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6 Common Dialogue Mistakes in Writing

Hi everyone, September C. Fawkes here. Dave was kind enough to let me do a guest post on his blog this week, and I decided to bring you one about some of the common mistakes I see in dialogue as an editor. (And you can learn more about me below.)

1. Dialogue Tags Don’t Match the Dialogue.

Some people in the industry say writers should only ever use “said” and “asked” as dialogue tags. This is because it forces the dialogue itself to do the work. Personally, I’m not wholly against alternative dialogue tags (“groaned,” “cried,” “yelled,” “lamented,” etc.) when used in moderation. I think they can be particularly effective when the dialogue itself, and the context of the story, can’t portray the way that it’s said. For example:

“That’s great,” Melody groaned.

But sometimes the chosen dialogue tag honestly doesn’t make sense. Such as . . .

“Elephants use their skin folds to crush mosquitoes,” Milo whined.

The direct dialogue doesn’t sound like whining. The content doesn’t sound like something to whine about, and the structure doesn’t sound like whining. (And I doubt in a story it could logically pass off as whining.) That dialogue tag doesn’t seem to fit.

“Elephants use their skin folds to crush mosquitoes,” Milo said matter-of-factly.

That’s better. But sometimes I see weird combos like this:

“Elephants use their skin folds to crush mosquitoes,” Milo whined matter-of-factly.

I don’t know about you, but “whined matter-of-factly” sounds like something that’s pretty difficult to pull off.

Make sure if you do use an alternative tag that what you write makes sense.

2. Modifiers Don’t Match the Dialogue.

Some people really love using modifying phrases (participial phrases) with their dialogue tags. Again, I’m not against this, but like anything, it can be overused, and more than that, it needs to make sense. A modifying phrase after a dialogue tag is adding information to the dialogue tag. It works as an adjective. Here is a fine example. “Do you ever sunburn?” Manny asked, squeezing sunscreen into his palm.

“Squeezing sunscreen into his palm” is a modifying phrase–it adds information to “Manny asked.” Because it functions similarly to an adjective, it’s also saying that Manny squeezed the sunscreen into his palm at the same time he asked “Do you ever sunburn?” Not after. The same time.

Here is a problem example: “Grab the gun!” I yelled, holding my breath as a cloud of smoke came our way.

You cannot yell and hold your breath at the same time. Luckily, you can easily fix it: “Grab the gun!” I yelled, and I held my breath as a cloud of smoke came our way.

Other times, the participial phrase doesn’t match because it doesn’t fit with the dialogue (usually it doesn’t logically match in length). “Yes,” she said, putting her dress, socks, and pajamas in a suitcase and then the luggage on the floor.

You can’t tell me she put her dress, socks, AND pajamas in a suitcase AND then put the luggage on the floor at the same time that she said “Yes.” Unless she’s Quicksilver from X-Men, it’s not possible to do all those things during a one-syllable word. So this needs some work.

Some writers say you should try to leave out participial phrases with dialogue tags altogether, since cognitively it is difficult for the reader to imagine both things happening at once. I’m personally okay with it and don’t think it’s a big deal. They just need to make sense.

3. Improper Punctuation

I think probably every writer struggles at some point with figuring out how to punctuate dialogue. Let’s be honest, to a beginner, it’s not that clear-cut, and if you don’t know the rules, it might seem somewhat random. Ultimately it gets down to where you place the dialogue tag. For a full rundown on punctuation, you can check out this post: https://www.septembercfawkes.com/2019/03/how-to-punctuate-dialogue.html

4. Maid-and-Butler Dialogue

Sometimes an author is trying to get information to the reader through dialogue. And it’s obvious. And feels contrived. Maid-and-butler dialogue is a term that originates from stories where the maid and butler would tell each other things they already both know. For example: “Voldemort was a very dark wizard who killed Harry’s parents,” Dumbledore said to Snape. “Voldemort was one of the most powerful wizards in history, as you know, and he went to school here, at Hogwarts,” Snape replied.

Dumbledore and Snape both know these things probably better than anyone, but they’re talking this way solely for the benefit of the audience (by the way, this example is made-up). The reality is, as a writer, you often do need to convey information to the reader through dialogue. One way this is handled is by having a character speaking to another character who doesn’t know this information. Another way is to convey that info through subtext within the dialogue.

5. Straightforward Dialogue

Often the most powerful dialogue is indirect. This is because it contains subtext. What’s cool about subtext, is that it happens when the audience comes to a conclusion about what they are reading. So, it invites the audience to participate and experience the story, instead of just “spectating” it.

Here is an example of terrible, straightforward dialogue: “Jennifer, I love you! I love you more than the moon and the sun,” Cole said.

“I didn’t like you at first, but I guess over time I came to like you too,” Jennifer said. “Maybe we can be friends for now though.”

Straightforward dialogue releases tension. It has a place in storytelling for sure (like . . . when it’s time for the tension to be released). But most of your dialogue should not be so straightforward. In life, people often speak indirectly about things, and their words reveal more than what they are actually saying. Good dialogue does too. It says more than what’s on the page.

6. Overusing Names

“I am so mad, Fred.” “What happened, Melanie?” “Oh, Fred, I just don’t know what to do. Jacob lied to me about the concert tickets.” “Melanie . . . I’m so sorry to hear that.”

Newer writers have the tendency to overuse character names in dialogue, but in reality, we don’t actually say each other’s names that much. This tends to crop up because writers want an emphasis or to make the moment feel more intimate—that’s okay, but you don’t want to overdo it.

Quick Tips for Writing Great Dialogue

Now, it only seems fair that I leave everyone with some quick tips on how to write great dialogue.

– Use character voice. Remember this equation: What a character says + how she says it = Voice

– Use subtext Remember this: Subtext almost always employs contradictions of one sort or another. Subtext happens when the audience comes to a conclusion that explains those contradictions.

– Create character circuitry Remember this: While it’s fine for characters to simply respond to each other, it’s more interesting when each line of dialogue builds off what the other just said.

– Use callbacks occasionally Remember this: A callback is when the writer brings back a line that happened earlier in the story but uses it in a new context. For example, in Pirates of the Caribbean, there are multiple lines about the rum being gone, but all in different contexts.

. . . I could go on, but this post is getting a bit long.

Bio Sometimes September C. Fawkes scares people with her enthusiasm for writing and reading. People may say she needs to get a social life. It’d be easier if her fictional one wasn’t so interesting. She has worked in the fiction-writing industry for over eight years and has been editing stories for longer. She has edited for both award-winning and best-selling authors and has worked on manuscripts written for middle grade, young adult, and adult readers, and she once worked for Dave for several years. She runs an award-winning writing tip blog at https://www.septembercfawkes.com/

Find her on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100008321732625 Twitter: https://twitter.com/SeptCFawkes Tumblr: https://septembercfawkes.tumblr.com/ and Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/septcfawkes/

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The Book Break

I recently did an interview over on the Book Break. Check it out here https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=2395490457219059

Workshops

Two of my online workshops Writing Enchanting Prose and the Advanced Story Puzzle will be starting again March 28th!

The Advanced Story Puzzle: How to Brainstorm and Outline a Bestseller

The Advanced Story Puzzle covers the steps involved in prewriting and outlining your novel.

Learn to identify what pieces you need, what pieces you’re missing, how to find the elements you lack, how to know if a piece to your story puzzle is worthy of being included, and how to know if you’re even working on the right “puzzle”.

There are six lessons on setting, character, conflict, plotting, theme, and treatment. You will also have weekly video conferences where we can discuss your story and answer any questions. Turn in your weekly assignments and I will grade them and give further advice.

Writing Enchanting Prose

You’ve read stories that absolutely swept you away into another world, stories made you forget you were reading and ultimately left you changed. This workshop is designed to teach you how to enchant your readers.

Similar to the Advanced Story Puzzle, there are eight lessons with weekly conference calls and assignments.

You can find more information on both workshops here: http://mystorydoctor.com/online-workshops/

Craft compelling narratives with ease in our 100-day writing adventure! Click now to unlock your FREE copy of ‘Daily Meditations: Writer’s Tips for 100 Days’ at Apex.com

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11 Things You Want When Choosing a Publisher

Most authors don’t think about “choosing” a publisher. Most authors send out manuscripts, sometimes rather blindly, in the hopes that a good publisher will choose them.

But think about this: before a publisher can respond to your manuscript, you have to initiate the contact. You’ll never get a good publishing deal without choosing to send the manuscript to them in the first place.

Here are 11 things you want in a good publisher

1. You want a publisher who has the money to purchase your manuscript at a decent price. Please note that if the publisher doesn’t have that kind of money, they also don’t have the money to print lots of copies or to advertise the books. Thus, anyone who fails this test isn’t a publisher that you should consider.

2.They have the artistic experience to create a great cover, one that will catch the eyes of your intended audience. This usually means that the publisher has a well-trained artistic director.

3.They have a caring editor who will use his or her genius to help you sculpt and polish your manuscript in an effort to make it a bestseller.

4.You need a publisher that sends books out to critics in an effort to advertise and who will try to help you win awards. Note that some major awards can only be won if the publisher sends the book to a committee and pays a fee to enter the contest. Sometimes, even if your book wins, the publisher will be required to pay a large fee just to put that info on the cover.

5. The publisher needs to have contracts with major distribution companies like Ingrams, or Baker and Taylor. These are the companies that create catalogues of books so that various bookstores can order them, and then these distributors fulfill the orders by taking the books from the warehouse to the bookstores. (Please note that many small publishers fail at this step and can’t even get your books into bookstores.)

6. You want a publisher who has the money to actually market your book to the bookstores, putting out ads in their own catalog, sending out booksellers to contact store owners personally, and so on. If your publisher has no marketing department, they really can’t help you. You might as well print the books yourself.

7. You want a publisher who can afford to engage in point-of-sale advertising. The publisher needs to negotiate with the major bookstore chains to put up display stands, pay to have the book put face-out, and so on. Again, most small publishers don’t have this ability.

8. You want a publisher who can advertise to the masses as well as the bookstore. This might mean putting ads for your books in magazines, newspapers, email newsletters, and so on.

