Inventing Reality Editing Service Blog

Given the many different ways of coming up with a story title – using a character’s name, using a line from the text or drawing from a conceptual object in the story, to name a few – just about any word or phrase would seem to serve as an adequate appellation.

Not so. In fact, you want to avoid writing an “adequate” title. You want something that stands out, something that grabs your readers, something that makes them wonder what the story is about and proceed to page one. While every reader has different tastes, some titles seem to appeal to the common elements of science fiction readers’ psyches and stand out: “I, Robot”, “The Stars My Destination”, “A Clockwork Orange”, “Fahrenheit 451”, “Lord of the Flies”, “Ringworld”.

To avoid creating an adequate (or even a god-awful) title, don’t use titles that are:

n Unpronounceable - Science fiction readers like to talk to one another about what they’ve read. But it’s difficult to talk about something that they can’t pronounce. Even worse, they might want to ask a book store clerk if that title is in stock.

n Embarrassing to say – Ditto.

n Difficult for others to spell - A number of book sales today are made online. But if you’re reader can’t spell the title at Amazon.com or in a search engine, the title may not be found. (Of course, “Fahrenheit 451” is one of those titles that is difficult to spell – almost no one knows how to spell “fahrenheit”. But the word is common enough that you shouldn’t let readers’ ignorance rob you of a truly memorable and apt title).

n Difficult to remember - If readers can’t even remember the title, forget about them asking a book seller or search engine to find it.

n Forgettable - Ditto.

Tags: gobbet title, style, titles

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Sometimes authors start with the title and build the story around it. This is called a reverse gobbet (you may recall that a gobbet is a title taken from a story’s text). James Tiptree Jr.’s novel “Brightness Falls from the Air” is an example of a reverse gobbet, with the title originally appearing as a phrase in a poem by Elizabethan Thomas Nashe (well, sort of – it’s a misread line). The reverse gobbet may seem like an odd way to write a story, but sometimes a single evocative phrase can rouse the muse.

Tags: getting motivated to write, gobbet title, reversed gobbets, style, titles

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Selecting a title marks one of the most important decisions you’ll make about your story. The title blares across a novel’s cover and is listed in a magazine’s table of contents. For science fiction readers, those few words hint at the story’s meme (or subgenre, such as alien invasion, space exploration, time travel); some readers prefer certain memes over others and will pass over a story (or give it a try) simply because of the meme your title suggests.

The great problem facing writers then is to come up with a catchy – and memorable – title. There are a number of approaches authors take in selecting titles. With examples from “Star Trek: The Original Series” episodes, you could name the story after:

n Characters - “Miri” is the name of an episode about a 300-year-old child survivor of a plague that wiped out all of her planet’s adults; she’s the story’s pivotal character who must mature if the Enterprise landing party is to successfully cure the disease and prevent their own deaths from it.

n Attributes of characters - “The Enemy Within” is about a transporter accident that splits Captain Kirk into two: one that is gentle and rational, the other that is aggressive and emotional. To survive – and be a complete person - the good Kirk must reunite with the evil Kirk, or take back the “enemy within”.

n Real objects - “The Galileo Seven” is the name of a shuttlecraft that crashes on a planet in a quasar-like phenomenon.

n Conceptual objects - In “The Doomsday Machine”, Kirk and crew must stop an automated robot of immense power that consumes planets to sustain itself. The object, Kirk surmises, is like the H-bomb, a doomsday machine that’s never meant to be used in war, though this one was.

n Events - In “Court Martial,” Captain Kirk is tried in a court martial (sic) for the death of a crewman.

n Places - “The Cage” is about the Talosians keeping Captain Pike as breeding stock to develop a race of human slaves; most of the story’s action occurs in Pike’s cage.

n Times - “The Enterprise Incident” is about a specific event/time period in which the Enterprise is caught in enemy Romulan space on a spy mission to steal a cloaking device.

n Themes - “Let That Be Your Last Battlefield” centers on the fight aboard the Enterprise between two members of an alien species – but they represent different races, one master and the other oppressed. Their planet’s racial conflict has left them the two last survivors of their species, though.

