Making Sense of it all

When planning your stories, consider what sort of emotion you are trying to get your readers to feel. For example, in a thriller or crime story you might want to generate a foreboding mood through your writing. This might be achieved by dropping in little hints of troubles to come; or creating darker scenes through your narrative. Dialogue could include a character's worries and concerns; you might pile on the layers of difficulties to add to that overall sense of foreboding through your description, narrative and dialogue.

The same applies if you're trying to create a sense of intrigue and mystery. Let everything you write go towards that mood and atmosphere. Or perhaps you're writing about the grandeur of something, a royal palace, a sumptuous banquet, so you want to create a sense of occasion. Again, build up the atmosphere through description, using all the senses.

Maybe you're trying to write something humorous. You'll definitely be hoping your readers will have a sense of humour and will see the funny side of what your characters are saying and doing. You'll no doubt find that the characters themselves aren't deliberately trying to be funny. The humour often happens through their tragic circumstances, as things go wrong for them. 

So, think carefully about the mood and atmosphere in your scenes, know what sort of 'sense' you're trying to get across to readers. Keep that in focus as you write your stories.

Common sense

Unless you're writing about a Frank Spencer or Homer Simpson type of character, then your characters should be blessed with a bit of common sense. So that in any given situation, they would use their common sense. And this is worth remembering if you're not going to irritate your reader. For example, your character might be facing some sort of emotional or physical conflict that could be easily sorted if they just used their common sense.

Try not to let your plot become contrived – if a character's difficulties could all be overcome if they'd just used their common sense. For example, all would have been sorted if they’d spoken to Uncle George, or opened the letter, or said they were sorry etc. It’s so annoying for the reader when the character doesn’t do the obvious.

If it would ruin your plot for them not to act in the most obvious way, then be sure you have a very good reason for them not to have acted as any normal person would.  Otherwise readers and editors with be groaning with frustration. Look at your plot and make sure your characters do the obvious. It might mean you thinking a lot harder about the conflict facing them, and their situation.

Sensing when it’s right

As writers, we have to use our senses too, especially when trying to work out whether we've got a piece of writing right, or whether there's something wrong with it.  Far better to sense that it's not right and then to work on improving it, rather than thinking it's great – when it's not.

So how do you do that?  I can only say that it comes with practice and with learning. Writing is a craft that you can learn. If you don't bother learning the rules of grammar, punctuation, viewpoint, the tenses, adverbs, dialogue etc., then you won't be able to see your mistakes. Additionally, it’s so important to read. You learn by reading and seeing how other writers create their magic.

But even if you've done all that, you still need to develop a sense of knowing whether your work is finally as good as you can get it – or not. This comes with edits. You need to go over and over your work, tweaking, re-arranging, re-phrasing, reading it aloud, listening to the euphony of every sentence, listening for repetitions. Look out for bad writing habits. Know when something jars. Have a keen ear and listen to anything that doesn't sit quite right.

If you're looking to create a tear-jerking scene, it should bring tears to your eyes. If you're creating a dramatic scene, then you should feel anxious as you read it. If you're creating a humorous scene, it should at least bring a smile to your face, no matter how many times you go over it.

Be critical of your own work, but not to the extent that you're never happy with it, or you lose confidence in your abilities as a writer. Develop that sense of knowing when something isn't right, but also develop the sense to know when it's well written. Learn to trust your own senses.

Narrative in brief

• Always aim to keep the reader reading. Don’t make it easy for them to put your book down, or to put your short story aside before finishing it.

• Don’t let there be a let up from the action. When one trouble is over another one is just beginning.

• When the action isn’t so dramatic or intense, consider using a transition to move the story forward. Also, feed the reader with tasty little morsels or hints of the drama to come.

• Plot and plan your story scene-by-scene, or by chapters so action and/or emotion rises to a crescendo at the end of that scene/chapter. Stop at a point where the reader is desperate to know what’s coming next.

• Don’t be afraid to use cliff-hangers. Let your protagonist be in some sort of predicament – emotionally, physically or both.

• If you have more than one viewpoint character, make them as interesting as each other.

• If a section is feeling even slightly long winded or tedious to you, shorten it, either in content or in the sentence structure. Or consider whether it’s even necessary. Make every word count.

• When describing people and places and things, pick out the most poignant aspects. Always tell the reader something they didn’t know.  

• Create characters that the reader will be interested in.

• Use good dialogue to move the story forward. Let characters say how they are feeling.

• Hint at troubles to come though the narrative and the dialogue.

• Adjust punctuation. You can create tension through your punctuation. Add a more breathless feel to a section by deliberately shortening the sentences.

• Occasionally highlight poignant words, phrases or thoughts in italics.

• Always use the senses. Let the reader see, hear, feel, smell, touch and taste everything the character experiences.

