewarding if you think of it as a form of meditation and try to have fun with it.

Okay, so you have the best possible neutral location in which you and your characters can freely discuss birth, death, and everything in between. Now what? Well, now the fun begins.

But hold on, you might be thinking, what if we have nothing to say to one another? What if it’s awkward?

Not to worry. Whether a character does or does not speak with you demonstrates who they are as people. Note your character’s gait if you two are walking. Is your character a fast or slow talker? Make note of what diction they employ. What about their posture if you two are seated somewhere? Does your character slouch or are they as stiff and upright as a white picket fence? These are the questions I ask myself before asking my characters anything.

Toni Morrison, in the above quote, said, “Nice hat,” when she saw Beloved because she noticed her nice hat. It could be as simple as that.

If your character is awkward speaking with you that says something about them as much as it says about you. I believe that we learn more about ourselves through the characters we create and meeting them in our heads before the story begins is like meeting a piece within us we didn’t know we had. And when you do begin to write, you’ll feel as though the character for which you are writing is familiar and you’ll greet them like a friend you haven’t met with in a while.

Photo Credit

Photo by Tom Miller on Flickr – Some Rights Reserved

Guest Author Bio
Rygell Arana

Rygell P. K. Arana is a part-time freelance writer based in Los Angeles, CA, and a full-time stay-at-home father. He covers a wide range of topics ranging from politics to sociology and is determined to share, inspire, and educate others. He writes hoping to inspire others to share their light with the world.

Blog / Website: Rygell Patrick Kumar Arana

I have also been fortunate to have lived in Kentucky and Tennessee. In those mountains, I listened to the “old timers” weave their tales of the coal mines and the people who are now ghosts moving through a “hollers” moonscapes on a summer night.

Shutta Crum has deep roots in this Appalachian heritage of storytelling. In this tradition, stories are passed from one generation to the next. Sometimes the stories have you on the edge of your seat with your neck hairs straight up. Other nights, you can laugh so hard your ribs hurt.

Before devoting herself to writing full-time, Shutta taught high school English and creative writing at a community college. She still does workshops around the country. For 24 years she was a librarian. I was fortunate to meet Shutta through my son at the public library. There is one constant in Shutta’s career, like a creek coursing through hill country, and that is being a storyteller. Her books have been nominated and won awards. Her articles about writing and education have appeared in professional journals. Shutta’s poetry has appeared in both print and on-line journals for adults.

Poet, children’s writer, novelist, librarian, and educator, Shutta invites us to sit on the front porch, to listen to the crickets, to watch the fireflies sparkle and dance on a warm summer night, and to listen. . . her stories aren’t just for children—they are for all of us.

Shutta Crum in Her Own Words

Q: Though books were scarce in your parent’s home, storytelling was, as you have said, in your family’s blood. How have those stories shaped you not as a writer, but as a person?

A: Storytelling was a way of cementing family relationships. My father moved my mother and I north in that diaspora of Kentuckians to Michigan after the war to work at Willow Run. I felt my parents’ homesickness and that longing they had for closeness that comes from large families. So we went “down home” every summer. The stories were a way of reconnecting each time. The old stories were a “given” that everyone could take off from toward the new stories we were making with our new lives. Everyone seemed anxious to “tell one.” And all ages were respected. Kids could get the undivided attention of all the adults by telling a good one, just as an adult could. It was a way of saying, “We love you, we value you. And now we’re going to listen to your story.” It was a terribly empowering, and completely loving feeling for a kid.

Q: Curiosity is an essential ingredient to writing. You are people orientated. Also, in 1985 you and your husband purchased a farm. How have people, animals, the land nurtured your curiosity, and inspired you since you first began to write as a child?

A: Hah! You ask this now—as we have just moved from the farm into town. We spent 27 years out in the country, and loved it. But it was hard work. (Time to relax a bit now.) But back to your question about curiosity . . . certainly some of my books have scenes taken from the animal life witnessed at our farm: skunks, mice, dogs, chickens. And then there were the wonderful thunderstorms!! (These inspired “THUNDER-BOOMER!”)

The farm sat in a small bowl of a valley, and we could watch the weather when it came and when it left. I loved being able to see weather across a large distance, as opposed to simply looking straight up in the city.

Most of my books are character-centered, and will probably always be. It is people that inspire me first (even when that “person” is in the guise of an animal for a young reader). But the world of nature will continue, I suspect, to color my work. I cherish those years at the farm and I have a whole collection of memories to work into future manuscripts.

Q: Do you remember the first time you went to a library, what you felt, and thought?

A: Great question. I don’t remember the very first time. However, we did not have a public library in the small town in Oakland County, Michigan, where I grew up. But we lived next door to the elementary school, and the school’s small library both fed my hunger for books, and taunted me with the knowledge that there were many more books out there. I remember thinking the library was so big, and I was so proud that I’d read almost all of the books. When I got older, I realized that the library was actually the size of a janitor’s closet . . . but it became a place where I could curl up in one small corner with a book and lose myself in the excitement of a world beyond my own. Of course, I had to become a librarian!

Q: What brought you to writing, particularly storytelling for children?

A: Mostly it was the work of doing storytimes at the library. I’d actually specialized in adult services, and administration, while getting my master’s degree in library science. But doing storytimes every week opened my eyes, and reminded me of the love of storytelling that existed in our family.

I am in awe of children’s books—they are so much more inventive than many of the books written for adults! There’s a great quote from Madeleine L’Engle that addresses that. She said, “You have to write the book that wants to be written. And if the book will be too difficult for grown-ups, then you write it for children.”

Q: Who are some of the authors and poets who have influenced you as a writer?

A: Oh my goodness—this list could go on forever! Partly because children’s books have such a wide range in formats. I write poetry, novels and picture books–so there are many influences. Here are a few that come readily to mind. For poetry, Ted Kooser, Ruth Stone, Jane Yolen, e.e. cummmings and Langston Hughes. For novels and short stories, Shirley Jackson, Jean Craighead George, Kurt Vonnegut, Kate DeCamillo, Flannery O’Connor, M. T. Anderson, Brian Selznick and Jerry Spinelli. For picture books, William Steig, Maurice Sendak, Eric Rohmann, Peggy Rathmann, David Wiesner and Rosemay Wells.

