Thunderbird and Pen

I tend to prefer organizing chapters so they contain an odd number of scenes as it helps with pacing, and ensures a chapter has a beginning, midpoint and an end. 

One final note - try not to keep all scenes within a chapter at the same length.

Example - A 5000 word chapter can have an opening scene that’s about 1500 words, a second scene that gets to the “meat” of the chapter that’s about 2200 words, and then a 1300 word chapter to wrap things up and move you into the next chapter. 

1. Sentences can only do one thing at a time.

Have you ever heard a four-year-old run out of breath before she can finish her thought? I edit a lot of sentences that work the same way. You need a noun, you need a verb, you might need an object. Give some serious thought to stopping right there.

Sentences are building blocks, not bungee cords; they’re not meant to be stretched to the limit. I’m not saying you necessarily want a Hemingway-esque series of clipped short sentences, but most writers benefit from dividing their longest sentences into shorter, more muscular ones.

2. Paragraphs can only do one thing at a time.

A paragraph supports a single idea. Construct complex arguments by combining simple ideas that follow logically. Every time you address a new idea, add a line break. Short paragraphs are the most readable; few should be more than three or four sentences long. This is more important if you’re writing for the Web.

3. Look closely at -ing

Nouns ending in -ing are fine. (Strong writing, IT consulting, great fishing.) But constructions like “I am running,” “a forum for building consensus,” or “The new team will be managing” are inherently weak. Rewrite them to “I run,” “a forum to build consensus,” and “the team will manage.” You’re on the right track when the rewrite has fewer words (see below).

(If for some insane reason you want to get all geeky about this, you can read the Wikipedia article on gerunds and present participles. But you don’t have to know the underlying grammatical rules to make this work. Rewrite -ing when you can, and your writing will grow muscles you didn’t know it had.)

4. Omit unnecessary words.

I know we all heard this in high school, but we weren’t listening. (Mostly because it’s hard.) It’s doubly hard when you’re editing your own writing—we put all that work into getting words onto the page, and by god we need a damned good reason to get rid of them.

Here’s your damned good reason: extra words drain life from your work. The fewer words used to express an idea, the more punch it has. Therefore:

Summer months Regional level The entire country On a daily basis (usually best rewritten to “every day”) She knew that it was good. Very (I just caught one above: four-year-old little girl)

You can nearly always improve sentences by rewriting them in fewer words.

5. Reframe 90% of the passive voice.

French speakers consider an elegantly managed passive voice to be the height of refinement. But here in the good old U.S. (or Australia, Great Britain, etc.), we value action. We do things is inherently more interesting than Things are done by us. Passive voicemuddies your writing; when the actor is hidden, the action makes less sense.

Bonus: Use spell-check

There’s no excuse for teh in anything more formal than a Twitter tweet.

Also, “a lot” and “all right” are always spelled as two words. You can trust me, I’m an editor.

For a long time, archeologists didn’t know how greek women did their high-piled braids and hair. There was a word that translated to “needle” in the descriptions. They went, “seems like we’ll never know.” Then a hairdresser took a fucking needle (big needle) and did the fucking thing you do with needles, which is sew - and by sewing the braids into place, she replicated ancient styles.

The Egyptians had diagrams of construction steps for their pyramids. Archeologists went “oooh, ancient primitive people, how they do this?” LITERALLY MYTHBUSTERS OR THE OLD DISCOVERY CHANNEL or someone went “what if we did the thing the pictures said they did” AND GUESS FUCKING WHAT. GUESS FUCKING WHAT.

Also that thing with native Americans saying squirrels taught them how to get sap for maple syrup, and colonizers going “that’s a myth sweaty”

Because the sources left by Romans always just said to mix with water. Because, if you were a Roman??? Obviously you knew that you used seawater for cement. Duh. That’s so obvious that they never really bothered specifying that you use seawater to mix it, because it wasn’t necessary, everyone knew that. 

But then the empire fell, other empires rose and fell, time passed, and by the time we were trying to reconstruct the formula the ‘mix the dry ingredients with seawater’ trick had been forgotten, until chemical analysis finally figured it out again. 

It’s sort of like the land of Punt, a ally of Egypt that’s mentioned all the time, but we don’t actually know where it was located. Because it isn’t written down anywhere. Why would they write it down? It’s Punt. Everyone knew where Punt was back then. It’d be ridiculous to waste the ink and space to specify where it was, every child knows about Punt. 

