Writing Tips (#TuesdayTips)
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TuesdayTips95
Book Review.
The Reacher Guy.
The Authorised Biography Of Lee Child
Heather Martin
This week’s #TuesdayTip is a book review.
Unlike my previous look at Stephen King’s much-lauded autobiography/writing manual On Writing, this is not billed as a must-read for writers.
Yet I still feel it belongs here.
For those not sure what it’s about, Lee Child is the pen name of James D. Grant, the phenomenally successful best-selling author of the Jack Reacher series of thrillers. The first novel in the series has just been successfully adapted into a terrific series for Amazon, with two more series confirmed.
The much-derided Tom Cruise films (derided because the protagonist Reacher is 6’5″ and 250lb, and Cruise very much isn’t) were serviceable adaptations, but the most important thing is that a star like Tom Cruise was desperate to star in them.
That’s how big this franchise is.
The book is not a list of dos and don’ts. There aren’t detailed articles about grammar or structure or the writing craft. However, it is the very candid biography of one of the most successful thriller writers in the world, and woven amongst a fascinating life story, is a telling of how he did it.
Will others use this as a manual to mimic Lee Child? Of course, many already do. But through a combination of timing, luck (good and bad) and his own unique personality, nobody else has come close to creating Jack Reacher or replicating Child’s success. And I suspect nobody will.
So why read it?
Buried within this book are Child’s thoughts about writing. It doesn’t matter if you think his prose is wonderful or recoil with horror at the thought of trying to average 4-5 words per sentence. It’s an interesting perspective and a valuable insight.
It’s a very good biography. James Grant was brought up in the fifties, in an urban landscape that has largely disappeared or changed beyond recognition. Similarly, he worked at Granada TV during a golden age of television, doing a job that has largely disappeared or changed beyond recognition. In that sense, it is a form of social history.
He started writing at the end of the nineties, before eBooks. He admits that he probably wouldn’t have done as well if he started out today. The professional writing landscape today, especially for those starting out, is almost unrecognisable. Again, this charts a fascinating era of history.
His childhood, and his complicated relationship with his parents, has shaped the man he is today and his writing. Dr Heather Martin is a literary expert and she uses this to derive insight from his interviews, his books and his friends. It’s not cod psychoanalysis by any stretch, but she paints a complex picture.
He is phenomenally well-read. He had a classical education, and it is clear that his exceptional memory allowed him to absorb and internalise much of that writing. Martin is able to draw parallels between what he has read and what he writes, and it’s clear that she regards his writing as worthy of study as any so-called literary fiction. Given the high-praise that he has received from some of the most lauded writers of the modern era, anyone who thinks that Jack Reacher novels are trashy airport reads is mistaken (the secret to Child’s success of course, is that he’s also managed to corner the airport market, with a staggering number of his books being sold at Heathrow and Gatwick).
The book is very honest. It’s clear that Martin finds him a charming and likeable man. I’ve met him a couple of times, and he is a very pleasant person to spend time with (I am no longer tongue-tied!). However, she isn’t afraid to delve deeply. In some ways Lee Child is almost as fictional as his creation Jack Reacher. She takes care to differentiate between James (Jim) Grant, a family man with strong political views and an openly-shared love of his wife of forty-plus years and their daughter, and Lee Child, the mythical writing behemoth. Twenty-five years of being interviewed has meant that story-teller Lee Child has perhaps exaggerated some of the tales of his upbringing. His recollections of events might not be entirely accurate… Martin tracked down school friends, work colleagues, neighbours, and even school teachers. Some of the stories were confirmed, others were openly derided. But it doesn’t matter, because at the end of the day, Lee Child is a story-teller.
It brings the story up-to-date. The book was published around the time that Child announced his impending retirement. It details why he decided to do it, the reaction of his publishers, and the decision to hand over the reins to younger brother Andrew Grant, who would now adopt the pseudonym Andrew Child. The paperback version even includes a brief addendum to include his experiences during the pandemic.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, it’s a damn good read! Ian Rankin describes it thus ‘As gripping as one of Lee Child’s own bestsellers’. I thoroughly enjoyed it. I’m not a big reader of biographies, but this was a real page-turner.So whilst this is technically a #TuesdayTip, it is also a #RecommendedRead.
