How To Write Magical Words: A Writer's Companion

by Unknown

  Horse is such a limited word. The beast in the diner had the grace and delicacy of an Arabian and the size of a Clydesdale, multiplied by two. It shimmered a watery grey, bordering on silver, the color so fluid I thought I might be able to dip my hand in it. Despite myself, my gaze jerked up to its forehead. There was no spiral horn sprouting there, but I wouldn’t have been surprised if there had been. It was Plato’s horse, the ideal upon which all others are based.

  It was trying to kill me, and all I could do was admire it.

  Then it screamed, shrill and deep all at once. The blonde behind the counter shut up, but I screamed back, a sort of primal response without any thought behind it.

  Just for a moment, everything stopped.

  There was a rider astride the grey, arrested in motion by my scream. He wore grey himself, so close to the color of the horse I could barely tell where one ended and the other began. The reputed Native American belief that white men on horseback were one exotic creature suddenly seemed very plausible.

  The rider turned his head slowly and looked at me. His hair was brown, peppered with starlight, and crackled with life, as if touching it would bring an electric shock. It swept back from a massively sharp widow’s peak, and was held in place by a circlet. His face was a pale narrow line, all high cheekbones and deep-set eyes and a long straight nose.

  The impression he left was of living silver. I locked eyes with him, expecting to see that liquid silver again. Instead I met wildfire green, a vicious, inhuman color, promising violence.

  He smiled and reached out a hand, inviting me towards him. His mouth was beautiful, thin and expressive, the curve of teeth unnervingly sharp, like a predator’s. I pushed up the counter, using it to brace myself, and wet my lips. Marie was right. I was going to die. The rider wanted my soul and I was going to give it to him without a fight because of that smile and those inhuman eyes. I took a step towards him.

  That scene, those paragraphs, took me about six hours to write. Not all at once, but going back and staring and thinking and crafting and working as hard as I could to get all the words right. The penultimate and antepenultimate paragraphs took me about four hours of work alone. Remember that I write, on average, about a thousand words an hour. Description is not easy for me. And I find it utterly fascinating that apparently something like two-thirds of people see pictures in their heads.

  Me, I can’t hold an image in my head for more than an instant. Ted, on the other hand, can apparently call up a specific person or thing, hold the image in his mind, do a 3D rotation on it . . . bizarre beyond belief.

  (At a con a few years ago I put this question ("Do you visualize?") to the forty people in the room. Every single one of them raised their hands. I said, "You are weird," until several people laughed and pointed out I was the oddball there. But being me, I persisted in thinking they were weird.)

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  Faith Hunter

  OMG. Catie, I never ever see in pictures. I thought I was the only one in the whole world who can’t. I can’t bring up pictures of faces, even my own hubby or mother. If I saw a mugger or murderer I could tell someone what they looked like if I started the process right away, but I’d never be able to do it after a few minutes. I’d recognize them if I saw them again, but I couldn’t bring up a picture of them.

  My hubby can do the 3D thing. First time he told me about it, I didn’t believe him. So can my mom. We three were eating lunch one day and they were talking about this and I told them they were destined for the loony bin. I had no idea!!! (Mom also has the gift of synesthesia, colors and numbers, pictures and numbers, which is weirder.)

  When I write, the world disappears, and I suppose there are pictures (of a sort), but more, there are emotions and words. Just wonderful words. The words build a partial vision. But if I see a movie of the story later, I am not bothered by it at all. Nothing in my brain to fight with.

  And I do not do poetry. I can sometimes see what it needs, if I am critiquing it, but I don’t read or write it.

  Thank you for being a word person!!!

