Research in Fiction: The Foundation of Realism, the Structural Support for the Fantastic

When I was a junior in college, I took the "Intermediate Journalism Workshop" with Professor Ted Gup.  As a journalist, Professor Gup was renowned at the time for the release of his recent book The Book of Honor : The Secret Lives and Deaths of CIA Operatives.  More, he's released his second book, Nation of Secrets: The Threat to Democracy and the American Way of Life.  And he's received some pretty important awards for these books (including a nomination for the Pulitzer).  Clearly, working as a journalist around secrets as closely guarded as those held by the CIA, he knows his way around research.  He's probably met a roadblock or two preparing his manuscripts, making sure they have sufficient material - and evidence - for the general market.

Now, imagine a younger Ryan Edel taking Professor Gup's course.  I was an English Major by then, very excited about the prospects of becoming a fiction writer, and certainly proud of my own work.  And our first assignment sounded like cake - eight hundred words written about Cleveland's West Side Market.  And I was accustomed to writing ten or twenty pages  - I figured that 800 words would be the time to show my talent.  I even wrote over and then pared it down, cutting from 1,200 words to a magical 798.  And somewhere in there I also talked about my visit to the West Side Market.

I hope you see the problem in this approach.  Writing these 800 words for a journalism class, I approached the story not from the facts, but rather from the words.  On that trip to the market, I wasn't looking for knowledge about the market - I was looking for information for the story.  I walked around, gathering my laundry list of shops and locations, the general layout of the place, maybe a bit about the history.  The fact that my memories are pretty vague on this reveals something very important - I never actually experienced the West Side Market.

This of course became very clear when it came time to read our articles in class.  I tend to favor encouraging, positive criticism - Professor Gup favors direct criticism which is fair but very much too-the-point.  "Did you talk to anyone while you were there?" he asked.  And of course I hadn't - it never occurred to me that I should.  And even now, the thought of interviewing a living, breathing human being is rather scary.  I don't like the idea of asking personal questions, especially the awkward moments of sitting down for the express purpose of asking such questions.  But my list of shops was nothing to the history of the single stall that one of my classmates had written about.  Even now, I remember his line about "the smell of ground chuck" at the butcher shop, and then how he went on to read about the woman who had worked there for many years.  He didn't cover the entire West Side Market the way I had tried to - in 800 words, no one really can - but his article gave a name and a face to the place.  It revealed why a person would work there, how a person would find a life and a living there.  It changed the way I look at research.

Come back to the present.  Consider this idea that, as fiction writers, we must "write what we know."  And ask yourself - "What do we know?"  Me, I know about the Army and writing workshops and running.  I know a bit about books.  I can tell you what it means to be an RA, and I can talk about love and relationships and other topics I won't mention here.  But what about the weightless feeling of going into space?  Or how it feels to work under the hood a Jiffy Lube, coming home every night with the smell of oil permanently welded to one's hands?  Or how about the feeling of being ill and having no idea about treatment - maybe having tuberculosis in, say, one of those countries inhabited by two-thirds of the world's population?

Now let's say I wanted to write a story for one of these settings.  Clearly, I don't have personal experience with these situations, but I can still write about them.  Here are techniques for conducting the research necessary to do these situations justice.

1. Gain that Experience
This is very time consuming and potentially expensive, but it gives the most genuine result.  One of the reasons I joined the Army was so I could write better stories with a military theme.  Now, bear in mind that I enlisted the year after September 11th, just a few months after graduating as an English/German major with no other job prospects - there was a lot more going on than just a desire to write a better story.  But those five years in the military gave me an irreplaceable wealth of knowledge.  You can learn about claymores and RPG's and HMMWV's from books, sure, but can you also learn how to use a salute to insult an enlisted man?  Or how to say "sir" in such a way as to carry the mandatory respect while also telling an officer he's full of it?  These are aspects of the military one can only learn through direct experience, and this experience has significantly improved the realism in my stories.

(As you'll see in some of my other posts, one of my pet peeves is reading a military story that gets the basics wrong.  I'm reading a military sci fi book right now that has characters flat as posterboard, a plot thin as tissue, and language so direct that its stilted.  But the author gets the military part right - really right.  Maybe even too right, too perfect.  The book isn't that great, but it doesn't bother me as much because I buy the basic premises behind the military decisions.)

2. Interview Others - Better Still, Just Talk
I hate question-and-answer sessions unless I'm the one answering.  When you're answering, you have the power - you have the knowledge that someone else wants.  And for me, as a fiction writer, I already feel oppressed enough - my body simply isn't sturdy enough to support the dead weight of ego floating in my head.  So direct interviews are practically out.  And that's okay - tragic, but okay.  I've done a couple interviews, and I remember that I didn't like them.  More importantly, I understand why didn't like them.

Let's start with why interviews are important.  As I mentioned above, there are certain experiences that simply cannot be learned from books.  You miss the facial expressions, the tones of voice, the very subtle ways that people move their hands as they interact.  And interviews on TV don't quite provide the information you need, either - they're good, but the facts you need for your stories are very specific, and you alone will know what they are.  Unfortunately, you don't often know which facts you need until you hear the facts you're interested in.

This is where the interview comes in.  Say you're writing a story about the socioeconomic injustice of Jiffy Lube.  (Nothing against Jiffy Lube - I really like their service.  I actually take my car there for every oil change.  But for an example of some assertive interviews and a good reason for me to be wary of my favorite oil change, check out Channel 4 Takes on Jiffy Lube).  Now there are several perspectives on this - the needs of a business to thrive and prosper, the needs of those employees to keep their jobs and get paid, and the needs of customers to get their cars serviced at an affordable price.  If you really want to know what's going on, you'll want to talk with some people who work there - they are the ones who see the place day-in-and-day out.  Their lives and livelihoods depend on understanding the place and succeeding there.  They will understand the Jiffy Lube in ways that no customer or reporter will ever know.

