Category: Characters & Setting

Naming, research, maps, and other fun.

Smite! Smite! Ice Cream, Sunshine… Smite!

Within the world of the story, the author is God. You plant all the trees, paint the clouds in the sky, and breathe life into every inhabitant.

And then, you smite.

Your job is not to win the adoration of the creatures you create. It’s to make them hate you. If you let them fall in love, you must also tempt them to stray, or place vast distances between them. If you give them fortune, it cannot bring them joy. Okay, fine, they can get a taste of happiness now and then, but you can’t let them stay that way.

In the Writing Cave, as we discuss how to make some character’s fate more interesting, we know we’re on track when they give us the stink-eye and a sarcastic, “Gee, thanks.”

There is another side to this omnipotence gig, of course. If you grind everything down until it’s all just a gray paste, that’s just as boring as across-the-board sunshine and leisure. Monotonous suffering or monotonous bliss, either way is bad from the readers’ vantage. You have to let some characters off easy, relatively speaking, to give your hapless creations hope. Maybe they’ll be one of the lucky ones who doesn’t die in a fire! Maybe theirs is a love that can really last!

Well, maybe. Maybe not, though. Letting them hope is the key to making them really despise you.

A writing partner is someone to plot with against your own creations.

A Ghost By Any Other Name

We thought we were all set with names for our ghost series, until we started watching Supernatural. We’re about a decade and a half late to that particular party, but better late than never, right? The problem is that we were going to have a character named Jensen. And he was going to be peripherally involved with our ghosts. And for those of you who, like us, spent the past 15 years living under a rock, one of the stars of Supernatural is named Jensen Ackles.

Nothing against Mr Ackles or the character he plays. They’re both quite handsome, and we’re definitely enjoying the show. The issue is that our Jensen wasn’t going to be much like Dean Winchester. But with an uncommon name and a similar occupation, we were concerned that readers would immediately picture Dean/Jensen. We didn’t want to fight against that. It would be like having an archeologist in your novel and naming him Harrison. Everyone would expect him to wear a fedora and fight nazis.

So our Jensen has a new name now. And we’re mostly used to calling him by it. Jen is tickled by the idea of naming a dude character after herself, so Jensen is filed away, waiting patiently for a different story world. One in which he will be free to be himself without a bunch of preconceptions.

A writing partner is someone to enjoy old TV shows with, and brainstorm new names for your characters as an indirect result.

POV 2: Whose Do You Use?

Operating with multiple POV characters means that sometimes you have more than one of them in a scene. This presents you with a choice: whose eyes should we watch this through?

Of course, the answer is “it depends,” but that doesn’t mean you have nothing to go on. It might be easy. If one of your POV candidates carries vital knowledge that the others lack, it probably makes sense to go with them. Probably. On the other hand, maybe it would be richer for the reader to share in dawning realization, to hear the news with innocent ears.

The weight of what’s revealed or discussed in the scene might not fall evenly on those involved. Any given big moment is probably bigger for one character than for the rest. So, if you use that character’s POV you can spell out their inner state. This works well when the emotional reaction isn’t exactly what might be expected, or when the character’s surface response doesn’t give much away. If it’s the key gut-punch moment in this person’s arc, then using anyone else’s POV would be a missed opportunity.

But again, there’s no single correct approach. Using one of the other POVs creates a chance to observe how the primary recipient takes the news. Even if it is a crucial turn for that character, you might want to show it from one remove. This can allow tension to be prolonged or escalated, creating anticipation for circling back to their POV.

There’s nothing stopping you from rewriting the scene from a few different vantages to see what works best. Experiment.

A writing partner is someone who’s always ready to offer you another point of view.

The Rune Skelley Theory of POV

We like to tell big stories, with lots of characters. And we like to give lots of those characters point-of-view. And by “lots” we mean, like, eight or so POV characters in a novel. We don’t do first-person or omniscient, but a very close third. We let the personality, diction, and knowledge of the POV character seep into the narrative.

Not every cast member gets that honor. Of course someone needs to be interesting to be considered for the job, but all of our characters are interesting. (Honest!) So, that’s no help in narrowing things down.

