BRANDON: All right, let's do class. Today
we're on Character Part 2. All right? I am just going to dig into it because this is
what I do. I blab. I've kind of divided today's topic into four different general areas. We're
going to talk about using what we learned last week in order to characterize, and also
hopefully teach a few other things about writing books that don't quite fit anywhere else.
Because books, stories, short stories, they basically are made up of four types of things,
four types of writing you're going to be doing. You are going to be doing dialogue, description,
beats, and introspection, also called navel gazing. This is going to basically be mixing
these four things together are what your story is made up of. So we're going to take each
one of these, talk about some strategies for using them, with an eye toward how to characterize
with them. We're going to start with dialogue. The question
becomes, how do you use dialogue for maximum impact in your writing? There is no, again,
like most things, one way you have to do this. There are strategies to use. When people talk
about your voice as an author, it's going to come down to how you intermix these and
how you decide to use them. Some tips on dialogue. Dialogue, generally,
is one of the most active ways that you can convey information and characterization, particularly
when there are multiple characters speaking, and it feels like a dialogue. The first thing
you want to avoid, if you can avoid it, is avoid having your dialogue sound like monologues.
Unless you are purposefully writing a monologue. Sometimes you will do this. For instance,
a character will stand up to give a speech, St. Crispin's Day. Or you have a character
who has an epilogue in each one of your epic fantasies, which is basically him monologuing
to an empty room. You will have reasons that you want to do monologues. But you want to
avoid your dialogues feeling like monologues. How you do this is, you generally, here's
a thing you don't want to do, big dialogue chunk, then another character says, "Ah!"
and then big dialogue chunk, and the character says, "Hmm." You will find yourself doing
this naturally, and this reads pretty poorly. Now, it reads better than most info dumps
done in description or in introspection, so it is a step forward, and once in a while
you're just going to have this, because it's basically a monologue disguised as a dialogue.
But this is a less effective way to do it. More effective is generally when you have
it look like a conversation. Bum, bum, buh, person starts to launch into, em dash, gets
interrupted by other character who says, "Wait, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah."
And this character says, "No, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah." And then this
character says, "Oh! Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah?" And this character's like,
"Yeah." And then another part of your info dumps. Then this other character's like, "But
what about this other thing." And the character's like, "We considered that. The blah, blah,
blah, blah, blah, blah, blah." And you are breaking your info dumps up and making it
into a conversation. This is just going to read way better, and it's going to give you
way more opportunities to make your dialogue feel like it's expressing character.
The thing that we want to get across with all four of these is you want to find strategies
for letting your dialogue, description, your action, your introspection either convey likeability
for a character, convey proactivity for a character, convey the arc the character's
one, their flaws, in other words, to convey their competence, and their motivation. If
you can get those five things into your dialogue for your characters, suddenly your dialogue
is going to start to pop off the page, look really fresh and interesting, and it's going
to be expressing character. You can see how you would be doing this. How
would you maybe express likeability, or increase likeability for a character in this sort of
thing? Any suggestions? You want to move that character up on the likeability scale.
STUDENT: Humor! BRANDON: Humor. They're funny. They're making
a wisecrack. Absolutely. How would you move them down?
STUDENT: Whiney. BRANDON: Whiney. Move them down. They're whiney.
Argumentative without it actually serving a purpose. Not paying attention. Making fun
of the character in a way that's not funny, that's just cutting them down. You could move
a character in this conversation up or down on that scale.
How do you express character's proactivity in a dialogue?
STUDENT: They talk a lot. BRANDON: They talk a lot. They're really excited
about this idea. They're like me talking about writing. That's going to come across as a
proactive character. Any other suggestions? STUDENT: Their contributions are meaningful.
Like, if they're just like not meaningful, then they're--
BRANDON: Right. They offer-- like, a proactive character would say, "I can do that, and I
could do this to help to." They offer. When you're in the group meeting, if you ever do
this, and someone volunteers to take a task, that's, like, a great thing. We're all happy
when someone actually volunteers to do something. You can use your dialogue to express that.
How can you use the dialogue to express motivation of a character?
STUDENT: "But, oh, my son!" BRANDON: But, oh, my son. Right. Completely
can be overdone, but that is expressing the character's motivation. When the character
cuts in and says, "But what about the droid attack on the Wookies?" in the middle of a
conversation about something else, that character is expressing part of their motivation. They're
raising the issue. Get across the character motivations in this. "When we're on this trip,
could we stop and see this place I've always wanted to get a stamp from," going back to
our stamp collector character. You can put these things into the dialogue in a way that's
just going to express your character. How would you express characters' flaws in
dialogue? Their journey, in other words. How are you going to get across that they are
having an arc? STUDENT: You could make your character stubborn,
where they are constantly repeating the same thing.
BRANDON: Yeah, totally. And if you want the arc to work, you're going to show them changing
on that over time through the dialogue choices they make. Any other suggestions, show their
flaws? STUDENT: Have them say something really stupid.
BRANDON: Yeah, have them say something really stupid. Or if their character journey is the
journey of, because sometimes a journey is apprentice to master, they can be asking a
lot of insightful questions. They don't have to-- the flaw, again, the flaw is not their
fault, but they still don't know things. They can be asking for information. Later in the
story they can be giving the information. I've seen lots of great arcs where character
learns something and by the end they're teaching that thing.
STUDENT: Have them pointedly not say anything when they really should.
BRANDON: Yeah, absolutely. All right, how can you show characters' competence? You want
to move them up on the scale of competence in dialogue. You already answered so we'll
go right there. STUDENT: If they know a lot about the issue
and things other people don't know and put things together no one else has put together.
BRANDON: One great way to do this, as I mentioned last week, if another character acknowledges
it, it's going to be more reinforced. So if someone says, "This, this, and this," and
another person's like, "Wow, I didn't realize you were so up to date on this." That's going
to reinforce it to us. Finding ways through the conversation. Or somebody who's really
competent could cut through all of the, say, rigamarole about an issue and get right to
its core. You are showing a competence. How can you move them down on the competence
scale? You want to establish that this person is not competent yet. Yeah?
STUDENT: They're talking like they think they know a lot about something, but obviously
they don't. BRANDON: Exactly.
STUDENT: "I didn't know that." BRANDON: Yeah, "I didn't know that." Totally.
