Story Elements: The Basic Tools of the Writer Part 2

Every writer has a box of tools to bring their story to life. They include variety of sentence constructions and length, description, action, dialogue, internal thought, interior monologue, flashbacks, implied or explicit memory recall.

Variety

Keeping a read fresh and smoothly flowing is a result of varying your prose. Sentence structures, sentences lengths, paragraph structures and beginnings can prevent an unwanted rhythm settling in and stultifying your readers. It prevents predictability, the sense of narcissism (all too prevalent in poorly written first person narratives, with their myriad “I”s), it can control pace and tension and give energy and ‘pop’ to every scene.

Consider the following examples:

He ran his hand down the sides of the car, admiring its sleek beauty. In his mind tumbled half-formed visions of Le Mans and Indianapolis, of winding mountain roads and the long straights of the empty desert. The car made him feel young again. Alive, again. Not even the seven-figure price tag was going to keep that from him.

and…

He ran his hand down the side of the car and admired its sleek beauty. He thought of racetracks when he looked down at it. He thought of driving the lazy curves of mountain roads. He thought of the long stretches of straight desert roads. He wanted to feel young again. He wanted to feel alive again. He didn’t care about the exorbitant price tag. He was worth it, whatever the cost.

Both say more or less the same thing. The constant beginnings “he this” and “he that” set up an unconscious rhythm that detracts from the flow. The sentences are variable in the first example, more uniform in the second. The last thing any writer wants to do is to lull their readers to a point of not really reading or skimming over the words. Or god forbid, sending them to sleep!

Long sentences slow pace down, they invite greater focus, greater attention and contemplation of what is being described. Short sentences have greater punch. Greater impact. They are useful for action, for speeding pace and driving toward a conclusion. But, be aware that this isn't a rule. A long sentence can be fast-paced, the detail racing through the reader's mind. Short sentences can invite thought, slowing the pace. The constructions you use determine not just meaning and mood, but flow, pace and tension.

In the same way, attention to character names and the use of pronouns can help to give variety and interest to the paragraphs in a scene. Establishing the character with the name, and then using a pronoun to refer to them, particularly in closer narrative distance, smoothes the flow of the scene. When another character appears, names are needed more frequently to maintain clarity, but if the characters are not the same gender, pronouns can still be used, along with the occasional descriptor (the young man, the old teacher etcetera) to provide variety in reading flow.

Description

Description is often maligned as filler — in some cases, with justification — in a story. The use of description should always be aligned with information the reader requires to place themselves in the story, gain additional insight and as a useful place to hide clues or foreshadow upcoming events within the story.

As well as that, skilful description can create atmosphere, externally for a location and for the internal atmosphere of the character through whose view we see the story unfolding. It can be used to set mood, to control pace — sparse description having the effect of speeding up the flow, rich and detailed description having the effect of slowing it down — and as such should be used in that way deliberately and with the purpose of the scene in mind.

A room, seen through a character’s view, can give an enormous amount of information in a few lines about the circumstances, the situation, the scene, the character and/or other characters in the story. Each thing in the room as seen by the point of view character can add emotional over or undertones.

By far, the most valuable part of describing characters and locations is in their introductions. Setting the scene and introducing the characters does not require block paragraphs of terse or lavish or lyrical description. Describing a new location can be through the perspective and observations of the character encountering it, mixed up with action, with thought, with memories of places similar or opposite. It can be, as mentioned earlier, hued with mood, making a bright day seem dull, or dull place seem vivid.

Characters can be described as much through their gestures and mannerisms, their verbal tics, dialect or accent, pitch and timbre of voice as by their physical appearance and in the choices of the clothing, accessories and gadgets they wear or carry. The more senses are involved in description, the more insidiously the image of the character — or location — is perceived by the reader, resulting in familiarity that goes a long, long way beyond ‘she was a blonde goddess, five foot ten inches, with boysenberry-coloured eyes’.

We interact with the world through our senses. Our descriptions are more memorable, more vivid, more striking when the input from all senses are included, slipped in without fanfare through the action of the characters.

Without description, particularly in a setting such as science fiction or fantasy, the reader is sometimes left in a white void, to come up with something themselves in lieu of being given the details. In such a position, my first reaction is usually ire. The settings I will imagine will not be the same as what the writer envisaged when creating their work and should any details then be contradicted later on, it requires work on my part to re-jig my interior imagery — something I shouldn’t have had to do in the first place.

