The Craft of Writing, Part Eight: The B&E Factor

Good afternoon, my few and fellow readers! This post officially concludes our eight-part series on the craft of writing. Fiction writing, that is. For nonfiction, there are completely different criteria, but I’m not very experienced in that arena, so there’s little advice I can give. I appreciate those of you who have stuck it out on this long, two-month series, and I hope that if you enjoy the craft of writing, you’ve found some helpful advice in what I’ve written. This craft, the use of language in drafting stories to enchant a captivated audience, is a topic which lies very close to my heart, so I offer my deepest gratitude to you, dear reader.

Today, I’m going to cover a topic that I have invented, and I call it the B&E Factor. The “B” stands for “beauty,” and the “E” stands for “exploitation.” This is essentially a ratio, which can be represented as B/E or B:E, but before I go on with this, let’s go into detail on what each of these terms mean in my vocabulary. After all, it’d be irresponsible of me to keep discussing the ratio if you have a completely different interpretation of those terms  than I do.

Beauty

By “beauty,” I’m not necessarily referring to descriptions of pretty scenery or beautiful women. Rather, I’m talking about the quality of the story and the writing itself. Do your words flow poetically, or do they engage the reader with a quick wit? Do you introduce high concepts and delve into the deep philosophical or spiritual undercurrents which run beneath your story? Or does the story come to represent something far more grand than the simple story itself, becoming an exemplar for the working of fate and destiny?

There are two examples of this that stand out in my mind, both in film (although one of them was based on a book which I’ve never taken the time to read). The first is from the movie Stay, which is one of my favorite movies. I’ll spare you the plot, but I’ll say that I believe this to be one of the most beautiful films ever made. The storytelling style, the dialogue, the characters and pacing, and what it all builds toward create a beautifully tragic tale, set within the philosophical concept of dream-worlds. The beauty comes not from any one factor, but from the overall style of the storytellers (the writer and director, in this case). The second example is the film Holes, which deals with the concepts of luck, fate and generational curses. While the style of this film is more fun and kid-oriented, the overall narrative weaves multiple storylines which grow closer and closer together until they all converge in the film’s climax, at which point we realize that everything has been building toward a greater destiny for the protagonist and his close friend.

Exploitation

Exploitation can also mean a variety of things. It could refer to the antagonist exploiting the main character’s weaknesses, or it could refer to the narrator taking advantage of different avenues of thought in order to draw in the reader and get their own imagination rolling. It could even mean properly using the craft of writing in order to produce a high-quality tale. None of these are what I mean when I talk about exploitation. In my vocabulary, exploitation refers to cheap sensationalism used to increase your readership. For instance, while Playboy once contained fascinating stories (and might still, I don’t know, I’ve never touched a copy, though I’ve read stories which are noted as having been originally published there), they draw in the majority of their audience through immodest displays of the female form. Similarly, we can see in many, many, many, many films these days that the stories and characters are oversexualized, intending to draw in the viewer by appealing to their more primal instincts. And as far as literature is concerned…well, let me just say that I don’t think it was the story which drew in the fans of Fifty Shades of Gray.

Similarly, the horror genre too often lends itself to gore and dismemberment, as opposed to the dark creep factor which was more prevalent in works of the early masters like Poe and Lovecraft. In films, Rob Zombie is notorious for his obsession with gore, and in literature, Clive Barker uses both sex and gore to acquire his audience. In my opinion, the need for sex and/or gore in your writing in order to gain a captive audience simply speaks of bad writing. If you need to appeal to the baser instincts of the audience in order to keep their attention, then it simply means that your writing isn’t good enough to stand on its own. That’s why, as much as I am able, I try to avoid these two things. It forces me to perfect my writing by challenging me to keep an audience captivated without appealing to cheap exploitation.

The B&E Factor

So now that we have the concepts, how do they relate to each other? Well, that’s simple. You want to keep the ratio as high as possible. You want to maximize the B and minimize the E. Mind you, there must, unfortunately, be at least a little exploitation in order to draw in an audience in the first place, but if you can keep that as absolutely as low as possible, then even that attempt will make the beauty of your work stand stronger by contrast.

Keep your writings beautiful. Never sacrifice your style, your story or the heart which drives it just to gain a wider audience. And never compromise your own integrity through exploitation. Then, when you’ve brought everything together and told a story worth telling, your audience will remember the work you’ve done. Let your work stand on its own strength, power and beauty.