Yeah. Or they could ask some really asinine questions. Yeah?
STUDENT: If somebody was trying to put humor in a place where it's not appropriate.
BRANDON: Yeah, humor where it's not appropriate. You can see, as you're starting to build your
story, if you can master doing some of these things, if you can master getting across all
of this in dialogue instead of your normal way. There's a reason why we're going to do
this one last. You are going to default to this every time, unless you start training
yourself not to. That doesn't mean that introspection has no place. It does have a place in the
story. But you are going to default to it. You are going to end up with these things.
You're like, “This isn't an info dump. This is important, meaningful stuff about the character.”
Four pages later of the character ruminating about whatever issue that they are trying
to work on to become a better person, your reader is collapsed on the floor asleep.
Whereas, if you're doing it like this, and you have three characters with different motivations,
different flaws, and different areas of expertise, having a conversation together, where at the
end of the conversation the reader feels like they know all three characters better and
it's given us the information about the heist they're going to pull off. Suddenly you have
just mastered characterization in a way that will not put your to sleep.
We talked another week, we won't talk a ton about it, but you do want to try to vary your
dialogue based on the character, aggressive stance versus nonaggressive stance, the character
who always asks for more information or clarification versus the character who's like, "I got it.
I'm ready to go," even if they don't have it.
One question I get a lot is on dialect. How often should you use dialect? This is a personal
choice. This is a stylistic choice. My default recommendation to you is less is more, even
for little tag words that a character uses that distinguish them. I used one of these
in Elantris. It's based off of a-- we have them in English but it's more like "eh," where
you say "Eh?" You ask for-- what are these called? The linguists can tell me. They are
a form of conversation where in conversation a lot of languages have a thing you stick
at the end to ask if the other person's understanding. STUDENT: [inaudible]
BRANDON: What's that? STUDENT: Back channeling.
BRANDON: Back channeling. OK. So in Korean it's [kudecho]. "Isn't that so?"
Which is that part. In Elantris I put in "kolo?" If you've read Elantris, this character always
has one of these. It's part of the linguistic quirk of this character. My editor cut, like,
three quarters of those and said, "I know that realistically in dialogue people use
these all the time, and indeed, you will find in some languages and some conversations every
sentence is tagged with one of these things to make sure that the person you're talking
to understands that they can speak up at that point and say if they understand. But you
don't need nearly as many as you think you need." Any of these things that you are adding
to the dialogue, consider using them as a light dusting of dialect rather than an all-in.
That said, there are some writers who write fantastic pieces with all-in dialect. There's
a nice little section in Name of the Wind that has an all-in dialect section that is
very fun. The Wee Three Men by Terry Pratchett is very into this. You might even argue that
a bunch of Star Wars is in dialect with Chewbacca and R2D2 in a dialect we don't understand.
A lot of times, if you're going to go heavily into dialect, you will need to understand
that a lot of readers eyes will glaze over, even if they could figure it out. So be careful
about that and give contextual clues of what's going on in the conversation. But this is
really just a personal choice sort of thing. We're going to go through these fairly quickly.
So let's just ask other questions on dialogue, particularly getting across character. Yeah?
STUDENT: You talk about the idea of, like, someone always asking more information, or
people have different really ways that they-- BRANDON: Yep.
STUDENT: The conversation. How do you make that a trend for a character without making
it seem kind of stiff? BRANDON: Good question. How do you make it
a trend for a character without making it seem kind of stiff?
Number one is, again, less is generally more. If you're having the character do this every
sentence, it's going to get old really fast and it's going to feel stiff very fast.
Number two, variety. For almost everything you're doing in your writing, particularly
when it comes down to these sorts of things, variety is king. Having some conversations
that go a little bit more like a monologue, mixed with some conversations that read like
an argument and feel almost like a fight scene with words, having other things where people
are just shooting the breeze and talking together and stuff is coming out, having a variety
of different types. And in the same way, the character who always asks for more information
can have a variety of ways they do this. The idea is never to have the reader and these
sorts of things really pick out, this is the character that always asks for more information.
If you do your job right, they would be able to tell that this character is talking, but
they wouldn't be able to tell you why until you say, well, they often are asking for more
information, or this is the character who is empathetic to how other people are feeling
and always asks the person who is being quiet in the conversation what they think. And if
this character does that several times through the story, your reader's going to pick up
on that subconsciously, and that character's dialogue is just going to feel like their
dialogue. The king way to show off your skills in this
is to do dialogue-only sections and to practice them without attributions. This is very hard,
and it rarely works to keep them in a book. I have one in an Alcatraz book, where that's
the joke, is that people keep entering the conversation, and there's a random pirate,
I think, that wasn't there when the story started. The idea is that it's a joke that
you don't give any attributions and people are just yelling at each other.
But practicing this can be really handy. Having a three-- it's generally got to be a three-person
conversation for you to really practice it. Write it without any dialogue tags or any
descriptions and see if you can pull off having different characters with different motivations,
different ways of speaking, that the reader can mostly keep track of who all these people
are without the tags. Then when you add the tags in and give it a little bit of description
and stuff, it reads like a really powerful sequence often.
I usually recommend a couple of short stories I really like that do this very well. One
is "They Are Made of Meat," which is a two-person, or two-being, conversation. And then there's
another great short story called "Wiki History," which is an epistolary story told all through
forum entries by various characters, where you could strip away the dialogue tags, they
still have them in this, and you could still follow what's happening. It's a short story
that takes place on a time traveler's forum, and it's really fun. Those are both free on
the internet. I can't remember who wrote "Wiki History," but "They Are Made of Meat" is on
Terry Bisson's website. Anyway, let's move on to other questions.
Yeah, go ahead. STUDENT: Sometimes I feel like when I'm reading
a book or writing a story, I have a hard time presenting when a character is lying. Is there
a way to make that obvious to a reader without making it obvious to the other characters?
BRANDON: Yes. OK, lying. You've got basically two things going on here,
whether it's lying as untrustworthy narrator, or whether it's not. We're going to talk about
untrustworthy narrator in a little bit, but basically the idea with untrustworthy narrator
is to show through these one thing and contrast it with introspection that says something
else. Oftentimes you say something in introspection, but you show something else through dialogue,
description, beats, and action, and that contrast between the two, that dissonance, is what
clues the reader in that this is an untrustworthy narrator. That's not the only way to do it.