n Line from text - In “For the World is Hollow and I have Touched the Sky”, the Enterprise encounters an asteroid spaceship whose inhabitants believe they are on a planet rather than a spaceship. An old man tells the Enterprise landing party that he once climbed a mountain and was surprised the see it held up a roof, and then he says the line that becomes the episode’s title. A line from the story’s text also is known as a “gobbet title”.

n Twist titles - “Tomorrow is Yesterday” involves the Enterprise accidentally traveling back in time and trying to avoid altering the timeline. The decisions they make during their next day literally will create their “yesterday”.

n Scientific concepts - In “The Paradise Syndrome”, a psychological concept describing why people become intoxicated with beautiful natural settings is used to describe Captain Kirk’s taking of a wife and settling down (though the actual explanation for his decisions is he lost his memory during an accident)....

Tags: gobbet title, style, titles

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Avoid starting a paragraph - and especially a story - with “It”. As a pronoun, “it” is shorthand for another word that preceded it, such as: “The phone rang. It woke up the baby.” You know that “it” is the phone ringing. If the opening sentence starts with “it”, however, the reader doesn’t know what “it” is.

Tags: opening sentence, pronouns, style

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One of the quickest ways to ruin a story’s texture is to repeat the same word between sentences and paragraphs. For example:

Koorana quivered as Birray’s scent grew stronger than ever before, so strong that the teenager thought it entwined with her very blood. For a teenage male with such wide shoulders he possessed the sweetest smile, she mused, and so tall, too. He motioned to look up, and Koorana realized everyone else in the tent was standing. She broke her stare, quickly stood. Averting her eyes to the dirt ground beneath them, Koorana vowed to concentrate on the service, but a moment later she allowed herself one last look at Birray. He was still staring at her and winked. The teenager turned back, happy, and even in the dim light could see the flowers adorning the altar.

Notice how some words, particularly “teenager” and its variant “teenage” are repeated? The paragraph could be improved by eliminating two of the three uses of that word, perhaps by replacing the first “teenager” with a synonym such as “adolescent” and simply using the pronoun “she” for “The teenager” in the last sentence.

Flaubert recommended never using a word more than once on a single page, but I consider that a bit extreme. After all, sometimes repeating the word is necessary for rhetorical effect. Consider this passage:

“Do you realize how complex living things are?” the gobena said from the revival’s dais. The crowd’s eyes clung to him despite the heat exacerbated by the tent walls’ dark hadrosaur hide. “Do you realize how complex a family is, with all of its interactions and behaviors? But some say life is no more difficult to make than the simple whistles of an ugly scrubfowl.”

The audience laughed. “How could organs as complicated as the eye or the ear or the brain of even a tiny bird ever come about by chance or natural processes?” the gobena continued. “How could a family?”

The gobena’s speech harkens to that of a revivalist and thus seems more real when the phrases “Do you realize how complex” and “How could” are repeated.

Another acceptable practice for repetition is when using an invisible word, like “the”, “and” or “said”. In the preceding passage, “the” was used 11 times, though you probably didn’t notice it.
Beyond these instances, however, avoiding repetition of words is advisable.

Visit my Web site about writing science fiction, Inventing Reality.
(c) 2008 Rob Bignell

Tags: invisible word, repetition, rhetorical effect, style, texture

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Have you ever wondered why some television characters always wear the same clothes? Gilligan of “Gilligan’s Island” always dons his red shirt and white cap while Fred Flintstone always wears a spotted leopard’s wool. Such characters appear less real because in the everyday world, people wear different clothes from day to day.

Likewise, you don’t want your characters to always refer back to one another with the exact same word throughout your story, particularly in a novel. Such a word is called a “referent”.

In the real world, different people refer to us in different ways. Suppose your name is Amanda Philips. Your co-workers might call you “Amanda”, your close friends “Mandy”, your significant other “Snookums”, your professional contacts “Ms. Phillips”, your kid sister “Manda”, etc.

Consider how “Star Trek: The Original Series” handled referents for its characters, particularly Chief Engineer Montgomery Scott. Captain Kirk and Dr. McCoy refer to him as “Scotty”. Mr. Spock calls him “Mr. Scott.” Others call him “Engineer Scott.” This is a realistic way of handling referents.

