Month: July 2014
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The Three Profiles of Fiction
July 15, 2014
In an earlier post, ‘No Offence?’ I touched on the idea of certain modes of storytelling, and how important the ‘profile’ of certain content can be to determining its effectiveness as a piece of prose.
This isn’t just some jargon I made up to feel self-important. This is a direct reference to a method that I often use in my own fiction to help in identifying what kind of story I’m telling. It’s one of the first questions I ask myself when I’m determining the focus of the story and its content: Which one of the three profiles of fiction am I using?
My perspective on profiles doesn’t have anything to do with the oft-cited ‘seven kinds of stories’ or any other element of writing directly related to plot and methodology. By ‘profile’ I’m referring to a specific focus that any piece of fiction has. Of the three basic profiles below, all fiction wears the garb of one of these profiles – or mixes and matches accordingly. I believe that any fiction can be strengthened or shattered based on how it incorporates these three profiles. (As a side note, poetry can potentially be modelled off the same principles, but this is more of a general fiction practice.)
To freshen up the lecture a little, let’s give these profiles some identity. Let’s build their archetypes in a way based on some classic characters that would make closet role-playing fans proud. Without further adieu, I introduce you to the warrior, the thief and the mage.
The Warrior
This is the plot profile. Hack, slash, save the princess and kill the dragon – oh and carve through some of that weighty exposition while you’re at it. There’s no time for scrolling through text-blocks of conversation! The quest must be completed!
In their purest form, these stories are the swashbuckling adventures that are most commonly found in airport newsagencies and on top of bedside tables. Warrior stories often shy away from meaningful character or theme development because what matters most is the plot, and the sheer momentum of stuff happening. Any character arcs or themes are in direct service to the progression of the story’s events.
This is the most common way to write a story, and often the most effective when it comes to captivating an audience quickly and effectively right from the opening sentence. It also suffers the most from the incessant ‘popular v literary’ debate, usually being firmly entrenched in the popular end of the divide.
With such a position on the divided line, warrior stories can often be labelled as dumb or shallow – sometimes justifiably, but sometimes unfairly.
The Thief
The character profile. The thief lives for rewarding interactions and the quieter moments – while that muscle-brained warrior is storming on ahead and getting himself into constant trouble with dragons, the thief lingers and learns a little more about what’s going on. A good thief cases the surrounding world and lives in an environment where people are assessed – their importance, threat or benefit is carefully logged.
Thief stories are very much in vogue these days – these stories don’t necessarily lack plot, but they have made a conscious decision to focus more on relationships and character development. They are often cerebral, slower-paced and rely on the numerous interactions between characters to further the story. The modern tag of ‘contemporary fiction’ is often used for novels that seek to blend deep character interaction with a serviceable but non-sensationalist plot.
This can be a rich and engaging profile, but also a risky one. A common tag in Melbourne is ‘the Carlton café novel’. This refers to the notion of a book that self-important authors might write as a thinly-veiled way of placing themselves in stories that favour style over substance. It’s a narrow assessment, but it summarises the inherent risks of writing in this profile. A good thief won’t get caught in ‘navel-gazing’ or redundant conversations.
The Mage
The theme profile. This is all about the esoteric – the mind over matter, and the application of higher principles. That dragon doesn’t need to be ‘slain’ – maybe it doesn’t even need to be encountered at all. Or even more, maybe it’s a metaphor for greed or perhaps anti-feminism (has anyone ever considered whether the princess wants or needs saving?). Reality itself is a construct, and there’s something greater lying behind the materialism that the mage uses to full effect.
In other words, the mage profile doesn’t care about events or people as much as it cares about the ideas and non-material aspects of the surrounding world.
It goes without saying that this is the most difficult form of fiction to make both engaging and entertaining. Mage stories are often considered the most socially relevant or the most intellectually rewarding, but it’s also the profile most likely to blow up in the writer’s face – like when a wizard in a movie botches a spell and turns some poor kid into a field mouse.
This is the realm of allegory and commentary. It’s fine in a controlled dose to add cultural relevance or nuance, but unchecked it can slide into rampant soapboxing – or worse, a story that has lost all sense of storytelling.
Often a single book will slide in and out of different profiles depending on its immediate requirements. A plot-based book will find time to slow down and analyse its characters. A book focused on characters will connect those characterisations to a unifying statement. The best books, of course, know how to cherry-pick from all three profiles to fulfil its purposes. But any individual writer will always have a profile they’re most comfortable with.
So what profile does your writing defer to the most, and why?
Beau Hillier | Editor, page seventeen
Unnecessary Shortcuts
July 10, 2014
As writers, we are warned not to use clichés in our writing. Clichés are overused phrases which no longer have any real meaning.
- When Gloria left me, she broke my heart.