But one of the other ways is to simply have the character find out info in one scene,
and in the very next scene tell different information to the people around the, which
will let us know that everything that character says from the on is a lie. Like, if we know
that this character's telling a lie about something else, then we're going to be suspicious
of everything else they tell, if that makes sense. But we have to know that the character
knows that information first, and then see the lie being told.
You can do this-- one of the great people-- someone asked, I think last week, about how
you do things with side characters and characterization. Keep in mind, you can generally do all of
this and all of this through someone else's viewpoint for a side character. You can do
a decent amount of this. You just can't generally do much of this. So you have two and a half
of the four tools for characterizing people who are not your viewpoint characters. The
reason description is only half is because half or more of your description power is
characterized in the person who's doing the describing, not necessarily the person they're
describing. But two and a half of your four tools exist
for all side characters and people you aren't in viewpoints of. So you just have to practice
making sure you get across those people's characterization through dialogue beats and
the half description that is about them, rather than relying on introspection. But if you're
doing your job and you are practicing, then you are learning how to do these three, and
not leaning on this one as a crutch except when you need to. That's just going to make
your writing more powerful. Now one little thing to mention about dialogue
is there is a lot of discussion in writerly circles about how much you should modify your
dialogue. This is a personal stylistic choice, and you do not have to follow anyone's rules
on this. I think it's useful for you to know the rules, however. Generally, the rule of
thumb is that pieces of dialogue should have what we call said bookisms at the end. "He
said." That said and asked should be, rule of thumb, 90% of your attributions.
The reason this is a rule of thumb is that said and asked are invisible to the reader,
and it doesn't draw focus away from the dialogue. I generally expand that. My personal philosophy
is shouted, whispered, and some of these other things are really handy. I use more than I
really need. I use noted way more often than I probably need to use it, because it's basically
a meaningless word. If it's been done in the dialogue, it's obvious that they're noting
it, and things like that. Yeah?
STUDENT: If it's just two people dialoguing, like, really quickly, can you take those out?
BRANDON: Yes, you can take them out. Yeah, so what Dave said in his class is he usually
tried to make sure that you only went, like, through three exchanges in a two-person dialogue
before you added a beat or another dialogue. But generally, if it's just two people and
it's quick back and forths, you want to scale way back on your tags. If there are three
people in the conversation, or even another person in the room, it's often better to use
more tags than you think you need, just because that third person, it's going to be jarring.
But, yeah, that's a-- Like, if you were reading a novel version
of some of this Joss Whedon quippy dialogue between two characters, most of those shouldn't
have dialogue tags at all. This goes also in the adverb direction. "He
said softly." Rule of thumb is to avoid those, or to be very sparing with them, or to only
use a couple of them to modify tone, like softly or loudly or things like that. Some
people will say just take them all out. This is a personal stylistic choice, again. I think
I may have mentioned J. K. Rowling loves all of these things. She loves using every different
synonym of said that she can come up with and putting it in. She is the most successful
writer of our time. So this is why you should take these things with a grain of salt.
But the why, remember you're chefs, not cooks. The why is that if you aren't leaning on these
things, then you often will naturally make your dialogue sharper. If you have to replace
shouted with someone actually emphasizing a word and being very angry, then you will
write your dialogues more strongly than if you could just say, "He said angrily, furrowing
his brow." Generally, writing advice from most professors is going to be cut as much
of this out as you can and try to let the dialogue do the talking. Ha ha.
Yes. STUDENT: Do you find-- I try to use more of,
like, action along with my dialogue. [inaudible] BRANDON: Right. So that's a beat, and we're
going to get to those. That's what a beat means. Variety there is really handy. The
reason beats are also very good is because a beat, like for instance, "He slammed his
hand on the table. 'I am done talking to you.'" Then you don't need a shouted, you don't need
a he said. We all are framing that, and it also does this kind of pyramid abstraction
stuff where we're grounding you in the scene and keeping you there.
This is also a stylistic choice, how often you use beats in your dialogue. Some writers
like a beat almost every line of dialogue. Some writers like to keep only as sparse number
of beats as they can in order to keep you grounded in the scene and who's talking and
add some variety to the said and asked. Personal stylistic choice.
I find that if you use fewer beats, just like you use fewer adverbs and things like that,
that you are naturally going to force yourself to write better dialogue, and the reader's
going to be adding more of those beats in themselves. But this is a stylistic choice.
Basically, it comes down to if, as you as a writer, how much do you want to be painting
a cinematic picture in your readers' heads and giving them every single action, and how
much do you want to back off on that and have them be imagining it themselves. This is also
going to vary, based on your genre. Some genres like more, some genres like less.
Also, it's going to depend on how much you want that dialogue to pop. You can imagine,
on the page, how different it's going to be if you read a scene that looks like this.
Short dialogue, short dialogue, short dialogue, short dialogue joke, short dialogue. Now change
that just in your mind to beat right here. “He went and scratched his face.” And
then beat right here. “She sat back, folded her arms, and cocked her head.” Beat right
here. Beat right here. Beat right here. Instead of reading like bam, bam, bam, bam, rapid
fire, you're going to get a slower scene. You're going to get an introspective scene,
where you're seeing characters. You're stopping the reader from focusing on the dialogue and
you're pulling them into what the characters are doing, and you're making the subtext more
important than the text of the dialogue. These do different things. Generally, I recommend
erring on doing less with beats, but there are definitely sections where you want to
pull out from the dialogue and actually be talking about the subtext and stuff like that.
You'll see some fantastic writers, like Frank Herbert will do this, where it's like, what
you're really doing is you're showing the character giving commentary on all the dialogue
and things people are saying, and the purpose of that scene is more to characterize the
character who's giving a running commentary, either in their head or to someone else about
the dialogue, and the dialogue itself becomes less important than that commentary, because
the purpose is to show that this is how this person is.
Any last questions on dialogue? Yeah, go ahead. STUDENT: What are your thoughts about writing
in caps? BRANDON: Writing in caps? I tend to personally
feel that all tools available to a writer are good to use now and then. So I am a fan
of caps and small caps as both tools to use. I am a fan of em dashes, colons. I think I
talked about this last week, right? Semicolons. No, I didn't? OK. I am a big fan of using
all of the punctuation marks. The only one I don't use is the interrobang, because it
feels too comic book to me. I'll show you. I am a big fan of using your three different
types of emphasis, italics, caps, small caps. I guess there's another one. There is both
of these italicized. I like using-- generally I stick to italicized versus caps, and maybe
in a caps italicized, as varying levels of emphasis. My emphasis is going to be 90%,
that's a weird 9, 90% italics. But I am a big fan of italicizing words to emphasize
them in dialogue and in prose, just because it's an extra way to get information to the
reader in a way that feels like it's showing rather than telling.
