Those famous opening words are associated with Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s 1830 novel Paul Clifford. They begin a much longer sentence describing rain, wind, London streets, rooftops, and flickering lamps. However, Bulwer-Lytton didn’t invent the phrase: Washington Irving had used those same words inA History of New York in 1809, and variations appeared even earlier. Bulwer-Lytton gave us the famous opening, rather than the first recorded use.
Then Snoopy took up the typewriter. The Charles M. Schulz Museum dates the beginning of his writing career, complete with that opening line, to July 1965. For many of us, the image of a beagle typing on top of his doghouse is more familiar than the novel that inspired him.
But is starting with the weather actually bad writing?
Elmore Leonard certainly discouraged it. The first of his ten rules for good writing was straightforward: “Never open a book with weather.”
Your opening words have a job to do: Hook the reader. A paragraph about weather doesn’t give them anything to care about.
Consider this opening:
Rain fell steadily over the town. Dark clouds covered the sky, and water streamed along the gutters.
There’s nothing especially confusing about it. It’s raining. We understand. But who cares?
Now try this:
Martin shoved the stolen wedding cake into the passenger seat, started the car and sped off.
That opening gives me a lot of questions. Why is he stealing a wedding cake? Whose cake is it? Is anyone chasing him?
If we need the weather, we can add the rain once Martin has hooked our attention. It might even be useful to escalate the situation.
This is why I really like stories that start with action. Something is happening, and I want to see what happens next. I feel like am in it and moving right away, not some observer standing around looking at the clouds.
Kurt Vonnegut offered a useful companion to Leonard’s advice: “Start as close to the end as possible.” In the same list, he urged writers to give readers information early so they could understand what was happening, where, and why. Together, those ideas suggest an opening that gets moving without leaving the reader behind.
And that’s the risk with starting in the middle of the action. You can get so busy making things happen that you forget to provide enough context to the reader to let them know what any of it means.
For me, the useful question when considering an opening is to ask is: What have I given the reader to care about?
It could be a person trying to get something or a decision with some uncomfortable consequence. It could be a conversation that has already gone wrong. Even ordinary tasks can become interesting when we understand why someone is struggling to complete them.
On your next draft, try removing the first paragraph. Does the story lose anything important?
If not, I think you know what to do with that paragraph.
As long as the opening gives the reader enough information to follow along, you can usually safely cut those sentences.
And if it really must be a dark and stormy night, please give me someone with a reason to be out in the rain.
Storytelling takes many forms. Sometimes it involves a man balancing on a stack of chairs while an entire audience wonders whether they should have signed a waiver.
On a recent trip to Las Vegas, I had the opportunity to see Absinthe, an excellent, albeit bawdy, show featuring some amazing acrobatic performances.
As I watched one performer stack chairs beneath himself, I realized his actions were a method of storytelling.
He began with something impressive but manageable: a handstand on the back of a chair.
That was the hook.
Okay, you have my attention. Now what comes next?
Another chair joined the first. Then another. What had seemed impressive a moment earlier was merely his starting point. With each addition, the performer gave me a new reason to watch and a little more reason to worry. Rising action anyone?
Soon, he was 20 feet above the stage on a stack of impossibly interlocked furniture. The chairs rattled and swayed, keeping us on the edge or our seats.
And then he began moving into a one-armed handstand.
By then, he had us. We had followed him all the way up, and nobody was looking away.
How is he going to get down?
It’s what we want in a good story: a character does something that interests us. Their situation grows more difficult. The stakes rise. Each new development builds on what came before, until we reach a moment when everything seems to depend on what happens next and there appears to be no way out.
The performer couldn’t have created the same effect by simply appearing at the top of the stack. By watching him build it, we became participants. We had seen where every chair went and we even felt that wobble halfway up. Was that on purpose? Is he in trouble?
Good stories earn their biggest moments in much the same way.
We need those earlier steps. We need reasons to care, questions we want answered, and enough uncertainty to keep us leaning in. Each complication adds another chair.
At the top, the performer held his position for a few extraordinary seconds while we held our breath. It was just long enough for the applause to swell and for us to take in what he had accomplished. This was the climax of the story.
Then he came down.
