How To Write Magical Words: A Writer's Companion

by Unknown

  An author I’ve worked with for a long time at IGMS emailed me once about a story I had rejected, saying that every editor who had seen the story had said nice things about it, but ultimately rejected it, and could I give him an idea of what about his story had turned me off. (Let me say right away that the only reason I replied to his email was because we have a long-standing relationship. Don’t write to editors with this kind of question and expect to get an answer unless you know them very well.)

  My answer to him was this:

  "There were other factors, but the knife in the heart was that I was six or eight pages into the story and still didn’t have a sense of what the story was supposed to be about. The story lacked a specific focus and direction. To give you an example of the kind of thing I am looking for, go back to issue four of IGMS, to Eric James Stone’s story, "Tabloid Reporter To The Stars." You know within the first 500 words that the main character is a disgraced science reporter who has been given an opportunity to redeem himself. A lot of other stuff happens in that story, but at its heart, it’s about that character’s quest for redemption. To me, every successful story has to have that kind of engine. And to get back to your story, if it had that kind of driving engine, I didn’t see it, or it didn’t show up soon enough."

  A story’s purpose can be established in a variety of ways. It’s not hard to do; you just need to be intentional about it. One way is the classic mystery structure. Lay a corpse out for all the world to see, let us know who’s responsible for bringing the murderer to justice, and let the fun begin. Simplistic? Yes. But it’s so effective that people have been doing it for a hundred years and there’s still a market for it.

  Another way to approach this is what Orson Scott Card refers to as the M.I.C.E. quotient. It’s detailed in his book, Characters and Viewpoint (which I highly recommend), but in a nutshell, here’s how it works: M.I.C.E. stand for Milieu, Idea, Character, and Event, and each of those terms represent a different kind of story structure.

  With each structure, the kind of story you are telling is clearly defined. A Milieu story is any of the fantasy-type stories where the main character gets taken away from his normal life (usually here on Earth) and inserted into a very foreign realm. One of the earliest examples of this kind of story is Gulliver’s Travels. When Gulliver first arrives in either of the strange worlds he ends up in, the immediate question he (and the reader) asks is "Where the heck am I, and how do I get home again?" This question should arise within the first few pages of any short story, or within the first chapter or two of any novel. Once the question is asked, the necessary sense of purpose has been established. Once it is answered, the story is over.

  The next kind of story, the Idea story, is one where the driving force behind the story is an idea of some sort. The classic mystery structure I talked about earlier is one example of an Idea story. Anything, really, that involves solving a puzzle is an Idea story. The movie, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, is an example of an Idea story that isn’t a murder mystery. Various characters in that movie start having strange experiences and visions, and they all want/need to find out what’s going on. When they finally do understand what’s happening—aliens are visiting Earth—the story is essentially over. Idea explored, story done.

  The most common kind of story today is the Character story. Character stories are often blended with other kinds of stories, which is fine as long as the author keeps in mind which is the primary structure and which is secondary. You can’t start by emphasizing the mystery and end by emphasizing the character’s personal growth; you have to pick one primary and stick with it throughout. Sadly, the Character story has become so prevalent that many people argue that it is the only one worth telling. While I enjoy Character stories very much, I strongly disagree with the idea that it, and it alone, is worthwhile.

  The essence of the Character story is showing the main character in their current life-situation, making it clear that that situation is difficult or challenging for them, and then showing their quest to create a new situation. If they succeed, you have the traditional happy ending. If they fail, you have the traditional tragedy. But the key here is to show right away that the way they are living at that moment (the beginning) is intolerable and has to change. That sets everything else in motion.

  The last kind of story in the M.I.C.E. quotient is the Event story. This is your basic disaster story. Think Poseidon Adventure. The characters’ world is literally turned upside-down, and the story is about what they have to do to adapt to their new world (or return it to the way it was before the Event), and about who survives the experience and who does not.

  All of these structures can be used to establish expectations for the reader, to tell them what kind of story they are going to be reading. But really, these structures still all boil down to one single question, the one I asked earlier, and the one I ask you again now: What does your character want? Whether it’s to know "who done it," or to know why their world has been turned upside-down, or to know why all the people around them are three-inches tall, establishing expectations by making plain the character’s greatest desire remains the single most important thing an author can do in their story. Its absence is, without a doubt, the single most common reason why I reject stories that are otherwise wonderfully written.

  When Kurt Vonnegut talks about having your characters wanting something as simple as a glass of water, it’s a fine starting point. But opening up your characters’ souls and showing us their hopes and dreams is what great storytelling is made of. Of course, once you get the ball of yarn rolling properly, pulling all the threads together successfully is another project, requiring a host of other skills. But it is, without a doubt, the place to begin.

