The Empty Counsel

A Splinter blog of The Empty Manuscript. Just Writing Advice and observations about Creative Writing. Treat everything piratically. It's all guidelines more than rules. Take what you want and let the rest fall behind. No one KNOWS anything. That makes this the land of the blind where only you can see your own work. That leaves you in command. TOP RECOMMENDATIONS FOR BOOKS ON HOW TO WRITE

[random-questions-fairy]

Oh my gosh. I just found this website that walks you though creating a believable society. It breaks each facet down into individual questions and makes it so simple! It seems really helpful for worldbuilding!

[theredscreech]

Heads up that this is a very extensive questionnaire and might be daunting to a lot of writers (myself included). That being said, it is also an amazing questionnaire and I will definitely be using it (or at the very least, some of it).

[heroineimages]

Bookmarking this…

[backofthebookshelf]

This inspired me to see if Patricia C. Wrede’s Worldbuilding Questions are still online, and not only are they, they’re on the exact same page I saw them on in 1998. Somewhere there’s a binder of the Word doc I made of all of them and the answers I filled in for Baby’s First Fantasy World

[azrielgreen]

The best advice i can give any creator is do it before you're good at it, do it BEFORE you're happy, do it while you suck, do it while you're doubting yourself and get stuck the fuck in, because waiting around to be "good enough" is a motherfucking trap of the highest degree. You'll get good along the way and better after ever project is complete. Remember, this is the greatest thing you've ever created, and then you'll do something else. You're only ever gonna get better, but not if you stand still.

[emptymanuscript]

W. Somerset Maugham wrote one of my favorite quotes about writing:

There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.

Part of why I love it is because I love thinking about what they would be. Sometimes I am even pretty sure that I DO know them. The problem is simply that they're not terribly satisfying. At three, it's almost the level of 'get good.' It's big enough that it's just kinda: yeah, duh.

Be clear

In general you should write a novel so that the intended audience understands at least all of what you want them to understand. Mysteries and weirdness is fine but the reader shouldn't think the character is in a cellar when you need them to know they're under the open sky. If the character's hand bursts into a swarm of horse flies for no known reason, yet, the audience needs to know that is what happened instead of asking, "huh?" because they have no clue what happened to the hand so they don't know they have to solve that mystery.

Be believable

You should use the details that will get that audience to believe what is happening in the story within the context of the story as you set it up while avoiding details that will make them disbelieve. If the story is about Superman, he can fly because the audience knows that Superman can fly. You can't just have some rando fly 3/4s of the way through a novel about a washed up golfer getting one last chance to make it big. Context does matter. But within the context, the audience has to be willing to buy what you're selling as legit.

Be interesting

And none of that will work unless you know why the audience is going to care about what is happening. Because you're going to need to sell that to them to get them to invest enough energy to try and understand and believe your writing when they can do something else easier and more fun. There is a particular thing your audience is interested in and you have to give that to them to keep them.

Bonus rule 4: don't take the concept of rules too seriously. Every "rule" exists for reasons but they're not holy writ. In fact, you should just assume that every other "rule" is more a guideline for the purposes of selling your work rather than an actual rule of how to write. They may help. They may not. It depends on what your audience will find interesting and believable. If it helps, great. If it doesn't help... well, there's also a reason that there are only three rules and they're so obnoxiously large scale. The creative art of making story is a vast and ancient space overflowing with untapped potentials. Novel publishing in English in the USA is an extremely teeny-tiny window flitting over a tiny section of that space that a few companies "know" is profitable. It's comparing the universe to a municipal water source. Both are real, true things. They're simply so vastly different that saying something about one isn't a good indication about the other.

[faelanvance]

there's this trend I see a lot in more "modern" writing styles, that I see often in fanfiction, where writers will have a character [do/think something] and then the following paragraph will go on to explain not only the character's process behind the action/thought, but the reason for said action/thought as well

and all you need is the first part. Seriously.

if you're writing the story well enough, you shouldn't need to state why a character is doing what they're doing, thinking what they're thinking.

You don't need to write: [name] said "this," feeling [this way] about [certain thing].

You can literally write: [name] said "this."

You don't have to write characters intentions explicitly, or their thought processes and opinions quite this literally. I find a lot of newer novels tend to really bloat stories this way, and we end up with doorstoppers that don't actually have much to them in the long run, most of it is an author really explicitly trying to show you [x] is my good character, [y] is my bad one, or [x] was representing this and [y] representing that. It's very heavy handed when it comes to telling, across almost every aspect of the story.

