Happy Thanksgiving

A couple of unexpected events happened this week with significant impact to the world of Riyria.

Rise of Empire, the second in the Orbit published trilogy, is now available in print and is appearing on store shelves across the country. How is this possible? How is it that both Theft of Swords and Rise are popping up at stories before the official release date? To be honest I don’t know exactly, but from personal publishing experience, I would guess that arranging for books to hit stores on a precise date must be a bit like herding cats on a time schedule—more art than science. Royce and Hadrian don’t have the influence of a Harry Potter, and probably can’t convince stores to sit on inventory, so the books are made available when they arrive. Better early than late, right? The eBooks are much more a science, far more punctual, a flip of a switch and they go. Either way, the books are out there and that’s a good thing.

And since we are on the subject, it is November 23rd, and that means that today—right now—is the official release of my first Orbit published novel. While the print books came out a bit early, the eBooks have just now been made available for download. So it’s officially. Cue the confetti, streamers and balloons. For those of you who waited all night on the cold concrete at your local bookstore it’s time for the hot soup and a good book.

The third bit of news is that The Library Journal has released its Best of 2011 list and Theft of Swords is on the ten best of fantasy/science fiction, alongside George R.R. Martin. I was pleased, of course, as it meant more libraries would carry the books, but it wasn’t until later that the implications of this hit home.

Here is the list of the other authors on the list:

Debris, by Jo Anderton

Leviathans of Jupiter by Ben Bova

Leviathan Wakes, by James S.A.Corey

The Uncertain Places by LisaGoldstein,

Raising Stony Mayhall by Daryl Gregory

A Dance with Dragons by George R.R. Martin

The Unremembered by Peter Orullian

The Quantum Thief  by Hannu Rajaniemi

The Children of the Sky by Vernor Vinge

 Where is Brandon Sanderson? Where is Patrick Rothfuss? Where are all the names of all the authors that came out with books this year that are giants in the field. Okay, so there are only so many slots—ten—but then…why am I there? I think I am going to go with the old Academy Award ploy—that those movies released really close to the judging deadline are more apt to be nominated. Someone just finished reading Theft and had it in their mind when it came time to cast ballots. (Do they even cast ballots?) Poor Pat and Brandon’s books came out too early to be remembered.

That has to be it, right?

In any event, it is good news for those of you who have long lamented the lack of Riyria books in your local library. It is good news for Royce and Hadrian, as they will get to meet lots of new friends, and it shows what Orbit can do that Robin and I couldn’t.

So with all this happening, and in keeping with the holiday spirit, I’d just like to say—thanks everyone.

And happy Thanksgiving.

Writing Advice 22 — Applied Description

I’ve already covered the basic aspects of description which works fine, but it can be taken a step further. I mentioned how you don’t want to sit down and actually describe things as if you were a scientist recording an experiment, or a coroner working up a report. Such clinical approaches to description is very boring.

The subject was male, five foot, eight inches, twenty-four years old. He was Caucasian, with black hair, and blue eyes. He wore a single-breasted dark blue suit with a white collared shirt and a red tie.

The first impulse is to clean up the data-speak and turn it into something more casual.

He was average height for a white male in his mid twenties. He had black hair and blue eyes, and wore a dark blue, single-breasted suit with  a white shirt and red tie.

This is easier to read but still dull, so the next impulse is to dress up the description using more sophisticated, artsy language.

He was of median height for an anti-chromatic male in his newly minted adulthood. He had raven hair and cerulean eyes, and wore a dark single-breasted suit that enveloped him like a dark shadow, with a red tie like a line of blood slicing down his alabaster clear-buttoned chest.

This is where a lot of aspiring writers get stuck, lost in the clever wording and surprising imagery. It can be like a drug. It’s fun to play with words, to think of new ways to say old things. It is also easy to delude yourself into thinking this is great writing. It has to be, it’s beautiful, and it’s hard to do. It takes a lot more work than just saying something bluntly. A sense of mingling poetry and prose can soon follow and the effects become dramatic.

Mediocre this bleached pedestal of western dominance, this man newly stamped and licensed—legal to drink. Inky black, his raven’s wrath of hair perched indomitable upon his crown shading two cerulean marbles sucked in rolling sockets. His fascist uniform of the new national socialism, blood on snow, on black of death.

