| Essays on Writing
By: Timothy D. Wise |
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I've gathered the following tips from a number of sources. I learned several of them in a journalism class at Louisiana Tech University. The teacher, Wiley Hilburn, writes for the Shreveport Times.
Tip #1: Use Significant Detail: It is the details that bring a story and its characters to life. The gritty feel of the sand in your character's shoes when she's walking along the beach at night, the smell of corn dogs and blooming onions cooking on the midway of the carnival, and the way your character's saliva turns to paste when he's scared out of his mind all make the story seem real.
Tip #2: Write simply and directly. Use as few words as possible to say as much as you can. Earnest Hemmingway was a master.
Tip #3: Use adverbs sparingly. "He trudged," or "He stumbled," instead of "He walked stiffly."
Tip #4: Write as you talk. Does your work have a rhythm and flow of normal speech when you read it out loud? I'm not saying that you should include regional or ethnic dialect in your work.
Tip #5: Don't preach. This does not mean that writing can't be used to communicate moral and religious truths. Journalists, poets, and ministers alike use it for that very purpose. It has to be done carefully though. It is better to demonstrate your point in the story than to fill your work with religious bumper stickers. (Personal note: When I took a journalism class in college, I was excited about my faith and used every opportunity I could to inject it into a journal I was keeping. My teacher circled several of my paragraphs and quotes and wrote the words "bumper sticker" beside them. It was a painful experience, but I have never forgotten it.)
Tip #6: Give your characters a history. Know the character's personality, history, and motivations. Did he grow up on a farm or in the "projects." Was her father her hero or was he abusive? Is he trying to please everybody or is he in mad pursuit of goals he thinks will give his life significance? (Stephen King's stories are full of flashbacks that give insight into a character's life.)
Tip #7: Use visual metaphors. Weather is often used to communicate mood. Statues or twisted trees can communicate menace. Sand castles washing away can communite death or the end of childhood.
Writing for s series is not the same as writing a one-shot story. Not all good books or movies make for good sequels. As good as Psycho was, there are only so many times Norman Bates can go crazy and murder his guests. Jaws and Die Hard, likewise, were build around unusual events. In theory, however, film producers could make James Bond, Indiana Jones, Star Trek, and Batman movies forever. Those movies were not built around one-time events but around the interesting lives of the characters. So, for the writers of novels, comic books, and television series, I offer the following suggestions on laying the foundation for a series.
Suggestion #1: Give your character a job where he or she travels around solving problems. The formula worked for the X-Files, Indiana Jones, Kolchak the Night Stalker, James Bond, Sherlock Holmes, the Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew, and several generations of Star Trek characters.
Suggestion #2: Put your characters in an interesting universe. The young adult series Eerie Indiana placed the characters in a bizarre town where Bigfoot and Elvis were seen on a daily basis. Babylon 5 and Deep Space Nine were space stations that all manner of characters passed through. Warner Brothers' Smallville series provided Superboy with super-powered foes in an otherwise normal universe by introducing the idea that Kryptonite rocks cause bizarre mutations in normal humans. Carl Kolchak, from the Night Stalker series, lived in Chicago and encountered most of his monsters there. Mayberry, North Carolina, wasn't a frightening place, but it certainly had its share of colorful characters.
Suggestion #3: Give your character(s) a problem to solve that is big enough to keep them occupied for the entire series. (This can be frustrating if you keep teasing the readers or viewers with the solution and then pulling it away.) The characters in Sliders, Voyager, and Lost in Space were trying to find their way home. David Banner, the hero of The Incredible Hulk, was traveling around trying to find a cure for his condition. The Fugitive was searching for the one-armed man who murdered his wife and framed him. The characters in M*A*S*H used zany humor to survive the Korean War.
Suggestion #4: Keep the love stories interesting. This is actually a subset of Suggestion #3, but it deserves its own space. A continuing love story keeps a series interesting regardless of the genre, but the problem is preserving the tension. Is it possible for two characters to marry without killing the romance of the series? The comedy series Mad About You actually did a good job of making married love look cute, fun, and romantic. Bewitched actually built a series around the problems couples face when they come from very different backgrounds. The writers of Spider Man, on the other hand, have struggled greatly with Peter's marriage to Mary Jane. Once the good guy gets the girl, what's left? Possibly a great deal, but the focus of the series does change.