Visit my Web site about writing science fiction, Inventing Reality.
(c) 2008 Rob Bignell

Tags: characters, dialogue, referents, style

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Sometimes the only purpose of a story’s sentence is to say that nothing happened. Such sentences are called “nulls”. An example would be the sentence “He said nothing.” Fortunately, nulls are easy to spot: if your story were occurring in real life, nulls would be the points where nothing happens. Nulls can be deleted from the story. They slow down the piece’s immediacy and dramatic tension.

Tags: dialogue, dramatic tension, nulls, style

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Tight writing is using the minimum number of words necessary to convey an idea or to describe an event. Writing tightly allows your text to be punchier and for the plot to move more quickly. At the very least, tight writing reduces your word count, allowing you to spend more words on text that truly advances your story’s or builds dramatic tension.

Here’s a list of common expressions , which I’ve run into during my years of editing, that should be tightened.

“a blonde girl”

Just write “blonde”; a male with light-colored hair is “blond” (no “e”)

“knelt down”

Just write “knelt”; the act of kneeling implies one is going downward

“nods his head up and down”

Just write “nods”; this gesture alone indicates the head is moving up and down

“nods yes” or “nods to the affirmative”

Just write “nods”; this gesture alone means “yes” or indicates agreement

“shakes his head no” or “shakes his head to the negative”

Just write “shakes his head”; this gesture alone means “no” or indicates disagreement

“stood up”

Just write “stood”; the act of standing implies one is rising

“the two of us”

Just write “we”

“they both”; “we both”

Just write “we” or “they”; the pronoun already implies both characters

“was nodding”

Just write “nodded”; see entry on active vs. passive voice

“were wearing”

Just write “wore”; see entry on active vs. passive voice

“with a smile on her face”

Just write “with a smile”; a smile couldn’t be anywhere else but on a face (unless we’re talking alien life forms)

Tags: style, tight writing

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Converting passive to active voice is a simple process. First, identify the sentence’s subject, or who/what the sentence is doing something. For example, in the passive sentence “Through him was running an icy shiver.” “Shiver” is the subject.

Next, place the subject at the sentence’s beginning. You would then have a sentence that reads “An icy shiver through him was running.”

Tags: active voice, being verbs, passive voice, style, verb tense

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Tags: active voice, being verbs, passive voice, style, verb tense

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So you’ve written a scene jam packed with action, ripe with conflict and filled with tension – but every time you read it, the writing feels flat. The problem may be that you’re writing in passive rather than active voice.

Active voice is when the subject of the sentence does (or acts upon) something. In the following active voice sentence, the subject (streak of light), does something (arcs):

The streak of light arced across the sky as if a falling star.

Passive voice, however, occurs when the subject is acted upon. For example, the above sentence in passive voice would be written as:

Arcing across the sky was a streak of light, as if a falling star.

Passive voice generally should be avoided, for a couple of reasons:

n It’s dull - It’s like telling you something “exists”. In the above the example, the author really is saying “In the sky exists a streak of light.” Sleeker and more economical, active voice speeds up the story.

n It’s awkward - Notice how the phrase “as if a falling star” seems stuck to the end of the sentence, as if it is out of place. Rewriting the sentence so it’s in active voice would give the phrase a place to fit.

n It’s wordy - The passive voice sentence above says in 14 words what the active voice sentence says in 13 words. One word may not seem like much, but in a 100,000-word novel, it can mean a few unnecessary pages of copy.

Of course, sometimes “passive voice” is needed. You do need, on occasion, to tell people that something “exists”, especially when writing exposition. In addition, you don’t want to overdo it with active voice. The reader can only go at high speed so long before getting sick.

Tags: active voice, being verbs, passive voice, style, verb tense

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Sometimes the real pleasure of writing – and reading - isn’t about a well-crafted tale with a fast-moving plot involving intriguing characters set in a well-described landscape. After all, penning such a story entails a lot of sweat, and for readers, they expect nothing less than a well-developed piece. Instead, the real smile comes when the author leaves a special treats for the reader, such as hiding some surprise not germane to the story. These surprises are called “easter eggs”, a term science fiction writing workshops have borrowed from the jargon of computer programming.

