Archetype Online

We <3 genre fiction! Posting short stories & blogging about writing topics in mystery, horror, suspense, sci-fi, fantasy, romance, and historical fiction!

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Archetype’s Great Choose Your Own Villain Adventure

You’ve finally done it — you have written an amazing hero.

She has all of your own best traits: kindness, bravery, stubbornness, cute glasses. You don’t know if you want to be her or marry her. Readers will see themselves in her and dress to match her style. Critics will fear her. And best of all, she is wholly, undeniably, ready carrying the weight of your complex plot.

But now you need to craft your antagonist. And this fellow really needs to measure up.

Don’t worry, though—in this post, we’ll break down some of the many tools you can turn to when creating someone to foil your protagonist’s plans.

Just how bad is bad?

A.  An Evil Villain? This villain has no morals, or if she does, she buried them deep down a long time ago. She’ll sacrifice her family, friends, and everyone’s free will for eternal beauty, unlimited power, or world domination. Think the Evil Queen from Snow White or Sauron from Lord of the Rings.

B.  A Disgruntled Opponent? This villain's had a lifelong streak of bad luck. His parents were killed by someone eerily similar to the hero, global warming flooded his lair last week, and the hero spilled coffee on his pants while saving a cat from a tree this morning. Really, all he wants is a nap—if he has to chain up a few good guys for some peace and quiet, it’s no more than he deserves. Think Luke Castellan from the Percy Jackson series.

C.  A Good Person with Questionable Goals? Rational people presented with the same situation won’t always agree, because at the end of the day all people, even equally good people, have different values and morals. If your hero wants to flip the switch and save five people on the train track but your antagonist doesn’t think the one man on the other side should die, you’re probably going for this dynamic. This is Captain America: Civil War through and through.

Just how serious are they?

A.  Funny and exaggerated? A villain like this is there to put a wrench in your hero’s plans (and probably provide lots of comic relief), but not seriously threaten anyone with bodily harm. They may think they’re irredeemable and say they couldn’t care less about another person, but they’re either confused or wildly incompetent. Think about it: nobody believes Dr. Doofenshmirtz is going to do anything more than mildly inconvenience them.

B.  Menacing and exaggerated? Your villain shoots lasers out of their eyes. Their knuckles are embedded with knives. One whiff of their breath causes paralysis. One word from their mouth has civilians leaping off cliffs. They wear only black, and their evil lair says “Evil Lair” on the front door. They also probably have a lot of henchpeople. Basically, everything about them screams Bad Guy, to the point where it’s definitely not realistic. A good example is Gru from Despicable Me.

C.  Spookily realistic to the point of goosebumps? The world is a scary place, and sometimes it’s important to represent that in your work. Antagonists can be made all the worse by the fact that they’re just regular people doing reprehensible, unforgivable things. Think Frollo in Hunchback of Notre Dame or Mother Gothel in Tangled—attempted sexual assault and child abuse are no joke.

Was your antagonist …

A.  Brought into being because of the actions of your hero? Some villains might have been a cashier down at the 7-Eleven if it wasn’t for that chance encounter with your hero all those years ago. Now, though, they’ve sworn to get revenge for their slighted pride—stupid heroes and their ego, right? Buddy Pine, AKA Syndrome from The Incredibles, is a great example of this.

B.  Morally transformed by a dramatic life event? Sometimes good people do bad things when they’re under a lot of stress, especially if they’ve been traumatized. Have they been forced to make an impossible choice with consequences that haunt them? Tortured because they were good? Watched their family die? Depending on who you ask, the Punisher falls into this category.

C.  Doing the wrong thing for the right reasons? Sure, your antagonist stole the diamonds and fired a warning shot at the reception outside the gala, but the real baddie is holding her wife hostage at home. Your hero would have done the same thing—right? Think the origin story of the Hook-Handed Man from A Series of Unfortunate Events, or Killmonger from Black Panther.

On a related note, does your antagonist …

A.  Have a history with your hero? In many cases, the protagonist and the antagonist go way back. Maybe they were once friends (this has tons of potential—do they know each other’s weaknesses? Have certain pet peeves they’ve sworn never to exploit?), or maybe they’ve just fought about this issue many times before. Have they dated? Were their parents friends? Think Catra from Netflix’s She-Ra reboot.

B.  Fear your hero’s reputation? This antagonist knows your hero is coming, and as much as he tries to deny it, he knows he’s not ready. Maybe there’s a prophecy. Maybe the hero just has a really good PR team. Either way, the villain is going to try to shoot first—and if he misses, he probably won’t get another chance. Voldemort.

C.  Have no interest in your hero whatsoever — the hero wants to stop them, but they don’t think the hero is a threat. There’s always a chance, though, that your villain doesn’t even think your hero is worth the time of day. Maybe they’ve heard of him, maybe they haven’t—what does it matter when they’re not going to be stopped either way? This villain feels toward your hero what Irene Adler feels toward Sherlock Holmes—totally unbothered, and maybe occasionally amused.