  David B. Coe

  I do visualize as I write. I see scenes in sometimes minute detail. I’ll see a room, say. But I don’t just see shape and color and furniture. I’ll see things like the post-it note stuck on a desk with something scrawled on it in blue ink. I’ll note the way it refuses to lie flat, instead curling up slightly like a dried leaf. Sometimes I can do the 3D thing, but I have to really work at that. But I see stuff as I write. I see people, places, objects, and the images remain in my head until the moment I’ve committed them to words. Then they vanish, and recalling them without referring to what I wrote can be next to impossible. Weird.

  But I don’t get poetry at all.

  Misty Massey

  I’m a movie-in-the-head type. But not really 3D. More like the flat screen of an actual movie.

  I hate when I’m reading and I suddenly realize that the character I’ve been visualizing looks nothing like what I was seeing all along. Blonde instead of dark, or taller than I had imagined. But it’s not the writer’s fault—it’s just me being way too visual.

  High Concept Stories

  A.J. Hartley

  While "high concept" is mainly used for movies, it can be useful in conceptualizing novels. Simply put, a "high concept" story is one in which the hook—that which grabs the reader/audience’s attention—is so strong that it drives the engine of the entire story: it’s a premise with legs. The core action of the story can thus be summed up very succinctly (and supplies the "log line" used to encapsulate films when they show up in your local TV listings): Giant shark terrorizes Cape Cod resort town (Jaws), for instance.

  Screenwriters live by these things, reductive though they obviously are, and prominent producers like Steven Spielberg have suggested that if the core of a movie can’t be summed up in twenty-six words or fewer, it probably shouldn’t be made. To clarify further, most sitcoms are low concept because they depend on character interaction. High concept shows are those like Buffy (reluctant high school cheerleader has to slay vampires) or the new program, Flash Forward, in which the entire season is driven by the global blackout in which everyone glimpses their part in the same future moment. One of my favorite recent high concept shows was the BBC’s Life on Mars: a cop injured in a car accident wakes up in 1973—he’s in a coma and has to solve cases there to get back home. This is what I mean by a premise with legs. Everything which follows—all the various story arcs, character journeys, the core intrigue of what is going on, what will happen next and what it all means—comes out of that initial hook.

  There are, of course, dangers with deriving guides for long fiction from the briefer and more visual forms of film and TV, but a snappy log line can go a long way to piquing the curiosity of an agent or publisher. In fact, I would go so far as to say that—for better or worse—you have a better chance of selling a high concept story which has only mediocre execution than you do a beautifully written story with a lower concept premise. I’m not saying that’s a good thing or that a high concept necessarily makes for good art, but I do think that higher concept stories are more marketable. Terry Pratchett’s Night Watch (in which Sam Vimes is sent back in time to secure the future by teaching his younger self how to be a policeman) is a higher concept story than his The Fifth Elephant (which is a convoluted mystery with multiple plot strands), and though I much prefer the latter, I can see how the former would be an easier sell, particularly had it been Pratchett’s first book.

  And let’s not make the mistake of assuming that a high concept story can’t have good execution. Just because the premise of a story is particularly arresting doesn’t mean it can’t have nuanced characters, careful plotting, and emotional depth. Those things will carry the day once your manuscript is in your reader’s hands. But the premise will keep them turning the pages, giving your smaller-scale stuff chance to work.

  The truth is that editors and agents have to have an eye for how a book will sell, and h
igh concept stories make for good marketing, even if the form that marketing takes is nothing more than the jacket copy or the cocktail party word-of-mouth. When someone is excited about a book and they try to convey that to someone else, a high concept book is easier to describe in ways that might transmit that reader’s enthusiasm.

  Consider the way these stories immediately raise the collective eyebrow: a beleaguered orphan boy discovers he is a wizard and has to go to a special school for his kind (and no, I don’t think Voldemort becomes integral to the series until the [to my mind inferior] fifth book. What initially dominates the story is the school itself). An insignificant person has to save his world by destroying a ring of power deep behind enemy lines (LOTR). A "symbologist" races to unravel clues hidden in Leonardo da Vinci’s art while being chased by murderous religious fanatics. A prince discovers that his father was murdered by his uncle, the king, who has married his mother (Hamlet or, if you prefer, The Lion King). In each case, you’ll notice, the log-line suggests the story’s core conflict.