STUDENT: What about bolding things? BRANDON: Bolding things is generally not done
very often in prose fiction in the market right now. Italics and bold mean the same
thing generally. You can make a distinction, and some writers do. But I would say most
of the time italics and bold are the same thing, and so they just pick one or the other.
STUDENT: For internal dialogue, do you prefer quotes or a different font?
BRANDON: OK. All right. Direct speech or free indirect speech, these are fancy writer terms
for-- there's actually a different one. I'm trying to remember what it's called. But there's
three different ways you can convey information in someone's head. One is, "Oh, no, classes
are cancelled. What am I going to do?" he thought. The second way is, "He heard that
classes were going to be cancelled and wasn't sure what to do." And then the third way is,
"Classes were cancelled. Whatever will I do?" but not italicized, just left as it is. Generally
you're choosing between the first two, italicized thoughts in head or not. My personal style,
which I find very effective, is to use the italicized thoughts as either subject sentence
or concluding sentence to a section of introspection. We're kind of jumping all over the place,
but that's OK, because the questions are. For instance, I would, if a character was
thinking about classes, they would start with a subject line of, "'Man, classes have been
cancelled. What am I going to do?' He had seven classes. They all had tons of homework.
It was going to be really troubling, and how was he ever going to get to the dance on time.
Was the dance going to be cancelled?" And then anchor it with a coming out of it line
like, "'I guess we'll just deal with it as it comes,' he thought." So you're using the
direct thought, the direct speech, as a way to funnel into the introspection and out of
the introspection. That's my stylistic choice. Different people
have very different styles on this, and none of them are really-- no one's going to come
down hard on you for picking one or the other. It's just a personal style.
STUDENT: When you say, "he thought," are you italicizing?
BRANDON: I italicize the "he thought." I really, strongly prefer italicized direct thoughts,
as opposed to nonitalicized direct thoughts. STUDENT: What about a mental dialogue between
two characters? BRANDON: Mental dialogue between two characters
I will also italicize. Now, you have a lot of different options on this, because some
people will small caps those, and that we'll be tagging as this is what small caps means.
People are speaking mentally to each other. Some people will use italics and quotations
marks to mean mental dialogue between people. Some people use italics to mean this is happening
in a different language than the normal language we going in right now. We have shifted. Italics
can mean a lot of different things, and you can play with those your own way and how you
want them to go. I generally put thoughts with someone else as, "'Hey, what's going
on with you?' he said." But it's in italics with no quote marks. That's a mental projection
of a thought to someone else in telepathic communication. But lots of different ways
you can go on this. STUDENT: In working with publishers and editors,
are they likely to make you change to their standards, or are they just going to make
it consistent? BRANDON: My experience, so in working with
publishers and editors, are they going to make you adhere to their standard, or just
be consistent? My experience has been be consistent. I have never had a publisher change any of
these sort of things. I've had copy editors do that. But those are the people they send
the manuscript to who are going to try and apply a style guide, and you can change that
style guide by saying, "I use this. Don't change instances of this. I like direct thought.
Don't take it out." Almost no copy editor would do that. But what they do try to is
they try to change your use of ellipses sometimes and things like that, if you prefer ellipses.
We'll get to all the punctuation marks in a second.
STUDENT: Do you think it's better to have thoughts as part of your-- not as an italicized
section, but as part of a block of someone narrating almost?
BRANDON: OK, so narrators. Do I like to have a big block of narrated direct speech inside
someone's head. I do not. That's because I feel like variety is really important, and
that I can signpost using it. For instance, if we're doing a big block,
you need to do three big paragraphs of introspection. The character's by themself, and there's not
a lot of beats or action here. These happen a lot. I prefer thoughts right here in italics
to launch us into it, and maybe a summarizing thought right here to keep us focused in the
character's scene, and then a thought right at the end to summarize what the character's
come-- the decision they've made. That just breaks up that big block of text. It's visually
more appealing. You do this enough and it starts to get the character-- the reader starts
to realize these italicized things are summaries or subject lines. If I'm paying attention
to them, I'm getting bread crumbed through this long section of introspection in a way
that starts to make it feel like an internal monologue, but also has more back and forths
and things like that. Particularly with, like, a lot of times you'll
see this one from me. This is, by the way, various how the sausage is made. If you guys
start paying attention, this is going to ruin books for you for a little while, but it will
un-ruin books for you later on. Generally, for a little while, books, you will only see
how this stuff works and it'll be really frustrated and annoying to you. But then you kind of
get over a hump where you are internalizing this, and you're noticing what the author's
doing, at the same time as kind of internalizing the tool and paying attention to the story
separately, and you can start to do that. It will-- just warning you. But it's not usually
permanent. Usually this one for me is going to be a contrast
to where this went. So topic sentence, and then ruminating on it, going a different direction,
kind of off topic, and they're saying, "But, no, I can't do that because remember this
clue we found." Circles us back to having to deal with the clue. Character almost is
having an argument with themselves at this point. Flows you through to the end where
they've made their decision. "I'm going to go tell such-and-such about this clue." We
have now made progress in the scene and there's been motion, and it's been summarized for
you at the end. Like I said, how the sausage is made. I hope
this does not-- yeah. But start paying attention to how you do this. Use all of these tools
to-- you want to control the reader's flow through your story. You want to know when
things are going to be slower paced for them and introspective and when they're going to
be fast. You want to direct the reader's attention in the direction you want it to go. And using
some things like this can take this introspection and boost them into the next section where
they're going to go have an argument with someone, and you have laid out their entire
motivation. They have had a mini argument with themselves. You are coming out of this
introspection knowing what their motivation is and what they're going to do next, and
then you get to see what they do next as they have the argument with someone else about
the things they just talked about through themselves. Establishes motivation.
