LIN WRITES

hi guys! so this is the first livestream that we’ll be having for june prep week– it’s on Sunday at 6PM EST time! we’ll be choosing our projects for camp nano! here’s the link to the livestream, so make sure to click on the bell for a reminder!!

Dear zee-the-nerd,

I think it’s about salient noise.

I got this ask a few days ago, and I’ve been thinking about it on and off ever since, because even though I’ve talked a lot about my writing process and how I build characters from real-life people, I’ve never really talked about how my writing, art, and music are all the same in my head. There is an overlying filter/ principle/ law that directs the way I write characters and the way I compose songs and the way I decide what to put in the background of an art piece, and I knew that if I could explain that, I could explain why building a character doesn’t feel like a different skillset than building a world for a new novel or deciding what color blue to use in a portrait of a horse or whether to put hand-claps in the background of a piece of music. The issue is that I’ve never really figured out how to practically describe it. And I’ve never been sure it would be useful to anyone else even if I did.

But today I was sitting down to work and I looked out of my office to where the morning light was illuminating a piece of furniture in the entry, and a way to lay out my thought process hit me. The jury’s out on whether or not it’ll be useful to anyone else. But I’m going to give it a go.

I’m sorry, this is gonna be abstract.

Here’s a picture of what I just saw:

Let this image serve as an extended visual metaphor. I very much like the view from my office. I think it’s interesting and attractive. If you don’t, this might not make sense.

Ok, let’s make a metaphor.

All of my creative pursuits begin with a real-life thing that piques my interest. The crudest form of my art will involve me directly copying this object. I’m not an artist at this stage. I’m a forger. I’m merely trying to objectively copy a simple, truthful likeness.

This part is difficult: fraught with technical skill. I spent years teaching myself how to draw things exactly as I saw them:

Years teaching myself to write a person exactly as I thought they were. To copy the precise style another musician achieved with their harp or bagpipes or whatever I was playing at the time. Because of subjectivity, it’s a tricky thing, this artless forgery. Everything I saw, heard, and experienced came through the corrupting lens of my mind. I’d forge a new verse of a traditional song for our band, but the style would be affected by my modern understanding of scale. I’d draw glass, but I’d get it wrong because my brain kept shouting that it was supposed to be invisible even though my eyes knew better. I’d steal siblings for my characters and get them wrong because I’d misunderstand and simplify motivations. 

Teaching myself objectivity — basic forgery, the elimination of bias, the non-negotiable skill of using pigments and words — that involved learning the technical tools of each trade.

Back to the bench outside my office.

Once I became a forger of all sorts, I had the skills to recreate the bench in whatever media I was working in. Thievery. Technically impressive. Technically correct. Technically objective. 

This is not art: this is fact.  

Now, we all remember that we’re in MetaphorLand, right? Do I need to explain that the bench does not really mean “a bench”? It is the subject of whatever I’m creating. 

This is where salient noise comes in. 

From that objective seed, that tiny bit of forged reality, I start to complicate. Every time I add something to my creation that is not exactly like real life, I’m making an intentional subjective decision: that’s the art of it. Every time I choose a color that the original subject didn’t feature (a blue horse), or a hobby the person didn’t have (hunting for Welsh kings), an instrument that wasn’t available at the time of a traditional tune’s original composition, I’m building a new and subjective thing.

Artful forgery means not merely copying but creating something that seems like it could be real, even though it’s not. That means adding in as much detail as you need to convince your viewer that the thing they’re looking at could exist somewhere else. Adding in salient noise. The right amount of backstory and surface detail to suggest reality. 

Here’s that photo again.

A technical copy of that bench would be a skillful wonder. But that’s not what makes the view out of my office appealing to me. The bench is clearly the center stage, but the noise around it is what makes the photo interesting. The light across the bench is a complicating factor — an aspect of reality that suggests a sunny world outside the room. The violin case beneath the bench holds the promise of a backstory. The painting above it sets the mood and tells you what sort of person might sit on that bench. In the corner of the photo we see a hint of a complicated life: is that a music room? Maybe so — look, there’s a piano, a guitar rack. A set of bagpipes in a case behind the piano, but out of focus, not the point of the photograph. Photos on the wall, telling us that there is more to this life than we can easily see in one glimpse. All of those things are interesting on their own, but they are put off to the edge, put out of focus, so that they don’t overwhelm the bench’s role. So we don’t forget who the story is about.

