The two-sentence version:

I swam for hours upstream against the raging current. I’d have made it, too, if it weren’t for that cuss of a bear and his wicked, yellow teeth at the waterfall.

And as a haiku:

Against the current
swim upstream passionately
fanged by a bear

Here is my first attempt at writing a story in two sentences:

I walk, for now undetected, with a mimic of their emotionless countenance set like chiseled flint on my face while the terror in my heart races  beneath the drab, gray, requisite coveralls.  The cold, unforgiving sidewalk provides the solution: fill the empty cavities with concrete, leaving only the minor inconvenience of alone performing all those lobotomies.

I’ve was recently reading Plot and Structure by James Scott Bell, and he has a nice outline of The Hero’s Journey, or Mythic Structure in a Three Act format, which I paraphrase here:

1. Act I
   1. Introduction to hero and his world
   2. Disturbance that interrupts the hero’s routine and/or a “call to adventure”
   3. The hero may (typically) ignore the disturbance/call
   4. The hero is coerced/enters into conflict with the dark forces [1st Doorway]
2. Act II
   1. A mentor may appear to instruct/guide the hero
   2. Encounters with the dark forces/a lot of muddling about/develop readers rapport/sympathy
   3. Hero must confront a weakness or fear or other ultimate low dark moment within himself that he must overcome.
   4. A talisman, usually with supernatural power or significance, aids hero in battle
   5. Final setup for the climactic conflict [2nd Doorway]
3. Act III
   1. The climactic, final battle is fought in a total knockout, usually in defeat of the dark forces
   2. The hero returns to the mundane in his own usual world

So I was poking around on the FA Forums to kill a few minutes, and I ran across this 3-month-old thread about how much description in writing, which caught my attention because I’d been thinking about it lately.  I thought this post by Ursa Maximus was really well put:

I think above all else, an author should stick to what they’re best at. Writing engaging visual description is probably one of the harder literary skills, so for most authors, less is more. But if you stubbornly want to get deep into it, there are definitely not just two types. There aren’t even just two ends to the spectrum of visual description.

None: The wolf stood in front of an office building.
The office building is not described, only named in a sentence about something else. It could look like anything. Who cares. This is not a choice to scoff at. It’s the easiest way to not screw up!

Vague: The office building was grand and imposing.
The office building has just an adjective or two flavoring it. Three artists would produce three very different pictures but maybe this is all the reader needs to know. The words do double duty, offering both visual and emotional content, while the text stays light and easy to read.

Factual: The office building was three stories tall, the façade mostly glass, situated in the center of a large parking lot.
Though far from complete as a description, everyone is imagining pretty much the same thing. Sterile though, no emotional content. If this goes on for paragraphs or if you do it too often, readers are gonna die of boredom.

Evocative: The office building looked cheap, like the kind of place you’d see on the news after a storm had torn off its roof.
No visual description is given but you can practically smell this place, with its damp air and moldy drywall. Hear the buzz of fluorescent lights. How clearly your vision comes through is a function of your skill as an author and the life experiences of your readers. So this type of description can easily miss the mark.

Metaphorical: The massive office building opened its mouth, consuming a stream of suited businessmen.
Who cares what this place looks like, it’s eating people to survive, man. Abolish the wage system. Prepare for readers to roll their eyes if you ham it up too badly.

Vivid: The office building stood, majestic, inconceivably tall, its upper floors cloaked in resplendent, gossamer clouds.
You can do great things by piling a bunch of multisyllabic words on top of one another until you evoke exactly want you want, both visually and emotionally. But again, you’re going to lose readers who just plain don’t know the words you’re using or, even worse, maybe you don’t know the words you’re using as well as you should.

I guess I shoot for a mixture of whatever seems right at the time, then edit aggressively until every single word is working in service of the story.