Again, don't lean too hard on this one. But I always say that because I know from experience
that most writers are going to do 90% that one, when really it should be probably like
20% or 30%, depending on your personal style. STUDENT: I read some online books where people
can post comments, and I noticed books with a lot of introspection get a lot of criticism
from people because I think people introspect differently.
BRANDON: Yeah. STUDENT: Or sometimes they criticize how they're
coming to this decision. BRANDON: That's true. People introspect differently
in their own lives. STUDENT: Yeah, and I think it's like opening
up the machine and showing how it's working, and sometimes people don't like how the machine
is working, and so they'll criticize that. BRANDON: Sometimes that's true. That is very
true. I would agree with that comment. All right. Let's do the punctuation marks
really quickly. Your punctuation mark's job is to help you be more clear to your reader,
to guide them through complex ideas. All right? Use the punctuation marks to do that. When
you're taught grammar in school, it wasn't about this. These things are really useful
tools. For instance, so punctuation marks are period, comma, em dash, semicolon, colon.
Did I miss any? Then, you know, the period replacements. These are all tools in your
toolbox to use if you want. Oh, by the way, interabang is that one that's
a question mark, exclamative question mark. See it all the time in comics, not very often
in prose. Some people hate it. Some people love it. Sometimes you will see it actually
written as-- right? The interabang is just a combination of those two things. I don't
use the interabang in either of its forms. That's just a thing. Most prose fiction does
not use the interabang in either form. You are totally allowed to use the interabang.
There is no rule against it. Even if your copy editor tries to cut them all out, you
are allowed. You are the author. Most of the time, the purpose of your comma
is going to be to set off thoughts in a way where they all combine together. They're not
parentheticals, but they are controlling how the reader absorbs your information. This
is when you have dependent clauses or introductions or conjunctions or things to give the reader
a chance to be like, "All right, I have to kind of segment this piece of information
that's going to relate to this other piece of information," and that is really useful
for controlling how people read through your books. If you're not using your commas to
set off ideas like that, your books are going to be really hard to read.
Study how writers do it. I can't give you a big grammar lesson here. But generally this
idea is going to be, like, the purpose of a comma is almost always to be, hang on a
sec, and now we'll get the rest of it, as opposed to the em dash, which is a parenthetical,
which is an aside. Em dash is when you say, "I was on my way to get, I had to go get milk.
Oh, and my wife had also said that I should stop by and pick up the kids on the way home--
when I got in a car wreck." Like, that's a parenthetical. It's a completely separate,
independent idea interjected into the center of another idea.
You will also use them when a sentence breaks kind of almost mid-thought and moves to another
idea. So you kind of are stapling two sentences together in a way that they are disjointed
from each other, where you're trying to indicate that the character is either breaking their
own thought, or someone else is interrupting them, or something is interrupting them, or
they're being kind of, they're jumping around to a lot of different thoughts. Em dash will
say to your reader, "OK, whatever that thing you were doing, were thinking about, this
is a completely new idea." Whereas comma doesn't do that.
Note that one of the most useful ways to remember if you want a comma is almost always if you're
repeating subject and verb you're going to want a comma, because they're independent
clauses conjoined by a conjunction then. "I went to the store to buy some milk, and I
saw my friend John." The reason you put a comma there is because if you don't, and you
say, "I went to the store to buy some milk and I met my friend John," until they get
to the second verb, the reader's going to think they went to buy milk and what else.
They went to buy milk and ham? They went to buy milk and bread? But no. You're adding
an independent clause on the end of that. Put that comma in to indicate to them, "and
I also did this other thing." OK? I know it's all grammarly. It's annoying stuff. It's really
useful to keep your reader-- remember, the whole point is to keep your reader from getting
confused. Then semicolon and colon, used less often.
Semicolon staples together two related ideas that for whatever reason you don't want to
do with a conjunction. And colon is usually used for lists, you know how that goes, or
a definition that's coming, where you're going to define a thing for people. You're going
to set it off. You're like, here's the thing, now the definition of what that thing is.
"He had to go get some milk: this blue stuff that he really thought was cool." I don't
know if that one actually works. But, you know, that's where you're going with colons.
I may have said comma. I meant colon. All right. That's a complete aside. This is
stuff that most of you already know, but I'll say it just in case there are those who don't.
The whole purpose is to control the reader's flow through the story. And I tell you, if
you do not use your commas, particularly when you're separating those independent ideas,
you're going to have reader comprehension issues all over the place. All right?
All right. Let's move on to description, which we have already mostly covered when we did
the pyramid of abstraction, if you remember that conversation. Where did I put my phone?
Oh, my back pocket. But let's ask how you then can use description to make a character
more, move up or down on the likeability scale. How can you use your descriptions? Your paragraph
of description about the setting. STUDENT: You can describe things in funny
or comical ways. BRANDON: Yes. A character who is humorous
about the way to describe their world is naturally going to be more likeable. Yeah, go ahead.
STUDENT: What you describe is kind of what the character's thinking about.
BRANDON: Yeah. What you describe is what they're thinking about.
STUDENT: So if they're thinking about positive things, then you write positively about their
world. BRANDON: Like, I'm not sure if this is an
exact one, but kind of these things, like when Matt Cauthon thinks, I'm going to get
this quote wrong, but he's like, "She looks like she could bite iron ingots and spit out
nails." That's his description of what this person looks like. That tells you something
about him and abut them. STUDENT: I saw this one book do this really
well with everything he described as either sexist or disdainful.
BRANDON: Yes. Yes, you definitely can do that. Make sure that the reader knows that this
is the character and not you, which you need to separate by making sure your viewpoints
are distinctive, or that you're hanging a lantern on it. But yes, very handy. Yeah?
STUDENT: So is this description from the point of view character's perspective?
BRANDON: Yes. STUDENT: What he's seeing and describing?
BRANDON: Yes. STUDENT: Or is it description of a different
person? BRANDON: If you are in third limited or first
person, which is going to be 95% of what writers should be writing in today's market, it's
always through the perspective of the character doing the describing. So every description
is going to say something about the character that is doing the describing, and the character
being described. Those are both separate tools. Now, a lot of times, your description will,
particularly if you're in third limited and not first person, you're going to veer into
being just a little omniscient for a little while. It doesn't all have to be in the character's
voice. Sometimes you just do an economical this is what this thing looks like or this
person looks like. In that case, you're moving that dial all the way over toward describing
the thing and characterizing it, and less on the character doing the describing. But
remember that character doing the describing is one of your primary tools of characterization.