This then brings me back to the point of my original post where I suggested describing things using tiny details and general impressions. Here is the same description distilled down to one sentence using the impression method:

Jimmy Davis looked like an insurance salesman, already doomed at the age of twenty-five.

This sentence also uses a bit of something else, which is the real point of this post, and that is involvement and real value. A paragraph of description should never be just a paragraph of description, it should be part of the story, and provide real information that the reader can use. This helps prevent readers from just skipping that large block of descriptive text in which they know nothing will happen—it’s just description.

Too often a writer will introduce a character and feel obligated to describe them. Sometimes however you’ll read a book where the writer offers no description at all to most of their characters, and strangely, while reading it, you don’t even notice until someone points it out. In fact you thought they had, because you have a pretty clear idea in your head what they look like.

How do they do that?

They manage it by building impressions through events in the story. People’s brains are wired to look for patterns, and we have a strong tendency to settle for stereotypes. This is unfortunately why all too often people generalize about whole groups of people, picturing them as having the same attributes. So if a person acts a certain way, or talks a certain way, a visual image forms, and if that is how you want the character to appear, then you really don’t need to waste time describing them. If you portray a character through events as a nervous, sniveling, greedy, fast talking, thief, the visual of a small thin, dirty, beady-eyed, rat-like face will emerge. And then there are subtle hints. If you describe all the other characters as “looking up” at the him, you don’t need to say he’s tall.

Setting-description is a bit more complicated. Failure to provide imagery will leave your reader feeling blind, and in my previous post on description, I mentioned how focusing on just a few precise elements will cast a bigger picture, but this is still just description, and readers find description to be boring. What they like are stories. The answer is to describe the setting through stories that provide real value to the reader—that tell you about the characters or that move the story.

In the middle of the killer’s room was the exact same Wal-Mart coffee table that Detective Gifford had in his own living room.

In this sentence, you are describing the room, but you are bringing the description back and showing how it has personal meaning to the character observing it. You learn a bit about his past as well as the present setting and this makes it more interesting to both the character and the reader. This can be pushed further.

On the table was a stack of souvenir shot glasses, each painted with the names of states. When he was a kid Gifford’s mother used to bring those back to him. He would search through her purse the moment she walked in the door; feeling around like it was a treasure chest and he was Indian Jones. Some, like Florida had oranges on them, and Hawaii had a grass-skirted lady. Gifford was twenty-eight before he thought to wonder why his mother was gifting a ten-year-old shot glasses.

In reading this, no one is going to miss that this killer has souvenir shot glasses on his cheap table because that point was rolled into a little story that was far more entertaining than straight description and also gave you a huge insight into the main character’s past.

This is especially important to do with significant points. I’ve read stories by new writers and I’d have no idea how old the character is, or where they were, only to find out later they said right in the first sentence. The problem is, readers miss things all the time. So if you really need the reader to know something, you need to reinforce it. You don’t want to out-right repeat yourself, or the reader will think you just forgot, which writers often do, and why editors need to watch out for this. If a year, or an age, or the name of the city is mentioned as part of a sentence, it can easily be missed.

It was her first time in New York and she just dumped the contents of her suitcase on the hotel room dresser and then ran for the phone.

It’s not that the reader doesn’t read the words, they just don’t register them if the focus of the sentence or paragraph is elsewhere. That bit of data was just not burned into the reader’s consciousness. In the above sentence, the focus in on this woman in a hurry to unpack, not on her destination.

It was her first time in New York, in fact it was her first time anywhere, and it was amazing. The skyscrapers, their tops hidden by the clouds, took her breath away. And the sidewalks were wide enough to support a two-lane highway, and still not big enough to hold all the people walking. Passing the Empire State Building she eventually entered Times Square, but in the daylight it was disappointing. Still there was the ball perched on top of the building—the one that always dropped on television. Finally, lost in a daze, she reached her hotel room and just dumped the contents of her suitcase on the dresser then ran for the phone.

There is no way any reader will not register where this woman is now, and again it is not just description. Her perspective, her excitement, comes through. This is a place she had dreamed of.

So rather than spending hours creating poetic prose to spice up dead description, that some readers might be inclined to skip, you might find it more effective to write clearly, but make what you write interesting to read by way of the content.