Q: Some of your stories are rooted in Southern folktales. Much of the rich Southern tradition of storytelling comes from England via the early settlers. Another source for folktales is the African-American tradition of storytelling that begins with the slave narratives. There are those who deny that there exists a Southern literary voice today whether in adult or children’s literature. Has that Southern voice been lost in literature and poetry today? And have we crowded out those distinct African-American voices that resounded so clearly during the Harlem Renaissance?

A: Gracious! I think there will always be a distinctive “Southern” voice, and other distinctive voices that are indicative of neighborhoods, cultures and ethnicity—white, black, Latino, Asian. Look, for example, at Junot Diaz’ strong contemporary voice, Rick Bragg’s, or Linda Sue Park’s, Jacqueline Woodson’s, or Nikki Grimes’. All are writing today and winning awards by writing from their particular perspectives with their particular voices. If someone isn’t hearing these myriad diverse voices that are coming to life in new books today, he/she isn’t listening (reading)!

Q: You have stated that while writing “Who Took My Hairy Toe”, you were conscious that children look for justice in a story because of their innocence. In contrast, adults, with their sense of guilt, look for mercy in stories. Are the lines between justice and mercy really so clearly drawn? How do you balance justice and mercy in a story so as to appeal to an adult who will be purchasing a book for a child?

A: No! Things are never quite as simple, or clear, as one can relate in a short statement! It is simply that as adults, readers are more “open” to books without endings, or with unfair endings, or with ambiguous endings. Do Rhett and Scarlet end up “happily ever-after?” We do not know, yet we are willing to be satisfied with that. Children, especially young children, see justice (and resolution) as something concrete. They want a story to turn out the way it should in a right world. The older the child reader, the readier he/she is to accept that sometimes the world is NOT fair, and sometimes we simply have to go on and never know the ending with certainty.

When you’re writing a book that an adult and a child will share you always write to the youngest reader. This is because if the tone, setting, motivations, and language are lively and lovely . . . this is often plenty for the adult. The child is your primary audience, and hopefully any adult also reading your book will find enough to satisfy.

Q: Beginner writers think they can jot anything down on paper, getting by on the first draft. You increasingly find yourself invited to speak at workshops, schools, and conferences. This year you spoke at the University of Virginia at Wise. What do you tell aspiring authors about the role of revision in the creative process?

A: I tell them revision is a pain in the patootie! But it’s also where a lot of the magic happens. It is when I’m trying to push and pull and pry my words that often an idea will suddenly pop up that’s perfect. And then, I think—but, of course! Katherine Paterson, a multiple Newbery winner has said, “It’s just the stupid 1st draft, just get it down. Any end will do for now.” I keep this posted by my computer. The real writing doesn’t start until the second draft.

Q: One of the biggest hurdles authors face is finding an agent and/or a publisher. How long did it take you to find a publisher and agent? What role should marketing play when developing a story and during the process of writing that story?

A: It took two and a half years before I sold my first book. I’d garnered over 300 rejections on approximately 20 different manuscripts. I sold my first seven books myself. And it wasn’t until I had about four books in print that I got an agent. My agent sold my next eight books. (12 books out now, three under contract.)

I find that with children’s books one should submit to editors and agents at the same time. An agent can only handle so many clients, and a lot of them are writing similar material. Sometimes with books for kids, one can snag an editor easier, especially at a mid-sized or smaller publishing house. But eventually, an agent may be wanted/needed just to keep from going crazy with all the business end of the business of writing.

Marketing has everything to do with the life of a book after it is published. But, for me, NOTHING to do with a story before it is written/while it is being written! To be successful I truly believe one needs to write from what’s in one’s heart, and find an audience to market that writing to later. A good book will find a publisher, and readers.

Q: In your story “My Mountain Song”, the grandfather says, “everybody born in the mountains got a song inside of ‘em.” A common complaint among students both in high school and college is that the educational system stifles creativity rather than encourages it. What can educators and parents do to bring out that song students have inside of them?

A.: One could write a dissertation on this question—and have! I say that we need to value each child’s contribution by listening and facilitating. It is incumbent on adults to make safe, non-judgmental, space for children to experiment and to tell their own stories in their own ways. And then we all—adults and kids—celebrate!

For more information about Shutta Crum, she can be contacted at http://blog.shutta.com/.

Photo Credits:

© Shutta Crum. All rights reserved.

~

Every artist was haunted by lies. Every artist fought to find truths. Every artist failed. Some turned back, embracing those comforting lies. Others took their own lives in despair. Still others drank themselves into the barrow, or poisoned everyone who drew near enough to touch, to wound. Some simply gave up, and wasted away in obscurity. A few discovered their own mediocrity, and this was the cruelest discovery of all. None found their way to the truths.

With these lines the artist (as artist) is described, and once again we can, if we choose, shift worlds, since all the examples noted can be found here, and in our history. This blurring is extended in the next paragraph.

If he lived a handful of breaths from this moment, or if he lived a hundred thousand years, he would fight – for something, a truth, that he could not even name. It was, perhaps, the god behind the gods of colour. The god that offered both creation and recognition, that set forth the laws of substance and comprehension, of outside and inside and the difference between the two.

Here I make the closest connection to our own, monotheistic, world.

He wanted to meet that god. He wanted a word or two with that god. He wanted, above all, to look into its eyes, and see in them the truth of madness.

As an artist, I am with K here, in every way.

With brush and desire, I will make a god.

This line foreshadows K’s reappearance in the ten-volume series, which temporally occurs thousands of years later.

Watch me.

But in this moment, as he rode through swords of light and shrouds of shadow, upon the trail of blind savagery, Kadaspala was himself like a man without eyes.