What are your thoughts on the phenomenon that is Lee Child/Jack Reacher?
Have you read The Reacher Guy?
As always feel free to comment here or in the comments.
Best wishes,
Paul
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TuesdayTips94
Guest Blogger
Keith Dixon
Avoiding Call and Response in Dialogue.
For this week’s tip, I’m delighted to welcome Keith Dixon.
Keith has written two series of crime novels – one featuring Sam Dyke, a private detective working in the north of England and another featuring Paul Storey, an ex-police marksman now living in Coventry and occasionally getting involved in bad stuff. He’s currently embarked on a third series set in a fictional southern England resort.
Keith’s Writing Tip- Guidance to writers of fiction often includes the instruction: “When writing dialogue, avoid call and response.”
What this means is that you should avoid having a character ask a question and another answer it directly, like this:
“Did you finish that report I asked you for?”
“Yes, I typed it up last night,” Joe said.
“What conclusions did you come to?”
“That the victim probably knew his attacker and let him into the house.”This is all well and good, and gives the reader information they might need. But it’s dull!
My tip is to remember that everyone in a scene has their own motivation and goal – another instruction writers are often given – and so answering a direct question with a straightforward answer might not satisfy their need to express themselves fully. So before writing the ‘obvious’ response, the factual reply, take a beat to consider the situation from the other person’s perspective and empathise with them …“Did you finish that report I asked you for?”
“You never told me why it was so urgent. What’s the rush?”
“When I want to tell you why I do things, I’ll consider it … before deciding not to. All right?”
“I think you take me for granted.”
“I’m your boss, I’m allowed.”
“So it seems,” Joe said. “If you’re interested, I think the victim knew his attacker and let him in.”The failure to answer a direct question leads to a brief exploration of the second character’s own feelings about being used by the first. This could have been intimated at through the narrator editorialising, but is more effective and direct when seen in the dialogue.
So before you write that next line, pause, and empathise with the character!
(c) Keith Dixon 2022In a long and unstructured career, Keith has taught English and American Literature, been an advertising copywriter, a business psychologist and an online learning creator. He’s currently living in France where he writes crime novels and wonders whether he should give up trying to play the guitar.
You can find out more about Keith and his writing by visiting his website or his Facebook page or by following him on Twitter (@keithyd6) and Instagram (@theidlewriter).
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TuesdayTips93
Logging it right
Prologue and Epilogue.
One of the weirder debates I got sucked into on a Facebook book group was about the necessity of prologues.
One poster stridently announced that they always skipped the prologue, as it never contained anything useful.
I was gobsmacked.
In pretty much all of my books, the opening murder takes place in the prologue. Some would argue that’s fairly useful. Most other participants shared my view, but the original poster would not be moved in their opinion.
To this day, I can’t decide if the person was a troll, or just as mad as a box of frogs.
Some members of the group claimed they disliked books with a prologue, even to the point that they will avoid reading them.
“Just start at chapter one!” they implore.
Suggestions that if it really offends them that much, they could just mentally renumber the chapters so that the prologue is called chapter one, fell on deaf ears.
The thing is, in my DCI Warren Jones books at least, the prologue isn’t chapter one. My novels are, for the most part, set out in a linear fashion. I divide the story into sections, typically headed with a date. So for the initial murder to take place on an as yet undisclosed date, it needs to exist outside that structure. The prologue deliberately doesn’t have a date attached, so that if I wish, I can tease with an opening scene that may not be referenced again until well into the book. In my sixth book, A Price To Pay, the prologue has a woman running through a darkened forest being shot at and chased by dogs. The scene ends before we find out what happens to her.
