Creating Religion in Your Stories

Let's talk about religion. No, not let's argue about religion or discuss the viability of religious though and action and defense. Let's talk about religion as it relates to your fiction. 

Religion can be a powerful way to say something about your characters and about the world they inhabit. It can be a vital part of your setting culturally. Or it can even be a foil against which your protagonist rebels. 

Ignore It at Your Peril, Writer (Oh Life Is Bigger)

Let's be honest. Religious affections or reactions to religious dogma are a part of life. They are part of what shapes much of the world. They are the very reason for so many of our holidays, for example and any story that revolves around a holiday should have at least a cursory understanding of it. Sadly, so little of that makes its way into a lot of fiction. Granted, this is looked at more in literary fiction than Summer beach reading, but every empty spot is a missed opportunity. 

To be fair, we're not talking about using fiction to evangelize one religion over another (unless that's your character's, well, character -- after all, it worked for Hazel Motes in Wise Blood even if it didn't make him a nice person). 

Nor are we only talking about Western or Christian religious viewpoints. The world is much, much bigger than American and European history, and we should as writers be open to exploring as much of it as we can. 

Additionally, when we talk about religious viewpoints here, let's be sure to include the viewpoint of disbelief. Although atheism or agnosticism would never be considered a religion, they are religious points of view that choose not to believe rather than believe. 

What we're really talking about here is religion as part of a character's background, what goes into the development of that protagonist, antagonist, or bit character as a person (albeit it a fictional person). Religion can be as effective as race, location, education, hobbies and interests, and goals when it comes to creating a three-dimensional character.

Also, we're going to address religion as it relates to world-building. So much of Ursula LeGuin's work couldn't exist at the same level or excellence if she had ignored the religious inclinations of the worlds her researchers visited. The same goes for Dune, and for a lot of the writing of Asimov and Bradbury and Shūsaku Endō and Margaret Atwood and Toni Morrison and Zora Neale Hurston.

But, as said earlier, so many contemporary writers avoid any mention of religion, most likely (just my opinion here) due to the bad taste the merger between religion and politics has left in the mouths of so many folks nowadays and the fear of being labeled a "religious writer" instead of a writer using religion to build characters from words. 

There are several ways to go about this, and we're going to look at each of them. 

• Religions based on real-world faiths
• Dogmatic/theological religions
• Mythological religions
• Human as God religions

 

Building My Religion (I Thought That I Heard You Laughing)

It's far more common for writers of fantasy and sci-fi to create elaborate religions than it is for writers of mystery and romance. Now, that primarily happens because of the differences between a real-world and a not-tied-to-the-real-world (except maybe only tangentally) setting. Fantasy and sci-fi writers have the freedom to explore really out-there ideas or lock their created religions into more established norms. Writers who work in something based on the real world have less freedom (at least without becoming urban fantasy or romantasy). For them, the thousands of faiths across the globe are their base for research. 

My Backstory Story

I was once asked by a fellow writer: How much of your character's back story do you know before the story begins? Do you know everything or just the basics? 

I love the question. 

There are two opposing ways of thinking about this, as opposite as democrats and republicans are politically -- at least in my experience of meeting and talking with writers. The members of one group tend to make it all up as they go along, reinventing their characters almost willy-nilly with every twist and turn or plot and nuance of the story. On the other hand, the members of the other group keep their folders of notes and printouts and family tree diagrams handy near their computer desk or (for the tech-obsessed authors) in a spreadsheet on the cloud so they can't lose the information at home and can have it readily available even when they're not at home.

Many, however -- and I'm certainly one of them -- fall somewhere in the middle. I like to know the basic personality and major life experiences for my core characters, but I tend to fill in the details for other things (like what college he attended, who was her first boyfriend, is he allergic to gluten, where did her tattoo come from, for example) as I'm writing and as the story dictates. It's funny, though, how often some of those minutiae of details can become key plot points in a story or triggers for a new story for a future volume featuring the character in some cases.

A real-life example: When I came up with the Victorian detective for my story "Death with a Glint of Bronze" in Dreams of Steam II: Brass and Bolts (story now available in this collection -- direct or Amazon). I knew that within the scope of my 20 or so pages, I wouldn't need to dig so far into McKendrick's past to know about the facts and dates of his previous marriage or how long his time as a soldier in India was exactly. But I did need to know all the details of the accident that took one hand, and the childhood malady that left his other hand palsied. Those were the important back story details. Those were the ones on which the story hinged and swung.

I used to do questionnaires about my characters, and I think those kinds of details are good to know, and I still recommend them as character exercises for beginning writers. However, after writing for nearly 35 years now, the questions that lead to those kinds of details have become internalized, and I no longer have to make a conscious effort to fill out questionnaires or apply for jobs as my character. As the characters become real in my head, those specifics become automatic, and sometimes even just held in my subconscious until such a time as they are needed for the story. 

A caveat -- the longer the work, the more information I've learned that I need to know upfront about the back story. Why? Because I've found that those are the kind of details that help carry a story beyond the simple plot point A leads to plot point B leads to plot point C, etc., kind of story. Those are the things that take a story (at least for me, your mileage may vary) from a mere skeleton to a flesh and blood living being.

Tighten the Tension

You know that feeling when your gut constricts and your brain starts thrumming. Your heart might even pound a little. When it happens in life, it can be terrifying. When it happens in a story, it means the author did something right. The author affected you in a real, emotional, visceral way. The author made you react.

That reaction is called tension. 

And if you can do it consistently as a writer, you’ll never fail to sell your work. 

What It Isn’t

If you research this stuff on the ‘Net, you’ll often hear this topic discussed closely with the idea of suspense. Some folks might even try to tell you that tension and suspense are the same thing. 

Don’t listen to them. They’re not. 

Tension vs. Suspense

Tension is an immediate feeling of discomfort or stress. Tension is the knot that suspense can create inside you. Tension is the uncomfortable feeling you get because a situation isn’t optimal, or even something you can cope with. Tension is the tiger roaring on the plains near your camp. 

Suspense is the feeling of anxiously awaiting a future event. Suspense is the buildup or increasing tension over time. Suspense is taking those uncomfortable feelings and combining them with anticipation. Suspense is the tiger’s roar getting louder every few minutes, making you look around for when its head eventually appears at the edge of camp. 

Tension vs. Conflict

If you have an absence of conflict, you will never have tension. However, just as tension and suspense are related but not equal, the same applies to conflict. Without conflict, there may be no tension, but tension isn’t conflict. 

It grows out of conflict. 

Which conflicts? Well, all of them. You can have great tension with a person vs. nature story (2012, 28 Days Later, The Poseidon Adventure). You can create tight tension ina person vs. society story (A Clockwork Orange, The Awakening, The Crucible, Their Eyes Were Watching God). The same holds true for a person vs. person plot (The Bourne Identity, any Bond novel, Kramer vs. Kramer). Even a solid person vs. self story can keep a reader all wrenched up inside (Hamlet, Fahrenheit 451, The Old Man and the Sea). 

A well-established conflict for your characters, particularly your protagonist and antagonist, builds a solid floor from which to create tension. 

The Editing Onion

Editing isn't a one-stop shop.

Editing. It's the dirty word of writing. For most, it's the part where the fun and creativity goes to sleep or drives off into the sunset, leaving you with a boring, tedious, time-consuming, and oh-so-not-at-all-fun WORK of finding out just had poorly you can spell and how much you use weak verbs and too many adverbs and why you should just chuck your Creative Writing MFA and go sell... Sorry. Got a little lost in the weeds there. 

But it doesn't have to be. 

Maybe it will never be fun exactly, but it doesn't have to totally suck either. 

And the best thing is that the more you learn to do it effectively, the better you tend to be at it. 

But, at its heart, what is it exactly?

Not That Kind of Onion

No need to cry about it, editing has layers, just like an onion. (I never said my puns were actually funny. Sorry.) Still, just like our sweet Vidalia metaphor, editing gets more specific and more useful the deeper you dig into it. 

