If you’ve done your job as a writer, your readers will predict and anticipate your character’s behavior before they act, just as in a real world social situation. This ability to discern one’s own and others’ mental states such as “Purpose, intention, knowledge, belief, thinking, doubt, guessing, pretending, liking . . .” and to interpret behavior based on this discernment is a concept originally introduced by Premack and Woodruff in 1978 in their article, “Does the Chimpanzee Have a Theory of Mind?”
According to Lisa Zunshine in her 2006 book Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel, our “theory of mind” or “mind-reading” tendency is the reason why we read and write fiction: “Fictional narratives feed our hungry theory of mind, giving us carefully crafted, emotionally and aesthetically compelling social contexts shot through with mind-reading opportunities.”
As my improvisation teacher, Melanie Chartoff, always tells me, to make a scene real: Stay in the moment, get inside your body, and interact with the objects in the world. If you believe the world exists, then so will the audience. And the same holds true for writing. If your characters slow down to see, feel, and interact with their surroundings, then your readers will believe in the new reality also.
So now, the question is how to make it real. Visualize the landscape of the scene before you begin to write. Paint the world with sensory experiences, allow your characters to react to the inputs, and follow Newton’s Third Law of Motion: For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.
Make it sensory by incorporating sight, smell, hearing, touch, and taste. Be specific by providing details that readers can easily identify from their real life, so they have a base to compare with the “new” world or reality of your story. Imagine your character walking through this world and interacting with objects within the landscape rather than just listing them. If the reader can experience the world with the character, then it will be three dimensional and real. I need to see the world before I can even begin writing. If it feels real, then to me it is real.
Try this technique and see how it works for your story. With each revision, the scene will become richer and more believable. Don’t rush. Take the time to make it real.
EXERCISE
1. Pick a specific moment within your story. Before writing, try to imagine the setting for the scene. It could be a cave in Cornwall, a castle in Northumbria, a forest in Brittany, or an office tower on Wall Street in New York City, anything you desire. Write a description of the landscape (or place) without editing. Be sure to have your character look in all directions and try to describe what they actually see through their eyes.
2. Reread it. Did you include all five senses? If not, then revise by adding sensory inputs. How does it smell? What is the temperature? Is there any background noise?
3. Did you describe the world through the character’s eyes, from his or her perspective? Get inside the character’s body. What would the character notice at this particular moment within the story, and why? Have your character show what he is feeling by how he interacts with the environment in the scene in the moment.
4. Did you include some real-world details to ground your reader? For instance, you could describe a thatched hut with a sleeping roll stuffed with goose feathers, a glass jar of fermented ginger, and a box filled with amulets in the shape of serpent eggs. If the reader can relate to objects from his or her real world, then you can include a fantastical element like the serpent eggs.
5. Did you follow the law of action and reaction?
6. Reread it one more time and revise again. Remember to slow down and stay in the present moment with your character.
LILLIAN STEWART CARL
Describe a Spiral Staircase
LILLIAN STEWART CARL has written multiple novels and multiple short stories in multiple genres. She was nominated for a Hugo Award for co-editing The Vorkosigan Companion, an overview of Lois McMaster Bujold’s science fiction work. She lives in a book-lined cloister in Texas and enjoys crossword puzzles, music, needlework, and tai chi.
Many years ago I worked with a man who would tease me for using my hands while I talked. He’d grab them and say, “Now describe a spiral staircase.”
So how do you use no more than words to form images in the reader’s mind?
As a child doomed to be a writer, I’d verbalize descriptions of my grandmother’s living room, from the bay window to the tapestry depicting a desert scene (I thought it illustrated “We Three Kings”), from the four overstuffed bookcases to a card table piled with dictionaries, newspapers, and crossword puzzles.
A twentieth-century house, a Christmas carol, newspapers—the scene is an ordinary one. A scene in a fantasy or science fiction tale, however, is not. It’s tempting to catalog every sight, every smell, every noise, so your reader will know where he is before you pull the rug out from under him.
In The Call of Cthulhu, H. P. Lovecraft describes a statuette: “this thing, which seemed instinct with a fearsome and unnatural malignancy, was of a somewhat bloated corpulence and squatted evilly on a rectangular block or pedestal . . .”
Expressions such as “unnatural malignancy” and “squatted evilly” are narrator intrusion: telling, not showing. After a page and a half of adjective overload, Lovecraft begins to sound like a lecturer waving a laser pointer.
J. R. R. Tolkien in The Two Towers describes the road leading to the city of the Ringwraiths: “Here the road, gleaming faintly, passed over the stream in the midst of the valley, and went on, winding deviously up toward the city’s gate . . .”
One word, deviously, nails the image.
Or consider instead the dialogue in FORBIDDEN PLANET, where Morbius compares the trapezoidal doorways in the Krell laboratory to our doorways, shaped to the human body, and leaves the rest to our imagination.