But this isn't to say they'll want to share that knowledge.  Chances are, they won't just answer questions, especially if they don't know who you are and what you're after.  (If you look or sound like Channel 4...best of luck...)  This is where we switch to what I like to think of as the "soft" interview.  It's more of a conversation, really - just two friends, hanging out, talking about things.  Alcohol may help with this, but not in a "I'll get this person drunk so they'll talk" kind of way.  Actually, you should avoid that kind of thinking.  What we're going for here is comfort.  This is easy if you're having a conversation with a good friend or a relative, but it's hard if it's a stranger or a relative who's close enough that they worry about what your questions might mean for them.  (it would be like asking your parents about sex - probably not the best idea).

So what do you talk about during these soft interviews?  Lots of things.  You'll talk about yourself, and your new friend will talk about things you'd never think to ask about.  Conversations might slip to family, or they might slip to school, or they might slip to that topic you're really interested in.  Whatever you do, don't rush things.  Let it come naturally.  Ask questions to get your interviewee interested in the subject.  If you're ever lucky enough to talk with a former fighter pilot, for example, avoid starting out with "so what's the weight-to-thrust ratio of an F-18?"  Instead, go with the pilot's interests: "What made you want to be a fighter pilot?  How'd you like flying?  Which plane was your favorite?"  By focusing on the interests of your interviewee, you'll establish rapport and maintain they're comfort.  You send the message that the subject is less important to you than the person.  By doing this, you'll encourage your pilot to share vignettes about the pilot's locker room on the carrier, and then maybe that story about pissing off the colonel's daughter and getting a martini splashed in his face when he was actually hoping to piss off the colonel by feeding a martini to his daughter.  These stories might have nothing to with airplanes, but as you listen you'll find they have everything to do with being a fighter pilot.  (to any fighter pilots - I hope I haven't gotten things horribly wrong.  I've never had a chance to meet a fighter pilot, though I always wanted to be one).

Now you want to know how to meet all these people for your research.  The simple answer is to meet lots and lots of people - go to parties, volunteer, etc.  But this doesn't always work.  In fact, I do horribly at parties.  They're kind of like a serial interview, interviewing one person after the next after the next.  Not that I'm interviewing - it's just the stress of all the noise and people and having to "say the right things."  So I try to go out in smaller groups.  Whenever I see someone sitting alone at a party, I try to strike up conversation.  If I have nothing interesting to say, I ask a question.  It doesn't always work, but every little bit helps.

3. The Boring Part: Read.  Read a Lot.  Then Use Google.
I don't want to talk too much about this one.  It's mostly self-explanatory - read good books, find reputable websites, and learn as much as you can.  One strategy I do recommend is to do your reading before you do the writing.  Get a feel for your subject first - you'll find that research offers wonderful vignettes that find their way into your story.  For example, I'm working on a story right now that involves an electromagnetic pulse.  Now we all know from movies that EMP's wipe out cars, cell phones, and digital watches.  But would an EMP kill the brake lights in your car?  I didn't know.  But then I found this wonderful video of a guy driving a car under an EMP generator.  And yes, it killed the engine, but some of the dash lights still worked.  And, as an added bonus, I learned about why airplanes and certain kinds of research centers might (only might...still need to do more research...) be immune to the effects of EMP.  And this is very handy knowledge for when you're writing a story about advanced warfare.  Might change the plot a bit if the hero can find a drivable Mercedes parked on the street, or if he runs into the only nutcase in the state who has researched all this stuff so he could own said Mercedes...(trust me - if you have to ask, then your car would probably not survive EMP.  I checked.  If nuclear war is something you lose sleep over, then it's time to buy some beer for that interview with the local nutcase...)

So, with these tips in mind....Happy Research!
Ryan

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Marching Orders: Write the Beginning of a Novel

About a month ago, my thesis adviser gave me "marching orders" for my novel-in-progress: "I want you to write the first fifty pages," she said.  "I'd hate to have you graduate without getting that down."
What she means by "getting that down" is one of the most fundamental aspects of writing the long fiction piece: the ability to write a solid beginning.  And we know from publishing practices that the very first lines of a book manuscript can determine if that first chapter gets read by an agent, and the first three chapters can play a very, very critical role in determining whether a publisher picks up your book.  Learning to write the beginning, then, is not only a necessary skill for becoming a full-fledged writer, but also a strong economic move - and you know a writer needs every economic advantage he or she can find.
In this post, I'll talk about how to go about writing the beginning to your novel while also discussing why I'm having so much trouble writing the beginning to my own.

1. Find Your Character's Voice
The first step in writing any beginning is to determine the voice of the work.  Many writers and writing coaches present this as a kind of tactical decision - they recommend that you decide which point of view can tell your story best, and then you use that point of view to "show what you need to show."  I actually disagree with this approach - for me, the voice of the piece must be a natural extension of the work, and you won't always know that voice until you start writing.
For my own novel, I'm somewhat lucky - I have a very strong character who I've been writing about for years.  His name is Jonathan Mitchell, he's soldier (and I'm a veteran, so I can relate to his mentality), and he's fighting a bunch of aliens from the future (a very original plot, I know...).  For me, when I sit down, his voice just comes right out.  I'm very comfortable writing him.  And, unfortunately, his voice is not a storytelling voice - if he was a living, breathing person, he would never tell anyone the story that I need to turn into a novel.  He's more of the taciturn type, the "I've been there and back and there's no reason you have to share the pain, too" kind of person.
So when I refer to the voice of the work, I'm not necessarily referring to the voice of your protagonist.  In fact, it's quite possible that your main character will not even provide the primary point-of-view of the work - just think of Dr. Watson telling the adventures of Sherlock Holmes, or the narrator who relates the stories of Poe's C. Auguste Dupin.  If your story is written in third-person, you may purposely pull back from the main character at times, telling the audience what the main character is thinking (or a fact he doesn't know yet, or a perspective he's never thought of).  For me, I write the Jonathan Mitchell character from a very limited third person - we only ever see what he sees.  At the same time, though, the narrative voice is not his own voice:

