Month: November 2019

Characters

Economy of Character

Bruce Byfield

My late friend Paul Edwin Zimmer wrote a story in which a trained fighter defeated a vampire, not through speed, but through the absolute efficiency drilled into him over decades of training. The idea has always seemed a working definition of skill, and, not incidentally, an apt description of Paul’s own writing. However, it’s only recently I realized that it could apply to the creation of characters as well.

Most people, including me, seem to create characters unsystematically. They arise out of the immediate needs of the plot, or emerge full-grown out of their creator’s imagination. Few, if any, seem to consider characters as a long-term part of the story’s development who can become a member of a sort of central casting that can be drawn on to increase the long term efficiency of writing and help to bind the story together.

Perhaps you need to be someways along in your story to realize such possibilities. My own revelation came a third of the way through my first draft. I had thrown my main characters on the road, penniless, and in desperate need of a place to hide as their pursuer closed on them. I could have created a new character, but then I remembered a character who didn’t even appear on the page, a servant whose newborn child had been sacrificed for magical purposes. Nobody would have bothered to tell her, so her story was left unfinished, a minor part of my main characters’ adventures.

That seemed callous — however common in fantasy. However, I realized that I wanted my characters to be responsible. In the middle of their own misfortunes, they took the time to carry the sad news, and in the process found a roof for the night. The next morning, the servant is last seen stoically trudging home.

Realizing I was on to something, I had a soldier who had played a previously minor role show up further down the road. I also took an embarrassing ex-lover with a sheltered view of life — a comic character, a throwaway, really — and set her on the road to maturity with the soldier’s help.

However, the real advantage of having cast only struck me when a main character woke up alone in a village whose language he barely spoke. He had come with his lover and a young hero who was adopting him for political reasons, but neither were available. Two other characters were enemies who were not about to help him.

I did not want to have a chapter of my character wandering around inarticulately, so I needed a few people he could talk to. I found them in the form of a sexually ambiguous shaman he consulted, and a crippled ex-prisoner of war turned blacksmith. Later, I added two Aunties who started as his enemies, and became friendly due to their sense of romance.

All these characters appeared for ruthlessly practical purposes. Yet, after each served an original purpose, by the time I started relating the village’s politics, together they gave me a ready-made crowd cast for crowd scenes. For example, one chapter involves the reactions to the sudden appearance of an item of magic. Between all the previously invented characters, I had a full range of reactions.

For instance, I had originally made the smith crippled because I had the image of him swinging around his workshop on parallel bars. I had no other reason for that detail than it was vivid in my mind. However, when the magic appeared, and others were healed but not him, I had a new aspect to the story, and a new image of the disappointed smith limping back home disappointed. The shaman, a likely candidate for a cure, didn’t want one. As for the Aunties, one was reassuring the other that the cure would not affect their lesbian relationship. I had an entire cast ready to perform without any need to introduce more bit-players.

Nor am I through with this cast yet. Looking ahead, I can already see the roles most of them will play. Like Paul wrote years ago, it’s all about economy — and that’s a lesson I’ve never seen in all the millions of words published on how to write. Maybe it’s one of those skills you can only learn by doing.

Uncategorized

Writing and the Sunk Costs Fallacy

thelocaldialect

Not many people know this, but my current manuscript started off as something else entirely. I was about 90k words into the novel, a character driven fantasy set in the foothills of the Himalayas, when I decided I needed to rewrite the thing entirely, reworking my point of view character, my protagonist, even my tense. My antagonist became my protagonist, my past tense narrative became present tense, my third person became first person. The end result (I am on the second draft now) is barely recognizable as the same novel, and yet it is, objectively, a much much stronger piece.

 
If you’re pondering a re-write but are reluctant to actually commit, likely you’re struggling with something known as the “sunk costs fallacy.” The sunk costs fallacy is the impulse that tells us to keep waiting for the bus because we’ve already been waiting for twenty minutes so if we give up now, that twenty minutes will have been wasted. The sunk costs fallacy tells us we need to stay at a job we hate because we’ve already been there for five years and if we switch tracks now we’ll have wasted those five years. It tells a couple who has been together for a decade that they can’t break up now because then the previous ten years will have been for nothing. For us writers, the sunk costs fallacy tells us that because they’re already 90k words into a novel they had better see it out to the end, otherwise those 90k words will have been wasted.