9. You need a publisher who will print enough books so that you can hit bestseller lists. Think about it. If it takes 10,000 sales in one week to hit in the top 10 of the New York Times Bestseller list, then you need a publisher who can get about 30-40,000 books out to stores in your opening week so you can make the list. A publisher who can only print 1000 books just isn’t big enough to be make the list.

10. Typically, if a publisher can do all of this, the publisher will have a lot of previous hits in the field. Such a company will operate like a well-oiled machine. So you’re probably looking at one of the “big” publishers.

11. Last of all, you want a publisher who treats you fairly. That means that they offer you standard royalty rates for your books, and they shouldn’t be trying to grab all of the rights to your intellectual properties—things like your movie rights, foreign rights, and so on. Be warned: there are many small publishers who hope to make fortunes by grabbing all of your rights for practically nothing, then selling to other publishers.

Now, in any genre, there are only about 6-10 publishers who have all of the things that I’ve mentioned on this list. In short, there are a lot of publishers who have no advertising budget, no marketers, and no ability to pay you anything. So the question is, what value does that publisher offer you? I can tell you the answer: they aren’t offering you diddly squat, and you should probably never, ever deal with them. There may be special cases where a small press makes worthwhile offers, but when you’re doing a major first run, stay away from small publishers who can’t print and distribute a book properly.

Transform the way you craft stories with our 100-day writing adventure! Don’t miss out on your FREE access to ‘Daily Meditations: Writer’s Tips for 100 Days.’ Click now!

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10 Tips for Bringing a Scene to Life (2020 update)

Years ago, I wrote an article on bringing a scene to life—and then I did an exercise based upon my own article.

Here are the bare bones of that article. These are techniques and 10 “Tips for Bringing a Scene to Life”

1. Use “Resonators”

Especially at the beginning of a tale, use “resonators” to better tie into your audience’s subconscious.

A resonator is a word or image that gains power simply because your reader has seen it before.

Resonators are often words that identify your piece as belonging to a particular genre, such as fantasy, romance, or horror. They are part of the secret language that is used within a particular genre to give the writing more power by referring to previous works written in that genre.

Thus, as I mentioned before, in romance, a resonator might be the word “grey,” as in “Heathcliff’s grey eyes bored into hers, stripping her naked and piercing her soul.” But a resonator may also be a word that carries strong resonance with real-life experience. For example, everyone who goes to a school might feel a sense of nostalgia when one mentions the “silent halls rich with the scent of layers upon layers of wax that have hardened for eons upon the floor.”

Some words that resonate arouse a sense of danger in a reader—words like “smothering,” “blood,” and “cold,” while others help awaken some other profound emotion. In some books, a particular thing or person may gain resonance with the reader when it is used as a symbol for other things.

Here’s an exercise on using resonators. In the following opening paragraphs from my novel Wizardborn, consider the nouns, adjectives, verbs and adverbs and then see which ones you think have resonance—either by harking back to the fantasy genre, to real life, or by creating a sense of danger. Circle the resonators that you see.

Stars blazed in a cold blank sky, as if intent on igniting heaven. Raj Ahten raced in the Hest Mountains above Mystarria, sweat drenching him, his blood crusting from wounds at his knee and chest. His shirt of black scale mail, torn from battle, rang like shackles with every step.

The trail twisted over the torturous ridges and through the crevasses, curling among black pines that struggled up to bristle like spears through rock and a thin crust of snow.

It was a bitter night, and though he detected no foes, Raj Ahten clung to his war hammer. After the rout at Castle Carris, reavers had fled blindly in every direction. Twice Raj Ahten had stumbled upon the monsters in the wood and brought them down.

Wolves howled in the shadowed pines. They’d caught his blood-scent, and now loped behind, trying to match his pace. Raj Ahten could smell his own vital juices, cloying amid the competing scents of snow, ice, stone, and pine.

2. Don’t be afraid to overwrite in your first draft

(you can always delete the excess).

3. Using precise language is essential.

That means that if you are describing a person, consider using his name. If you want your reader to envision a pine forest, let them know that it is a pine forest, not just a forest, lest they imagine oaks or palms.

4. Appeal to all of the senses—sight

(don’t just describe the colors of things, but also their textures),

sound, smell, taste, touch

(hot/cold/wet/dry/firmness/abrasiveness). Don’t forget the sense of passing time.

5. Remember the to be verbs

In order to avoid the use of the to be verbs, consider putting the object being described at the front of the sentence, followed by a strong verb, followed by the thing that is acted upon.

For example, rather than saying “The day was so cold that bits of ice hung in the air, driving into Theron’s face as he plunged into the storm,” you would say, “Needles of ice drove into Theron’s face as he plunged through the storm.”

You may often want to:

6. Focus tightly on your viewpoint character.

Describe the scene from his or her emotional perspective. For example, in describing a spring day for a young man who is sure that he has just fallen in love, I might describe the vivid greens, dwell on flowers, or birdsong, or the comfortable warmth. The same detail for a young man who is jilted might be described as more mocking of his situation, and we might dwell more upon the bones of leaves that lie thick beneath a maple tree rather than the purple crocuses thrusting up through them.

7. Give the object you’re describing a past, present, and future.

For example, when describing a city, you might describe in a sentence how it had begun: “The Keep at Tillock hunched on the red rocks overlooking the Rangell River, supposedly built to secure the only ford within sixty miles.” You then describe how it looks today. “It had fallen into disuse when Gaborn’s grandfather was young. . . . ” You then describe how it will look in the future. “Captain,” Gaborn warned the garrison commander, “Come week’s end your men will raise the earthen wall here on the west bank by sixteen feet . . .”

Here are some more examples of describing things in motion from My novel Wizardborn: After the storm, the small animals of the field came out to dry, as was their wont. Mice scurried to the mouths of their burrows and dared the hawks as they sat pawing the wet that clung to their fur. Their black eyes blinked against the sun; whiskers twitched as they scented the damp earth. From every thicket on the heath, from every gorse bush and from beneath the boughs of every winding oak, the birds emerged. Sparrows like windblown leaves flitted among the hedges. Black grackles strutted on the hard pan, the rising sun daubing their oiled wings with rainbow hues so that they glimmered like shards of live coal. The sodden air teemed with birdsong—whistles and trills and querulous twitters—making far more clamor than the single flight of mourning doves weaving across the sky could account for.By noon the birds would fall silent, Iome knew, but for the moment she felt persuaded to celebrate with them. Sir Borenson doffed his iron helm and rode to the orchard eagerly, thinking to fill it with fruit. From a distance, the pears at the treetops looked gravid—the sun had bronzed many and bestowed a few with gleaming flecks of gold. But as he neared he found that the orchard had fallen into disuse. Leafy branches obscured limbs heavy with deadwood. The few pears near ground were still green and hard, pitted and scarred by the high winds that pounded down from the Alcairs in early summer. And as he drew rein, he could tell that even the pears at the treetop were not enticing to anything other than a few worms that called them home. Perhaps only want had made the fruits seem large. In another two weeks, the air here would sweeten with the scent of ripening pears. Today the old orchard smelled only of leaf and wood.

8. Signal to your readers how the protagonist feels

In addition to describing how things change over time, make sure that you signal to your readers how the protagonist feels about the thing described. Please note that feelings might also be in transition.

9. Especially when you open a story, you are trying to put things in motion.

One way to do that is to describe things—even inanimate things—in motion by creating metaphors. A writer might have trees “march down out of the hills.” Buildings can “huddle” or “lunge” or “straddle.” By the same token, if you’re trying to create a sense of rest in the story, particularly near the ending, make sure that you describe your settings and even creatures and people in motion as being still. For example, a hawk can “hang in the sky.”

10. The setting must intrude in every scene.

Often, new writers create conversations where two people talk, and never give reference to anything other than their words. But a conversation can be interrupted by the sound of a dog barking, or your character might notice the smell of a nearby orange tree in blossom, or your character may be in the process of doing something, such as cleaning a weapon.

But the world must intrude into every scene, every conversation, no matter how briefly. And if the scene is fairly long, you’ll want it to intrude in a number of ways that your reader (and your characters) won’t anticipate. For example, in describing a medieval hostel, I might have such unexpected incidents as. “A mouse came racing from the pantry, past the roaring fire, chased by a yellow cat.” Or “A fat trader had stacked so much wood on the fire that the heat from it would have blistered a blacksmith; yet he thrust his wet boots next to the coals and sat there contentedly as steam curled up from his soles.”

“How do I know what I think until I see what I say?”

—E. M. Forster

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10 Career Killers

Most writers kill their own writing careers. Several people asked me to write about some of the ways they do this. So I’m going to take a moment and just mention a few career killers.

Some writers focus on appealing to the wrong crowd. Very often new writers will try to gain the approval of literary critics, writing books that become more and more obscure and difficult to read, so that the average reader ends up not liking them. They try to load their books with (often simplistic and foolish) metaphors. I call these folks the FRM crowd because they are “fraught with meaning.” Remember: critics don’t buy books. They get them for free, and their tastes are not necessarily the same as the average person.

Then again there are some writers who try too hard to write to the “common man.” They’re writing what I call LCD fiction—Lowest Common Denominator fiction. Remember, idiots won’t read your book. They won’t read any book. They’ll wait and watch the movie instead, or play videogames.

Many authors can only sing one note. In other words, they have one tale that they tell with passion, but once they write that novel, they’ve got nothing else to say. Maybe they crave to write a story about child abuse or drug addiction, but after having dealt with the topic, they can’t move on. Some of these writers get quite famous—for one book. Try to develop wide tastes and be passionate about a range of topics.

Fear kills careers. Some authors are afraid to read in public, afraid to talk to agents or editors or movie producers, afraid to travel, afraid to try new styles or learn how to write in different mediums. Such authors die a slow and strangled death.

Many authors start out strong to great reviews but decide that they don’t always have to put their best foot forward. Here’s a simple rule: Never excuse the weaknesses in your own writing. Yes, we’re all human, but when you spot a weakness, try to figure out how to eradicate it. If a fan or critic points out a weakness, don’t argue with them: thank them.