For example, an author might encode, with the first letters of consecutive sentences, some message to the reader. In other instances, the author may use obscure allusions, such as what James Lecky does in his recently published “The Season Without Sun”. In the Lecky’s story, the antagonists are a people called the “Dajzyn” - the Tuva word for “enemy.” Tuva is a Russian republic on the central steppes of Asia, which one theory posits is where homo sapiens came from when moving into Ice Age Europe, the apparent setting of this story.

The pleasure for the author is akin to being part of an inside joke. The pleasure for the reader comes in possessing a deeper understanding of the piece – or at least in knowing that he’s one of the few who got the inside joke! It strengthens the bond between writer and reader.

Tags: allusion, cookies, style, symbolism, tuckering

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Tags: editing, proofreading, style, usage

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There are a lot of great writers out there but only so many novels and short stories that book companies can publish. To prevent your piece from having a competitive disadvantage, you’ll want to ensure it is as publishable as possible when the editor picks it up. That includes enduring your piece follows all of those punctuation and capitalization rules that back in grammar school that led us to many a daydream about being on an exotic alien world or hunting dinosaurs in the Jurassic.

Not following these rules instantly makes your story more difficult to read. And despite a great plot line and descriptions, your editor will be thinking of how much time he’s going to have to spend correcting your work – time he doesn’t really have. When there’s another piece in a pile of submissions that probably is as good as yours, he’s likely to set aside your story in favor of one that won’t overburden him.

During my editing experience, I’ve seen the same set of capitalization and punctuation errors repeated in many pieces. Here’s a list of them.

Tags: commas, end marks, punctuation, semicolons, style

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When writing any story, your goal ought to be to create and maintain a fictional dream, or an “illusion that there is no filter between reader and events that the reader is actually experiencing what he is reading,” as the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, Inc. defines it.

For the reader, one of the joys of literature is to be immersed in the fictional dream. As a writer, there may be no greater disservice to your reader than to break this illusion. As science fiction author and editor Stanley Schmidt once wrote, “Your job as a writer is to make your reader forget that he or she is reading …”

The stronger the fictional dream, the more immediate the story and its characters are to the reader. The payoff for the author is that his story’s message will stick longer with the reader – never mind that the author’s stature (and sales) correspondingly will rise.

Tags: fictional dream, getting started, plot, show vs. tell, style

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Tags: cliches, style

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A common mistake among novice writers is shifting within their story so that events are occurring in the now but then in the next paragraph are happening in the past. This is a sign that the writer is changing verb tenses.

There are two common verb tenses in which you could write. Most typically used is “past tense”. In this case, the story’s events are told as if they’ve happened in the past (never mind that your story may be set in the future – the reader actually is hearing about the events from a future beyond which the story is told):

Col. Noel turned away from the reflection of his wrinkled face in the starcraft’s portal. Nothing to see but dust and gas anyway, he muttered to himself. His baggy eyes glanced at the gamma ray radiation sensors; soon the ship would enter the glowing cloud’s open center, where immortality awaited him. He moved toward the helm but cringed as the arthritis in his knee spiked. There was nanomedicine for the infirmity, but taking the capsules only reminded him of his body’s inevitable slow destruction. He sighed, resorted to giving the computer a voice command to slow speed, noticed a rasp in his words that had never been there before.

Tags: past tense, present tense, style

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Perhaps the most common mistake among novice writers is that tell rather show.

To “tell” what happens is to state it directly, as might occur in a newspaper article. For example:

Lambert was excited to see another boot print.

To “show” what happens, however, is to present the events without being told directly how one feels or reacts. The above example of “telling” could be rewritten to show Lambert’s excitement:

“There’s another one!” Lambert said, pointing at the boot print.

Tags: description, dramatic tension, passive voice, style

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As developing your story, maintaining a sense of tension is vital. Without dramatic tension – a feeling of uncertainty in the reader about how the main character will solve (or even if he will resolve) the central problem – the story will be flat and vanilla.

Creating tension involves controlling the story’s pace. Pace is the timing by which the major events in the plot unfold and in which the big scenes are shown.