He motioned with the gun and told her take a seat.  She reminded him, somewhat, of a girl he'd known in high school - short, petite, that red hair.  He had trouble thinking of her as an enemy, someone he might have to shoot or possibly even kill.  But she was Martian.  She wore their uniform, had that eternal stoned look to her eyes.  Still, when he took the seat across from her, he forgot, for a moment, the dangers.  He set the pistol on the table.  He closed his eyes.  He was tired.  He really wanted to sleep.  Only then did he jerk awake - she was already reaching for the gun.

Now, if Jonathan was going to tell us what happened, it would be a very different story:

I told her to sit down.  I shouldn't have set the gun down, but I was really tired.  If I'd been smarter I would have stayed on my feet - I should have known better than to take a seat.

Note that Jonathan's person voice is very focused on his own sense of "should have" and "shouldn't have."  He misses - or simply doesn't care about - many of the details that a reader would need in order to fully see this story.  The look of the Martians, for example - the fact that they look so human that "she reminds him of a girl he knew in high school."  He'd never let on a detail that personal, but understanding him requires that the reader sees this about him.
Now I'm not saying that the first-person perspective here is necessarily the wrong approach to this story - it would simply be different.  The tone of Jonathan's first-person narrative is somewhat reminiscent of a hard-boiled detective novel - "I should have known better than..." is the kind of line we here just before bad things go down, and the relative lack of information could be used to build some inherent tension.  But it really depends on the writer.  As a person, you'll find that you naturally gravitate to certain voices, that they resonate with you in interesting ways.  Hopefully you can do with more than one character voice - this gives you more room to experiment when it comes to Step 2 below.

2. Experiment
Honestly, this shouldn't be listed as Step 2 - it should be combined with finding the right voice above.  In order to find the right voice, you may well need to experiment a lot.  When I write stories, I often start anywhere between three and ten drafts before I find the right combination of voice and opening scene.  And sometimes these drafts are pretty long - one of my short stories (20 pages or so) was written from scratch after I cut a 33-page opening.  Those 33 pages were going great until one morning I woke up and realized "no, that's not right."
I'm relating this to you as a separate step because I really want you to give a lot of attention to experimentation.  Too often, I see classmates in workshop submit the same stories written in the same ways.  They write a story that feels "comfortable," and then they lock in that opening as if it was gospel.  I feel that this is the wrong approach.  I strongly believe in writing quickly and trying to churn out drafts as quickly as possible - it really helps you keep the creative and emotional energy flowing at full-tilt (either that or it's a sign of mania - I think the verdict's still out on that one...)  However, when you write, don't chain yourself to the comfortable.  If you wake up one morning and something doesn't feel right, feel free to rewrite.  In fact, given the choice between editing and rewriting, I believe rewriting is often a stronger way to go.  Just as master painters will sketch multiple "studies" of a subject before laying brush to canvas, so too should you write studies.  Try out rough drafts, experiment with different voices, feel free to rewrite.  What I've found is that through rewriting, I often discover a voice that I couldn't have envisioned before, a much stronger voice than you'd find in my original openings.  And when this happens, you as a writer will take a stronger interest in your own work.  The story will begin to write itself.
This said, it is possible to take experimentation too far, especially with the opening of a piece.  It's very likely I'm guilty of this.  Currently, I'm on opening draft 30-plus with this Jonathan story - that's not 30-plus pages, but rather over thirty different first pages.  Some even go up to five pages.  By the time this story really gets rolling, I may have a few hundred pages of slush taking up space on my hard drive.  (Can you imagine if I was writing this stuff out by hand?  Or on a typewriter?  I wouldn't have enough space in my apartment to store the excess pages.  I'd need a burn barrel next to the shredder just to stay sane.)
At a certain point, a story does just need to be written.  So if you do find yourself in the kind of position I'm describing, I recommend you don't follow my example.  Instead, continue to experiment with the voice of your work as you move on past Chapter One.  If your gun-toting muscle-bound marine suddenly decides to a cigar-smoking Kara Thrace in Chapter Three (see Battlestar Galactica), then just go with it - you can always rewrite Chapters One and Two later.

3. Bum to Seat - Keep Writing

 My thesis advisor's marching orders for me require fifty pages.  Now fifty pages is a good chunk of story, especially when you consider that a complete novel may be eighty to two hundred pages.  This kind of writing requires diligence - you won't write this much in just one day (trust me, I've tried.  I think I've maxed out at up to 35 pages in a single day - that's eight to eleven hours of writing in one day.  By the end of a day like that, I start to lose touch with reality.  It gets really hard to think about things like eating or going to class when you've immersed yourself in a story like that).
The goal here is to be reasonable - push yourself, write for long enough periods to let your inspiration get warmed up, but don't overdo it.  (Or if you do overdo it, treat yourself to lunch at Chipotle or something to get out of the apartment and experience this amazing thing called real people).  The main thing with writing a novel is that it requires sustained effort spread out over the course of days that stretch into months and possibly years.  We're talking about a real investment of time and energy - we're talking about the kind of labor usually reserved for a Ph.D. thesis or the architectural plans for a skyscraper.  And with that reassuring thought...