Some writers get too rich. When money does start flowing in quickly, many authors will begin socking it away, and after they have a couple million in the bank, they quit writing.

Other writers get a steady income stream and then act as if it will always be this way. Every writer, even professionals, will have up- and down-cycles. Plan on it. Don’t go out and buy your dream house on your first royalty check. You’ve heard the advice, “Don’t quit your day job.” Well, you might be wiser to quit it if your career is taking off, but consider those kinds of moves carefully. Remember: Invest. Save.

Lack of FH. Your ability to write is determined by the number of “Focus Hours” you can spend on a project. Most people can only focus for half a dozen hours per day. If you spend those hours working at a second job, you will not write. If you spend them handling family affairs, you will not write. If you spend them playing videogames or watching television or exercising or chasing folks of the opposite sex, you will not write. Your Focus Hours—should be held sacred. You focus on your writing and do other things on the side. Don’t spend all of your FH promoting your work. Watch out for fans or business acquaintances who will waste your time.

Poor career management. Very few writers get any career advice or support from their agents or editors. We’re left to flounder on our own. You need to constantly keep your eyes and ears open and learn how to manage your career better—even before you ever begin your career. So many new authors are like athletes who are all geared up to run the race, but they stumble at the starting block. Sometimes they stumble so hard that they end up on the ground looking like roadkill. In short, you need to figure out which books to write, when to write them, and how to market them effectively. You may need to learn to write screenplays or turn your book into a videogame. Authors who sit back and expect their publishers to make them rich are fools. Even if it works for them (and sometimes it does), they’re being foolish.

Poor personal skills. I’ve known a couple of authors who were so bad at interpersonal skills, their agents “fired” them or their editors couldn’t figure out how to work with them. As an author, we need to learn to play well with others. That doesn’t mean that you always demand your way, nor do you always give others exactly what they ask for. You need to learn to negotiate nicely, to play fair, and to avoid burning bridges. Create opportunities, not obstacles.

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Sign-ups for my online classes, the Advanced Story Puzzle and Writing Enchanting Prose, are now available at MyStoryDoctor.com. Both classes are $449 each and include weekly conference calls and I will also be giving feedback on your writing. Classes start August 24th which is also the last day to register. Each course will run for 10 weeks.

Craft compelling narratives with ease in our 100-day writing adventure! Click now to unlock your FREE copy of ‘Daily Meditations: Writer’s Tips for 100 Days’ at Apex.com

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Aim for Profundity

For some authors, it is enough to try to make big bucks, but most of us would like to deliver a powerful message at times, too—something that carries extra meaning in our lives, something profound.

Doctors studying the neuro-science of storytelling go so far as to suggest that a story doesn’t really work unless it also surprises and educates the audience. This is something that I noted years ago while judging Writers of the Future. I would sometimes find a story that was gorgeously written but which didn’t touch upon topics that had meaning in the real world. I would send them in to the judges to see what they thought, and every single time, the gorgeously written story would lose to other stories that weren’t written as well but which had greater depth.

So how do you write a story that is profound? Here are a few things to think about.

1. Does the story present a theme? In other words, does it touch on topics that people deal with on a regular basis and argue about?

Those gorgeously written stories that I mentioned will often have intriguing characters, fantastic settings, and powerful prose, but in the end, the story feels as if it is weighed down by theatrics, lacking a heart and soul.

In the great stories that we read, we begin them thinking that the story is about someone else. But through the course of the story, we become personally involved. On a subconscious level, we actually live through the story.

When we reach a point where the theme touches on aspects of our own lives, intersects with our own concerns and experience, that’s where the story takes on import for us. It becomes meat, food for the soul. We realize, it’s about us, on some level.

2. Does the story present a viewpoint that the reader hasn’t considered before?

Very often, observations that seem mundane to one reader will feel profound to another. Profundity is measured on a sliding scale. In other words, a story isn’t profound to everyone at the same level.

For example, I went to see the movie War Room at a church social last night. It presented the argument that “When you can’t solve a problem, pray.” I’m sure that to a person who hasn’t heard that message before, it might seem profound and life-changing. But to others who are deeply religious, it might seem a bit ho-hum.

In particular, young readers can often be touched deeply by stories that older readers dismiss, simply because the younger reader doesn’t have a wealth of life experience to draw upon. Thus, the themes in Harry Potter (on how to find a friend, keep a friend, and how friendships deepen) might seem a bit trivial to an adult, but be deeply nourishing for a child.

3. Does the tale present an actual argument, thoughtfully taking into account opposite points of view?

Very often, writers who are eager to push a certain agenda will not be aware that they’re being dogmatic. They’ll present an idea as incontrovertible truth, when in fact there are good arguments both for and against it.

For example, what if you wrote a book in favor of gun control? You know what I mean: if we only took guns away from everyone in the US, we wouldn’t have so many killings. You’d be right, of course—in your dreams. I could present arguments for the pros and cons for hours, and I know gun-rights advocates who would tear your half-baked tale to shreds.

4. Does the tale offer an ingenious solution?

An ingenious solution to a problem isn’t just one that the average person hasn’t considered, it’s one that no one has considered. Stories that are profound come from writers who think outside the box. Sometimes, the ideas are completely innovative, and maybe even seem to defy logic.

5. Does the plot of the tale that you are telling seem to validate your resolution?

In Dicken’s classic tale A Christmas Carol, he proposes that Mr. Scrooge can only attain true happiness by sharing his worldly goods. Mr. Scrooge himself, the old curmudgeon, voices his own arguments against this notion eloquently at the start of the story but then undergoes an education of the heart, mentored by three spirits. The tale unfolds powerfully, and Scrooge’s experiences seem to “prove” the point that Dickens is making. But imagine for a moment that Scrooge didn’t have a change of heart at the end. Imagine that he woke up on Christmas morning, considered helping others, but instead went to sit by a warm fire and count his stacks of gold? What if he lived “happily ever after” without effecting a change of heart. Would the story have worked as well? I think not.

In short, as we write tales, those that sell best tend to touch readers because they present real problems and explore novel solutions to them.

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Transform your storytelling journey with our 100-day adventure! Don’t miss out on your FREE access to ‘Daily Meditations: Writer’s Tips for 100 Days’ – join us at Apex.com today!”

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Accepting Responsibility for Your Writing Career

Like many of you, when I began writing I started a couple of novels but soon discovered that there was a lot more to writing than I had anticipated. I got a few chapters into each of them and had to stop for one reason only: I didn’t know what to write next.

Over the next six or seven years I began to study writing earnestly, but I only practiced on rare occasions. Everything had to be just right in order for me to work. The house had to be empty. I had to be in the mood. Of course I could only write when I had the energy.

On those rare occasions when the stars aligned, I would crank away at the typewriter.

But one day a realization came to me. As a new writer, someone who was unpublished, no one gave a hoot if I ever wrote another word. My parents kept hoping that I would study medicine or business. I had no wife, girlfriend, or writing group to spur me on. So if I failed to write, no one noticed.

Many of you are in that same position. You may have something to say to the world. You may hope for acclaim. You might only wish to tell stories.

But if you don’t write, the world will never know what you might have done.

I realized back then that I had to take complete responsibility for my writing.

I had to set up times to write. I needed to make sure that I stayed on task.

I hoped that someday I would get fan mail from readers who would be eager for my next book, and maybe that would help inspire me, but I knew that that day would never come unless I practiced my craft, all alone, with no audience but me.

Over the past few years, that realization has grown. And you don’t have to just write the novels, you have to sell them.

Your publisher cares whether you sell, of course, but not nearly as much as you do. It’s like horse racing, where you’ve only got one little horse. The publisher might be backing you, but he’s got dozens of horses all in the same race.

His chances of winning are excellent.

So we have to take responsibility for our writing—not just for writing our own novels, but for editing them, writing the blurbs that sell them, getting cover quotes, and marketing them both in person and on the web.

Yes, agents and editors may help, but ultimately we must be responsible. Writing a book is only part of the job. It may take a couple of months. But promoting a book well can require years.

***

Check out this article: 5 Epic Fantasy Series that Could Replace Game of Thrones. My Runelords series came in at #4.

***

Transform the way you craft stories with our 100-day writing adventure! Don’t miss out on your FREE access to ‘Daily Meditations: Writer’s Tips for 100 Days.’ Click now!

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A Question of Balance

How do you develop as a writer? It requires a balance of study and practice.

As a new writer, I heard that the average writer took seven years to go from being a novice to professional. I wondered if I could speed up the process. So I set a goal to begin making money within one year. To that end, I began to study (taking classes in college, reading books, and reading the works of other authors) on a daily basis. I also set goals for writing—finishing short stories, poems, and working on novel chapters on a weekly basis.

At the end of a year, not only was I making money as a writer, I had won several awards and landed multiple novel contracts. I’m convinced that if you’re dedicated, you can do the same.

Some writers, if given the choice, will study endlessly. I know authors who will read books on writing, go to workshops, listen to others, read the latest works, and hobnob at writing groups—but they don’t actually write.

Some of them have been studying for years but have never completed a novel, a short story, or even a poem. Are they really writers? Are they getting ahead? That’s debatable. They might be able to speak on panels at conventions loquaciously, but they’re not proving that they understand the process by doing it.

I was in one writing workshop years ago with my old friend Dean Wesley Smith. Dean was the “leader” of the workshop, and everyone there understood that they participated at his pleasure. So I was surprised one day when he pointed out people in the workshop—over half of the participants—and said, “You, you, you and you. . . haven’t written a story in three years. You’re all out of this workshop. Go ahead and leave now, and we’ll talk about letting you in when you’re writing again.” By doing that, he cut, as I recall, some twenty people from the crowded workshop. It was exactly what needed to be done.

Other authors will write extensively, practicing the craft out of the love of it, but they refuse to study, refuse to learn to do better. They become locked into bad habits. As a child, we used to say, “Practice makes perfect.” But children in school now wisely tell you, “No! Perfect practice makes perfect.”