 
The truth is, when we invest time, resources, and emotional energy into something, we often hold onto it a lot longer than we otherwise should. We have an attachment to that thing that is no longer connected to the happiness we get from it or the utility it brings, it is purely based upon an irrational idea that giving up on this thing will signify that all previous time spend on said relationship, project, job, or book will have been a ginormous waste. Herein lies the fallacy: whether or not I decide to rewrite my novel, the time I spent on it is irrevocably lost. Continuing to write a novel that I probably should re-write is not going to make the previous time I spent on it any more valuable, any more than continuing in a dead end relationship will justify the previous time spent in the relationship. The costs — time, money, energy, emotion — are sunk already. They’ve been spent, they’re gone, and they’re not coming back. We can sink more costs into them, or we can change track, taking the lessons we’ve learned from the first go round to our new endeavor.

 
The 90k words I previously wrote were not a waste. Through them, I realized what my narrative was lacking. Namely, the plot was meandering because my main character lacked a clear purpose. You know who did have a clear, and actually rather sympathetic purpose? My antagonist did! Without those 90k words though, I would not have thought of the story in those terms. It became extremely clear to me, almost from the moment that I had the idea, that I needed to do this re-write. The story came together in a much more coherent way, and when I sat down to write it, what came out of my fingers was first person present tense. I showed the sample to a critique partner, asking if the POV and tense, which was not my usual, worked, and I got a resounding thumbs up. So I kept going, and committed to the re-write.

 
Chances are, if you’re considering a major change, whether it be in your manuscript or in life, somewhere inside you already know that a change needs to take place. When my manuscript just isn’t working on a fundamental level, I know, and while I can try to convince myself otherwise, ultimately I’m just prolonging the inevitable. The thing about sunk costs is that the longer you delay the change, the more those costs accumulate. Every day that I spend toiling over a dead-end manuscript is a day that I spend not fixing the problem, not making progress. My writerly advice to my readers is this: do it. Take the plunge. Rewrite the thing from page one. Don’t worry about wasted time or energy or emotion because it’s already wasted and you’re not getting it back. The only thing you can influence, from here on out, is the project’s future outcome. You know what’s got to be done, so give yourself permission to go ahead and do it.

General Writing

Take the Work Seriously, Never You

Bruce Byfield

A few weeks ago, someone asked for general advice about writing. My reply was, “Take the work seriously, and yourself not at all.”

I was trying to capture the combination of attitudes I have observed in successful writers over the years. However, as an aphorism, my reply needs more explanation. So let me add a few comments. I’ll start with the second half first.

As a writer, you can easily develop an egocentric opinion of yourself. You have a skill that most people cannot match. Probably, you are surrounded by family and friends who want to be agreeable and praise you so that everybody is pleased. Moreover, as you settle to work, you face long hours alone, much of which involves learning what works and what doesn’t. Under these conditions, to look for compensation is only natural. After all, it is arrogant think that you can write a whole book. Even a non-fiction book, which placed no demand for dialog or metaphor, is difficult simply in terms of size.

Under such circumstances, it’s understandable that you might daydream about finishing your current work, or imagine your future success. My critique partner, for instance, jokes about her future six-figure income. She’s as wistful as she is serious, however, so she does herself no harm.

However, the problem sets in when you start thinking of yourself as special — when you think of yourself as misunderstood, as lacking the respect you think you deserve. You rant about how other people don’t understand the importance of art (or, by implication, of yourself as a servant of the muse). Perhaps you start talking of visions, or of epiphanies, like James Joyce. You bristle at any critique that is less than wildly enthusiastically supportive. If the subject of diversity arises, you insist that no one should dare to tell you how to write, and allude to freedom of expression and the arrogance of encroaching on your sacred vision (see above).

The problem with such attitudes is that they make you miss opportunities for development. Moreover, by rejecting all criticisms, you miss the chance to learn how to separate the valid comments from the useless. That kind of attitude is especially harmful if you aim for traditional publishing, in which the transition from an agent to a publisher to publication is all about knowing how to learn to evaluate criticism. Before long, you are off on the wings of ambition, planning twenty book series when you are stuck on the first thousand words.

If you ever have thoughts like these, stop and have a look at yourself. You are not special; one Facebook writing group alone has over ninety thousand members, all a little ahead of you or behind you in their writing careers. The most that the majority of us can say is that we have — or might have — potential. That potential does not mean we are misunderstood or special (although it might mean that our ranting puts people out of sympathy with us). And if you find yourself rambling on about epiphanies, you might gains some perspective by recalling Ursula K. Le Guin’s comment that Joyce used have a lot of epiphanies, especially, apparently, in his bathroom. In other words. get over yourself. None of us are important because of our potential, only because of what we manage to actually do.