Nothing is left to interpretation (which if you're developing the characters well, the reader will come to the same conclusions as you intended anyway, just in a far more effective way.) It lacks nuance.

The story you're telling, the way you frame the scenes, the moments you choose to show - or not to show, the choice of point of view, the ways the characters respond and react and change with the plot, should enable the reader to piece together who or what the character represents, who they are, how they were feeling, for themselves, without the author needing to state it outright throughout the whole novel.

Leaving these "gaps" allows the reader room to visualize and interpret it for themselves. Don't treat your audience like they don't understand and give them stories to think about. Your characters and stories will leave much more of a distinct impression.

[emptymanuscript]

Magnetism Over Tension

One of the things you’re stuck worrying about when you’re writing any fiction longer than a paragraph or two is propelling the reader along towards the end. The most common metaphor we tend to use for this is Tension. We like Tension as a metaphor because it suggests things that are useful to achieve what we want. In the case of tension, as just one example, there is the suggestion of a straight line, so it puts in your head the idea that you don’t want to go off in a different direction or let things drag (same metaphor, you see?). But Tension isn’t the only possible or even only useful metaphor for reader propulsion. Another useful possibility is Magnetism.

Magnetism relies on the attraction of positive and negative. If you put something in a story that is too positive, your reader is going to expect something negative. If you put something too negative, your reader is going to expect the opposite. You can exploit this by putting in too much of anything. Even if it is just too much emphasis.

I recently saw this handled extremely deftly with the opening paragraph: “I’ve never been what you’d call a crying man.” Every reader who sees that placed so baldly in front knows that the whole book ahead is going to challenge that statement. The positive, the need to cry, is going to seek that sort of statement out, home right in on it. I’ve seen it handled much less deftly too. This is the same technique as, ‘had I only known what was going to happen, I would(n’t) have….’ This is, again, the negative, putting the expectation of the positive. In this case the lack of knowledge putting the pull on events. Thinking of this as magnetism tells you why that second version is less powerful. You are mentioning the negative and the positive in the same statement, diluting the amount of attracting charge. The magnetism metaphor equally implies the strength of the crying example, it’s not just negative in specific, it is a negative quality that will continuously attract, it is HOW the character is negative.

And that brings me to the next way that the metaphor of magnetism is helpful. It tells you WHY you need to have character flaws. A character is not flawed simply to be flawed or just because every person has a flaw. The flaws are your negative qualities, what will naturally attract tests and difficulties throughout your story. This suggests the connection between character and plot, the character is one charge and the plot the other, which means a story about an alcoholic challenged by issues of self control, addiction, and tragic loss is going to naturally work well where a story about an alcoholic challenged by the hordes of Mordor and a vicious curse by a necromancer is not going to work as well naturally without some non obvious machinations since that is not the obvious attracting charge to the flaw.

How about all of you out there, can you think of more benefits to the magnetism metaphor?

[emptycounsel]

A decade later I still use this metaphor.

[screenwritingtips-blog]

Screenwriting Tip #919

Repeat after me: “I will write it now. I will fix it later.”

[emptymanuscript]

Best advice. One of the things that is always sort of a shock for me dealing with The Wonder Hutch is how very different our art forms evolve in a piece. She gets to do it once and maybe correct over a small mistake if it is small enough but essentially it has to be right the first time. Me? Meh. If it’s no good, I can just fix it. Still no good? Fix it again, more this time. Still no good? Redo it again. Not that I don’t occasionally do things just once but the idea that I have to get it right the first time is just alien to me. I have a word processor, I can even drag words around to see how it reads best.

[alicevernon-deactivated20201111]

A Worryingly Useful Writing Exercise

Today, in my Transpositions workshop, we did a pretty fun exercise that you might want to try.  Basically, the theme was ‘from long to short’, where we took an existing plot and made it shorter and shorter.  In the end, we were reducing films and books into magazine headlines and then read them out for others to guess.  Here are a few of mine:

“Watch Me Use a Pronoun: Rorschach in the Hot-Seat”

“World War C-Bomb: The Typewriter is Mightier than the Gun”

“I’m Absolutely Neckered: Mina Harker Reveals All”

It’s a good way to start the creative thinking process, I think.  You’re welcome.

[emptymanuscript]

That does sound like a very useful exercise actually. I knew there was a reason I chose to do grad school in Wales XD But seriously, that’s pretty much what I’m actually doing right now with my book, I’m just being less clever and fun about it. And I have to say I adore the Dracula sum up. 