One of the few actual rules we stick to is that nobody’s allowed to have just one POV scene in a book. Once we take a ride in someone’s head, we’re committed to doing it at least once more. Having this rule has seldom been an issue, but sometimes it seems convenient to slide into some secondary character’s thoughts just for one particular thing. This is a temptation that must be resisted. It’s lazy, and leads to too much head-hopping and a disjointed narrative. If you have only one scene revealing someone’s interior, how can you craft a journey for them?

When a singleton arises, we have two options. We can find a way to convey the info from one of the established POVs, or we can write more scenes — legitimate scenes that earn their wordcount — from this new one. Over the years, we’ve taken both approaches. It all depends.

Just because we have a rule doesn’t make it the only right way to do things. There are surely fine books out there that break this rule. None come to mind, but YMMV.

A writing partner is someone who doesn’t let you take shortcuts.

Naming Follies

The Ghost Story is beginning to materialize as we discuss it during walks with our loyal assistants, pictured below: Lady Marzipan and The Bandit Lord. (They should form a band, that’s the best band name evah!)

Speaking of names, we ran into a bit of a problem with the Ghost Story’s dramatis personae. A new cast member showed up, who is really cool, and we gave her a really cool name. But the more we explored her arc, the more it became clear that she was going to have a lot of shared page-time with a certain other character and that their names were too similar. So, something’s gotta give.

The new character’s name was cool for assorted reasons. It just sounded cool, plus it gave us a desireable, subtle association to a relevant historical person. But in the end, that wasn’t enough to save it and we picked something else.

Why? Because it wasn’t just those two names. The new person’s name actually formed a bridge between two formerly unconnected names.

It was like we already had a Tina and a Will. That’s fine, nothing confusing about it. But then we dreamed up this new character, and discovered that her name should be: Willemina! And we blithely had numerous chats about Willemina, getting to know her better, meanwhile forgetting about Will and Tina. Until we noticed Tina glaring at us.

Willemina’s new name is also cool, and we’re getting used to it. (We still call her by the old one pretty often, though.) We’re glad we straightened this out early in the process.

Explain It Like You’re Five

Communicating complex ideas is hard. People want to understand what you’re telling them, but they don’t want a complicated lecture. This is where “explain it to me like I’m 5” comes from. Use simple language, and frame it in an everyday context.

However, the failure mode of this approach is condescension. The very premise is “talking down.” There’s a good chance some readers won’t care for how that makes them feel.

One way to adapt to this in fiction is by having a literal 5-year-old request the explanation. That way readers don’t feel that the simplified language is being aimed at them. We discovered it’s even more fun to turn that inside-out and make the 5-year-old the one explaining things. The main weird aspect of our story world is part of normal life for this kid’s family. He’s always known how it works, so to him it’s other people not getting it that feels weird. Looking at it through his eyes, and expressing it in the terms he would use, helped us check our own understanding of what we’ve created.

Using this technique to get explanatory/expository passages into the text relies on having a qualified and suitably precocious youngster around. That does limit the viability of applying it in certain settings and to certain topics. (A know-it-all whippersnapper doling out sage strategy in the trenches of WWI might not be in keeping with your desired tone, for instance. Then again, feel free to use that.)

Meanwhile, we’ll be in the Writing Cave huddled around our edits on Son of Music Novel. Quarantine, you say?

“I’m Not a Monster”

The conventional definitions of the words show us what distinguishes a monster from a villain. A monster is a frightening and destructive creature, while a villain is a person who commits evil deeds.

They both have their place in fiction. Just don’t mix them up. If your hero really needs a villain to oppose, but you provide a monster and call it a villain, there will be imbalance. Remember, the villain is the hero of their own story. Another way to think of it is that a villain is an actual character, with a complex interior state. Good villains have a powerful drive, and are capable of emotions besides inchoate rage and savage glee. But, let’s give the monsters their due. A powerful and relentless foe, something that doesn’t need a reason to want the hero dead, can create a lot of tension if properly cast.

Enough with the theoretical stuff. Why bring any of this up right now? So happy you asked!

Our read-through of the Music Series is getting close to done. We just passed the middle of book three, and there are exactly three books in the series, so. Getting close!

