i know iâve probably written about these all individually but iâm putting them together in one post. these are writing tricks that are extremely cheap and dirty; when you use them it feels like cheating and honestly by posting them iâm probably exposing all the easy moves in my own work, but more than a writer i am a teacher, so here you go, some writing cheats that have never steered me wrong.
whatâs really annoying is when you have two characters sitting at a restaurant or something and the server has to come by. to what degree do you describe the server so that itâs clear theyâre just a background character but that theyâre not just a faceless form, so that the world has texture without taking up too much space on the page? rule of three, babeyyy: two normal things and a weird one.
she had pale skin and blue eyes but her hair was dyed black like a 2010 emo kid.
he was tall and broad, and he wore a sweatshirt with an embroidered teddy bear on it.
the woman stood there comparing the prices of toilet paper. she had a short angled bob and carried a keychain the length of a trout.
why does it work? it gives the reader something to hang onto, a brief observation that shows the world exists around your narrator. it also works when introducing main characters, but thereâs so much action going on that you canât take time to write a rich long paragraph about them. all you need is a little hook.
i used to TOIL over descriptive paragraphs. for years i was like, description is my weakness, i must become better at developing imagery. i believed this because a famous writer once projected a paragraph i had written onto a screen and asked my cohort, âcount how many images are crafted in this paragraph.â there were none. none! my friends were sitting there like, âwe are TRYINGâ but they couldnât find any.
i would say that after years of studying imagery development at the sentence level, i am, perhaps, competent at it, but what was more helpful was for me to shrug and tell myself, âiâm just not a writer who does that.â
anyway. my cheat is thus:Â
thereâs not much you can assume about your audience. the audience is not a homogenous whole. but your ideal audience is something you can guess at, and that means you can play around with their existing knowledge and expectations.Â
if you say your characters are in a tacky shit-on-the-walls restaurant, if your ideal reader is an american who went to restaurants during the maximalist era of franchise design, they will conjure their nearest memory of one of those places. and for those readers who arenât familiar with it, theyâll use other context clues to conjure that space. the point is, you donât have to list every single stupid license plate nailed to the wall. you can leave it as one detail of one sentence and let your reader extrapolate from there.
if i say the dentistâs office looked like a gutted 90s taco bell, maybe no ideal audience would have ever seen a place like that, but a lot of people can mentally conjure a dentistâs office and a 90s taco bell and overlay them together to create a weird and fun image.
you can go even simpler than that: a bathroom the size of an airplane lavatory. a tiny studio apartment with a hotplate instead of a stove. a mansion with a winding stairwell. the point is that you want to define the size of the space and its general vibes.
in some ways detailed description can be overrated, because your reader conjures images even in absence of them on the page. and for those readers who canât mentally conjure images, it doesnât matter anyway; they take you at your word. the trick is to figure out what details are unexpected, relevant to understanding the story and its characters, and those are the things that you add in.
one other note: after working with hundreds of writers on drafting, for *most* of us itâs difficult to develop images and establish setting in a first draft. itâs nearly always something to be saved for a second or later draft. i think itâs because while weâre writing we tend to put character and action first.
thereâs a joke i heard once from a writer i really admire:Â âyou know itâs literary fiction if the story ends with a character looking at a body of water.â
and god itâs so painfully sad and true how easy it is to nail the landing of a given story by ending on a totally irrelevant piece of imagery. the final beat of a story followed by your character looking up at the sky and seeing a flock of birds in the shape of a V flying past. or maybe theyâre sitting in their car and they count the rings of a nearby church bell. or maybe they watch an elderly couple walk down the sidewalk hand-in-hand. i donât know!! when in doubt shove an observation, an image, whatever, something neutral at the end and itâll sound profound.Â
(this cheat is the only one that can really bite you in the ass because if the image is too irrelevant you risk tonal incongruity. for use only in the most desperate of times.)
when writers ask me how to punch up their writing or start developing their own style, my go-to advice is to give up the idea of a complete sentence. fuck noun-verb-object. if you have a series of character actions, knock off the sentence subjects like in script action. if the clause at the end of your sentence is particularly meaningful, donât separate it with a comma but a period and make it its own thing. if your character is going through something particularly stressful or heinous, that bitch is not thinking in complete thoughts so you donât have to convey them that way. make punctuation bend to your will!!