This page documents some things I found while reading other peoples’ works that I think stood out as lessons in greatness or lessons in mistakes.  I only cite authors if I quote them verbatim and if it’s not so bad it might embarrass them :-O

Errors of Their Ways

• I read a short story in the first person where the narrator used phrases and words that the ordinary guy off the street would not.  There was no indication of the narrator’s profession,  and nothing to indicate it had to do with word smithing, so the effect was to make the character himself unbelievable as a real person.  Thus his interactions with others became purely academic.

Great Ways

Shining Quotes

Sometimes it is helpful to see how your character would handle being in different situations to get a better idea of who he/she is.  Here are a few samples:

• Set your character up on a blind date
  How does he/she react to the idea?  What does he/she do to prepare?  What happens on the date? Afterward?
• Have your character deal with engine failure in a remote area
  Could be on an undeveloped section of interstate, or secluded rural road, or an uninhabited moon around some distant planet in another solar system.  Could be his/her horse dies in a desert.  How does he/she react?  What does he/she do to get “back on the road”

I’d like more ideas for scenarios I can put here.  Comment or email me (graowf@wolf.ishly.me) your candidates for inclusion.

Sometimes I talk to my characters.  Here are some questions that you can ask your character to get the conversation going and discover more about him/her:

Questions for your character

• How do you feel about that?
• Why did you do that?
• What interests you about that?
• When did that develop in you?
• Where were you when that developed in you?
• Who influenced the development of that in you?

Consider preparing for and then conducting an interview with your character.

Now, place your character in various scenarios and see how he handles them.  You can use the ones I posted here, or invent your own.

Here is a template, in the form of a set of questions, for understanding a character when you first meet him/her.  At the bottom I’ve linked to the sources for a few of the questions and references to some resources on this topic.

Basics

Full name:

Species:

Age: How old is he? (And how old is he mentally? Is he a 40 year old in the body of a sixteen year old, or vice versa?)

Birthday: Day/Month? Year or age-as-of year?

Education:

Physical description: What does he look like? What distinguishing physical traits does he have?

Present situation (where he lives, how he makes a living, his social condition):

Childhood/history/future: Did he have a happy childhood? Why/why not? OR What will he be like in 20 years?

Past/ present relationships? How did they affect her?

Life’s “defining moment”?

Motivation

What is the character’s archetype (see 4+ below)?

What does he care about?

What is he obsessed with?

What’s missing (physical, psychological, social)?

What MUST he do? What does he THINK he MUST do?

Biggest fear?

What makes him courageous?

What is his greatest strength? Weakness? Flaws?

What is the best thing that ever happened to her? The worst?

Most embarrasing thing that ever happened to her?

Biggest secret?

Does he have any grudges?

How does the presence of other characters or group situations affect him?

What is the one word you would use to define her?

What is his religious life like?

What are his idosyncracies?

How does he show/react to:

• anger?
• happiness?
• envy?
• love?
• etc…..

NOTE: find ways to make reactions surprising yet logical.  For example: a character who is slightly claustrophobic might feel trapped living in a remote, country setting.  Why?  Because there is no immediately attainable safety net, the character sees no escape if there is some kind of urgent need for medical care or water or whatever.  Thus the character feels trapped even out in the wide open space.

Some articles on this topic:
(1) http://www.writersdigest.com/online-editor/how-to-write-a-plausible-character-3-key-tips
(2) http://www.writersdigest.com/editor-blogs/guide-to-literary-agents/agent-donald-maass-on-your-tools-for-character-building
(3) http://www.writersdigest.com/writing-articles/by-writing-goal/improve-my-writing/8-ways-to-write-better-characters
(4) http://www.writersdigest.com/editor-blogs/there-are-no-rules/how-to-use-archetypes-in-literature-when-creating-characters-for-your-novel
(5)  http://listology.com/list/character-archetypes
(6) http://www.jillwilliamson.com/teenage-authors/jills-list-of-character-archetypes/

Here are some tips, pointers, and reminders I find useful to keep close while writing.  I put them here in the hopes that at least one will be helpful to you ….

This page changes at the drop of a hat as I find something useful to add, and I just add the new content quickly, so keep that in mind ….

Some of these are my own, some are my rephrasing/reinterpretations of things I’ve found elsewhere ….