Remember, if it’s boring for you to write, it will be boring for the reader to read. 

Drive-By Signing

While the official stated release is November 23rd, copies of Theft of Swords have been surfacing at various bookstores across the nation and the United Kingdom. Recently Robin and I were having lunch at a restaurant across the parking lot from a Barnes & Noble and dared to do a drive-by signing.

Truth be told, it was Robin’s idea. She is devious enough that I question the true motivation in choosing that particular eatery. While there—using her iPad—she tracked to see in what stores the books were in stock. California, Michigan, Chicago, Portland, just about everywhere—Davenport, Iowa was one of the few places that did not have it yet. So with leftovers in hand, she coaxed me into walking over and seeing if they had my books on the shelf. They did.

Theft of Swords, the new split-frame, gold-based, fresh-faced American edition was there right under the Science Fiction/Fantasy sign, on the shelf directly above Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. Not too sure how I felt about that. Being near was comforting, even exciting, like being an actor and walking on the set of your first film where you meet one of your idols. But being above just felt wrong. They had four—one spine, the rest face out. Nice.

We gathered them up and walked to the customer service desk. I felt awkward. “Um…I’m the author of these. Would you like me to sign them?”

The desk attendant immediately called for backup.

The supervisor arrived. “Sure, we’d love you to!”

I couldn’t help but think how very strange this was and how trusting our society still is. We still serve food before payment, still deliver goods on credit, and people in bookstores let you sign new books you claim to be the author of, without so much as asking for I.D.

“Sharpie or pen?”

“Pen. Sharpies bleed through. Readers hate that. Learned it the hard way.”

“I feel like I should get a camera,” one of them said.

Trying not to laugh made it hard to sign. Yeah, it’s like Tom Cruise was right there in front of them, except they had no idea who I was, nor would anyone they showed the photo to. No one took a picture of me, until later. After I finished signing, Robin and I put the books back on the shelf, just as they were, and then she snapped the above photo in which I gave my best dopey looking, I-should-be-writing-right-now,-but-instead-I’m-posing-for-photos-in-a-bookstore-because-my-wife-made-me, pose. Still, let’s face it, how could it not be fun? And of course it doesn’t hurt that my book is the only one in color.  

In other news, reviews are also popping up, like this one of Wintertide by Sarah at Bookworm Blues, and a Theft of Swords review by Stefan Fergus at Civilian Reader. Everyone is being very generous. Even Liviu Suciu at Fantasy Book Critic is offering a rerun of his first reviews of my books. Gotta love them bloggers.

And in addition to crashing stores to deface books, I’ve been busy doing both written and live interviews. What I’ve learned is that my computer’s audio capabilities are not conducive to the podcast world, but my wife’s little laptop is. If interested, you can listen to me chat with the zany folks over at Sci-Fi Saturday Night this Saturday I believe. I’ll add a link when I see one.

I did another interview with Tim Ward, but that may take a little while to hit the interwebs as we chatted, along with Robin, for hours, and I’m sure Tim has his hands full with editing. Again I’ll post a link when one becomes available.

Now my only concern is that with Skyrim’s release, everyone will be preoccupied and miss the news that my books are finally on the shelf. Is anyone not playing that game?

Writing Advice 21 — Dealing With Failure

I was at a book convention recently in Baltimore where a young man asked a panel of writers what he was doing wrong. He had written his first novel, edited it, written a good query letter and had sent it to all the right agents, using all the right methods…only he still wasn’t published.  He was baffled. He couldn’t understand what he had done wrong. This isn’t the first aspiring writer that I’ve met who had this perplexing problem. And it isn’t restricted to traditional publishing. Self published authors have a similar problem. They publish their first novel and it just doesn’t sell no matter how much promotion they give it. What’s the problem?

Maybe, as the panel suggested, the young writer just hasn’t found the right editor. One editor might hate a book, while another—even at the same publisher—might love it. Or maybe, in the case of the self-published author, that person just hasn’t managed to find the right reviewers. While these are possible, I have a different thought.

Practice is sometimes a necessary component to success.  

I don’t believe that the majority of authors make a commercial success of their very first novel, and when I say first novel, I don’t mean the first published novel, I mean the first novel you’ve ever written. Many authors have had huge success with their debut novel—the first book they managed to get published—but these were not necessarily the first book they wrote. Brandon Sanderson who wrote Mistborn and is now working at finishing the Robert Jordan Wheel of Time series, was working on his thirteenth novel when ELANTRIS, his first published novel was picked up. Coincidentally, I had written thirteen novels myself before Crown was published.