Third time we return to those shafts of light, but now their emotional context is stark: violence (swords) and grief (shroud).

The painted face was everywhere. His fingers could not stop painting it, in the air, like mystical conjurations, like evocations of unseen powers, like a warlock’s curse and a witch’s warding against evil.

Recall K’s belief that what his fingers describe defines and shapes reality.

Fingers that could close wounds at a stroke, that could unravel the bound knots of time and make anew a world still thriving with possibilities – that could do all these things (god-like power), yet tracked on in their small scribings, trapped by a face of death.

Yet, for all that power, he is a helpless creator, and why? Because he feels.

Because the god behind the gods was mad.

Direct and logical conclusion to his thesis. The proof is on the ground all around him.

I shall paint the face of darkness. I shall ride the dead down the throat of that damned god. I, Kadaspala, now avow this: world, I am at war with you. Outside – you, outside, hear me! The inside shall be unleashed. Unleashed.

I shall paint the face of darkness. And give it a dead child’s eyes.

Because in darkness, we see nothing.

In darkness, behold, there is peace.

The section closes with K’s avowal, a reaffirmation of his role as an artist, but drawn tightly back into his own world. There can be instances where it works to keep that metafictional blurring open to close a scene, but not here. The scene has to close with a firm re-anchoring in the fictional world, and this is why “darkness” is brought to the fore. The last line is delivered (in my mind) in the bitterest tones imaginable, with thudding emphasis on the word “peace.” Because by this point, isn’t “peace” synonymous with death? And doesn’t this echo back to his opening thoughts on the gods of colour and their absence? So, K continues on his journey, but it will be into a place devoid of all colour. This too is foreshadowing.

Now, as writers you must be wondering: to what extent is this guy aware of all this stuff? I assure you that one cannot deconstruct as part of the initial creative process. No, what I’m trying to show here is how you can (and, if you work hard at it, will) reach a place where you can do this with your own work. It’s down to discovering the potential of language, and the fullest extent of your control over it as writers, and this comes from practice and lots and lots of thinking – about your creative process, about what is possible and how it might be achieved, about the effects of what you put on the page. I emphasise this last bit because it is where you will find your revelation as an artist (in this case, as a writer), your blinding moment of realization and recognition. It is, to put it bluntly, fucking breathtaking what you can do with language, and the degree to which you can set forth a sequence of words to convey and trigger psychological effects in your reader. But bear in mind, you need to free yourself first: free yourself to feel those effects. A writer who has never shed tears would have a long way to go, not just as a writer, but as a person. We cannot create from an intellectual starting point: it must be an emotional one, beginning with the impulse to create in the first place. The only role of the intellectual perspective is in the structuring and ordering (the craft) of what you’re doing. The joy lies in fusing the emotional impulse with the intellectual craft, until they exist in a seamless state.

Deconstruction exercises like this one might suggest that instinct is suspect, or unimportant. Not so. Instincts are powerful forces of recognition and reason: they just fool you into thinking they come from some formless, emotional, state of the subconscious. I would suggest the opposite: instincts know what work. Now it’s down to you to look those instincts in the eye, and work out why they want what they want.

No writing course can give you the reason for writing – the reason you possess inside. Nor should it have any business telling you what to write, or what to write about. The only thing it can do is reveal to you the tools of the craft.

As an aside, I was being groomed to begin teaching a creative writing course at a Canadian university, wherein I would teach a workshop on writing in Science Fiction and Fantasy. But then we left the country. Thinking back on it, I would probably have been the worst choice possible, as not only does my work often subvert the tropes of my chosen genre, but I also see no real distinction, in terms of craft, between all forms of fiction, and would no doubt have argued from that position, which would have made a workshop in SF and Fantasy kinda pointless, huh?

Cheers

SE

Image Credit

Photograph published with permission of author

~

There were other corpses. A man and a woman, their backs cut and stabbed as they sought to hold their bodies protectively over those children they could reach, not that it had helped, since those children had been dragged out and killed. A dog, lying half cut in two just above the hips, the hind limbs lying one way, the fore limbs and head the opposite way. Its eyes, too, were flat.

Badly written clause, highlighted here, and obviously something I need to fix in the revision. This paragraph elaborates on details of the scene, but still within a human context (mother, father, children), emphasizing once again the brutality of the murders. Connecting the flat eyes of the dog to that of the child points to the dehumanizing necessary to kill, but also raises the disturbing query of what’s the difference between child and dog, “human” and animal?

When traveling through the forest, Kadaspala was in the habit of leaving the main track, of finding these lesser paths that took him through small camps such as this one. He had shared meals with the quiet forest people, with the Deniers although they denied nothing of value that he could see. They lived in familiarity and in love, and wry percipience and wise humility, and they made art that took Kadaspala’s breath away.

This offers K’s relationship with these people, moving us back to a personal context, though for K that context is still one of art. But we’ve begun the return journey to K as a person, a feeling entity, and this is important for what is to come in this section. It also provides more details on the Deniers, humanizing them as well.

The figurines, the masks, the beadwork – all lost in the burnt huts now.

How violence destroys beauty. This foreshadows a major scene with K later in the novel.

Someone had carved a wavy line on the chest of the dead boy. It seemed that worship of the river god was a death sentence now.

Cultural context reinforced.

He would not bury these dead. He would leave them lying where they were. Offered to the earth and the small scavengers that would take them away, bit by bit, until the fading of flesh and memory were one.

This points to K’s understanding of these forest people, as integral parts of nature.

He painted with his fingers, setting in his mind where all the bodies were lying in relation to one another; and the huts and the dead dog, and how the sun’s light struggled through the smoke to make every detail scream.

Through his painting gesture, we get a summary of the salient details, but in an emotionless tone, a running through of a shopping list, all of which leads up to underscore the emotional impact of the last word in the paragraph. Juxtaposition on an emotional level can be very effective.

Then, kicking his mule forward, he watched as the beast daintily stepped over the boy’s body, and for the briefest of moment hid every detail in shadow.