Instead, focus on making each work the best you can manage. Instead of isolating yourself in self-referential dreams, look at the trees and streets around, you, and the river of voices and noises around you. In the words of Fritz Leiber, the creator of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, make gathering snippets for your stories part of your everyday adjustment to living. If you see a good bit in someone else’s work, see if you can repurpose it and make it your own. If you need to information, research it. Learn to love editing. Listen to critiques until you can tell which are useless and why might deserve consideration. In short, put your ego away, and dedicate yourself to perfecting your craft generally, and your work in progress in particular.

It’s the work that matters. Not you. Repeat those seven words until you believe them, and they describe how you work. You’ll be doing yourself a favor. And when you feel pride in your work, it will because you earned it.

Uncategorized

Marrow and Bone

thelocaldialect

Sometimes I miss China so much I can’t breathe. I get a panicky sort of feeling, as if my old life is drifting into the background and soon will become nothing more than an anecdote told affectionately at holiday gatherings. “When we lived in China …” “Back when we were in China…” I cling to every scrap of the country that so generously transformed me from a ridiculous adolescent child to a slightly less ridiculous adult, and I crave what I can no longer have. If my memories are air, I gulp them in deep breaths, reminding myself that this happened.

People who are of two places know well this unique and exquisite sorrow. China was my home for a decade and a half, and it created me — not the same way it created my husband. He was born in the 70s to the tail end of the Cultural Revolution, to a farming village in the southeast part of Yunnan, to the banks of the Nanpanjiang river that claimed his oldest cousin, to tanks rolling through the Yunnanese hills, off to fight the Vietnamese in a forgotten war, to a birth policy that forced family members to commit atrocities, to a new China that had no place for the likes of him. China shaped his very being. He is Chinese, of China, in a way that I will never be.

Still, China created me in a different way. People who are of two places know this dual creation. When you arrive in your new country, you are born again. You learn a new language and stumble, like an overgrown child, through basic interactions — buying apples from a seller on the street, hailing a taxi, paying your bills. Everything simple is complex anew. Slowly, you learn a new way of being, new rules of interaction. If you stay there long enough, those ways, those rules, they become your own. My husband is now reborn in America — learning anew how to be. In your new country there are small revelations almost constantly, until one day, there aren’t. Nothing surprises you, because you too, are a part of the surprise.

How can I explain this to other people, people who have only ever experienced that one life on their own shores? I moved to China before cell-phones, before Twitter, before Facebook. I moved to China during the Bush years, during the Iraq war. When Obama was elected, I was in China. When the financial crisis of 2008 hit, I was in China. When Donald Trump took office, then too, I was in China. While people back home experienced — whatever they experienced (I still cannot even properly say what the touchstone events of the Western world were, I was not there.  A decade and a half of current events, hit songs, actors, shows, fims, memes … I do not know) — I experienced SARS. The Sichuan Earthquake. The Beijing Olympics. Riots in Tibet. The terror attack on the Kunming train station. The rise of Xi Jinping. I’ve never taken a cross country trip in my own country, but I’ve traveled the length and breadth of China. I speak the language — speak a dialect even. To look at me, I am wholly American, but there is a segment of my soul, fifteen years long, that belongs to another place.

To be of two places is to forever miss one or the other. When I was in China, there were days I longed for my home soil. For the salty air of the Carolina coast. For the ambient sound of my own language, effortlessly understandable. For the tastes of home — butter and cheese and beef. For the right to vote, for the right to participate in government, for the ability to speak out. I longed for those things too. An now, in America, my longing turns the other way. The smoky smell of the village. The incessant popping of firecrackers. The taste of rice noodles and fermented tofu. The mountains. The music. The sound of the dialect that I fear I will lose. Even things I am not supposed to miss. Is it terrible to admit that sometimes I miss the order of an authoritarian state, the near surety that no gun would ever harm me? (I know, it is my privilege, my husband’s Han Chinese privilege, that we had this surety. Others do not. In America too, I am privileged with the freedom that others do not have).

Today, my children willfully forget their mother tongue. I once fretted that they would never speak English, but now, Chinese eludes them. My husband and I speak to them in the harsh fourth tones of the Kunming dialect, desperate to preserve what America would have them forget. “What’s the use?”  They say. Indeed. What’s the use of memory? When I write, my memories flow, they wreck my heart with longing, but no matter how many pages I fill, they will never be enough. China is not yours to write, still others say, and they are right. It is not my own. It is only that part of my soul that China created that I can lay claim to. And so, again and again, I return to China on the page, sucking out the marrow of my second life like it were a great soup-bone (yes, I ate those too, with straws and plastic gloves. If you know, you know). I suck and I gnaw, but the flavor of the bone never fades, the marrow still flows.