Now I’m not saying that you have to write thirteen novels, but expecting to be successful with your first novel I think is a bit like picking up a tennis racquet for the first time and expecting to win Wimbledon. Sure, it’s possible, just not very likely. So it might be a good idea to play a few games first, get a feel for them, for the strategy, the length, the stamina you’ll need.

The problem is that writing a book takes a long time, and involves a lot of hard work. People often think that writing a book will be fun. They often sit down and enjoy zipping through the first chapter. They might even get into the third chapter before it starts to bog down, before they begin to think, “where was I going with this? Humm. Maybe I should think the story out a bit more before just writing. Okay, so Bob, my main character will discover that…oh, no. That’s not going to work because…crap. Damn, this isn’t working out the way I wanted. Oh look, I got a new email.” And so ends the first attempt at writing a novel.

The second attempt is likely more of the same. This sort of thing happens a lot and then the aspiring-writer finds themselves at a crossroads and needs to decide which way to go:

1) Writing just isn’t for them.

2) Writing a novel needs to be approached with a bit more seriousness than hey, you know what would be fun?

This is the point where the aspiring writer takes a deep breath, rolls up their sleeves and says, “I’m going to do this if it kills me.” They set aside time and they write with a single-minded effort. They know it will be tough. They know it will be hard work so they aren’t put-off when things get rough, and with great determination they finish this epic project.

Then they celebrate. It is like finishing a marathon. They did it! They actually wrote a novel! Then a week, or a month later they read it. Or worse they let someone else read it, and discover that what they made, what they spent months, perhaps even years on, isn’t as good as they hoped. This is actually better than having their friends and family support them and say how great it is, causing them to spend years doing nothing but trying to sell a bad book.  

Now the aspiring writer is at a new crossroads, that looks remarkably like the last, but instead of two choices, now there are three:

1) I suck and need to find a new hobby.

2) Maybe if I re-write it…

3) …

Number three is the true subject of this post, and it is not what writers want to hear, but is what I think is most often the case. The first novel is a learning experience and should be viewed that way. Odds of getting it right on the first try are very slim. To quote The Matrix, nobody makes the first jump.

The writing of a first novel from cover to cover, gains you entry into a new world. You can see what it takes. You know it can be done, and you can see where you failed. You can estimate the length and can pace yourself better. You’ve learned just how much runway you have to get your story and characters in the air, and won’t be so rushed next time. You’ve discovered the practical uses of PoV, and what you can do, and what you can’t do in editing. You’ll see where you’re weak and need improvement, and where you’re strong and how to build on that.

Of course no one ever sees it that way. No matter what the age, we are all impatient to succeed. If you’re old, you’ll feel you don’t have a lot of time left to start publishing, and if you’re young you’ll look at people like Christopher Paolini, who was around 19 when he published Eragon (15 when he started writing it. He is one of those people who I believe made a success of the first book he wrote.) So failing at publishing a first novel is rarely seen as progress.

If you’re unlucky denial will set in, and you will convince yourself that your book is great and others just can’t see it. If you’re lucky, you’ll obtain honest feedback, learn from it, and realize you haven’t failed, you’ve passed your first semester, but that doesn’t mean you get a diploma. Now with this new understanding, all those things you’ve read about writing make a lot more sense.  You know you can do better next time.

With this in mind you set out to write another novel. Much wiser, you pick a different kind of plot, one perhaps less grandiose, less extravagant, one that you feel confident you can handle. You do a bit more research up front, because that was a lot of the problem before, and then you have at it again.

It is still hard. The only thing that keeps you going is that you know you can do it because you did it before (this is something else you learned, this is your edge.) Finally you finish once more, but you aren’t so eager to celebrate. You know there are problems. You wait. You give it time. Then you read it.

It sucks. You can admit that now, your previous honest critiques provides you with this insight to see beyond just what you want to see, but still it is better. You can see that too. You study the problem, analyze where you failed. The problem is that the plot broke down part way. There are five gigantic plot holes you couldn’t fill. Places you hadn’t anticipated going in. Some characters are unneeded, others you added by necessity that were never fleshed out properly. Looking back you can see how you might have worked them into the main line more from the very start. There’s so much that could have been done better, even so, even with those changes, it still would never be great. Not bad maybe, but not great, and “not bad” won’t cut it.