When lots of folks think about editing, they are thinking of just one thing. That one thing might be proofreading. It might be copyediting. It might even be concept editing. Some folks might mentally jump straight to story editing. But each one of these isn't just a 'one thing.' They're all just a part of something bigger--the process of editing.

For me, rather than breaking it into categories like those, I prefer to think about the pieces of the story we're editing, hence my onion metaphor. 

Layer 1: Words

The atom of your story (yes, it's a new metaphor, just stay with me) is the individual word. It's the basic building block of your sentences, your paragraphs, your chapters, and your stories. It's the tree that makes the forest possible. And unlike that cliche, sometimes we writers can't see the trees for the forest. We're so busy noticing the sprawling majesty of the story that we can't or don't notice the individual words that created it. 

Writing for Comics -- A Basic Primer for Newbs

Over the weekend I was able to teach a class on basic comic book writing. I always love these classes, but I realized while I was speaking that I'd never turned this talk into an essay for the blog, so I'm remedying that now. 

As the cheerleaders say, "Ready? Oooo-Kay!"

The Pre-Writing

Rule number one. Read comic books. Whether you want to call them graphic novels, sequential storytelling, floppies, or the classic term comic books, you must read them. 

If you want to know how this particular medium works you must be well versed in it. Just like a screenplay or a stage play has its own set of rules, comic book writing has its own set of rules as well.

Whether you write full script or Marvel style (more on that further in) you still have to know the language of comic books. This is no different than knowing the language of fiction writing with its grammar, beats, dialog, characterization, setting, plot, theme, etc. In fact, all those things apply to writing comics too, but writing for comics comes with even more tools you need to learn. Panels, word balloons, thought balloons, narrative captions, internal monolog captions, page turns, etc. These are new and important concepts to learn to be able to effectively and efficiently write a script for sequential pictures. 

Rule number two. Think big. Your special effects budget is only limited by your artist's ability and your combined imagination. That interstellar battle you could never get a budget for in an indie movie or for a stage play, go ahead and write it. That hospital being attacked by giant cockroach creatures from a mythology you made up, no problem (I, in fact, did write this scene in Fishnet Angel: Jane Doe). Just do it, as Nike said. The sky is the limit. Your SFX bottom line is infinity. Period. (Unless your artist's hand cramps up.)

Remember your basics. You still need a story. You still need a story triangle with rising action, falling action, etc. You still need a beginning, middle, and end (even if you are writing a multi-issue with cliffhanger endings). You still need well developed characters. You still need a reason for the story and it needs to have something to say. Comics are no different than classic literature or Summer bestsellers that way. 

One last thing... and this part is going to sound like I'm arguing with myself. These two things sound like they're the opposite of each other. But don't be fooled. They're important. 

Here it is: Tighten your story. Now, once it's tight, let it breathe. 

Introducing "Book Talk with Sean Taylor"

 

Book Talk with Sean Taylor

Your one-on-one fiction coaching, 60 seconds at a time.

Visceral Writing + Nostalgia = Effective Writing Every Time

Pow! Right in the kisser! 

A knife in the gut! 

Intestines spilling out of an open wound! 

Bloody bullet holes!

Those are the kinds of things that often come to mind when we think or talk about visceral writing. Gross stuff. Stuff that is painful to feel. Feelings that make a reader feel bad. 

We like to think, I believe, that visceral writing is a perfect tool for crime fiction and horror stories, but maybe not so much for regular fiction that doesn't include fistfights, stab wounds, gunshots, or the rambling undead. But is that really true?

According to Vocabulary.com:

"When something's visceral, you feel it in your guts. A visceral feeling is intuitive — there might not be a rational explanation, but you feel that you know what's best, like your visceral reaction against egg salad." Visceral comes from the word viscera, or the gut, the organs. Visceral writing is that which produces a sensation physically in a reader's body, not just in a reader's mind.

But let's be honest. Are bad feelings the only kinds of feelings we experience in our gut, in our body, in our viscera? Not for me. And I certainly hope not for you either. What a horrible way to live. 

Always Look on the Bright Side of Life
(Do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do)

Remember the hysterical closing scene in Monty Python's Life of Brian? Who my age doesn't? Brian hasn't had the kind of life he expected and as he is being crucified, he and the others hanging there in the hot sun still find a way to look on the positive side of their situation. 

We can do the same even though we write viscerally. We can use the same tools, flex those same muscles to create gut feelings and physical sensations that stir up good feelings and not feelings of nausea or unease.

Don't believe me? 

Try these on for size. Picture these things, but not with your eyes. 

• Grandma's fried chicken sizzling in an iron skillet and how that made you salivate, almost tasting it through your nose
• The kitten-fur softness of the flannel blanket you had as a kid and carried around so much that mom and dad had to wash it every few days
• Not only the sweet taste but the crystalline texture of the rock candy you could trace with your tongue that you only bought once a year on the way to your usual family vacation spot

Can you see them? Good, but not good enough. Can you hear them? Can you feel them? Can you taste them? Can you smell them? Now here's the real kicker... can you experience them?

Let's look at each example and see what senses they activate. 

Grandma's fried chicken sizzling in an iron skillet and how that made you salivate, almost tasting it through your nose

Sight? Sure. Sound? Yep, nothing like the sizzling of anything being fried. The more grease the better. Feel? Yep. I remember getting too close and the leaping pings of grease finding the sensitive skin on my arm. Smell? Oh yeah, and if your Grandma was like mine, her special seasoning belonged only to her brain and the smell of the chicken cooking was different from any of your friends' families cooking fried chicken. Taste? Not the chicken. Not yet, but the taste of Crisco in the air, the thick greasy flavor that said "There's no way I can hold on until dinner." (Writing this is making me hungry.)

That's visceral right there. And there's not a zombie, a serial killer, or a crime scene anywhere in view. 

Moving on...

The kitten-fur softness of the flannel blanket you had as a kid and carried around so much that mom and dad had to wash it every few days

Sight? Again, sure, but that's the easy one, the low-hanging fruit. Sound? Not as much, but I can hear the blanket sliding on the linoleum floor or the hallway. Feel? This one is all about the feels. The gentle, soft way that blanket felt wrapped on my bare shoulders, even as a teenager. The warmth I felt quickly simply by virtue of being covered thanks to the way it trapped heat. Taste? Of course. (Like you never stuck your blanket in your mouth. Don't lie to me.) Smell? It ended up smelling like my skin where I held it, like whatever had been spilled in the floor where I dragged it, and like whatever Mom was cooking that lingered in the air. That's why it had to be washed so much. 

Next.

Not only the sweet taste but the crystalline texture of the rock candy you could trace with your tongue that you only bought once a year on the way to your usual family vacation spot

If you missed this special treat on the trips to the beach each Summer with your family, then you really missed out. There were dozens of hole-in-the-wall stores along the roads where you could get not only rock candy, but pecan brittle, divinity, pecan logs, invisble ink activity books, and plastic alligators to play with in the car. 

But enough about my childhood. We're supposed to be talking about visceral, senses-led writing. 

So... 

Sight? Yep. Red, green, blue, white, pink. Sharp and shiny. Hear? That crunch that sounds like not just the candy is breaking but your teeth also. Taste? Pure sugar, baby. Smell? It invades my sinuses with every bite. And the big one -- feel? If you can't feel the sharp points that you traced with your tongue, exploring each crevice and plain and peak before chomping down on a bite, then you're not trying hard enough. 

Have we unlearned all that we once thought about visceral writing yet? Have we tossed out the idea that it's only good for dangerous, violent, abhorrent feelings in our gut? Have we begun to see that the same tool we can use to destroy a reader's pscyhe (in the best way possible) can also be used to take them on a trip to good feelings and happy memories too? 

Wait?! Memories? What do they have to do with all this?

I'm glad you asked. 

Yesterday Once More
(Shooby doo, lang, lang)

Nostalgia. 

Merriam-Webster defines it as a noun, a feeling of longing, a "wistful or excessively sentimental yearning for return to or of some past period or irrecoverable condition." Simply put, nostalgia is memory, albeit a positive one we enjoy reliving. But at its heart, memory is what makes all visceral writing work.

