Write Right with Nighteyes

[Nighteyes5678]

A while ago, Rumrunner asked about how to do setting without being obnoxious about it (my words of course).

To start to answer this, I’d like to share one reason I absolutely love reading: it’s the only way we get to experience the world as someone else.

All other forms of entertainment have us experience the world as ourselves and simply encounter new things. Only reading can shove you so deep into someone else’s head that you think THEIR thoughts and feel THEIR feelings. We call this “depth” in writing.

Look at it this way. Imagine your story as a lake with crystal clear water, a dock jutting out into it. When a reader enters into your story, the depth of the dive is how invested they are. 

If someone is swimming along the surface, we call that…skimming. They can leave at any time. They’re aware that they’re reading, they’re aware of the words, and they’re aware of their surroundings. Often, they’re looking for a reason to bail.

If a reader dives a little deeper, they’re more immersed in the story. To get to the surface of the lake and climb onto the dock, they have to swim upward and expend effort to do so. It won’t happen naturally or easily. They’re less aware of the fact that they’re reading words, and more aware of the character that they’re following. They’re starting to become aware of the character’s surroundings, and they’re invested.

And if you get a reader to the bottom of the lake? They’re staying there. When their bladder finally forces them to put the book down, or they realize that it’s 4am and they have a 7am alarm set, they’ll feel that delicious sense of jarring. The character’s thoughts will still be in their mind, the story problems will feel more immediate than their own. At least, for a time. 

The goal of a writer, then, is to get as much Depth as possible. To yank a reader down to the bottom of the lake and hold them there until you’re done with them.

It’s here that we get to experience the world as another person. We see what they see, feel what they feel, think how they think, and solve problems like they do. The character’s mind becomes our own for as long as we read.

This is powerful.

This is mind-control.

This has lasting effects on our readers.

So, how do we do that? How do we create depth in writing?

It’s…tricky. But it starts by knowing why people read: character, it’s all about character.

Which means, according to the 7 Plot Outline of storytelling, every story begins with: 1) A character 2) in a setting 3) with a problem… 

[4) who tries to solve that problem 5) and fails, then tries again, and fails, and 6) finally puts it all on the line and tries the very last time 7) and then we see why the story matters. This is the outline that the bulk of all western fiction follows.]

We start with a character because that’s what’s most important. The character is our viewpoint, our entrance into the story world. And yet, we can’t just exist in Janet’s Void, a white blankness that expands as far as the senses can perceive.

Which is why we’re in a setting. This is where things get tricky.

All setting is character opinion.

I promise you that the above sentence alone will transform your writing. Let’s break it down a bit.

Nothing can appear on the page that doesn’t get filtered through the senses of the character, and every word is the opinion of the character.

This basically flies in the face of all the English teachers that had you write descriptive essays. Those awful things where you were supposed to describe a bowl full of oranges sitting in a kitchen for a page. They wanted you to be “descriptive” and “evocative”, yet there were no characters involved and no narrator with a voice. So you just get…a flowery list of big ol’ adjectives that don’t do much at all.

Instead, we want to focus on what our character experiences. There are five physical senses (more if you’re non-human or magic is a thing) and each of them is hardwired into our sense memory: Sight, sound, touch, smell, and taste.

Most early stage writing is all sight with a bit of sound thrown in. I’m no exception. A story I tell often is back when I first started working with my writing mentor. I turned in a short story (about 8k words or about 35 pages) for him to look at. He handed it back untouched with a sticky note: Highlight every line of setting. I had…maybe…four or five lines in the whole dang thing. I described the characters, the monsters, and the like, I just forgot to say where it was happening.

And it feels thin. Flat. Surface reading.

An early trick to combat this is to use all five senses every five hundred words (or every two pages, give or take). This forces you to stay in the character’s viewpoint.

In fact, basic Depth is typically the first 400-500 hundred words of a story. Which means that, if you remember our story start, we’re doing this all with nothing but a character in a setting (with a problem, but we’ll touch on that in a second).

What does that mean? Are they just standing there?

Maybe. Maybe they are.