You could try re-writing, but sometimes, and particularly at the start, all the rewriting in the world won’t save a bad idea, and until you know enough—until you have developed enough experience at building novels—you won’t know the difference between one worth saving and one that needs to be put to rest.

A lot of the time you just need to shelve that manuscript and come up with something new. Something better. You’re a veteran of two books at this point and having more than one experience, you can see patterns, draw conclusions about novel writing and how it applies to you personally. You got stuck in the same place twice now. Twice now you failed to create a satisfying ending, or failed to make your main character believable, or you gave away too much, or too little.  You know this about yourself, so it is time to make changes to correct those problems.

Maybe an outline would help to reveal issues before they arise, save months of work by discovering those plot holes early on and what characters are important and which should not even be in the story. It is so much easier to just think of a new approach before you start writing than to completely re-write a novel after the fact.

Once more you write. Once more you finish with less than perfect results. Damn! You relied too much on the outline and the story is stiff and contrived because you failed to let the character’s personalities and the situations dictate the direction of the plot. You re-write, you spot fix, but the story breaks down further because it feels like a patched quilt.

Again. Another novel. And another failure. And another and again a failure. It is hopeless.

“Can I read it?”

“You won’t like it. It’s awful. All the things I write are awful.”

“Huh? Are you kidding? This is good. I like this. It’s better than most of the junk out there.”

Blink. “Really? You actually like it?”

“Yeah.”

“What about the fact that the car starts when an hour ago it didn’t?”

Shrug. “Cars do that. Didn’t bother me.”

“And that it was his half-brother???”

“Actually I loved that!”

“You did?”

“You should try and get this published.”

“Seriously?”

“Yeah, it’s great. Ahh, but you might want to proof it better. There’s a lot of mistakes.”

“Oh…well, yeah. I could do that.”

Diploma.

You still might not get an agent with that book. You still might not find a publisher, just as that panel said, it can be hard to find just the right editor who will like your work, and maybe you’ll need to self-publish to get your work out there, to build an audience, but eventually it will happen.

Hopefully it will take less tries than it did for Sanderson and myself, but the thing is, looking back, the failure of that first novel, at the time, felt so terrible. It signified hours, days, months, years wasted. Time thrown into the black hole of a dream that would never happen. But…the moment your first book is published, the instant someone you don’t know reads it and says, “This was fantastic. You’re a genius. Have you written anything else I can read?” Suddenly you realize all those years weren’t wasted at all. That was just the time it took, the practice needed. And all those crappy books you wrote along the way? Looking back at them, you can see with perfect clarity what you did wrong. And some are just awful—what were you thinking? But a few had some good ideas, characters or plots that, knowing what you know now, you can easily rebuild into a great book. The best part—most of the work is already done. Even less time wasted.

Maybe you’ll be lucky and get your first novel published, but if you don’t, it’s not the end of the world, in fact I would think it would be surprising. No one expects you to hit a homerun your first time at bat. The difference between failure and practice, is when you quit.

Next: Applied Description

Just Two Weeks Away

 

Knock, Knock!

Who’s there?

A big, heavy cardboard box.

This week it has been raining books.

Not long ago the UK editions of Theft of Swords arrived. Now copies are popping up in photos posted by excited readers on Facebook. The UK released them a tad early. I hope no one ruins the story with spoilers. Oh wait—that’s right, I’m not George Martin. So there are some advantages to that.  And now this week I’ve received the American version of Theft as well as copies of the UK Rise of Empire and even the long awaited Czech hard covers of Avempartha. Not sure where Crown got to, likely circulating around the postal system taking in the sights.

Now that I have them in my hands, I’m a bit torn. I think I like the UK covers a little better due to the richer saturation of color in the images, and the dramatic close-ups. On the other hand, the UK versions feel flimsier with a tighter binding, where as the American editions are almost like text books and can lay open on a desk top without creasing the spine. I find this really nice. I also like the satin finish with spot varnish that Orbit US did. They are also a little larger which just makes them look and fell more substantial. 