He reversed the climb, carefully disassembling the stack by throwing chairs to the stagehands as he descended. With each chair removed, the tension eased. Eventually, his feet reached the stage.
Our hero had made it home.
Watching Absinthe reminded me that a story is also a performance. Whatever ideas we want to explore, we still have an audience trusting us with their attention. We need to keep their curiosity alive and let them feel the tension every step of the way.
They start on the ground with us. Then, chair by chair, we carry them through the unlikely, the improbable, and finally something seemingly impossible.
And when it’s over, our hero is home, back on the ground with an audience grateful for the journey.
Yesterday you had ideas, but today you’re staring at a blinking cursor. Here are a few things to try when the words aren’t coming.
Start with something that actually happened.
When I am stuck, I will sometimes get restarted by documenting a nonfiction event that happened to me, or even a story someone else has told me (changing the names, of course).
Then I start thinking about what could have made the situation more interesting or exciting. The end result is always wildly different.
Start as a reporter, then put on the story-teller hat and embellish.
Open your IDEAS file.
You are keeping an IDEAS file, right?
These are the half-formed concepts that aren’t quite stories yet. Mine are often two-sentence summaries of a scene or concept that is nowhere close to a story, but can often provide a starting point, or prime the pump for start down another path.
Something that didn’t interest me six months ago might look different to me today (usually embarrassingly so). Two unrelated entries could even end up in the same story.
Here are some examples from my idea file (and yes, most of these, if not all, are terrible)
A company takes keeping data on employees to the extreme. Knowing when they go to the bathroom and how much toilet paper they use, for example.
Sci Fi story about how improving athletes by reducing “unnecessary” weight goes too far. Starts with bone shaving and removing vestigial organs to temporarily removing stomach and intestines, skin and ultimately at the end of the story the whole head.
Some things only exist to bring other things together. I like to call these things a catalyst, you know, like in chemistry, something that is needed for a reaction, but is never used up itself. A lot of these things are around for dark purposes. Purposes that most of the world never knows, and for good reason. (I have no idea where I was going with this one.)
Story that exposes the fact that the government is using flu and colds to inoculate its population against biological warfare.
Story about a guy who is using robot(s) to do breaking and entering and hold ups. This creates a difficult to track back to the criminal issue. Could be told from a gumshoe point of view. Issues would likely be similar to kidnapping money drops where they have to track the robot and the stolen goods. (We may not be far off from actually seeing this happen.)
Write ANYTHING for half an hour.
This is all about getting you ass in the chair and forcing yourself to just write.
For those thirty minutes, the words don’t have to be good or make a lot of sense but you do need to write something. A lot of times this is just enough to get you going. I am often very surprised by what comes out of this.
Screenwriter John August uses a similar approach: he sets a twenty-minute timer and commits to working until it rings, with permission to stop afterward. I think the secret in what he does is that the commitment feels small and manageable.
Do something outside your normal routine.
Visit somewhere unfamiliar or do something outside of your normal routine. This create a new environment for you to see and wakes up your brain to start taking notice.
On Scriptnotes, Craig Mazin describes imagining scenes while walking or showering, then writing once he knows what happens. Thinking through a scene can be useful work, even before you start typing.
Leave some breadcrumbs to make the next start easier.
In my Masterclass post, I mentioned leaving yourself a prompt for the next session, moving past difficult passages with “TBD,” and allowing the first draft to be rough.
Ernest Hemingway described stopping while he still knew what would happen next, giving himself a way back into the story the next morning. Try leaving a few notes about the next scene before closing your current document.
What helps you to start writing again after you’re stuck? Let me know in the comments below.
“Story” is self-evident in fiction – I mean, that is what fiction is after all: a story. But I find it interesting to think about WHY story is so prominent and important to us. Story spans cultures and comes in different forms: short fiction, epic novels, poems, plays, film, art and music.
Story has existed for a long time. The Epic of Gilgamesh, circa 2100 BCE, is a collection of poems about the adventures of Sumerian king of Uruk and is commonly recognized to be the earliest written story. We could also argue that cave paintings and relief carvings depicting animal hunts are a form of story and much older.
So why is story so important to us?