Step 4: Enjoy Yourself
I'm serious - cherish the moments you write.  If possible, steal away from things you "should" be doing to write - it adds a sense of adventure to the undertaking (especially when your landlord is pounding on the door for rent money that you won't have until you publish the bestseller that's just waiting to be written...and no, that's never happened to me, though I did once lose a job because of National Novel Writing Month - I was writing long into the night on opening day when I "should" have been studying for employment training.)
Something here I want to emphasize is that the best stories are often written without the author really knowing where they come from.  You sit at the computer or with your legal pad, and you scribble away, and sometimes a character will just jump out at you.  You keep writing to find out what this character will do next.  Pretty soon, this character's life becomes far more interesting than your own.  Or maybe this character's life is your own, and you can feel all the pain and heartache of regret just pouring out of your soul and onto the page.  These are the moments when the real writing occurs - enjoy them.  Let them happen.  Follow them wherever they take you.  Because honestly, these moments don't last forever, and they might not come every day.  So...

Step 5: Accept Disappointment, Learn from It, and Keep Writing
When I say that writing a novel may take years, this is especially true for the first one.  Something to bear in mind with this process is that novels are not necessarily written in a linear fashion.  I read somewhere that Margaret Mitchell, when she was writing Gone with the Wind, would keep each chapter in a little folder, and she'd just pull out a different chapter each day to work it and rework it.
The novel I'm currently working on is actually one I've written before - at least the main idea.  I wrote it while deployed to Afghanistan - we had no movie theaters or restaurants and only limited internet, so it was a great time for some serious writing.  So in about ten months I wrote a science fiction novel that was 190,000 words.  And I felt great - for me, it was the most amazing thing I'd ever written.  I felt for sure that I'd finally "done it" - written something that would get me noticed.
It didn't take long though before I realized that the "novel" I'd written was actually really bad.  I mean, it's so badly written that I get a vague sense of nausea every time I open it to take a look.  And I still keep a printed copy handy - it's sitting in a three-ring binder on the floor by my desk.  I tried to line-edit it soon after finishing the last chapter, and that's when I saw the real flaws - the protagonist (Jonathan) made no real decisions, much of the plot was forced, and the lines themselves were so convoluted that I had to make the pages bleed red with all the run-on sentences I needed to cut.
That was December 2005, when I finished the last chapter.  Now it's January 2010, and I'm rewriting the same story - those 190,000 words turned out to be a first draft.  Or a very long study in characterization.
As you can imagine, I was disappointed by that manuscript.  I wasn't what I had hoped for.  It wasn't even close.  Worse still, publishers rarely accept any novel over 100,000 words from a first-time writer - unless I wanted to self-publish, that manuscript wasn't making it to the bookstore shelves, let alone the bestseller lists.
But this isn't to say the story wasn't important.  In many ways, writing that long, convoluted, deus ex machina text provided a critical turning point in my writing.  It taught me a certain discipline which serves me very well now that I'm an MFA student - when I need or want a story, I can sit down and write it.  If need be, I can churn out words, pumping out those long studies in characterization.  Some of them even become full-fledged stories.  It is much, much easier to experiment when you write enough to try more than one approach to a given story.
Just as important, though, is the fact that the long work really showed me the major flaws in my writing.  In writing, the greatest disappointments often teach you the most important lessons - it's when one of your own stories really fails that you see what it takes to make the story work.  And I believe that writing a novel - any novel - is one of the best ways to learn your own writing style.  After writing a novel manuscript, you can't help but compare it to the books your read from other authors.  It makes you appreciate what the best authors do - you see the entire process of writing in a new, more refined light.

Conclusion: Go Write Your Novel
I don't believe I've made the novel sound simple, but I do hope that I've shown the benefits and sacrifices inherent in writing the longer work.
Hopefully, many of you who read this are working on or are planning on writing a novel.  Even if you aren't, though, many of the techniques described here work well for any kind of writing career.  To succeed - to write stories and poems that will be published and then loved by readers - takes a great deal of dedication.  You should enjoy it so you can love it - otherwise, you may find yourself staring at a blank screen and hating your life for years at a time.
Success in writing rarely comes overnight.  And many times, people measure success in the wrong ways.  I know that I've mentioned publishing several times in this article, but I don't want you to think that publication is the be-all and end-all of writing.  The writing you do should first be for yourself - it should represent the stories that you personally need to tell.  Only then will your stories and poems resonate with the kind of genuine truth necessary for your own satisfaction and, later, publication.
Bear in mind that every great writer starts somewhere.  Wherever you are in your writing - whether scribbling your first story into a journal this week or punching away at the keys every day in hopes of publication - you are a writer.  Whether you write for a living or simply write for your life, you are taking part in one of the most important pursuits I know - printing lives and perspectives to a more permanent record, to a literature that can be shared with readers across time and distance.  Whether your stories are read by thousands or even just by the grandchildren yet to be born, they will represent your legacy in a way possible through few other means.

Happy Writing,
Ryan

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Fiction - The Unplanned Birth

In my workshop today, one of my writers touched on the fundamental difference between fiction and nonfiction. She said that she normally writes nonfiction, and that she’s accustomed to outlines and roadmaps for her writing. But she hasn’t liked the results of her planned fiction. She found that she likes the results of her freewriting, but that the process is scary – there is no planning, and editing is needed at the end. But still, the she likes the results.

Part of the reason freewriting inspires the creative process is that it forces the mind to write automatically. The result is that the words you produce are words you’re intimately familiar with. You begin writing about your life, about the things you’ve seen in life, even if the story is not a true story. And it works. It has the feel of truth, because in a deep way the words written on autopilot are truth – your truth. The life you’ve been living.

This is the funny thing about good fiction - it can't be planned. It's as random as our lives, as constant as the stars. Certain aspects of the human experience are accepted as absolute - the need for food, for example, or the strain and exhaustion that come with stress - but the events and decisions of an individual defy outlines. It's a strange phenomenon - generally, most writers avoid crossing back-and-forth between fiction and nonfiction. Before freewriting, I tried to control my writing. I wanted to “make” it good. I believed in working hard to produce the “perfect” story. But results of controlled fiction aren't good, let alone perfect. The characters are stale, the decisions pre-planned, the conflict watered down.