Until next time, friends…

The Craft of Writing, Part Five: Information

Hello, hello, hello, hello! I hope your Valentine’s Day went well. Whether with a romantic partner-in-crime or alone with God, I’ve recently heard a number of my wise friends say that what matters most is that you foster the prime relationships you have – both with God and your fellow man. I have to wholeheartedly agree.

Today we’re crossing into the second half of our series about the craft of writing. So far we’ve covered plot, character development, setting and pacing. Now, continuing on the notion of pacing is a factor to which it is intimately tied: the dissemination of information. What do I mean by this? By “dissemination of information,” I mean the revealing of mysteries, the answering of questions or the introduction of something new to the story. Essentially, it’s adding a bit of novelty.

Suppose, for example, you’re writing a story in which your protagonist unveils and ultimately foils a grand conspiracy. You can’t simply reveal the whole conspiracy in your first chapter, or else you’d have nothing left to reveal in the rest of the tale. But if you wait until the second-to-last chapter to reveal all that information, then with what have you filled up all of the previous chapters? What you need to do is space the information out, spreading it like butter over the toast of your novel. This is most preferable for two complementary reasons:

1. By spacing out the information, you’re contributing to the proper pacing that you worked hard to establish according to last week’s post. If you go too long without revealing information, your story may soon grow boring. And if you give away everything at the start, then you have nothing left to reveal and the rest of your book (until the climax) will be similarly boring. What works best is establishing a steady rate of revelation: a little bit here, a little bit there, some more here, some new facts there. And eventually, these little bits of information will begin to form something new underlying your story, something rich and developed. Your readers will feel like detectives, better able to identify with your protagonist as they put the information together along with him (or her).
2. But you also want to add breaks. If every chapter reveals truckloads of new information, then your reader can quickly become overwhelmed and lost in all of the novelty. My recommendation is similar to that of the pacing: after every high-speed place, after every information dump, take a break and allow the reader to catch their breath. Let them process the information for a bit before you throw something new into the mix. You don’t want to pull a Matrix Reloaded and wait until one of the last parts of the tale to unload everything, or it will be too much for the audience to take in at a time (I still have no idea what The Architect was saying in that scene). Let the audience take the information in little spurts, or at a slow and steady rate, but not too slow, or you’ll lose their interest.

Now you may, unfortunately, run into a pinched point where you have no choice but to reveal a large amount of information in a short amount of time. It’s understandable, it happens to me from time to time. If you have exhausted all other options and find yourself facing this conundrum, my advice is to try and be as careful and clever as possible. While writing Torjen II: The Search for Andross, I arrived at a chapter where I was forced to introduce over a dozen new characters who were to have an intense discussion. The best I could do in that scenario was to make each as unique as possible so that the reader could keep them separate, then focus predominantly on only a few of them. I had a similar issue in my most recent work, The Choice of Anonymity, in which the ultimate explanation was revealed in one chapter. To balance this, I added foreshadowing in order to set this up, and then I still held a few key bits of information on reserve so as to keep the reader engaged. The foreshadowing worked like a charm, allowing for the revealed information to read more like a linking of facts than a wholesale revelation of them.

So the basic rule of thumb is to tie in the revealing of new information with the pacing you’ve already constructed. That adds some consistency to your book, as well as depth. But as a final note, let me point out that in the end of your work, all of the most important information must be explained. That’s my personal pet peeve in writing, when mysteries are established and then left unsolved. I mean, sure, you don’t have to explain whether or not one character followed through on their resolution to quit smoking or if another character ultimately conquered her fear of flying. But the big, crucial information that forms the core plot of your work must be answered.

However, it doesn’t necessarily have to be answered in this book. Suppose you’re writing a trilogy, or a series, or a grouping of works that interrelate but don’t form a linear series. If, over the course of your stories or books (notice the plurality there), those things will eventually be answered, then you may withhold key pieces of information to be made clear later. Again returning to The Choice of Anonymity, I leave the ultimate fate of all but my protagonist unknown, but the reason for this is that there will be two follow-up novels in this trilogy, and their fates will be made known there.

So if you’re going to establish a mystery, or some unresolved question, please ignore the tendency of the highly-talented and fascinating writer/director J.J. Abrams, who chooses to leave his mysteries unresolved. Let it be known, my friends. Let it be known.

Until next time, friends…

Stay tuned for my next blog post, in which I’ll discuss the deeper relationship between the protagonist and antagonist!