These questions from Diana Rubino are about my new ebook, Art & Craft of Writing: Secret Advice for Writers. If you haven’t got a copy, you can now pick one up free.
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“10 Ways to Become a Better Writer in 10 Days”: “We can feel free to throw in gratuitous imaginary details, so long as they’re neutral and not meant to sway the reader toward positive or negative interpretations. If we feel the urge to sway the reader, we’ll use a detail bent in the opposite direction from where we want it bent.”—Why wouldn’t you put in a detail that elicits a positive (or negative) interpretation if you want to sway the reader that way? And why would the detail be bent in the opposite direction?
This is about learning authorial control.
Too often, we just put down on the page whatever falls out of us in the moment. When we’re riding along on the surface of the story like that, we’ll very likely to put down cliches, because those are what occur to us first.
So we use this exercise to build the habit of drilling down past the surface cliche stuff into surprising details that will make our scenes unique.
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Tension: “We don’t bother with transitions.”—Are you applying this to first drafts, when it’s all coming out of our right brains? Because I’ve been told that I have weak transitions.
Yes. Skip right over the boring bits. Go straight to the exciting scenes. The reader does.
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Isn’t SOME exposition necessary? I try to tell as much as possible in dialogue, but don’t want it to read like a play. Isn’t exposition part of a scene?
This is a very, very common misconception. I can’t even tell you how many industry professionals routinely parrot this belief without doing their research.
NO exposition is necessary.
The reader doesn’t want to be ‘told’ about the story. They want to be ‘shown’ the story itself. They don’t want to waste their time on extra stuff. They just want to see characters speaking and acting in their described environment.
So the more you stick to your characters doing interesting things and saying interesting things in an interesting environment painted in words—and leave the reader to do the thinking—the better the reader will love you.
Now, exposition can be done beautifully. Most of our canonical greats are famous for it. I post their quotes on Twitter. And we do generally wind up using some exposition, just because none of us is ever as disciplined as we ought to be. But exposition is so incredibly difficult to make worthwhile—and so incredibly easy to screw up—that I always advise writers to work as hard as possible to discipline themselves to do without it.
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What’s that one word Henry James uses to show his perfect authorial control?
“Stopped.” It’s the final word of “The Turn of the Screw.”
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“5 Ways to Make Our Novels Unforgettable”: “The reader is not moved to weep when we get all blue inside.”—You know that saying ‘no tears in the writer, no tears in the reader’?
Yes, I do. Another very, very common misconception.
And the only way for it to make any sense at all is to simply ignore the myriad fabulous techniques of fiction that have been discovered and developed over the past 150 years.
I’m afraid this is the kind of thing that happens when your industry becomes inundated with people who don’t even know those techniques exist.
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I realize they’re not going to cry at everything in the story that makes us cry, or be entertained as we laugh hysterically (love that line—I laughed at it!) but since our purpose is to evoke emotion, don’t we want to make them laugh and cry at the things we want them to?
Yes, we do. That’s why we have fiction techniques. And that’s why we practice our perfect authorial control.
For example: the first time I taught at a major writers conference, one of the things I was asked about was humor.
How do you do it?
I told them that I could teach them the techniques of humor, but I could not give them a good sense of humor.
This got a laugh.
Why?
Because I used the technique that I was about to teach. Humor is exactly the same as a story: build the reader’s expectations, then end on a punchline that is both surprising and yet—in the context of the expectations you’ve just built—inevitable.
I didn’t need to laugh in order for them to laugh. I already knew the punchline was coming.
Then I told them the old Groucho Marx joke: “Outside of a dog, a book is your best friend. Inside of a dog, it’s too dark to read.”
Groucho didn’t need to laugh either. He also knew his punchline was coming. But it’s still one of the best jokes ever.
Read more in: Art & Craft of Writing: Secret Advice for Writers