Karmic Writing: Doing Becomes, by Eric Witchey

Karmic Writing: Doing Becomes

Eric Witchey

We write stories for as many different reasons as there are people who write. Some people write as personal therapy. Some write to set the world straight. Some write to heal others, and some to heal wounds from their childhoods. We have stories that instruct, deny, teach, explore, justify, and warn. We have stories that do all these things at once. Yet, aspiring writers still ask these perennial questions:

1. How do I become a writer?
2. Where do I start a story?
3. What should I write?

In order, the truest answers I know are:

1. By writing.
2. With the writing.
3. And whatever you write.

You may have chuckled in humorous agreement after you read the questions and their answers. You may have become a bit angry and resentful at my apparently useless and flippant answer. You may have just skimmed forward to get to the bits you think you need.

Please don’t laugh, resent, or skim.

The questions are legitimate.

The answers are true.

We have all asked them, and we have all had to answer them for ourselves and others.

Let’s look at them one at a time.

How do I become a writer?

The word “writer” is the agentive nominalized form of the infinitive verb “to write.” In the strictest sense, a person who writes is a writer. If that’s as far as we take the answer, the writers were justified in their little chuckle. The haters were justified in their little moment of resentment. The skimmers were justified in moving on.

However, I want to bring a bit of karma into the concept of becoming a writer. Some writers are born into families where professional writing parents read stories to them in the womb, where the family played endless word games for fun, where no TV was allowed, where a giant dictionary lived in the living room, and where telling stories to one another was a form of entertainment every night after dinner. From families like that, writers emerge into academic and commercial circles carrying the burden of “talent.” Those writers are not kidding at all when they say things like “Just tell the story,” “I know if it sounds right,” and “the characters just do what they are going to do.” For those rare and highly talented people who were genetically predisposed to solid language skills and then internalized the patterns of success in language and story at very early ages, “Just write,” is a true, complete, and self-sufficient answer to the question.

I wasn’t born into one of those families. Most people weren’t. Sure, we all have some degree of the magical thing called talent, but talent is just the degree to which you were genetically predisposed to then trained to early life fluency in language and story. Luckily, many successful writers had little or no talent when they came to the craft. They compensated by working hard. It turns out that behaving like a writer creates writers.

That’s what I mean by karma. One definition of karma is that every choice we make turns us into a person who has made that choice. Having chosen, we benefit from all the pleasures and pains that go with that choice. If we choose to drive on the wrong side of the road, we gain the freedom and joy that comes with being unconstrained by law. We might even live through the experience. We might also experience the accident and death that can come with having made that choice. Either way, we create ourselves into the person who experiences the result.

By writing, we become writers. Showing up every morning at the keyboard causes our bodies and minds to adapt to the task of writing. By attending seminars, classes, and conferences, we train body and mind to become sensitive to the patterns of success in behavior and technique that make a writer a writer.

A person who says, “I am a writer,” but doesn’t touch the keys is the same person not writing today that they were yesterday. A person who says nothing but does sit down at their desk and reads, studies, and practices the craft becomes a writer. Mind and body adapt to what we do. Writers write. Writing makes writers.

Where do I start a story?

The entry point to any story can be any moment in the story. By entry point, I mean the first text on the page. I do not mean the opening line. As you would guess from what has come before in this little essay, it means that writers write in order to figure out what they are going to write.

Since the first shaman spit pigment onto a cave wall, writers have been struggling with blank stone, clay, or page. I can’t count how many different methods of beginning I have studied over the years, and all of them have been correct. I will say that my all-time favorite came from Meg Chittenden, who taught the Carlo Rossi Method of plotting, but that’s another story and not really mine to tell. Here are a few non-Carlo Rossi entry points along with an example of each:

• Start with A Theme: e.g.: Developing listening skills creates understanding, deeper respect for others, and greater success in family and life.
• A Social Issue: Prejudice against intelligence
• Personal, Emotional Issue: Unrequited love
• Trauma: Limitations in relationships because of early life sibling abuse
• Random Topics: A dirty coffee mug, a newspaper article about hauling ice from glaciers in Canada to L.A. as a water supply, and a Country Western Song. (This starting point actually became my sold short story “Running Water for L.A.”)
• Idea in The Shower: What would it be like to be a spider living in the sewer?
• Image or Images: My reflected house on a dew drop on the rust-damaged petal of a blue rose.
• A fast Scene: Just wrote five pages as fast as I could. Now, is there anything in there to work with?
• The Beginning: Her first day at Garver Road Middle School was triumphant and terrible in equal parts.
• Someplace in The Middle: By the time Gordon arrived at the farm, the dogs had eaten most of the flesh from Millicent’s corpse.
• The Climax: She held the flame of the sword close enough to his head to singe the hair of his beard and raise acrid smoke. When he closed his battered eye to avoid the flame, she said, “For my sister and my village.”
• The Final Moment: Susurrate waves tickled his toes and tugged at the beach sand, washing away his foundations and forcing him to shift his footing from time to time. The Corrilla’s black flag disappeared over the horizon. The breath he’d been holding slipped past his lips in a long sigh before he turned toward home, his wife, and their new child.

Any one of these could become the entry point for a story. Any one can provide the spark that allows the writer to begin asking the questions that define context, present a problem for solution, and result in answers that drive the project forward toward completion.