The story then progresses to chapter one, where DCI Warren Jones is called to a murder in a massage parlour. As the book unfolds, readers will be wondering about that woman, looking for hints at what her fate is ,or the role that she will eventually play.
I’d suggest that skipping the prologue because of some irrational prejudice is going to seriously impact your understanding of what’s going on and rob you of that anticipation.Lee Child, creator of the phenomenally successful Jack Reacher series, said at a literary festival that one of the reasons he made Reacher a drifter was to avoid the constraints of a traditional police procedural. Specifically he mentioned how a typical police procedural would start with the detective being called to the crime scene and the case unfolding from there.
It was a valid observation. Any police procedural that wishes to be realistic has an inherent structure. A Reacher novel can start from any point. In The Killing Floor, Reacher steps off a bus in a Georgia town, orders pie in a diner, and is promptly arrested. The Enemy opens with a heart attack, One Shot with a man carrying a rifle driving to a car park.
And that is the other reason why I always have a prologue. Each of my books starts differently. A Price To Pay has the woman in the woods. Forgive Me Father has two teenagers breaking into the grounds of a ruined abbey. The first in the series, The Last Straw, has the blood-soaked discovery of a body, the second, No Smoke Without Fire, starts with somebody released from prison.
Of course I strive to make chapter one original each time as well, but with one or two exceptions it usually starts after the discovery of a victim, when Warren is called to the scene.
But That’s Not The End.
One of the distinctive – and sometimes derided – features of Golden Age crime is the big final reveal. Agatha Christie’s Poirot novels are (in)famous for their closing ‘library scene’ (or similar), where all of the suspects are called together and Poirot goes through their motives one at a time, before discarding them. Eventually, whoever is left, is unmasked as the killer. It’s an effective and enjoyable device, not least because he ties up all the loose ends.
But of course it isn’t really appropriate or realistic for most stories. Gathering all the suspects together can feel contrived, and the tension of the reveal aside, isn’t especially dramatic. And attempting to wrap up everything in a neat bow can rob the final denouement of its momentum, as you seek to explain exactly what the final clue was that led to the killer.
But skipping that explanation isn’t a good idea. Your readers have earned the right to know exactly how the case was solved and perhaps even the motives behind the crime. Some readers like to ‘play along’, and will want to see if their thoughts mirrored the detectives. Simply having the killer presented, followed by The End, would be unsatisfying and frustrating.
So that’s where the epilogue comes in. The problem is that it can feel like an after thought. You need a way of getting across what you want to explain without it feeling like a list of bullet points. My own device is to have Warren debriefed by Assistant Chief Constable Naseem. He is openly collecting details of interesting cases for his future memoirs. It is usually a chat in his office a few days after the conclusion of the investigation. It has evolved over the years, with it becoming more philosophical in tone. I sometimes use it as way to foreshadow what may happen in future novels in the series (Out of Sight ends on a teaser about Warren’s future).Most books have some sort of epilogue, but it may not be marked as such. It could just be the wrapping up at the end of the final chapter. I label mine epilogue simply because I like the symmetry of a book starting with a prologue and ending with an epilogue.
What are your thoughts on prologues and epilogues? Are they important to a book or a distraction? Do you use any particular devices?
As always, feel free to comment here or on social media.
All the best, Paul.
Epilogue:
Are you a writer with a tip to share? I love having guest bloggers. Feel free to contact me via the email or social media links.
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TuesdayTips92
Block Buster
Ideas To Thwart Writer’s Block
Today’s Tip is another strategy to help move you on if you are suffering from writer’s block.
I’ve suggested before how a simple free-write activity can be enough to jump-start your writing engine for the day. Here is my take on another activity that is a popular starter activity in creative writing classes.
Use, as your prompt, a random image.
Writing Exercises is a great website – here is a tool for generating random images.
https://writingexercises.co.uk/random-image-generator.php
What can you write about that picture?- Is there a story to be told?
- Is there a conversation being had?
- Is it just a way to stretch your powers of description?