Story could have been a way to pass valuable information. Tales of close calls with lions helped others understand dangerous areas of the forest. Stories of successful animal kills helped others in the tribe understand methods of hunting. I can even imagine that fictional tales about monsters roaming outside at night helped parents ensure their kids stayed in bed and didn’t wander off.
But why does that information need to take the form of a story?
Give yourself 30 seconds to memorize these 10 words, and then look away and see how many you can recall:
Now read this story a couple of times and see if you can recall more words:
Ben grabbed his wallet and went out for coffee. Outside the café, a dog was chewing on his owner’s newspaper. While the owner was distracted, the dog’s leash caught a parked bicycle, knocking it into a display of flowers. As Ben helped the owner clean up, rain began to fall, so they ducked into a bakery. His phone buzzed, and he saw a text from his wife: “Did you remember your mother’s birthday?” Ben looked at the cakes and smiled. “Of course.”
When information is put into the form of a story, we tend to remember it more easily. Before the development of writing, oral stories were a way to pass down information about history and culture.
Exaggeration & Emotion
If the story becomes exaggerated to where the seriousness of the events is highlighted, it becomes emotional, resonating with us and making it more memorable. Have you ever had the experience of seeing someone you know you’ve met before and you can’t remember their name, but you know you don’t like them? That is emotion binding to memory.
Exaggeration helps to make the events more severe to the point that we feel them, this makes them stick with us. When that exaggeration passes beyond facts and reality, we have fiction.
Escapism
When a story is told well, we have the ability to relate to the events in a way that makes us feel like we are living them. This escapism becomes an experience and was likely one of the earliest forms of entertainment. The ancient Greek tragedies were thought to allow the audience to experience catharsis. Catharsis was thought to be a way of releasing pent-up emotions as a sort of cleansing relief.
So, the next time you sit down to work on your story, know that you are taking part in a practice that has a long history and spans every culture. Know that, if done well, the words you craft will resonate within every reader who sees them.
… but that all assumes you can find an editor who feels the same way.
They use the same words, but the ellipsis and em dash suggest different things happening.
In the first sentence, the speaker gets cut off. This is typically when they are being interrupted by another character, but could also be interrupted by some event, like an alarm, a door flying open or someone holding their hand up to cut them off.
In the second sentence, the ellipsis suggests the character’s words are fading because the speaker is hesitating for some reason. Oftentimes this indicates a character who is unsure of what to say next or may be changing their mind about what they want to say.
That is where punctuation gets interesting for fiction writers. It can suggest interruption, uncertainty, emphasis, and relationships between thoughts. Combine it with typography and white space, and you can influence how readers experience the action before you explain any of it.
We tend to learn punctuation as a collection of rules we all need to follow so we don’t look like amateurs in front of those gate-keeping editors. We need them to like our stories so they get published, after all. Punctuation, along with typography and white space, is great for conveying action and emotion without actual words. I like to think of these grammatical devices as a sort of subtext. I admit that is probably not the proper way to think of them.
Em dash vs. ellipsis
An em dash (—) commonly signals an abrupt break in dialogue. An ellipsis (…) commonly signals hesitation, faltering, or trailing off. The Chicago Manual of Style describes this distinction, but keep in mind that context still determines what the reader hears.
“Whatever you do, don’t touch the—”
The room went dark.
The dash helps the action interrupt the warning. We do not need to add a bunch of words to describe the character being interrupted, we understand it from that little bit of punctuation. In fact, I would even argue that the dash is better than a bunch of words as it feels immediate. It’s like we just watched it happen.
A dash can also mark a sudden correction:
“I never took your wallet—I mean, I never opened it.”
That little change of direction gives us more than a pause. It gives us a character attempting repairs while the confession is still coming out.
An ellipsis can suggest reluctance without necessarily cutting the character short:
“Yes… technically, the house is still standing.”
The hesitation makes technically considerably less reassuring.
Using hyphens, question marks, and exclamation points to shape delivery
A hyphen can suggest a repeated sound:
“D-don’t open it.”
That differs from a dash cutting off a word:
“Don’t op—”
In the first, the speaker has difficulty getting started. In the second, speech stops abruptly. Use repeated sounds selectively; a little can establish delivery without turning a character’s speech into an obstacle course or a caricature.
A simple change from a period to a question mark can turn an apparent statement into a request for confirmation:
“You sold the car.”
