NaNoWriMo

Want to know how to write a page turner?

The kind that readers simply cannot put down?

There’s a technique to it. And it’s easy to learn.

Oddly enough, I learned this technique at a little woodworkers shop in Milwaukee. The entry to it was just in the middle of an alley, in the side of a big old warehouse.

It was actually the back room of a slightly larger shop selling brewing supplies to hobbiests. The guy who leased the space was illegally renting out his back storeroom to the woodworker.

I had heard about this guy from a friend who collects typewriters. Apparently the woodworker had been a typewriter repairman way back in the day. But now he was in his 90s and was selling off some of his old tools. Tyepwriters have very specialized tools.

When I went in, the place smelled really off. And I don’t mean strange. It the gaggy sweet smell of decay. I was sure the old man had died and I was going to find his body. If only.

What I found was much, much worse . . .

That’s the technique.

Bait: Spark interest in the reader’s mind with bait. (I want to learn this easy powerful technique Eric mentioned!) Usually a question.

Tease: Delay answering the question with details that seem to be leading somewhere, but you can’t quite figure out where. Show details that create more confusion (brewer hobbiests? typewriter repairman? woodworker? What does any of this have to do with the technique?)

Twist: Surprise with a little (or big) twist. Something unexpected. (bad smell? not a dead body but something worse?)

Release: Relieve the tension, but not all the way beause you put out some more bait.

So how does this translate to scenes in your novel?

Like everything else I’ve discussed, it’s a skill you learn through practice. And once you’ve practiced it, your creative mind will happily use it. This constant bait, tease, twist, release cycle can happen even in very mundane scenarios.

Imagine using it in a scene where your main character is going to meet his girlfriend for dinner where she’s going to tell him whether or not she’ll marry him.

The reader wants the answer. Most will be hoping for a particular answer.

But he doesn’t just sit down and she says “yes!”

You want the waiter to interrupt before the conversation can even get started. You want your hero gauging his girlfriend’s answer from her demeanor, her eyes, her outfit. You make him listen to her talking and talking and still not answering. And he starts to realize that if she’s giving this long preamble, the answer can’t be good.

And then he starts resenting her and berating himself. Because why didn’t he see that her wanting to meet him at a restaurant was a bad sign in the first place? She just wanted to avoid dealing with him in private. She’s here to let him down where his natural politeness will prevent him from making a scene.

OMG this is a disaster.

To make things worse a mariachi trio comes up and starts playing “Bésame Mucho.” It’s agony.

What’s she doing now? She’s getting down on one knee. He’s appalled. She’s mocking him.

NO! She’s apologizing for making him wait, for saying that she needed to think about it. She’s apologizing for ruining his proposal by not leaping into his arms and shouting yes, yes, yes. She’s apologizing for ruining the special moment that they would one day tell their children about.

She’s proposing to him, right now, to make the proposal memory unique and unforgettable. Something they’ll tell their children about with laughter and tears.

“Will you marry me?” she asked, eyes welling with tears.

He pulled her into his arms. He whispered his answer so that nobody but her could hear. “Yes. My dear, sweet love, yes!”

The people seated nearby applauded, and the cheers rose and spread through the restaraunt. But one woman, seated near to the kitchen did not clap, nor cheer, nor clink her wine glass with the back of her butter knife. . . 

And so the cycle continues. You could write a book using only this technique, and it would work out pretty well.

So practice this idea. Take ten minutes and make up your version of the scene above and see where it leads. When your creative mind is engaged in this pattern, you will be dying to see what happens next.

It’s tempting to go straight at the emotion of a scene. To write what the character is feeling. Or to even have them say it in dialogue.

“I love you.”

That lets the reader know it. But it doesn’t make the reader feel it.

The picture above conveys tenderness, love, partnership, safety, comfort, ease. And we can sense it because we can see it.

No emotion words needed.

Here’s a snippet full of emotion that does not use any emotion labels:

Jen studied the table, finding it impossible to meet her mother’s weary eyes. The cafe door jingled as another patron went out. Jen’s neck flushed. Her sweater felt suddenly too tight, too hot. The heat rushed like a geyser to her cheeks. God! To be just a patron and not a daughter. That was freedom. Because then she’d be able to get up and walk out, jingle the bell one last time, and be away from this impossible table and its half-eaten scones and going-cold coffee.