  One of the problems faced by writers of genre fiction is that we are often led to assume that genre replaces the desirability for a strong premise, or that identifying our books as "fantasies" or "mysteries" is all we need to do to make people want to read them. If you have a strong track record as a writer, this indeed may be all you need, but for most of us a high concept story will stir a lot more interest. We have all read work by fledgling writers—including our own—where there’s nothing wrong with the prose, the characters are likable and engaging, and there are good scenes of action or suspense, but the whole fails to jell somehow. It’s coherent but doesn’t excite as a unit. When you try to encapsulate the tale, you find yourself explaining a lot or lapsing into lengthy plot summary. When that is the case, you probably have a low concept story, and while that might not in any way damage the book’s chances of success (artistic or commercial) it might also mean that the book is going to struggle to distinguish itself and that its finer points might not be enough to make it work.

  I have written entire novels only to discover that while the plot worked, the hook was weak, and the concept low in ways that made the story a tough sell. Sometimes you can go back and rework the story to raise the concept level of the premise, but by the time you’ve actually written the book it’s often too late. As a "pantser" (someone who writes by the seat of his pants rather than planning most or all of the story out ahead of time) this is a particularly difficult truth, because it means that it’s very difficult to just dive into a book when you don’t know what it’s going to be, yet still hope to meander your way to an exciting premise. If your book is to be high concept, you probably need to know what that concept is right out of the gate, even if the story evolves some thereafter. The premise isn’t just the conditions of the story as experienced by the reader. It’s also the groundwork from which the writer begins, and it’s very hard to create this in media res without massive rewriting.

  So before you start a new project—or before you get too deep into a current one—think about ways you might be able to shape a story whose heart can be encapsulated in a snappy log line. A high concept premise might help you keep the story focused and may even help you sell it. Perhaps people might share log lines of current projects so that we can see which seem particularly compelling. I’ll get the ball rolling with the log line for my previous novel, Act of Will: a cynical actor joins a band of principled adventurers to investigate a mysterious army of rampaging horsemen. Not incredibly high concept, I’ll concede, but it gives you a sense of the conflicts (character and plot) and suggests how the core story will develop.

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  Kim Harrison

  This is a great essay. I love seeing how things we make are marketed. Keeping in mind I’m really bad at this . . .

  I’ve got three. My log line for the first book was "Buffy meets Columbo."

  For my upcoming release, I went with a very simple, "Wicked Witches Really Do Come From the West" which is kind of lame, but "Rachel pits her magic against her own people for the first time to clear her name" lacks sparkle.

  For the piece I’m working on now, (so it will be tweaked as I go) "Rachel puts her big girl panties on and takes care of business."

  A.J. Hartley

  Kim, these are great log lines, thanks. I’m not (against all my instincts) going to ask too much about the "big girl panties." That way madness lies. :-) Your "Buffy meets Columbo" is a great, succinct example of how you can evoke a high concept story by drawing on a reader’s knowledge of other stories/shows.

  Holding Lightning / The Big Bang

  Faith Hunter

  Before you think I’m nuts (I am, but I get paid for most of it) the following essay is mostly tongue in cheek. Sometimes readers forget that I write fiction, and that means that I have a tendency toward hyperbole. Not that I did that here. Nope. No way. (grins)

  Essay starts . . . now.

  I like writing. I mean, I do it for a living, so it’s important that I like it, right? But a lot of the process of writing isn’t exactly fun. A lot isn’t exactly creative. Some of it is problem solving, some of it is technical, some is search and replace, some is relationship building, relationship destroying, boring, exhilarating, foot-stomping fun, tedious, and let us not forget, some is exhausting. Most of the time it doesn’t pay nearly well enough.