Really? Your heart literally broke? What does this mean exactly? Beyond our understanding of the cliché itself, how can we empathise with this response, outside of correlating an experience where this might’ve occurred to us ourselves? That’s not our duty as readers, though – the author is meant to infuse us into every aspect of the character, so we experience exactly what they’re experiencing. That’s good writing. Clichés are shallow.
Now there are several words that have devolved to exist in the same strata. They perform a duty expediently yet, when misused, no longer have any resonance.
For example …
‘Suddenly’ has become a cliché in itself.
- Suddenly, a man jumped out with a knife.
It’s used to generate drama, but has now descended into the realms of melodrama, a word much more comfortable in a creative assignment for Year 7 English.
Look for it in whenever you’re reading. It’s become grossly overused, if not abused. If you’re going to use it, keep two things in mind:
- make sure that the action it’s connected to is sudden
- don’t overuse it.
Run a FIND in whatever you’re writing, and see how many times you’ve used ‘suddenly’ (or derivatives, e.g. ‘all of a sudden’). You’ll be surprised.
If you’re going to have a sudden action, see if you can communicate within the prose itself the suddenness of the action occurring, rather than relying on the use of ‘suddenly’. E.g.
- Suddenly, the door opened.
Could be:
- The door crashed open.
Which is better? (And a combination of two is not the answer!)
Arguably, an even lazier word is this:
‘However’ is a formal word, better suited to nonfiction. But wherever it’s used, writers too often rely on it to change tact without needing to provide any sort of logical transition.
- The dog is humping the neighbour’s leg. However, there is a war going on overseas.
Excuse me? The only segue here is the ‘however’ allows us to jump from one subject to the other – that’s an important distinction in itself. It’s not from ‘one subject to the next’, as that implies there’s a logical progression in ideas. It’s two unconnected subjects. Yet the use of ‘however’ makes the crossover almost seem legitimate.
‘However’ can also be used to put forth an opposing idea.
- I believe grammar in English is important. However, some people holiday in the Himalayas.
Um, what? How did we get into the Himalayas from grammar? Lots of non fiction writers fall into this trap. They can explore one idea, then flip-flop onto another simply through the use of ‘however’, and most readers won’t question the narrative’s detour. They’ll accept the visual cue as a segue and just read on.
Again, as occurs with ‘suddenly’, it’s worth considering the way the prose itself progresses in expressing what it has to say. ‘However’ is a shortcut to get from one place to the next. It’s also another word that’s overused.
The final word:
How often have you heard this word used in your life? You never hear a parent chide a child, ‘Don’t you dare exclaim at me!’ or somebody tell a story where they use ‘exclaim’ (‘Oh, before I had a chance to exclaim, he’d stolen my car!’). It exists exclusively in writing, and even there, the bulk of its work is done as an attributor.
- ‘Don’t you dare use me,’ he exclaimed.
This is something we encounter frequently – a character exclaims, whilst the dialogue is punctuated as if it were everyday speech. Surely if somebody’s exclaiming, it’s worthy of an exclamation mark!
- ‘Don’t you dare use me!’ he exclaimed.
That’s befitting, isn’t it? But even with that being the case, doesn’t the existence of the exclamation mark make the attributor of ‘exclaimed’ redundant?
- ‘Don’t you dare use me!’ he said.
Isn’t that an obvious exclamation? What exactly is the point of exclaiming?
When you’re writing, consider the words you’re using, the roles they’re filling, and whether they have a meaningful purpose, or whether they’re placeholders allowing you to shortcut your way through prose.
LZ.
P.S. In case you’re wondering, the bird picture has no relevance to this blog. I just like the picture.
Keep the Faith
July 8, 2014
As we speak, page seventeen is digesting the submissions that have come its way between April and June. Hundreds of meaty short stories. Scores of spicy poems.
The reading process for the general submissions is still ongoing, but in the coming weeks the content list will be drafted and a lucky few will hear from us to confirm that they will be included in Issue 11 of page seventeen.
This means that many more will not be included. This is the unfortunate truth – we can’t publish everybody. Page seventeen is fortunate in that it has developed as a versatile platform for publishing a wide variety of content, but every ongoing project has to define its limits and not everybody can be lucky all the time.
All I can propose at this moment is to not let the possibility of rejection weigh on your mind. I say this especially to the writers just starting out, and perhaps haven’t built up a veteran’s resistance to emails beginning with cursory politeness followed by the inevitable ‘Unfortunately …’. No one is immune to the feeling of disappointment – of the risk in turning on oneself to draw out a reason why it wasn’t accepted. Was the story not good enough? Was it shot down because I left too many typos in the text? Did I play it too safe/risky for the magazine’s tastes?
Rejections are inevitable. Refining your work to improve its quality will improve your chances of publication, and knowing the tastes of the institutions you’re sending your work to is a must when it comes to sending out the right content – but nothing will eliminate the prospect of rejection completely.