“You sold the car?”
The second sentence might convey disbelief, confusion, or a last desperate hope that someone is joking. The rest of the scene puts the character’s statement or question into context.
An exclamation point can indicate urgency or force:
“Look out!”
A word of caution with exclamation marks: use them sparingly. In Elmore Leonard’s 10 rules of writing, he advises using not more than two or three per 100,000 words. And please never, ever use multiple exclamation marks!!!
Colons, semicolons, and parentheses direct attention
A colon can highlight a reveal:
He had forgotten one small detail: the dog could open doors.
The colon introduces an explanation; dramatically, it positions the payoff. I will often deviate from this and use an em dash, which, while not the most correct, feels the most correct to me.
A semicolon is used to hold two complete, closely related thoughts together:
He locked the front door; the footsteps continued upstairs.
I am uncomfortable with semicolons and tend to agree with Malcolm Gladwell’s point of view. In his MasterClass video, he mentioned preferring to use a period or comma instead of a semicolon.
Parentheses can be used to create an aside, which is good for highlighting or putting a spin of the information.
Martin had a plan (Martin always had a plan), and that made her worried.
The aside lets the narrator lean toward the reader without using a ton more words to convey that. Parentheses can be useful for humor, doubt, or a narrator who keeps revising what is stated.
Italics can change or emphasize what a character means
I like to use italics a lot in my fiction. Italics move the emphasis, which can create a significant change in meaning of the same words. For example:
“I didn’t say you stole it.”
“I didn’t say you stole it.”
“I didn’t say you stole it.”
The first sentence shows us the speaker trying to point out they weren’t the one to say it. The second sentence is leaving room for an accusation that was implied but not spoken and the third sentence suggests a different there was a different thief altogether.
Italics can also indicate thought. This is one of my favorite ways to use italics:
Please let that be the refrigerator, she thought.
Note that thoughts do not have to appear in italics. You can also accomplish this with close narration (also referred to as Deep 3rd POV) can carry the thought without a type change:
Please let that be the refrigerator. She couldn’t handle another ghost.
The Use of Bold, Underlining, and Different Fonts
These should be used sparingly, as they attract more attention. The aforementioned punctuation methods are quite a bit more nuanced and subtle. Bold, underlining and changing fonts hit the reader hard. This can be useful if that is what you are after.
BOLD can be used to do something like indicate a warning on a screen:
DO NOT RESTART THE SIMULATION.
Underlining might matter because a character physically marked a note. You can show it when the format supports it, or make the action part of the prose:
Someone had underlined “alone” three times.
Underlining shows us what is happening and feels more immediate.
Font manipulation is tricky and my advice would be to generally avoid messing with anything other that what the market is asking for. Comedian Don McMillan has a great bit on font choices. He does a better job of explaining it in the first part of his video than I can here.
Using white space to control reveals and comic timing
Paragraph breaks decide which pieces of information readers encounter together.
Compare this:
He checked the closet, the bathroom, and under the bed. Nothing. Then the bed sneezed.
To this:
He checked the closet, the bathroom, and under the bed.
Nothing.
Then the bed sneezed.
The second version has a different beat. The final line arrives independently, with room for the joke (or horror) to land.
The same kind of approach applies to sentence length. Short sentences can feel sharp:
The latch clicked. She froze. Too late.
But a longer sentence can carry momentum:
She caught the handle and pulled and pulled again while the footsteps crossed the landing and stopped outside her door.
Short does not automatically mean fast. Long does not automatically mean slow. Read the passage aloud and notice what the structure asks you to do.
I also want to again mention that you should always follow the market’s submission guidelines. A great story can do a lot to make editors reconsider how strictly they want to adhere to the submission guidelines, but most of the time you are better off doing what it takes to align with their requirements. If you do plan on violating what the publication is asking for by using a strange font or excessive underlining, at least make sure to do it later in the story, after the reader is hooked.
So let me know what you think about this topic and any punctuation or other methods you use to quickly convey action or emotion.
-James
Side note: this is the 100th blog post (which also includes stories I have purchased) for Breaking Into The Craft. Thanks for coming along for the ride!
