Greetings from the edge,
Stick a fork in me, I’m done. The article comparing the novel The Silence of the Lambs to the film is now live. It’s proofread, formatted, posted, and unleashed upon the unsuspecting public. You should check it out.
I’m currently working on the first in what I hope will be a series of worldbuilding articles for Crying is a Free Action. The basic thesis is that, when it comes to building a setting, it is best to start small and work outward until you have enough to flesh out the map.
The plan is to create a town alongside the article as a worked example, then drop it into my own Sunday game.
For today, however, I have mostly been reading and squeezing more useful information out of Mr King’s “memoir on the craft”. There is a lot of his personality on the page, so if you are a fan of his work, especially The Stand or Misery, and want to see how the sausage is made, then I can thoroughly recommend it.
Go on. I’ll wait.
Back? Good.
For those of you who ignored my advice, here and here are the biggest things that I have already gone over and below are today’s tasty nuggets.
- Dialogue reveals character faster than almost anything else. In the real, fleshy, non-papery world, people constantly reveal who they are through the way they talk, what they avoid saying, how they argue, and the rhythms of their speech. The trick is to listen to real people. Pay attention to accents, slang, awkward pauses, petty arguments, and the odd little verbal tics people have. If it sounds fake to you, your readers will hear it like a fart in church.
- Characters should feel like people, not tropes. I have a soft spot for the sarcastic, chain-smoking techie as much as the next man, but nobody in real life thinks of themselves as “the comic relief” or “the backstabber”. Even villains think they are the hero in their own version of events. Let your characters reveal themselves through what they do, say, and choose, rather than dumping a paragraph of explanation onto the page.
- Story is king. Dialogue, symbolism, character work, and clever literary tricks all exist to support the story, not smother it under a pile of literary confetti. Once you know who your characters are and what situation they are trapped in, they will often start reacting in believable ways. Leave the plotting to Machiavelli.
- Experiment wildly. Try strange ideas, unusual techniques, odd structures, and bold choices. Go full Doc Brown with a DeLorean in a thunderstorm. But if something beautiful is slowing the story down, then take it down a dark alley and murder your darlings.
- Symbolism is a delicate thing. It works best when it grows naturally out of the story, rather than being bolted on afterwards like a flashing neon sign that says “look how clever I am”.
That is where I am for now. Later today I am going to work on Rare for a while, then probably go back and rework a few more parts of The Bone Garden.
Busy little wordsmith.
See you in the margins,
Leave a Reply