Other fun questions to ask:

Do they have a sidekick? Why does that sidekick serve them?

Do they have an accent? Is it real or for effect?

Do they have powers? Do they wish they did?

Do they have a color scheme?

Does something dramatic happen every time they come into the room (lightning strikes, mirrors crack, a woman screams, etc.)

If left in the room with a wailing baby, how would they handle it?

If left in the room with a barking dog, would they handle that differently?

What are they afraid of?

Things to be cautious of:

Excusing appalling behavior via redemption.

Some things are just inexcusable—or at least, they should be, if we don’t want to contribute to the negative energy out there in the world. So ask yourself … has your antagonist beaten their wife? Sexually abused someone? Harmed children? Acted extremely racist? Gleefully supported fascism? Brutally killed their own father in cold blood?

If you answered yes to any of these questions, think really carefully before planning a redemption arc.

If you want your villain to turn to the good side by the end, they can still do villainous things. They can lie, they can betray those who are close to them, they can plot world domination, they can even kill. But there are lines you probably can’t let them cross if you don’t want them to be hated by your other characters for all eternity. Let’s put it this way—Aladdin, whose worst crime is stealing bread, is redeemable. Loki, who was supposedly being mind-controlled during the first Avengers film, is questionable. Hannibal Lecter, who eats people, is a lost cause.

A really, really phenomenal example of a villain doing sometimes-okay things and yet not being excused for his misdeeds is Count Olaf from A Series of Unfortunate Events—both the books and the Netflix series. There are genuine, emotional reasons he’s a terrible person, and he even does halfway decent things every once in a while. And yet, he’s not forgiven by the characters or the narrative, and he’s treated as the villain he is until the bitter end. Actually, A Series of Unfortunate Events is great at this all around:

Charles: You have to understand, he had a very terrible childhood. Klaus: I understand. I’m having a very terrible childhood right now.

A less great example is Severus Snape from Harry Potter. When it’s revealed that he loved Lily and occasionally didn’t have it out for Harry by the very end of Deathly Hallows, it’s like the narrative wants us to forget about his bullying, bigotry, attempted genocide, child abuse, pet-murdering, deception, and every other foul thing he gets up to for thousands of pages.

Queer coding. There’s this thing Disney does that you might be familiar with. Let’s pick a few examples and see if you can pinpoint it.

Simba vs. Scar

Hercules vs. Hades

John Smith vs. Governor Ratcliffe

Ariel vs. Ursula

That’s right—male villains tend to be more effeminate and delicate than their tough heroic counterparts, and female villains are hell-bent on corrupting sweet, innocent princesses. Even if the characters themselves aren’t meant to be read as gay—even if they don’t appear gay at all, aside from the coded traits—there’s a history of this being used to reinforce negative stereotypes.

That’s not to say that you can’t have gay villains—make everyone LGBT+, if you want. Goodness knows there are enough straight characters out there to last several lifetimes. But if only the villains are gay, and all the heroes are straight, you’re getting into the dangerous territory of suggesting that the traits that villains have are traits that only gay people have, and vice versa.

The same thing applies to race—if all your antagonists are black or Asian or Jewish or Romani and all your heroes are white, what does that say about how your readers should view good and evil? And if all your villains are disabled or mentally ill and your heroes are able-bodied, might you end up spreading the wrong message?

Writing diverse stories is amazing and so, so worth it! But it’s definitely going to take extra sensitivity and care—so make sure you’re fully committed, or you risk doing more harm than good in the end.

Questions? Concerns? Send us your thoughts at [email protected] or leave us a comment!

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Crash Course in Dialogue, Part II

In our last post, we talked about what goes between the quotes in your dialogue. But dialogue isn’t an island floating alone amid your text—there’s more to it, like surrounding speech tags, descriptions, and subtext. For tips on how to make the situation of your conversation match the quality of what’s being said, read on.

Using Speech Tags Appropriately

A speech tag is the label for a bit of dialogue, the “he said” or “she asked” that comes around what a character says. Here’s a not-so-great example of using speech tags:

“I’m exhausted,” Mikey said. “Why is that?” Samantha said. “Because I went for a walk in the middle of the night and ended up getting lost,” he said. “Oh,” she said. “What time did you get home?” “Not until six this morning,” he said. “Do anything interesting?” she said. “I saw a deer with a raccoon riding on his back,” he said. “I don’t believe you,” she said. “You were probably just sleep-deprived.”