In Memory, Lois McMaster Bujold shows Miles arriving at his ancestral home on the planet Barrayar. “Vorkosigan House sat in the center. . . . A stone wall topped with black wrought-iron spikes surrounded it all. The four stories of great gray stone blocks, in two main wings plus some extra odd architectural bits, rose in a vast archaic mass. All it needed was window slits and a moat. And a few bats and ravens for decoration.”
By segueing from a straightforward description into Miles’s thoughts, referencing familiar cultural images, Bujold not only shows the reader the hide-bound traditionalism of Barrayar, but also Miles’s mood—he doesn’t see his home as a place of comfort, but as a grim fortress.
In The Martian Chronicles, Ray Bradbury also uses familiar images, but twists them, ever so casually, to evoke an alien world: “They had a house of crystal pillars on the planet Mars by the edge of an empty sea, and every morning you could see Mrs. K. eating the golden fruits that grew from the crystal walls, or cleaning the house with handfuls of magnetic dust which, taking all dirt with it, blew away on the hot wind. . . . you could see Mr. K. himself in his room, reading from a metal book with raised hieroglyphs over which he brushed his hand, as one might play a harp. And from the book, as his fingers stroked, a voice sang, a soft ancient voice, which told tales of when the sea was red steam on the shore and ancient men had carried clouds of metal insects and electric spiders into battle.”
Here’s how I set the scene in my own story “Pleasure Palace,” nominated for a Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award: “Varina turned and glanced out a porthole. The cracked, steaming surface of Io stretched before her. Yesterday’s eruption had already begun to darken into orange; soon the crawlers would be sampling it for mineral content, for market value. A plume of fire billowed above the far horizon, consuming the stars; deep fissures glowed flickering red. Lucifer waited for the unwary, a rover slipping down a scoriated lava slope, a crawler caving in the edge of magma pool. A medieval Hell, painted by Bosch and orchestrated by the cries of the damned—except we, Varina thought, damn ourselves.”
Anna Jacobs, who writes historical
and modern tales, provides an example applicable to any genre. Compare version A: “The town sat in a circular valley with a river running through it. The hills around the valley were covered with woods which in summer were carpeted by wildflowers.”
To version B: “She couldn’t resist stopping the car at the lookout. She hadn’t expected the town to be so pretty—wide streets, gardens full of flowers, a big square where people were strolling or stopping to chat. ‘I think I shall like living here,’ she said aloud. As the river below her glinted in the sunlight and a breeze rustled through the trees she could feel herself relaxing, tension flowing away. Smiling she got back into the car. This was the last place he’d think of looking for her, the very last.”
And we’re off and running with the story!
EXERCISE
1. Describe your writing space.
Never mind the desk or the computer. What details reveal your personality? I could say I keep several toys in my office. Or I could say I have a doll of Merida from the movie BRAVE, with her red hair and bow and arrows, and an action figure of Éowyn from the Lord of the Rings series, complete with sword and spear.
Funny, my first published novel, Sabazel, was the story of an Amazon queen.
2. Describe a real place, perhaps a favorite vacation spot.
A misty morning in Scotland with the tang of peat smoke in the air? Waves lapping a beach in the South Seas? What is happening there, and to whom, and why? Is that actually peat smoke or smoke from a house fired by an arsonist? Are the waves lapping the beach because, just off shore, the Nautilus is rising from the sea?
Never assume the landscape is static.
3. Use the same methods to describe an imaginary place.
Just as in poetry, in description every word counts. Be specific. Choose strong words that show not just what’s there, but what the observer feels. Integrate the description into the narrative rather than leaving it in lumps. Description reveals character and motivation as well as setting the scene.
Make that spiral staircase carry the reader into the story!
JODY LYNN NYE
Breaking the Was-ing Habit (and Making Friends with Your Active Verbs)
JODY LYNN NYE has published forty books, including The Ship Who Won with Anne McCaffrey; a humorous anthology about mothers, Don’t Forget Your Spacesuit, Dear; and more than a hundred short stories. Her latest books are View from the Imperium (Baen Books), and Robert Aspirin’s Myth-Quoted (Ace Books).
Dynamic writing will bring your reader into your story in a matter of a few words. Many new writers don’t realize that they are keeping their readers at arm’s length by their very sentence structure. They begin far too many sentences with “It was,” “They were,” “He was,” and so on. I know, because I was one of those new writers.
During the early years of my professional career, I worked on a project under the aegis of best-selling science fiction legend Anne McCaffrey. She drew my attention to my over-reliance on was and its relatives, and broke me of the habit. With a kind but firm hand, Anne showed me where I let my reader down. I had gone to so much trouble to construct my world that I had overlooked the very phrases that presented my beautiful creation to my audience. I had taken what could have been emotionally satisfying encounters between my characters and their environment, and made them too remote to enjoy. In my own defense, I didn’t do it that often, just often enough to offend Anne’s sense of narrative flow. She made me more aware of my verb choices.