Getting rejected is part of submitting fiction. But sometimes we save an editor the trouble by rejecting ourselves before we ever send anything. I got an email from an author who wasn’t sure whether he could submit another story to BITC right after he received a rejection. I understand why he asked, as some markets have that stipulation. I don’t limit submissions that way, but this poor fellow was holding himself back from submitting. I think he just wanted to make sure he didn’t get on the wrong side of the editor, which is always good thinking, but in his mind, he turned a single rejection into a closed door that was never actually closed.
Unless the guidelines specify a waiting period, never assume there is one.
This next one is something I do a lot myself: Deciding the type or style of story isn’t a fit for what the market wants. You do want to be careful and be in the ballpark of what they are asking for in their submission guidelines. A hard-core horror story is not going to fit the likes of Reader’s Digest, but if it’s close to what the market is asking for, why not take a chance? If it’s a good story and at least touches on what they are looking for, an editor will usually give it a fair shake. That happened to me with The Right Answer. I wasn’t quite sure it was a fit but submitted it to the UFO anthology anyway, and it got picked up.
Another way we self-reject is by deciding our work isn’t “good enough.” Don’t get me wrong, do always err toward making your work better. Most of the submissions I see USUALLY need more work (and recognizing that yourself is part of becoming a better writer). But there is a point where revising becomes a way to avoid actually submitting. We keep polishing because sending the story means letting someone else judge it, which feels like submitting ourselves for judgment. You don’t need to believe you have written a masterpiece before giving an editor a chance to read it, but you should have made an honest effort to make it as good as possible. I am really hoping this paragraph does not create a bunch of subpar submissions for BITC. Please note that this is likely a small category of authors, but a very real group of people who let perpetual refinement keep a story captive for way too long. I have known a few.
I managed to create my own obstacle when submitting The Resignation to 200 CCs. I thought the stories had to be exactly 200 words, and I became so concerned about hitting that number that I nearly gave up on submitting altogether. I finally worked the story to precisely 200 words and sent it off. The editor responded that he liked the story and was impressed that it was exactly 200 words. Apparently, the thing I had treated as a requirement was something he considered an out-of-the-norm accomplishment. I had almost rejected myself over a restriction I had imposed.
Of course, “never reject yourself” doesn’t mean ignoring submission guidelines. If a publication accepts stories up to 2,000 words, sending them 5,000 words is just failing to respect what they asked for. Genre, submission windows, and other stated requirements matter. The careful balance is to understand the actual boundaries without inventing additional ones. Read the guidelines, give your story the attention it deserves, and submit it when it fits. There are plenty of editors who will tell you “No,” but you don’t need to do that for them.
Have you ever rejected yourself? Let me know in the comments below.
I turned my story That Dirty Bunch into an AI video. This is my second attempt, and it took me quite a bit longer, as it is a longer story, but I feel it turned out better than my first attempt, Thin Red Lines. It, once again, really helped me to understand the story better. The exercise of going from print to telling the story via video is really helping me to understand where the story could use improvement. For That Dirty Bunch, I realized that I have way too many characters and way too much warm-up before I get to the main plot line. The main storyline happens at a church, but I spend a lot of words (and later frames) getting to that point. I ramble on about why the narrative character is deciding to write down the events at this point and then why the boys were sent to church by themselves, going into detail as to how the mother was sick, and how the father was spending time caring for her and putting towels on her head. While they do add some color, all of those things are unimportant to the story and get in the way of the reader understanding what the story is about.
Does this mean you need to start turning your stories into videos to understand where they are going wrong? Not at all. I think there are much simpler ways. One practice I started doing with longer stories in particular is to break them into chapters and give each chapter a summary heading. Short stories typically don’t have chapters, but I find that by forcing each scene into a chapter and labeling the event (for example “Chapter six: Allen hits a long one”) helps to highlight the purpose of the scene. Seeing a scene’s heading alongside other chapter titles can tell me whether the scene should move to a different place or even whether it is needed at all.
After this exercise is done, I do remove all of the chapters from my short stories before submitting. While you technically could leave them in, it is uncommon enough to give an editor pause.