….

While writing:

• Show, don’t tell
  Instead of explicit explanations, let character actions, reactions, environment, etc., reveal meaning and facts
• Make heavy use of subtext. “Befriend ambiguity”
  Related to “Show, don’t tell”, assume your reader is intelligent enough to figure it out on his/her own from hints
• Don’t repeat yourself
  Don’t describe things the same way consecutively, especially avoid using the same word over and over.
• Make triangles, especially in relationships
  Add the other person, interest, or even story interact with the current situation and characters
• When writing in the first person, choose the narrator that has the voice that fits the story
  Narrator with the right voice will enhance the story. The wrong voice will stifle and kill it.
• Delve on each character’s motivations and idiosyncracies at every opportunity.
  Explore why characters do little things; let characters do little things that reveal something about themselves
• Ask “Why?” on every paragraph.
  Don’t let a logic error or motivational error slip in. Don’t let an opportunity for depth slip by.
• Create people, not characters
  Love and hate them. They will love and hate you back.
• Bring out character personality in physical description.
  Example: “… a plump, awkward 11 year old with a carefree gap-toothed grin and a halo of unruly blond hair.”  (credit to Feiona Addams). The physical description embodies personality traits: I get the impression of a cute, sweet girl with a tomboyish streak. By the end of the story, I can see those traits in her, but maturing into their teenage equivalencies emerge in her behavior.
• Express abstractions in terms of the concrete environment.
  This also helps establish mood.  Instead of saying, “A knock echoed through the door.  Cato had come.  Reality intruded, and dread froze her to her bed, hugging her pillow”, I might say, “A knock echoed through the door.  Cato had come.  A cold breeze through the window beset the candle on the table and quinched the flame, and dread froze her to her bed, hugging her pillow.”
• Express a characters feelings or state of mind by demonstration.
  Akin to show, don’t tell, use a characters behavior, or what he notices and thinks about things around him to express his feelings and state of mind.  For example, instead of “She grew more agitated as the evening wore on and became more and more distracted”, I might say, “As evening faded into night, she alternately paced the room nervously and sat staring blankly into the crackling fire, unable to rehearse the speech she’d prepared because of the nerve-wracking scenarios assaulting her out of her imagination.”
• Make it personal.
  Turn objective description into personalized experience.  E.g., instead of “because of the nerve-wracking scenarios assaulting her out of her imagination”, I might say, “because she could not stop his violent assaults in the scenarios playing always inevitably to a furious final act of rage.”
• Connect readers to characters before you ask them to hang out together.
  Make the opening excite the reader in some way so that they willingly invest in the characters before you present a slow point to delve deeper.
• Make your prose poetic
  Use poetic constructions in prose

The practice of writing:

• Find your soundtrack
  Music affects you in a way nothing else does. Find music that fits what you are writing.
• Write, re-write, and re-write again
  You must rewrite, then rewrite with a critical eye, then do it some more. Be ruthless on yourself.
• Maintain a character profile template and tools to help discover your characters
  Each character should end up with a scrapbook about his life: little stories, photos, memorabilia. Central is a profile sheet that describes the foundational characteristics (physical, emotional, intellectual) that form him.  NOTE: I have started using three tools in parallel: Protagonist (and usually others) Character Profile + the Story Spine + Lost and Found
• Reference materials are your friends.  No reader is going to give you points for not having used a thesaurus.
• Rethink the starting point of the story.  Often, after writing a story, it makes a more engaging start to restructure it so that it opens deeper into the story.  You can always use a flashback or other exposition technique to re-capture the skipped facts.
• Trust your reader and his/her intelligence.  You don’t have to say “The phone rang, and Bob stood up and walked across the room, picked up the receiver and said, ‘Hello.’  It was Billy.”  You can just say “The phone rang.  It was Billy.”  The reader can figure out what Bob did to find out it was Billy.