Fiction is not nonfiction. How do I know? Try writing nonfiction without an outline and good sources. That's just not a good idea, not for a longer work. The reader has to believe in the work, and for nonfiction that means believable, reputable facts. And these facts have to fit together tight as a jigsaw puzzle. To make the truth coherent, you have to sit down and plan it out, piece it together, see how every isolated piece matches with every other.

It's not that fiction's any different in that regard - the "facts" must still be "right," and they must certainly "fit together," but the source of these facts is a different place entirely. Some call it the heart, some say it’s the unconscious mind, others believe it's the soul. Tapping it, though, is hard. Allowing the disorder and the chaos of the inner mind to creep out onto the page is a process all by itself. And then telling your conscious mind – the part of your brain that stops you from giving embarrassing revelations at work – to step aside? For some, it’s inconceivable. I've met people who don't believe in freewriting and won't try it - they hold on to the control they have, choking their own creativity. It's not a pretty sight - flat characters, organized plots without purpose, antagonists who don't care about anything except owning the world.

When editors look for good fiction, they aren't looking for someone who can string words together in the "correct" way. They're looking for someone who can reveal a protagonist's inner hate, someone who can show the antagonist's hidden love, a writer who makes us appreciate life in new ways. As you push forward in your writing, make sure that you are learning to write from within rather than simply pen beautiful sentences. Don’t plan your novel to death – write it. Feel it. Express it. And then later, after the words are on the page, after you’ve bled your soul through the keyboard, go back and edit. Assert the control you didn’t need before. Make sure the grammar isn’t too ugly. But don’t do this until you’re done. Don’t edit until after the last line is written. If you’re tempted to edit early, tempted to “tweak” the story a little bit, just keep one thing in mind: you can always edit grammar. You can insert and delete characters and subplots in a finished story. You can even go through and emphasize a theme that didn’t get enough “air time” in the rough draft. But no matter how much you edit, you can’t revive a story without heart.

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Setting to Illustrate Conflict and Character

I remember setting as the bread and butter of my days in Reading class. Setting was the most wonderful (and most analyzed) part of every fiction story we read. Were there trees? What did they look like? How do they make you feel?

As you move up in the writing world, so to speak, setting begins to take a back seat in writing classes. Not that good setting is easy to write, but it becomes neglected as a tool. Setting is usually the one part of any story that is most easily grasped and understood. If you read a book that has too much setting, you still know exactly what's going on in the story - you can see everything. If there isn't enough setting, then you don't see and understand the imagined world. Oh well. It wasn't a very interesting story to begin with.

So we have a dichotomy with the teaching of how to write setting. One the one hand, it's taught early because it is so "simple" to understand. As a child, I couldn't have told you the first thing about character development, but I could read a story and describe the setting. On the other hand, setting is somewhat ignored later because a story can survive without it. In my experience, workshop stories often have problems with the setting (most of my own stories have setting issues, as well), but readers don't give much feedback on how to fix those problems. Larger issues take precedence. Is the main character fully realized? Do we see the conflict in light of the protagonist's inner development? "Oh, by the way, I wasn't clear on where this story was taking place - was it in the hospital room? Okay, if you can just fix that for next time." Sometimes we hear "you know, the description of the flowers in the vase on the bedside table was a little too much exposition." Okay, too much setting, so what? Don't you want to know where the story takes place?

Fortunately, we have a yardstick to judge whether you have "too little" or "too much" or "just enough" setting. In any work of fiction, setting must contribute to the story. It can set the tone, it can establish the character's mood, it can be a part of the action, and sometimes it acts almost as a character itself. The task of the writer is to identify the role played by the setting and to ensure that the setting fulfills that role without going overboard. The best way to understand this is through example.

Tone and mood are relatively straightforward. Let's say you have a detective novel - a young girl is kidnapped and held for ransom. Is the kidnapper a terrible villain? Are the parents worried? Is there a strong possibility that the girl is already dead? You can hint at all these things through your choice of setting:

The parents, they lived up on a mansion at the edge of the bay. I drove up in the rain. All I could see through the storm was the road - the sky and water to my right merged into a wall of black, and the mountain on the left looked like it might fall in any time. Lightning flashed - suddenly I saw the house, white like a corpse in the rain. The back end was a box floating in space over the bay. I figured it was only a matter of time before the whole place slipped away into the ocean.

Dark and brooding, with rain for tears - it's blunt, and such a setting builds the expectation that something terrible has happened or will soon happen. But you can go for a more subtle effect. Say the kidnapping happens in a small town - you may want to give the impression of innocence lost:

One by one, the clowns gave out balloons - long puppets twisted into lions and parrots and puppy dogs. The cotton candy vendor smiled and pointed over to her treats - clouds of syrup sweet pink and blue and yellow waited. A hand-lettered sign with a smiley face advertised "Hot Dogs, Too!" I looked away. In the corner of her stall was the garbage stuffed to overflowing. A pile of cigarette butts had been left on the counter by the ketchup. Obviously, no one had told these people the news.

What do cigarettes have to do with kidnapping? Nothing. But through the eyes of the protagonist, they take on a new meaning. Just as people always remember the clouds at funerals and the sun at weddings, your protagonist will see the world through the lens of mood. Beware of clumsy techniques in writing - it's rarely good to simply tell the reader exactly what the protagonist feels. "I was frustrated because the girl had disappeared, and it was my watch" abuses the reader's intellect. Instead, by focusing on setting, your narrative accomplishes two tasks as once. In the example above, it's clear how the protagonist feels - the readers don't yet know that the girl is gone, but they don't need to. By withholding this information and establishing a dark tone to "the news," you build immediate suspense. As you continue to answer questions and build more suspense, you will gain the trust and more importantly the interest of your readers. If you tell your readers everything right away, then there's nothing left for them to read.