In other words, you have to study other authors, you have to keep aware of emerging markets and business practices, you have to learn what you need to know in order to up your game, AND, you need to write.

So ask yourself: “Am I out of balance?” Do I need to “apply butt to chair,” as Heinlein put it, and practice more? Or do I need to actually study more?

For many authors, it might be a combination of both. You may just have to put your writing career on the back burner while you study your craft more. Or, you may have to set aside your incessant study and write for a change. Whatever you do, anything is better than nothing.

So here’s your challenge for today. Do what you need to do, whether you need to study more, practice more, or both. Then, do it again tomorrow.

Craft compelling narratives with ease in our 100-day writing adventure! Click now to unlock your FREE copy of ‘Daily Meditations: Writer’s Tips for 100 Days’ at Apex.com

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Avoiding Terrible Advice

There’s a lot of bad advice floating around out there. Some of it is bad for everyone, but some of it might just be bad for you.

For example, here’s some terrible advice. “Write the kind of novel that you love. Don’t worry about anyone else’s hopes or dreams or expectations. You’re not them. You can only write what you love.”

Now, on the surface, there is some decent logic here, but this piece of advice was given to me by a writing instructor years ago, and it sounded to me sort of like “making love” when you’re the only person in the room. By following it, writing became all about self-gratification.

It seemed to me that you ought to take your audience into account—specifically your paying customers. Shouldn’t you pay attention to their wants and needs, too?

On reflection, I realized that my writing instructor—wise and kind as she was—was not a working writer. In fact, she had never submitted a short story to a publisher. She’d never written a novel. And when it came to advice on lovemaking, I realize now that she wasn’t even married.

So here is my first piece of advice: consider the source of your information. A few years ago I was with some other bestselling writers and we realized that it was really tough for people nowadays to get advice from professional writers—ones who are making a good living at writing. So we started the Superstars Writing Seminars in order to help fulfill that need. (And now we’re in our tenth year!)

A lot of people give out bad advice by accident, but some people do it on purpose. Whenever Ernest Hemingway was asked a stupid question, he used to give outrageous answers. “How many times should I rewrite a story?” someone would ask. “I’d give it at least sixty rewrites,” he’d answer, “and make sure to let it sit for at least two years between each reading.” At that rate, it will take 120 years for you to finish a short story. Obviously, he never followed his own advice.

Other writing advice might be bad for you personally. For example, a lot of people ask, “What kind of mood music do you listen to when you write?” Now, I wrote my novel Star Wars: The Courtship of Princess Leia to the soundtrack of the original Star Wars movie, but I almost never listen to anything when I write. I listen to the voices in my own head. Gone are the days when I can listen to Ozzy Osbourne banging his head to “Iron Man” while I compose.

So you have to ask yourself, “What works for me?” If I write 20 pages a day in silence, but only get 5 pages while listening to heavy metal, then I know to turn off the music. Similarly, I don’t write late at night simply because even though I’m very productive at night, I’ve discovered that my critical sensibilities fall asleep at about 10:00 PM. Anything that I write after that tends to go into the garbage. I do better if I get up and write in the morning.

So when you hear advice from a writer, ask yourself, “Is this good advice? Does the writer know what she is talking about? Is the advice meant to be helpful, or is it mean-spirited? Would the advice work for me, or is it something that works just for that writer?”

Once you find a writing principle that works for you—one that you can depend on—treasure it!

***

There is only one day left on the Grifty Shades of Fey Kickstarter, and it needs about 30% of its money still to fund. If you’re interested in good fantasy, consider backing the project! You can back the project here.

Fyrecon

I will be teaching a master class writing workshop at Fyrecon this June in Layton, Utah. I’m also offering a special for Fyrecon. Get the Writing Enchanting Prose workshop there for only $350–a savings of $150–if you use the code: EnchantedFyre19. You can register here.

SpikeCon

I will also be teaching at SpikeCon in July 3, also in Layton, Utah. Learn more here.

Don’t forget to register for two upcoming writing workshops. Writer’s Peak July 19-20 and The Plot Thickens Master Class September 18-21. More info on MyStoryDoctor.com.

Million Dollar Outlines is $6.99 on Amazon Kindle and free with Kindle Unlimited! Learn how to outline a novel and become a best seller. The lessons taught in this book are invaluable to have. Get it here.

Transform the way you craft stories with our 100-day writing adventure! Don’t miss out on your FREE access to ‘Daily Meditations: Writer’s Tips for 100 Days.’ Click now!

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Audience Analysis Part 5

Identifying Your Book’s Target Audience

Tuesday I explained a little bit about how the term “resonance” is used in literature. In music we use it to describe how one melody draws power from what came before, and in literature we do the same.

Thus, when you read a book that affects you powerfully–whether it be Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, Shakespeare’s Macbeth, or Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, so long as you found the story to be satisfying, if you hear of another that reminds you of it, you will be more likely to buy it.

In fact, most purchases that most active readers make are based upon the fact that the book resonates with other works that they have enjoyed. The readers almost never make a conscious connection, but it is there.

As I mentioned the other day, we choose the category of fiction that we do because we are looking for a certain type of controlling emotion in our work. The word “genre” doesn’t really explain what we’re doing when we choose our fiction. Instead, the sections in the bookstores ought to be titled “Wonder, Romance, Drama, Intrigue,” and so on.

Sometimes the resonance comes in the title. For example, when I was young I mentioned that I loved the book the Swiss Family Robinson. But something bothered me about that book, even at the age of twelve. Why was a Swiss family named “Robinson”? The appendage “son” is commonly used by the English and the Danes, not the Swiss. It wasn’t until a few years later that I realized that the writer was trying to use resonance to draw upon another book about a famous castaway, Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. As what is often regarded as the first novel in the English language, reading it would have been a must for every English schoolboy in the 1800s. The name Robinson had resonance. In fact, I recently read that when Wyss wrote the book (in German), the family was not named Robinson. The title Der Schweizerische Robinson actually translates to “The Swiss Robinson,” implying that it is a Swiss “Robinson Crusoe” story. English publishers later gave the family the surname.

Sometimes the resonance that induces us to buy a book comes from the cover. My own fantasy novels have covers by Darrell Sweet. Sweet, of course, is famous for doing the covers for Terry Brooks and Robert Jordan, two of our best-sellers of all time. So when readers look at my novels, they are immediately reminded of books by those authors. Now, do I write like them? Not much. I write epic fantasy in a medieval setting, but I don’t have a lot of the Tokienesque trappings that Brooks and Jordan have. But readers who like their work are far more likely to pick up my books based upon the covers alone.

The resonance of course can relate to the major conflicts or settings in a novel. Thus we have romance readers who may like to read books set only within a certain period of the Napoleonic Wars.

Many times the resonance is based upon only a certain motif–the use of dragons or ghosts.

Maybe the story carries resonance because of its characters. Mystery writers, for example, often use the same character as a detective over and over. Thus, if you loved Sherlock Holmes in one novel, you may be eager to read about him in another. The same applies to Tarzan, Conan, and many other types of characters, though with romances, once a couple falls in love, you can’t really re-tell their love story successfully. In short, a novel or a series of novels may have what we call “internal resonance,” where parts of the story resonate with the writer’s own work.

Sometimes the resonance in a novel comes in the shared life experiences of the author and the purchaser. For example, if you’re writing romances set in New England, a reader might find your books to be more potent, simply because you’re creating fantasies in a setting that she’s familiar with.

But most of the time, as a writer, in any given paragraph you are loading your work with so much resonance, touching so many strings of human experience that it becomes difficult to untangle them all. Your readers of course are almost always unconscious of this. I’ve taught hundreds of students in various writing classes over the years, and as part of my lecture I always asked them why they think that they read the fiction stories that they do. In twenty years I have never had a student give the right answer, “Resonance.”

So I think that I should take some time to give some examples of how a great writer attracts and audience using resonance, and I’d like to use as an example J.R.R. Tolkien. There are a couple of reason why I’ll use him. First, I’m a fantasy writer who became converted to the genre by reading his work, so I’ve read him enough, and studied him enough, so that I understand what he did. Second, nearly everyone on my list that I know of is either writing fantasy or science fiction, and so you’re likely to be familiar with him.

But there is one other reason that I would like to use him as an example. A few months ago I was at a conference where a renowned writer dismissed Tolkien’s work as a “literary trick.” I’ve heard other critics occasionally take swipes at him, claiming that his work is juvenile and has little merit. Now, I’m not going to claim that he was the world’s greatest stylist, and I can certainly see weaknesses in it, but I believe that such comments are unfair.

Often when we talk about a writer who is a great stylist, we say that he has “fine literary sensibilities.” In other words, he recognizes what is good and what is bad, and writes well. Of course by saying that, it suggests that few writers have fine sensibilities. But the truth is that most of us have fine taste in given areas. Orson Scott Card has a phenomenal ear for dialogue. Another might write metaphors that leave you breathless. A third might have an unfailing sense of pacing. I have heard Steven King praised for being a modern Shakespeare when it comes to imitating the voice of the common man.

Here is the point that I’m going to make about Tolkien: when it comes to an understanding of and the use of resonance, he may not have had an equal in all of literature. He not only used resonance in all of the ways that I spoke about above–he discovered new methods that perhaps no one else had ever considered. His personal sensibilities were acutely focused on how a work resonated.

Notes: I will be speaking at Life, the Universe, and Everything Symposium at the Provo, Utah Marriott. It will be from 9 am to 5 pm on Wednesday, February 13th. Lunch is not provided. You can register here. My masterclass, “As The Plot Thickens,” will take place at the Hampton Inn in Provo, Utah from March 7-9. I only have a few seats left so click here if you would like to attend. My YouTube video issues have been solved. You can watch the first one by clicking here. Would you like the chance to win $1,000 with your writing? Do you have a friend who is an excellent photographer? Combine your talents and enter the People of Earth Contest by clicking here. You have until February 15th to enter. In January, I will be releasing my latest book, Casting Your Novel which helps with character development. I also have had my Serpent Catch series bundled which you can find by clicking on this link.