  Then there’s the more personal side of the job. Strangers give me advice on my hairstyle, clothes, appearance, my love life, my religious life, and my home life, because they think I am my characters. People in jail write me love letters. People want to sell me their great ideas. Or better yet, give me their ideas, have me write the books, and put their names on the covers with mine. Fans and other writers (no one here, thank God) fall in love with me, send me love letters, and want to suck out my brain with a straw. No, I am not drunk or stoned. It’s true. Misty, stop laughing.

  Even with all that, I still love my job. All except one, tiny, miserable part.

  I’m not talking about the idea part of writing, though that part is often like an insane treasure hunt. With the idea part of story creation, the problem is that there’s no map except the one inside my head, and the treasure, well, it’s in the same place, but I can’t always get to it from here. I have to go somewhere else to start. It’s like being crazy, hallucinating weird things, hearing voices, seeing parts of plays no one ever produced—letting my brain freebase on creativity. You know—the fun part of writing.

  This essay is about the next step in the creative process. The I-got-an-idea, now-what phase. I’m in it. Oh, baby, I am soooo in it . . . I recently had tea with writer pal, Kim Harrison, and discovered that she is in that phase, too. We compared notes. And here, for both of us, is where the nutso, head-banging part of being a writer lives and breathes and walks the earth and terrorizes small children and dogs and scares our families. I am totally serious. This part of writing is, for me and for my pal, Kim, hair-pulling, sleep-stealing, nerve-grating, and just plain freaking awful.

  Why? In my case, it’s because: I. Don’t. Know. What. To do!

  All my life I have needed to know what to do next. As long as I know what I can do to help or fix a problem, I am content even if the fix and help is painful, exhausting, and difficult. But when I am in idea-land, an idea in one hand but no clue how to control it, where to take it, or how to make it into something wonderful that people might want to read, well . . . I am lost. And half crazy with the excitement and the potential and the possibilities of both utter disaster and complete triumph. Holding onto the idea is like holding onto lightning.

  I have an idea and it is churning inside me like a dervish, like a demon on crack, like a Chihuahua on meth. It fills me with explosive energy, and the energy has no outlet. NONE! NO OUTLET! It is stuck inside me, and I don’t know what to do with the idea’s energy. I can’t sleep until I have a direction, a conflict, a character, and a plot that pulls it all together like skin on a drum. It has to resonate and have
rhythm and life and it has to feel right. And for me, it is the worst, most painful part of the creative process. I’m in it now. I have an idea for book three in the Jane Yellowrock series. Just an idea. And it has me in its grip and it is shaking me like a rat in the maw of a fox. Even my skin feels electric and agitated and awaiting . . . something. I lie down to sleep at night and can’t because it’s racing around inside me, bouncing off the walls of my mind.

  But I am not alone in this crazed phase. Kim and I shared about this creative-phase. She too goes through it—no sleep, no rest, just this *IDEA* bouncing around inside, looking for a conflict to ride or a character to conflict. It made me feel so much better to know I am not alone! You have no freaking idea. Kim says it’s like a burning bunny tearing through her, around and around, dropping flames everywhere, starting fires, spreading and growing and nowhere to go with it. Hers is so intense that she even created a burning bunny pin for fans, so they could share in the creative carnage. Knowing I was not alone with this particular crazy phase was a huge relief. (Though my family may accuse me of running at the head of the pack when it comes to being nutso.)

  This is the Big Bang part of writing. Got a seed, an atom, a whiff of the future. Need some nourishing soil or a cyclotron or a crystal ball. An idea, just waiting, ready to sprout, humming with the potential for conflict or violence or romance or catastrophe. Back when I first started writing, I would have a glass or two of wine to help me live with the insane djinn in the bottle of my mind. That looked to be getting out of hand, so I gave it up in place of just living with the crazed phase, knowing it wouldn’t last too long. And it usually doesn’t. I keep reminding myself of that.