Naturally, once you've got your readers hooked in the opening lines, you need to keep their attention. Setting alone cannot do that (unless of course you're writing a pure landscape...though painters normally have better luck with that than writers). Reader interest requires action, and setting is crucial for establishing the context of events. In speculative fiction genres, setting is often half the story - what would the science fiction masterpiece be without starships and plasma cannons? How can one read a fantasy tale without magic? Some authors confuse the need for setting with an excuse for exposition. When you need setting to establish your story, incorporate it with action:

Deidre climbed faster. The ladder's narrow rungs pinched her skin and bruised her shins. She could hear them below - their voices echoed up the narrow shaft. They couldn't have been closer than twenty feet - they sounded practically on top of her. She pulled herself up too fast, and the spin of the ship knocked her into the wall. Dazed, she kept up her climb.

Compare that to the following exposition:

The decks of the ship were linked by a ladder shaft. The ladder had metal rungs, and the shaft's interior carried echoes across decks. Coriolis forces from the ship's spin prevented objects from falling in a straight down the shaft.

Both examples provide the same setting details, but the first offers excitement and danger while the second provides a description without reference. Why should the reader care that the shaft carries an echo? If the reader has no reason to care about a detail, that detail will be forgotten, even if that detail holds critical importance later (and you don't want your reader leafing back to figure out "what the heck?" after getting to the exciting part).

There is, of course, a drawback to incorporating all setting into action - a good action scene is often too quick to adequately explain the setting. Readers may become confused by the spin of the ship knocking Deidre into the wall, and breaking out of the narrative to explain Coriolis forces interrupts the action. You can use judicious exposition establish the setting you need for upcoming action scenes. Build the tone and mood of the story tone to make details memorable:

Deidre avoided the long shafts between decks. The cramped metal walls and the narrow ladder left her claustrophobic. The echoes of voices from the other decks made her imagine ghosts inhabiting the ship. Most of all, though, she didn't like the Coriolis forces, as the engineer called them. She understood how the spinning ship provided a sense of gravity, but she didn't understand why nothing could fall in a straight line. She had tried it with a quarter, dropping it down the center of the longest shaft. The quarter's ricochets off the walls had nauseated her with a sickening ping!

Finally, we come to perhaps the most complex use of setting - establishing a world or a place with the force of character. You can cheat with personification, but most readers distrust stories told with "the glowering eyes of the thunderclouds" and "the chatter of the power lines as they exchanged the gossip of electrons." When setting takes on the element of character, if must fill the duties of a character from the background - it must drive plot, is must react to events in the story, and it should give opinion of its own. And it must accomplish these tasks without a body or dialogue. To pull off this feat, you must successfully provide your setting with a believable voice of its own. The key is in the interaction between your characters and their surroundings - the reactions of the characters become the window for viewing setting's character traits:

Turtle stared up at the clouds gathering overhead. He pointed
the end of his walking stick at a funnel cloud beginning to come
down.

"You've angered the sky," he said.

John rolled his eyes. "What, you think global warming will go away all on its
own? We expected the mirror to leave a storm front."

Turtle lowered his stick, leaned his weight upon it. Through the ground, he
could feel the vibrations ofdistant lightening. It struck the Earth
harder, now, than before. Like a freight train, the sound of it
carried through rock and soil. It was only a matter of time before
this new lightening found a city for its hunger.

"Look at the bright side," John said. "All this lightning's a great source of
renewable energy."

Here, the raging storms are a reaction to something the characters have done, and we can see that John's last line ensures an ongoing conflict. Can the sky really be angry? No, of course not. But for the story, Turtle will perceive it as angry, and Turtle's reaction to this setting establishes both his and the storm's attitude.

Ultimately, mastery of setting in your writing will come down to obeying the one rule: everything in your writing must work in terms of the story. Too much setting will drown a story in detail just as easily as an undeveloped sense of place will leave the reader thirsting for context. Use the examples here as a guide, but push forward in your own direction. If you fear that you are writing too much setting, keep going - you can always edit later, and sometimes it is harder to write in new setting than it is to pare down the words already on the page. Conversely, if you fear that you are not writing enough, keep going in the direction you are on. In the first draft, you are looking for the core of your story, the essence, and sometimes an aspect like setting gets left for later as you sketch out your plot and characters. Whatever it is you are writing, write it - that alone is the only sure way to success.

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About Ryan Edel

Cheeky Characters Write Themselves

Yesterday, I had the sad job of watching a story die on the page. It shouldn’t have died, I figured – it was the prologue. It had all the elements of a good prologue – a protagonist scorned, a world of injustice, the start of a very long journey. And yet the story stopped. I made it halfway to the end of prologue and found nothing more to write. This bothered me because the novel’s already half-written. After 42,000 words of novel, what’s a few hundred words of prologue? Why would it be so hard to write a stirring introduction to a story that’s already halfway done?

The problem was expectation. As I noted in “Hit Your Muse With a Rock,” expectation can kill inspiration where it counts most – on paper. As writers, we struggle with two expectations – we expect a certain quality in our words, and we expect a certain ability in ourselves. In good writers, these expectations are not necessarily in agreement, but they are in harmony. The writer expects that he or she can write, and the words produced generally meet the expectation of decent work. But most beginning writers face the problem of low self-esteem coupled with an intense desire to write something good, to write something incredible. The low self-esteem results from lack of practice, and the desire is a natural product of Barnes and Noble. Today, we are surrounded by good books. Even the second-tier authors we rarely hear of are very good writers. As human beings, we feel that we have to match their performance in order to join their ranks.