One thing I think is not talked about very much is that straight men live pretty much desexualized lives if we’re not actually having sex at that moment, and then there’s not much room to be the object rather than subject.

As I’ve said before, we men don’t have clothing options for “dressing sexy” in masculine clothing (there is cross dressing but that is different). There’s no male equivalent to the short skirt or low cut top. There’s no male lingerie that isn’t seen as a joke.

Further, we just don’t get validation for our sexuality outside of a sexual partner. We are almost never complimented for our looks or sexiness from platonic friends like women are, especially same sex friends.

There really aren’t many straight male role models for raw aesthetic sexiness in mainstream culture (besides unnaturally muscled men). In fiction, male characters are almost never attractive for embodying sexiness but rather for doing things (saving the world, being extremely witty, being a genius, winning the tournament, etc.). Their sexiness is non-aesthetic and sometimes is in spite of their aesthetics.

Anecdotally, it seems like a lot of men aren’t even called physically hot and sexy by their own sexual partners, who themselves focus on personality. There’s not much room to fulfill the role of passive sexism object for you partner for many/most men.

I think it is telling that a lot of porn for men ignores the man’s personality and has a woman just throwing themselves at the man, overcome with lust.

Also there the fact that women seem to rarely approach men and some seem to often expect the man to do most of the sexual escalation, especially in the early stages.

The answer always seems to be some combination of slot machine mentality (“maybe this one will like it, and make the other 50 worthwhile”) and a desire for witness. Surprising numbers of people admit that it’s validation even if the reaction is negative, simply because they’re still being viewed in a totally sexual context.

At the very least that has obvious consequences for people trying to reduce dick pic sending. There’s some core of people who can’t possibly be reached with “it’s not attractive to women” because that was never their expectation.

More broadly, I think efforts to get (Western?) men to emphasize with objectification wildly underestimate the challenge they’re facing. It’s not just a sympathy shortage, it’s a totally unfamiliar feeling. Making things even harder, it’s a feeling a lot of men say they wish they could have.

The usual narrative on not (politely) complimenting the appearance of unknown women is “sure, it’s nice if it happens once, but think about how annoyed you’d be if it happened all the time”. Fine in general terms, but I think a lot of men don’t have any way to intuit the emotional difference between too-frequent compliments and being pestered with too much of something totally innocuous like requests for the date.

The comments on those articles are frequently from men saying they’ve literally never received a single compliment from a stranger on their appearance, and can’t imagine what it would be like. The ones who have are often talking about a single, years-old compliment they still cherish. That’s not a framework that supports more than a purely theoretical understanding of what’s it’s like to be valued for your appearance too heavily - or at all.

https://www.thrillist.com/sex-dating/los-angeles/we-sent-a-preemptive-v-pic-before-dudes-could-send-dick-pics-heres-what-happened

Let’s be honest: while I enjoy penises, I don’t necessarily want unexpected visual boners intruding on my day. I wondered, “What would guys do if I turned the tables and sent them an unexpected vagina pic?” And so, in my own twist on revenge porn, I sent 40 unexpected vagina pics to men on Bumble.

This … didn’t work out the way she apparently expected it to:

Overall, I was surprised that I didn’t get my, “Gotcha!” moment. I’d initially hoped the guys would see how invasive it is to receive such intimate photos from a stranger. When I’m excited to get to know a guy, his penis isn’t the first part of him that I want to know. But given that men like to send dick pics, I suppose their enthusiasm for v-pics makes sense.

So, basically, women experience dick picks as a net negative, as an intimacy violation, while men experience v-pics as a huge positive, as validation and an indicator of interest.

This seems consistent with the above discussion, where it’s a pretty common male experience to basically never receive any sexual attention ever and thus respond really strongly positively to whatever scraps come their way (or to start trolling for attention - with the point of some of these dick pics apparently being to get any attention at all, no matter how hostile), while a common female experience seems to be more like being flooded with unwanted sexual attention and wanting a way to make it stop -

resulting in an absolutely massive inferential gap - with the result that if you’re on one side of the gap and try to describe your feelings and experiences to the people on the other side, whatever words you have will just fall on deaf ears because the feeling and experiences you describe are … not just unfamiliar, but outright alien, to the ones on the other side.