Stories are built around characters. In science fiction, fantasy, and horror stories, believable characters can make a completely unbelievable situation believable. So what makes for good characters?
They've got a history. As mentioned in "Tips on Style," the characters come from background that shaped them into what they are.
What was family life like? Did she come from a rich family who wanted her to behave like a proper young lady? Was his father an abusive alcoholic who burned the house down one Christmas? Did he have an older brother who was his hero? Did she come from several generations of policemen? Was he the first scholar born into a family of athletes?
What was the character like in high school? Was he the bright, nerdy boy who got picked on by the jocks? Was he the rebel who skipped classes and played practical jokes? Was she the school beauty or the brainy, hardnosed type who edited the school newspaper?
Was there a tragedy that shaped the character--a pain that still drives him/her? Batman's parents were murdered in a hold-up. The Count of Monte Cristo was imprisoned for a crime he didn't commit. Spider-Man failed to stop a criminal that later murdered his uncle. Fox Mulder of the X-Files was haunted by the disappearance of his sister Samantha. Magneto, the enemy of the X-Men, was a Jew who had suffered in Auschwitz.
Bad guys are often driven by personal tragedy. Sometimes they're just "bad seeds." The movie "Murder by Numbers" describes two bored rich kids who murdered someone just for the fun of it.
Dialogue : Does the character have a regional or national dialect? Dialect can be difficult to write and some books on writing advise young writers to stay away from dialect. While I do not necessarily agree with this advice, I will offer a few words of caution:
1. Develop a good ear for it before you use it.
2. Don't overdo it. Don't try to fill every sentence with dialect. Just let the character talk and drop the dialect in where it fits comfortably.
3. Don't assume all people from a certain region or ethnic background talk the same way. Education tends to minimize dialect. Generation and personality also influence it. Not all Southern people sound rural and not all African-Americans use the latest ethnic slang.
4. Don't use alternate spellings every time the character talks. If, for example, the character is from New Orleans or the Bronx, do not spell water "watta" every time the character says it. You'll end up with watta, sweattas, different flavas o' ice cream, etc., and you'll end up annoyin' da readda. Just include enough of those spellings to remind the reader that the character has a dialect.
Personality: A number of writers have attempted to break human behavior down into personality types. We'll take a quick look at a few of the more common approaches.
Hypocrites Four Temperaments:
Tim LaHaye, one of the authors of the popular Left Behind series, has written several books based on the four temperaments described by Hypocrites. The beauty--and the greatest weakness--of this approach is its simplicity. This model only uses four different personality types to describe billions of people. An individual can have a primary and secondary type, however, which allows for a greater richness of description.
According to Hypocrites theory, there are two kinds of introverts and two kinds of extraverts.
The two kinds of introverts are the melancholy and the phlegmatic. The melancholy is artistic, driven to perfectionism, loyal, sensitive, and prone to depression. The phlegmatic is calm, passive, reserved, somewhat unmotivated, and easy to get along with. Phlegmatics also have a dry sense of humor and tend to make fun of the other types.
The two kinds of extraverts are the choleric and the sanguine. Cholerics are driven, outspoken leaders. They are impressive to watch but tend to run roughshod over other peoples' feelings. Sanguines are talkative, happy-go-lucky, and openly affectionate. They love everyone as long as they are getting attention and as long as things are going their way.
The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator:
The Myers-Briggs, based on Jungian psychology, breaks the population down into sixteen personality types by combining four the following four variables:
Introversion/Extraversion: Introverts think before speaking and recharge emotionally by being alone. Extraverts think while they're speaking and recharge emotionally by being around others.
Sensing/Intuition: Sensors base their observations on facts and data. Intuitives base their observations on nuances, impressions, and intuition. Sensors tend to be "by the book" people and intuitives are creative. This is much the same as the left-brain/right-brain theory.
Thinking/Feeling: Thinkers base their decisions on rules while feelers base their decisions on how others will feel. Thinkers are more inclined to think, "You made the decision, you live with the consequences," while Feelers argues, "But it wasn't really his fault." According to studies, 2/3 of men are thinkers and 2/3 of women are feelers. (That still leaves 1/3 of each gender that doesn't fit the mold. So if Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus seemed backwards to you...)
Judging/Perceiving: This axis has also been described as structured/flexible or planned/spontaneous. Judgers like to make decisions and have things settled. Perceivers value spontaneity and tend to leave their options open as long as possible.