This seems a small detail, a simple description which sets him moving again, but it is crucial. On the one hand, the arrival of shadow foreshadows later events in the novel and in the series (especially regarding the Deniers), and on the other hand, it thematically leads us into the next train of thoughts, as K considers the hiding/disguising effect of the loss of light. Backing up, consider the use of the word “daintily” and give some thought to the emotion it registers in you, the reader. It is delicate, and anthropomorphic, which is fine because K is watching it (POV again). What if I had elected something else here? The animal roughly stepping on the body or kicking it carelessly. A whole different emotional context would be established here, one that would demand some kind of response from K: would he beat his mount for its indifference? How does that fit with K’s character? It doesn’t, so here, to avoid complications that I feel are problematic, I use the language to smooth the transition.

In the world of night promised by Mother Dark, so much would remain forever unseen. He began to wonder if that would be a mercy. He began to wonder if this was the secret of her promised blessing to all her believers, her children. Darkness now and forever more. So we can get on with things.

Welcome to an unseeing world (but then, you know all about an unseeing world). This is an artist speaking, an artist wondering why he bothers; an artist who sees his world turning into a place that makes him, and his art, irrelevant. And then, from the pain in his soul, from its despair and exhaustion, he wonders if that irrelevance would be merciful. But the last line rejects that notion, because it is bitter as hell. At this point, the artist as the enemy of authority is subtly suggested, which leads to what’s coming in this section.

A score or more horses had taken the trail he was now on. The killers were moving westward. He might well meet them if they had camped to rest up from their night of slaughter. They might well murder him, or just feed him.

We’ve started moving again, leading to questions of what waits ahead. The two possibilities raised by K for when he meets the killers come across as flat, which supports the next paragraph’s opening statement.

Kadaspala did not care. He had ten thousand faces in his head, and they were all the same.

POV control can permit the writer a natural shorthand. Consider the previous two lines. If I wasn’t as close to K in this point of view, I might have had to write something like: “Kadaspala did not care, because he had ten thousand….” But the tight POV permits me to dispense with “because.” So it’s cleaner and smoother.

The memory of Enesdia seemed far away now. If he was spared, he would ride for her, desperate with need. For the beauty he dared not paint, for the love he dared not confess. She was where the gods of colour gathered all the glory in their possession. She was where he would find the rebirth of his faith.

This reinforces elements of K’s character noted in other sections with him (his unnatural obsession with his sister).

Image Credit

Photograph published with author’s permission.

~

Kadaspala stared down at the child’s face. There was dirt on one cheek but otherwise the skin was clean and pure. Apart from the eyes, the only discordant detail was the angle between the head and the body, which denoted a snapped neck. And bruising upon one ankle, where the killer had gripped it when whipping the boy in the air – hard enough to separate the bones of the neck.

When revising this paragraph, I will make sure the word “neck” is not repeated. When you use repetition, do it with intent. The accidental stuff: get rid of, it distracts. Anyway, what we get here is objective physical description of what he is looking down at. These details add veracity.

The gods of colour brushed lightly upon that face, in tender sorrow, in timorous disbelief. They brushed light as a mother’s tears.

The emotional context of these two lines is all Kadaspala’s. What if I had written: “Kadaspala looked down upon that face, filled with sorrow and disbelief.” Probably fine, but not good enough. By using his disassociation, by echoing his relationship with his gods, I can do a whole lot more. There is a level of connectedness established by the optional line I’ve just written, but it’s nowhere near as tight as my electing to use his gods for these emotions. Why is that? Well, maybe (and I’m just guessing here) we as readers are experiencing the same disassociation. We are, after all, reading a description of a terrible scene, in cruel, brutal detail. But we’re doing it once-removed, through the eyes of a fictional character. We are both disassociating. When reader and character do the same thing, we move from sympathy to empathy. Anyway, one can be far more poetic than that flat description of the alternative sentence, and the two lines in the paragraph are very poetic (I don’t mean that as a boast: I mean, they are structurally poetic). Finally, the use of the alternative sentence would have precluded the second sentence, which is the emotional hammer. By using “mother’s tears” we are forced to connect the dead child to his mother, who, if alive, would surely have wept in grief.

The fingers of his right hand, folded over the saddle horn, made small motions, painting the boy’s face, filling the lines and planes with muted colour and shade, working round the judgment-less eyes, saving those for last. His fingers made the hair a dark smudge, because it was unimportant apart from the bits of twig, bark and leaf in it. His fingers worked, while his mind howled until the howling fell away and he heard his own calm voice.

The obsessive artist and his habit return, and like a god he creates for us (the reader) the image of this dead child’s face. He even decides what’s important and what isn’t. Because of the tight POV I don’t even question it as author; and as reader, neither should you. Besides, while he calls the boy’s hair unimportant, he then undercuts that with the details of “twig, bark and leaf.” Things which a mother would surely brush away…

‘Denier child” … so I call it. Yes, the likeness is undeniable – you knew him? Of course you did. You all know him. He’s what falls to the wayside in your triumphant march. Yes, I kneel now in the gutter, because the view is one of details – nothing else, just details. Do you like it?

Do you like this?

Stylistically, I use italics* for internal monologue. I set the precedent long ago and my readers now understand my usage of italics. But this one has an added twist. He is addressing “you.” Who is that “you” for Kadaspala? Neither of us is prepared to answer that. But it might be … all of us. The artist standing beside his work nods and smiles and says…

Just as in this fictional world, in our world children are dying, in myriad ways, all of them unjust on one level or another. Also, since this is the poet’s tale, are these really Kadaspala’s thoughts, or that poet’s?

Within the context of this tale, the “you” can be seen (with relief) as K’s fellow Tiste, his highborn kin. And from that we can conclude that we are given the targets of his rage. Of course, we might also conclude that we are all the targets of this artist’s rage, as he stands beside the painting depicting deeds permitted by our indifference…

The gods of colour offer this without judgment. In return, it is for you to make the judgment. This is the dialogue of our lives.