General Writing

Harp and Carp: The Fantasy of Medieval Ballads

Bruce Byfield

Harp and carp, come along with me, Thomas the Rhymer

In the writing community, you often hear that Europe is exhausted as a source for fantasy. Europe, people say, has been the default for so long that not much original can be done with it any more. Instead, writers are advised to look to other cultures. Nothing is wrong with that advice — providing, of course, that you observe any rules in the culture about who can tell which stories, and familiarize yourself with your culture of choice. However, Europe still has plenty of untapped inspirations, and, among those, my favorite are the English and Scots ballads that flourished 1300-1700. In fact, I go so far as to say that some of the most evocative fantasy ever written can be found in some of those ballads.

Usually, these ballads are not closely tied to time or place. Even when they allude to historical events, they are not always bound by fact. However, they usually depict a land ruled by feuding lords who are a law to themselves, and where raiding and revenge are a way of life. Many seem to derive from the Anglo-Scots border, where lawlessness prevailed even after the unification of England and Scotland.

Even when fantasy is not a major element, a sense of the uncanny is rarely far away. Consider, for example, this verse from “The Battle of Otterburn“:

Last night I dreamed the drearest dream,
Beyond the isle of Skye,
I saw a dead man win a fight,
And I thought that man was I.

Some ballads may not have been considered fantasy at the time they were written, but would be considered fantasy now — although, even 800 years ago, prophecies and visitations by the devil were presumably not the stuff of everyday life. In “The False Knight on the Road,” a child meets the devil, and his only hope is to stand firm, answering promptly until morning forces the devil to withdraw:

“Methinks I hear a bell,” says the knight on the road,
“It’s ringing you to hell,” said the child where he stood,
And he stood and he stood, and ’tis well that he stood,
“It’s ringing you to hell,” says the child.

. And in “The Great Silkie,” a man who shape-changes into a seal comes to retrieve the son he got on a helpless woman, and leaves with this eerie prophecy (presented here , as all other quotes, with modern wording):

And you shall marry a proud gunner,
And a proud gunner I’m sure he’ll be,
And with the first shot that e’er he fires,
He’ll kill my son and me.

Others are murder ballads that could have come straight from The Game of Thrones, straying from the improbable to the fantastic. For example, in “The Famous Flower of Serving Men,” a woman’s husband and baby is killed for unknown reasons by her mother. After burying her husband, the woman disguises herself as a man and takes service with the king. The king discovers the murder after being led to the grave by the husband’s spirit in the form of a stag and a singing dove, and realizing that his court favorite is a woman, kisses her the next time they meet. and takes revenge on the mother:

“And don’t you think that her heart was sore
As she laid the mould on his yellow hair
And don’t you think her heart was woe
As she turned about, all away to go.

“And how she wept as she changed her name
From Fair Eleanor to Sweet William,
Went to court to serve her king
As the famous flower of serving men.”

Still others are outright fantasies. “The Elf Knight” is a Blackbeard-like story, while “Allison Gross” is about a spurned witch who turns the man who rejects her advances into a giant worm. In two of the most popular ballads, the elves feature prominently. In “Tam Lin,” a young pregnant woman rescues her lover from the elves by dragging him from his horse as the elven host rides by a lonely place at midnight, holding on to him as the Elven Queen transforms him into dangerous shapes:

Well they changed him then – it was all in her arms
To a lion roaring wild
But she held him tight, she feared him not
He was the father of her child, she knew that he was
The father of her child.

Similarly, in “Thomas the Rhymer,” Thomas of Ercildoune — a historical figure in Scotland — meets the Queen of Elfland and is carried off to her realm, after being given the gift of prophecy. The song ends with one of the loveliest expressions of medieval Christianity, in which the Queen shows Thomas three paths: one to Heaven, Hell, and Elfland:

And do you see yon narrow, narrow road,
All beset by thorns and briars,
That is the path of righteousness,
Though after it but few inquire.

Don’t you see yon broad, broad road
That lies across the lily leaven?
That is the road to wickedness
Though some call it the road to heaven

Don’t you see yon bonnie, bonnie road
That winds about the ferny brae?
That is the road to fair Elf land
Where you and I this night must stray.