The continuous “he said” and “she said” are obviously excessive, and don’t need to be repeated half as many times for the reader to grasp who’s speaking. But the following revision has just enough signals to keep readers from getting lost:

“I’m exhausted,” Mikey said. “Why is that?” Samantha asked. “Because I went for a walk in the middle of the night and ended up getting lost.” “Oh!” Samantha’s eyes widened. “What time did you get home?” “Not until six this morning.” “Well … Do anything interesting?” He shrugged “I saw a deer with a raccoon riding on his back.” “I don’t believe you.” Samantha shook her head. “You were probably just sleep-deprived.”

There’s a commonly-given piece of writing advice out there that I’m going to advise you break: please do NOT listen if someone tells you to whip out your thesaurus every time you think about writing “said.” Cramming “said,” “asked,” “exclaimed,” “pontificated,” “ejaculated,” “screamed,” “whined,” and “demanded” into a few short paragraphs or pages will result in something that sounds more like My Immortal than a serious work of fiction. Using “asked” for questions or “demanded” in a particularly pushy moment is fine, and again, trust your instincts and carefully judge each case. But for the most part, “said” is more like scaffolding than content—much like punctuation, it starts to fade into the background of a story, so it’s not going to distract readers or annoy them à la excessive repetition.

There are a few cases where “said” may not be the best choice, though—and they usually have to do with adverbs. Describing how someone said something—happily, sadly, angrily, quickly—is often less effective than picking a word that means what the adverb implies. If it’s really important that the reader understands the emotion behind a character’s words, you might want to consider a stronger, more specific word that really packs in that emotion:

“Why did you do that?” she asked sadly. “Why did you do that?” she sobbed.

“I’m so glad you’re here,” she said happily. “I’m so glad you’re here!” she gushed.

That last sentence is still a little repetitive, though, because both the dialogue and the tag tell us the speaker is glad to be around the person she’s addressing. It’s often even more interesting when the dialogue and the tag don’t match. For instance, take this sentence:

“I’m so glad you’re here,” she grumbled.

The words spoken and the tone are opposite each other, which creates intrigue for the reader to latch onto.

It can also be refreshing to replace a tag like “said” with an action instead. Think of this strategy like “show, don’t tell”—instead of making the reader trust your assumption that a character is tense or excited, let the reader see it for themself in the character’s reaction:

A frown flitted across her face, and she avoided eye contact. “I’m so glad you’re here.”

From this, we know the character isn’t being completely truthful in what she says. When her estranged brother now confronts her with “Are you seriously going to act like this on Dad’s big day?” we’ll know the tension isn’t coming out of nowhere.

Try this:

Give each character a speech tag (he said/she said) at the beginning of the conversation. Take the rest out. Now, read through the dialogue, and any time you get confused about who’s speaking, add in a new speech tag to clarify. These are the only places they’re actually needed in your dialogue.

Think About What’s Not Said

One final thing to remember is that sometimes, what’s not said by a character can be just as important as what is.

Maybe Jack doesn’t come right out and say, “I don’t want to talk about Mary right now, because I’m sad she was hurt, and I feel responsible.” But every time Kate starts to talk about Mary or pressure Jack to call her, he steers the conversation away. He picks fights, because he wants people to get angry at him, to hold him responsible. He might even let his phone die and “forget” to recharge it, so he has a good excuse the next time Mary asks.

What are your characters keeping from their friends, and, as a result, your readers? How does that color the way they’re perceived? How does keeping secrets affect their mood?

Try this:

Secrets are fun! Give each of your characters a fact to keep close to their chest, and play with it in a few scenes. It doesn’t have to be big and dramatic—maybe they didn’t kill their father when they were thirteen, but Jesse is afraid of dogs and doesn’t want his squad to tease him about it. Maybe Grant is allergic to bees and embarrassed, because it’s silly to be afraid of bugs when you’re sixty-two. It’s still going to get interesting when Jesse’s roommate gets a mastiff or a neighborhood hoodlum throws a wasp nest in Grant’s car.

Grand Finale: Read Your Dialogue Aloud

In the end, your brain understands written words and spoken words differently, and you’re not going to know for sure whether your dialogue works until you hear it. Reading what you’re written out loud—anything, really, but especially dialogue—is like the final test. You’re guaranteed to pick up on new awkward things you need to refine, catch last-minute mistakes, and maybe even find a brilliant strike of new inspiration while you’re at it.

If you have kind friends, see if you can get them to act out your conversations! If not, just read the whole thing out loud to yourself, maybe filming it or performing in front of a mirror. If your words sound like something you’d hear on TV, or on the bus or at a party, or basically anywhere there are live humans instead of just the ones in your brain, you’ve nailed it! Congratulations on mastering the art of dialogue!

Questions? Concerns? Leave a comment below or send us your thoughts at [email protected].

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Crash Course in Dialogue, Part I

Writers tend to stress a character’s actions as the most important way to show who they are, but creating effective, interesting dialogue is just as important to a great story. Good dialogue can illustrate interpersonal relationships, reveal fears characters don’t even know they have, show development, and so much more. At the same time—and maybe more importantly—bad dialogue sticks out like a sore thumb, making readers uncomfortable and unwilling to get invested in your narrative. Your prose might be amazing, but if your characters can’t communicate, it’s going to put people off.