This is the journalist’s credo, in every photograph of atrocity. The artist records, reports, unveils, exposes. To see the revelation is to engage in a dialogue with it, even if that dialogue is short and is characterized by indifference. The question of judgment is left open. Anyway, at this point, we’ve moved away from the technical and into the thematic, so I’ll stop there.

Of course I speak only of craftsmanship. Would I challenge your choices, your beliefs, the way you live and the things you desire and the cost of those things? Are the lines sure? Are the colours true? What of those veils on the eyes – have you seen their likeness before? Judge only my skill, my feeble efforts in imbuing a dead thing with life using dead things – dead paints, dead brushes, dead surface, with naught but my fingers and my eyes living, together striving to capture truth.

These lines are carefully fashioned to bridge our two worlds, the fictional one and the real one. I do this on occasion. Why, because I want to blur the distinction and so carry the themes across into our own lives.

I choose to paint death, yes, and you ask why – in horror and revulsion, you ask why? I choose to paint death, my friend, because life is too hard to bear. But it’s just a face, dead paints on dead surface, and it tells nothing of how the neck snapped, or the wrongness of that angle with the body. It is, in truth, a failure.

And each time I paint this boy, I fail.

I fail when you turn away. I fail when you walk past. I fail when you shout at me about the beautiful things of the world, and why didn’t I paint those? I fail when you cease to care, and when you cease to care, we all fail. I fail, then, in order to welcome you to what we share.

This face? This failure? It is recognition.

Hmm, artistic statement? A good place for making a comment or two about postmodernism and metafiction. In the early eighties, when metafiction (self-conscious narration that breaks the illusion of fiction by addressing the reader directly) was all the rage, I recall railing (in workshops) against the bludgeoning obviousness of the examples being touted, just as I railed against the assumption that Magic Realism needs to be equally obvious and unsubtle. In these forms, the effect quickly lost its ardour and became just one more fad in fiction, and although Magic Realism persists as a form of fiction (in the pan-genre of the Fantastic), metafiction rarely rears its head these days (that I’m aware of). The reason for this withering is, I think, rather straightforward: to read fiction is to enter a fictive dream, the world of the writer, and the world that the writer creates. Breaking this dream has the same effect as a bad sentence breaking the dream, or the wrong word-choice. It knocks one awry. But then … what if one makes the metafiction subtle? What if one creates a form that can both address the audience directly while still, arguably, remaining within the fictive dream? In essence, this is what I began doing in my ten-volume series, and what I continue to do. It is what is going on in this “silent” address by Kadaspala. While he is ostensibly speaking to an audience within his world, he is also speaking to the reader. The veil isn’t torn aside; it’s made temporarily transparent. And through this, I endeavour to make my fantasy fiction relevant to the real world of the reader: it is not escapism at all. It is not talking about a made-up world: it is talking about this one.

 ~

Editor’s Note: Throughout this series I have distinguished excerpt text from authorial analysis by italicizing the former. In this segment, in order to denote italicization in the original excerpt text, I have set it in bold type.

Image Credit

Photograph published with permission of author

~

He understood why death and stillness were bound together. In stillness the inside was silent. The living conversation was at an end. Fingers did not move, the world was not painted into life, and the eyes, staring unseen, had lost sight of the gods of colour. When looking upon the face of a dead person, when looking into those flat eyes, he could see the truth of his convictions.

Now, this a curious little paragraph, since it seems on the surface only to reiterate K’s secondary thesis, the one about “nothing inside, nothing outside.” Why repeat it? But of course it’s not repeated; it’s actually slightly tweaked, as we move from “death” in the abstract to “death” in the face of a dead person. Hmm, why would I do that? Also, we now have another curious detail: the binding of “faith” to life, and its opposite to be found in the eyes of a dead man. Ever seen the eyes of a dead person? Take it from me: it can be hard on any kind of faith.

It was midday. The sun fought its way down and the gods fluttered, dipped and filled patches of brilliance amidst gloom and shadow, and Kadaspala sat on his mule, noting in a distracted fashion the thin wisps of smoke curling round his mount’s knobby ankles, but most of his attention was upon the face, and the eyes, of the corpse laid out on the ground before him.

So, back to setting, going so far as to actually repeat that opening line from paragraph nine. But now he’s not riding. He’s stationary. The sun’s still doing its thing (also in the second sentence, same as in paragraph nine). Revisiting the transition to setting in this way (in this first sentence and first clauses of the second sentence) reinforces that looping return I habitually use when constructing a narrative. But in that revisiting a few minor changes have been made. Where before, the sun’s light was passive in its “gifts,” now it’s fighting its way down. Also, having set up colours as gods, I feel it’s safe to transpose the two words, so that where “colours” should be in sentence 2, I use “gods” instead. This reminds us of our POV, among other things. The “fluttered, dipped and filled…” clause retains something of that melodic play, though less of the careful brush-strokes and more of a wilder “splashing” of brilliance. The painting hand has become oddly loose, careless. This is reinforced by the “distraction” described in the rest of the sentence. It might also suggest birds, as in carrion birds. Also, we now find out that he’s on a mule (recall that “plodding, stutter-stepping pace” earlier? Here’s why. It’s the pace of a man riding a mule down a narrow forest trail). And at the end of that long, disjointed, distracted, sloppy sentence, we see the reason for all that looseness. We also link straight back to the paragraph preceding this one. Death in the abstract to the body lying before K. and his mule. Another hint of discord is given in the mention of “smoke,” and that detail and mention of the mule’s ankles directs us to the notion that K. is looking down.

You can do a lot in one sentence.

There had been three huts on this narrow trail. Now they were heaps of ash, muddy grey and dull white and smeared black. One of the huts had belonged to a daughter, old enough to fashion a home of her own, but if she had shared it with a husband his body was nowhere to be seen, while she was lying half out of what had probably been the doorway. The fire had eaten her lower body and swollen the rest, cooking it until the skin split and here the gods sat still, as if in shock, in slivers of lurid red and patches of peeled black. Her long hair had been thrown forward, over the top of her head. Parts of it had burned, curling into fragile white nests. Recall the bird imagery. The rest was motionless midnight, with hints of reflected blue, like rainbows on oil. She was, mercifully, laying face-down. One rupture upon her back was different, larger, and where the others had burst outward this one pushed inward. A sword had done that.