Here’s that painting I did this weekend:

The people are the focus. But there’s all kinds of noise in this picture. Hanging flowers, a crock by a fireplace, two people sitting in the background, stairs, Rustic Architecture™. Even the light across the table is noise, an artful forgery.

This isn’t really as immersive:

I need the noise to make it feel real. I don’t want someone’s first gut impression to be wow, that looks like it must have been hard. I want their first impression to be an emotion. Noise. 

That’s how I make characters. I start with a very tiny seed of a real person, carefully and artlessly forged, and then I begin to complicate it until I’ve made someone as noisy as a real person. But unlike a real person, I select every element to manipulate how the reader feels about the character. A slash of light across the bench to immediately ground it in our real world and show that it follows our physical rules. A violin beneath to provoke interest. A complicated and cohesive backstory that is barely visible at first glance. 

Salient noise. Forgery plus. Rustic Architecture™.

Does this make sense? In my head it does. But things are sort of cluttered up there. Heck of a lot of benches.

urs,

Dear tvvinyard,

Why thank you.

As a reader, my favorite kinds of books are those that strike me as cunning and curious mirrors of the real world. I like nothing better than reading a line in a novel and thinking — yes! that is just exactly how that feels/ looks/ tastes! It’s like a currency. The more the author throws tiny truths like that out upon the page, the more willing I am to invest myself in everything else.

Because it’s something I like to do as a reader, it’s also something I try to do as a writer. There’s that old wisdom that you should write the books you would like to read, after all. 

It’s hard, though, because it requires both good observation of the world and a willingness to consider how the reader is feeling at all moments. Take the boxers in the jeans moment, for instance. I knew what I was trying to paint: that feeling of being an outsider among friends who know each other well, and also that feeling of being a teen girl among a stereotypical pack of boys. To do that, I had to think back on what kind of moments would make someone feel that way, then I had to scour through my observation of life to see if I could find a real-life example, and then I had to try to double check my instincts to make sure that whatever moment or behavior I’d observed was universal enough to have a good effect on the reader. 

Boxers tucked into jeans does a lot of lifting, I think. It’s the classic oh-god-underwear-has-touched-your-privates situation, for starters, and the tucked inside the jeans indicates a sort of familiarity among the inhabitants of the room: whoever removed those jeans had no problem stripping and leaving the stuff right there. 

tl;dr underwear does a lot of work.

urs,

Dear smellvins,

For me, writing a very atmospheric novel is a subtractive process.

What do I mean by that? You have the real world, with everything in it. Donegal, for instance, where I just was. You have every person who lives there doing every thing — the plumbers and the doctors, the cashiers and the bums. You have all sorts of buildings — cottages and clinics, grocery stores and knick knack shops. You have all sorts of days — misty one and sunny ones, hot ones and cool ones. All sorts of people — folks into the Kardashians and folks into knitting and folks into sheepdogs and folks into boats and folks into football.

Creating mood means taking away everything that doesn’t support your thesis — your desired atmosphere. So if you’re trying to lean on the ancient quality of Donegal, you pull out the pop culture references, you pull out the grocery stores with the florescent lights. You pull out the sunny, hot days. You narrow the lens until all the things you point at agree with your mood.

You can add things back in, of course, if you’re trying to balance a contemporary fantasy — you put things back in to ground you and remind the reader when it really takes place. But I add them in judiciously, and when I do, I try to lean on the same language I’d use to describe the ancient and evocative stuff. It makes it feel of a piece.