Remember I mentioned sense memory? It’s the memory that brings in the character opinion, which then makes everything reveal things about the main character. Our opinions are shaped by our perception and past. We humans are optimized to notice patterns, using tricks to speed up our ability to recognize the pattern and, more importantly, what is clashing with the pattern (the tiger’s stripes lurking in the tall grass, for example). We’re constantly comparing and contrasting the world around us with our memory and existing patterns, and everything will be colored with that opinion.

These opinions? They often show up as adjectives.

Which makes your character have a history. They’re a real person.

And now, they have a problem.

It doesn’t have to be the story problem. Often, it’s not. It’s just something that isn’t right, something on their mind, something that occupies them.

This is important because it does two things: 1) It focuses our lens, and 2) it builds reader empathy.

I know, I know. Writing advice is always “start with action!” And so you get stories where the main character is fighting with their best friend, or getting chased by ninjas (both these things can be done, but it’s advanced).

But remember, the reader is just meeting this character. Imagine you’re walking into a room of your best friend’s house just in time to see their brother, whom you’ve never met, shouting at an unknown dude. Both are red in the face, fists clenched. It feels personal. It feels… intimate.

If you’re like most of us, your response is to leave. Quickly. Maybe get your friend, let THEM handle it.

That’s what it feels like when you start a story with too much charge. We have no reason to care about any of the characters, so our instinct is to flinch away. It’s human nature.

But we need a problem, first, because it focuses our character and our lens. It gives our characters a reason to notice details, a reason to care. It focuses the story as it gives us momentum. The character must be trying to solve said problem. It can be as small as a rock in their shoe, or as large as torrential rain soaking through their clothing.

Because these problems are ALSO relatable.

Confession time: I’m not lich, nor am I working for one. I’m betting that’s the case for most of you. So those aren’t very relatable. They don’t engage my empathy.

But, an unexpected guest? Your boss showing up when you’re not expecting him? That I can relate to, and so I can relate to Estallian even though I might not ever have had to deal with my boss’s skin writhing as he stands in my living room.

That rock in the shoe? That’s happened to me.

Getting caught in the rain? Yup, happened to me too.

They’re relatable, and so they engage the reader’s empathy. Which then creates buy-in, which then becomes investment, so that when you start to have stakes, the reader cares about them. 

First, the reader must care about the character.

We achieve that by having a character in a setting trying to solve a problem.

Again, readers read for character, and all setting is character opinion.

Before I wrap this up, let me give two practical thoughts.

First, make it a focus to include all five senses every five hundred words.

Second, practice with your paragraphing. Have one paragraph be what happens, and the next be how your character reacts to what just happened, which leads to an action based on how they just felt, which….then cycles back to another action.

As you get more practiced, this becomes second nature. The paragraphs can be sentences, if needed (of course, paragraphs can just be a sentence, too!), or it can stretch out longer.

Finally, I believe in homework! That is, all writing is practice, which is why no writing is ever wasted. But we can make our practice more efficient, so I like to share those tricks when I can. Two assignments, one study, and one writing:

Study: find a story that you really love. You find it gripping. Compelling. Go to the beginning of the story and figure out what is 500 words into it, give or take a few hundred (usually you’ll want to give it more time).

Then, type in the opening into a blank word document. Let the words flow through your fingertips. Actually type it out! Seriously!

Finally, reflect on what you just wrote. What do you know about the character? What do you find relatable? What setting is there, and how does it reveal things about the character? Where does the Plot start?

Writing: Pick a setting. Say… a tavern, or a shop.

Now, close your eyes and pick a character who is experiencing the tavern for the first time and LOVES it.

Write that story start, five hundred words. Just nothing but that character loving that tavern.

THEN, close your eyes and imagine a character who is experiencing the SAME tavern for the first time and HATES it. It’s a different character, but the same tavern.

Write that story start, five hundred words. Nothing but that character hating that tavern.

THEN, close your eyes and imagine a character who is experiencing the SAME tavern for the first time and feels VERY NEUTRAL about it. 

Write that story start, five hundred words.

Remember, all five senses.

If you do either (or both) of these exercises and want me to, I will give you feedback. We can talk about it.

This is a big topic and I just scratched the surface. But it took me 1800 words to make that scratch, so….
 