POV: eyes register, mind interprets. There is fragile objectivity in the tone, but the gods of colour are present (even if in shock – but of course they’re not the ones in shock. Kadaspala is the one in shock, and part of his shock is to externalize his shock, setting it instead upon his imagined gods: classic disassociation). But it’s the colours that reveal those details, and so colours feature in every description. By this point, K’s POV should be absolute in the reader’s mind. He really is painting his world into existence.

We are in a postmodern world: even the Fantasy genre, for all its traditional tropes and innate conservatism (how many fucking medieval settings can you stomach?), can be tackled in a postmodern way. I tend to place what I call “ciphers” into my novels (or, in the case of my ten book series, the entire eighth novel was the cipher). These represent the key to a postmodern reading of the overall tale.

In this trilogy, Kadaspala is my cipher. The frame of the books is a poet telling the tale to another poet, but this poet has extracted himself from the tale. Kadaspala paints his world into existence, and this assertion will drive him to a terrible act, since the world he paints is one of horror. The poet narrator uses words to do the same. The two are linked in other ways, physical ways, but we need not get into that here, except to point out that those shared details confirm the linkage. Suffice to say, I always like offering up alternative ways of reading my stuff.

The body directly before him, however, was that of a child. The blue of the eyes was now covered in a milky film, giving it its only depth, since all that was behind that veil was flat, like iron shields or silver coins, sealed and abandoned of all promise. They were, he told himself yet again, eyes that no longer worked, and the loss of that was beyond comprehension.

For the first time, I throw in a linking clause: “he told himself yet again.” Why? We’re already tight in his point of view, after all. It should be entirely unnecessary. So why do it? Because what it’s saying is that he’s trying to convince himself of something he does not believe, or, in this case, does not want to believe. K. is an obsessive character. By now we should have a sense of that. How obsessive?

He would paint this child’s face. He would paint it a thousand times. Ten thousand. He would offer them as gifts to every man and every woman of the realm. And each time any one man or woman stirred awake the hearth-gods of anger and hate, feeding the gaping mouth of violence and uttering pathetic lies about making things better, or right, or pure, or safe, he would give them yet another copy of this child’s face. He would spend a lifetime upon this one image, repeated on walls in plaster, on boards of sanded wood, in the threads of tapestry; upon the sides of pots and carved on stones and in stone. He would make it one argument to defy every other god, every other venal emotion or dark, savage desire.

 This obsessive. A word or two on the language of this paragraph. One tends to avoid using passive future constructions, like “would,” in a fictional narrative, unless there’s good reason for it. In here, there’s good reason. K. is making promises, to himself, to everyone. He is making a vow, and he means it. So I repeat that word, each time, throughout the paragraph. Recall the use of “gifts” earlier. Recall the use of “lies” and “violence” and “venal.” Note also the media described and how they fit into the tech level of the setting (no acrylics here), and how “hearth-gods of anger and hate” evoke the cultures of Ancient Greece (chthonic cults), which was most assuredly a violent, brutal time and place. All of this seethes with rage. It sets out, in vivid language, Kadaspala’s state of mind. POV (it’s all about POV!).

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Photograph published with permission of author

Video Transcript:

Coincidences may be charming enough in real life, but in fiction, they’re a fast track to wrecking your readers’ suspension of disbelief. A clever rule of thumb is that it’s all right to use a coincidence to get your character into trouble, but never to get him out. This not only rules out deus ex machina in your endings, it also eliminates convenient appearances of characters—allies or antagonists—un-foreshadowed secrets suddenly popping out at the right moment, and even just suspiciously handy knowledge and skills on the protagonist’s part.

The thing about fiction is that it’s almost impossible to write a book without a few coincidences sneaking in. If you start out writing your story with a few key scenes in mind, you’re not likely to discover how those scenes link until you actually start writing them. And once you do start writing, you may discover that getting your characters from Scene A to Scene B in a logical, non-coincidental way is a whole lot tougher than it may seem.

So how to avoid coincidences?

1. As always, the first step is being aware of the pitfalls. If you recognize that something happening in your story is a coincidence, that’s a signal to step back and rethink your approach.

2. The second step is the highly non-glamorous act of applying a little elbow grease. Authors like coincidences because they’re easy. But, in avoiding them, we not only strengthen our stories, we also have the opportunity to discover revolutionary new plot developments that we may never have considered otherwise.

3. And, finally, your secret weapon against coincidences is going to be forethought and foreshadowing. It’s not a coincidence if you’ve already hinted to readers that it’s going to happen. If a character is going to show up to help later on, introduce him earlier. If your protagonist needs a special set of skills to conquer the climax, show him learning those skills. Just like that, your coincidence becomes a catalyst!

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Originally published on Wordplay: Helping Writers Become Authors

 Thumbnail – Screen Capture From Video

 This is the fourth in a series of articles in which author Steven Erikson deconstructs, paragraph by paragraph, an excerpt from his most recent novel, Forge of Darkness.

 ~

It was midday. He rode through a forest, where on all sides the sun’s light fought its way down to the ground, touching faint here, bold there. Its gifts were brush-strokes of colour. He had a habit of subtly painting with the fingers of his right hand, making small caresses in the air – he needed no brush; he needed only his eyes and his mind and the imagination conjured in the space between them. He made shapes with deft twitches of those fingers, and then filled them with sweet colour – and each one was a prayer, an offering to his gods, proof of his love, his loyalty. If others saw the motions at the end of his right hand, they likely thought them twitches, some locked-in pattern of confused nerves. But the truth was, those fingers painted reality and for all Kadaspala knew, they gave proof to all that he saw and all that existed to be seen.