  §§§

  Faith Hunter

  Edmund, I’ve studied writing for years, trying to see why some stories work and why some don’t, why some grab me by the throat and why others leave me dangling or, worse, bored. Bait and hook got me close to that understanding, and bait and hook fit nicely into what the character wants/needs/fears. But I still find books, stories, where I am properly baited and hooked, but not involved in the story.

  These lines explain the problem so well. "Without that sense of purpose, fiction is just words wandering aimlessly around the page. No matter how beautifully composed the words may be, if there’s no purpose, there’s no story."

  Spot on!

  Eric James Stone

  This is something I didn’t really learn until a few years after writing "Tabloid Reporter to the Stars." Sometimes I would get it right by accident, like I did in that story, but I didn’t really understand why my characters worked so much better in some stories than in others. I still have trouble with it sometimes, so this is a good reminder.

  Trusting Your Reader

  David B. Coe

  Over the course of twelve novels and twelve sets of revisions, my editor and I have touched on one topic again and again: Trusting our readers.

  What does that even mean? Trusting our readers . . . to what? To not steal our books from the stores? To not read them while taking care to keep the spine uncracked, so that the book can be returned to the bookstore for a refund? To not trash our books in Amazon reviews just for the fun of it?

  No, this is actually a writing issue. Trusting our readers, is, in some ways, similar to the familiar saying "Show don’t tell," and it is particularly important for beginning writers. Certainly it was for me when I was starting out. Basically it means not giving your readers too much information. Or, put another way, giving them enough information to understand what’s happening, but not so much that you preempt their sense of discovery. My editor scrawled "Trust your reader!" again and again when reading through my first couple of manuscripts because I tended to explain too much. I was writing what I thought were complicated story lines and describing the motivations of complex characters. I wanted to be certain that my readers knew where I was going with each twist and turn of my plot, and so I left mar
kers to make sure they "got it."

  My editor’s response was to say, as gently as he could, that while my plot was clever and my characters multidimensional, what I had written was not nuclear physics. The average reader would understand where I was taking him or her. More to the point, by explaining too much, by using those markers, I was denying my readers one of the great joys of reading: that feeling of epiphany that comes when we figure things out along with the characters we’re following.

  In what specific ways did my failure to trust my readers manifest itself? Well, for one thing, I described tone of voice too often. "She said, her tone suddenly urgent . . ." "He explained, obviously trying to sound comforting . . ." "She said with compassion . . ." All of those are dialogue attributions lifted directly from my first novel in its published form—these are the ones that slipped by my editor, or that he chose to ignore because some of my other passages were so egregious they needed more work. None of them needed to be more than "She said . . ." "He said . . ." The actual dialogue and the context were enough to convey the emotions and thoughts behind the dialogue. I should have trusted my readers to get the rest. But I was young and new to the craft and I felt that I needed to explain it all.

  Another example, also from that first novel: In discussing my main character’s struggle to learn to ride a horse, I describe how he overcomes the initial aches and pains of a long journey on horseback.

  As they remounted and rode on, he also realized that his horsemanship had improved. He was being jolted less; he felt himself moving more in concert with the animal beneath him; and he sensed that his horse now labored less than it had, no doubt in response to his growing comfort and confidence.

  Here’s how I’d write that passage today:

  As they remounted and rode on, he also realized that his horsemanship had improved. He was being jolted less; he felt himself moving in concert with his animal; and he sensed that his horse now labored less than it had.

  The stuff I cut was extraneous. Of course the horse is laboring less because he’s a better rider. My readers get that; they don’t need to have it explained. Trust the reader! Here’s a little trick I learned early on: when I find myself introducing or qualifying a passage with words like "No doubt" and "Obviously," chances are the passage isn’t necessary.

  As you can see, this really is a "Show, don’t tell" issue. By trusting the reader we rely less on explication; we allow our characters and dialogue and action to tell the tale. Our storytelling becomes leaner, more direct. Because while the phrase we use is "Trust the reader," what we’re really saying is "Trust yourself—trust your character development, your storytelling, your worldbuilding, your descriptions, your dialogue."

  These days, when I find myself explaining too much, my own internal editor kicks in and tells me that this is a symptom of a deeper problem. If I’m explaining too much it probably means that the plot lines aren’t clear enough in my own mind, or that I’m making my characters do things that are . . . well . . . out of character. In other words, it probably means that I’ve temporarily lost faith in the way I’m telling my story.

  So how do we avoid these "trust" issues? To begin with, I do my best to know as much about my characters, my world, and my plot as I can before I start writing. Some of you may say, "Hey, I’m a seat-of-the-pants writer and it almost sounds like you’re telling me to outline." Not at all. Pantsers can write a book without an outline but still know the story they’re telling. They can be familiar with all the background, the world they’ve built, the characters they’ve created, and they can know where a story is headed. Knowing all of that, having a clear vision of your project, can give you the confidence to trust your writing, even if you haven’t outlined your plot points.