For women, it feels like all women are sexy to men.

i wish it was more common to compliment people– especially guys– in a casual way. but when you live as a woman you can spend a lot more time dodging men’s attention rather than soliciting it… 

The first chapter from my comix on life and learning after seven hundred and seventy-eight days on testosterone!

THIS COMIC IS INTENDED FOR MATURE READERS – contains nudity, cigarettes, alcohol, and descriptions of gender dysphoria

The other chapters are

Trans Boy’s Complaint - negotiating identity in light of gendered perception

Nutrisco et Extinguo - on the myth of testosterone rage

Double Stellar Black Hole - the experience of gender dysphoria when you don’t know being transgender is a thing that exists

Adam Kadmon - for the first transgender man I ever knew 5.5 x 8.5, over 40 pages, surreptitiously printed in college computer labs

You guys, you must stop doing this. You must. We cannot keep yelling at you about it because it makes us so angry, and we are already angry all the time, about real things, like how our lives are turning into a real world Handmaid’s Tale, ha ha ha ha ha ha ha haha ha ha ha ha ha. We cannot keep spending our energy being mad at mediocre men for writing mediocre books that inexplicably win awards and that people tell us to read, for some fucking godawful who knows reason.

So men. My guys. My dudes. My bros. My writers. I am begging you to help me here. When you have this man in your workshop, you must turn to him. You must take his clammy hands in yours. You must look deep into his eyes, his man eyes, with your man eyes, and you must say to him, “Peter, I am a man, and you are a man, so let us talk to each other like men. Peter, look at the way you have written about the only four women in this book.” And Peter will say, trying to free his hands, “What? These are sexy, dynamic, interesting women.” And you must grip his hands even tighter and you must say to him, “ARE THEY, PETER? Why are they interesting? What are their hobbies? What are their private habits? What are their strange dreams? What choices are they making, Peter? They are not making choices. They are not interesting. What they are is sexy, and you have those things confused, and not in the good way where someone’s interestingness makes them become sexy, like Steve Buscemi or Pauline Viardot. Why must women be sexy to be interesting to you? The women you don’t find sexy are where, Peter? They are invisible? They are all dead?” He is trying to escape! Tighten your grasp. “Peter, look at this. I mean, where to begin. ‘She could have been any age between eighteen and thirty-five?’ There are no other ages, I guess? Do you know what eighteen-year-olds really look like, in life? Do you know what thirty-SEVEN-year-olds look like, god forbid? And not that this is even the point, but why are these supposedly sexy and dynamic and interesting women BOTHERING with your boring garbage ‘on the skinny side of average’ protagonist? Why did you write it like this, Peter?” 

And maybe Peter will say at last, “I don’t know.” Maybe he will be silent for a long long long time, and then maybe he will say, “I guess it’s scary and difficult for me to imagine the interiority of women because then i would have to know that my mother had an interiority of her own: private, petty, sexually unstimulating, strange: unrelated to me and undevoted to my needs. That sometimes I was nothing to my mother, just as sometimes she is nothing to me. That I was not at all times her immediate concern.”

“I know, Peter,” you can tell him gently.

Flaw for a too perfect character

I know you’re trying to find something that fits, but sometimes finding a flaw that seems to fit ends up making the character predictable, and maybe even boring, despite them having a flaw. Instead of finding a character flaw that seems to fit with his personality, try the opposite. Try to think of the unpredictable traits and see how those work.

A predictable character flaw for someone studious might be impatience, constantly annoyed when someone attempts to interrupt him or ask him too many questions about what he’s working on. But what if he was studious because he himself struggles to understand things? What if he spends hours and hours with books and research because one hour just isn’t enough to grasp the concept? And his persistence to understand concepts could lead back to insecurities he’s had in the past - what makes him believe he has to understand something fully to be a better person? Why does he have to know it all?

Another technique you could try is coming up with a list of just basic character flaws, with no consideration in mind for your specific character. Give yourself a catalog of ideas to start with. Then start plugging in and seeing how it rounds him out.

Try one of these websites if you’re stuck with this.