The “better” the story, then the better that the author handled the pace. “Star Wars IV: A New Hope”, the “Star Trek: The Next Generation” episode “Yesterday's Enterprise”, Douglas Adams’ comedic novel “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” and Ray Bradbury’s short story “A Sound of Thunder” all are examples of masterful pacing.

Every story has a different pace. Those that are more introspective tend to move at a slower pace while those that are action-packed tend to be fast. Because of this, all stories run on a “story clock”. This is a measurement in which action is internally described. As with the wider universe, however, there is no objective clock. A true sign of craftsmanship is when an author sets the story clock winding at the right pace for an individual tale. 

Regardless of the story, however, good pacing always involves compression and expansion of time - In “real time,” events don’t unfold at the same rate as they do in a story. For example, a suborbital flight from New York to Tokyo in real time might take a hour, but in the story it’s handled in a phrase that takes a couple of seconds to read. Usually the authors speeds up or slows down the action to match the emotions he wants the reader to have. 

Tags: dramatic tension, main character, plot, setting, style

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Any story you tell by definition has a plot, characters, setting point of view and theme. But to really make a story pop, an author has to interweave and play these elements against one another so that the story has tension.

Tension is the force behind the need to find resolution. It stems from the hook that caught the reader in the opening lines: there’s an interesting central problem to solve. The rest of the story needs to focus on solving that problem.

But the author shouldn’t make the outcome – the resolution of the problem – obvious to the reader. The author should always leave open the possibility that the problem won’t be resolved. Of course, most readers know (or at least expect) that the problem will be resolved. By creating doubt, the writer causes the reader to wonder how the problem will be resolved. The greater this tension, the more likely the reader will stick with you through the story.

Generally, the best way to create doubt is to make the problem increasingly more difficult to resolve as the story continues.

 

The story constantly leaves the viewer wondering how the Enterprise/Federation will overcome the Borg invasion as the situation for our heroes grows increasingly dire. By episode’s end (which was a season cliffhanger), apparently the only way to resolve the problem is for the crew to kill the series’ main character and hero, the man they are most loyal to.

 

Certainly the story’s settings – aboard the Borg ship, on a world where a colony has been decimated – are intriguing. Certainly the characters – Riker’s self-doubt, Picard’s transformation into Locutus – are fascinating. Certainly the plot – repelling an alien invasion – is interesting. But combining and playing these elements off against one another to create tension – now that’s spellbinding.

 

You Do It

Write an outline of a story in which your main character attempts to solve a problem, such as stopping an alien invasion or trying to stay alive after being marooned on an alien planet. In the outline, make sure the situation grows increasingly more dire and difficult to solve, so that as the story nears its end, the alien invasion appears likely to succeed to the interstellar castaway appears unlikely to survive.
 

Visit my Web site about writing science fiction, Inventing Reality.

(c) 2008 Rob Bignell

Tags: central problem, narrative hook, opening lines, plot, style

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What is a story? An idea or a setting or a character alone do not make a story. A fictional story is all of those and more.

For the convenience of analysis and discussion, stories often are broken into parts. These parts typically are referred to as the five elements of fiction. They include:

n Plot - How the problem in the story is overcome, typically thought of as physical action

n Setting -Where and when this action occurs

n Character - Whoever attempts to solve the story’s problem as well as those who create the problem and those that appear incidentally

n Point of view -Perspective from which the story is narrated

n Theme - Purpose for which a story is told

It’s easy to think of the five elements of fiction as a matter of the 5 W’s and 1 H, or what, where, when who, why and how. Plot is what happens in the story. Setting is where and when the story happens. Character is who the story happens to. Point of view is how the story happens to be told. Theme is why the story happened to be told, or its message.

Each of these elements appears naturally in the story, whether you consciously intend them to or not. Consider the “Star Trek: The Next Generation” episode “The Best of Both Worlds”. The plot is about stopping a Borg invasion of the Federation. The setting is the 24th century (various stardates are given) in various star systems and aboard the starship enterprise and the invading Borg cube. The characters are the Enterprise’s crew, particularly Captain Jean-Luc Picard, Commander Will Riker and Lt. Cmdr. Shelby. The point of view largely is from an outside perspective, as if we were aboard the Enterprise. The theme is that individuality and self-determination triumphs over collectivism.