Discover a new approach to storytelling in just 100 days! Unlock your FREE copy of ‘Daily Meditations: Writer’s Tips for 100 Days’ and embark on a transformative writing journey. Click to begin!

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Analyze Your Audience Part 4

For the past few days I’ve been talking about how you can try to maximize the size of your audience for a novel. Today I’m going to give you what is probably the most important lesson that I can give to a new writer.

So let’s start talking first about the buying habits of book readers.

By far, the vast majority of people in the United States do not buy novels on a regular basis. Some people choose to go to the beach for recreation. Others go to sports events or play video games. Some take meth. Many people satisfy their craving for stories by watching an occasional movie, or sitting in front of the television. Nearly half of the people in the United States will not read a novel in the coming year–or in the next decade.

Yet every year there are a handful of novels that break out and get enormous national attention. Sometimes these books deserve such attention because they tell stories that are fresh and exciting. Sometimes they don’t deserve any attention at all, but are instead sold primarily because a huge media machine is behind them, pushing with all its might.

Often these books become such a phenomenon that even non-readers will pick them up and give them a try. The books become so popular that people talk about them everywhere, and you as a person might feel uncomfortable if you haven’t read them. You might feel . . . uncultured, left out. So you pick up a book and read it just to be part of the herd, to find out what all of the excitement is about.

Most of the time, readers who buy because they feel pressured won’t get through the first few chapters. They’ll give up.

But if the book is worthy of the hype, our readers might find themselves actually liking it. In fact, they might like it so much that they’ll go out looking for similar books, and suddenly a whole niche market is created.

This happens time and time again.

One novel that made it big in the 1880s was Treasure Island. When it came out, it inspired a huge number of imitators, and for the next fifty years a “pirate novel” genre existed. Among the pulp magazines, pirate stories became a favorite, but finally died out in the 1940s.

Treasure Island was what I call a “niche builder,” in that it paved the way for countless other books by imitators. Some of those imitators were quite good in themselves. I recall reading Swiss Family Robinson over and over as a kid, loving it, not knowing that it was written in imitation of something even better. But eventually the furor over pirate novels died down, and the pulp magazines failed.

Yet the large number of swashbuckler novels gave rise to movies that were created to feed upon the “pirate story” frenzy. Some of these are classics. The original movie of Treasure Island (the 1950 version) is a classic, but we also had movies like Mutiny on the Bounty and very often a dead genre gets new life pumped into is. Hence, the swashbuckler movies inspired a ride at Disneyland, and in turn the folks at Disney realized that it was time for another movie. Given the great characters designs created by Crash McReerie and the delightful performance of Johnny Depp, a huge new franchise was born from the ashes of the old.

A few years ago, the current hot writer was Stephenie Meyer with her Twilight series. The third novel in Stephenie’s series had an initial print run of 1 million copies–twice the number that J.K. Rowling had on her third book. And I heard people talking about her books everywhere–at grocery stores, book stores, at my barber’s. Stephenie had been one of my students at BYU and I was proud to see what she had accomplished.

In any case, I think you can begin to see what happens. A writer comes along with a vision, and people love the book and talk about it enough so that it becomes a phenomenon. Other writers–some hoping to make a few bucks and become the next big thing, others perhaps writing imitations out of pure love for the author who inspired them–go on to create new works that might vie for popularity with the original or even surpass it.

In speaking with bookstore owners, I heard over and over again that the easiest way to sell a ton of books was to write teen vampire fiction in the style of Stephenie Meyer. Dozens of writers were doing it. Of course, in all fairness, there were plenty of fine writers working the teen horror angle before it suddenly gained so much attention–but suddenly they were developing a far wider audience than ever before.

Of course, that wasn’t the first time that vampire novels had come around. Dracula has been with us for ages, and surged in popularity with Ann Rice’s engrossing books. Perhaps feeding off of that, the television show “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” became a staple for teens over twenty years ago. So it isn’t surprising that once it was taken off the air, millions of young vampire-loving fans were ready to support the Twilight series.

In fantasy, of course, this happened years ago with J.R.R. Tolkien. His Lord of the Rings trilogy gained enormous attention in the mid-60s (years after it was first printed), and from all of the attention that it got, one would think that he invented fantasy. In fact, his work had such an impact on the fantasy genre, that it is still difficult to make a living writing epic fantasy unless you place your story in a medieval setting.

I read Lord of the Rings when I was 16, back in 1973. I loved the books so much that as soon as I finished, I picked it up and read them again. About my fourth time through, I realized that there might be other books like that “out there,” and I went in search for them. It was my good fortune that a new bookstore opened in Corvallis, Oregon at that time. It was called the “Grass Roots” bookstore, and it specialized in fantasy novels, incense, and–if memory serves me correctly–bongs. That’s where I discovered writers like Ursula K. Le Guin, Patricia McKillip, Anne McCaffrey, and Fritz Leiber.

Now, when a phenomenon novel comes along, it can build a vast audience, and if enough readers feel compelled to go out looking for similar novels, and if enough writers recognize and fill that demand, a new niche market can arise seemingly overnight. Our “niche-building” novel has what we call “conversion power.” Suddenly millions of people might go out shopping for a book that makes them feel the special way that they felt when they first read Harry Potter, Twilight, Lord of the Rings, Sense and Sensibility, etc. (You fill in the blank.)

In music, when an author plays a line of music, setting up a melody or a theme, he will often use variations on that theme. Most of you, I hope, will be familiar enough with Beethoven’s Fifth that you can play it in your heads: “Da, da, da, dumm. Da, da, da, dumm. . . . ” If you listen to the symphony, you’ll see how he plays with dozens of variations, seeming to abandon the theme altogether, until suddenly he leaps back into it, playing louder and more boldly than ever. Indeed, during the repetition of those notes, there is an electric moment, almost a shocking moment, where we realize that we have come full circle.

In music, when a refrain gains power by repeating what has gone before, we say that it resonates.

With novels, most buyers will purchase a book because it resonates with some other book that they dearly loved. For example, in fantasy a young reader who first read a Tolkien novel will often look for books that are similar. He may define his tastes by saying, “I like books with dragons,” or “I like books with elves.” The reader is attempting to duplicate his experience.

As he grows more sophisticated in his tastes, begins to grow in his tastes and widen them, he begins to look for something different; he will recognize that his like more than books with dragons and elves. He might even say, “I’m tired of elves. I wonder what other cool things are out there?”

So he goes searching for something different, but not too different.

If he began with Tolkien, the chances are excellent that he will stick with medieval fantasy. He will yearn to escape to a world that made him feel the way that he did when he first visited Middle Earth.

So as writers, we find that entire “genres” or “niches” grow up around great novels, and over the years, hundreds of different types of code words and phrases begin to creep into that genre. For example, if you’re writing a romance, do you say that your hero has “gray” eyes or “grey” eyes. The answer, of course, is that he has”grey” eyes. Why? Because Jane Austen’s heroes had “grey” eyes, and thus the British spelling became preferred. It has stronger resonance with romance readers.

In the same way, we have codes that creep into fantasy fiction. I judge the Writers of the Future Contest, and every few months I will get a story that starts like this:

Joe, John, and Dave are sitting in a bar, drinking cool beers, brought to them by a big-chested waitress. They’re jawing about things. “How’s work?” Joe says. “Oh, you know, same ol’ stuff,” John says. “Say, have you seen Tina lately,” Dave asks John. This kind of thing goes on for a page or two.

Suddenly, the door to the bar bursts open, and a dwarf walks in. “Dwarf!” all three men suddenly shout, as they leap up from their stools and draw their swords.

And as a reader, you ask, “Say what? They’re drawing swords?”

Do you see what is wrong here? The author begins with a description befitting any modern-day bar from New York to Boise, Idaho. But in fantasy we have a secret language, inspired by Tolkien and others, that lets us know that we’re in a different time, a different world, where men wear swords and attack dwarves on sight.

First of all, their names can’t be Joe, John, and Dave. They have to sound like fantasy names. So let’s try Theron, Wulf, and Sir Giles.

Second, they’re sitting in an inn, not a bar.

They aren’t drinking cold beer, they’re drinking “frothy mugs of warm ale,” and instead of a big-chested waitress, the brew is offered up by a “buxom serving wench.”

When the men talk about their day, they don’t say, “How’s the boss?” Instead, one might ask, “Is Lord Hebring faring well?” And so on.

All of this prepares us for the moment when the dwarf walks in, and the three city guards suddenly draw their swords ringing from their scabbards.

The truth is that if you as an author are not aware of the conventions and vocabulary of the genre and niche that you’re trying to write in, you will fail. Your readers will feel uneasy about your work, the critics who are familiar with the genre will lambaste you, and you will fail to sell. Sometimes, authors get the wild notion that “Writing romance would be so easy,” or “If I just moonlighted by writing a fantasy novel, I could write so much better than the rest of those idiots.” But it doesn’t work that way.

You have to write in a field that you know. You have to love what you’re doing. If you don’t, the chances are almost zero that you will succeed.

Thursday I’m going to talk more on resonance. I’ve given you an overview of what it is, but you need to understand the subtler nuances of it. For example, you need to understand how Tolkien used resonance to create his own fiction–drawing not just from other great stories, but from life itself. And then I’ll show how one modern writer–Robrt Jordan–used resonance with Tolkien to become the foremost author in epic fantasy today. Only when you understand how they did it will you be able to understand how you can do it.

Note: In January, I will be releasing my latest book, Casting Your Novel which helps with character development. I also have had my Serpent Catch series bundled which you can find by clicking on this link. I will be speaking at Life, the Universe, and Everything Symposium at the Provo, Utah Marriott. It will be from 9 am to 5 pm on Wednesday, February 13th. Lunch is not provided. You can register here. Finally, would you like the chance to win $1,000 with your writing? Do you have a friend who is an excellent photographer? Combine your talents and enter the People of Earth Contest by clicking here. You have until February 15th to enter.

Ready to level up your storytelling game? Join our 100-day writing adventure today! Grab your FREE copy of ‘Daily Meditations: Writer’s Tips for 100 Days’ and ignite your creativity.