The main trouble with was is that it can make for lazy writing. It leads to telling instead of showing. The most popular example of excruciatingly bad writing is, of course, “It was a dark and stormy night.” Would Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton have been better off beginning his deathless story with, “The rain slashed down, striking the unlucky traveler with icy bullets of rain invisible in the deep gloom of the night”? Perhaps. It comes out just as purple, but more active. The reader will become more involved in the story when offered a visceral experience instead of a remote one. Passive verbs cause the reader to have a passive connection with the narrative. If the aim is to engage them actively, then use active verbs. Naturally, there will be times when you want to hold the reader apart from emotional involvement. This exercise will help you correct yourself when you don’t mean to do it.
Even if you are not guilty of nonstrategic was-ing, it’s still good to hone your chops. Here’s your assignment:
EXERCISE
Write an action scene of two to five pages. You must create a setting, introduce and describe one or more characters, and describe a fight or a daring escape or a romantic encounter, all without using the words was or were. (Or, if you must write it in the present tense, is, am, and are.)
Search for an active verb that takes the place of one of the old reliable, boring standbys. Read it over to make sure none of those sneaky verbs have crept in (except where appropriate in dialogue). You’ll be surprised how much more fully you begin to picture the scene. Your readers will appreciate the difference.
SCOTT RUBENSTEIN
Surprise in the Twenty-fourth Century
SCOTT RUBENSTEIN has written thirty produced episodes for television including Star Trek: The New Generation, Cagney & Lacey, Hunter, MacGyver, Night Court, Nine to Five, and Diff’rent Strokes. Aside from also being a story editor on three shows, he executive produced the award-winning documentary NOT AFRAID TO LAUGH and Peacock Blues for Showtime. He taught for ten years as an adjunct professor at California State University, Northridge and USC.
It was 1988. I was staring at Maurice Hurley, executive producer of Star Trek: The Next Generation. A smile on my face. My writing partner Leonard Mlodinow and I were about to be on the writing staff of the most innovative show on the air.
I grew up in a family that loved science fiction. For a long time I thought Edgar Rice Burroughs and Ray Bradbury were relatives of mine. In some ways they were. Someone was always reading about “John Carter of Mars” and my mother became infatuated with The Martian Chronicles.
But this is an article about surprise. A definition of surprise is “to cause to feel wonder, astonishment at something unanticipated.” The perfect way to describe Star Trek: The Next Generation. The show takes place in the twenty-fourth century, so it must be filled with surprises. Unfortunately, the first surprise we’ll discuss here took place in the twentieth century.
A few days before our meeting at Star Trek: The Next Generation, our agent called and said the producers of the show really liked us, so we didn’t need to prepare anything. We just needed to show up and prove we weren’t very weird. We could do normal. We did show up, but after twenty minutes of normal, the producer asked us why we were there. Surprise.
I explained that we were there because we were going to be on the staff of the show. He said, “No.” The show was very hard to write for and one couldn’t be on staff without writing a script, and what ideas did we have? Bigger surprise.
First thought was I was going to have to call a lot of friends and relatives and tell them that we weren’t writing on the show, and also that we killed our agent. I needed help from my bag of tricks as a writer and a person, and I needed it fast.
Before I tell you what happened at the meeting, I’ll tell you what I had learned about surprise up to this point.
Surprise was always my weapon of choice. I learned it at a very early age. I knew that I wasn’t the smartest kid in class. Laura Scheiner and Ronnie Lipkin had the co-honor. I wasn’t the handsomest person. It felt like everyone other than me had that co-honor. First lesson for the writer to learn: the more awkward you are, and the more jokes you can tell—i.e., unanticipated, surprising reformulations of reality you come up with—the better chance you have at success as a writer. When you try to sell any idea—whether to Hollywood or the literary world—humor is important, but surprise is essential. Also, with a billion ideas out there, it’s important to u
se an element of surprise to make your idea unique. Often it’s good to even surprise yourself; your audience will follow.
I was at my first college dance. I had never asked a girl to dance. I saw this beautiful young woman sitting at the sidelines, moving to the rhythms of the song. Little did I know this was about to define me as a man, as well as help me succeed as a writer. I don’t think she had a clue either.
I asked her to dance. She went into the crowd of dancing bobblehead dolls and moved to her and the band’s rhythm. I was totally lost in my head. I realized that the entire trick to winning this woman for the night was to get her to dance with me for a second song. My history of second dances was limited. So I needed a strategy. I needed intrigue. So there was that awkward moment when the song ended and I asked her name. She told me, Melody Martin. She asked me mine. I paused and said, “Thirteen.”
“Thirteen?” she mouthed. The band started playing. She paused for a moment. And started dancing. I had the rest of the dance to concoct a story. After that song was over, I told her my parents had twelve children before me and they ran out of names so they called me Thirteen. She laughed and we ended up dancing together for two months.
So the tricks I learned in life helped me in writing. But I should have known, if you don’t come prepared for anything, you might end up in shit’s creek without a paddle, or a boat.
And at this life-changing producer’s meeting, my writing partner and I were up a twenty-fourth century creek. A group of writer-producers wondering what ideas we had for them, and we had been told by our agent, “No need to prepare.”
Now Write! Page 26