I am already working on my next video — a Sci-Fi comedic short. I have jumped to Higgsfield.ai for that, as it seems to be the top-end tool everyone is using. There is a bit of a learning curve for me as I have gotten used to Google Flow and I can already see where it is going to be quite a bit more expensive, so I may end up using a combination of tools to keep the costs down. I mention this as I suspect some of you may want to try your hand at this too. It is rewarding to see your stories come to life and, while I am far from being where I want to be with my video creation talents, I am enjoying the journey.
As writers, we can have what I call pet words and phrases. These are words or phrases we tend to use more than we probably should. One of my big ones is the word “just.” That guy can creep into my writing so easily that I will often find it three or four times in a single short story. And like most adverbs, it is usually better omitted completely.
Here is how I tend to use it:
“He just felt it was time.”
“It was just the kind of thing she liked to do.”
“She was just over the speed limit.”
I think you can see in the first two examples how removing the word actually strengthens the sentence. There can be an argument for keeping the word in the third sentence, as it is a qualifier as to how much over the speed limit she was.
Other times you can have whole phrases that feel completely normal and natural to use but may be more specific to you than you think. I am reminded of a brother and sister I knew in college who would both use the term “Nanook of the North” to self-describe how they were bundled up in the winter. I am not sure if I have ever heard anyone else use that term, but I suspect it was rather common in their family growing up, so it came to feel ubiquitous to them.
The danger in using pet words and phrases is either coming off as repetitive or, in the case of Nanook, using a reference that may not be familiar to the reader.
While the use of AI is controversial and may go against market submission standards, it can be useful to help reveal your pet words. Here is a an example of a prompt I used with ChatGPT:
Review the following stories for “pet words” and phrases: words, expressions, sentence structures, or descriptions I use more often than I probably realize. Look for repetition both within individual stories and across the entire collection. Identify each repeated word or phrase, how often it appears, which stories it appears in, and a few representative examples. Explain whether the repetition seems distracting or acceptable, and briefly suggest ways to reduce or vary it. Rank the results from the most noticeable repetition to the least. Do not rewrite the stories.
The three items I would place on your personal editing checklist are: search for “just,” inspect clusters of “like,” and watch for repeated “looked/turned” action beats.
The surprise for me is the “looked/turned” action beats comment. I didn’t realize I default to that so much.
Let me know in the comments below what pet words you find creeping into your stories.
I often give tips or advice on the rules of writing, or maybe “best practices” is a better term. The beauty of writing is that there are no hard-and-fast rules. Below are some cases where great storytellers effectively broke from commonly accepted practices.
Show, don’t Tell
One that immediately comes to mind is Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game. When I read that fantastic book, I kept thinking that he was doing a lot of telling. Card, in fact, has commented on how he feels about the show-don’t-tell argument. In short, he argues that there is a place for both showing and telling and writer’s need to know when to use each, although he is later quoted in the forum as saying “Most storytelling should be just that, telling.”
Maintain a linear Storyline
Another one that comes to mind is the movie Pulp Fiction and its nonlinear story line. That movie changed the perception that an audience (or reader) needs to be fed events in a linear fashion to understand a story. It’s structure was not random. Breaking from the chronological structure gave Tarintino the freedom to:
Open and close with the same restaurant robbery, giving the film a circular shape.
End with Jules’s moral transformation instead of Vincent’s death. I feel this is the larger key aspect; he chose to have the character arc drive the sequence as opposed to showing the events chronologically.
Introduce characters before fully explaining how their stories connect.
Create suspense by withholding context rather than merely withholding outcomes.
Make each short story/video feel like parts of one larger story.
Have One Consistent Narrative Voice
William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, breaks the convention of a story being told from a central narrator. A total of fifteen narrators (with wildly different personalities and mannerisms) tell the story of the Bundren family and their journey, including one character who actually narrates after her own death. It is an interesting approach because the point seems to be that the Bundren family members cannot communicate honestly with one another, so no single member can narrate the entire story.
The Narrator Is Honest
J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye violates several common practices, but the one that stands out in this book is making the narrator an unreliable one. Holden Caulfield, the protagonist, repeats the same words and expressions, wanders into lengthy digressions, contradicts himself. The story has very little actual plot and seems to be mostly an exercise in getting to understand this narrative character. Holden is judgmental, dishonest, and downright not likable. When I read the book, it felt like Holden was either lying to himself or brutally unaware of reality. It was clear that he failed to look at his own hand in ending up where he was or his own ability to make changes in his life he desired (something I feel still burdens a lot of people today). He calls other people “phonies” and insists that he doesn’t care about things that are obviously causing him pain. These weaknesses created one of the most recognizable voices in American fiction, particularly for that time period. Salinger did a great job of turning an unreliable narrator into a form of indirect characterization. We gradually understand Holden because we learn not to trust him.