But never fear! Here are a few handy tricks to writing amazing dialogue that will get your characters saying what they mean or misdirecting like a pro, all while drawing your reader successfully into the story.

Creating Unique Voices

When you start writing dialogue, one of the most important things to keep in mind is that your characters should all sound different from one another. Just based on their words alone, a reader should be able to tell whether your character’s personality is bubbly or gloomy, if they feel comfortable with the people around them, if they’re in pain, what kind of education they have, and so much more. You want these factors to be unique for each character, even if they were raised together or come from a similar background.

A great test is to write down only the spoken part of your dialogue, without any speech tags (he said/she said, etc.). Does each character sound distinct? Can you tell whose lines are whose just based on what they say, without the surrounding context clues?

If not, try some of the techniques below. There are so many ways to say the same thing differently—and reveal your characters’ history, personality, and quirks at the same time!

Techniques

Using lots of big words like abysmal, paramount, satiate, ubiquitous, etc.

This can make a character sound more educated, imply a wealthier upbringing, or show the care he puts into communicating. Or, it can make him sound pretentious, and become a trait that annoys your other characters. Just be careful your character doesn’t come off like a weirdo carrying around a thesaurus in their pocket (unless that’s what you’re going for, of course!)

Character 1: His rant was just the shameful rambling of a crazy old man. Character 2: The display was simply the ignominious drivel of a deranged geriatric man.

Using clipped speech—only a few words at a time, monosyllabic answers

Quiet characters, characters who don’t like their companions, characters who are in pain, and characters with something to hide might not want to have long conversations where they bare their soul to others.

Character 1: I really don’t think so. I’m sure I’d remember an intense reaction like that. Character 2: No.

Using terms of endearment or pet names—babe, sweetheart, bro, dude, pal

Depending on how these are used, your character can come across as warm and fuzzy, sarcastic, flirty, or evil and taunting.

Bonus: if your character is angry or distracted, they can leave off the pet names they usually call their friends. This is a good way to reveal to a reader—and other characters—that something fishy is up.

Character 1: Can you toss me that pencil? Character 2: Hey babe, be a sweetie and toss me that pencil? Character 3: Uh, that’s my pencil, pal. Character 4: Toss me that pencil, bro!

Speaking formally versus informally with contractions

Is your character uncomfortable around present company? Are they trying to act extremely professional to prove they’re qualified for their job, or still recovering from a strict, affectionless upbringing? If so, making their speech more formal can help convey what’s going on.

Character 1: Admittedly, I have been wondering much the same thing. I will look into it. Character 2: Yeah, I’ve been wondering that too. I’m gonna check it out.

Swearing

Depending on context, characters who curse can sound meaner, rougher, cooler, more laid-back, and even funnier than the people around them who don’t.

When using curse words, be aware of your audience. If you’re writing for kids or younger teens, you may get some pushback.

Remember that these words are sometimes at their most powerful when they’re not overused. When your sweet character finally snaps and mutters something really strong under her breath, you’ll know she’s at the end of her rope.

Think of Simon finally confronting Martin in the movie Love, Simon—if Leah (who swears all the time in the book’s sequel) told Martin to f*ck off, it wouldn’t have anywhere near the same impact.

And yet, in The Raven Cycle by Maggie Stiefvater, Ronan’s glee at swearing is one of the things that sets him apart from the more polite Gansey and Adam.

Try this:

Sit in a public place where people talk—a coffee shop, a food court at the mall, a break at school—and listen to a conversation. Write down what you hear—every little um or ah, pronunciations, pauses, stutters, repetitions. How do words, fillers, and phrases shape the distinct voices of the people you’re listening to?

Using Accents and Dialects

Another great way to make characters sound different is to give them accents or let them speak in dialects. If your character is from the South, he’d have a Southern drawl; if she’s from the India, she’s not going to sound like your classmates from Connecticut. But how can you capture a voice like that without making your writing sloppy or distracting (or exaggerating it into an offensive caricature)? Passages like the following, from Huckleberry Finn, certainly take a lot of concentration to read:

“Oh, Huck, I bust out a-cryin’ en grab her up in my arms, en say, ‘Oh, de po’ little thing! De Lord God Amighty fogive po’ ole Jim, kaze he never gwyne to fogive hisself as long’s he live!’ Oh, she was plumb deef en dumb, Huck, plumb deef en dumb—en I’d ben atreat’n her so!”

A general rule, using features other than phonetic spelling to show how characters speak differently can communicate the same information in a less distracting way:

Diction/word choice: Taylor from New York eats fries for lunch and chips as a snack, but Henry from London eats chips for lunch and crisps from the vending machine during his break at work.