Yes, even the negative usages. 

Why does that crude, iron-blood drawing on the crime scene floor turn our stomachs? Because we've smelled it before, tasted it in the air even if it was only from an injury on the ball field or falling out of a tree or getting smacked in the face by a careless sibling in a hurry. Why does that steel bar crashing into our main character's stomach hurt us too when we feel the bruises start to form with words alone? Because most of us have either felt it or watched someone else feel it and the words trigger the "ouchness" of the memory. 

Let's just call that the "bad nostalgia," the feeling of "wanting to avoid some past and completely recoverable condition."

Just like our "bad nostalgia," our classic nostalgia, or wistful yearning works together with our sensory details when we tell stories to create the ultimate form of positive visceral writing. When we reinforce our readers' nostalgia with the right details that trigger sights, sounds, smells, touch feelings, and tastes they long to experience again, we can shortcut (in effect) the rational brain and go straight for the memory centers that make them feel and experience our stories. 

It's kind of like learning sight words in school. When you recognize a word immediately, you don't have to use any brain power to apply to spelling, meaning, or context. It just is. 

In the same way, the right details partner with nostalgia. The right smell, taste, or feel word can skip the rational brain and find immediate comfort in a sensory memory that makes it identify with the scene being described. 

Now, this doesn't always have to be used in a straightforward way. Sometimes the best writers will use positive sensory details to create conflict in the gut of a reader. Let's say, for example, that the smell of the pie cooking reminds our spy of home, but she's not supposed to let anything distract her from her mission. And in spite of the pain in her ribs from the beating she took before convincing the bad guys she was on their side, the scent of the pie relaxes her. The entire experience is supposed to be something negative she won't mind putting behind her, but that damn pie and it's nostalgia gut feeling is getting in the way. Let the reader feel the emotional, gut conflict right along with the character. 

When you reinforce physical sensations with emotional sensations, that's always effective wordsmithing. And, after all, isn't that the goal?

Help! I'm Stumped and I Don't Know What To Write!

 

We've all been there. You sit down to write, and your poor little brain shuts down. I'm not talking about writer's block. I'm talking about feeling like writing and wanting to write, but not having a single idea of the story you want to tell. 

You've worked your way through your backlog or story ideas and nothing is needed for a publisher. Nor are you happy with any of the previous ideas in one of your little notebooks with story nuggets that may or may not still make any sense to you. 

What do you do?

Hi. I'm Sean, and I'm glad you asked. Because, well, I have answers. 

Writing Prompts

What you need is a prompt. You're not facing writer's block (because that doesn't actually exist -- it's always something else, but that's an article for another day). You're just needing that one idea that gets your brain excited. 

A prompt is exactly what it sounds like. It's something that PROMPTS you to write. You can find lists of these things all over the Internet, and every writer has a few that he/she/they use as their go-tos and stand-bys to break through the silence and start making story noise again. 

These are just a few of the ideas I use to remind my brain that I have stories to tell. Maybe they'll work for you too. 

My Quatrain of Cheat Codes

Here's my #1 brain trick. Ready? It starts like this:

What if...

I've written an entire tutorial on using "what if" questions to launch stories so I won't go too far into it here. But it's where most of my best ideas have come from. 

• What if... the mirror in Alice in Wonderland was the same mirror as the one in Snow White? (that one became the story "The Fairest of Them All" from Required Reading Remixed (originally released in one volume as Classics Mutilated)
• What if... a woman had an accident that made her a superhero but it also made her so dangerous that she left her family behind? (that one became the multiple stories of Starlight from Show Me a Hero)
• What if... the KKK killed a black jazz musician in the 1930s, only it wasn't really the Klan and actually solving the crime could potentially destroy a white detective's relationship with his black lover? (that one became the cover story for The Ruby Files Vol. 2, "A Tree Falls in a Forest")

Here's another I particularly love. It's great for when I need a less traditional, more right-brained, out-of-the-box approach to coming up with story ideas. 

Pick three things

It's that simple. Just pick (or have someone pick for you) three unrelated things. This works great if you are in a conventional panel or at your table and ask people for random lists of three things to save for later. Perhaps my best story to come from this method is one called "Lake Jennifer Blair" from Show Me a Hero. I was in a story funk, and I randomly jotted down three items: a Coke can with ants crawling all over it, a duck with a blue goatee, and a cell phone. That it. Then I figured out a story that put all those elements together. Even though they had nothing to do with the plot, just figuring out why they were there and why they would have been there to begin with gave me the rest of the tale before I could finish the first paragraph. 

This little trick comes from the legend about Checkov in which he boasted he could write a story about anything. The story goes:

“. . . when asked how he wrote his stories, Chekhov laughed, snatched up the nearest object—an ashtray—and said that if Korolenko wanted a story called "The Ashtray," he could have it the next morning.” [And he did.]

So what if I stole the idea and added two more objects? It works for me. 

What's this character doing now?

Since I end up writing a lot of the same characters over and over again (it comes with the territory when you write superheroes and pulp characters), I have to always have the next story in my head ready at the helm. A lot of times I create these while I'm writing the previous story simply by throwing in some detail that most likely seems extraneous, but it becomes a kernel, a nugget to prompt that C-plot the won't be revealed until the next story sees print. The danger of this is to be careful not to add stuff that is just fluff. It still has to make sense in the context of the story it appears in, whether it initially feels "extra" or not. 

Often though, when I'm asked to revisit a character hadn't planned to write again, I just reread the stories I have written and look for some small thing to jump out at me. 

When that doesn't help, I just ask the question directly, "What's this character doing now?" That's where my Rick Ruby and The Fool stories came from (The Ruby Files and Show Me a Hero, respectively). I sit down with my brain and say, "Hey, brain, how are Rick and Evelyn doing right at this moment? Are they happy? Why or why not?" Or maybe, "Hey brain, is The Fool getting any better at being a costumed vigilante yet? What's holding her back?"

Reframe a classic

I love this one. It's a trick that many folks don't realize is common in the big world of publishing and movies. It goes like this: Think of a classic. Let's go with Alice in Wonderland. Now put it in a different setting. Okay, how 'bout an urban landscape? Okay, now tell me the story from a different character's POV? 

Whoa?! What?!

That one I just described is the wonderfully decadent film Malice in Wonderland. Some aren't so obvious though. 

Did you know that Star Wars is basically a re-skin of Kurosawa's Hidden Fortress? Or that Jane Smiley's neo-classic novel 1000 Acres in just Shakespeare's King Lear set on farmland and told from the POV of one of the "bad" sisters?

You don't even have to re-skin completely to trigger some ideas. You can simply re-theme the tale. Angela Carter's "The Company of Wolves" from her collection The Bloody Chamber asked what if the story of Little Red Riding Hood was really about one girl's sexual awakening, and bam, the story took form. 

It also doesn't have to be a classic story. Reframe a song if you like. I've done that several times. Prince's "The Beautiful Ones" became a story idea about four aliens living as women in the big city. Bon Jovi's "Living on a Prayer" became a Poverty Row thriller story idea about a trumpeter whose horn is in hock at the pawn shop to pay off a gambling debt while his new wife waits tables at a diner frequented by the gangsters he owes. 

This is also a fun, creative exercise just to loosen up your brain even if you don't use the ideas that are dreamed up. 

More Prompts

As I mentioned above, the Internet is filled with pages upon pages of writing prompts, some from individual writers, others gleaned from publishing houses and magazines about writing. Here are just a few you might want to take a look at:

• https://blog.reedsy.com/creative-writing-prompts/
• https://www.writersdigest.com/prompts
• https://www.writtenwordmedia.com/500-writing-prompts-to-help-beat-writers-doubt/
• https://www.servicescape.com/writing-prompt-generator
• https://www.reddit.com/r/WritingPrompts/
• https://www.pw.org/writing-prompts-exercises
• https://squibler.io/learn/writing/writing-prompts/writing-prompt-for-adults/

Well, if that's enough to help you break the silence and get writing, I don't what will do it for you. And as always with the best writing tools and tips, steal freely and make them your own. 

