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!

Quick Tale – A Beacon in the Gloom

Continuing the scary story tradition for this week, I’m sharing a bonus story! This one was based off of a dream I had of my wife and I traveling in a strange country. I managed to keep with the eerie mystery of the dream, though I added a touch of encouragement so it wasn’t total gloom. As with the previous story, let me know what you think!

“It was late in the summer when my wife and I found ourselves walking along the edge of a forest in a small rural village. We’d been backpacking for a month, “touring the countryside at the cost of a dime,” my wife would often say. We moved from village to village, town to town, exploring shops and trekking across great expanses of countryside, then propping our tent up on the outskirts when no other shelter made itself available, and we would watch the brilliant colors of the sunset bring forth the coolness of night, which was more often than not an enjoyable relief from the exposure of the season’s heat.

Despite the enjoyments of our journey, we’d become uncomfortable in the past few days, traveling through villages which appeared on no maps and whose residents spoke dialects and languages that we’d never before heard. When approached, they would stare at us oddly, then turn their backs and walk away, muttering in their strange tongues. As a result, we’d decided to bypass the next unknown village and continue following our map toward a town that we did recognize not far away.

It was at least a two-day walk to our destination, however, and so we found ourselves at last choosing to enter the woods that sprawled beside us, following an open path into the gloom. Through the tops of the trees, we could see the sun beginning to dip down, assuring us that we needed to find shelter for the night. As we searched for a clear space to set up our tent, we were surprised to find the woods parting in the wake of a small cottage, sitting alone and dark in the center of a miniature clearing. It was perfectly circular, with a small, thatched roof and windows shimmering black against the shadows.

Cautiously, I knocked on the door. We waited a moment, then I knocked again, four more raps upon the worn wood of the door. At last, I pushed the door and it swung inward, letting in what little light was left from outside. The cottage was indeed small, with only one room containing a table and a bed with a counter on the opposite side below the far window. I stepped inside, my feet shuffling across the dirt floor, but my wife stayed outside, keeping one of my hands in hers so that I couldn’t take more than two steps inside. “I don’t think we should,” she told me. “We don’t know who lives here.”

“Are you afraid it might be a witch?” I asked, trying to scare her a little bit. “Maybe she’s planning to lure us in and gobble us up!”

“Don’t be stupid,” she told me. “Do these walls look like they’re made of candy?”

I couldn’t argue with that logic. “Well it’s nearly dark now,” I told her. “Why don’t we stay here and keep a light on. No surprises that way, and it’ll only be one night.” With a sigh, she relented and followed me inside, closing the door behind her. With our shelter taken care of, I propped our lantern on the table and lit it so that we could see the food we’d brought. There was little left, and it had a strange taste to it, but I attributed that to the fact that we were eating it in such a strange place. When we’d finished our dinner, I left the lantern on as we both climbed into the bed, which was unusually comfortable. Then, to the muffled sound of the forest outside the window, we both drifted off to sleep beneath a heavy sheet of wool.

–    –    –

I awoke when it was still dark and I rolled my head around, trying to see. There was very little that was visible, and so I first tried listening to the sounds of the forest, only to find that it was completely silent. Then I realized why it was so dark: the lantern had gone out. Trying not to awaken my wife, I carefully climbed out of bed and walked over to the table to find the lamp cold and dark. I moved past this and looked out the window, my vision now adjusting to the night. Outside the window was a more profound gloom than I’d ever seen, as if some dark fog had rolled in between the trees and pressed itself against the sides of the cottage. There were strange swirls and motions in that fog, as if strange forms were moving within it, following patterns that conformed to nothing I’d ever seen in this world. Some of the forms looked almost human, and every now and then, my eyes would lock onto dark sockets in cold shapes, which vanished like wisps almost the moment I spotted them. Others seemed to spread in many directions at once, as if taking over the forest.  After making sure that the window was latched shut, I moved quickly back to the bed, still trying not to wake my wife.