Syntax/word order: Someone whose native language is English will likely say “the brown shoes” or “the white fence,” but if your heroine was born in France and learned English not long ago, she might say “I was wearing my shoes which are brown” or “the fence that is white stands behind the house”

Idioms: Different places have different expressions that mean more than what they look like. While you’d say you’re “buttering someone up,” someone who speaks Spanish might say they’re “stroking his beard.” Research idioms that would be a natural part of your character’s speech—or, make up your own!

Some phonetic spellings and slang, every once in a while, do a great job of signaling a continuing accent: s’pose, ain’t, ya, dahlin’. But if what you’ve written takes any amount of real concentration to decode, it’s going to be annoying, not helpful or cool. In other words, if your main character has a lisp, tharting every thentence like thith ith going to get really fruthtrating, really fatht. An’ writin’ an o’er-exaggera’ed Cockney accen’, owr a loooong Suthen draaaawl, is sure to get on your reader’s nerves as well.

If your protagonist’s baby sister with three lines has a lisp and says, “Thamantha, read me a thtory” or her great-auntie from Georgia bemoans, “Lawdy-me, it shaw is hawt in hea today” once in 300 pages, though, you’re probably good.

If you want an example of dialects and pronunciation done really well, check out the Chaos Walking series by Patrick Ness. Protagonist Todd Hewitt grew up in a primitive settlement and can’t read—while always completely understandable, he does say “ain’t” all the time, and occasionally throws in misspellings like “creacher” and “recognishun.” The sections narrated by his friend Viola are more grammatically correct, because while Todd was doing farm work, she was attending school. And people Todd meets with even less schooling than him talk like this: “Ah kin give y’all a ride thrus. If ya want.” (But these characters don’t pop up very often, so the style doesn’t become distracting—instead, it highlights the differences between outsiders and the protagonists.)

A note of caution:

Remember that African American Vernacular English, American Sign Language, and other variations/translations of English have their own complex rules. If you aren’t familiar with a dialect you’re writing, don’t just simplify standard English, throw in an extra “be,” or take out some helping verbs. If your character uses one of these, do some extra research to make sure your dialogue is accurate.

Include the Right Kind of Content

So now you’ve decided how your character talks—but what should they say? Here are a few things to avoid: small talk, excessive info dumps, drawn-out background information, and background conversations. (Like most rules of writing, these can and should be broken if you have a good reason, but in general, they can be helpful in moving a story along and keeping it interesting.)

Instead of the characters taking up valuable space and audience attention on pleasantries, focus on the real meat of the conversation. Alfred Hitchcock once said something to the effect of, “Drama is real life with all the boring parts cut out.” Which would you want to read about? A character describing her brunch of thick, fluffy pancakes to her mother in mouth-watering detail?* Or the moment she asks her mother for $500—the third time this month—to cover her outrageous credit card debts? As the writer, you have the privilege and responsibility to pick the important moments to pass on to the reader—the ones that are important to the plot later, that develop the characters, that are memorable and exciting. Be kind to them—and yourself—by carefully judging what’s worth everyone’s time.

This then gives you an opportunity to work something else essential into your conversation—conflict. It’s very hard to make a compelling conversation where each character agrees with everything said before them. Just because “yes, and” works for improv, doesn’t mean it’s the best strategy for dialogue in fiction—instead, put your characters against each other. If they have opposing goals, or even slightly different takes on a situation, you’ll be able to flush out both viewpoints and push them to an interesting breaking point much easier than if they simply build on whatever the other says.

It can also be tempting to save long, detailed explanations for dialogue—especially when it comes to worldbuilding in sci-fi or fantasy. If you have a physics professor who’s perfected time travel or an old witch who’s worked out everything about magic, it would be easy to give them a few pages to give the specifics to your clueless protagonist. But unless you can’t get your story to work any other way, try not to do this—long descriptions tend to end up pretty boring, and hard to follow and remember. Instead, let your reader pick up fewer details at a time from different people, or see how things work for themselves. In the first Harry Potter, Hagrid doesn’t explain everything about being a wizard to Harry—readers get to experience the many magical details firsthand through Harry’s eyes in Diagon Alley, and then later at Hogwarts.

*Note: If your character is a cook and criticizes the pancakes because he could obviously do better, or if she grew up in poverty and is promising her mother she’ll move back home and take her to brunch every morning once she gets one more paycheck, this is obviously fine. So is her describing how great she thought the pancakes were if it turns out they were actually poisoned, and next thing she knows she’s waking up from a 10-year coma. And so on... Find exciting exceptions!

Try this:

Listen to a scene from your favorite movie and think about what’s included and what’s not. Do both characters greet each other and ask how the other has been, or do they jump right into the deal they need to make? Does one character agree with everything the other says, or do they disagree frequently?

Have more questions about writing dialogue? Leave us comments for Part II, coming soon!