15 Action/Adventure Tropes That Need To Die a Painful Death

Tropes. Ya gotta luv 'em. Without them, we'd have no shorthand to convey information with pages of unnecessary narration that disrupts the flow of our stories. Based on stereotypes and cliches, they can help and they can hurt. When they help, it only bolsters the "contract" between writer and reader. When they hurt, they can say things about both the writer and the work you may not like. The trouble is, usually, that they weren't intentional. It's just that the trope popped into your head without really thinking about it and you followed it to develop your story. 

The following list is 15 such tropes that I believe need to die a painful death, and none too soon. 

In addition to my list below, are there any that really grate you like sand at the beach? Let me know in the comments below. 

Sexist Tropes

1. Women are only good story fodder for being loved and being saved. 

Thankfully, I see lots of evidence of this one changing, at least in commercial fiction from the big publishing houses. That's because they follow marketing trends and realize the world isn't the same place it was in the 1930s or 1950s (even much of the 1970s). However, I still see a lot of this used in independent and small-to-midsize houses that are trying to recapture the glory days of men's fiction. Guys, you can still be heroes without every woman in sight becoming the damsel in distress or love interest. 

Ways to play off this trope to fix it: Twist it a little. Have the guy who sees every woman as a potential date get labeled a misogynist or creeper. Have the dude who assumes the woman is in trouble get his ass handed to him and have to be saved by her occasionally. Share the time as the hostage between the sexes to keep it balanced. Write heroic women instead of heroic men as your next protagonist. 

2. Men who punch and shoot their way out of problems are the only real men. 

This one is also a throwback to earlier adventure fiction, but it hasn't begun to show signs of fading. Today's TV and movies (not just books) are filled with the macho types who (while they might also have a brain) primarily use their fists and firearms to solve problems. Again, the world has changed and no matter what morons on Twitter (I'm still not calling it X) say, this outdated idea of the alpha male is no longer the prevailing goal for men. Men can be smart and caring too, and can even refuse to throw a punch. It won't make them less heroic. 

Ways to play off this trope to fix it: Have the male hero use strategy and deduction rather than threats and fights to get what he's searching for. Watch a procedural thriller rather than a Jason Statham shoot-em-up next time you feel like taking in a movie. Have the smart guy in your story get the win and the glory. Embrace the regular guy as a hero. 

3. The ability to kick, punch, or shoot are the only skills that make one an adventure hero. 

This one is hot on the heels of the previous one, but it applies not only to males but to females as well. As the action/adventure genre started to change, they only updated the window dressing. Instead of kick-ass men beating the shit out of villains, writers created kick-ass women beating the shit out of villains. A side problem this has created is the "ball-buster" heroine who exists only to make men feel emasculated. Now, don't get me wrong, way too many incels feel that just about any powerful female character who doesn't need a man is a ball-buster, AND THEY'RE WRONG. Anyway, back to the point... there are far more heroic qualities than physical strength and military prowess. 

Ways to play off this trope to fix it: It's similar to the ways mentioned above. Avoid writing women as men inside. Try to avoid writing men as cavemen inside. Embrace the other attributes of heroism such as honesty, loyalty, strategy, bravery, etc. 

Homophobic Tropes

4. The gay best friend.

This one was a necessary stop-gap that initially helped writers and publishers embrace diversity and include gay and lesbian characters in their work. But it became more of a stop-period instead of a stop-gap. Writers and filmmakers became satisfied with gay side characters, in much the same way black characters started off relegated to servant or sidekick roles in books and movies. I'm convinced this trope remains primarily because it can be a safety net to keep writers from embracing the LGBTQIA+ character as the hero instead of a sideline character while still ticking a diversity box.

Ways to play off this trope to fix it: Go whole hog. Let the LGBTQIA+ character take the spotlight and be the protagonist. But do your homework. Don't write a stereotype. (Of course, this applies not to just protagonists but side characters as well. Don't be satisfied writing stereotypes. Talk to people. Get to know them.) Or write characters (main or otherwise) who are allies to the community or in their baby steps of learning to change if you don't feel you can do justice to writing a member of the community directly in an honest way. 

5. All LGBTQIA+ characters must have at least one stereotypical trait so "norms" can tell they're not hetero.

This one was a shorthand that helped the writers who took advantage of the "gay best friend" tope. Remember that bit about getting to know people and doing your homework as a writer? Well, they didn't. Singling out certain so-called "flaming" traits allowed some writers to include gay caricatures without actually including gay characters. It was the equivalent of writing black men known only by their basketball prowess or lengthy endowments. It was, in a word, total bullshit. A high-pitched voice, coifed hair, or a bit of a swagger when you walk does not a gay character make. We need to do better.

Ways to play off this trope to fix it: This one is so easy. Step out of your comfort zone if needed. Get to know people. Learn that people are just people. Then write them that way. After all, there's no way all straight characters would want to be identified by bad hair or constantly lusting for each member of the opposite sex they encounter.

Racist Tropes

6. Skin tone or nationality has any bearing on the quality of one's character. 

You would think this one would have died a long time ago, but sadly, traces of it remain. It's particularly easy to vilify someone of a nation your country sees as an enemy. In the '40s Nazis were an easy way to create a villain without having to give them any other traits than just being a Nazi. Some of that kind of thing is considered okay, but when just being German or just having a different pigmentation is your marker for being either a villain or even being a sort of saintly hero (simply by virtue of birth), that was what my kids like to call a "no bueno." It's more often applied to characters of Middle Eastern descent (the Muslim terrorist) today, particularly in thrillers. Or even the "Mexican Cartel" stereotype. The "noble savage" is a particularly overzealous usage of this trope, as if the addition of the word "noble" makes it any less offensive. On the other hand, assuming a lower character or intelligence for a dark-skinned or Asian character is more straightforwardly vile. 

Ways to play off this trope to fix it: Stop. Just stop. Period. Stop it. Don't be an asshole. If you remotely think that this is a justifiable way to portray someone's internal character, go take some classes in being a good human being. A caveat -- if you are writing asshole characters, it's okay to let them think this way, but don't make it an admirable trait. 

7. The white savior. 

This one is an old one, but it still sticks around. We can trace it back to early adventure stories like She and Tarzan all the way to newer stories like Dances with Wolves, Avatar, and The Last Samurai. It started as a way for European writers to tell exciting stories about exotic locales while not having to learn much about the populations in those locales. It became terribly prominent in the world of comic books as well, with everyone from Sheena to Iron Fist embracing this trope. It actually has roots in the missionary zeal of early Protestantism, where "selfless" white men risked life and limb to go take the gospel to native peoples, all the while seeing them as a sort of lesser being in need of white culture and white religion to reach a higher, more civilized peak. 

Ways to play off this trope to fix it: Flip it over on its ear. Have the so-called "exotic" be the savior to a group of white people. Have a member of the indigenous group rise up as the hero instead of having to bring in an outsider at all. Have the white guy in a strange land be the learner only and not the savior. Or have the self-proclaimed savior be a fake (The Man Who Would Be King) or just so inadequate to the task that he/she/they do more harm than good. 

8. Indigenous locals are exotic and trigger some kind of "otherworld" intrigue. 

If there's an indigenous group, they are special to the story in some kind of magical, supernatural, or extraordinary manner. Even the fantastic Indiana Jones flicks embrace this overdone and racist trope. There are two ways of approaching this trope, both of which need to end. The first is to add an indigenous group to your story when you need a "lost civilization" to trigger your hero's story beyond the gates of, well, maybe not Hell, but Normal. The second is to hide the weirdness and have a big reveal later that just proves the hero should have been on high alert around such a "not-normal" group he/she/they encountered. Fantasy can get away with this trope more often than other adventure stories because fantasy writers aren't limited by human races and skin colors and cultures and can custom create worlds and peoples. Phantastes and Alice in Wonderland are fantastic examples of this, one using fairy beings and the other using a whimsical world of animals and other strange beings such as playing cards.