[emptymanuscript]

Time is What You Make of it

Write two short parts of something longer (though not necessarily long), two snippets. Have your first snippet be very short but depicting a fair amount of time passing, at least several hours but you can have it depict days, months, or even years. Make your second snippet at least twice as long but depicting an extremely small amount of time, no more than a minute.

[emptymanuscript]

“The frontiers of a book are never clear-cut: beyond the title, the first lines, and the last full stop, beyond its internal configuration and its autonomous form, it is caught up in a system of references to other books, other texts, other sentences: it is a node within a network. And this network of references is not the same in the case of a mathematical treatise, a textual commentary, a historical account, and an episode in a novel cycle; the unity of the book, even in the sense of a group of relations, cannot be regarded as identical in each case. The book is not simply the object that one holds in one’s hands; and it cannot remain within the little parallelepiped that contains it: its unity is variable and relative, As soon as one questions that unity, it loses its self-evidence; it indicates itself, constructs itself, only on the basis of a complex field of discourse.”

—

Michel Foucault- The Archaeology of Knowledge: And the Discourse on Language, p. 23 (via findingsherlock)

Piggybacking because this is why you, the writer, need to read the genre you are writing because you need to have some idea of the references your reader is pulling from to construct your story in their head. You also need to be aware of what you are pulling from to construct the story to make sure it is reasonable to expect your reader to be able to pull from it as well to get the idea you want. The Harry Potter books are a safe bet, Flying to Valhalla… not so much. Though all fashions are temporary, so beware of over-reliance. I used to read one person where I was always picturing with crystal clarity what he was writing but on close reading he used almost no description, until I finally figured out what I was picturing was all the sci-fi movies I had seen that were triggered by his minimal statements. But without the same sci-fi triggers, another reader wouldn’t be picturing the same thing. So definitely try to be aware of this^.

[emptymanuscript]

I Beg to Differ

Write the same event from three different first person points of view. The event should be relatively brief, no more than five minutes long. And each rendition should also be short, no more than a page. Do not make all the characters friends or even all acquaintances, at least two must be strangers to each other. Do your best not to decide on the “truth” of the event until after you have written it from all three points of view. Let each character’s description be valid even if they disagree and make sure that there is some disagreement. Only after you have written the three first person pieces, write a fourth narrative of the event in the third person. Do all four parts as quickly as possible, aiming to finish this exercise in less than forty five minutes. 

[emptycounsel]

Just ignore the forty five minute time limit. Do quick for you.

[emptymanuscript]

Hey, Look! I'm on the TV!

Write a scene where the TV is on. The TV can just be on in the background while your characters interact or they can be watching it as the focus of their attention. Have what is playing on the TV relate either emotionally, thematically, or interactively with the scene going on outside of the TV. By interactive, by the way, I mean that the the scene on the TV has appropriate dialogue for the moment or shows something that fits what is being said outside the TV as if the TV is, at least briefly, another character in the scene able to communicate. 

[misswallflower]

[emptymanuscript]

Not originally intended to be a writing prompt but it seems like it would make a good one. Write a scene in which the viewpoint character compares their companion in the scene with someone else who is not in the scene. Who is lessened by the comparison, the companion, the absent person, or the view point character themselves?

[emptymanuscript]

““Very skilled writers will sometimes use baroque prose to good effect, but even among successful literary authors, the vast majority avoid flowery writing. Writing is not like figure skating, where flashier tricks are required to move up in competition. Ornate prose is an idiosyncrasy of certain writers rather than a pinnacle all writers are working towards.””

—

How Not to Write a Novel (via fictionfiction)

Yes, really, truly, absolutely, yes. Please print and keep a copy. I have seriously been considering stopping the book I’m on just because of the sentence structure. I’m having to work three times as hard, at least, just to figure out what the author is saying, forget what they are talking about. Ugh. And, I swear, the very worst unpublished authors I read nearly always have these big purple sections of fancy sentences and big words. Shut up already! Sorry. /end rant.

[emptycounsel]

A decade later I would step quite a bit back from this.

What matters is knowing what audience you are writing for and knowing what you are selling them.

Sometimes the baroque language is the selling point. Sometimes the book is as much if not more about the poetry than it is about the plot. That's fine.

When it's not fine is when the language isn't the selling point. Then you're drawing attention to the wrong thing and driving away both the audience who won't read you and the audience who would with a better focus.