Virtually all of the problems with poorly written stories are that they in some way muddle one or more of these elements. In addition, you may perfectly nail each of these five elements but still tell the story poorly because it lacks flair; such problems are a matter of style, which is a part of understanding the craft of writing though not an element of fiction itself.

You Do It
Read a SF story. Jot down its plot, setting, characters, point of view and theme. You may find yourself writing more than a page of notes. If so, you can see how intricate even a short story can be. It also shows you’re thinking deeply and thoroughly about the elements of fiction, which will be a good carryover into your own writing.

(c) 2008 Rob Bignell

 

Tags: character, plot, point of view, setting, style, theme

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A sign of true craftsmanship for a writer is when he selects the right words and arranges them in an evocative way. After all, the most interesting character facing a significant moral decision in a fast-paced plot and exotic setting will sound flat if the words used are wrong. The vocabulary choices and ways they are arranged to create a sense of style is known as diction.

Consider this excellent use of diction from Frederic Brown’s short story “Puppet Show”:

Horror came to Cherrybell mounted on a burro led by an ancient, dirty and gray-bearded desert rat of a prospector who later gave the name of Dade Grant. Horror’s name was Garvane. He was approximately nine feet tall but so thin, almost a stickman, that he could not have weighed over a hundred pounds. Old Dade’s burro carried him easily, despite the fact that his feet dragged in the sand on either side. Being dragged through the sand for, as it later turned out, well over five miles hadn’t caused the slightest wear on the shoes – more like buskins, they were – which constituted all that he wore except for a pair of what could have been swimming trunks, in robin’s-egg blue. But it wasn’t his dimensions that made him horrible to look upon, it was his skin. It looked red, raw. It looked as though he had been skinned alive and the skin replaced raw side out. His skull, his face were equally narrow or elongated; otherwise, in every visible way, he appeared human – or at least humanoid. Unless you count such little things as the fact that his hair was robin’s-egg blue to match his trunks, as were his eyes and his boots. Blood red and light blue.

Notice how certain words describing Garvane evoke a sense of revulsion and alienness about him: “It looked as though he had been skinned alive and the skin replaced raw side out”, his hair and trunks are a contrasting “robin’s–egg blue”, he’s a “stickman”. In fewer than 100 words, we have a good idea of what Garvane looks like, but even more than that we are moved at an a gut level and find him repulsive.

Mastering diction really is a matter of reading a lot of good authors and spending a lot of time writing. But if a beginner, there are a couple of things you should keep in mind to improve your diction right away:
n Don’t use big words for the sake of showing off -Bigger isn’t necessarily better. Often such words distract the reader and make him think the author is a show-off.
n Don’t always go for the simplest, shortest word (as so many writing books wrongly recommend) - Instead, opt for the right word – the word that best fits, in definition, tone, characterization, etc. The English language is vocabulary rich, and the word you’re looking for probably is out there.

You Do It
Write a 100-word piece that describes an extraterrestrial. Select words that evoke a specific sensation in a reader. If you \yourself using big words, grab a thesaurus and see if there are shorter words that work better.

Visit my Web site about writing science fiction, Inventing Reality.
(c) 2008 Rob Bignell

Tags: description, style, word choice

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The kernel of any good science fiction story is a scientific fact that we know of today. A good writer grows his story by extrapolating from this fact. In the process, he probably should create an intriguing world that awes the reader in some way.

Consider H.G. Wells’ “The War of the Worlds.” In the 1890s when he wrote the piece, many scientists believed Mars was capable of supporting life. They also believed (incorrectly we now know) that the father a planet was from the Sun, then the older it was. From this, Wells made an extrapolation: What if there really were Martians living on a dying world? What if they had to take drastic measures to ensure their survival? What if, because of Mars’ lower gravity and older age, the Martians had evolved differently than humans?

He answers all of those “what if” questions with his novel that pits invading Martians against Victorian England and the inhabitants of Earth. In doing so, he creates a sense of wonder by using real science – at least real science for his time.