[PixCO]

2 hours ago, Nighteyes5678 said:

Nothing can appear on the page that doesn’t get filtered through the senses of the character, and every word is the opinion of the character.

Or a narrator. Which becomes a character if used in that way.

I've always said that Stephen King books make for terrible movies. I realized why when reading 'It' for the first time. The dam building scene - in the book, he went into such incredible details that it brought up memories of me and my friends doing the exact same thing around that age. I was enjoying the book so much because I could relate to the book, live in it for a moment. I could only do that because the scene was given such incredibly accurate detail. All of which came from narration.

And when Stan first encountered the mummy, I was expecting it to be boring and played out. Mummies? C'mon. Abbot and Costello dealt with mummies. But the details we so perfect. Describing the dry flakiness of the ancient wrappings, the skin underneath, the breath. All of that came from Stan's perceptions.

None of this could be conveyed visually and achieve the same impact.

The Green Mile was a great movie, because narration gave us the insight we needed. Same for The Shawshank Redemption. And The Shining was a great movie because it had almost nothing to do with the book.

Does anyone actually remember the first It mini-series? There was a lot of hype, and now there's a lot of nostalgia, but I remember all the King fans I knew being disappointed. Not even Tim Curry could scratch a fraction of the Depth that King had in the novel. None of the important scenes had the impact they needed.

 

And... homework. Yes. Read once for the surface. Again for the depths. And again to see how it was all put together. Create your own characters, settings, and situations appropriate to the world. Not just overwritten with your own style, but try to show an understanding of the author's style. Treat every book as a potentially shared world and practice!

[Varen Tai]

NE and I have commented that Talonus is a difficult character perspective to write because, while he is the narrator, you never get into his head (and we will go the entire campaign and never get into his head - too many secrets bubbling on the surface there), so it's harder to see the world from his perspective in the way that NE is describing. He gives little info on the environment, focused very strongly on the internal workings of his own head and heart, as well as analyzing (correctly or incorrectly) those whom he watches.

[Rumrunner]

Funny the mention of action scenes as complex. I think it's maybe derived from cinema, but it's more and more common in recent writing styles.

I think going too slow risks skimming to something more interesting, and the longer you skim, your pace keeps you from sinking into the depths once they're presented.

I'm going to have to find books I like... I may have to pick up those I don't as well just to get a gauge on it. Time allowing, which it probably won't so... I'll think about it while driving.

 

[Basil_Bottletop]

I think Talonus will be increasingly difficult to write for and read about because at some point the vagueness of his narrative will lose their effect. There's only so many ways a writer can shape the ramblings of someone without a counterpoint included in there for levity. The indistinct nature of his time and place is also difficult to convey in a way that keeps him from just becoming a figurehead for plot breaks. He offers insight into some things which assists in his voice being validated, but his vague-booking will grow difficult to remain relevant the longer it goes. I look forward to how you guys handle it because I've done similarly and eventually just had to kill the whole practice because I couldn't write my way out of it.

I don't know what they're called, but I've always loved the little blurbs authors like Sanderson (and a bajillion writers before him) puts at the beginning of chapters from otherwise untouched lore, books, sayings, etc that help shape the world AND prepare the reader for the upcoming chapter. Weis and Hickman used to do this in the Dragonlance books with little quippy summations of what lied ahead. Like 4 word teasers.

But those book exerts and quips can't be taken too deep because as the reader we're not meant to memorize that Chapter 3's exert was from page 3 of a book and page 5 was later referenced in Chapter 9's intro. What does it all mean?!!??! There's a podcast that I know is very well liked called The Magnus Archives. The first season is little horror stories -some of which are really good and others that kind of fall flat- but by the second season, things start to reference old episodes. It's this winding, weaving... thing. But if you're a listener like me and you don't binge 20 episodes a day, you will not be able to catch many of those little Easter eggs.

I've gone so far as to have a listening companion know where I'm at in the podcast so that they can just tell me what I'm missing.

Edited February 15 by Basil_Bottletop (see edit history)

[Nighteyes5678]

* Because I was keeping the post simple (and I was having bad insomnia so writing this was far better than screaming into my pillow, but it does lead to certain oversights on my part), I didn't talk about "fancy" openings to story. These are the two most common: voice openings (most common in first person, where the narrator or POV will do a lot of introduction without any story or setting, which would be absolutely dull if the character Voice wasn't so riveting), and summary (Star Wars text crawl! But not limited to that.).