You can think of there being 6 primary categories of sell in a story. You will need all 6, at least a little, but you need to emphasize some over others. Having them all equal is competing with yourself and you end up driving away audience as above. Instead, your job is figuring out who to satisfy because different readers want different clusters.

The 6:

Character(s)

Plot

Ideas

Setting

Structure

Language

For myself, as a reader, language is very low down on my list of concerns. I'm not going to like a book where Language is the primary selling point. So I'm a terrible audience to test that sort of work on. On the other hand, Plot is very high on my list of concerns and if everything else is only halfway decent, you can sell me on just that. So I'm probably a very good audience to test that sort of work on.

The trick, for writers, is knowing which you're doing and doubling down. You pour your energy into the important elements and for your read and critique, you focus on that and ignore people like me who just won't get it. That may mean you're writing for a smaller audience but that is also alright, as long as you're doing it intentionally. But it also means anyone who is commenting toward your focus has to be taken much more seriously. Anything that suggests a problem with the focus requires intense attention.

I would still note that purple prose is quite common among amateurs who don't know what they're doing because it is an easy way to self aggrandize (look at what I can do) and hide flaws in what should actually be the focus.

Your best guide is going to be what you read. Pull down a bunch of your favorites and you'll start to see a pattern in what selling points you're buying. And those are going to be what you'll be best at selling in turn.

[turnstyle-chester-blog]

Writing Challenge: Six-Word Stories

When asked to write a full story in six words, Ernest Hemingway once responded with “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.” This story in a sentence has become somewhat of a trend now. So why not try it yourself? Try to write a story in six words. Here are some links for inspiration:

Smith Magazine Six-Word Memoirs

NPR Six-Word Memoirs

[emptymanuscript]

I seem to remember this going around before, still a good exercise though.

[emptymanuscript]

A Picture is Worth a Page

If there was an answer, he’d find it there.

-Another Place, Another Time from The Mysteries of Harris Burdick by Chris Van Allsburg.

This is another of my favorite exercises from grad school:

Write a single page from a story that is meant to have this picture accompany it. In the course of the page you must use the quote, “If there was an answer, he’d find it there.” However, this page can neither be the first nor the last page of the story. Begin the page with a sentence that has carried over from the previous page and end the page with a sentence that will carry over to the next.

When I was in grad school I got an entirely different picture and quote out of The Mysteries of Harris Burdick which is, if you are interested, a beautiful book essentially composed of writing exercises without it ever being identified as such. Just pictures, titles, and quotes for you to weave a story around. I believe there is a website somewhere entirely devoted to submissions of stories inspired by the Burdick pictures. And waiting on my shelf to be read is a published book of short stories by famous authors, each having picked a story to write in full, called The Chronicles of Harris Burdick. Which means not only can you do all these exercises you can find examples of other people doing them. 

And, again, if you do this exercise and put it up, please let me know to link to it so the rest of the class can admire it ;) Also, again, if anyone has suggestions for a direction I should go or things I should put up. I would be happy to hear them.

[beatwritersbane-deactivated2014]

Imagination and Inspiration

Imagination is the real and eternal world of which this vegetable universe is but a faint shadow.

WILLIAM BLAKE

An idea, like a ghost, must be spoken to a little before it will explain itself.

CHARLES DICKENS

If writers had to wait until their precious psyches were completely serene there wouldn’t be much writing done.

WILLIAM STYRON

I sit in the dark and wait for a little flame to appear at the end of my pencil.

BILLY COLLINS

Use your imagination. Trust me, your lives are not interesting. Don’t write them down.

W.P. KINSELLA

You get ideas from daydreaming. You get ideas from being bored. You get ideas all the time. The only difference between writers and other people is we notice when we’re doing it.

NEIL GAIMAN

You go to the attic of your mind and rummage around and find something.

MARY HIGGINS CLARK

Thinking is the enemy of creativity. It’s self-conscious, and anything self-conscious is lousy. You can’t try to do things. You simply must do things.

RAY BRADBURY

[emptymanuscript]

I like all of these together, it gives a bit of a spectrum.

[emptymanuscript]

No Time for Fun

Write a single scene that takes place in the middle of something very serious or awful or dramatic. Think of this scene as taking place between two very tense scenes but write this one for laughs. Don’t ignore the big thing hanging over your character’s heads but don’t let it overwhelm the moment either, your goal is laughter in the darkest circumstances.