Like, you've only got four ways to characterize people, and I've told you that you want to
avoid the last one as much as is relevant for your writing style. So use those tools.
How would you use the description that you're doing to establish a character's motivation?
Yeah. STUDENT: For example, like, if they're in
a desert, then you could describe something as, like, looking like water, but, like, seeing
a mirage. BRANDON: Yeah. Let's say there's a character
who wants to go-- oh, go ahead. We'll do yours first.
STUDENT: I don't know. I guess it kind of is maybe worth [inaudible], but they see everything
in context of whatever goal they have. BRANDON: Right.
STUDENT: Like, oh, I could use that for this. BRANDON: Yeah, exactly. Just try to imagine
two different characters describing this classroom, one whose main goal is to get A's on every
class, and it's working for them, how are they going to describe their classroom, and
another whose main goal is to get married. How do you describe the classroom differently
for those two characters? This is a tool in your toolbox, your descriptions, and it is
one that writers, new writers particularly, ignore way too often. How can you make a character
more proactive through your descriptions? STUDENT: Notices the important things first.
BRANDON: Notices the important things first. Ranks them. Plans out what they are going
to do. How can-- oh, go ahead, yeah. STUDENT: All the descriptions are pointed
out towards the character's goal [inaudible]. BRANDON: How can you-- oh, go ahead.
STUDENT: I was just going to say, like, creative dialogue and consistent, like, you know that
their mind is active, even if they are not. BRANDON: How can you make a character express
their flaws through their descriptions? Yeah. STUDENT: I guess the firsts thing that came
to mind for me is if go with, like, a drug addiction, or something along the lines of
that, looking at something and being like, "Oh, that looks smokable."
BRANDON: Mm-hmm, there you go. There's a great-- if you guys haven't read The Truth by Terry
Pratchett, there's a character who's always looking at things through the eyes of whether
he could snort it. He generally thinks he can, and it will give him a buzz, when it's
not something that will give him a buzz. The most amusing thing is this character does
that. This is also the character who has read a
whole bunch of Victorian novels and it's never stated directly, this is how you use dialogue,
where he thinks that this . . . is a swear word, because in Victorian novels
they would edit out the curse and they would write it in the book like this. He's read
the books enough that he knows that's a swear word, but he doesn't know that the dash replaces
a word. So he says "ing" in dialogue all the time, and other characters are like, "What?
Ing? What?" It's brilliant. Talk about using dialogue in order to characterize
a character. This is someone who likes to read, but is not good at putting two and two
together. This is a world that has a Victorian sort of sensibility about its literature,
where they are not writing the actual curse words out, and it's characterizing all the
people around him who all know all these curses and are really confused by him. It's just
brilliant, and it's half a word. Like, talk about a dialogue sequence that does so much
where Pratchett could use half a word to just give you so much. He was a master at all of
this. Pratchett's my favorite writer. That's why you hear me gush about him so much.
All right, let's move on, because we want to do these other two, and we've covered description
a ton. Let me make sure that there wasn't another bullet point on description. OK. Right.
All right. There's a few more things to talk about with description.
One thing is establishing shots. This is a screenplay term, or a movie making term, where
often you will use an establishing shot, the pan across the area the characters are going
to be in so you get a large scale look at this before you zoom in on the character interactions.
Descriptive establishing shots can be very handy for a writer as a shorthand. You will
often see writers start scenes with an establishing shot, which is description. Sometimes they're
in omniscient. This is Robert Jordan's style. If you haven't
read The Wheel of Time, every book starts with an establishing shot in omniscient before
moving into a character's third limited viewpoint. These establishing shots, generally, if you're
in third limited, be careful about how you start a scene, because the first name that
a reader sees is the one that they are going to assume you're in that person's head. Not
always, but you have to be very careful. So if you're not in someone's head, and you then
are mentioning someone else, it's going to start to root the reader's idea in that character's
head. Often, if you're going to do this establishing
shot, oftentimes you say, "Brandon leaned against the little railing thing and looked
over the room, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah." Establishing shot description of what
the room looks like. Now we move into the scene. Then once you've done your establishing
shot, you use anchoring descriptions that are very short descriptions to keep us centered
in this space, or relative to one another, and to keep us focused in this space. This
is our pyramid abstraction thing. You use this sometimes as beats, which we're
kind of moving into here, and sometimes just as pull back for a second, give us another
sentence of description. "Brandon has noticed the Expo pen." And for some reason it's relevant
and gives us a description on the Expo pen. That extra bit of description right there
just will keep us in the scene, rather than-- the danger is white room syndrome, where the
longer your characters talk without interacting the setting, the longer your character spends
in introspection without interacting with the setting, the more danger your reader starts
to be of imagining that this is all happening in a white room with no actual setting around
it, and then you're way up on the top of the pyramid abstraction, and when things start
happening the reader will be lost where they are in relation to this, where the characters
are in relation to this. They'll have forgotten the scene.
Remember description has to it more than one sense. There are five senses, depending on
who you talk to. You're going to over-rely on sight. Almost all authors do. You are going
to under-rely on sound, and you're going to under-rely on scent. Taste is the hard one.
You're going to under-rely on touch. Oftentimes, a great establishing shot in writing prose
versus anything, is that you can tell us what temperature it is and how the character feels
about that temperature. You can get us key sense that no film can really get across in
the same way and play to your advantage the fact that we can use multiple senses when
films have to evoke other senses through using sight or sound. Understand that these are
tools of yours and they are great at the beginning of setting a scene. All right?
OK, let's move to beats and action. I just explained to you the advantage we have over
visual mediums like cinema. We have a big disadvantage at the same time, and that is
that cinema being a visual medium with a strong secondary audio component means that they
can set a scene real fast and you will, if the filmmaker's doing their job right, never
lose track of where the character is in relation to everything else around them, unless the
filmmaker wants you to. The reader of your book is going to struggle
to place your characters into the setting. This is going to be a constant back and forth
between you and them as you don't want it to become white room syndrome, and you don't
want to overly laden them with too many blasé descriptions of people walking around in the
space. But at the same time, if you're going to have action in particular, the reader needs
to be able to place all the important components into the scene.
So action sequences are a little harder for novelists to do than films are. The films,
let's just say they get an extra little boost from being a visual medium to action sequences.