urs,

7 Setting Basics That Can Bring a Story to Life

I recently finished reading The Snow Child by Eowyn Ivey. While the story was fascinating and well-told, what captivated me the most were the setting details that the author wove in seamlessly. The Alaskan wilderness in the 1920’s came alive to me in a magical way so that I felt like I was right there in that dark cabin eating moose steak and listening to the blizzard rattle the roof. Setting is a critical aspect of story, but in critiquing and judging books, I find that it is often one of the most neglected or under-developed writing skills. It’s usually something I have to work very consciously to incorporate into my own stories. The fact is, writing setting is tricky. Sometimes we relay too much information, sometimes too little. Sometimes we share fluff instead of what’s truly meaningful to the story. As we look at ways that we can work at making the settings of our stories come alive, here are 7 basics that can help: 1. Refer to the setting more than once. Most writers will remember to ground readers in the setting at the beginning of the scene. We often give at least a brief description of where our characters are at. But then as the scene progresses our characters often end up acting on a blank stage. We have to remember throughout the scene to continue to keep our setting details alive for our readers by making subtle references. If our hero is sitting on the beach, we need to briefly describe the beach in the first few sentences of the scene, but then as the scene unfolds we can refer to the sound of the waves, or the squawk of the sea gull, or the stench of the seaweed. We need to keep hinting at the setting details throughout the scene, NOT just in the opening lines. 2. Use bite-size details. Don’t dump large chunks of description in one place. Readers’ eyes will usually skim a paragraph that is mostly or all description. We don’t want a large paragraph to sound like we took it straight from the Sears catalog. Instead we’re better off dishing out details in bite-sizes which are more palatable and digestible for modern readers. 3. Weave description through the point-of-view character. We should never randomly describe anything within our books. And of course we can’t describe everything. Rather, we need to be strategic in what we pick. One way to decide what deserves space on the page is to ask this question: What would THIS particular character notice? What would he see through his worldview, personality, past experiences, etc.? For example, my hero isn’t going to notice that the color of my heroine’s dress resembles buttercups (unless he’s a florist). If he pays attention to the color at all, he’ll call it yellow. Now the heroine might notice the color AND the lace at the hem AND the embroidered collar, because she’s a woman and her dear grandmother lovingly sewed the dress for her. 4. Use description to set the mood. Another way to pick what to describe is to decide what mood you want for the scene. If the mood is spooky, then you might point out the rancid odor of the decaying fish among the tangles of slimy seaweed. If it’s a happy scene you might describe the way the sunshine makes the sand sparkle like diamonds. 5. Pick items to describe that are important to the plot. When I read a detailed description about one particular item, as a reader I like to think that “prop” is significant, that somehow it will come into play later in the book. Otherwise why would the writer spend so much time describing it? Sometimes, as a literary technique, we can focus the camera lens more closely on the setting or a particular item when it’s important to the plot for purposes of symbolism, foreshadowing, or strategy. But we need to be careful not to lead our readers on with descriptions that don’t matter. 6. Use all five senses to bring the setting to life. Most writers can paint a vivid picture with words and SHOW a scene through the EYES of their character. But it takes much more work to add in smells, sounds, tastes, and textures. And it’s even harder to work in those ancillary senses without saying something like, “The room smelled like burnt coffee.” Instead we should strive to eliminate the actual sensory words and instead say something like, “The bitterness of the burnt coffee was so strong in the air she could almost drink it.” While we can’t always avoid using the actual sensory word, the experience becomes stronger when we carefully select specific words that can evoke our readers’ sensory memories. 7. Be as specific as possible. We can add authenticity (especially historical writers) when we are as precise as possible with what we’re naming and describing within our settings. We can say, “The drunkard had a cup of beer” or we can say, “The drunkard swigged a tankard of ale.” The more we can specifically name details—whether particular kind of car, flower, tree, book, etc—then the more the more vivid the story becomes in our readers’ minds.  

We’ve all been warned about the dangers of using too much description. Readers don’t want to read three paragraphs about a sunset, we’re told. Description slows down a story; it’s boring and self-indulgent. You should keep your description as short and simple as possible. For those who take a more scientific approach to writing fiction, arbitrary rules abound: One sentence per paragraph. One paragraph per page. And, for god’s sake, “Never open a book with weather” (Elmore Leonard).

But what this conventional wedding wisdom fails to take into account is the difference between static and dynamic description. Static description is usually boring. It exists almost like a painted backdrop to a play. As the name suggests, it doesn’t move, doesn’t interact or get interacted with.

There were clouds in the sky. Her hair was red with hints of orange. The house had brown carpeting and yellow countertops.

In moderation, there’s nothing wrong with static description. Sometimes, facts are facts, and you need to communicate them to the reader in a straightforward manner.

But too much static description, and readers will start to skim forward. They don’t want to read about what the house looks like or the stormy weather or the hair color of each of your protagonist’s seventeen cousins.

Why? Because they can tell it’s not important. They can afford to skip all of your description because their understanding of the story will not be impacted.

That’s where dynamic description comes in. Dynamic description is a living entity. It’s interactive, it’s relevant. It takes on the voices of your narrators and characters. In short, it gives us important information about the story, and it can’t be skimmed over.

So how do you make your description more dynamic so that it engages your readers and adds color and excitement to your story? Here are a few tips.

(I have a TON more tips about setting and description. These are just a few. But I’m trying to keep this short, so if you have any questions or want more advice about this, please feel free to ask me.)