Remember, it doesn’t matter if the prompt doesn’t relate to what you are writing. This isn’t about adding to your manuscript’s wordcount. If a few minutes doing one of these exercises is enough to get your creative juices flowing, then it’s time well spent.
To keep yourself focused, consider some constraints.
Don’t spend too long choosing an image. Depending on the image database, the first picture might not be suitable (eg a logo or icon set), but commit yourself to using one of the first 5 images.
Give yourself a time limit. What can you get down in 10 minutes?
Don’t lift your pen. Write any old nonsense, just go with the flow. Don’t stop and start to overthink it.
At the end of the activity, open your manuscript and start immediately. Try and get at least something down whilst you are still warmed up. Fingers crossed, once you’re up and running you’ll keep going.
Good luck!
Have you got any suggestions about overcoming writer’s block?
Feel free to comment here or on social media.
Happy writing,
Paul
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TuesdayTips91
Say What?
Writing Realistic Dialogue
(3/3)
For the past two weeks [#TuesdayTip89 #TuesdayTip90], I have been focusing on the dialogue we place in our character’s mouths, and making it realistic and appropriate. I will be concluding the series today with some more concrete suggestions about how to go about doing this.
Keep an eye out for a future post, where I will be looking at dialogue attribution – the stuff outside the speech marks that tells us who is speaking and how they are saying it.Suggestions for writing authentic dialogue.
Not everything needs to be said: The first rule is to remember that you aren’t transcribing what a person says. AI-powered speech recognition software means that automatically generated subtitles are far more accurate than they used to be. But what gives away those that aren’t edited by a human before broadcast is their slavish attempts to faithfully render every utterance the actors make.
Natural speech is full of pauses, repetition, mis-pronounced words, stutters and verbal tics like um, and ah. Unless you are using this as a way to signpost that a character is nervous, or drunk etc, cut them out. Otherwise, you’ll drive your readers mad!
Rehearse it. I have learned a lot from conversations with my audio narrator. One of his most important tips is not to write sentences that are so long that they leave the reader gasping for breath! Even if you aren’t planning on having your book narrated, remember that your character can only speak for so long without pausing for breath. The easiest way to test this is to actually read the dialogue out loud yourself – if you run out of breath, you need to break it up into shorter sentences!
Break it up anyway. Even an inspiring superhero-style monologue gets dull if it is too long. On screen there will usually be things happening and movement that keep the viewers attention. In books, you need to break the monologue into more manageable chunks.
Supergirl loves a good monologue to inspire the people of Earth. Written down, they would last for several paragraphs, so if they were in a novel, every couple of paragraphs would need some sort of break. This break can be invisible to the reader, but it keeps them focused for example:“People of Earth! Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.”
She looked around the room. “Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.”
Around her, the audience started to stir.
” Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah! Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah! Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah!”
Stepping back from the podium, she acknowledged the applause.Listen to people from that part of the world: If the character that you are writing is from somewhere different from where you come from, then making their dialogue sound authentic can be a challenge. An easy way to ‘tune into’ their modes of speech is to find video or audio clips of people speaking on YouTube. Or listen to programs on local radio – this is far easier these days, now that the BBC Sounds app archives programs from regional stations. Shows with phone-ins can be very useful, although you need to be careful to make sure that ‘Brian from Sutton Coldfield’ was actually born and bred there, and didn’t move there from Liverpool ten years ago for work.
Ask advice: Sometimes you just need somebody to tell you if what you’ve written is authentic. Social media can be a terrific tool for this. Depending on whether or not you want your dialogue snippets to be visible to the world (you probably don’t want the denouement where the killer is revealed to be out there), you can ask for feedback from native speakers by either posting the lines of dialogue and asking for native speakers to give their thoughts, or putting out a request for someone to contact you privately. You’d be amazed how helpful people can be – folks hate it when their region is portrayed inaccurately and are usually tickled pink if you put them in the acknowledgements or name a character after them!Do you have any suggestions about how to write authentic dialogue?
Feel free to comment here, or on social media.
Until next time,
Paul
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TuesdayTips90
Say What?