This is the part where scores of examples can be sent your way – about how many times J K Rowling was knocked back by publishers before Bloomsbury finally took a punt on her quaint little book about some kid with a funny-looking scar. About the scathing rejections for titles now considered as classics. About how those writers never gave up hope.
Well, that’s the point right there. In spite of all the for and against for being resilient, what matters more than the evidence is the simple fact that hope is at the crux of it. If you stop hoping – if you stop believing in the possibility that there’s a home for your writing somewhere out there – then it’s all over.
We live in an age of cynicism and discussing ‘hope’ is often downplayed. But it defines those in the creative field – because it is usually little more than hope, and a genuine love for the craft, that keeps them going. Work can be thin and hard to come by. Opportunities can be vaporous. A network of supportive and like-minded friends can be heartening and inspiring, but often well-meaning support can be practically ineffectual. It’s a tough gig and a highly emotional way to spend one’s time.
Established writers need to learn to develop a thick skin. But I also believe that a standard among established writers, more than hard-boiled resilience, is the ability to maintain hope. It is the hope that that there will always be opportunities and there will always be a way to reach out to an audience that will engage with their work.
That’s a lot harder than it sounds. And for emerging writers unprepared for rejection and disappointment, that hope can quickly evaporate.
I want to try something. Some of you reading this may have submitted to page seventeen in 2014. Which means that there is a likelihood that you will receive a rejection notice from page seventeen.
Let’s say that happens. At that point, I want you to post, either in the comments on this post or on one of our social media platforms (Facebook or Twitter) the following message:
I’m not in page seventeen this year. But I’m a (writer/poet/etc) and my work will find its audience.
Making a simple statement like that can have a powerful effect.
And who knows? Maybe in a few months time, you can email us back with a sentiment such as ‘Ha! That piece you rejected is now going to be published in [insert reputable magazine/journal/website here], shows what you know!’
It would be our loss, but it would still be awesome.
Beau Hillier | Editor, page seventeen
Dialogue
July 3, 2014
Something a lot of us struggle with is writing dialogue, even though talking is a necessity of our everyday lives and we’re subjected to constant chatter from one person or another. When it comes to translating that onto the page, though, we struggle. A lot of us also do things in written dialogue that we don’t do when we speak. For example …
Contractions
We all use contractions when we speak, e.g. don’t instead of do not, can’t instead of cannot, aren’t instead of are not . But for some reason, when we write dialogue, a lot of us revert to uncontracted words. It makes our dialogue stilted, or formal.
Well …
This is the most overused word in dialogue. People are always prefacing their dialogue with it. E.g.
- ‘Well, he says he’s going to come tomorrow.’
You’d be amazed how often it’s used. I can only guess that writers feel it helps them segue into what’s going to be said. Nine out of ten times you can chop it without affecting the dialogue.
Big words
This goes for prose in general, but a common misconception is if we stuff big words into the mouths of our characters, it’ll make them sound intelligent. No, it makes them sound disingenuous (and does the same for prose).
Listen to people speak. Truly listen to them. We stutter, we ‘um’, we pause, we mispronounce words, sometimes we simply forget the word we’re going to use, and often we begin one sentence … then break-off mid-stream to start a new sentence. On the written page, this would be infuriating. Sure we might use it selectively as an affectation, but the reality is that written dialogue is a dilution of the way we speak.
And yet despite that, we need to be as real as possible. Use those contractions. Listen to the vernacular. If you’re writing teenagers, they’re likelier to say ‘gonna’ rather than ‘going to’. And represent the situation – we’d speak one way to a child, another to a friend, another to our boss, and another to the gas company when we ring them up to query the bill.
Dialogue has cadences. It’s has rhythms and nuances. The best way to test our dialogue is to not only read it aloud, but to act it. Emote it. Feel it. How does it sound? Something that looks scintillating on the page might sound clunky aloud, or might be tongue twisting.
Writing dialogue is a skill in itself. Hollywood brings in screenwriters specialised in dialogue to polish screenplays that are otherwise taut. Yet, as writers of prose, we often let (unconsciously or not) our attention to prose overshadow our dialogue.
A final note relating to dialogue: be simple in your use of attributors – the ‘he said/she said’ that comes after the dialogue. There’s a school of thought that you should only use ‘said’ and ‘asked’. Some writers introduce adverbs. E.g.
- he said wearily
she asked angrily
Others believe versatility is the key. E.g.
- he postulated
she lambasted
Keep it simple. If your dialogue is written well, people will get the tone. In fact, that’s a good practice for improving your dialogue – keep the attributors simple, and see if your dialogue still communicates the emotions you’re intending. If not, then it needs work.
Write until your characters are speaking for themselves in every way possible.
LZ.