As we might have mentioned, we’re really pleased with the state of all of these books. One of the points of pride is that the adversaries take a variety of forms. There are villains, and there are monsters. There’s even a villain who repeatedly denies being a monster. (While demonstrating so eloquently that sometimes people can be both.)

What type of adversary does your protagonist need? What kind of tension will keep your readers turning pages?

Reminders For The Reader

We have a lot on our mind (the single, shared Skelley hive-mind) as we do our read-through. Among the many things we’re keeping an eye on is whether we succeed in keeping the setting and the characters vivid and lively for the reader the whole time.

How much description is too much, and how many reminders should there be about certain details, is a challenge every author has to deal with. Description is a fundamental element of prose, but it can slow down the story. What you’re really seeking is balance. That search is a place where beta readers and critique groups can provide really useful feedback, but ultimately it’s the writer’s call to make.

There are no straightforward rules for this. The right answer depends on the type of story, what part of that story you’re looking at, and what your readers really want out of the book. Sure, if you figure out the right search terms, you’d surely land on someone’s list of rules for exactly this, but they’d be of dubious value. (Whereas if you keep reading our blog, you’ll get pure gold, of course. Anyway.) Rune Skelley keeps these two guidelines in mind:

  1. the less ordinary the details, the more reminders are warranted
  2. prevalence in the text should line up with what’s significant for the characters
  3. (bonus guideline) remember that you’re never going to please everybody

Point number one relates to world building. It’s not just important to say, somewhere, “oh by the way the sky has polka dots.” You have to keep the place and its denizens feeling real for the reader.

Point number two is one we pay careful attention to here in the Writing Cave. Just because something is a fact doesn’t mean it needs to be brought up. Focusing on which details the characters care about helps the reader really get inside their skin. This is also a way to bring a sense of wonder into a familiar or ordinary setting, by helping the reader see it through someone else’s eyes.

Point three simply acknowledges that this is all subjective. You collect your feedback, and Reader A tells you the recurrent descriptions are like a pleasant leitmotif running through the prose, while Reader B says he started skimming whenever it felt like things were sliding toward reminder-town. Meanwhile Reader C asks why you waited until page 200 to mention the sky having polka-dots, when actually by then it’s been described seven times. However, if multiple sources agree that something’s either too heavy or too sparse, then you should probably make adjustments.

All through the writing of the first drafts of these books, we fretted about this ongoing description issue. Kent was pretty convinced that we were going to need to add tons of reminders. But at this stage, almost three-quarters of the way through our reading of the trilogy? We’re both quite happy with the overall state. Editing will most likely involve sprinkling in a few more mentions of certain things, but it’s in a good place already.

A writing partner is someone who helps you get a feel for how to help readers inhabit the story’s world.

On The Mean Streets

Our recent trip to NYC was great, as we’ve already mentioned, and we learned several things about our story’s locations that will help us enrich (and sometimes correct) the descriptions. Some details might even impact the action.

We’re decidedly not going to start rewriting stuff that’s already done, though. We have our notes, and we’ll take the new info into account going forward, but that’s just the thing — we will keep going forward. There will be a second draft.

It’s inspiring to stand where our characters stand. It’s wonderful to be able to do it together.

We Can Be Taught

The purpose of our recent trip to New York wasn’t to spend a lovely afternoon with our agent — that was an immensely enjoyable bonus. The true purpose of our visit was to scope out locales that figure in some of what we’re writing. What we’re currently writing, no less. Yes, we can learn — this time we didn’t wait until the draft was all the way done before heading out to do recon. This time we’re in the middle. Perhaps someday in the future we’ll be organized enough to conduct our location scouting before we start writing at all.

The need for this research took us by surprise. We’ve been to New York before — more than once! — plus, there are a million pictures online to fill in the gaps in our knowledge. We thought we were all good, but once we set fingers to keyboards we discovered more and more details that were a little too fuzzy for comfort. Details that our google-fu was inadequate to turn up.

The specifics of where we went and why are on a need-to-know basis, but we’ll share a tidbit that’s not too spoilery: verifying certain facts entailed renting a rowboat in Central Park. In the process, we verified that working a set of oars brings out the creative side of many New Yorkers.

We really do hope to be able to stay put for a while now, and focus on the actual writing. A writing partner is someone to enjoy a romantic getaway with under the guise of research.