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One Reason You Might Hate “The Last Jedi”

Over the past two weeks I’ve seen a lot of people on Facebook talking about The Last Jedi, the latest release in the Star Wars saga. It seems to be a very polarizing movie. In fact, right now, Rotten Tomatoes says that it has only a 51% audience approval rating.

One of my writer friends walked out on it, an honor he had never bestowed on any other movie. My son said he couldn’t wait for it to be over and warned me against wasting my time.

Meanwhile, some other friends have talked about how much they loved it.

So, what’s going on?

Might I make a suggestion?

First, I was there on the opening weekend when Star Wars was introduced. Most people who watched it didn’t notice that Lucas had introduced some technological breakthroughs with it. For example, the movie starts with its scroll that gives us a setup of the movie, and then some very loud spaceships scream overhead. Most people who were there thought that the visuals were what drew their attention, but the truth is that we had seen big spaceships and star fields on screen years earlier in 2001: A Space Odyssey. What we had not experienced before was the sound of those spaceships flying in from behind and zooming overhead. Star Wars introduced us to Dolby Stereo surround sound in a stunning way.

So there were breakthroughs in sound, some interesting character and artistic design, and other elements that made that first movie a hit. As a teen, I watched it several times just because I loved it. Then I started watching it in order to tear it apart and study it. It was a classic hero’s journey (Lucas had taken a class with Joseph Campbell on the hero’s journey and had actually filmed his critique of the script for that first offering), and so for a teenage boy it was powerful.

But what I want to point out is this: The movie was very male-centric. Luke, Han, Chewie, and a couple of robots join forces with only one woman to fight a bunch of baddies—who are also all men.

So us guys loved the film. I was crazy about it.

But years later, when I was asked to write my own Star Wars novel (I authored Star Wars: The Courtship of Princess Leia under the name Dave Wolverton), my first question to my editor was, “Does the universe have to be so male-centric? Can I introduce a powerful new female Jedi? Can I put in more interracial characters?” The answer was no, my publishers wanted me to stick to the main heroes of the films.

So I wasn’t able to introduce any new strong female leads, but I was able to introduce a new planet to the Star Wars universe: Dathomir, a prison planet where the Empire had dumped powerful force users for generations, a planet that had a matriarchal government run by women who were sort of Darth Vader wannabes. In fact, later, the villain Darth Maul (from Episode 1) was said to be from Dathomir.

So I got to help the franchise evolve a bit, but I didn’t get to introduce the powerful female Jedi lead that I wanted.

How was my story received? A lot of people loved the novel, but I did get one fellow who panned it, claiming that I was obviously a “rabid feminist.” I actually sat down and penned a letter to him explaining that, “Yes, I am a feminist.” I told him that I had a wife, a mother, and daughters, and I hoped to see a better world for them with a brighter future. So I started trying to justify my position in a generous tone, but the more I thought about it, the angrier I got, until I finally told him to go screw himself. However, since I had been warned never to respond to critics, I decided against sending my letter. But if by chance you are reading this, you Neanderthal woman-hater, go screw yourself!

So, I was excited when in episode 7, we got to meet Rey and Finn. Finally, the Star Wars universe was opened up to women, and to people of color. Good grief, it’s about time!

But do you see what happened? The producers switched audiences on us. Those old-timers like me who loved what is now Episode IV were sort of scooted aside. Most people don’t recognize this, and don’t even want to admit it, but we tend to identify best with characters who are our own gender, age, and ethnicity. Notice that Rotten Tomatoes has a 51% approval rating on the film. There are also 51% females in the average population. I don’t think that it is an accident that I have read notes from women who say that the latest film caused tears of joy to stream from their eyes every time they saw Rey.

Now, obviously the makers of the film are trying to catch a wide audience and the approvals don’t exactly follow gender lines, but the truth is that some old-timers are losing interest.

Now, obviously an author can develop a tale that appeals to huge audiences, but it is hard to do. In fact, while I was writing some little Star Wars novels for Scholastic Books, I was asked to help pick a book that could be pushed big in the coming year. I searched through a number of properties and found one that I believed had blockbuster potential. Using some criteria that I developed, I picked a book, notified the managing editor at Scholastic, and then we had a brainstorming session on how we could best release the novel and push it big. The novel of course was Harry Potter, and it quickly became a monster IP.

The question is, can Star Wars be engineered to appeal to a wider audience, too?

Of course it can. Many of the older, primarily male fans, are worried to see it go through some growing pains, and so we’re hearing complaints.

As for me, I recognize that the films are struggling to appeal to a new generation, and I’d love to see a film that appeals to everyone.

***

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Are You Writing a Book, or a Movie?

In his book on screenwriting, George Lucas briefly discusses the difference in approach between writing a movie or a book. Since this question lies at the heart of so many problems that I see with new writers, I want to get into it a bit more deeply. As Lucas points out, with a movie, the writer stands outside of any character and watches the story unfold visually, while with a novel, the writer tells the story from the point of view of a protagonist who is himself a player in the story.

You may not see it at first, but the approaches are vastly different and cannot be easily meshed.

As a screenwriter, you are telling the story as seen from a camera. This allows the camera to focus on different characters at a moment’s notice, to view groups of people, and to emphasize the visual aspects of a tale. This approach maximizes the strengths of film as a storytelling medium.

As a novelist, you’re most likely to tell a story in a way that your audience will experience it. In other words, you will typically stick to one or two viewpoint characters. You’ll tell us how the story unfolds making sure to use all of the senses—sight, sound, smell, taste, touch—and you’ll also include the internal thoughts and feelings of your character. By doing this, you can maximize the strengths of the novel as a storytelling medium.

Of course, there are a lot of mistakes that both screenwriters and novelists can make as they get involved in writing. For example, I once read a movie script where a writer told me that a police officer has been working with his partner for five years. But nowhere on screen were we shown that or told that. It also mentioned the character’s inner thoughts in one place, and inner feelings, but failed to tell how that might be shown visually. The screenplay felt sloppy and underwritten.

The screenwriter should focus on letting the story unfold visually and verbally. Instead of writing a note telling us that “John is a farmer,” you show John working on the farm. Instead of telling us on a character sheet that John is a miser, you show John burying his pennies in the barn.

Emphasizing the visual and auditory aspects of a tale is so vital to film, that there are certain tricks that have fallen out of favor in filmmaking. For example, in most films we are not privy to what a character thinks. We rarely hear a voiceover where a character is thinking, even though the technique has worked well in many films. Producers and directors feel that the technique became worn out and cliché ages ago. But it does create a lot of other problems in filmmaking. For example, if you’re creating a big action adventure and you have four main protagonists, say an older romantic couple and a pair of kids, by choosing one person to focus on, you may be limiting the appeal of the film to a wider audience. In other words, if you’ve got a middle-aged woman who has voiceovers, then all of the focus goes to that one character, and people who might be rooting for the male protagonist or one of the children will feel a bit left out.

Similarly, novelists often have problems when they try to make their books cinematic. Usually, this is manifested by problems in viewpoint.

You see, in real life, we live from day to day lodged in our own worldview. We see the world through our eyes, smell it, taste it, think about it, and have our own emotional lens that colors our perceptions. Thus, as a person, you may feel that vanilla is the best flavor of milkshake, that only Democratic candidates make any sense, and that Ford makes the best pickups—despite any evidence to the contrary.

When writing a novel, we can replicate that natural experience more fully than one can with a movie. Thus, we can get deep into the point of view of a single protagonist and let him be the star of the story, having it unfold naturally, as it would in real life. That’s where the novelist gets his or her power as a storyteller.

But sometimes novelists try to be filmmakers. This almost always manifests itself as a problem with viewpoint. For example, a novelist might find himself jumping into the head of every character who happens to come into the story, so that the reader is unsure who the protagonists is. Or perhaps the writer will show us bits of scenes that the protagonist could never have seen. Sometimes the point of view violations are fairly minor. I often see writers say, “Darren’s brown eyes filled with glee.” That’s a viewpoint violation, albeit a minor one. Darren can’t see his own eye color. So you’re a bit restricted if you want to focus on a single point of view.

So different writing tools have evolved for different mediums. When you’re writing for any medium—whether it be novels, film, video games, plays, or whatever—you need to learn what storytelling tools are available for that medium and how to use them.

***

Online Workshops Open Tonight!

Just in time for the holidays, my online workshops are reopening–but we are taking a limited number of students. Watch for the change here.

Passionate about writing? Join the Apex Writers Group! Receive feedback, engage in challenges, access resources, and network with authors like James Dashner and Brandon Mull. Unlock your writing potential. Get a 30-day membership for just $1. Visit https://apex-writers.com/register/apex-writers-1-trial-offer/

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Appealing to the Senses, Part 2

Last week I wrote about appealing to the senses and stated that humans have more than just the five sensory inputs that you learned in school. Any time that you use a human viewpoint character as a “camera,” you need to use all of the senses, and input the character’s thoughts and feelings as well, if you really want to completely transport your reader.

But not all appeals to the senses are equal. Some are so powerful that they’re riveting, they “create” the scene. Yet others appeals are . . . worthless.

So let’s talk for a moment about “non-appeals.”

Non-appeals. The worst kind of non-appeal occurs when you simply neglect to show us something. For example, let’s say that you start a story and your character goes outside his house. You as a writer might imagine that it is dark, but you’ve never told the reader that it is night time. So when your character gets mugged and can’t describe his attacker, the reader might be confused. (This happens quite often in stories. Always let us know what the light source is in every scene.)

If your protagonist hears, sees, smells, feels, does, or thinks something, you need to let the reader know. If you don’t tell the reader directly, and it can’t be surmised by the context, then you’re not communicating.

But new writers often do worse than neglect to say it’s night time. They may withhold information for the reader on accident, but sometimes they do it on purpose.

For example, I will often see a viewpoint character who never once has a direct thought, primarily because the author is trying to withhold information. (For example, the viewpoint character is also the murderer in a mystery novel. In this case, the author is just trying to hide that by being dishonest with the reader.) Doesn’t that seem kind of strange to you when you read it? How often do you go through the day without ever having a direct thought? When I start to read such stories, I often wonder if the story is being told from the point of view of an android or perhaps a serial killer, since the author who forgets to include thoughts almost always forgets to include any emotional connections.