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Blog: Less Isn’t Always More: When Long Sentences Aren’t the Enemy

Sometimes, with no small degree of thoughtfulness and care, writing in a meandering style, that is to say with numerous elaborations, twists and turns, and infamous semi-colons, can be an elegant and, indeed, effective strategy.

But when? And how do you do it well?

If you’ve ever taken a creative writing class you were probably taught to internalize certain rules. Less is more, clarity is key, and if you must use an adverb (God help you) do it quietly, and with an appropriate level of shame.

Maybe you managed to take those rules to heart. Maybe you didn’t need to be taught them in the first place, they were so innately obvious. Or perhaps you felt exactly the opposite: that the rules you were told to follow were completely wrong, irrelevant, or at the very least, inapplicable to your specific creative vision. You, dear reader, are a free spirit, a unique individual. Teachers aren’t dumb, and it would be silly to assume they can’t help you improve your writing in some way. But how can they tell you exactly what to do? How can there be strict guidelines for a fundamentally creative process?

In truth, you’re right to be suspicious. Many of the standards we’ve come to associate with “good” fiction, especially those that are taught in high school and college level English courses, aren’t standards at all: they’re strong historical preferences. Take, for example, the golden rule of writing courses the world over: “less is more.” You’ve probably been told that long sentences with too many adjectives are, in a word, wrong. Prose should be simple, clear, and concise. If your reader needs a map to find the purpose of your paragraph, you’ve made a grave and irreversible mistake.

But this preference for clarity isn’t an age-old law of the written word. Take some of the opening lines from Moby Dick:

“Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people’s hats off—then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can.”

This sentence (or depending on your point of view, sentences) is ostensibly an editor’s worst nightmare. Have you ever seen that many semicolons in one place? Let alone a single sentence that could rightfully be a full paragraph? What was Herman Melville thinking? Or how about this sentence from Carmilla:

“I have said ‘the nearest inhabited village,’ because there is, only three miles westward, that is to say in the direction of General Spielsdorf's schloss, a ruined village, with its quaint little church, now roofless, in the aisle of which are the moldering tombs of the proud family of Karnstein, now extinct, who once owned the equally desolate chateau which, in the thick of the forest, overlooks the silent ruins of the town.”

Would these excerpts be substantially improved if they followed the rules; if they divided their meandering clauses into neat little chunks with periods at the end? They’d certainly look a lot more like what we consider quality writing today, the “tight” prose that writers like Raymond Carver and Ernest Hemingway are famous for. But wouldn’t something about the distinct voice of Ishmael (Moby Dick’s protagonist) be lost if he didn’t think and speak in winding, introspective monologue? Wouldn’t the isolation and desolation of Carmilla’s ruined village lack something if it was communicated to the reader without clause after clause of ornate gothic prose?

Tastes change, and if Moby Dick or Carmilla were published in 2018, they might read completely differently. But different is not necessarily better. In 100 years the standards for “good writing” might be completely unrecognizable to us, but this would no more invalidate the quality of the books we publish today than the existence of Raymond Carver invalidates the existence of Herman Melville.

That’s not to say that sentences can never be too long. Consider the following excerpt from my (as yet unpublished) novella, Bartleby Goes West:

“Bartleby knew that he had unfinished business, business being his preferred term for acts of incomprehensible brutality, business that stuck to the back of his brain like bits of omelette at the edge of a frying pan, but he knew also that Laura had drugged his drink, Laura who never believed in his dream to join the circus, the dream he had tended to in the garden of his mind since the age of seven, Laura who had stabbed him that night in Reno, stabbed him with the back-end of a rusty box-cutter, Laura who left him to die there, bleeding, with seven box-cutters stuck between his ribs…”

And it goes on. There are many problems with this sentence, but the main one is that the length, combined with its lack of focus, turns the whole thing into the prose equivalent of an 18 car pile up. Without a point, the sentence goes nowhere, and instead of paying attention to any element of the story the reader loses interest entirely.

It’s possible to write something like this well. Take the first sentence of The Crying of Lot 49:

“One summer afternoon Mrs Oedipa Maas came home from a Tupperware party whose hostess had put perhaps too much kirsch in the fondue to find that she, Oedipa, had been named executor, or she supposed executrix, of the estate of one Pierce Inverarity, a California real estate mogul who had once lost two million dollars in his spare time but still had assets numerous and tangled enough to make the job of sorting it all out more than honorary.”

This sentence contains its fair share of digressions and details that seemingly don’t relate to the main idea. Whether it’s executor or executrix, that there was too much kirsch in the fondue, or that Pierce Inverarity had once lost two million dollars in his spare time, while details that are appropriate to the story itself, all seem unrelated to the immediate purpose of the sentence: informing the reader that the protagonist, Oedipa, has been charged with the execution of a millionaire’s will. But because of the way Pynchon weaves the point of the sentence throughout its text, the meaning is fairly obvious. If we remove the digressions, the sentence becomes:

“One summer afternoon Mrs Oedipa Maas came home from a Tupperware party ... to find that she, Oedipa, had been named executor... of the estate of one Pierce Inverarity, a California real estate mogul who … still had assets numerous and tangled enough to make the job of sorting it all out more than honorary.”