We might need more context to understand all of the emotional currents in the the little vignette above, but we don’t need much.

Even by itself it provokes a sense of several emotions. Jen is uncomfortable under her mother’s gaze. Whatever she’s feeling, it’s making her too hot, and that’s making her more uncomfortable. Is it embarrassment? Is it anger? Is it guilt? She sure has a wish for freedom, which suggests being trapped. The half-eaten meal and cold coffee suggests the meal was interrupted by a discussion that had cost one or both of them their appetites.

Real emotions are complex, and you can evoke them more powerfully by not naming them directly. Let your reader infer the emotion and suddenly they aren’t merely thinking: “oh, this character feels guilty, or she feels judged.” They are feeling it.

And that is powerful.

As you continue in your writing journey, you’ll come across scenes where complex—or chaotic—emotion is needed.

Sometimes the most powerful way to say “I love you” is something quite indirect:

“You had me at hello.”

Do you remember what movie that famous line is from?

That payoff is anything but generic, and that’s why it knocks our socks off.

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George Orwell struggled with his writing.

In a letter to a friend he wrote, “I am so miserable, struggling in the entrails of that dreadful book and never getting any further, and loathing the sight of what I have done. Never start writing novels, if you wish to preserve your happiness.”

His letters are filled with this sort of stuff.

It’s almost like he was performing self-criticism for his friends and colleagues to shield him from external criticisms. I see this all the time with new writers.

The Orwell state of mind is not an advantage if one wants to be happy and (dare I say it) enjoy writing. It’s certainly not helpful if you want to stay motivated to write.

Orwell is trying to be writer, editor, and critic all at the same time. He was qualified in all three of these domains. And that was his biggest problem.

If you write with an editor on one shoulder and a critic on the other, writing will be miserable indeed. Orwell was miserable all his life.

Ray Bradbury, by contrast, just wrote. He wrote Farenheit 451 in the basement of UCLA on coin-operated typewriters. A dime would give him 30 minutes of writing time, and he didn’t have money to spare. He spent $9.80 writing that book. Money was slipping away every second. He couldn’t sit there and agonize over things or rewrite the same scene over and over. He got on with it.

So here’s my takeaway: You will gain nothing by hating your writing. It will not improve your book, and it certainly won’t make writing easier. You will not protect yourself from criticism by criticising yourself first.

Hating or loving your writing is a choice.

It’s obviously wiser to love it, considering how much time you’ll spend doing it.

So brush the editor and critic of your shoulders and immerse yourself in your world. Go on the adventure and delight in it.

“Don’t think. Thinking is the enemy of creativity. It’s self-conscious, and anything self-conscious is lousy. You can’t try to do things. You simply must do things.” —Ray Bradbury

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One thing that satisfies my power madness is naming characters.

I just love it. But here’s a secret: I don’t think about names for very long. I have never evrer agonized over what to name a character.

I don’t know if this even counts as a tip, but when I need to name a character I just start typing consonants and vowels and see what comes out. If it’s too close to another name I’ve already used, I change a couple letters.

Here are some actual tips:

Try to make names pronounceable.

I’ve been accused of coming up with unpronouncable names. (Ahem, Yples. Or Flaumishtak.) In my first novel I had a character called Boffoygeedanama. (In my defence, he was a bigfoot. And he went by a much easier to pronounce nickname: Grizz.)

Avoid having characters with similar names. For instance, Sauron and Saruman might be confusing for some readers.

Don’t worry too much. Changing a name is easy with find and replace. I once named a character Beyonce. That did not make it to the final book.

Here’s where a few names in my books came from:

Harvin: a character in my first series (Bigfoot Galaxy). I needed a name. I happened to have a Green Bay Packers game on. I looked up and their adversaries for the day (Minnesota Vikings) had a talented wide receiver called Harvin. I saw it on the back of his jersey. I took it. I moved on.

Writing an early version of Thief of Sparks I had to name a ginger-haired young thief. I was listening to The Eagles at the time. I grabbed the name Henley from their drummer, Don Henley.