But I also see authors who write about characters who never smell or taste or see, etc. What am I to think of these characters? For example, I recently read a story by an author who did a fantastic job of feeding the reader dialog, but her visual descriptions were so weak, they could have just as well been thrown out.

Each of us as writers processes information differently. In this case, the author was a strong “audio” writer, but she was a weak visual writer. Odds are, she learns by hearing others, not by watching what they do. So she would tell us precisely what a character said, for example, and describe their tone, but would not give us visual clues to their body language.

On the other hand, a strongly visual writer might describe expressions beautifully, but might forget to describe characters’ voices and tone.

You can discover your own strengths and weaknesses as a writer simply by reading twenty pages of your work and looking at how often you appeal to various senses. If you find that you aren’t appealing to touch in twenty pages, then you know that it’s something you need to work on.

So simply forgetting to “show” appeals is one kind of non-appeal.

But a “non-appeal” can also occur if you use vague language. You’ve heard the age-old writing advice to “Show, don’t tell.”

When you “tell” a reader something, very often the information is so vague as to be confusing or worthless. Let’s take a common one. Let’s say that you tell us, “Marie was beautiful.”

What the hell does that mean?

When you think of a beautiful woman, what do you think of? As a reader trying to decipher your signals, I have to imagine “beautiful.” Okay, maybe I’ll guess that she’s blonde, green-eyed, five-foot-8, age 27 with an ample chest and shapely curves, sort of a Marilyn Monroe. But perhaps as I read on, I discover that what the author really means is that Marie is a beautiful woman because she has a wonderfully sweet disposition. She’s generous and looks for good in others. I didn’t realize that she was forty-six, red-headed, and slightly plump, but the truth is that the writer who simply tells us that someone is beautiful will almost always forget to describe the character in any further detail. The character probably hasn’t come to life in the writer’s mind, and thus is more of a placeholder in the story.

And so you get sentences like, “Senator John Glade came in and shook Jack’s hand.” Well, as readers we might not know a thing about John Glade except that he is a senator, and for some situations, that might be all that the reader needs to know. But if we want John Glade to come alive, we need to know an awful lot more about him. We need to hear his voice, see his face and clothes, smell his cologne, feel his grip, and so on. For a story to work, we might need to know that the viewpoint character mistrusts him for being a Libertarian, and we might need to know that the MC is thinking about breaking John’s scrawny neck.

Why do non-appeals get made? It’s because the writer is so preoccupied with writing quickly that he or she doesn’t write well. He’s like a television station transmitting a weak and faulty signal, and the reader has to try to peer at the screen and get clues through the static as to what is going on. I remember being a kid who lived out in the country, and very often if the signals were weak, all that I could pick up on the television was a ghostly image of a character, and I’d sometimes play a game of trying to figure out what was going on. That’s what reading a story by an author who doesn’t know how to write appeals is like.

But a non-appeal is sometimes made when the writer makes broad generalizations. For example, when you say that “the weather was inclement,” I have no idea what you mean. Does that mean that there is four feet of snow outside, or that a windstorm is kicking up, or that a drought is on? In the same way, if you say, “he ran through the woods,” what am I supposed to envision? Being born in Oregon, I might imagine that “he,” whoever that is, is running through a stand of Douglas firs. But maybe you as the writer are from New England, and you’re thinking more of maples, or you’re from Utah, and you’re imagining a stand of aspens in the high mountains. Imprecision leads to reader confusion.

So in order to learn to appeal to readers, you must first learn to appeal to all of the senses, as mentioned in last week’s article. This means that on every two or three pages you describe characters in motion (kinetics), sound, sight, smell, taste, touch, emotional feelings, and thoughts. If you don’t, you will fail to connect to your readers.

Not only must you make appeals, you want to be so specific in those appeals that the reader clearly can imagine himself or herself acting in the place of the main character.

In part three of this series, I will talk about how to take weak appeals and make them stronger.

***

My assistant’s in-law, Alex, has been suffering a debilitating migraine since October. She was forced to leave work and has spent several thousands of dollars paying for MRIs, CT-Scans, Neurologists, Chiropractors and more. Like many artists, she has no insurance. She needs further treatment and has started a GoFundMe to get the money necessary to get her life back.

Any donation amount is appreciated, and for any donation over $10, she’ll send you an original art piece (she was a part-time artist before the migraine and holds an art degree). If you cannot donate, any sharing or liking on social media for more exposure would be greatly appreciated.

***

We have a new live workshop listed: David Farland’s Advanced Intensive Workshop will be happening November 6th – 10th in St. George, Utah.

Transform the way you craft stories with our 100-day writing adventure! Don’t miss out on your FREE access to ‘Daily Meditations: Writer’s Tips for 100 Days.’ Click now!

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Appealing to the Senses, Part 2

But not all appeals to the senses are equal. Some are so powerful that they’re riveting, they “create” the scene. Yet others appeals are . . . worthless.

So let’s talk for a moment about “non-appeals.”

But new writers often do worse than neglect to say it’s night time. They may withhold information for the reader on accident, but sometimes they do it on purpose.

On the other hand, a strongly visual writer might describe expressions beautifully, but might forget to describe characters’ voices and tone.

So simply forgetting to “show” appeals is one kind of non-appeal.

But a “non-appeal” can also occur if you use vague language. You’ve heard the age-old writing advice to “Show, don’t tell.”

When you “tell” a reader something, very often the information is so vague as to be confusing or worthless. Let’s take a common one. Let’s say that you tell us, “Marie was beautiful.”

What the hell does that mean?

Not only must you make appeals, you want to be so specific in those appeals that the reader clearly can imagine himself or herself acting in the place of the main character.

In part three of this series, I will talk about how to take weak appeals and make them stronger.

***

We have a new live workshop listed: David Farland’s Advanced Intensive Workshop will be happening November 6th – 10th in St. George, Utah.

Transform the way you craft stories with our 100-day writing adventure! Don’t miss out on your FREE access to ‘Daily Meditations: Writer’s Tips for 100 Days.’ Click now!

#writing help #writing tips #writing tips and tricks #writing groups #writing advice

Appealing to the Senses

Most writers don’t know how to write prose that entangles a reader’s imagination.

Envision a reader picking up your novel. As she begins to read, she hopes to be transported into a story, one that is rich and detailed, one that takes her away from her own place and time. Now, as she reads, she may be sitting in her living room, while a turkey bakes in the oven and a fan rotates overhead. She may have been worrying about her sister’s sick dog, and perhaps a sore throat.

If you want to move her out of that chair and into your fictive universe, you need to consciously replace what she is thinking, seeing, hearing, smelling, and feeling.

You see, as you describe a character running, and the reader imagines herself running, the better you describe the action, the more strongly you will appeal to her kinetic sensibilities. If you create a sound, it will replace the whispering fan. If you depict a powerful scene, she will see it in her mind instead of the book in her hand, and so on.

Each time that you make a conscious “appeal” to her senses, you ease her out of her chair and into your fictive universe—until she reaches a point where she is no longer conscious of her real body. You can literally “hypnotize” your reader into forgetting where she is and what she is doing, to the point that the book she’s reading feels more “real” than reality until you transport your reader into your fictive universe.

In order to do this, you have to be conscious of the “appeals” that you are making. Here are the appeals that you should be making in every scene.

Kinetic. If you appeal strongly enough to her sense of motion, for example by having your protagonist crawl through a barbed-wire fence, then your reader will forget that she is just sitting.

Audio. When you create sound, for example through dialog or by giving sound effects, your reader will imagine those, and thus replace the noise in a room.

Visual. By describing what a protagonist sees, the reader can envision a scene.

Smell. Scent can be a powerful appeal.

Those are the major ones that I worry about, but in each scene, you also need to remember that your reader has more than just those four major senses. Here are some other appeals that you need to make:

Taste. If your character is eating something, describe the taste.

Touch. We feel various things when we touch them—hot, cold; wet, dry; rough, smooth, and so on. But we don’t just feel with our fingers. Our entire body receives this kind of input.

Many writers understand the importance of appealing to the five senses. I’ve just given you six senses that you need to appeal to. But wait, there’s more!

Emotion. Your reader has a certain emotional state when she’s reading. You want to replace those emotions with your protagonist’s emotions. If your protagonist is afraid, for example, your reader should begin to sense it. If she’s feeling romantic, you want your reader to feel that. So you appeal to emotions. But the story itself will have its own emotional appeals—things like wonder, humor, horror, and so on. So we aren’t just trying to create simple emotions, we’re actually creating a complex stew of them.

Logic. Your reader has a running dialog going on in her head as she lives through her day. By having your protagonist think, the protagonist’s thoughts can direct the reader’s thoughts.

Ambitions. Every person has ambitions, goals, and dreams. If your main character’s hopes are properly laid out, they can supplant your reader’s goals.

Time. Your reader has an internal clock and may have a list of things to do. But as you tell your story, your protagonist will have his or her own important list.

Stress. Your reader has his or her own stresses and concerns, things that she worries about. But your characters have their own worries. As your reader begins to live through your fictive dream, she will take on the protagonist’s concerns.

Now, can you see how your story can transport your reader into another time and place as you consciously use “appeals” to various senses? It really is pretty easy for an author to take control of a reader’s mind. Why? Because the reader is actually eager to give control. That’s why she’s reading in the first place. She gives you control of her imagination, and you as an author have promised to take her through a worthwhile fictive dream.

If you neglect to use the proper appeals, then it becomes more and more difficult for the reader to engage in your shared dream. So the dream only becomes real if you use enough appeals.

But not all “appeals” are equal. No, some are far stronger than others. A good metaphor, for example, can describe something more accurately than a mere word. In fact, sometimes writers think that they are appealing to the reader’s sense, but aren’t really. Writers are often too vague. For example, if I say, “Sharon looked deep into Roger’s eyes,” what does that mean to the reader? Will she actually be able to imagine Roger’s eyes? Not unless she knows his eye color, and probably his hair color, his facial shape, and so on. There’s a lot that goes into creating an appeal that works.