Writing Realistic Dialogue
(2/3)
Welcome to this week’s Tuesday Tip. Last week’s post (#TuesdayTip89) looked at the importance of making sure that your character speaks authentically for the region that they are supposedly from. This week, I want to focus on accurately portraying their age, background and education level.Consider their background: A couple of years ago, I read an excellent story that was really gripping with a terrific twist. But one thing really jarred – all the characters sounded as if they had the same background. The cast varied from wealthy, university-educated barristers, to teenagers on a poor housing estate. Yet they all spoke like the author (who I have heard at literary festivals). It was strange that the editor didn’t pick up that a fifteen-year-old kid who bunked off school used grammatically perfect English that was indistinguishable from the forty-something solicitor representing them. I’m not saying the author should have filled the youngster’s speech with slang and dropped consonants, but it could have been made to feel far more authentic. It reminded me of 1940s dramas where everyone from the lord of the manor to the scullery maid spoke in “BBC English”.Make it age appropriate: The age of a character is another determinant of their vocabulary. Unless your speaker is consciously trying to sound young and cool, or extremely formal, their vocabulary can often give clues to their approximate age. As we age, our speech changes (listen to the Queen speaking in the fifties, and then listen to her now), but only to a degree. We can get set in our ways, especially if we continue socialising and working with same people for many years. Leaving aside racially-charged language, which I have previously covered (#TuesdayTip62) there are words and ways of speaking that we continue using, and which may elicit an eye-roll from the younger generation.
Something that has always fascinated me is calling someone “love”. If I were to use that term in school, or to a woman I don’t know in her thirties, I would be regarded as patronising at best and sexist and offensive at worst. It would probably earn me a quiet word from my line manager at the very least. Yet take a wander around a London marketplace and it is normal for sellers to address women (of any age) as “love”. It’s a term of polite endearment. Unquestionably some women do find it offensive, but from what I’ve seen most folks regard it as normal. They would object if it was used in the office, but rarely bat an eyelid when a sixty-something grocer hands over a bag of vegetables and says “there you are, love.”
Writing younger characters is more tricky. As a teacher, I’m probably exposed to more teenage slang than most, but even I struggle to keep up with the latest phrases and sayings. And I learned a long time ago that trying to emulate their speech is embarrassing for all concerned. The language also evolves at a dizzying rate, with words coming into and going out of fashion very quickly. Even if you get it right, it really ages a story, which may or may not be a good thing. My recommendation is to maintain a light touch.Consider the situation: We all moderate our language, and even pronunciation, for different situations. Leaving aside profanity, which may or not be acceptable in that context, we often speak differently at work than we do at home. I’ve taught alongside people from all over the UK (and some from outside the UK). When observing them in the classroom or interacting with kids in our little corner of England, they often (me included) speak differently. It isn’t a huge change – and is largely subconscious – but it is noticeable. Even in the staffroom, the way we express ourselves is different than with family and friends, We used to joke that we always knew when one of our colleagues had spent the weekend with her parents, because it took until lunchtime on the Monday before we could understand her again!
Does your character have a “telephone voice”?
I will be concluding this series of posts next week with some suggestions on how to go about writing authentic dialogue.
Until then, do you have any tips?
As always, please feel free to comment here or on social media.
All the best,
Paul
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TuesdayTips89
Say What?
Writing Realistic Dialogue
(1/3)
Characters are at the heart of all good stories. I’ve previously looked at the topic of how to write realistic characters, avoiding cultural appropriation or lazy stereotypes (#TuesdayTips77). Over the next few posts, I want to look a bit deeper at the words we place in our character’s mouths.
Writing realistic dialogue is essential. It serves numerous roles within a story. In fact, I would go as far as to say that it is perhaps the most important tool in a writer’s toolkit. Radio plays and low-budget stage shows have proven that you can tell a compelling story with almost no need for description. There are countless highly effective dramas told with no props and little or no sound effects, just characters talking to one another. Now try and think of a tale with no speech. They are few and far between.