That scientific extrapolation can create a sense of wonder or awe is a philosophical attitude in the science fiction genre. We’re not talking about wide-eyed naivety in storytelling, however; indeed, a danger is that you can get preachy about science and rationalism, especially at the story’s end. But science fiction readers like a sense of adventure, are intrigued by the exotic and love science with a dash of romanticism. Most of them expect that your story will do something “cool” with science.

Tags: dramatic tension, science, style, tone. diction

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Ever read story before bed and find it so gripping that you stay up far later than you should just to find out what is going to happen? If so, you’ve been a “victim” of narrative drive.

Narrative drive is the force that makes a reader feel that something is about to happen. The more powerful your narrative drive, the less likely the reader is to put down the story.

All of the great works of science fiction have powerful narrative drives.

But creating a powerful narrative drive involves a lot more than creating interesting worlds as does Frank Herbert in “Dune”, intriguing characters as does Orson Scott Card in “Ender’s Game” or a fascinating premise as does Isaac Asimov in “Foundation”. It is all of these things more: good plotting, mesmerizing settings, captivating characters, proper point of view selection, an absorbing theme and an artists’ handling of stylistic issues. So, while we can discuss elements of a story in isolation, as occurs on this Web site, always remember that a good story is the sum of these elements.

To obtain narrative drive, then requires a full sense of a story’s various elements. Still, there are a couple of things to keep in mind to improve your story’s narrative drive:
n Link description with action - Whenever you opt to describe a landscape or character, ensure that it serves the dual purpose of moving forward the story’s plot.
n Avoid stiff writing by using repetitious and superfluous wording - Poor writing follows a “He did this then this happened” pattern while quality writing takes an “As he did this, this happened” approach.

You Do It
One way to master any craft is to model the greats who came before you. Select the first page of a story or novel that had you transfixed. Now create a new story that uses the same sentence patterns as that tale. However, make up new characters, settings and theme. What techniques does the master writer utilize that you haven’t in your previous writings?

Visit my Web site about writing science fiction, Inventing Reality.
(c) 2008 Rob Bignell

Tags: action, description, style

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Every author writes in a certain "style." Style is the choice of vocabulary and phrasing to create an effect that runs through the entire story.

Consider this snippet from Arthur C. Clarke's short story "The Awakening":

Marlan was bored with the ultimate bordeom that only Utopia can supply. He stood before the great window and stared down at the scuddling clouds, driven by the the gale that was racing past the foothills of the city. Sometimes, through a rent in the billowing white blanket, he could catch a glimpse of lakes and forests and the winding ribbon of the river that flowed through the empty land he now so seldom troubled to visit.

Now compare it it to this sample from Joe Haldeman's "Angel of Light":

It began innocently enough. Christmastime and no money. I went down into the cellar and searched deeply for something to give the children. Something they wouldn't have already found during their hajjes down there.

Both pieces make use of different stylistic techniques to creat a certain impression. Clark uses full sentences describing a panoramic scene and repeats words to give a sense of the sweeping ennui facing not only his main character but all of humanity. Haldeman, however, uses short, incomplete sentences to establish the slightly desperate nature of the everyday main character, who is having a conversation with you.

On one level, each author’s style is unique because the words are a product of his own, unique mind. But even a lone author can create vastly different works by changing styles. Pick up a copy of Harlan Ellison's short story collection and compare the abstract "Repent, Harlequin!” said the Ticktockman" to his more conversational (but no less symbolic) "Jeffty is Five".

There are some basic guidelines for style that can help elevate the author from crude apprentice to respected craftsman. For example, varying in sentence lengths, using active rather than passive voice and avoiding cliches all make one's writing better. Recognizing these issues is important because style can be the difference between getting published or receiving a rejection letter. During future entries about style, we'll discuss those and other topics.

You Do It

Write a scene in a sweeping style like Clarke does in "The Awakening." Now rewrite the scene, using Haldeman's more conversational style. How does the scene's tone change? Does one style work better than the other for this scene? Why?

Visit my Web site about writing science fiction, Inventing Reality.

(c) 2008 Rob Bignell

Tags: phrasing, style, vocabulary

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