Beyond the writing:

• Connect, engage, celebrate, and lament with other writers
  This is how you build and experience the craft. Cheer them on when they succeed, encourage them when they fail, offer to help and support, ask for their help and support
• Surround yourself with supportive friends.
  Keep people around who will lovingly kick you when you are down and knock you down when you are up. These are the people you can trust that help keep you level and balanced.
• Only practice makes perfect
  No number of classes, lectures, books, or psychics will make you a better writer, only writing makes you a better writer.
• Live the world as a narrative.
  When I was in college learning to be a programmer, I executed all my mundane tasks by stepping through an algorithm. “Grip lid, do twist_counter-clockwise() until (resistance==0), etc….” Now that I have decided to learn to be a writer, I often will describe my own life’s moments as I live them as if in a story, “He walked briskly up the hillside, the chill spring atmosphere making him briskier, because the cold reality of time waits for no man”
• Write all the time, even when you aren’t writing
  Turn a poetic phrase even in a Tweet. Write a story plot in narrative form on a napkin. Churn out a campy poem while you are waiting in the parking lot for your spouse because choir practice that is running late. You can do this even without a pen and paper: see “Live the world as a narrative”
• Twitter @sesever: “DID YOU KNOW? If you make the 1st #ebook in a series free, you’ll sell 8 times more copies of subsequent volumes #writing”

Considering for inclusion in one of the above lists:

• Be ready to cut the parts you skip when you re-read, but clip them into a folder where you keep scraps.
  Read your stuff and if you find yourself skipping something because you can’t wait to get to the next paragraph, cut what you skip. Don’t let it get away, though: if you feel attached to it, put it in a folder so you don’t lose it. Maybe you’ll never use it. Maybe it’ll become something of its own. Maybe it’ll get inserted in something else.
• Don’t read unsolicited reviews, but if you do, be humble and objective and learn from them, don’t take them personally.
  Critical reviews (you don’t ask for) can really put you on the defensive and upset you, so just don’t read reviews. But if you do, go into it expecting to be hurt and steel your nerves determined not to be. Put aside the desire to defend and make yourself agree — at least for a moment — with the reviewer. Learn the truth, discard the lies.
• Introduce your character’s strengths and weaknesses from the start
  In a novel, in the first five pages.  In short stories, in the first few paragraphs.
• “Make ’em laugh and break their *****’ hearts. Accomplish that and your doing pretty good.” ~ Mark Richard to Matt Sumell
• What does whatever character A just said/did touch in characters B and/or C?  Especially indirects.  Like death of lonely elderly neighbor making a woman think about protecting her own unborn child against her death.
• What do supporting characters represent/symbolize about the main character/subject?
• Every detail of life is a story prompt
• In a story, an unrelated detail should server to answer: “What do I want to bring out here?”  They might relate two otherwise unconnected memories, for example.
• Don’t miss an opportunity to let a character be confronted with his own internal loose ends — especially as a response to other, external things.

Here I’m going to drop links to helpful pointers, tips, lessons, and tools for better writing  that I have learned or picked up here and there and along the way of whatever way I am on.  Since most of my writing is fiction and poetry, these are focused primarily on those genres.

I’m always interested in constructive comments, suggestions, references to resources, etc.  Comment here or email me at graowf@wolf.ishly.me

Collected Tips, Pointers, Reminders

Character Profile and Discovery Template

Questions to Ask Your Character

Character Discovery Scenarios

Self-editing Checklist

Lessons Learned and Examples from the Writings of Others

 “The Hero’s Journey” Outlined in a Three Act Structure

External Links

The Character Profile template has links to lists of character archetypes.

Mythical Archetypes list is a list of archetypes commonly found in fairy tales and the like.

Plot Devices Wikipedia article on major techniques of plot development

“Seven Basic Plots” Wikipedia article on major plot archetypes

“Thirty-six Dramatic Situations” Wikipedia article on situations found in dramatic stories and such

Monomyth Wikipedia also has a detailed article about the stages of the hero’s journey

Crafting Characters Scene By Scene is a really good article on using scene and action in character development

Sara Pennypacker’s List of Books about Writing