 Now that I look at the two UK editions together, I’m stunned. When did I write all that? I realize there are two in one, but still—they are just so massive looking. I can’t help but think, geez, this guy had a lot of time on his hands.

 

The Czech versions are a kick. They look like children books, and at first when my wife carried a handful into me, based on their spines, I thought she was holding the hard cover versions of the Narnia books that we have. Everything in them is upside-down in that the text on the spine is backwards from how it is done here, quotes appear at the bottom of a sentence, the chapter heads are reversed and the table of contents is in the back—which I think defeats the purpose.  I can’t read a word, so it is an odd sensation to know that I wrote them.

It is exactly two weeks until the official American release of Theft of Swords, and three weeks before the release party at One More Page Books in Falls Church. And in case you were wondering…yes, everyone is invited. (Although I’m not sure where we’ll put you. At last tally there are 7 billion on the planet now.) I believe the party starts at 7pm, but feel free to line up outside at midnight the day before. It’s November 30th in Northern Virginia, so you might want to dress warm and bring a mummy bag.

Yes, I am delusional. I like it that way.

One more thing. The Riyria Revelations Facebook page finally hit 1000 likes this last weekend, which means chapter three of Percepliquis has been posted. Orbit wants 5000 likes before they release chapter four. So either read slowly and savor, or introduce a lot of friends to Royce and Hadrian.

Well, maybe Hadrian—Royce has never been a people-person.

Writing Advice 20 — Sculpting Language

I will be the first to admit, I am not a wordsmith. Many writers focus a good deal of energy on constructing beautiful prose. I used to do that, but I found it counterproductive to the goal I was after, which was to make the words disappear and the story and characters shine. I am not assaulting literary writing. I enjoy beautifully crafted language. I just determined that for the kinds of books I was working on, word-craft was not the best methodology because I have a theory that there is a sliding scale. The more eloquence you put into the language, the simpler the plot needs to be. The reason is that eloquence requires room. An author can carry on poetically about almost nothing for pages. As such a very simple plot allows the writer to run in tangents, use beautiful metaphors, and explore character quirks without the weight of having to convey a lot of mundane information clearly and precisely.

So, for a set of fast-paced action adventure novels, I did not aim for eloquence. To be honest, I can’t tell you how many times I had to go back and edit out passages that were too good. Sentences or paragraphs that I impressed myself with, and thought, wow, that’s really great writing. The moment I paused in the story to marvel over the words, I knew I had to cut them. I don’t want people noticing my writing. And I certainly don’t want them noticing how one specific sentence or paragraph was very different from all the rest. I want them focusing on the story. I wanted clear, not clever. Having said this, there is still a surprising amount of sculpting going on in the word structure. Subtle manipulations that readers and even some writers might not notice.

ACTIVE AND PASSIVE

This could have gone in the basic posts, but it fits here too.

The man was beaten by Danny. (passive)

Danny beat the man. (active)

In passive voice, the subject receives the action. In active the subject does the action. An easy way to see this is often when the subject is followed by the verb. He ran… Susan stood up… The door opened…  these are all indicators of an active sentence, and active sentences are great because they are crisp, clear, exciting, direct, and well…active. They cause writing to come alive instead of sounding dead. And they are the best way to write action. As a result, active sentences are what most writers like to use. This is not to say that passive sentences equal “bad.” Passive voice has a role to play, the most obvious being when you are describing a passive situation.

Johnny was locked up in handcuffs.

Johnny is clearly in a submissive situation here, and the style of the sentence emphasizes this. You could write, The cop cuffed Johnny, but that focuses on the cop and the action rather than the feeling of being restrained. And if you want to make the reader sympathize with Johnny the passive sentence works better.

So passive sentences relate passive moods, of characters or situations. Active makes the sentences pop and come alive.

DECLARITIVE

Then there is the declarative sentence. Technically a declarative sentence is just any sentence that states something and ends in a period, as opposed to a question, or one of emotion that ends in an exclamation, but I like to tweak definitions to suit myself.

He seemed to be opening the door.