This expectation of great work kills the creative process. It turns writers into control freaks. We spent hours mulling over the meaning of a single line, lose precious minutes trying to decide between “he said” and “said he.” The momentum of the moment stalls as the process of writing gives way to the process of frustration.

Unfortunately, lesser expectation often creates the same problem. Yesterday, my prologue had little chance of greatness. I wasn’t looking for great – I was looking for an introduction, a way to explain the character who stars in my novel. When the story stalled, I shrugged and walked away. I figured inspiration would come to me, but it didn’t. The expectation that killed this work was a desire to mold the character myself, to control the outcome of this prologue to match the novel. I had turned into a control freak of limited scope, but the effect was equally devastating – the story stopped. The words ran dry. The prologue sat unfinished.

My story needs a prologue, so I’ll start it again. But on the second try, I will remember the cardinal rule of fiction – the best protagonists write themselves.

Now, you’re wondering how I can label this the “cardinal rule.” If I had a dollar for every “first rule of writing” I’ve heard, I wouldn’t need to publish to pay the rent. But the fact is, life is about conflict. Great stories are about conflict. Readers sit riveted because they want to know what happens next, because they can’t predict from page one the outcome of page two. But if you want to keep readers in their seats through page four hundred, you must maintain the same unpredictable tension on every page of the book, whether it’s page one, two, or three-seventy-three.

There are two processes you can use to accomplish this. In the first process, you can carefully plan out a riveting story and then write it. I don’t recommend this. Very few writers can pull it off. This method fails because the inner control freak gets free reign. In the outline, every plot twist seems simply stunning. But in the manuscript, as you’re trying to foreshadow and trying to build tension and trying to insert the critical plot twist – everything just like it says on the outline – the story stagnates. It sounds dry. It’s a lot of trying and not a lot of “let’s see what happens next.”

The second process is better. Start with your character, and then write. You don’t need to know exactly where you’re going to write a good story – in many ways, it’s better if you don’t. Pick your favorite fictional protagonist – I’m fond of Jane Eyre, myself – and think about what you enjoyed about that character. Was it the way the character reacted to the world? The words the character said? The way they always managed to do the “right” thing, even if it was unexpected or simply outrageous?

Characters don’t achieve this kind of free-spirited winner-take-all success through outlines. They become flesh-and-blood heroines through their own quirks and their own ways of viewing the world. They become realistic because the author allows the character the freedom to pick what comes next. Stories are about conflict, yes, but they are most riveting when they are about personal conflict, the kind of struggle that rocks the protagonist to her bones.

The prologue I couldn’t finish failed in that regard. I inserted my protagonist, but then I withheld the conflict. I made it a secret. She didn’t know that she was walking into a trap, or that she was about to start her long journey. She had nothing to do but stand and wait.

Readers hate waiting. And it’s a dull theme to write. I grew bored, and the writing stopped. When I start again – from the beginning – the protagonist will know the conflict. She’ll know what she’s fighting for – or at least what she’s fighting against. And I’ll have an idea of what the protagonist will do, but I won’t know. That part’s up to her. As a full-grown character, she has to make decisions. She has to be an adult because that’s what readers want to see – an adult making grown-up decisions regarding her own life, regardless of how twisted the world she’s written into.

So as you go forth and write, remember to ease up on your protagonists. Allow them the freedom to make the choices that you yourself would not make. If the protagonist wants to try something outside your plans for the story, go with it. Try it out. Let the characters speak for themselves. You’ll have more fun, as will your readers.

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About Ryan Edel

Journal Your Inner Character

For fiction writers, the journal is a complicated subject. Moments spent documenting one's own life can be viewed as a selfish joy, a way of procrastinating on "serious" work for publication. It can also serve as a portal to the inner self, a way of examining the human experience. From established authors, I have heard both sides. I once knew a poet who felt that spending hours and hours on a journal was a waste of time. Another author once wrote that journaling detracted from the creative energy she needed for her fiction. On the flip side, a very literary couple I know keeps dream journals. They write down all they can remember from their dreams. They've said that at first, it's hard to remember much, but the more you access these memories and write them down the more accessible they become. It's as if you can train the mind to remember those elusive thoughts which are normally relegated to the dustbin of waking.

I'm afraid I've never tried a dream journal, and the journals that I have kept of life have never been as regular or as thorough as I would like. Before I took writing seriously, journaling was an occasional aside to myself, usually a way to gripe on paper about the girls (or lack of girls) in my life. As I became a better student of writing, it annoyed me that my journal entries were so vacuous. Occasionally I made attempts to go "in-depth" with a particular subject - a family concern, for instance, or a memory that I very much wanted to cherish dozens of years in the future.

Unfortunately, desire plays a strange game with motivation. Generally, I've found that a truly vivid memory tends to burn itself into my consciousness, and the "lesser" memories tend to drift under the surface of my waking thoughts. This sounds normal enough, at least until I go back and read the journal entries. A particularly telling article was an essay I once for the one journalism class I took. "Why I Write," it was titled - even now, I can't remember having written it. I can tell it must have been late at night, though, and under a deadline - it has the sound and feel of a journal entry. The entire article revolves around the girl I "loved" at the time, a friend of mine who lived five states away and who I mostly knew through e-mail. "Why I Write," it was titled, as if her distance and our e-mails would be enough to explain why I put fingers to keyboard every day. But reading this essay again last week, I discovered a depth of feeling that I had forgotten regarding this friend. It's been years now since she and I last talked or e-mailed - we barely knew each other. But for a few months my junior year, she was the headline of my life, the front-page story of the day, the reason I looked forward to waking up and the reason I never wanted to go to sleep.