Ways to play off this trope to fix it: Take the exotic out of indigenous. In order words, let them be your portal, but don't make them so other as to be weird. Let them be a normal small town with local businesses, not a voodoo village with people secreting the back alleys at night. Have the weird happen at home instead of "in a land far away." A lot of modern urban fantasy uses this fix effectively, such as Neverwhere.

Other Prejudiced Tropes

9. Priests/Clergy are always the villains.

As the world changes and becomes less religious (or at least less Christian) than it used to be, writers, who are particularly known for their more progressive ideas in many cases, started to turn the clergy into villains. We can see this in classics like The Hunchback of Notre Dame and in modern works like, well, the various evil nuns in horror films. Of course, there was noting wrong with the freedom to assign even the clergy the status of the bad guys. We see this in The Crucible and in the hundreds of witch-burning characters throughout the '60s Hammer explosion. The trouble comes with the trope's overuse. Nowadays, it's an automatic assumption that if there is a religious character (a priest, a preacher, a neighbor), he/she/they will be either the villain or at least a jerk. 

Ways to play off this trope to fix it: It's okay to write anyone -- anyone! -- as the hero or villain. But don't stick to one type as your go-to for either. Keep readers guessing. Play against the trope. Is the aloof, quiet priest genuine or is he hiding something sinister? Is the religious woman next door really as bad as she lets on or does she have a trauma that is causing her to act that way? Just like when it comes to race or gender, people are people. Don't let a prejudice against religion cause you to fall into writing stereotypes whenever people of faith show up in your work. 

10. The moral high ground is the most satisfying. 

This one is the opposite of the previous trope. This is the one where writers make the assumption (without realizing it, most often) that the character with the moral high ground (often religiously motivated regardless of faith) is the happiest and most satisfied one. It can also be that this character becomes the most altruistic one. The idea comes from the notion that a person of some belief is a better, or at least happier person. There are years of European history behind this thought so it's not going away anytime soon. Not only that, but it is also typically applied to Buddhism and other Asian religions. That's a potentially dangerous pairing of this trope and that of "the exotic indigenous people" trope. But they're both hogwash. Statistics tell us that religious people have similar percentages of depression and divorce. And often the person who takes the so-called moral high ground invites only more stress and self-doubt into his/her/their life. Often, this trope plays out with the "sage" character in non-fantasy stories, as a character presented as the morally upright one is able to help and guide the protagonist to the best choice in the journey. 

Ways to play off this trope to fix it: Let your moral folks be wrong, even when they believe they are right. This doesn't mean necessarily making them villains, just letting them fail to be the sage. Make them have to learn a lesson along the way too, even if they're just side characters. Allow them not to have answers or to confess doubts. Allow them to hurt. Allow them to hurt so much that they end up hurting others. Let them be human. 

11. Heroes never make immoral choices. Villains never make moral ones.

This one I learned to avoid earlier as a writer. I had a writing mentor at the time share this helpful tidbit with me: Always give your hero at least one negative trait and always give your villain at least one positive trait. The same thing holds true for the choices your heroes and villains make.  I know it was en vogue in the days of yore for villains to be all bad with no redeeming qualities and heroes to be all good (with white hats and all), but when you do that, your story suffers. This is one of the things I so loved about Haggard's She. Ayesha is a tyrant, yes, but she loves deeply, and even that positive love is her downfall as it leads to intense jealousy. 

Ways to play off this trope to fix it: As my former mentor said, always give your hero at least one negative trait and always give your villain at least one positive trait. Let the hero choose selfishness, not always saintliness or even goodness. Let the villain choose benevolence, not always malevolence. Nobody is one thing and one thing only, no matter how easy that makes your plot. Think more deeply. Build more complex characters. 

Overdone Tropes

12. The chosen one. Period.

This is probably my most hated trope. I am so sick of the chosen one. Don't tell me Buffy the Vampire Slayer got it right. It was overdone long before that even (as good as that show was, it would have been just as good without the "In every generation..." speech in the intro). It's even worse when it's an almost messianic character. Spielberg, for example, will go out of his way and risk a good movie just so he can put a "Christ-figure" in it (look no further than ET the Extraterrestrial and AI: Artificial Intelligence). There's nothing intrinsically wrong with it. But it has become the go-to story for fantasy and even some sci-fi nowadays. Need a plot for your epic novel series? Oh, you need a chosen one. IT'S JUST SO FREAKIN' OVERDONE. Can we please let Harry Potter and Wheel of Time be the nails in the coffin of this one and move on? Think of something new. Okay. Rant over. 

Ways to play off this trope to fix it: If you actually want to use this trope, please, for god's sake, flip it somehow and make it your bitch. Let the chosen one get the calling wrong as in Life of Brian or Wholly Moses. But I still feel it's best to skip the chosen one completely and have the "well, you were available and willing" one rise to the occasion instead. 

13. The unwilling hero who changes his/her/their mind to save the world.

Cozying up beside the chosen one is this way overcooked trope. It's not enough that he/she/they is chosen by prophecy or fate or God or the giant spaghetti monster from space, no, they also have to play out the same damn story in every novel, movie, and television series. It goes like this: 

What do you mean, I'm chosen?
I don't want to be chosen.
I'm going to run away and not be chosen.
Then I have a lightbulb moment and I change my mind.
Okay, I'm ready to be the chosen one now. 

OMG, there are other plots, you know. 

Ways to play off this trope to fix it: Burn it. Okay, I'm kidding. If you insist on walking this old road, do the unthinkable and have the chosen one accept the calling and fail... badly. Maybe the hero has to be saved by a sideline character. Maybe the chosen one is a dupe who is being public to protect the real chosen one. Let a non-chosen one be the protagonist and keep the chosen one off to the side as a peripheral character. 

14. Gunmen have an endless supply of bullets.

This one may be less of a trope and more of a cliche. But while everyone plays semantics, let's just say that Colonel Shoots-A-Lot should have run out of bullets, shells, cartridges, etc. by this point. That rifle doesn't hold that many bullets. That shotgun only shoots one or two shells at a time. And that automatic rifle runs out when the clip is empty. Besides, as a writer friend of mine pointed out recently, sometimes a reload scene can be cool too. 

Ways to play off this trope to fix it: This one has an easy fix. Make sure your hero has extra ammo. Then give him/her/them a place to hide to reload. If anything, this downbeat will build more of a wave of pacing into your action scene. A wave needs peaks and valleys, after all, and slowing down your prose for a reload could be the magic your story needed. 

15. Clever banter for the sake of being clever.

As much as I love the dialog of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Tarantino films, it didn't take long for the talking everything about nothing to get old really fast. Dialog must serve your story. It must move the plot, show characterization, establish backstory or exposition, something!. If it can be easily cut from your story without affecting anything at all, well, if wasn't necessary. No matter how cutesy or witty it was. Now, that's not to say that characters can't talk around things that are important to them. Unlike in his poor imitations, that's what makes Tarantino's dialog work -- just like that of Ernest Hemingway and Raymond Carver. They understood that human beings will do almost anything to avoid talking about what's really on their minds. 

Ways to play off this trope to fix it: You only have two options to fix this one that I can see. (1) Cut it. Just deal with the pain and snip the hell out of it and toss it in the trash or save it for a story where it might actually matter. Or, (2) rework it to make it both witty AND needed. Let it be the thing your characters use to avoid the thing they really need to discuss to save their marriage or to deal with one betraying the other and defecting to the enemy, that kind of thing. 

This Week's Theme Is, Well, Theme

I know this opening paragraph isn't going to win me any fans in a blog about writing action-driven genre fiction, but I'm just going to write it anyway. I can't tell you how often I've heard fellow writers say in convention panels that they don't really think about or care about theme because they just want to tell a fun, action-heavy story that entertains a reader and leaves everything the same when it's over. Well, I cringe every time I hear that. I really do. 

Why? Because (1) it means those fellow creators don't really understand what theme actually is and (2) they're totally full of shit. 

Yes, I said it. 

Theme Is Historically and Contextually Important for Stories

I teach high school English in addition to writing, and our current unit is one about Short Stories and the art of small fiction. We've read Edgar Allen Poe, Ernest Hemingway, Alice Walker, Raymond Carver, Ambrose Bierce, and Louise Erdrich. Each of these writer's stories continues to resonate with readers because they say something and do more than just "pass the time." 