Action

Action compromises everything the characters do in the story, from pouring themselves a cup of coffee to leaping off a tall building and paragliding to the street below. Few people sit completely still in life. Most of us fiddle with things, eat, drink, smoke, get up in the middle of conversations and pace around, stare out the window, tap on the desk or tap our feet impatiently on the floor. Dialogue, thought and recall are all made more natural, and flow more smoothly for the reader, when action is woven in and through them, giving the reader both the interior and exterior aspects of character.

Actions are most effective when they are crisp and accurate. The only way to write actions well is to observe them in great detail and over many subjects. How does the waitress stand? Hipshot and filled with barely contained impatience as she waits to take an order? What does a student do with their hands when researching in a library — and what can their actions tell you about them? Does the girl stare at her book, her finger twirling a skein of hair around and around? Does she shoot glances from beneath her lashes to the cute boy sitting at the end of the next table? What does that tell the reader?

When a man is shaving in front of a mirror, and thinking about having an affair, what is he doing? Does his hand tremble with the direction of his thoughts? He’s watching the blade, not himself — until that moment the decision is made and he looks up guiltily, the blade catching and leaving a small cut.

Any action provides a host of clues to the mental and emotional state of the character. Woven through dialogue, it can provide the necessary contrast to the words that leaves the reader with the impression of two conversations, one spoken, the other tacit. It gives depth and truth to the dialogue, to the characters, and to their reactions, hidden or shown. It provides subtext to the surface, in fact.

Action in its more energetic states also requires research and observation. While we write what we know, we also write what we (fervently hope) we’ll never experience. A plane crash. An attack by zombies. A meeting with a soul mate when already married and with children. We can give the reader the full sense of knowing what these events are like through our research, our observations, our imagination, and through giving the required detail of each scene to lend verisimilitude to the action. If you really think about what a scene would be like, research it, talk to those who’ve lived it, and put yourself in their place, you will get both the detail and the emotions that come with it.

Action scenes

Fight scenes, gun battles, scuba diving with sharks, jumping from a moving train, flying a Tomcat … in writing any action scene, the same advice applies. Know what you’re talking about, in as much detail as you can because the slightest fail in logic or detail will be picked up by a knowledgeable reader and it will destroy their belief in you, the writer, as a reliable source.

I’ve read dozens of fight scenes that describe moves impossible for the human body or the laws of physics. For that matter, more often than not sex scenes have the same problem. It’s always a disappointment to find the writer has not done their job well enough to enable my suspension of disbelief to remain, and it invariably makes me look at the rest of the work with a far more jaundiced eye.

If you desperately want a fight scene in the story, but neither know about combat nor are willing to research it, consider leaving the physical details out of the scene and focus on the emotions of the combatants, the sensations, even the reactions of any other characters watching the fight. There are many different ways to get high impact reactions from readers and it’s surprising how much we can write about what we ‘know’ when we take the time and trouble to look at a situation from a different angle.

Dialogue

Dialogue is one of those tricky things to write well. Some have a flair for being able to write naturalistic conversation, where others need to work on it. Ideally, dialogue in a novel does several things:

· Conveys information

· Moves the story

· Illuminates and reveals the characters

· Provides additional information as to emotion and motivation beneath what’s actually said

· Does all of the above invisibly and seamlessly for the reader.

Writing dialogue to achieve those things requires a writer with good observational skills and the ability to listen. The common failures in written dialogue are a lack of distinct ‘voice’ from each character (they all sound the same or use the same verbal habits), too-formal speech (a lack of contractions in dialogue in speech quickly becomes formal, false-sounding and tiring to read) and conversations between characters that don’t add anything to either the plot of the story or to the reader’s knowledge of the characters.

In life, people’s voices are highly distinctive and closing your eyes and listening to a conversation (even the artificial ones in good films) it’s not difficult to hear the different characters and be able to follow along without resorting to watching.

For a novel, the same criteria applies. Every character’s voice should reflect their personality, both in internal dialogue and in external. Every character will speak at a different speed, they might have an accent from a region or different country (in which case their grammatical construction of sentences will also differ), they will have verbal tics — patterns of speaking that are particular to them and easily identifiable, beyond the demographical tic of age — and often, sayings or phrases that are particular to them. Conversely, the writer’s verbal tics — the excessive use of ‘but’ in dialogue and thoughts of different characters and in the narrative itself is a very common one — are quickly discerned by the reader, making the story that much more difficult to become lost in.

To the writer’s mind’s ear, each will sound different and that is what has to be transferred to the reader’s mind’s ear. And here we come to the purpose and use of punctuation.

Punctuation is designed to give the reader the exact clues required to read prose or poetry as closely as possible to the way the writer intended it to be read. Pauses, long and short, interruptions, emphasis and tone, even volume, can all be indicated by using punctuation as accurately as possible. That’s not to say that experimenting with punctuation is a no-no, on the contrary, when you know the uses of punctuation thoroughly, experimentation with it enables you to transfer how you want your prose or poetry to be read by the reader easily.