Am I proud of my journal entries? Not particularly. Are they honest? Sure. Do they reveal the inner depths of my character? Most days I hope not. But these brief records of life - of my personal life - reveal the richness of the human experience. They rest like slow-release time capsules, waiting for those brief moments when I have a chance to leaf through and read about the person I once was, the person I've always been. The details are always so mundane that I forgot them, but they were pivotal enough to write.

So now, as I contemplate another night of typing fiction or typing a journal entry, I have to reflect on what journal entries have actually done for my writing. I like to think that I am a creative writer, that the thoughts I put on the page are unique and uniquely mine. But the source of these thoughts is unclear. Are they subconscious meanderings, the deep waves hidden far beneath the surface? Or are they the steady breeze of the ocean air sending laughter like ripples across the bay? I have my guesses, and so do the psychologists, but no one truly knows the source of great writing. No one can bottle it, there is no formula, and selling your soul works only until the director calls "cut!"

So when you reach a point in your fiction writing that you cannot write more, a moment when you don’t know what your protagonist should do or think, it might be time for a journal entry. The words might not seem important, and you might never share them, but those words are your life. They are the front-page story of your day. And if you want to write stirring fiction, the kind of work that truly explores that hidden continent the human mind, then what better foreign correspondent will you find than your journal?

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About Ryan Edel

Writing Workshop Curriculum

This week's posts are dedicated to laying out the curricula of the writing workshops to be offered here at 1-2-Writing. Each workshop will have a unique focus geared toward developing an aspect of your fiction writing. Through these posts, you'll be able to preview the courses and decide if you like my approach to writing. Although these posts are intended to provide the complete workshop plan, a workshop involves far more than just a curriculum. The keys to any successful workshop are instructor feedback, individual participation, and group cohesion. Workshops should be helpful, they should be motivating, and they should be fun.

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About Ryan Edel

Light-Hearted Look at the Hazards of Being a Writer

Light-hearted? There is nothing light-hearted about the hazards of being a writer. Every day, I hear voices in my head and feel compelled to talk back.

“No you don’t.”

What? Dag-nabbit, there goes another one. She’s a protagonist, I think…I’ve been trying to delete her.

“Don’t even try, bucko.”

So yes, it’s a serious condition, this mental deterioration which results from writing. The longer you work with the words, the more they begin to seep through you subconscious mind and take over the rest of your life. You begin to think of freedom of speech as a right and you try to enforce it, but then you have characters who begin to say terrible, horrible, unpublishable things.

“What, you think I’ll be like Jane Fonda? She only said the c-word. And it was only national television.”

Dagny, stop it – I don’t need to get banned from Helium because of you.

“What, you’re afraid of a fictional character?”

I’m not afraid of you, just afraid of what you’ll make me write.

“Well fudge,” Dagny mutters, planting hands on hips, glancing down at the polished handle of her plasma disintegrator, “how in the gosh-darned heck am I going to express myself? What, you call yourself a writer? More like a two-bit cyber-punk wannabe trying to drive traffic to some cheap-skate website.”

Like I said, it’s dangerous being a writer. Just when you think you’re safe, your fingers start typing out the n-word and the f-word and then all kinds of social norms get shattered in the name of literature. Before you know it, the Catholic Church is pounding at your front door while Homeland Security goons drag you out the back.

“Oh, you wish,” Dagny adds. “That only happens when you’re popular. I don’t think you have enough friends for that.”

Great. There it is, the greatest hazard of all, true death to the writer – self esteem so low that his own imagination fails to believe in him.

Dagny rolls her eyes. She would tap her foot on the ground, but I’ve been taught to never write in clichés.

“Oh, it’s not that I don’t believe in you,” Dagny says. “It’s just that we’re tired of your whining.”

We? Who’s we?

“We, us, the rest of the voices. What, you thought it was just me down here?”

Ah crud. I suppose I could just go ahead and ignore the physical hazards, then – carpal tunnel, eyestrain, mental disfigurement.

Dagny crosses her arms. “Mental disfigurement? Are you making up words again?”

No, I’m trying to describe the act of jabbing a pair of scissors through my skull. Man, can’t I get even a few moments without you crazy inner monologues? I’m trying to express a serious point here about the hazards of being a writer.

Another voice pipes in – Jonathan. He sounds tired again, as usual. “Hazards?” Jonathan asks. “I think you have it pretty good.”

Right. Listen, Jonathan, I know you don’t understand that you’re fictional, but you should at least know that you’re only some dude in a novel. It’s your job to face down fire-belching dragons and homicidal robots. It’s called poetic license.

Jonathan and Dagny exchange looks. Dagny mimes the act of jabbing a pair of scissors through somebody’s skull – probably mine.

Listen, I tell them, sitting at a keyboard all day isn’t as easy as it looks. I get migraines from neck pain, and my wrist still hurts, so if you buggers could just go back to whichever part of my brain spawned you, then I’ll go on back to work.

“Um, correct me if I’m wrong,” Dagny replies, “but, ah, aren’t we your work? Aren’t you, well, kinda unemployed when we’re quiet?”

I said can it!

“He’s bitter,” Jonathan tells her. “He thinks he’d rather be fighting the dragons himself.”

“Oh really? Why don’t we let him, the ingrate.”

“Trust me,” Jonathan tells her, “if real live dragons were a hazard of writing, our wonderful author would have a lot more than scissors sticking through his head right now.”

Right, right…moving on, let’s see if there’s something else to write about…something safe…a nonhazardous channel. Maybe politics. At least there I can express an opinion without overruling by myself.

“You wish.”

“Shh! Come on, Dagny, we gotta let him pretend. He’ll stop writing if he gets depressed.”

“So?”

“If he jabs those scissors through his forehead we’re dead.”

Dagny again rolls her eyes. “Whatever.”