Now, just so you know, I'm not only referencing the kind of stories we read in English Lit classes, I am an avid reader of detective, horror, sci-fi, and pulp hero stories. The best of these genres too, in addition to wanting to tell a ripping yarn, also have themes that elevate them beyond just being fun, action-heavy stories that entertain. 

In fact, I'd go so far as to say the reason they can entertain in the first place is because they have something to say to the reader. Stephen King writes about childhood trauma carried into adulthood... a lot. Raymond Chandler writes about personal loss transmuted into public good. Walter Mosely writes about changing racial norms and trying to overcome them. Ray Bradbury writes about whimsy being the basis for both technology and horror. Stephen Donaldson writes about how our bad decisions play a great hand in determining what we think of as our fate. The Golden Amazon tells us about absolute power corrupting absolutely while The Spider tells us that sometimes fighting evil can taint us with some of that evil. 

Don't get me wrong, the trouble with much "Literature" with a capital L is that it has a lot to say but fails to entertain. However, that doesn't make the opposite a better, more honest option. It's equally a failure to write a story that entertains but fails to have something to say. Those stories (and trust me, I've read more than a few in old Pulp mag reprints) disappear from my brain almost immediately. 

It's the ones that do more that stick around, even if they're not the best written or the kind that gets anthologized in high school and college textbooks. Theme isn't about longevity. It isn't about your Literature class. It isn't about being discussed at author forums and writing conventions. It's about every story being itself. It's about every story, no, your story mattering to someone, anyone, a reader out there. 

Again, writing with a theme doesn't mean said theme has to be an indicator of high art. Some may. Some may not. But ultimate, for me, it gets down to this statement from Abbie Emmons: 

If we don't understand why what's happening matters to our characters, we don't know why it matters to us. 

(from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ot3jkbmBKsc)

I want to break that down into two parts. 

What Is Theme and Why Does It Work?

The first part of Emmons' statement is "why what's happening matters to our characters." That covers PLOT and STORY. Plot is exactly that, what's happening to our characters. Story is why it matters to them. Plot alone can't sustain a story, either novel or short story. It's why even bad horror movies usually involve a character trying to overcome some kind of trauma instead of a generic anybody (except when that's the central theme -- that it can happen to anyone) as a hero or most often final girl. The horror of the killer/ghost/monster is what enables them to process that trauma (loss of a kid, family member, sight, job, etc.) It's what is at stake beyond simply living and dying or beating the villain. It's that awesome marriage between plot and CHARACTER. Get those two together with a bottle of wine and some Wynton Marsalis, and trust me, soon you'll see a baby called story. 

Story then determines your THEME even if you're not planning it out on the front end of storytelling. It's this second part of Emmons' statement: "why it matters to us." 

This is where, I'll admit, a lot of the issues genre writers (particularly pulp writers) can have with theme begins. Theme usually involves change, or at least the opportunity to change, or failure to change. But, the argument goes, pulp heroes aren't supposed to change. That's the whole point of reading their stories. They have a fan base because they're consistent characters. 

I agree. There are certain things about certain characters that can't change, at least not permanently. Frank Fradella had a saying while I was Vice President of Cyber Age Adventures/iHero Entertainment that went like this: "Don't blow up Cleveland; we're going to need that later." 

This works to the benefit of some characters, particularly those who can face their flaws, traumas, and issues and still refuse to change no matter the pressure they face. Batman often faces the need or desire to kill the Joker, and the theme of that story is not whether he actually will or not, but how he walks that tightrope. That can be compelling every time even though the reader knows there's no way Bruce is going to pull the trigger. 

On the other hand, this works to the detriment of some characters, particularly those who are perfect and have no flaws or struggles, no matter the pressures or issues they face. It's the one reason I've never been a fan of Doc Savage. I don't mind that he is physically perfect and always wins, but he never struggles with anything. He never faces any failure in his past or present. He never struggles with emotional baggage. And rarely does his support cast. They can be as flat as cardboard cut-outs. 

I know, if you didn't tune out at the first paragraph, that comment about Doc Savage just sent many of the rest of you running for the hills. 

I present Superman as a counter to the good Doc though. Although Clark is the pinnacle of physical perfection and the sheer embodiment of American values of mom, baseball, and apple pie, he still struggles. He knows that his superheroic identity puts those he loves in danger, so he fights to keep it secret, which can screw up his everyday life (with work, with Lois, etc.). He also faces doubt when his choices for winning don't include an "American values" option. How does a man with a perfect record choose between two bad options and then live with the consequences? Those are great Superman stories. Of course, the best Superman stories figure out a way to choose neither but it doesn't come easily, hence "why what happens matters to the characters" is still a part of the story. The theme of trying to remain true to your own nature is also a theme. But without a conflict that forces that theme, a hero like Doc Savage never changes for different reasons than Superman. 

Note: Maybe this happens in other Doc Savage novels, but in the several I've read before I gave up, Doc Perfect is never allowed to have a flaw or less-than-perfect choice to confront.

What Isn't Theme?

I hope you didn't miss this sentence just a few paragraphs above: "Story then determines your theme." Theme is always an organic outgrowth from your story. Now, remember, story isn't plot. Story is plot and character working together to make the plot matter. 

That's why many writers who may not consciously write with a theme in mind tend to have them show up by nature of the kind of characters they write, the kind of stories they tell, and the kind of outcomes that happen in those stories. As most writers know, it's a difficult thing to keep yourself out of your stories -- and not just in a Mary Sue or Marty Stu way. The beliefs that have guided you through life, the ideals to which you ascribe, the politics you try not to discuss at Thanksgiving -- all of that stuff seems to find a way to seep into your work as if it escapes through your fingertips as you type. (Hell, maybe it actually does. That's as good an explanation for it as any other I've seen.)

If you can't find it yourself, and you're any writer worth your storytelling salt, don't worry. Astute readers will find it for you. Even if you're one of the writers I was talking about in the first paragraph. You still end up writing variations on a theme, and the sum total of your body of work will shine a spotlight on it. Just be warned, sometimes those themes may not say the kind of things you want to be said about your writing. (Such as women only exist for saving and men who don't punch their way out of trouble aren't real men, but that's an essay for another day.) 

Nor is a theme a moral. We're not talking about fables or allegories when we talk about theme. Yes, the best of those still have themes. You can't turn a page in Lord of the Rings, A Swiftly Tilting Planet, or even "The Little Match Girl" or "The Ugly Duckling" without bumping into theme. But the moral isn't the theme. Themes can lead to lessons as we confront things about ourselves as readers, as writers, as critics, etc., but the lesson itself is never the theme. 

So, all this to say: Don't be afraid of the concept of your story having a theme. Don't be afraid to talk about it or bring it up at convention panels. And for god's sake, don't think that decrying the concept of theme from your position behind a table or podium at a conference or convention makes you somehow more honest than other writers. That's about as honest as being an ironic hipster. If your work resonates with someone, you have a theme that reader has identified and identified with -- even if you didn't intentionally approach the work with a theme as you pantsed your way through writing. 

Yes, I acknowledge that even Doc Savage has a theme that folks resonate with. I see my own hypocrisy just fine, thank you. (LOL). 

To paraphrase Aerosmith: Theme on, theme on, theme on, theme until your writing dreams come true! #sorrynotsorry

[Link] Mistakes Writers Make About Bladed Weapons (with Teel James Glenn)

The Description Toolbox: 3 Tools Every Writer Needs

Dialog and description. What people say and what they do in the world they inhabit. There would be no stories without them. 

I know there are thousands of articles and books about writing description out there in this big ol' wide world, so why waste my time with one here on this mostly unknown blog by a D-list indie writer of pulp and genre fiction? 

Because I'm both vain and stubborn, I guess. 

Now that that's out of the way, the real reason is that since we each have different ways of approaching our work, I figured it might help someone else out there if I shared what worked for me. Your mileage may vary, as the saying goes. 