Everything is slightly more exciting on film than it would be on the paper naturally when
it comes to quick things like an action beat. You can counter this by using the advantages
that you have that cinema does not, which are specifically, more than two senses, but
also you are inside a character's head. So you can treat an action sequence, and I would
recommend that you treat action sequences, and introspection, and dialogue, less description,
but you can treat them all as mini arcs, as we talked about in plotting.
For instance, if you're having an action sequence, one of the best things to do is to start off
with showing character motivation, then you hopefully have established this before the
action sequence starts. Then you can show the character making a plan. It doesn't have
to be an active "I'm going to have a plan now." But you can set up what the promise
is. The character can see, "All right, there's 10 of them in this room." You can give us
an indication of what the progress is then going to be. "There's 10 bad guys. I win when
they're all dead. We're going to count them." Right? Because you can show the character
going through and giving a sense of progress to an action sequence by even, you'll see
me doing this, counting off how many they've defeated to get to the end. Now that's not
the only way to do it, and don't rely too much on any one tool.
But you can also have your plan be, "I need to get to the end of this hallway." That is
your stated objective for the character. The progress is them fighting their way through
the hallway, taking cover here, going here. In this case, you don't count the enemies,
because your progress is not how many enemies do I defeat, your progress is do I reach--
you're basically writing a fighting travelogue in this case. Do I reach the place that I
need to get to? And then what is the payoff? You can do in action scenes little mini versions
of each of these things. The character's like-- if it's-- how about this? There's a great
scene where, in The Emperor's New Groove, there's a short action sequence where Kronk
cuts a rope and drops a chandelier on Izma. And it all plays out in this way. Most of
them you will. This is a big strong character who's goofy and funny and sympathetic antagonist,
versus the very unsympathetic antagonist who has been his boss for the whole thing. You
have character motivation set up all the way through where Kronk is thinking, he has shoulder
angel and things like that, and you have all this motivation established that his motivation
is "I need to-- we're done." Then she insults his food, his spinach puffs. You have his
plan. STUDENT: From above, kind of evil receives
their just reward. BRANDON: Yes. The plan is "you're going down."
The progress is his shoulder angel points at the ceiling. Or he points at the ceiling
and they say that. Then you have your payoff where he cuts it. And because it's a comedy,
what happens? She goes right through the middle. STUDENT: [inaudible]
BRANDON: It's strange that usually works. This is all a little sequence of an action
sequence that is done. You can go-- but most action sequences you will read in books that
work, and in movies, will have some variation of this. You've established a character motivation.
You show them come up with something they want to do. You show-- you lead the reader
to the points of progress and then the payoff, which is success or failure. Run your action
sequences that way, and you will have a lot more success than if it's like, action sequence
happens now, they fight for a while, and then we're done. Those action sequences are going
to be boring, and you want to avoid them as much as possible, and you want to have this
as much as possible. STUDENT: How do you do a sense of progress
in, say you have, like, two characters fighting, and you as an audience don't know which character
is going to win, so there isn't, like, a sense of progress because they're just fighting
until one of them slips up and the other wins and gets the upper hand. Like, how do you
write that? BRANDON: Great question. How do you write
two characters in a fight? How do you express a sense of progress to this fight and you're
not sure who is stronger than the other? STUDENT: In one of my writing pieces, I have
two characters that are just physically separated, and as they move and attack each other they
just get closer and closer. BRANDON: That's true. That's a great way to
do it, if you're fighting at range and they're moving to closer and closer.
STUDENT: You can show a back and forth and small victories really easy there.
BRANDON: Back and forth and small victories are very, very key there. Changes in the status
quo. Like, what this didn't include is changes in the status quo. A lot of times you do this
progress and the status quo changes. A lot of times, you have a great action sequence
where Jackie Chan needs to fight all these dudes with a ladder. And then what happens
at the end? A bunch more dudes come in. So then Jackie's like, "OK, new plan. I give
up." Go ahead. STUDENT: I'd say the addition of injuries,
but also how tired they become. BRANDON: Yeah, addition of injuries, how tired
they become. These are all things like-- writing your fight sequence between two characters,
to ask yourself, what are my surprises, like I would in a regular plot? What are my twists
and turns? What are the issues we're going to get into where we have a narrative turn,
or we discover new information? They've gotten out a chair from underneath the thing. Wrestling
tends to be really good at this, the one on one that has back and forths that you can
use to strip fight sequences. they tend to be very good at it.
STUDENT: How do you describe fighting sequences about somethings your reader might not know
about? They might not know the punches and kicks.
BRANDON: OK. How do you describe the tactical punches and kicks in a way that is going to
work for the reader that doesn't know all this? You've got a couple tools. One is to
teach them through the course of the story so that they're an expert in that jargon by
the time it's relevant. Another way is to abstract it some way or summarize it some
way. Robert Jordan would have these forms, it's like boar rushes down the hill is a way
of using the sword. You don't need to necessarily imagine exactly what Rand is doing when he
does boar rushes down the hill, because you're like, OK, I see what's going on here. It's
a momentum. I can imagine the boar going down the hill. And then he'll use that tag to explain
it in the future and things like that. You can use it like dialect. This character's
using dialect, but we're going to make sure there are summaries periodically so that you
know what's happening as the reader, even if you don't know all of these things. You
can have commentary going on at the same time that is working that for you. There's lots
of different approaches you can do, depending on the style of story you're writing.
That said, subgenre can help with this. For instance, if you're writing a regency romance,
there are certain things you can expect that your reader will pick up on or will just pick
up through context that you do not have to explain, because it's part of the genre. If
you're writing science fiction you say, "They went to FTL between planets." You don't necessarily
have to set up how the FTL works if your story's not about that, and your reader will accept,
"All right, they went between planets. I don't even know what FTL means, but maybe I should
know." STUDENT: Faster than light.
BRANDON: Yeah, it means faster than light. Yep, go ahead.
STUDENT: How do you-- coming at that from a different angle, if your reader is, for
example, well versed in martial arts, how do you describe fight scenes using martial
arts without breaking immersion where you're not an expert?