This is in fact a declarative sentence, but I don’t place it in that category because the sentence doesn’t actually “declare” anything, it “alludes” to it.  Maybe he is opening the door, maybe he isn’t. If that ambiguousness is what you are trying to convey, fine, but all too often writers are just timid. They don’t want to declare too much, because technically, maybe the character couldn't exactly see perfectly what was actually, truly, objectively, without a doubt, happening. This is just splitting hairs. If a character “seems to” open a door, then he had better not have actually opened it, because there would be no reason for the “seems to” if he had opened it.

As the author, you know everything, and even if the character doesn’t it is still okay to be definitive about events. Why? Because people never see someone “seem to” anything. In real life it either is, or it isn’t. Only a narrator with foreknowledge striving to relate a story as accurately as possible would use “seemed to.” In real life, a door is opened. If later it turns out it wasn’t, then at that point, the door is closed.

Bob thought Danny opened the door, but he hadn’t.

 Seemed to, is a cheap, unsophisticated attempt at suspense, or a means of hedging bets, or being technically accurate to the point of killing the story.

He had what appeared to be some kind of rope.

Unless what the guy is actually using for rope (and it really had better not be rope) plays a big part in the story later, just call it rope.

Writing in (what I define as) declarative sentences cleans up sentences by getting rid of the useless clutter of author hesitancy. Either it is or it isn’t, and as the author you should know, so don’t pretend you don’t, and if you really don’t know, you should.

BACK LOADING

Now that I explained how to make sentences clear and strong, I’m going to contradict everything I just said, because there are often times you want to flip, or mangle sentences for effect. Often this is done to emphasis the emotion, or to hold off a reveal to the end. In some ways this is like writing poetry in that, impact, or impression, are more important than clarity.

He wrote the truth on the letter in the house.

The truth was written in the letter inside the house.

Inside the house, on the letter, was the truth.

The first sentence is a good active sentence. The second, while passive is still far more straightforward, and direct. But the last sentence has more impact because the point of the sentence is held in reserve to the end, creating a punch. This is what I call back-loading. When you save the best for last and front-load suspense.

He saw her when he entered the room.

He entered the room, smelling the familiar perfume, his eyes searching until he saw—her.

This is an even more pronounced and dramatic expression of the idea. The first sentence is serviceable, but dull and lifeless despite being active. While the second creates a story in a single sentence. Back loading sentences are ideal for adding drama. You can almost hear the bass chords play at the end of the sentence, bump, bump, bah! And the camera would zoom.

When I was in art school, I had a teacher who explained the difference between a house painter and an artist. A house painter sweeps back and forth with the brush. An artist does whatever they need to. You can push, slap, dribble, stab, whatever necessary to create the effect you want. Fiction writing is an odd cross between art and craft. While most of the time it is good to stick with the rules, sometimes it pays to paint outside the lines.

SOUND

Then there are the patterns, the music of the words. The best way to hear it is to read your work aloud, or have someone else read it to you. Too fast, too slow, awkward, or just grating. Here are a few things to look out for.

A sour note is created when you use the same unusual word twice in a single paragraph. If it is really unusual, it will stick out if you even use it twice in the same book. Common words you can get away with. For example you can use the word “the” several times in a single paragraph and no one will notice. But if you use “paradigm,” twice, for no apparent reason, it will sound strange. These are the kinds of things you most often find in proofing and should not really be concerned with in writing.

Then there are patterns to watch out for. If you start three sentences with “He was…” in a row, it will be noticeable and the sound will be off. Even if the pattern of the sentence is the same more than twice, it will be a grating sound unless repeating the beat-phrase is what you are after.

He threw the ball. He threw the stick. He threw everything he had. Nothing worked.

In this case, the pattern is set up with intended repetition. There is a cadence to the phrases designed to roll and then these are capped with a different and abrupt sound at the end. It could just as easily have been written:

He threw the ball, the stick, everything he had. Nothing worked.

The first displays more of a sense of frustration, while the second is faster and more exciting. It would depend on what you were aiming for.

I find it is usually best to be conscious of sentence patterns and lengths. Too many short sentences in a row and the writing is choppy. Too many long ones and it comes off slow and wordy. If you aren’t writing action, or not trying to create a specific mood of serenity, then the sentences should be an ambiguous mix avoiding patterns. Long, long, short. Short, short, long. Long, short, long. Just varying helps. Sometimes just the occasional semicolon or em dash can help. 

It's amazing how complicated writing can be, even when you're trying to keep it simple. 

 Next up: Dealing With Failure