The Importance of Grammar and Punctuation
E. E. Cummings* is an interesting example when it comes to punctuation. Here is a summary of the conventions he challenged or outright broke:
The omission or repositioning of punctuation.
Selective rather than conventional capitalization.
Words broken apart or combined in unexpected ways.
Fractured sentence structures.
White space and line placement used as part of a poem’s meaning.
Visual arrangements that allowed readers to experience movement on the page.
Keep in mind the writers and storytellers discussed above are masters in their respective crafts. They know where the lines are, what they are risking, and how to tread carefully when they choose to cross them.
For a while, I thought it would be cool to be known for having the gimmick of never naming my main characters in a story. I envisioned how cool it would be for someone later to connect the dots on this in an aha moment and understand it was an intentional thing. Instead, one of the first stories that got rejected had an additional comment along the lines of “And what was the protagonist’s name? It is never mentioned in the story!”
Not that a good writer couldn’t have ever pulled that off, but I learned that people do take notice when you cross that particular line.
How about you? What line have you crossed in your storytelling? What are some boundaries you feel need to be pushed?
There seem to be two basic approaches to character description in fiction.
Method 1: Painting the entire picture
This is the method I grew up learning in high school creative writing classes: lots of adjectives and descriptive details intended to paint a complete picture of the character for the reader.
I think authors can sometimes fall into the trap of believing this is what “good writing” is supposed to look like. The more detailed the description, the better the writing. But it can easily be overdone.
Much like fractals, or measuring a coastline, you have a nearly unlimited ability to zoom in on a character at finer and finer resolution. You can go on and on describing infinitely finer detail as to the hair, the eyes, the clothes, the wrinkles, the way someone stands and on and on.
The problem this often creates is something I call letting the words get in the way of the story.
Too many adjectives or too much descriptive prose creates a longer journey for the reader to get to the underlying plot. That doesn’t mean detailed description is bad. Sometimes the details matter. They can establish mood, tell us something important about a character or even reveal something about the plot, but the question is whether the detail is actually doing something for the story.
Here is an example:
She held the white, dew-covered lilies at her side.
vs.
She held the delicate, white, fragrant, dew-covered, freshly cut lilies at her side.
We do “see” a lot more when it comes to the lilies, but is that really important to the story or is the main point that we understand she has the lilies and they are being held at her side for some reason? Note that “dew-covered” could also be cut if there isn’t an important reason for us to know that.
I try to use no more than two adjectives in series to describe something, sometimes three at the very most if I feel I really need to have it.
Method 2: Giving the reader just enough
The second approach is what I think of as the Stephen King method: provide enough detail for the reader to get a feel for the character, but allow the reader’s imagination to fill in the rest.
King will often give a character some kind of hook: a memorable physical trait, habit, or mannerism that helps us quickly orient ourselves to which character we are reading about.
This is particularly useful in the kind of fiction King often writes: long novels such as It and The Stand, with large casts of characters who may disappear for many pages before showing up again. Giving a character a memorable trait helps the reader recognize them when they return.
I also think part of King’s strategy is to avoid giving us the entire character all at once.
Instead, he organically reveals more details along the way. We learn about the character as they move through the story through actions and dialogue.
In some ways, this is closer to how we actually get to know people.
When you first meet someone, you don’t receive a paragraph describing everything about them. You notice a few things. Then, over time, you learn more. I am not sure if he has ever said this in an interview or a talk, but I feel like it is one of his strategies.
The answer is likely somewhere in the middle
As with many things in writing, taking either approach to an extreme can become problematic.
Describe too much and you let the words get in the way of the story.
Describe too little and we risk the reader not identifying with the characters.
For me, the key is to allow character description to serve the story rather than compete with it.
What do you think? Do you prefer detailed character descriptions, or would you rather have the author give you just enough and let your imagination fill in the rest?