BRANDON: Right. How do you approach these things when you're not an expert and some
of your readership might be? You have a lot of information at your fingertips
on the internet. You have a lot of primary sources on the internet, and you have a lot
of people doing really great, useful things to help you learn about whatever it is you
need to learn about. For instance, I use Matt Easton's channel on YouTube where he will
often record bouts of "this is a person with a spear versus a person with a knife. We're
going to run it 20 times and you can see how it plays out." Very handy for someone who
has never fought a knife against a spear. You have the advantage that you can get--
you can learn a bunch about a topic very quickly and get yourself up to, I'm making up these
numbers, you can get 50% of the way to an expert on something with a minimal amount
of research. And then that next 50% takes nine more years. So my recommendation to you
as a writer is to get yourself to 50% on as many of these things as you can that are going
to be relevant to you, and then find experts to fix the little things you get wrong.
I generally hire subject experts on things. For instance, Kaladin's field medicine. For
the first book I hired a field surgeon who had medical training in the military, who
had been in these situations, to go over all of the things I was doing and say if I did
it right or wrong and to give me little hints here and there. I've found that if you get
yourself most of the way there, that easy part, then you will not make the big mistakes.
You will make small mistakes that somebody can tweak for you. It's not 100%.
In Skyward I made some big mistakes, even though I didn't realize it. But fortunately,
I had three fighter pilots read my book, and they very quickly disabused me of the big
things that I had gotten wrong, and it did require a more extensive rewrite then. But,
yeah, those experts, people who are passionate about things generally look forward to the
opportunities to be passionate about it in a way that's going to make your story better.
So find those people and make use of them. Go ahead.
STUDENT: Just out of curiosity, what were the Skyward mistakes?
BRANDON: Skyward mistakes was mostly about how it feels to feel G forces in different
directions and what it did to you. I was not writing that G force this direction versus
this direction versus this direction. I was not separating the three different ways those
would feel. Or that direction, I guess there's four basic ways. They were all jumbled together
in the original draft and I was not accurate on how those different things felt and the
differences they had on your body as you were being pulled the different directions. I had
worked on the instinct that G force makes you go unconscious. But it only makes you
go unconscious if the G force is in the direction that's going to draw blood from your brain
somewhere else. It's more dangerous to have blood go into your eyes and do visual damage
to you than it is to go unconscious. STUDENT: Oh, thank you for that.
BRANDON: Yes, I'm sorry about that image in your head. Yeah, go ahead.
STUDENT: Did the gyroscopic cockpit exist before this conversation.
BRANDON: The gyroscopic did not exist before this conversation in Skyward. The point of
that was me realizing I was exerting G forces in the wrong directions for what people could
actually tolerate, and I needed some sort of system that would help with that. That
was why it was it was a bigger rewrite. We don't have a ton more time there, so let
me just make sure that I've got everything that we were going to talk about on action.
Let's see. Oh! We won't go over this one long, but let me
ask the same question for you. Think about it in your head. How can you use an action
sequence and beats to make a character more likeable? How can you use it to establish
motivation? How can you show someone being proactive? How can you show their flaws? How
can you-- whatever the fifth one is? Show how competent they are? That one's pretty
easy in action sequences, or incompetent. You're going to look to use these five things
in all of these things. We're going to end with naval gazing. You
don't need a lot of explanation how to do naval gazing, because you all probably are
doing it way too much already. You're probably experts at naval gazing and having your characters
ruminate on their problems for multiple pages. STUDENT: In life or in writing?
BRANDON: Yeah, in both real life and writing. Some recommendations for your naval gazing.
Try to break it up. Try to use the other things. And try to find some way-- if you're not going
to use the direct thought versus free and direct thought thing like I do, figure out
how you're going to make sure that there is a point to this period of naval gazing, and
that the reader can have a strong, solid takeaway from it that something's been accomplished.
Make your naval gazing do those five things. Make sure you're not accidentally just not
doing any of those in this one where it should be very natural for you to be doing that.
but make sure that the naval gazing is causing your reader to strengthen their motivation
or change their motivation. Make sure that the naval gazing is establishing for them
their flaws and their becoming aware of them. A lot of your naval gazing is going to be
reinforcing your character arc. For your character arcs, just a few things
to keep in mind. At some point, most arcs involve a reassessing of goals. This generally
is your character's want versus need sort of thing, where they're coming to understand
the need and giving up the want. Not always, but a lot of your character arcs are going
to do that. In fact, a lot of your character arcs are going to follow a little bit of three-act
structure on their own, because a lot of your character arcs are going to have a point where
your character has established their flaw, theoretically through all of these things,
without really noticing it. There's going to be a point where they change from inactive
about their character flaw, to being active working on their character flaw. Just like
you often have the transition between Act I and Act II, between the character being
acted upon and taking action. That doesn't always happen at that point.
But at some point, most flaws that's going to be the case. Sometimes you have an entire
book where the character does not acknowledge their flaw until the end, and the end of book
one is the character saying, "I really need to work on this thing. This is serious. This
is a big deal." Then you're going to, in the next book, show them actually working on it.
But at some point they should move from inactive to active regarding their flaw. Not all stories
follow this format, but just kind of giving you a few rules of thumb.
A lot of times your character is going to have a relapse on their flaw, which is going
to be kind of parallel to the darkest moment in the plot, the all is lost moment, where
your character thought they had it, but then they slip up, and it looks really bad because
they have slipped up. But there's still something left for them to learn to pick up and move
forward. A lot of times in your character arc, you're going to have a moment where the
character's internal conflict aligns in some way with the external conflict. This can be
an overlapping, where the character finally gives up their wants and realizes that their
need is the thing that is going to accomplish the plot. It can be a contrast, where the
character realizes that they're going to have to lapse further into this dangerous territory
with their flaw in order to accomplish what the plot needs them to do. This is kind of
more of the tragedy sort of thing. This is where the serial killer character who doesn't
want to be a serial killer anymore realizes that he needs to kill this demon. Dan Wells.
Where you're having that moment where the character has to give up something they really
want and backslide. You can do all sorts of these different things, but at some point
those two need to intersect, external and internal motivation need to intersect. Almost
all plots, that's going to be a very vital and important moment for you.
That's all the time we have for character. We will do Q&A on these two weeks of characters,
so please do fill out your thing. Remember that we have put over here, the writing advice
section, we have on there, we have the Skyward outline and the first two chapters done differently
that I threw away before I settled on the third one, so you can see actively me doing
this. Next week we'll meet online, and I will answer your questions from this week and last
week. Thank you, guys.