• When you want to ‘up’ the tempo of your story, let there be a deliberate switch, something happening in the story that changes everything.

• Plan scenes to give a ‘calm before the storm’ type of feel.

• Make good use of the weather and environment to add drama and atmosphere.

• Show don’t tell: Don’t say a character is afraid/happy/excited etc, show it by how they behave and what they say, do and think.

• Read aloud. You may find that adjusting the punctuation and re-phrasing may turn something mundane into something dramatic.

  

Exercise 1

As an exercise think of an object. Now describe it using the relevant senses i.e. what you might see when looking at it; what sounds it might make; what it tastes like; what it feels like; what it smells like. Ask a friend or relative to try and guess what you have described. Repeat the exercise until you are bored (or your friend is).

Tomorrow:  Editing your work.

Thank you Rob Tysall, Tysall's Photography for the image. This was taken at the Nuneaton & Warwickshire Wildlife Sanctuary.

Keep the reader reading

 

Whether you’re writing a short story or a novel the outcome is the same – you want the reader to be so captivated by your words they can’t put your story down until they’ve reached the very end. So, keeping hold of the reader’s interest is something that needs to be worked on. And there are lots of little ploys that can be woven into your fiction that help to do just that.

Firstly however, you must have a good story, believable characters, realistic dialogue, a gripping flawless plot, written without superfluous words and continually moving forward with vocabulary that’s a pleasure to read. And then you can start to be a bit crafty!

When I’ve found a good book that keeps me reading, it’s often because there’s no let up from the action, the protagonist hasn’t resolved their troubles. Before one problem is solved another is just beginning. Be sure to have things happening in your story, don’t allow it to become stale or slow.

Be guided by your own judgement. If a section you’re writing feels even slightly long winded or tedious to you, then look to shorten it, either in content or in the sentence structure. Or consider whether it’s even necessary.

Of course, you don’t want every sentence and scene to be high drama, but when the action isn’t so dramatic or intense, then feed the reader with tasty little morsels or hints of the drama to come. You can do this either through narrative or dialogue. For example, this snippet of dialogue foretells trouble: “We can’t go there, haven’t you heard the legend?”

Or a little narrative to sow the seed of more drama to come: She put the creaking of upstairs floorboards down to the house settling for the night.

The occasional repetition of a word or a poignant phrase can work well to keep the reader on board. A word or phrase they’ve heard before in the story, but then said in a different context can be effective.

In The Beast, when the strange old Scotsman tells Grant and Amanda to “Beware the Beastie” they find it hilarious. But later in the story, when they sense something stalking them, the old man’s words, “Beware the Beastie” take on a far more sinister meaning.

And look at punctuation and sentence length. Short punchy sentences can give a breathless effect to a scene. Likewise, with dialogue, you can really create drama and mood through your characters’ conversations.

Still with The Beast, the valley where Grant and Amanda are camping is reputed to be haunted and early one morning:

    “You must be able to hear it. Listen, Grant. It’s coming from the valley.”

   “What is? I can’t hear a thing.”

   Amanda swung round to face him, her frown heavy over her eyes. “Are you deaf or what? There are people coming this way…I can hear an enormous crowd of people heading right toward us. And horses, can’t you hear the hoof beats? Can’t you feel the vibrations through the ground?”

   Grant slowly shook his head. “Manda, it’s as silent as the grave out here.”

   “Shouting! They’re shouting now!” She gripped his arm. “And screaming.” Her voice rose. “Can’t you hear those screams, those horrible shrieks? Like…like people killing each other.”

   Grant put his arm around her. “We’d better go and get Mum.”

   “What’s happening, Grant? What’s happening to me?”

It might be a cliché but remembering the calm before storm can certainly work when pacing your story. When you have a tense scene about to happen, ensure that the scene before is the complete opposite. Trust/betrayal; love/hate; tranquility/chaos etc. So, when the drama happens it has more impact because of what’s just gone on.

Another little ploy when you want to ‘up’ the tempo of your story, is to create a change – perhaps in the environment your character finds themselves in; or a change in the weather; or a change in the atmosphere in some way. Have something happening which triggers that switch.

Cliff-hangers

One sure way of increasing the tension and the dramatic high spot is by having cliff-hangers. Plan your scenes so that the most dramatic spot can come at a point where you can break off for a new chapter. Build each scene up to its most exciting point – then stop. Perhaps your character is left in a tricky position emotionally or physically.

A new chapter may provide fresh momentum, or you may keep your reader hanging on in suspense while you deal with another thread of your story. Maybe that too can be brought to boiling point. You could be like a juggler spinning plates, precarious yet balanced so perfectly with you in control.