What these different starts pretty much all have in common is that they shift the order of things a bit. You have your Start, then when the story narrative actually starts, the writer will drop down into that depth of setting I talked about. They'll ground you to the bottom of the lake, nice and hard.

* I was a little curious how long it would take for Stephen King to get mentioned. My advice? Love him, read him, don't study him. He's...so good. Spooky good. And so much of what he does is almost impossible to see or figure out why it works. He's a confounding mystery, one we can aspire to, but he's not the easiest to learn from by studying.

* There's a fine balance between starting too far into the action and doing what's called "Walking to the Story". That's the problem you get when the depth opening is there, but the narrative starts (frequently) with the POV taking a leisurely stroll before anything happens. How you solve that is point #3: ...with a problem. Often, those story starts don't have a problem that the character is actively trying to solve.

Look at it this way: you can have an orphan who has had a tragic life and a whole list of problems, and they can spend a long time telling us about all of those problems. It feels like when you haven't seen a friend (you know the friend I'm talking about) for a long time and when you sit down at the cafe with them, they spend an hour telling you all the things they have to deal with and how they feel stuck in the muck. I'll stick around for that friend because I care about them and love them. But if that was how a Speed Dating session started? Or even a first date?

NOPE. I'm gone. I don't care.

But, if that orphan is trying to find a perfect gift for their best friend, the one who has stuck with them through thick and thin, the one who rode a goat through the rain in order to deliver a package of scones for them to share while they were still hot, THE friend that means everything to them and so the gift has to be absolutely perfect or they might not KNOW how incredibly important they are--I'll read that story every time. Sure, I got a lot of the problems woven in, but the character cared so damn much about the Thing that I'm happy to be there and listen.

So, you know, it's all about pacing. Which is a huge topic all on its own.

[PixCO]

1 hour ago, Nighteyes5678 said:

* I was a little curious how long it would take for Stephen King to get mentioned. My advice? Love him, read him, don't study him. He's...so good. Spooky good. And so much of what he does is almost impossible to see or figure out why it works. He's a confounding mystery, one we can aspire to, but he's not the easiest to learn from by studying.

What I'm curious about is when he talks about his 'Vault'. It was brought up in Bag of Bones, I think, and mentioned again in either his 'On Writing' or the interview collection 'Bare Bones'.

He mentions that when a writer is young and the creative juices are flowing, write more than your deadline dictates. Write books you never plan to publish. Stick them in a safe-deposit box and start pulling them out when you're tired and hit a block.

Now I'm wondering if what he really meant was 'Write as much as you can until the coke runs out, then take a nap".

 

Either way, he does cheat. He had an entire research team shadowing state troopers to get 'From a Buick 88' accurate. Found out how things are supposed to happen, and how they really happen in a station house. So there is no way he wrote 'Mr. Mercedes'. There's not one ounce of King in that entire book. It was either ghost-written or he's gone so far back into his Vault that he's finding stuff from before he learned how to write.

He talks a lot about how 'The Shining' just came to him and poured out in one go. Maybe that one did. Most of his books were very meticulously constructed with a lot of help to get those details.

I know that I'll never be able to write like King. So it's not frustrating if I try and fail. Wasn't expecting it to work. But I can see how he does it -- like that hornet's nest in The Shining. Something declared universally as harmless, so of course it's going to attempt murder at some point. It's why I'm afraid to leave anything sitting on a stove. I'm pretty sure one of the burners is going to spontaneously set it on fire without anyone touching it.

Or Polly's arthritis in 'Needful Things'. He brings it up again, and again, and again, just beating us over the head with it until we're sick of hearing about it. So when it's finally cured, the readers feel the same sense of relief as the character.

 

Man! I can't do that. Not as often or as quickly as King, anyway. Every. Single. One. Of. His. Books. Are like that. Filled with details that draw you deeper and deeper. Except for 'Mr. Mercedes'. That was just not his style, sorry.