I was startled when I looked down and couldn’t see my feet. A glance at the door revealed that the mist was sweeping in beneath it, the floor of the hut appearing to vanish below it. The darkness was becoming unbearable and my heart began to race. I jumped at a rustling sound behind me, realizing a moment later that it was only the movements of my sleeping wife. Trying to calm myself, I crawled back into bed beside her, pulled the blanket up to cover us both, then closed my eyes and prayed for the sun to return and banish away the strange shadows.

–    –    –

By the time the light of the sun first peered through the leaves of the canopy, my wife and I were dressed, packed, and ready to leave. The mist had begun to dissipate, and as we reached the edge of the clearing – our packs strapped firmly to our backs – we turned around to see that the clearing in which we’d spent the night was empty, with barely a stone out of place as the last gloomy wisps of mist were conquered by the light.

The two of us rarely speak of that time in our travels. We tell the stories of the charming villages which welcomed us, but of the strange people and the cottage that had left, we always skipped. Never again had we found those towns or even that forest; it was as if they only existed in our dreams of that one, gloomy night. And in those dreams, I’ve become convinced that we had never truly stopped that evening. We’d kept moving, taken by the cottage into a world between worlds, where only ghosts and darker things walked, things only glimpsed in the imaginations of the mad. Whatever those things had been which I’d seen, I find relief in the fact that they’d taken nothing with them but the light of our own lantern, the single beacon in that unknown realm. Perhaps there’s solace in giving that to them, a gift from the living to the lost.”

Until next time, friends…

They Dynamics of a Godly Relationship, Part Five

Hello, and welcome to my last in our series on relationship dynamics between man and God. I’ve enjoyed writing these for the past month as they’ve caused me to think not only about what kind of human-divine relationships there are, but how exactly my own fellowship with God operates. Do I see God as a best friend, a parent, a lord or an alien? In truth, I feel like I often vacillate between these, but more often than not, I see a vassalage (Lord-Servant dynamic) relationship focused on duty and honor. After all, a daily prayer that I never even realized became a habit was “Lord, please make me honorable today, and help me to honor you.”

But how do these four dynamics function together? In truth, they present a sort of spectrum, varying from closeness to distance.

Best Friend <————— Parent ————— Lord —————> Alien

Closest ————————————————————– Most Distant

From this, it might be a natural impulse to say that the Best Friend dynamic is automatically the best because it fosters the closest intimacy between God and humanity. Now while intimacy is very important, and a goal worth striving for, we cannot forget the benefits of the Alien dynamic, which causes us to rethink our preconceived notions of God and recognize that there are aspects of his character that we, as mortal men doomed to die, will never truly understood.

So does that mean we should strike for the middle ground, trying to hit some sort of “sweet spot” between the Parent and Lord dynamics? Nay, I say. Instead, I think it would be good for us to try and find the important aspects to emulate from each paradigm.

From the Best Friend dynamic, we enjoy a closeness with God as the Holy Spirit, feeling his presence all around us. By recognizing that power, the force of God, we can do mighty things for God, so long as we don’t take the closeness of that relationship for granted.

From the Parent dynamic, we can recognize that God is helping us to mature, and realize that the trials we face are there to make us a better person. In addition, seeing God in this way ensures us that we have someone divine looking out for us, so we needn’t fear the dark spiritual forces of this world. After all, the great Lord of Lights is shining his light on us, and the sacrifice he made for us has rescued us from that very threatening darkness. But we needn’t forget that God is more than a parent, and the family dynamic must not be overemphasized as the only proper method for viewing God.

From the Lord dynamic, we recognize our own duty to God, and we seek to honor him with our servitude. Recognizing our own responsibility to the Cosmic Creator pushes us to effect real change in the world, reaching out to do his will in place of our own. Missionaries have struggled in the deepest recesses of our planet in servitude to their Lord, and we should be willing to do whatever he asks of us. But we must remember that God is not a distant lord, but a merciful, caring one. He is no distant despot but a king who invites you to his table for the feast, and we enjoy his presence in our reverence.