Read aloud

And finally, if you want the readers to keep reading, then read your work yourself – out loud. By doing so, you’ll hear the euphony of your sentences and phrasing. You’ll get a good ear for how it should sound and how it does sound. Awkward sentences may only need a word taken out or putting in, or a slight alteration of the punctuation. Read aloud and only pause where you’ve indicated a pause with a punctuation mark. The smallest little tweak to a sentence can make all the difference.

So, go through your story and see if by re-phrasing certain sections you can add to the atmosphere or build tension. See if you can create little ploys of your own – barely noticeable things which only register in the reader’s subconscious. Occasional words in italics for example, or the repetition of a word or sentence that turns it into something poignant or sinister. Could you subtly hint that disaster is soon to befall the character? Could there be a recurring thought, word or phrase that jabs at your character when things are getting tricky? Experiment with your writing and see what works and what doesn’t.

Today’s Exercise:

Write two scenes where it's the calm before the storm, e.g. trust/betrayal, joy/misery. read aloud and try to improve your work so it has more impact.

Tomorrow: Making Sense of it all.

Opening photo is of my good friend, writer Karen King and I running a writing workshop.

Creating atmosphere and mood

So, you have planned your story carefully, you know your characters so well they are practically your best friends, and it is all jogging along nicely. The thing is you don’t want your story to jog nicely along, you want it to bring tears to your reader’s eyes, or make them laugh out loud, or make them so involved they miss their bus stop, or read long into the night even though they know they will struggle to get up in the morning.

To keep the reader gripped and hanging on to your every word, you need to bring in changes to the pace and the atmosphere of your story.  Avoid keeping it on one straight level, let moods darken; let the atmosphere become more tense; let heartbeats quicken; bring the reader in even closer to what’s happening to your character.

Before you can do this, you need to create a character who the reader cares about. And the way you get a reader to care, is to let the reader in on your character, let the reader understand what’s going on in that character’s mind – reveal their inner worries and concerns; show that they are human by the things they do, say, think and feel. Strive to make the reader identify with them in some way.

Once you’ve hooked the reader in that way, when things become more difficult, or the mood darkens, then the reader will feel the tension and keep turning those pages.

Changing the atmosphere is down to your planning – you may have decided earlier that at a particular point in your story, something dramatic will happen; or that particular scene might just creep up on you unawares as you write. Whichever way it happens, when you have a scene that requires some change in atmosphere or mood, then work your magic on it to make it really effective.

I’m a firm believer in the calm before the storm. If the scene just before the dramatic moment is a complete opposite, then the contrast of calm/frantic, relaxed/tense, works really well. Then, once you get into the scene where tension rises, you keep on going, adding layer after layer of drama as the character’s situation becomes more and more precarious.

So, these layers, what exactly do they comprise of?

• Make the character’s senses heighten. Let them become more aware of things around them, smells, sounds, tastes, things they see are now more threatening.

• It’s more effective to show all this through the character’s perspective, rather than you simply narrating what’s going on around the character.

• Draw the reader closer so they experience everything that the character experiences.

• Tighten those sentences.

• Deliberately repeat a word to empathise a point.

• Physical changes to surroundings e.g. weather, light/dark, silence/noise, movement/stillness etc.

• Dialogue. What your character(s) say and how they say it.

Let your characters talk to each other

As you know, characters need to communicate with each other. Tension, conflict, anger, hatred, love, can all develop through characters talking to one another. Characters can reveal they are afraid or anxious or show the drama rising through their speech and what they say. Staccato dialogue shows their breathlessness. Maybe they don’t have time to speak at length, even the narration should come across in that same short sharp manner. Dialogue that is interrupted, or the speaker stops abruptly fearing they have said too much can all help to increase the tension; the occasional ellipsis can work wonders, if used sparingly.

Here’s a few examples of showing mood change through dialogue:

“Another coffee, dear?”

“Don't mind if...” Jane stopped in mid-sentence. Her nose wrinkled. “What's that smell?”

Another example:

“Pete, if this is your idea of a joke. If you’ve set me up...”

He laughed. “Course I haven’t...”

His voice trailed away.

“What?” Sue demanded. “What? Speak to me. You’re scaring me now.”

In a voice no more than a whisper he said, “What do you think that is, standing over there?”

Even the way one character addresses another can indicate the change in mood. Imagine if Mary normally called her husband, Joe. What kind of mood do these alternatives suggest?

“Joseph, I’m talking to you!”

“Oh, Joey… have you got a moment?”

Today’s Exercise:

Your protagonist is walking across the clifftop with someone their care about and all is going to plan. Using dialogue and narrative, write a scene to reflect what they are doing, and then bring in some conflict. Something happens to totally change the mood and atmosphere.

Tomorrow: Improving your narrative.

Thank you Rob Tysall, Tysall's Photography for the image. This was taken from our trip to France to write about Champagne.