 

Or this new series I've recently added to the rotation. There's a character named Colby who is just coming off as suspicious for all the wrong reasons. Now I have to finish the book just to find out if he's going to become a love interest or a mortal enemy. That's some good depth!

Edited February 15 by PixCO
BARE Bones, not DRY! (see edit history)

[Nighteyes5678]

Yup! Those are a lot of the reasons he's a master of the craft! ^_^

[Basil_Bottletop]

My professor-advisor was a published poet and he used to say the same thing to anyone who would listen. He said in the age of MS Word, you should have three or four open word documents where you put one-line shower thought ideas and word vomit paragraphs and just hit the save button. You never know when reading those lines later on will either help you with a writer's block or you can spin them into whatever you're primarily writing.

He also said one of the tricks to doing this is to make sure you make note somewhere when you've used one of those lines or paragraphs so you don't repeat yourself.

[Zelphas]

As someone who's in the middle of trying to take the jumbled word salad of a Nanowrimo attempt and turn it into an actual, functioning story, this seems like very solid advice. Description isn't something I'm great at, for the most part, so grounding it in the senses and giving a concrete word count to put all five in is helpful.

[PixCO]

On 2/15/2024 at 3:13 PM, Nighteyes5678 said:

So, you know, it's all about pacing. Which is a huge topic all on its own.

Robert Jordan. I was never able to get into Wheel of Time because I was coming straight off of his Conan Chronicles. I remember hitting a point where Conan would have been in a rock-lifting contest with lizardmen, but in WoT I was following some rando walking along a white picket fence and wondering what pies were going to be at the fair this year.

I'll admit that may have been an unfair expectation on my part and I should give the series another shot. But still, the action I wanted wasn't happening at the time I expected and I gave up on the book. Getting it right is a real bitch. Even building out timelines with emotional impact graphed to match key moments, I've never been able to manage those transition scenes between the important parts. It always ends up being something I'd skip if I was the reader.

 

What's your opinion on opening lines? I've never understood why "It was a dark and stormy night" is so universally considered to be the worst ever written. I've read much worse than that.

[Civit]

One of my peeves is authors who try to hard to write the next “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.”

Ursula Le Guin, who I had the great fortune to meet and talk books for 15 minutes, wrote “First sentences are doors to worlds". So it is a fine balancing act, drawing in the reader but not beating them over the head with it. A great book doesn't have to have the best opening line ever written. Even if I can quote the entire first paragraph of The Hobbit by heart.

[PixCO]

Right, but if the night was indeed dark and stormy, it seems like "It was a dark and stormy night" would be an acceptable, if unimaginative, opening. No idea why Writer's Digest called it "the literary posterchild for bad story starters". Or why it deserves it's own annual Bad Writing contest.

I have a John Lescroart paperback in my hand right now. I won't try to copy the first sentence here because it would take too long. He's trying to pack this guy's entire life into a single sentence. It's objectively worse in every measurable way.

Maybe there's a lesson in that. It doesn't matter if you succeed or fail. The only real sin is being mediocre.

[Rumrunner]

I can't imagine Robert Jordan after the Conan chronicles... Or I can, but it would be easier to go to comics than Robert Jordan from those books.

[PixCO]

Geez, I didn't realize so many books used that title. This 'The Conan Chronicles' was the Robert Jordan trilogy; Conan the Invincible, the Defender, and the Unconquered. I figured it was written by the same guy. It should be kinda' similar, right? It was not.

 

Ooh, how about one-hit-wonder authors? Writers who got you with that one book or series, but couldn't keep your attention with any of their other material?

 

Greg Costikyan. @Varen Tai should recognize that name. He was one of the original designers for Paranoia among many other games. Just some amazing West End influences all across my formative years. But that's not why I love the guy. He also wrote fiction.

One book in particular, "Another Day, Another Dungeon". Everything came together brilliantly in plot, setting, characters, and complexity. I like to compare things to the only two British authors I really know, and this one scores very high on the Discworld scale. It's better than most of the books in the series, but only this one. And only in my opinion, of course.

He seemed to run out of ideas on the second book, though. No offense if Greg happens to be reading this (it's happened to me before), but I'm planning on giving it another shot along with your Magic of the Planes series. It might hold together better than I'm remembering.