Description, defined personally, is the art of putting a place to your work. It's where the world is created with words and each item in that world worth mentioning is created as well. But there's a fine line between not enough description and too much description. How do you know if an item in or a detail of that world is needed or not? 

I go to my toolbox. I have one for description and one for dialog. The description toolbox contains three key tools that help me answer that question for my writing. These are, in effect, my hammer, screwdrivers, and wrenches for my stories. For most situations, they get the job done for me, in spite of any additional fancy, schmancy gadgets I may also have access to.  

Tool #1: Journalism School (The Four W's)

I come from a background in both fiction and nonfiction writing. I cut my teeth on magazine and newspaper articles, and as such, I had to learn quickly the most important questions for informative nonfiction. They've been called the "W's" for years. 

They are: 

• Who?
• What?
• When?
• Where?

Now, I know it's tempting to add "Why" to this list, but hold off on that for now. Honestly, if we can't detail a clear picture of these four questions, then why doesn't really matter to your story. We need to know who is on the set, what is on the set and what is happening, when it's happening (era or time of day or season, etc.), and where it's happening. Once those details are clear, readers will have all they need to ponder the why in their own minds and in Literature classes for time to come.

Without all that, who cares? It's just a list of plot points and random dialog. 

Most writers devote more time to who and what than anything else, but it's important to remember that each is equally important to your work. 

Who?

Without a who, the plot is meaningless. The story only happens because it happens to somebody. And that somebody is either short or tall, lanky or stout, male or female or trans, blonde or redhead or raven-haired. That person has a personal style of dress, or stuff important to them, etc. Plot happens to characters, not to placeholders in the shape of one. 

But it's not just your antagonist and protagonist. You also have to think about your other characters, even to the point of onlookers. One of these coolest tricks in filmmaking is to add a third person in a scene between two important characters. It's not just a way of breaking up the monotony of talking heads, it also can supply comedy, tension, suspense, or that moment of relief as the viewer sees another character react to those two primary leads for the scene. It's a trick we can apply in our fiction too, a breakaway from the key action to describe something in the background, something that may have importance or not -- the reader won't know yet. It could be important or it could be red herring.

What?

Without a what, nothing happens? Characters do things in a way that tells the reader something about them. The things they touch, the way they walk, the words they say. the drinks they drink, the colors they choose for their living room decor -- all those whats establish identity and place a real character in a real place, at least in the theater of the reader's imagination. 

When?

A lot of writers, particularly beginning writers, tend not to even think about when. I can't tell you how many times I've read a short story without any sense of day or night, winter or fall or spring of summer, or the year. Some might say that's not nearly as important to the plot, but I disagree. If you didn't feel the snow and isolation of winter in Ethan Frome (it's pretty much its own character in the story) would the outcome of the novel matter or even make sense? If you could sense the oppression of night in Chander's hardboiled tales, you'd miss the moral ambiguity of the themes. If you couldn't feel the summer heat in Bradbury's Dandelion Wine, you'd missed the exuberance of childhood play that underlines all the weirdness of the stories the boys live. 

Where?

Where is the one we writers think about almost as much as who. But do we really populate where in a way that makes a vivid picture for readers? Think about the various colored rooms in Poe's "Masque of the Red Death" or the simple living room in Vonnegut's "Harrison Bergeron." The importance of the setting will determine how fully you describe it. In "Red Death," the colors not only exist for opulence and extravagance but also for meaning and symbolism. In "Bergeron" the setting is sparse intentionally because no one in that world has any more or less than any other. 

Tool #2: The Senses

Now let's go deeper into our W's. How do we perceive the who, what, where, and when in our real life? Through our senses, of course. 

It's the same with our fiction. Sensual (not to be confused with erotic though it can be that) writing simply means understood through or by the senses. 

For those who haven't taken elementary-level science in a few years, they are:

• Sight
• Sound
• Smell
• Touch
• Taste

On the surface, these are all very easy to work with, but like a screwdriver, they each function similarly but with different specifics, whether flat, Phillips, hex, socket, etc. Let's break them down. 

Sight

Sight, simply put, is what the writer (and by extension, the reader) sees. It's where details like size, color, shape, number, background, etc. are perceived. It also has an emotional quality to what is seen, but we'll get to that later. In many ways, both in real life and in fiction, it's our default sense. It's the one we use even as a beginner without really having to think about it as we bang out words on a keyboard (or for you old schoolers, write on a notepad). 

"It was a dark and stormy night..." is proof enough of that. (Thanks Snoopy!)

Sight descriptions run the gamut from basic (Hemingway, Carver) to uber-detailed (Faulkner, Tolkien) to flowery (Hurston, Garcia Marquez), and each is a valid choice when the writer knows when and where to use it. When it is overused, it is often referred to pejoratively as purple prose (often leveled at the pulp stories from the magazine heydays when writers were sometimes padding the pay per word). 

Sound

This one is often underused, I've always believed. Maybe it's because I'm also a musician and I hear sound in a perhaps different way from non-musicians. For mean, perception through sound goes way beyond just the message heard, beyond the words. 

At the risk of sounding stuffy (too late, I know), a message or setting is communicated more than just in the words said. I also understand meaning and location through volume, pitch, "pleasantness," etc. 

For example, a loud speaking voice can be like a cannon or like a droning bug in my ear. And each conveys a different message about the speaker. Loud background sounds can provide feelings of calm or tension, whether cicadas, grasshopper "fiddles," water babbling, or falling timber in the distance. Even urban sounds can have different tones they convey just like nature. And how that message is received by your characters is important. But to experience them, they have to hear them first, and that means you need to write them. 

The pitch of a sound also carries meaning to the listener. A high lilt may relax someone in the same way a low, husky, deep voice might relax another. Sharpness in the tone will almost always irritate me and put me off, whereas a softer timbre will put me at ease. Don't forget your characters have these traits too. 

Volume and pitch and tone all cause a sound, whether speaking or mere noise, to fall somewhere on a pleasantness scale. And we all have different ways of describing that scale. Like mama soothing me after I scraped my knee. Like a bird trapped in a chimney. Like my aunt scolding my cousin. Like leaves crunching underfoot. You can't read those without feeling something, and that's the point of sound descriptions. 

Smell and Taste

I like to think of sight and sound as the (sort of) basic senses and as the remaining three as the visceral senses. Sight and sound often tell you what while smell, taste, and touch tell your body how to react to that what. 

As such. smell and taste often work together. If you can smell a fresh apple pie or a dead animal on the side of the road, you can almost always taste it as well. 

Likewise, when you taste something and hold your nose, you miss out on quite a bit of the experience of tasting in the first place. 

Every place your characters go and every person they meet and every new thing they see will have a taste and smell component. Your job will be to determine whether that is an important detail to include. However, don't be fooled into thinking that only food and fragrances are worth tasting or smelling. The thick, iron odor of blood can be a useful detail in a murder mystery or a coming of age tale in the wilderness. The taste of chalk on a vase can tell a detective or a nosy neighbor details about the person who owns the vase. 

And, because these are visceral senses, how far you take that taste or smell is up to you and the story you're trying to tell. "The dried beef crawled down my throat like maggots swimming in gravy" tells a far different story than "The cottage pie warmed my tongue with the sweetness of green peas." 

Touch

I could (and have) done a full tutorial on this sense alone. It's often the first sense that action writers go to for their visceral descriptions. It's the gut punch that twists your guts into a bag of bones and blood and playdough. It's the catch in your throat just before you lurch forward and send the contents of your stomach spewing. It hits like a proverbial sledgehammer. 

But it's so much more than that. 

It's also the touch of a lover's fingernails on the ticklish spot of your back, the one that causes your hairs to tingle and stand up, the spot that itches and relaxes your muscles all at the same time. 

It's also the warmth of your father's palm against your face when he leans in, gripping slightly enough to force your  cheeks against your jawbone, then backs away before leaning his forehead against your own and says, "I always knew you could do it."

It's also the gentle brushing of a thousand tiny dancers against your calves and ankles as your walk through the field between your house and your grandmother's place, each step sending the twirling off into the air. 