More on writing dialogue

Writing good, natural-sounding dialogue comes with practice. For some, writing dialogue is the easy part. For others, they struggle to make it come across as sounding natural. The way you blend your narrative in with your dialogue will add to the quality of your style. And an important part of setting out your dialogue is to do with your use of attributions or speech tags.

Attributions or speech tags

Attribution is the term used to describe who is speaking – he said, she replied, I answered etc. Some writers feel they need to look for other ways of saying who is speaking and search the thesaurus to find alternative ways of saying ‘he said’.  In fact, the humble ‘he said’ is virtually invisible in the context of the story. By using an alternative, it can become conspicuous, drawing attention to itself rather than what is being said. If your story is littered with contrived attributions it will make it appear amateurish. You can vary your character’s speeches with equally unobtrusive attributions such as he replied, he answered, he asked and similar phrases.

Narrative showing the character doing something either before or after the speech could do away with the need for any speech tags. Also, sometimes the dialogue needs nothing around it, as it’s perfectly obvious who is speaking. However, read your work aloud and listen to the euphony and flow of your words. Adjust with the addition or detraction of speech tags or narrative as necessary.

Dialogue is one of the best ways to show the personality of a character and the reader should know who is speaking simply by what is being said and the way it is being spoken. However, be careful not to have a whole section which is nothing but dialogue without narrative or character interaction. The reader does not want to have to count back to see who is talking.

Dialect

It can be difficult to write dialogue for characters who come from a region or country with a strong dialect. It’s easy to get into a quandary trying to mimic a broad accent, dropping g’s and h’s and spelling words where the reader has to mentally form the sound in their heads as they read. Not only is this difficult but it also looks awkward on the page. Far better to research and listen to the speech patterns and idioms from the region or slip in a word or phrase that indicates the locality. Be careful this doesn’t come across as clichéd, however.

Slang

Certain characters in your stories will undoubtedly need to resort to slang if they are to sound realistic but be careful not to use the latest modern day slang which comes and goes year after year. While it might be the way characters are expressing themselves today, especially younger characters, by the time your book or story comes out, it could be totally outdated – and make your work ‘dated’ too. Better to stick to the good old fashioned slang words and expressions that have been around for decades.

Additionally, while it’s not slang, abbreviated words are important in dialogue. A character saying: “I have been looking for you.” sounds less natural than: “I’ve been looking for you.”  Read your dialogue aloud and listen to whether it sounds natural or not.                                                                                             

                                                                                       

Four lettered words

For your characters to come across as real people there may be times when you have no alternative but to use a ‘four lettered’ word. If you feel it is the only thing your character could say under the circumstances, then use it with confidence. However, I would add, that in my mind, this would only apply to adult books, certainly never in children’s or YA books.

For adult readership, a swear word may be necessary to create impact and show the character’s mood. However, if you have a character who swears continually it will quickly become irritating for the reader. Plus, the impact will be lost. An occasional swear word in a novel can be startling and effective, while a hundred will become tiresome.

Of course, if you’re writing fantasy or sci-fi, you can create your own swear words without offending anyone.

Punctuation around dialogue

Getting the punctuation correct around dialogue must become second nature to you. So many novice writers get it wrong or fail to be  consistent with their layout around dialogue. Remember that all the punctuation goes inside the quotation marks. If you’re adding a speech tag, you don’t capitalise the first letter, even if your final punctuation mark before the closing speech mark is a question mark or exclamation mark. E.g. “Shall we take the bus?” she asked, glancing at her watch.

Also note the comma after the attribution. Start a new paragraph for every new character speaking or doing something. Check your settings so that you’re not adding extra white space every time you hit the return button on your keyboard. Adjust your settings to indent every new paragraph for fiction, unless the magazine guidelines/style says not to.

If you know the publication you’re writing for, then check whether they use double or single quotation marks around their dialogue. If you haven’t a particular publication in mind, then it’s your choice – whatever feels more natural to you. However, in my opinion, I would suggest using double because it’s easier for an editor to change those to single if re-formatting your story for publication, rather than the other way around.

It’s easy to make mistakes – all those important commas, full stops, quotation marks, exclamation marks, capital letters and uncapped letters. Make sure you have it perfected so that it’s second nature to you when you write dialogue.

Don’t expect anyone else to put it right for you, it’s no one’s responsibility but your own. If you don’t master the correct way of presenting your dialogue it could spoil your chances with an editor.

So, make it second nature and enjoy your dialogue. Enjoy hearing what your characters have to say and let their dialogue carry your story forward.

 

Today’s Exercise:

As dialogue practice, write a page or two of mainly dialogue but incorporating narrative, around this scenario: The bridegroom and best man await the arrival of the bride. The bridegroom is getting cold feet, about the wedding.

 

Tomorrow: Writing narrative.

Thank you Rob Tysall, Tysall's Photography for the photograph.

Read more writing tips in my book, Become a Writer, a step by step  guide. https://amzn.to/3487fws