Dialogue tells us so much. Characters can verbally tell us what took place. It can convey the emotions that they are experiencing. The interactions between multiple people during a conversation can tell us what is happening, with no need for us to use our other senses – imagine eavesdropping on a conversation in the next booth in a café. You can’t see who’s speaking, yet the tone of the voices, the pitch and the cadence can tell us what they are feeling and allow us to determine the relationship between those involved. Listen to the dialect or the use of language and you can infer their age, their education level, their class (which we in Britain are so obsessed with), their upbringing, or where they are from. Similarly, as speakers, we can modulate our language and accent to influence the impression we wish to portray or to match the situation.
And so dialogue should be something that all writers take great care with. In this series of posts, I am going to focus specifically on the language we use inside the speech marks. I will be posting a separate article about dialogue attribution- the stuff outside the speech marks, about who is speaking and how they are saying it.
Characterisation:
Dialogue tells us about the characters. Who are they? The most obvious thing here is their vocabulary, and the way they structure their sentences.
Get the region right: Different people use different vocabulary. Part of this is dialect – the specific words and the way they are used in different parts of the country/world. At its most basic level it can mean using the correct word for an object. Bread rolls are a terrific example. Travel up and down the UK and what the locals call these varies enormously. Most Brits will understand what you mean by a bread roll, but can be baffled when somebody in Manchester asks for a barm cake or a local in Coventry asks for a batch. The question is whether you, as a writer want to use these local terms for your character and if you do, how much you are willing to explain what you mean to non-locals. If you have an omnipotent narrator, you can do this by using the more common term immediately after the character uses it in dialogue.
Warren looked at the menu above the deep fat fryer. He only had a couple of pound coins in his pocket.
“I’ll just have a chip batch,” he said.
His stomach rumbled as he watched the server split the soft, white bread roll, slather it with margarine and shovel chips in.Another example that can catch folks out is the use of shortened terms for mother.
In large swathes of the UK, you call your mother “Mum” or “Mummy”. In the United States, the term is more commonly “Mom” or Mommy”. Yet this is also how some parts of the UK Midlands (especially Birmingham and the Black Country) refer to their mother, although the accent tends to make it sound a little different. If you want to be accurate, your Brummie characters should use this term. In the North of England and Northern Ireland, “Mam” or “Mammy” is more common.
When I see a character talking about their Mam, I’m already starting to make assumptions about where they are from. If they call her Mother when addressing her, I may assume that they are more formal or perhaps quite posh. If they call her Mummy, I will usually assume that they are either very young, or again, quite posh.
Of course, you can’t tell a whole lot about a person from a single word, but if you pepper a few of these throughout a person’s speech, you can portray a person’s background quite easily. On the flip-side, if you have already told the reader where they are from, then you should try to ensure the dialect is consistent.
Getting this wrong can take a person right out of a story, and is a great way of signposting that the writer is not from that region or country. If you tell me that a character is a proud Scouser from Liverpool, they aren’t going to use Cockney rhyming slang!
The same goes for foreign languages. If you have a character speaking in a foreign language, then you have two choices – render it in the original, then provide a translation – OK for short sentences, but can break the flow and be frustrating for long stretches. Or have your characters speaking in English, but sprinkle in a few words for flavour that readers can interpret from context.
Tom Clancy and his ghost writers are very good at this. His globe-trotting thrillers often have Russian or Chinese or North Korean generals deep in conversation, which is rendered in English but with appropriate curse words or terms of address in the original language. Anyone reading or watching Scandinavian crime dramas will usually be familiar with yes, no and thank you by the end of the story.
The caveat:
Be wary about overdoing this. If you are writing for a broad, mainstream audience, you need to balance the need for authenticity with readability. A very well-known best-selling author was recently castigated over their use of dialect that some felt was verging on parody. Doubtless it was accurate, but many readers found it baffling. Much of my family is from England’s West Country; for fun, they sometimes text each other in Devonshire dialect. I struggle to understand it; my partner who comes from a completely different part of the country hasn’t got a clue!