Dialogue cannot be written as it would be spoken in real life. In life, there are too many ums, ahs, repetitions, tics and inarticulate noises that accompany normal conversation, and which replicated precisely would drive a reader mad (and sometimes works that way when speaking to someone too). However, the flavour of ‘real’ conversation is needed, within the voices of the characters and their purposes for speaking to each other.

Listen to people talking — in every situation — as often as possible. Listen to the way words are contracted and run together. The way people speak can tell you a lot about the person, from the obvious levels of education and their relative ages, to the area they come from and their opinions on the topics. Some people speed up and talk over others, as their passion for the subject rises (or their fears that they are talking nonsense escalates). Some slow down and become more pedantic, enunciating their words ever more clearly as they attempt to drive their points home. Those differences in dialogue are excellent ways to show character and provide distinctive differences between them.

Internal Thoughts, Monologues, Recollection and Flashbacks

These devices, used in close narrative distance, in first person, close third person and with varying degrees of success with omniscient narrative point of view, allow the reader to know what the character is thinking and feeling, what they remember, what they are saying to themselves and even in reliving past events of the character in focus.

They can, when used in the right situation and with other tools, be a very effective way of connecting the reader to character, allowing them to ‘live inside their heads’ and feel the impact of events as if they had experienced them. Like every other tool at the writer’s disposal, the key word for using these tools is sparingly.

It’s as tiring for a reader to be constantly bombarded with a character’s thought and reasoning processes, their interior flagellation (or congratulation) and their memories in Technicolour detail, as it is for the reader to be stuck in talking-heads dialogue or a continuous stream of non-stop, high-paced action.

Variety is what works best for most readers. Action and description, dialogue and thought, brief, fast sequences followed by times of reflection, woven in balance to build tension and release it.

When using internal, but not direct thought, the reader gets the idea of what the character is thinking but not the exact thoughts. It’s more of a shorthand version of getting across the character’s mental state:

Eg. John considered the drop to the ocean below carefully; it was almost as difficult as the descent he’d made last month, but he’d have the advantage this time.

In direct thought:

Eg. Wasn’t so bad. He leaned out, the pull and buffet of the updraught tugging at his hair. Not as bad as the drop last month and at least I know what I’m heading for here.

The reader gets the thoughts of the character, in the character’s unique voice. The convention for direct thought in text is often italics. It’s not an absolute necessity and occasionally italicized text is used elsewhere for some other form of mental communication.

The ‘voice’ of the character must be developed for any and every character. It comprises speech patterns and mannerisms, verbal tics, syntax, ways of thinking and if it is differentiated from all other characters, the reader is never ‘lost’ as to who it is they’re reading about.

Monologues are most frequently used as stream of consciousness thinking by the POV character, to show mental and emotional state, or to follow a complex reasoning process within a character:

Eg. He shot him. In cold fucking blood — I can’t believe I just stood there and watched that sonofabitch just shoot that kid — what could I have done? Really? Taken the bullet myself? But I didn’t move — didn’t move an inch. I couldn’t move. Not at all. The gun wasn’t that loud. Who the fuck cares about the noise? He SHOT him! I did nothing!

Recollections may be a character remembering an event or moment, but not directly reliving it. We think of things in a narrative form as indirect thought rather than reliving those moments.

Eg. The sunlight had just about gone from the water, he recalled. Her skin was that shade of gold, that shade no artist could ever replicate properly, and her eyes had been full of shadows. What she’d said still had the power to pierce him, down deep, where he lived and breathed.

Flashbacks, in contrast, are memories relived, happening in present or immediate past tense.

Eg. All he has to do is pull that lever. That’s all. It’s right in front of him, gleaming red under the glass cover. Break the glass and pull the lever. His hand rises, half-curled into a fist but he doesn’t do it. Sweat’s running into his eyes from the heat. It’s getting hard to breathe. He can’t do it.

Each tool has a place in a story. Allowing the reader to see the exact circumstances of a past event not contained in the story but vital to the character gives them greater understanding and empathy for the character in situations that would otherwise be difficult to understand.

Giving a reader a chance to follow a character’s reasoning helps to explain their actions in subsequent scenes. Indirect recollection can be used within action or dialogue, to prompt the reactions and actions of the character or to change the direction of the conversation in a way the reader can follow without effort.

Examples of all these tools can be found in the works of writers in every country and of every age. They aren’t special or right or wrong in and of themselves. Ideally, they will help the writer transfer their vision intact to the reader and that’s all.