I’m not an expert in writing, but someone asked me earlier how I write emotions for certain scenes or how I focus on particular areas/make it interesting etc. So I just thought I would post this and see if it helps anyone out. I’m not saying this is professional advice because it’s not, but this is just personally what helps me to write and hopefully it can help some other people too.

If you’re stuck on how to write the characters reaction to a certain scenario, relate it to a time you’ve been in a similar place or frame of mind: Obviously if you’re writing about a character murdering someone or hunting monsters it isn’t going to be able to be related to. However, if you look deeper into what is going on you will be able to find something you can relate it to. For example, your character has to make a big decision, and it’s a life or death situation, no matter what they do the outcome will be bad. Relate this to a time in your life where you had to make a decision, it doesn’t even have to be anything wild. It could literally be choosing between two different toppings for your ice cream or pizza, but you have to focus on what you were thinking at the time. How did you come to a final decision? Did you find a compromise? Did things go well in the end or did things go badly? Was it a risk or did you stick with what you knew to be safe?

Paint a picture in your head of the exact scene before you write it so that you know it well enough to give a brief summary that will make the layout of the scene easy for the reader to follow: An example would be if the character/s were in a kitchen and you described where the table, counter and oven were and what room the door led to if they were going to exit. Sometimes it’s important to go in to detail about the setting but sometimes you just need a brief summary so that the story can start. It’s easier for you as a writer to follow this and let the story flow if you know exactly what this place looks like.

Know your character: If it’s an original character, make sure you write a fact file on them first and get to know them. Ask yourself questions about them that might not seem important like what’s their favourite animal and why? Why are they here? Who do they choose to keep around them? What’s their opinions on politics? Are they sexually active? Does everyone around them support their life choices? Etc. If you’re writing a fan fiction of a character that already exists, try to think about how they are as a person and how they may have reacted in similar situations to what you’re writing. If it’s a reader insert and you’re writing it specifically for a reader to be put in you might want to avoid certain pronouns or descriptions. Unless your reader is supposed to have a particular trait e.g. Their gender may be referenced to, their skin colour, weight, body shape, hair colour, eye colour. But if it’s not specific to a certain criteria, for reader inserts you might want to steer clear of those little details.

If you’re experiencing writers block, write something that you never expected to write or take a story in a direction you had never considered before: If you are having writers block in the sense of you have no idea where to start your fic/story/book, go somewhere to come up with a character and a story line should follow. Go and get the train or the bus to somewhere and pay attention to a few different people. See how they react to different things like people sitting next to them or the train stopping. Are they alone? Why could that be? Or are they with someone? How many people? Is the person they’re with someone they like or someone they’re forced to be around? (Like an abusive partner, a disliked family member etc). Once you have a better idea for a character, ideas start to stem of what situations they would end up in or maybe even struggle in which would make an interesting dynamic. If you are finding it hard to carry on with a scene, move on to the next chapter or paragraph. If it’s a short story or fic then write the ending, then build the rest of the write up to that end. If you don’t know where to go with the rest of the story there a few ways to mix the story up. 1. Kill a character 2. Bring in a new character that threatens the status of the protagonist 3. Bring back a character that left 4. Bring back a character that ‘died’ or faked their death 5. Write the next chapter in the POV of a different character or writers POV 6. Introduce a new problem

Write out a plan for your story: It can be as messy as you want but always write a plan. Get all of your ideas for the fic/story/book written down. Whether it’s in your notes or written on paper. Just write down quotes you have in mind for the characters to say at some point, beautifully written sentences that you imagine writing for the situation, scenarios, the actual plot, who’s involved. As soon as it’s all down, when you get stuck while writing it you can go back to it and see a quote or idea you wanted to use and it might help you with your writers block or move your story along.

So I just stumbled across an article from Trello. They’ve recently instituted a “matchup” system between remote and on-campus employees. Basically, once a week, employees are randomly paired and then meet for fifteen minutes (usually via video conference) at some point during the week. There’s more info on the full system HERE.

What do you guys think of starting something like this for Writeblr Connects? When I saw the article, I thought it might be a good way to encourage even more connection in our community. We do get some time to talk over on our Slack channels during write-ins, but Slack can be an extra hurdle for some people and our write-ins are subject to moderator availability, so there’s not much flexibility there.

Matchups would be TOTALLY OPTIONAL, of course. And the “meetings” wouldn’t have to be video conferences–they could be Tumblr chats, Slack chats, emails–whatever is easiest. The article does mention that their employees “report in” about their meetings, but again, that would be optional. Personally, I’d love to hear what everyone is up to, but I get that everyone is busy enough as is.