Next week, I am going to focus on age, background and education level.
Until then, what tricks do you use to make dialogue realistic for your characters?
As always, feel free to comment here or on social media.
Best wishes, Paul.
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TuesdayTips88
Earning Their Place
Justifying A Character.
Welcome to this week’s #TuesdayTip!
This week, I want to examine the right of a character to exist.
It sounds rather brutal, and I suppose in some ways it is. But the nub of what I want to discuss is whether or not a character belongs in a story. Have they earned their place?
I have just completed structural edits on a forthcoming novel and one of the questions asked by my editor was whether we could trim the cast somewhat. It was a very valid question and one that made me go through the manuscript with a critical eye, asking if individuals were absolutely necessary to this story (or were present because of their role in the series as a whole).Characters in crime fiction can be roughly divided into three groups. A character is not limited to one group – indeed an individual might fall into more than one category, or may move between groups as a story, or even a series, progresses.
Broadly speaking there are:
Protagonists: Crudely put they are the “hero” of the story. That doesn’t mean they are necessarily the good guy, but they are the ones that we are following, and often cheering on.
Antagonists: These are the characters that act as a foil to our protagonist.
In a classic who dunnit, the protagonist might be the detective, and the antagonist the person they are seeking to bring to justice. But the wonderful thing about this genre is that characters can move between the two camps as the story twists and turns, and they might be complex enough that the protagonist is a bad person, whilst the antagonist that they are chasing has admirable motives. And of course, your story might deliberately keep their role ambiguous, only choosing to clarify their role in the big reveal.
The third group are the secondary characters: These are those people that don’t fall easily into either of the first two camps, but without whom the story doesn’t progress. In a book with twists, a secondary character might suddenly become a protagonist or an antagonist, perhaps surprising the reader.Regardless of their role, each character needs to justify not only their existence, but also how much space they take up on the page. When it comes to “killing your darlings” during the editing process, it may be necessary to excise the character completely, reduce their role or perhaps reassign or distribute their functions and actions to other characters.
So why would we do this to a character?
First, space and pacing. You might just need to trim some words or speed things up, in which case cutting down or excising the richly-described person that serves our hero their coffee – no matter how much you like them – is low-hanging fruit.
Second, your readers need to remember all of the characters. In a genre such as crime, where many of your readers will be paying close attention to every person that crops up, in case they are the culprit, too many characters can make things confusing. You don’t want to excise all of these characters – obviously, you want to keep a few red herrings so readers are kept guessing – but ask yourself if there are too many? One trick is to remove their name. Instead of talking in detail about Kelly the barista, perhaps just acknowledge that your character is served coffee by someone. If your officers find a dozen folks out and about without an alibi the night of the murder, only one of whom was the killer and three of whom are persons of interest and will become red herrings, why not cut a couple, or at least describe them in the sparsest of terms and then rule them out ASAP?So how can you decide who to cut or trim?
Presumably your protagonist(s) and antagonist(s) are the backbone of the story. So their existence is pretty secure. But they can take on additional duties. In one of my books, a previously unknown officer made a useful suggestion that the team followed up on. The officer doesn’t feature again and losing them would have no impact on the story. So at the suggestion of my editor, I cut them and “gave” their idea to one of the established characters. It saved a couple of hundred words, and my readers won’t spend the rest of the book trying to remember their name.So for each character, ask yourself these questions. They are not intended to tell you who to cut – that’s an artistic choice to be made by you – but what they can do is help you make that choice. You don’t have to answer every question for every character, but I would suggest that asking them of a few, especially secondary characters, can help you justify their existence.
What would happen to the story if they didn’t exist?
Do they play a pivotal role? Can that role be assigned to someone else?
Are they necessary for later stories?