  I also try to keep my prose directed and strong. When I slip into passive writing or start using vague filler words—"a bit," "somewhat," "obviously," etc.—that is usually a sign that I’ve lost my way and need to rethink where the story is going. Finally, I look for redundant passages. If I’m saying things more than once in order to drive home a point it probably means that something is wrong with what I’m writing.

  So trust yourself, trust your reader. Have enough faith in your craft to believe that the story you’re telling is clear and compelling enough that your readers are paying attention. You’ll wind up with a better book. In the end, trusting your reader is self-fulfilling and reciprocal. If you write a book that’s lean and clear, you’ll have justified the trust your reader placed in you when she took it off the bookstore shelf and spent her hard-earned cash to buy it.

  §§§

  Kenneth Mark Hoover

  Just wanted to elaborate. This was probably the single hardest lesson I had to learn in my growth as a writer. It’s difficult to believe because it’s not intuitive. When you’re starting out in this business you figure you gotta make things obvious and apparent for the reader. So in my case that meant a lot of over-writing.

  I look at really old stuff I did twenty years ago that’s 10K words and realize I could write the same story at 5K or 6K. It’s hard to believe, but when you finally buckle down and "trust the reader" the writing improves immeasurably. Anyway, it did for me.

  David B. Coe

  Mark is an accomplished writer, and his comments are spot on. It is counterintuitive—you want readers to understand. The last thing you want is for your work to seem too obscure, too difficult to follow. But over-writing is just that. Trust yourself; trust the reader—it’s a good mantra. Thanks very much, Mark.

  Developing Your Voice

  C.E. Murphy

  What Is Voice?

  Voice is the distinctive style that tells you who wrote the book you’re reading as much as the name on the cover does. It’s not terribly likely, for example, that a reader would mistake Hemingway for Dickens: they’re very nearly the antitheses of one another.

  A friend of mine often says that she thinks people who grow up to be professional writers usually come to the table with a couple of cards in their hands. Voice, dialogue, description, character-development, plot, motivation—whatever your couple of cards might be, chances are you’re going to have to work hard to learn the rest.

  I came to the table with two cards: voice and dialogue. My writing sounded like me right from the get-go: take a pile of essays or stories from a class and if you knew me at all, you could tell which one I’d written. So in retrospect, when I sat down to prepare a lecture on this topic, I realized that perhaps I’d chosen poorly. This wasn’t something I’d studied on my writer’s journey; it came naturally. On the other hand, I also realized that having a strong, natural voice meant I’d had a lot of leg-work to do when I stepped outside of what came most easily to me.

  How do you develop your voice?

  In all honesty, it’s the same way you get to Carnegie Hall: practice, practice, practice. But it’s also about trust. I know a lot of writers who have been screwed up by listening to people telling them how they "should" write, and trying to do that for years and years rather than trusting themselves and their own style.

  This actually comes down to something I think is a little ironic: I think trying to teach someone how to develop their voice can be dangerous. I figure there’s an equally good chance of me screwing you up entirely as there is of me helping you.

  Really, though, a significant part of developing your own voice is trusting yourself. As a professional writer, I passionately believe that the only way to succeed is to be true to yourself. Don’t try to write to the market because the market’s going to change by the time you’re done writing, much less by the time your book gets published. Don’t try to sound like Nora Roberts or Michael Connelly just because you think that’s what’s going to make a novel sell. Your passion and your talent are going to make it sell.

  Okay, so I just said don’t try to sound like Nora Roberts or Michael Connelly. Now I’m going to say, "Well, except . . ."

  If you want to write chick lit, for pity’s sake, read Jennifer
Crusie. Read Meg Cabot. Read Stephanie Plum, for that matter. If you want to write romance, read Nora and Kat Martin and Teresa Medeiros. If you want to write crime, read Michael Connelly and John Grisham and Raymond Chandler. Learn from them. Discover what you love about their writing. Absorb what they do: their wordplay, their methods of showing emotion or description, their cadence as storytellers. Then write. Don’t try to ape them, but take what you’ve learned—and this isn’t even necessarily a conscious learning process—and write. We all know what a Sam Spade noir detective sounds like. The important thing is that we don’t know what your Sam Spade detective sounds like. He’s not going to sound like Dashiell Hammett’s Spade, because you’re not Hammett.

  I have a great quote from Louis L’Amour: "I took a number of stories by popular writers as well as others by Maupassant, O. Henry, Stevenson, etc., and studied them carefully. Modifying what I learned over the next few years, I began to sell."

  This is exactly what I’m talking about. L’Amour apparently took a very deliberate approach, where as I tend to be a bit more haphazard myself. But what he’s saying here, I think, is the crux of developing your own voice. Read, learn, adapt. This is the first step, and I imagine most Magical Words readers are avid readers already, so I’m going to assume the groundwork’s already been done.