I could go on and on, but I think I already have. For those interested in learning more, Child Ballads collects over three hundred of these ballads, complete with variations. Many recordings are available on Youtube from folk acts like Fairport Convention, The Corries, June Tabor, and Steeleye Span. Together they represent a rich source of mostly unused material in fiction, despite the current popularity of retold fairy tales. If you don’t find some inspiration in them, you might at least find some music to write by.

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Lessons From Film School: Dialogue

thelocaldialect

Not too many people in my current life know this about me, although in my old life it was common knowledge: I started out university as a film major. A film major at not just any film school either, at the University of Texas Radio-TV-Film school, which consistently ranked among the top five film schools in the nation. I wanted to be a director or a screenwriter — I hadn’t settled on which. Film school had not been easy to get into, and it turned out it was even harder to complete in any kind of reasonable time frame, full of upper level classes restricted to ten students out of fifty competing for slots. After I spent a semester studying abroad in China, I got bit by the expat bug and was hungry to leave the United States again, hungry and impatient. I changed my major to Asian Studies and never looked back.


Well, that’s not quite true. Sometimes I look back. I wonder what might have happened if I had stayed the course. One of my old cohort moved to L.A. after school and became a producer. Another stayed in Austin, but still in the industry. Perhaps, I too, could have made a career out of film, but I chose China instead. So, although I sometimes did look back, it was never with regret, because China changed my life and made me who I am. I probably made a good choice.


However, film school left me with some habits, and studying screenwriting taught me enough to know, as a writer, that fiction writing and screenwriting are two entirely different beasts. There is some crossover, though. Although I sometimes cringe when I read fiction writing blogs or internet posts that seem to draw their examples entirely from film, television and anime, my background in film wasn’t entirely useless to me as a writer. So, without anymore preamble, I present to you the writing lessons I learned from film school.


The most important lesson I learned from film school is probably the most obvious one — the importance of dialogue. As a former screenwriter, I learned to write lines and lines of snappy and concise dialogue, the kind of dialogue that is filled with subtext, that hardly needs any filler. In fact, I took the dialogue lesson so much to heart that there are times when I know that my dialogue more resembles the dialogue of a screenplay — spare with description, no dialogue tags — and I’ve had to go back and clean it up. Here’s the thing though — it is easier, in almost all cases, to add than to subtract. A writer who can learn to write tight, clean dialogue without all of the fussy descriptions can add in necessary descriptions and tags usually more more easily than the same the same writer can edit out or pare down descriptions.


But the lack of description isn’t what makes film dialogue unique. Good screenwriting conveys in dialogue only the necessary information, no filler, while still (and this is the important part) telling us precisely what kind of character we’re dealing with. Every line is leading us towards the inevitable conclusion. Take this exchange from Alan Sorkin’s The Social Network:

Eduardo Saverin:
They’re saying, the Winklevoss twins are saying that you stole their idea.

Mark Zuckerberg:
I find that to be a little more than mildly annoying.

Eduardo Saverin:
Oh? Well, they find it to be intellectual property theft. Why didn’t you show this to me?

Mark Zuckerberg:
[flippantly] It was addressed to me.

Eduardo Saverin:
They’re saying that we stole theFaceBook from Divya Narendera and the Winklevosses.

Mark Zuckerberg:
[trying to grab the letter out of Eduardo’s hands] I know what it says!

Eduardo Saverin:
Did we?

Mark Zuckerberg:
Did we what?

Eduardo Saverin:
Don’t screw around with me now. Look at me!

Mark Zuckerberg:
[Mark begrudgingly looks up at him]

Eduardo Saverin:
The letter says we could face legal action.

Mark Zuckerberg:
No, it says I could face legal action.

Eduardo Saverin:
This is from a lawyer Mark, they must feel they have some grounds.

Mark Zuckerberg:
The lawyer is their father’s house council!

Eduardo Saverin:
Do they have grounds?

Mark Zuckerberg:
The grounds are our thing is cool and popular and HarvardConnection is lame! Wardo, I didn’t use any of their code, I promise. I didn’t use anything! Look, a guy who builds a nice chair doesn’t owe money to everyone who ever has built a chair, okay? They came to me with an idea, I had a better one.

Eduardo Saverin:
Why didn’t you show me this letter?

Mark Zuckerberg:
I didn’t think it was a big deal.

Eduardo Saverin:
[sighs before sitting down beside Mark] Okay, if there’s something wrong. If there’s ever anything wrong, you can tell me, I’m the guy that wants to help. This is OUR thing. Now, is there ANYTHING that you need to tell me?