If you write a series with an ongoing story arc, do you need to introduce a character in a previous book, even if their role is tiny? There is a running joke that in Star Trek, any red-shirted security guard that is played by an extra that you’ve never seen before, will be dead by the first ad break. If you decide that in book 5 one of the police officers will turn out to be corrupt, try not to introduce them in that book! If possible, introduce them – perhaps in a minor role – in earlier books, that way readers are used to them being around and are less likely to suspect them.
Does their importance to the story justify their wordcount?
How you define ‘important to the story’ is a matter of perspective. In my books, Warren’s in-laws feature regularly. They rarely have any role in the crime being solved. However, they impart an insight into Warren as a person, and are a source of internal conflict for him. So in that way, they are justified. For narrative purposes, they can also act as a page break to slow the pace of the story, or add humour if it is too bleak.Cutting a character can be hard, especially if they have been in the book since the first drafts. But sometimes we have to make hard choices for the good of the story. As a sweetener though, there are some crumbs of comfort. First of all, if you really like the character that you’ve crafted, save them for another book. The film industry is full of examples of actors who failed an audition, but were called back and offered a different part or cast in another production. I wonder how many interesting, quirky characters started life as a well-crafted secondary character who couldn’t justify their place in the original book but were so good the author recast them in a different role in their next book? And of course, if you have already come up with a great name for them, you can use that name in a different book!
How do you decide if a character has earned their place? Have you ever reused an excised character in a different project?
As always, feel free to comment here or on social media.
Until next time,
Paul.
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TuesdayTips87
Block Buster
Ideas To Thwart Writer’s Block
Today’s Tip is another suggestion to help move you on if you are suffering from writer’s block.
Writer’s block is a funny old thing. Sometimes it’s more about getting your head in the game and starting your day’s work than what you actually need or want to write.
I liken it to a sportsperson warming up before a match. It’s all about stretching those writing muscles, ready for the game.
In this case, a simple free-write exercise can be enough to get you going. These sort of things are popular in creative writing classes. Regardless of the topic being studied that day, the class often starts with one of these. It helps you mentally switch to writing mode, rather than whatever other things your mind is on today.Googling “Writing Prompts Generator” delivers dozens of hits, but here’s one that looks quite nice.
https://randomwordgenerator.com/writing-prompt.php
Don’t worry if the prompt doesn’t relate to what you are writing. This isn’t about adding to your manuscript’s wordcount. If you watch a training session for an athlete, their warm-up exercises don’t always link to the sport they are competing in. The goal is to get everything running smoothly.
And don’t worry about “wasting time”. When writer’s block is really entrenched, you can spend all day writing, re-writing, deleting and stressing, with nothing to show for it at the end.
If a few minutes writing something that you’ll junk at the end is enough to start you working productively, there’s a net gain there.Setting some constraints can be useful.
Give yourself a time limit. What can you get down in 10 minutes?
Don’t lift your pen. This is a classic in creative writing classes. The rule is write any old nonsense, just go with the flow. Don’t stop and start to overthink it. Obviously, this is better suited to a pen and paper, but if you are a reasonable typist or use dictation software, you can still do it.
No editing. Once it’s down, it’s down. Own your previous choices!
Don’t spend too long choosing a prompt. If you do this, you can waste even more time. Pushing yourself to write something outside your comfort zone can be good – and remember, this is just for you. If the end product is gibberish, who cares? Nobody minds if a goalkeeper looks a plonker during warm-up, if the end result is a clean sheet at the end of the game.At the end of the activity, open the manuscript you are working on and start. Get at least something down whilst you are still warmed up. Hopefully, it’ll be like jump-starting a car – once the engine is running, you just need to drive it for a bit to charge the battery up.
Good luck!
Have you got any suggestions about overcoming writer’s block?
Feel free to comment here or on social media.
Happy writing,
Paul
If you are a writer and have a tip you’d like to be featured on my blog, please don’t be shy. Contact me on social media or using the email link above.
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HappyChristmas
Happy Christmas
See You In the New Year
The #TuesdayTips will return in the new year.Have a great holiday.
PS If you are a writer and wish to be featured as a guest blogger, please email me.