this one opened a lot of doors for me stylistically. remember that famous writer who called me out on my lack of imagery? i always thought his prose was beautiful, that heâs one of the best living prose writers, etc. once i learned more about rhetoric though, i realized he just employed it a lot.Â
usually when we talk about beautiful sentences it means a sentence that uses rhetorical devices. the greeks were like, you know what, when we give speeches there are certain ways to phrase things that make the audience go nuts. letâs identify what those things are and give them names so we can use them intentionally and convince people of our opinions.
i love shakespeare, i really do, but one of the big reasons heâs still a household name today and his plays are still performed is because every sentence of every goddamn play utilizes a rhetorical device. the audience is hard-wired to vibrate at the sound and cadence of his writing, like finding the spot on a dog that makes their foot thump. for five hundred years, william shakespeare has been scritching that spot for us.
i have no idea why, cognitively, rhetorical devices are so effective. iâm no rhetorician. all i know is that well-deployed anaphora makes a reader want to throw their panties on stage. my intro to rhetorical devices was the wonderful book the elements of eloquence by mark forsyth, a surprisingly fun read! hopefully that will open some doors for you the way it did for me.Â
the downside to this is that once you know rhetorical devices, itâs like learning how the sausage is made. on one hand, as a writer, youâll have a lot stronger grasp of style, but as a reader good prose loses some of its magic. Â
many writers, myself included, rely on the tried and true âhe bit the inside of his cheekâ or other some such random action to help pace out dialogue. one time my thesis advisor sat me down and said âyouâve got to take all of those out.â
âall of them?â i said.
âall of them,â she said.
i thought, but that will weaken the text! it didnât. once i cut what i came to call cheek-biter sentences i never went back. and now when i edit for other people iâm like, look i know where youâre coming from but just cut all these out and see how the scene stands. if it doesnât feel right you can put some back in. a lot of times when youâre drafting you put those in the way some people say âum.â theyâre just sentences you jot while youâre thinking of what the other character says, so from a writing perspective it seems like youâre pacing, but readers donât read it that way. they just want to get to the next line of dialogue.
but sometimes you really do need to pace out a scene and i think there are other ways to do that that donât rely on banal physical movements, such as:
interiority: a sentence or paragraph of relevant cognition, bonus points if you weave in background context. good interiority defines the voice of your writing.
observations: i know i just said description is overrated but idk sometimes you just need a character to note the back and forth clacking of one of those desk ball toy things.
character texture: maybe your character notes something about the person theyâre talking to. a wilted pocket square. a mole that looks like it needs looked at by a dermatologist. a scar on their forehead. some detail that deepens or complicates our understanding of a character.
narratorial consciousness and access
this one is less a cheat and more a problematic opinion i have that doesnât win me any popularity in writing circles.
i believe that if youâre writing in first person or close third or any narration which is dedicated to the mind of one character, you are only ever obligated to convey the experience of that characterâs consciousness. and nothing else.
by that i mean, if your point of view character is unobservant? then theyâre not going to even notice the flight attendant is missing one of their canine teeth. if your pov character is focused and obsessive, theyâre going to think lavish, detailed paragraphs about that which theyâre obsessed with and have no acknowledgement of the rest of the world. if your pov character has no understanding of time, does your story even need to be linear?
defining the scope of a narratorâs cognition early on can give you parameters in which to work. even if you donât consciously do this, you still do it. if you write in third person limited present tense without really thinking about it, thatâs your scope. iâm just pointing out you can choose to do it differently. you get to define your narrator.Â
whenever we talk about narration we also talk about information access and the order of information being revealed/conveyed. writing must always be in order; even if youâre writing multiple concurring things, it still has to be rendered on the page in order one after the next, because the human mind canât read two sentences over top of one another.Â
if weâre restricted to the mind of a character, that means weâre also restricted by their knowledge and experiences, and this can be used to your benefit. i donât want to take too much space for this but i do talk more about the relationship between narration and reality here.
in short, you the writer get to choseÂ
in what order they know it, and
its relationship to the presumed real events of the story, which develops the (un)reliability of your narrator
okay going to cut this off now before i go on more rants about narrative scope. i hope you found this helpful and go on to put some of these nasty lifehacks in your own writing!!
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