A whole lot happens in this paragraph. Finally, we get clean exposition, describing the setting, placing K. and all his thoughts into a recognizable reality. This is the ninth paragraph in this section. I took my time getting here: this is all down to trusting in the reader, and hopefully having already established in the reader their trust in me. The first sentence is short and blunt. It serves as a sharp transition from the preceding internal world with all its complexities: it does so not just in its content, its fixing in time, but also in its brevity. Both work together to make the reader amenable and ready (with relief) to shift gears.

Let’s pause on this for a moment: I said “with relief,” and this is important. Much of what drives a narrative is the creation of pressure in the reader’s mind. You write to create pressure: this is the core of storytelling; it is, in fact, what storytelling is all about. If one thinks of story as question leading to answer (or no answer, or an ambiguous or ambivalent answer) the longer it takes for that answer to arrive, the greater the pressure, and it’s this pressure that drives a reader forward (the old “page-turner” thing). “I couldn’t put the book down!” Ever heard that? Ever said that? Why? Why couldn’t you put the book down? You might answer: “The story! I wanted to know what was going to happen next!” But … why? Why did you want to know? Because of the pressure built into the narrative. We are inquisitive creatures, but also ones needing instances of “cause and effect.” Watch toddlers and babies as they throw something on the floor, watch as it’s picked up and returned to them. This is the most basic learning process we all go through: do something, see what happens. It stays with us like a hidden narrative in our minds, a very hungry narrative, which is why we love stories: books, films, sitcoms, you name it. So, at this point, fiction both appeases that hunger and deviates from reality, but in a comforting way (often in the real world we cannot make that cause-and-effect linkage, or even when we do, the comfort it can give can be bitter). A story invites one into a world where connections can be made. As a writer, as a storyteller, it’s your job to set up those connections. The most successful examples apply this with both great subtlety and with a more direct, more obvious approach. Interestingly, it’s often the subtle stuff that really drives narrative, and that pressure. When it is too obvious, or exclusively obvious, it comes across as trite, camp, melodramatic. So, consider this a pitch for subtlety.

Back to that question-and-answer thing for a moment. If you have one question and one answer for your tale, it’s probably a short story. If you have many, it’s a novel.

Now, back to the paragraph. K. is a painter. Simile and metaphor will all serve that notion. We have seen how colours dominate his soul. Now, in the description of the forest, we see it from a painter’s eye. This is an example of using the language itself, in terms of exposition and setting, to reinforce the point-of-view’s perspective. That may seem simple, or obvious, but often when description arrives in a body of text (in fiction) the author makes a kind of mental switch, away from the POV, driven by the need to accurately describe said setting to the imagined audience, and at this point, that “switch” drops the POV and imposes the author’s own voice and style – after all, in your description you are drawing from memory either directly or only slightly transformed. So, the point here is: take a hammer to that switch. Smash it into pieces. Always tie your descriptions to your POV: the tighter the better. This does a number of things to the reader (and the writer, but I’ll get to that in a second): first, it unifies the sense that we’re with that character, inside and out, and we’re seeing all of reality through that character’s eyes. Second, it affirms to the reader that we, as authors, know what we’re doing. Third, it invites the reader to read more carefully, and hopefully appreciate that unity of language and intent. Now, what does it do for the writer? One: it maintains your tightness to that POV; in effect, you keep seeing the world through that character’s eyes (mindfulness). Two: it frees you to work with metaphor but in a tight, constrained fashion, which is where it works best. This is useful, as usage of metaphor can run away on you and end up sounding ridiculous, simply because once it runs away on you it is no longer anchored to any POV. Characters can use metaphors in their thoughts, even in their dialogue, but unless it’s a deliberate affectation or cultural trait, it can seem clunky and absurd: but in the creation of characters, you as author can use metaphors as much as you like; or rather, as much as the narrative can bear. It’s one of the great pleasures of creative writing, and one of the most extraordinary gifts of language, this happy interplay between the denotative and the connotative.

Here we have the world described as if K was painting it. Given all that came before, this makes perfect sense. I then add a physical habit to K. Specifically, his “painting” with his fingers. It’s an odd little habit and I present it without judgment. It’s just something he does, well-suited to his notions of his relationship with the world, including seeing himself as witness and participant to the act of creation. Where did that detail come from? I stole it. Yes, a terrible thing to do. But then, when I think about the real-world context to that habit, I can hear my wife’s voice: “Steve, stop drawing with your fingers!” So, detail plucked, added to K. But it’s too good a detail to leave alone. And I don’t.

How does a writer’s radar work? How do you know when you’ve stumbled on something that’s going to prove immensely useful and (hopefully) effective? Hard to say. But remember, in creating a character you want to establish memorable details from their behaviour, their gestures and habits, their clothes, and so on. Any one of those details could prove useful for other reasons, and it helps if that detail is unusual in and of itself. So, I use it here to reinforce the strange notion that K. creates all that he sees. If one chooses to view that as the kind of delusion of godhood that could lead to madness … well (and no, now’s not the time to bring my wife back into this discussion).

So, for all that I finally provided details of setting, they weren’t much. He’s in a forest. It’s midday. He’s riding. Riding what? It’s coming, but I’m in no hurry, because almost immediately I return to K’s internal world. Was it enough to settle the reader? I think so.

In the game of creating pressure, a long narrative must set up many of these pressure points, and ease the reader with minor answers along the way: but never offer up such relief as to undermine the plot’s narrative build-up. When you loosen that valve in the midst of your story, don’t open it all the way. It’s not time yet, and you don’t want to kill momentum. And even more interesting (for the writer), even the dramatic or fraught conclusion to a minor event can end up just turning the screws higher on that pressure. Funny, that.

Image Credit

Photograph published with permission of author

~

There was but one place and one time when the gods of colour withdrew, vanished from the ken of mortals, and that place, that time, was death.