You can see how the parts of these parts of the sentence that elaborate on the main idea frame the parts that meander off or seem to get sidetracked.

Ultimately, writing in a meandering style isn’t impossible, it just takes a lot of thoughtfulness and care. You can also see now why the Bartleby sentence just doesn’t work: without a framing device, the writing becomes a list of digressions and non sequiturs.

And with that in mind, dear reader, remember not to be too hard on your teacher. Newer writers often struggle to communicate exactly what they mean, and from a teacher’s perspective, strict rules can help guide students into producing work that more closely adheres to what they meant to say in the first place. But at the same time, over-reliance on rules and over-emphasis on the value of “tight” prose can leave a lot of students feeling adrift and unmoored. Just because something is difficult doesn’t mean you shouldn’t attempt it. And if you love long meandering sentences, if you love books that experiment, that break the boundaries of traditionally “good” fiction, then why not try your hand at writing one yourself?

Like our blog? Find more posts at https://archetypeonline.org/blog/

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About #PitMad #PitMad is a pitch party on Twitter where writers tweet a 280-character pitch for their completed, polished, unpublished manuscripts. Agents and editors make requests by liking/favori…

In line with our latest blog post, it’s #PitMad today — if you have a finished manuscript and no agent, tweet a pitch with the hashtag PitMad. If an agent likes/favorites your synopsis, they want you to send them the manuscript! You have until 8 PM to tweet.

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Blog: So it’s time to write a query letter …

You’ve just finished the perfect short story and want to submit it to your favorite journal or magazine. Or, you’ve finally put the finishing touches on that 80k-word novel and you need an agent to start pitching it to all the big publishers. But how do you approach these intimidating professionals* who have been reviewing masterpieces longer than you’ve been alive? Your best friend throughout this process is going to be a really strong query letter.

If you don’t know what a query letter is, don’t stress! It’s just a short note, almost like a cover letter, that pitches the idea of your story to an agent and asks if they’re interested in representing you. It gives you a chance to specify the title, length, and genre of your story, as well as provide a brief summary, so an agent can decide if your work matches their professional interests. A good one can get you moved to the “keep reading” pile — but a bad one can mean an immediate rejection. Like all first impressions, the way you represent yourself and your work is key.

Read on to see our comments and critiques of example letters, as well as advice on how to create and refine yours.

*The people we’re talking about — agents, editors, publishers, etc — shouldn’t be seen as intimidating. They only want what you do — to find amazing, creative works, and to make them available for everyone to appreciate. If it helps, think of them as giant book nerds like you and your friends.

MAGAZINES/JOURNALS

When submitting a short story to magazines or journals, you don’t really need the long summary and detailed description authors include for novels. Your submission is short enough that editors will be able to read the whole thing! Instead, just give them the basics and thank them for their time. A lot of times, journals will post exactly what information they’re looking for in their calls for submissions.

Here’s a sample:

Dear Editors,

I would like to submit my short story “Hills Like White Elephants” (1,400 words) for publication. I have never previously published a short story.

This is a simultaneous submission. Per your guidelines, if I don’t hear back within three months, I will assume my story does not align with the publication goals of Transition Magazine.

Thank you for your consideration.

Sincerely, Ernest Hemingway

This offers all the important information — title, word count, whether you’ve been previously published, and whether this is a simultaneous submission (in other words, if you’re submitting the piece to other journals at the same time). It takes the time to be polite, but it isn’t so long it’ll waste an editor’s valuable time.

The line about the guidelines is optional, though you should definitely follow all guidelines. You can also include any relevant personal information here. Make sure you check the requirements of the journal you choose to see what information they require.

ROUGH QUERY LETTER — MISTAKES TO LEARN FROM

Before we get to a really strong query letter, we though it would be fun to show you one that pretty much misses all the key requirements. See if you can figure out why the mistakes below are so tragic and ill-advised.

Now that you’ve survived that train wreck, here’s why these mistakes might be the last ones you make with that particular agent, and how to avoid them:

1. Agents get TONS of query letters every day, and they want to know you’ve already done your homework and checked whether they’re a good fit for you. So sending the same unpersonalized query letter to every agent listed on a website probably isn’t the best idea! If you didn’t take the time to look up their name and write a separate email, why would they waste time reading the names of your characters and worlds in addition to everyone else’s?

Instead, address the agent by name and always start a new email for each agent.

2. This doesn’t tell us anything particularly interesting about the writer or how their interests connect to the agent, so it’s kind of a waste of time to read. It would be better not to include this paragraph at all.