Character Flaw Generator

Character Flaw Reference Sheet

Ultimately though, don’t be afraid of flaws that don’t seem to fit. Blending traits that don’t seem to go together is what makes your character unique! And the more unique they are, the more fun they are to write about and read about.

kenobi’s just sitting there in his pile of sand like a smug fucking bastard. he doesn’t need to hide jack shit. he went to the tattooine board of tourism and got them to print up flyers that say ‘COME TO TATTOOINE, WE HAVE SAND’ and luke is probably going to be safe until his midlife fucking crisis at this rate.

palpatine finds vader aimlessly checking behind pieces of furniture in some shitty space motel on kamino

‘he’s on tattooine,’ palpatine says. 

Adding Depth to Your Language

When you say hollow, I assume the problem is the writing feels stiff. It lacks personality, emotion, and maybe it’s even too grandiose for the subject matter you’re tackling.

I think the problem might be that you’re trying too hard to differentiate between spoken language and written language. It’s not as if writers throw a switch when they shift from conversing to writing. Our speech patterns are often mirrored in our writing, though often times with a bit more polish that comes from the ability to edit, which you can’t do when you’re just talking to someone, and even editing with online chats is limited to the seconds before you send the message.

When I think back to some of the first things I wrote, they read very much like stories I was relating to people in real life. I’d pretend I was telling someone a story, and I’d write the words I’d use to describe it. As I gained more experience, and exposed myself to the ways other authors wrote, I started to learn the right ways to embellish my writing.

So if you’re still trying to figure out your writing style, I say just jump in and tell stories the way you would tell them verbally. Get them on paper, and practice. Your first story may not feel all that “story-like,” and maybe your second won’t either, but once you get comfortable telling stories in this way, you’ll find yourself experimenting with language and structure more.

Writers often write in closets for many years, and what I mean by that, is that they write in secret. They don’t share their work with others, so they don’t get constructive criticism. And yet, even without someone critiquing you, you improve. Criticism and advice from others may help you improve faster, but it doesn’t mean you won’t improve without it just by writing, writing, writing.

The important thing is that you’re telling stories and enjoying yourself while doing it.

Bearing all that in mind, here are a few tips to make your writing seem less hollow:

Use POV - When you’re writing a description, don’t think of it as a camera lens; think of a character who is actually there, seeing, hearing, and feeling it. Don’t focus only on the visual details - include sounds, sensations, and when applicable, see if the object of description reminds your character of anything. A memory, a person, or a place.

Use Words - When it comes to word choice, think of words that convey feelings, both physical and emotional. Instead of saying something is loud, you could say that it’s ear-splitting. And when you describe pain, be specific. Don’t just say something hurts - does it burn, sting, ache, throb, ect.? When it comes to description, don’t just focus on the colors of things - imagine their shadows, and the glares from sunlight or artificial light. Describe textures, even if the character/narrator is unable to touch what they’re describing.

I don’t need to touch this to imagine it being scratchy, grainy, or bumpy. So add texture to descriptions if they feel flat.

Use Reactions - When writing is hollow, it’s often because it seems to just sit on a page, not doing anything. But when you have characters reacting to the things you’re writing, it starts to have some movement. Characters can respond to something you’re describing by smiling, speaking, or even taking action. If your character is standing in the thunderstorm you’re describing, have them react! Have them run for cover, or attempt to hide their head, or zip their jacket, or try to hail a cab. Even if your setting is less intense (like a patio on a sunny day), your character can react by removing their jacket, or drinking something cold, or fanning themselves with a menu or pamphlet.

If you couldn’t sense the theme that shows up in all three of these, it’s emotions. We read fiction to experience stories with characters. And the way we connect with characters is by becoming intimate with their emotions. Injecting emotion into your language will immediately help the story feel more real.

Good luck!

A. Fire, flames, or excessive heat. B. Under cover of darkness. C. A moment’s respite. D. Subtle kindnesses. E. Sharing a drink. F. An absent look or touch. G. A fistfight. H. Someone’s greatest fear. I. Broken glass. J. When words aren’t enough. K. On the edge of consciousness. L. A stolen kiss. M. When it rains/snows/storms. N. The color green. O. The stars or space. P. While driving or in/around a car. Q. One missed call. R. A deafening sound. S. Music [send a song or a lyric] T. An obscure AU. U. Coming home. V. An abandoned or empty place. W. Waiting impatiently for something. X. A flash of anger. Y. Tears. Z. [Make up your own]

Looking for a random city? Click here.

Looking for a random city that people have actually heard of? Click here.

Need a random surname for a character? Click here. (They also give prevalence by race, which is very helpful.)