From the previous paragraph’s describing the coming of death, we come to it directly in this one. It’s earned the right to stand alone, because in this section, death is very important to what follows. Without the natural progressions set up in the previous paragraph, this one would lose its impact. Also, in following syntactical rules (“one place and one time” to “that time, that place”) I reinforce, hopefully, my control over what I’m writing. What would happen if I inversed the second set: that time, that place? If I had simply included this line in the preceding paragraph, I would also risk a diminishment of its effect. What we’re looking at here is control of pace, making use of the natural breaks readers make moving from one paragraph to the next. But this is a different level of manipulating pace: the larger scale for this relates, as I’ve mentioned before, to overall sentence pattern. In general, the pace of this opening to this section is slow and measured despite its alarming content. Note also that we’re still not anchored in a setting, but there is something of the plodding to this pace thus far, combined with the occasional stutter-step. Bear that in mind (because, you see, I know what K is doing right now though I’ve yet to reveal it to the reader; I know where he is, and more to the point, I know what he is looking at).

Kadaspala worshiped colours. They were the gifts of light; and in their tones, heavy and light, faint and rich, was painted all of life.

This line concludes K’s thesis. If separated out from all that surrounds it, this paragraph sounds almost pastoral. “Worship” is a positive notion. “Gifts” are always welcome. And, since K is a painter, he uses his profession, his obsession, in his descriptions. Amidst everything else, this paragraph is an island of peace, and so it was meant to be. You need to draw a spiritual breath, away from the oppression established thus far. But of course, it’s a small island.

When he thought of an insensate world, made of insensate things, he saw a world of death, a realm of incalculable loss, and that was a place to fear. Without eyes to see and without a mind to make order out of chaos, and so bring comprehension, such a world was where the gods went to die. Nothing witnessed and so, nothing renewed. Nothing seen and so, nothing found. Nothing outside and so, nothing inside.

We leave the island immediately and return to “death.” Bound to religious belief there is fear (for K.), and here we are given the nature of what K. fears. Having merged internal and external landscapes, K asserts that, in effect, he (the cognizant mind, the seeing eye) is necessary to maintain the living world. The core of this is central to his greatest fear concerning the cult of Mother Dark, and the stealing of Light that it seems to promise. Note the last three lines and the balance of syllables in “witnessed/renewed,” “see/found” and “outside/inside.” Shifting the order would have imbalanced these three sentences as a unit. Once again, rhythm is established through repetition. This is a poetic device but it works well in fiction, too. The mind likes repetition. This paragraph offers up the terror of absolute negation, and as an argument, at this point it has nowhere else to go. With the last line, we’ve descended into oblivion. Accordingly…

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Photograph published with permission of author

The Responsibilities of the Reader

This whole collaboration is pretty awesome on a number of levels. For one thing, it means the burden of crafting a perfect story isn’t ours alone. Our job is to guide the readers’ imaginations, but it’s their job to put their imaginations to work in the first place. The story their minds project will never be exactly the one we (not to mention their fellow readers) see.

Admittedly, this can actually get a bit frustrating for the average control-freak writer who doesn’t want readers messing with even the smallest detail of his story. But the good part is that once a reader invests in a story by recreating it in his own imagination, he owns that story just as much as we do. He’s caught in its web just as we are. After that’s happened, chances are good he’s going to love it just as much as we do.

The second awesome thing is that when readers join us as co-writers, the whole concept of suspension of disbelief becomes almost moot. As Steve Almond says:

“All readers come to fiction as willing accomplices to your lies.”

In Creating Characters, Dwight V. Swain agrees:

“…readers know a story isn’t real, isn’t true. But in their role of fiction fans, on an unconscious level they pretend it is true, accept it and live through it with the characters.”

The Responsibilities of the Writer

Other than being kind of a neat concept, what does this notion that the reader is our co-writer mean to us?

To begin with, it means we have to be willing to relinquish just a little bit of control. We have to be able to trust our readers to be smart, to be honest, to be demanding, and to be forgiving. When we come right down to it, we have the most awesome business partners in the world. How many high-powered business gurus would kill to have partners so trustworthy and accomplished? In a Writer’s Digest interview with Jessica Strawser, novelist Chris Cleave expounded:

[T]rust your readers, from the sentence level—you don’t need to hammer a point home—all the way through to the level of the whole novel. You can trust readers to let you write about difficult, complicated subjects…. [Readers] do half the creative work with the novel.

But this hardly means we can dump all the work onto our readers. If we don’t do our job right to begin with, they won’t even have a chance to do theirs. Dwight V. Swain again (this time from Techniques of the Selling Writer):

“That incredible, pompous, egocentric gem from the pen of a “literary” novelist, “I write. Let the reader to learn to read,” would be funny, were it not so ridiculous as to be tragic. To refuse to write so that a mass audience can understand you, and then rage because that same audience rejects you, is about on a par with insisting that grade-school youngsters learn their ABC’s from college physics texts. Most professionals accept it as their job to devise ways to communicate with their readers, regardless of said readers’ level. After all, if you feel too superior, you can always go hunt a different market.”

The Bottom Line

Authors don’t always know quite how to relate to readers—which is ironic, since not only are readers pretty easy to figure out, they’re also a club to which almost all authors belong themselves.

To understand the balance of power between author and reader, all we have to do is consider our own reading experiences. What authors have given you the greatest amount of creative control (and, as a result, emotional investment) in their stories? Which authors have hoarded the co-writing responsibilities and prevented you from adding your own imaginative flourishes? And which authors have demanded too much production from you without supplying the tools your imagination needs to work with?

The reader isn’t an enemy or a dupe. He wants to love your story. He wants you to sweep him off his feet into a world of excitement and insight. He can’t wait to be your partner, and the only way you can endanger all that enthusiasm is by either failing to fulfill your own responsibilities—or by failing to trust him with his. Paul Auster says it like this:

“…the book doesn’t only belong to the writer, it belongs to the reader as well, and then together you make it what it is.”

Photo Credit

Photo courtesy of K.M. Weiland

Originally posted on Wordplay: Helping Writers Become Authors