Mark Zuckerberg:
[very pointedly] No.

The dialogue, even without context, is packed with subtext about the relationship between Mark and Eduardo, even foreshadowing the eventual downfall of the relationship that ends with Eduardo being pushed out of a company that Zuckerberg essentially saw as his and his alone. It tells us a lot about Zuckerberg himself — his way of pushing others away, his arrogance, he refusal to take any challenge seriously. It’s a brief exchange, but every line is essential.  


Not only is screen dialogue tight, it tends to be quite voice-y, giving important hints about character that cannot be delivered through expository detail. Is the character a cynical sort, full of sarcastic quips? A worrier? A nurturing type? Personality is often conveyed through dialogue in film because dialogue is, while not the only tool the filmmaker has to convey what kind of person the character is, it is perhaps the most powerful one. One of my favorite films in my film school days was P.T. Anderson’s Boogie Nights. The film tells the story of a sort of found family of pornography actors and directors and has probably some of the most memorable characters to come out of the rich cinema scene of the late 90s. The loveable screw up of a main character, a bright eyed teenager whose stage name is, ridiculously, Dirk Diggler, is brought to life entirely by Anderson’s dialogue, masterfully delivered by Mark Wahlberg.

One of my favorite quotes from the movie comes from a point in the film when Dirk is near his peak as a porn star, when his dreams are coming true and his ego is growing along with his fame: “What can you expect when you’re on top? You know? It’s like Napoleon. When he was the king, you know, people were just constantly trying to conquer him, you know, in the Roman Empire. So, it’s history repeating itself all over again.” The film never lets us forget — Dirk just isn’t that bright. He has more charisma, ambition and energy, than he has sense. How does the film show us this? Through Dirk’s words. The muddled historical allusions show us Dirk’s bluster, his need to be seen as a someone, his almost desperate desire to impress, to be a somebody (several times througout the film, Dirk repeats his mantra “I’m a star, I’m a star, I’m  big bright shining star.”). At the same time, the line reinforces the idea that, although Dirk may be at the pinnacle of his career, he is, for all of his aspirations, for all his bluster, nothing more than a porn star.


While film dialogue and novel dialogue are not always the same beast, there are lessons in dialogue writing that any aspiring fiction writer can take to heart. The ability to write tight narratives and dialogue that drives the story forward, rather than meandering along aimlessly is a skill that every writer, no matter the medium, must eventually master. In film, because of built in time constraints, this becomes absolutely imperative, but the novelist will also find that these lessons are not wasted on fictional dialogue either. Ultimately, as writers, or job is to push the story forward while building characters and creating atmosphere. Our characters own words can be the best tools to do just that.

General Writing

Finding the Right Title

Bruce Byfield

Titles

Titles are the most important half dozen words in a piece of fiction. However, the right title can be nightmarishly hard to hunt down, and matters for more reasons than most people think.

A non-fiction title is relatively easy. The potential readers are a select audience, interested mainly in an accurate summary of the article. As a result, a title is often no more complicated than “Setting Up Bluetooth Speakers” or “Ghosts in Shakespeare.” Sometimes, though, I pun shamelessly — more because I can than for any valid reason. For instance, in writing about Gaël Duval’s eelo project (now /e/) to produce a free-licensed phone, I couldn’t resist “You say goodbye, and I say eelo.”

However, in fiction the stakes are higher. Probably, you won’t want to pun, except perhaps when doing humor. More often, an effective fiction title is like a good blurb: it should intrigue a reader and summarize the story without giving too much away. For me, the titles in Tolkien’s trilogy cover the full range of effectiveness: The Fellowship of the Ring intrigues, The Two Towers is neutral, and The Return of the King gives away a key plot point.

But how to find a title? That is the hard part. Ideally, you want a phrase that encapsulates the entire work. Unfortunately, though, that is a painstaking business. Too frequently, I need several dozen attempts, and even then I may not find a suitable title. The trouble is that I first have to decide what the main themes are — which, like most authors, I struggle with — and then have to find a way to express it in a few words. Personally, I’d rather write a Spencerian sonnet.

In desperation, I may turn to collections of quotations. Shakespeare has been largely mined out, so much so that the more famous passages can sound like a library catalog. I, for one, am unable to hear or read Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” soliloquy without envisioning a stack of unmemorable Penguin mysteries from the 1930s. However, there are countless other writers whose quotes you can borrow. All you have to do is to scan a list until you find one that suggests one of the themes of your work.