And from the Alien dynamic, we recognize that our search is never fully complete. God can never be fully understood, encapsulated or contained within a heart, a book or the universe itself. Part of him will always remain unknown to humanity. But that need not be discouraging; on the contrary, it should fuel our search, pushing us to learn more, to seek more, to press onward on our journey of discovery. And we must never look down upon those who are unsatisfied in their search, but instead try to join the search alongside them.

I love that God is so dynamic. There is no perfect template that can be laid across him, no perfect description of his relationship with the people of our planet. His reality is multi-faceted, ever-changing, putting us outside of our comfort zones only to call us back into his warm embrace, giving us a Spirit to rely on while causing us to look just a little bit deeper, to go just a little bit further, to never become complacent but to conform our spirits to his own will for us. In so doing, this alien Lord we serve will become both our parent and our friend.

Until next time, friends…

Discover Who You Are, Part One

Salutations, fair readers! Today, I’d like to begin a very special series about discovering your own identity. Indeed, your identity is one of the most important things about you; it affects your behaviors, your beliefs, your self-esteem and self-worth, even how you view and engage with other people. To be clear, your identity is who you see yourself to be, and so it is intimately tied up with your sense of personal worth. Most people take years – even decades – to discover their own identity. They may move from place to place, from country to country, job to job or even from religion to religion trying to figure out who they are. The years we spend as teenagers are especially difficult because those are the awkward years between not-quite-kid anymore and not-yet-adult. We make stupid decisions because we’re in the process of discovering ourselves.

Many people find their identity in what they do for a living. As a matter of fact, when you meet someone new and learn their name, is there any other question that comes to your mind before “what do you do for a living?” Writers, lawyers, doctors, janitors, teachers, even astronauts tend to find their identity not in who they are but in what they do. This may work for a long, long time, but it becomes a serious issue when the person gets fired or retires. Suddenly, their identity is lost and they’re left wondering: if I’m no longer (insert occupation here), then what am I? This can lead to anything from wild, reckless living to huge impulse purchases to devastating despair. But good news! There’s a way around this, a way of finding your identity that makes it resolute and set in stone. This is a process that’s actually fairly simple, and I want you to follow me on it.

Today, we’ll cover step one: finding out what you like. This may seem a bit selfish at the start, but just go with me. Make a list of your likes and dislikes. Now I’m not saying that you should list your favorite foods or the smells that you can’t stand. Instead, focus on your behaviors and hobbies. What kinds of things interest you? What things make you excited?

Take me for example. I’ve found that I love stories, especially those about monsters. I also like to wonder about philosophy and the universe. From this, I decided to spend my college years studying religion and philosophy, wherein my most passionate focus was the stories of the Bible. I often couldn’t care less about the politics or practical applications of the Bible; no, what I loved were the stories and the philosophy. In addition, I also majored in astronomy, exploring the universe through my studies. My wife, on the other hand, discovered in high school that she has a deep love of the German language, so she made that the focus of her studies.

But you don’t have to be in college to explore these things. You can go to a bookstore or bum around online, looking for anything written about your topic (though I would earnestly recommend that you seek out the experts and educate yourself as much as possible). You can begin focusing on hobbies that allow you to engage with your hobby. When I was in high school, for instance, I became involved in the theater due to my love of stories and storytelling. If performing is your interest, consider a sport or Speech Club. Even if you love something as strange as arguing and yelling, then the Debate Team awaits, you weirdo! (Don’t be offended, I’m a weirdo, too, just in different ways!)

So take a nice, deep look at yourself and see what you love to do or learn about. Figure out how you can put that interest into practice so that you can get better at it or more knowledgeable about it. Whether it’s Civil War reenacting, camping, spelunking or reading mystery novels, find what you love and do what you love (as long as it’s legal). And if you have the time, begin prioritizing those hobbies, ranking them based on what you love most down to what you love least, and put your most effort into the ones on top. That’s more for the sake of not over-extending yourself, which is an easy way of pushing yourself too far and sucking the joy out of all of them. Try and whittle your interests down to your top two or three, or maybe even four if you just can’t get the list any smaller. Then, when you’ve figure this out, you’ll be ready to move to step 2.

Until next time, friends…

Stay tuned for my next blog post, in which we’ll get to Step 2!