3. Make sure to mention the title and genre of your work near the top, so the agent knows what they’re about to read. Also, avoid boastful claims or bragging about how good your story is — let your writing speak for itself later on.

4. A lot of people say there’s no such thing as a new story, just new ways to tell it, but you still don’t want your summary to sound like twenty other books or every movie that came out in the 90s. Instead of relying on cliches like “new kid in town” or “chosen one” that we’ve all heard a million times before, focus on the parts of your story that are fresh and exciting!

5. Repeating “mysterious” and “mystery” in the same sentence starts to feel a little sloppy — make sure you read through your letter out loud before you send it off, to catch any embarrassing mistakes.

6. When you read this paragraph, the plot and conflict are really hard to follow. Make sure your summary gives the reader a clear picture of what happens in your story. You can test it out on your friends before you sent it for real — if they can keep track of what’s happening, you’re probably good to go!

7. Again, if a particular sentence doesn’t add very much, cut it — that way, it won’t take up an agent’s time and annoy them.

8. When reading real query letters, the funniest thing is always when people claim their work is “the next Harry Potter” or “following in the footsteps of   J.R.R. Tolkien and George R.R. Martin.” By omitting a claim like this, you’re not saying your work isn’t amazing — but you’re also not setting yourself up for an unfair comparison between you and incredibly sophisticated, famous writers. Think about it — even J.K. Rowling probably wasn’t calling herself the next Roald Dahl or Madeleine L’Engle as she was querying The Sorcerer’s Stone. Statements like this are too bold, and give agents a weird feeling before they even start on the manuscript.

It can be helpful to include works you think are similar to yours if such information will concisely convey the mood or themes of your story to an agent. Try something like, “fans of Neil Gaiman will appreciate the whimsical atmosphere of my setting,” or “my protagonist will captivate people who love the inquisitive nature of Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot.” From these descriptions, I’m prepared to get a similar general feeling from your work. But I’m still expecting you to be a unique, individual author doing your own thing, with all your own artistic choices.

9. Promising your book will make a good movie is also too bold, and feels weird.

10. Be respectful and formal in greetings and closings.

GOOD QUERY LETTER

Strong query letters avoid the mistakes we listed above, and add some other really important information. Here’s one for reference:

1. This writer clearly did their research and found an agent they want a strong partnership with in the future.

2. If you have a really great anecdote, this can be a good way to connect with an agent. If you don’t have something strong and you’re just looking for any way to connect, however, it can be best to omit this section.

Good anecdotes: You’ve interacted with the agent before, either at an event or on social media, and they encouraged you to reach out (this is a REALLY good way to open — get out there and make connections if you can!). Another agent recommended you try querying this one. The agent is particularly interested in minorities or strong women, and that’s a main selling point of your work. This agent stated recently they’re looking for (YA fantasy, middle grade sci-fi, etc) and that’s what you’re going to provide now.

Not-so-good anecdotes: You have a similar taste in books. You think other books they’ve represented are amazing. You strongly suspect based on a few comments in interviews that the agent likes hopeful stories, and your story is hopeful. You just know you’d get along based on something they wrote on Twitter last week.

3. Always mention the name of your work near the beginning, so the writer knows what story they’re about to read and can easily remember it. You can put this in the subject line of your email, too.

You should mention the target age group and genre, too, both in the body and the subject line. Do you write middle grade? YA? New adult? Adult? Is your story fantasy? Sci-fi? Mystery? Dystopian?

4. The summary of your manuscript is arguably the most important part. You want to make it sound interesting and complex, so it stands out among all the other letters the agent will receive. Write it and rewrite it, then rewrite it again. Get feedback from everyone you can.

5. You should specify the word count, and you should also know that your length is right for this kind of story. Agents are going to run away from a middle grade novel that’s 120,000 words, or a high fantasy book with tons of world building and subplots that’s only 30k or 40k. Do some research as you’re writing to make sure you’re hitting the sweet spot, and if your story ends up being too long, consider splitting it into multiple books.

6. Advice varies on whether to mention sequel potential, but if you have a series started, feel free to say so.

7. On their websites, agents will probably tell you how they want work submitted. Are they looking for two separate attachments, a query letter and a manuscript? Do they want the first twenty pages of a manuscript, the first ten chapters, or the whole thing? Do they not want to open attachments at all, and request that you copy everything into the body of the email? MAKE SURE you follow these instructions, as writers that don’t will be rejected immediately.

8. Be respectful and formal in greetings and closings.

As with most of advice, none of these tips apply in all cases at all times. There are always exceptions to any rule, and since you know your work better than anyone, you should trust your judgement if you think something doesn’t apply! But in general, if you stick to this format, agents will be able to move past your query letter and evaluate your work based on its merit.

Want feedback on your query letter? Send it to us at [email protected]!

Like our blog? Find more posts at https://archetypeonline.org/blog/

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