Sometimes, too, you can echo a quote, changing it just enough to be intriguing. For instance, when I published my master’s thesis on Fritz Leiber, I knew that the academic title would never do. No one is going to stop to read the title, much less pick up “Divination and Self-Therapy:” Archetype and Stereotype in the Works of Fritz Leiber.” Instead, after countless self-starts, I remembered that Leiber had memorized most of Macbeth while playing in his parents’ theatrical company. Coming to the “dagger of the mind” passage, I finally found something with which I could work. The thesis was about the Anima, the female aspect of a man in Jungian psychology, which often gets tangled with the Shadow, or sinister aspect. With all this in mind, I settled on Witches of the Mind, which, to those who know the original passage, suggests that Leiber’s depiction of women was all about male perception, not actual women.

Similar twistings of familar phrases are especially common when a movie becomes popular. For instance, shortly after the release of My Big Fat Greek Wedding, there were all sorts of plays upon its title.

Other times, a phrase within the work may provide the title. I avoid a phrase from the start or the end of the story, which when combined with the title can sound repetitious. For the same reason, I avoid chapter titles, if I am using them. I also suggest not using invented characters or place name, although many writers do. But that still leaves thousands of words to choose from. In my current work in progress, my critiquing partner Jessica suggested The Bone Ransom, highlighting an important piece of background detail. I admit that I had invented the bone ransom for some creepy atmosphere, but as soon as I heard the suggestion, I knew that I was unlikely to find another title half so intriguing.

No matter which method of finding a title you choose, it’s always wise to check the title before using it, especially if it’s only one or two words, and is therefore likely to have been already used. For instance, I thought I had a wonderful title in Sister Assassin, but, unfortunately it’s been used. I might have used it anyway, but I prefer for my titles to be unique. But even if a title is unique, it can never hurt to field-test it among friends or a Facebook writing group. You are unlikely to have a consensus, but if most of the respondents approve the title, and the negatives are minor, or for trivial reasons, you can adopt the title with some confidence.

The Reason Why

Asked why a title matters, many writers say that it is meant to catch a potential reader’s attention. With any luck, seeing the title will make people stop to read the blurb or maybe the first few pages. And if you are self-publishing that may be reason enough to labor over the title.

However, if you aiming for traditional publishing, it is not readers whose attention you are trying to attract: it’s agents or editors. This difference matters because the title you’ve labored over stands a good chance of being changed on the way to publication, sometimes for a sensible reason. For instance, your perfect title may have “blood” or “dark” in it, at a time when many other submissions have as well. In such a case, changing your title might keep your work from being lost in the crowd. For this reason, in traditional publishing, your working title becomes a way to prove your competence to agents and editors.

Titles may come at any point in a story, ranging from before you start to the completion of the final draft. I was lucky with an unfinished story called “Grendel Night,” but often, I can’t settle on the title until the very end, simply because until I finish, I don’t know what the story is about.

Yet whenever possible, I try to have a working title as early as possible. Why? Because the title works on you as a writer as much as it does on a potential reader. A well-chosen title is a way of thinking of your story as a whole, a kind of mental shortcut that makes thinking about the story easier. Moreover, the title can be a guideline for the direction of the story, or at least for revisions. For example, when I settled on The Bone Ransom, I immediately understood what parts I needed to emphasize in the next draft, and what I needed to add.

In this way, your title can help you as much as it does potential readers or editors. The influence of a title can be as much artistic as commercial — and either means the time devoted to finding the right one is justified.

Characters, General Writing, Uncategorized

Transparency and the Writer

thelocaldialect

Recently, together with my online student, a seventeen year old boy from Guiyang, I’ve been listening to Malcolm Gladwell’s newest book, Talking to Strangers. While generally audiobooks are not my thing, Gladwell’s book is a different sort of audiobook altogether. More like a podcast, Talking With Strangers explores all of the ways we perceive and misperceive people we don’t know, using interviews, stories, and research. While most of the chapters are fascinating, for this writer, chapter 3 in particular, entitled “Transparency,” was particularly enlightening.

Transparency in psychological terms, refers to how well a person’s personal mental or emotional state understood by others. The illusion of transparency is the idea that most of us tend to overestimate how well others can perceive our emotional or mental state — that is, we believe that others can tell when we are happy, sad, angry, confused, etc. We believe that our facial expressions, actions, and body language are expressive enough that our mood should be “transparent” even without us saying anything.