It's also the breeze that makes you shake from the sudden ice cubes hunching across your shoulders and the single drop of rain that hits you on the forehead just as you enter the church for your mother's funeral. 

It's touch. And it conveys so much more than just the physical sensation. It also tells the reader how to feel without ever saying how to feel. 

Tool #3: The Psyche

We've actually been using this tool throughout this tutorial already because none of those previous tools works without this one. It's the creamy filling inside every chocolate candy we've eaten thus far (and yeah, I'm mixing metaphors; just go with it, we'll call it stream of consciousness if that helps). No who, what, where, or when exists in a vacuum. Each W question you describe the answer to has all kinds of emotion and reaction built in. It's the reason words like gigantic resonant more than big. It's why alluring means more than just pretty. The technical term for it is connotation. If denotation is the meaning all by itself, connotation is the meaning when the word is filtered through the brain. 

This deepest tool of description is where we intentionally move our pictures from the outside to the inside. Like I said, we've been doing it all along, but now is the time we do it on purpose, not by accident. 

There's a lot going on inside a reader (and a character) we need to tap into. Among them:

• Inferences
• Implication
• Emotional responses
• Empathy
• Personality
• Experiential understanding
• Pondering

This is where we not only drink the dandelion wine we've been waiting for, but we also pick up what the drinker feels and thinks when they drink it. But that's not description, you say, that's narration. Duh. It's all narration. Has been all along. It all is. 

This is where those adjectives and adverbs become strong nouns and verbs instead or become more targeted from our initial brain droppings (often called cliches). 

This is when the particular words chosen have something meaningful to say about what is implied when the narrator says the sun is yolk-like rather than yellow. 

This is where the vision seen by the POV characters tells the reader something unique when they see rocks that are like little broken cities of the past rather instead of dried clumps of dirty stone. 

This is the place when the way a character sees, hears, smells, etc. another character or a place will differ from how they see, hear, smell, etc. another character or place. 

This is when the smell of cheese toast reminds a character of home in a good way or a bad way, like a melted combination of butter and cheese, with the tops all crispy and blackened, hot and sticking to the inside of your teeth or the dead odor of burned cheese and too much butter, thick in the air like the grease would undoubtedly soon be in the reader's mouth. 

This is where the most important how in your work can finally come out and play -- the how it makes your characters feel and how it makes them think. 

A Few Examples From My Work

Rather than analyze the works of writers far more gifted than me and tell you what I think they intended as they wrote, I'll take the coward's way out and just pull a few examples to examine from my own work. 

    It begins as always with the crick-cracking of the neck bone where it attaches to the top of the spine. Then there is the delicious constriction as the breath slowly ceases its movement through the windpipe. At last, after moments sometimes but more often after teasingly painful minutes, thick as the dripping of Winter’s oil, the body lies limp and unmoving, lifeless in the metal, springs and gears that have become my new strength. 

    -- "Death With a Glint of Bronze" (Dreams of Steam: Brass and Bolts)

This story opening is filled with visceral sense imagery using sounds and touch particularly. I can not only hear the crick-cracking but also feel in my fingers what it would feel like to make a neck make that sound. 

    A high-pitched male voice cut through the throng of onlookers and one of the bobbies fell to the street with a wet thud. A dwarf of a man, five feet tall at his best, stepped over the fallen officer and strode between McKendrick and his assistant. 

    -- "Death With a Glint of Bronze" (Dreams of Steam: Brass and Bolts)

Here's an example of using description to show a POV character's summation of a character he encounters. Words like "thud" and "dwarf" tell you exactly what he thinks of this interloper. 

    She reached across her lap and pushed the broken bone back into place then shook her wrist to check the connection. It held, and would stay together long enough to get some gauze and tape to secure the cracked bone. Not that it would heal of course. Those days were over. 

    “What do you call this bone?” she asked, holding up the arm to show him. “I used to know, I think, but I can't remember it now.”

    “Hell if I know,” the man said. “That's what I hire editors for.”

    -- "Posthumous" (Zombiesque)

For this zombie protagonist, I wanted to show not the grossness of the bone but the monotony of her having to constantly repair her body when she got angry and broke a bone. The emotion was not an active one, but a passive one in this case. 

    They were nameless, though they had no trouble distinguishing one another. Short and squat, they smelled like the caves they mined, but that didn’t bother them. They had done so and been so for more than two hundred of the humans’ years, and they looked neither older nor younger than they had a few decades ago.

    -- "The Fairest of Them All" (Classic Mutilated)

I wanted to convey the way a fantasy dwarf might describe his kind in this story opening. Rather than the four-color world of Disney's Snow White, I wanted to build a dusty, dirty world of cave living for the seven dwarves. 

    The door burst open and a small dog with white matted fur bounded in and leapt into her lap, pushing her back onto the bed. Her feet hung of the edge and touched the floor, flat-footed, and the top of her head pressed against the head rail. The dog snuggled into her chest and licked her lips and nose. 

    -- "The Fairest of Them All" (Classic Mutilated)

When the story needed a break, it was time to bring in the dog, but only in such a way that made the scene feel childish, but not quite, since her feet touch the floor flat from the edge of the bed. 

“You do know she's dead, right?” the girl tossed her hair back, flicking a solid streak of purple amid the unnaturally dark black. “Besides that, she wasn't real. She's a movie character.”

“What do you know about String Theory, Gert?”

“God, I hate that I got stuck with that name. Why couldn't my mom have been a hippy instead and named me something less stupid, like Sunshine or Rainbow?”

Reed ignored her, and traced the Hello My Name Is Gert on her cockeyed name tag with his eyes, then let them dart over to her breast for the merest of moments. “Or even better, M-Theory.”

    -- And So She Asked Again, (Reel Dark)

Clearly, Reed notices Gert, and this established Gert's personality and even Reed's. I can clearly see Gert with her dark hair and streak of purple. 

In a few minutes the worst of the pain had passed, and I gathered up Elise's purse and overnight backpack just in case the doctor sent her own to the emergency room. He didn't do it often, but frequently enough that we had learned to keep the bag packed with a few toiletries, fresh underwear, and a pair of sweats and an baggy T-shirt and her flip-flops. 

She made it out to the car leaning against me for support, and I helped her in the passenger side, careful not to touch her legs more than needed to help lift them into the car. She grinned weakly and said thanks then looked away and grimaced. 

    -- "The Watching Thing" (coming soon in A Crowd in Babylon)

This is one of my favorite passages of description. The contents of the bag say something meaningful, and then the description of Elise getting help into the car tell us it's worse than even the bag indicates.

    Just as he’d requested in the Mid Town Reporter, the flowers were all made of papier-mâché. They were orange. And green. No other colors. The pallbearers wore suits of black, against which the brightly colored paper looked like a gift from a well-meaning, but naïve child, the kind of gift that a parent couldn’t dream of turning down, but clenched still at the thought of accepting.

    -- "Foolish Notions" (Show Me A Hero)

I loved the color contrast in this story. It sets up the theme and tone from the beginning. 

    The woman’s accent was just German enough to get his attention, all dripping with sexy gutturals and thick vowels, just exotic enough to trick a man’s ears into thinking he was having a drink with Marlene Dietrich instead of some two-bit nightclub singer in a no-account New York dive like Belle’s. But the comparison stopped cold at the woman’s voice. She was attractive, of course, but lacked the sex appeal that would have brought sell-out crowds to the local bijou. Her skin was pale and almost sickly, and her figure—while a far sight better than that of the average woman with a nice apartment and radio in her living room—well, it was never going to get her silhouette painted on a playbill. But her eyes, her dark eyes that threatened to go solid black in just the right light, those were something special, and it was those eyes that had convinced him to listen to her story in the first place. 

    -- "Die Giftig Lilie" (The Ruby Files, Vol. 1)

The whole point of this story opening was to make the reader picture the idea of hard-boiled. I wanted to create the background images and the incidental music without having to say the bar was smoky or that a jazzy soundtrack played over the scene. 

In Conclusion

Okay, I've shown you the tools, and I've provided a few examples. Now it's your turn. Get to work. Dazzle me.