***

What the Apex Writers are up to

Best selling author and Apex writer Wulf Moon’s “Super-Duper Moongirl and the Amazing Moon Dawdler” won Best Science Fiction and Fantasy Short Story of 2019 and many SFWA members placed it on this year’s Nebula Recommended Reading List. The Nebula nomination voting ends February 15th, I believe, so give “Moongirl” some love.

Apex writer Jenna Eatough has a story in the anthology A Mighty Fortess which released on February 18th. Also, in the anthology are Apex members Jay Barnson and Nathanial Givens.

Right now the Kindle version is available for pre-order: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0844MVZ94/ref=nav_timeline_asin?_encoding=UTF8&psc

Runelord’s Board Game

If you or someone you know loves to play board games, then I’ve got excellent news! I’ve been collaborating with Red Djinn Productions to create a board game based on my best selling fantasy series The Runelords. It is now available for backing on Kickstarter and it looks amazing! You can back it here: bit.ly/therunelords.

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Creating the Perfect Cast

I’m putting on a workshop called “Creating the Perfect Cast.”

This workshop will be held from Thursday, Feb 27 through Saturday Feb 29, 2020 in Provo, Utah. Check it out here: http://mystorydoctor.com/live-workshops-2/

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Transform the way you craft stories with our 100-day writing adventure! Don't miss out on your FREE access to 'Daily Meditations: Writer's Tips for 100 Days.' Click now!

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Analyze Your Audience Part 3

I mentioned in yesterday’s post three elements common to all of the bestselling movies and books of all time–the fact that ALL of them are set in another time and place, nearly all of them are aimed at a broad audience (the only exception in film being The Godfather, which was aimed at a primarily male adult audience (though television ads featured the wedding scenes, which lured women in, too), and all of the bestsellers also register high on the emotional Richter scale.

There is nothing wrong in trying to write novels that don’t adhere to this formula. You can do just fine writing mysteries set in the present day that feature an old woman as a protagonist, for example. There’s nothing set in stone that says that you have to set your books in another time and place in order to sell. You can also decide that you’re only interested in writing to teens and make a living, rather than have a broad audience.

But here’s something interesting: you might be able to ignore the advice on setting and on targeting a wide audience, but you can’t ignore one thing: you still have to score high on the emotional Richter scale if you want to attract attention and make a living. Some authors will say, “Well I don’t want to appeal to my readers’ emotions, I want to appeal to their intellect.” But when you appeal to a reader’s intellect–when you surprise them with insights, or make them feel as if their head will explode from a revelation, or when you twist your story in dizzying directions that they’d never imagined–your intellectual insights invariably lead to powerful emotional responses.

On Tuesday, I’m going to explain in far greater detail why people choose to read the books that they read.

Note: Fyrecon is attempting to get a grant. All you have to do is click the “like” button after clicking on this link. In January, I will be releasing my latest book, Casting Your Novel which helps with character development. I also have had my Serpent Catch series bundled which you can find by clicking on this link. I am also going to be doing YouTube videos from now on with writing tips. You can view my first one here.

Ready to level up your storytelling game? Join our 100-day writing adventure today! Grab your FREE copy of ‘Daily Meditations: Writer’s Tips for 100 Days’ and ignite your creativity.

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Analyze Your Audience Part 2

I took a lot of writing classes in college, and I think that in just about every one that I took, the professor pointed out that the world is made up of both men and women, but beginning writers typically only write stories for people of their own sex. That’s because they are used to reading stories primarily about people of their own sex.

But think about it: why would you want write to a small audience?

Currently the earth has seven billion, five hundred and thirty million people in it. Of those people, over half are women.

It only makes economic sense that if you could capture readers of both sexes, you would more than double your income.

Of course, not all authors want to capture readers of both sexes. There are men who are only interested in writing for other men. Women are too hard to understand, and as authors we’re afraid that we won’t be able to write about them convincingly. The same goes for women. Some women don’t feel that they can write stories that will engage men.

So we tend to write stories about people who are of our same sex, and roughly our same age.

Some authors take it much further. I happen to be a Mormon. I know lots of Mormons who are so deeply rooted in their own culture, that they couldn’t write authentically about someone who was an atheist, a Catholic, or a Muslim. So these authors tend to write for the five million people who belong to their church. But with such a small audience to draw from, very few of them can make a living.

And that’s the crux of the problem: the smaller the audience you write for, the tougher it is to support your writing habit. You want to write a novel that could only really be appreciated by Texans, you’ve got a fairly small audience. You want to narrow it further and say it’s just for men. The audience gets smaller still. You want to decide that it’s only for men who like polyester, and it shrinks farther.

So I suggest that you look for ways to expand your audience rather than minimize it. Here are a couple of authors who did just that. Let’s take J. K. Rowling first.

In chapter 1 of Harry Potter, if I recall correctly, three people gather together to leave a child on the doorstep of a muggle family. One is the aging headmaster of a school for wizards. The second is a woman of similar age, and the third is middle-aged giant. Though young Harry Potter himself is only a babe, he takes the center stage not because he’s the viewpoint character, but because a) he’s the one that the others are talking about, b) he is so powerful even as a baby, that he has just killed a Dark Lord.

Do you see what Rowling has done? She has inhabited her scene with people of diverse backgrounds, from newborn babes to graybeards, both male and female. The group is small enough to be intimate, large enough to give us diversity.

She then continues with this throughout the books. Harry grows up in a nasty household, is rescued by wizards, and soon meets a nice cast of friends and enemies–once again of varying ages and sexes.

The reason for this should be obvious, but in case it is not, here it goes: The easiest way to engage a member of a particular demographic is to write about a character that the reader can develop a rooting interest in, and the easiest way to gain rooting interest is to show that this person is somehow like the reader.

In short, we almost always grow attached to people who are like us. Women tend to feel more strongly for other women–women who are their age or slightly younger. It’s easier to empathize with such characters. And of course men tend to empathize with other men.

Not only that, we tend to empathize with people of our own nationality. Once again, Rowling populates her story with people from diverse cultures, having tournaments where the English battle competitors from other nations. You’ll meet people from Ireland, France, Soviet Bloc countries, Asia, and India in her stories.

In short, as an author she learned early on to try to capture wide demographics–both male and female, old and young.

Here’s another writer who learned to maximize his audience: James Cameron. I recall back in 1997 watching the movie Titanic for the first time. Cameron doesn’t cater particularly to children, but he did do something interesting. In populating his ship, he shows immigrants crossing the oceans from dozens of nations–France, Spain, Germany, Italy, India, China, and so on. He makes it a massive multicultural event. As an English speaker, you might not notice what he did. After all, each of these families that are shown get only a few seconds of screen time. Sometimes, they are simply heard and seen in passing. Yet we see them, we hear them, and their stories get woven into the fabric of a greater tale.

As I watched what Cameron did, I was impressed at how gracefully he braided these stories together. I recall thinking, “He’s going to set international sales records with this. I wonder if the studios know it?” Of course, they did know it. In fact, they did something unprecedented with the movie: they released it all across the world, translated into dozens of languages, all on the same day.

The result was that Titanic doubled the sales of the next best-selling movie of all time.

It didn’t take much work on his part. He simply populated his story with people from dozens of countries. In fact, if you will sit down and watch it, you’ll note something interesting. The largest sales territories for selling movies are: the United States, England, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Japan, and Australia–pretty much in that order. If you watch the movie and count, you’ll notice that actors from all of those nations are present in the movie. In short, Cameron wove them into the film in order to guarantee good distribution in those realms.

Now, I have to admit, that I’ve sometimes done the same. I do it subtly sometimes, but I do it. If you read The Runelords, you’ll note that I have characters with English and Scottish names, mostly, but among the royalty we have people like Gaborn Val Orden–a German name–which is very important. For you see, if you look closely at the language of Mordor, the orcs speak a distinctly Germanic-sounding language, and authors who tried to imitate Tolkien used the same ploy for decades. As a result, every German who reads a fantasy novel feels somehow victimized. At some level, he must recognize that “I am the goblin.” I also use other names from various cultures–Iome, a French name, or Ahten, an Egyptian name. If you pay attention to accents and sentence structures, you’ll see that characters’ voices often hark back to their roots.

But I don’t just weave multiculturalism into a few names, I weave it into the very fabric of the story. For example, I have one powerful subplot dealing with Sir Borenson, a man whose honor is tested to the core in a very oriental way. I wrote it hoping to appeal to a Japanese and Chinese audience. Five years ago, I was invited to China to see about making the book into a movie. In that visit, I was introduced to a man named Fong Li, who is China’s foremost producer–their Steven Spielberg, so to speak. Fong Li had my screenplay translated into Chinese before my visit, and so he had a chance to read the story. When we met that morning, he politely bowed–a custom that is not commonly practiced in China anymore since the cultural revolution. As he bowed, dozens of businessmen fell back in astonishment and gasped. You see, Fong Li has a reputation for being a very proud man. When receiving China’s highest honors for artistic achievement, he refused to bow to the premiere. So the notion that this man who would bow to no one would bow to me . . . well, it dropped a few jaws.

So I asked him why he bowed to me. His answer was simple. “No Western writer has ever understood the heart of the Asian as you do. This movie will be the most popular American film ever to hit China–far bigger than Star Wars, far bigger than Jurassic Park.” I was delighted to hear it. I’d spent months studying the concepts of honor–giri and gimu–as taught by the Japanese. I quite frankly still find myself very much attracted to their code. So I was happy to see how deeply the story had touched him.

As a result of this bow, something odd happened. Within four hours, the script for the movie was rushed through China’s censorship board and approved not only for filming in China but for distribution. Normally, this process takes years. It takes two years to get a script approved for filming, and then once the film is made, it can take another nine months for approval. But based upon Fong Li’s estimation of the story, we made history. Not only was the movie approved for distribution before it was filmed, the approval process was all done before we finished lunch.

So one key to enlarging your audience is to create a diverse cast of characters, but there are other more-subtle approaches to writing for a global audience.

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