Talking to Strangers refers to a study done by Carlos Crivelli in which he showed pictures of various facial expressions to Spanish schoolchildren. When the schoolchildren saw a face with a downturned mouth, they were easily able to identify the face as sad. Wide open eyes and an open mouth indicated fear, knit brows indicated anger, etc. This is unsurprising, of course. These are the same expressions that writers routinely use to express emotions in our own stories. “He knit his brows in confusion.” “Her eyes widened” “Her mouth dropped open.” They’re also the expressions we see actors use when they are portraying an emotional moment.

Crivelli then showed the same photographs to Trobriand islanders, whom he’d been living with and studying for some time. Crivelli had learned their language and had been accepted in Trobriander society — the people trusted him, and what’s more, Crivelli spoke their language and was able to understand their responses without complicated secondhand interactions. However, the islanders response to the pictures was The Trobriand islanders did not identify the same emotions as the Spanish schoolchildren at all. Where the Spanish schoolchildren saw fear, the Trobriand Islanders saw aggression. The only emotion that showed any sort of consistency was happiness — it seems the Spanish schoolchildren and the Trobriand islanders both recognized a smile as a sign of happiness. In order to confirm his suspicions, Crivelli and his team traveled to Mozambique and did the same experiment with a group of fishermen known as the Mwani. The results were similar — while the Mwani recognized a smile as a sign of happiness, frowns, scowls, raised eyebrows, and open mouths were all interpreted in a variety of ways, none of which corresponded with the responses of the Spanish schoolchildren.

The obvious conclusion seems to be that facial expressions are culturally bound, but as it turns out, the obvious conclusion in this case is not necessarily the correct conclusion. While it is true that different cultures seem to have different perceptions of what a surprised face or a sad face should look like, the reality is that even within the same culture, we have trouble identify emotions through facial expressions. Talking to Strangers discusses the experiment done by two German psychologists, who put participants into a shocking situation and had them rate how surprised they were at the exact moment the shocking image appeared, and then compared the self-rating to a still photograph taken at the same moment. Very few of the participants faces showed the classic “surprised” face with an dropped jaw, wide eyes, and raised eyebrows. Instead, their faces showed a variety of different expressions. And this is where the illusion of transparency comes in. All of these people believed that their shock and surprise would be written all over their faces for everyone to see — but it wasn’t. An observer looking at the still photos of the participants, devoid of context, would not have recognized the emotion on their faces as surprise.

According to Gladwell, our facial expressions are a kind of folk psychology. Drama and fiction have reinforced the association of certain facial expressions with certain emotions and so we believe these are the actual expressions. It turns out, however, that our expressions are, if not arbitrary, than at least somewhat distinct and unpredictable. For the writer, the implications of this are clear — the facial expressions and gestures that we’ve painstakingly studied (how many of us have a copy of the Emotion Thesaurus? I know I do) in order to add realism to our characters may have nothing at all to do with actual emotions our characters are meant to be feeling.

Does this mean that we should discard these typical emotional signifiers as writers? Not necessarily. After all, regardless of whether they’re folk psychology or not, readers understand these facial expressions as universal. However, I can’t help but think of all of the possibilities this knowledge opens up. Instead of my character widening their eyes in surprise, I might give them idiosyncratic mannerisms. Although I would have to establish context, why couldn’t I write something like, “A always furrowed her brows when she was surprised, B had noticed”? And of course writers do like this, but what these studies show us is that these sentences would actually be more accurate than one depicting the typical expression of surprise.  Listening to this chapter, I felt a sense of possibilities unfolding.

Like most of us, I’d accepted the idea that emotions are universal and that facial expressions naturally reflected certain emotions. To learn that, if I was writing an ancient Roman historical fiction I would technically be inaccurate if I wrote, for instance, a Roman centurion frowning in consternation, was a bit of a surprise. However, the power of the written word is such that fictional depictions of emotional reactions have created a sort of template for an expected emotional reaction that have nothing to do with what the subject is actually feeling.

This template is what causes the “illusion of transparency” and makes us think we are so much better at discerning another person’s emotional state than we actually are. In fact, according to Gladwell, we are terrifically bad at reading each other’s faces. Many of history’s great misunderstandings have come from this sort of confidence in our own ability to read others (Gladwell gives the example of Chamberlain famously declaring that Hitler seemed like a trustworthy and honest person, and Hitler then proceeding to make a complete fool of Chamberlain). Thinking about each time that I may have written something along the lines of “I could tell by the way her face did X that she felt Y,” I couldn’t help but laugh. In fact, the idea of transparency has unlocked for me all sorts of opportunities for glorious misunderstandings and conflict. What more could a writer want?