The monarch of Starside’s first name is Ell, which I stole from my daughter Ella.

When I named Dunne Yples (who later in the series becomes Kila’s main foe), my mind drifted over Ypres, the Belgian town figuring in WWI battles. Why? Who knows. I went with it, and the resonances (which are meaningful to me and invisible to my readers) ring in my subconcious mind as I write his story.

The donkey Tolky was originally named Tolkin, but I thought that was a bit too on the nose. So I shortened it.

The Hargothe was a phrase I typed purely in the stream of creative flow. I later read an old science fiction novel by Leigh Brackett that had a character called Hargoth! I couldn’t belive my eyes.

Terms like dragnithan, qiznithan, yoznithan, or felnithel. All of that comes from stream of creative flow. Same thing with the term “shadline” which first appeared in an unfinished proto-story that I wrote years before starting Staride Saga.

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fix plotholes with reasons

You’ve been merrily writing along, building your story day by day, and yet something about it nags at you. Some doubt.

Did you overlook a plot hole?

This fear is reasonable. After all, even if you’ve carefully outlined your book, it’s entirely possible that you’ve missed something.

Writers do get too close to their novels, such that they cannot easily see the larger picture.

My answer to this worry is simple:

Yes. There are plot holes in your novel.

There. Now you don’t have to worry about whether or not they are there.

When you go through your revision process, you’ll uncover a couple. Then you’ll fix them. Sometimes this requires major reconstruction, other times little patches. It’s part of the process.

The most troublesome plot hole is when your readers notice an alternate, lower resistance path your hero could have taken. A path that would have avoided all the drama and conflict.

Remember our discussoin about what to do when you get stuck at the 1/3 point in your novel? Have your POV character make a tough decision.

Writers sometimes leave holes in the plot when they are too tentative in forcing a hard choice on the main character. Choices that, when taken, cut off all other options.

Sometimes all you need is this:

Freedom was through that door. She could charge through and escape. The killer would never find her, never root her out of the alleyways and lanes she knew so well. This whole ordeal would be over. Except for the lifelong hangover of self-loathing she would suffer, for being a coward, for being weak.She wiped the blood from her lip with one hand and gripped the crowbar with the other. And then she crept deeper into the warehouse, more afraid than she’d ever been. But the only true freedom lay ahead, in there, beyond the shadows.

In this case above, I’ve filled a potential plot hole (“why didn’t she just run away”) by making her decision to go into danger very clear. She knows safety lies in the other way, but she’s given a reason for going forward.

Here’s another. “Why didn’t the hero use his sword to cut the rope bridge behind him? Then the ogre-skeleton could never have crossed. The whole fight that followed could have been avoided.”

Kerek staggered off the rope bridge just as the ogre-skeleton was lumbering onto it. Kerek unlimbered his sword. There were four ropes, two for handholds, and two massive ones supporting the wood planks. He raised his sword. Then lowered it. If the ogre fell, it would not be destroyed. And Kerek knew what lay at the end of the gorge below. The village. To cut the rope would subject everyone who lived there to the skeleton’s wrath.

OR

Kerek drew his sword. There were four ropes, two for handholds, and two massive ones supporting the wood planks. He quickly severed the top lines. The bridge twisted under the ogre’s weight. It fell and clung the gyrating bridge.But the support ropes were secured to tie-offs well below the ledge. Kerek couldn’t reach them. The ogre skeleton was clambering toward him like a weresloth, hanging from beneath the bridge. And it was coming fast. He ran.

Very often all you need is a sentence or two to let the reader know your POV character had a reason for their decision. It doesn’t have to be a good reason, or even particularly rational. As long as it is in keeping with who they are, the reader accepts it and goes along for the ride.

Whenever you discover a plot hole, look for a spot where you can have a character think about the alternative path and dismiss it for a reason. Better yet, have them try it and fail.

Another common problem is the continuity error. Readers sometimes call these “plot holes” when they are simply mistakes. If your main character has blue eyes in one scene, and then later has green ones, that’s a continuity error. You’ll catch most of these during revisions.

Or maybe you’ve put the same character in two places at once. I’ve done that! That takes a bit more creativity to fix, but in every case remind yourself of this: You are creative. You can fix it.

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