What would it be like to be a spider in a sewer? Replace spider with rat and watch the film Flushed Away. Go back to spider, and ask what makes the spider worth following in the sewer? She loves her children—deep fried with vinegar and salt. Nothing in the sewer can satisfy her hunger. Why does that matter? Because she is the only spider of her kind in the sewer and the other sewer spiders shun her for her culinary peculiarities. So what? She can solve murder mysteries in the sewer, and that will bring her back to the bathroom where she meets her grown children but no longer only sees them as food. So, the sewer is a metaphor for her exploration of the shadow self and her resentment that her children are a part of herself she wants to recover by eating them, and the murders force her to recognize the deeper value of every life and the interconnectedness of each life to all….

The above example of uncensored, question-driven brainstorming would not end with the ellipsis. It would go on and on until enough silliness and non-silliness appeared on the page to allow the writer to begin to see a story worth telling.

The point is that writers start by starting. Any start is a start provided we keep going.

What should I write?

Did you read the bit about the spider? Did you shake your head and think, “Oh, for the love of…”? Now, go back and look at the list of starting places. Which one is the one we should pick as the story we want to write?

Exactly. Any of them. All of them. Just pick. The one that you picked is the right one. Don’t pick. Start a different way. Toss a coin and write about the glimmer of it spinning in the sunlight. Travel to a festival and write about carnies. Write about not being able to write. However you start is the right way to start. Whatever shows up in your writing is the right thing to write about. Later, you can do the work of turning it into a story.

One of the most disturbing phrases I hear from writers at conferences and in seminars is, “My story is about…” Compare that opening phrase to “This story is about…” Writing a lot of stories allows writers to learn faster, understand story more deeply, and discover which stories, themes, concepts, and issues are most powerful for them. Additionally, writing a lot of stories results in, well, a lot of stories. More stories provides a broader range for possible sales and reduces the worry surrounding any one story.

Let’s change the question just a little bit. Instead of asking “What should I write,” ask, “What the hell did I just write?” The answer will often be, “Huh. Well, I’ll be damned. That was fun.”

As one of the mottos of the Literary Non-Profit WordCrafters says, “Don’t be a writer. Be writing.” To become a writer, write. To start a story, write. To figure out what to write about, write. The shaman who spit pigment over their hand on the cave wall didn’t get it right the first time. They choked on ashes, ochre, and dust. They practiced. They experimented. They figured it out. The doing creates the doer. The doer does in order to create.

What the Hell Is Subtext? by, Eric M. Witchey

What the Hell is Subtext?
by Eric M. Witchey

I’m a lucky guy. A couple of writing groups in and around San Antonio, Texas recently pooled their resources to fly me to San Antonio to teach. Some were publishing professionals. Some were aspiring professionals. All were wonderfully kind and accomplished. While there, I even got to do some touristy things.

So far, I’ve written in general terms about things that were fun for me. Readers may now be thinking, “Get to the point, Eric.” However, if that first paragraph were in a short story or a novel, the reader would be, in the back of their mind, wondering what it means in the context of dramatic development. If, as would probably be the case, it added nothing to the reader’s sense of tension or character change, they would get disgusted, drop my story, and never look at another one of my tales.

Go, readers!

That’ll teach me economy in language. More importantly, it will teach me to figure out ways to imbue even apparently mundane passages with some additional layer of meaning, subtext.

Normally, I teach subtext by introducing students to a seminal article in discourse analysis. I then extrapolate from that article into the use of implication in dialog. Once that has become clear, I demonstrate how “subjective interpretation of setting through the character filter” can create an underlying sense of changing character psychology in the reader’s experience. That all takes a day or two, and it takes a fair amount of practice.

Did you catch the subtext? I’ll translate. “This set of very specific skills takes time and practice.”

However, I’m writing a blog entry, so I’ll try to give you the quick and dirty. I stopped short of calling this a shortcut. It isn’t. The time and practice is still necessary.

For my first bit of sleight of hand, I’m going to replace the term “subtext” with another term I think is more descriptive of the function of a number of techniques. The term is “implication.” Writers manipulate the text in order imply things that are not actually part of the explicit text.

Above, in the paragraph beginning with “Normally,” I described a longish process that wasn’t actually necessary if I just want to tell you what I’m about to tell you. However, I did put it in the blog entry, which tells the reader that I am either just horribly wordy or was implying something. The reader tries to fit what I wrote into their growing sense of the purpose of this blog entry. Since I then talked about a shortcut and the technobabble paragraph is more than I needed to write about the shortcut, the reader tries to find additional, underlying meaning. If they can’t, they think I’m stupid. If they can, they think I’m brilliant. In truth, they don’t even actually know they are looking for that subtext. The brain does it automatically.

In fiction, if a character says more (or less) than they would normally say or than they actually need to say in order to respond to their circumstance, some other meaning is being conveyed. The reader unconsciously examines text in conjunction with context in order to draw the special meaning from the text.

In practical application in fiction, it looks something like this.

“Honey,” he said, “I need to take the car to Bend this weekend.”

“The Metzgers are having a lawn party on Sunday,” she said. “Jennifer will be sixteen, and her oldest brother, the Army doctor, is in back from Afghanistan. Can you believe he wants to meet our daughter?”

She said a lot more than she would normally say in response to his statement about the car. In fact, all she had to say was, “Okay.” Of course, she might also have said, “No. We have a party to go to.”

Instead, she said, interpreting the subtext:

You have other responsibilities this weekend. Show some respect to our friends. Demonstrate that you at least pretend to care about their daughter. If you can’t pretend to care about our friends, then think about the returning soldier and how important his homecoming is. If you can’t get your head and heart around that, then at least think about the happiness of your own daughter.

To get all that from a couple lines of dialog, the reader needs a little more background. In fact, the reader needs the same things we need in the real world in order to interpret the wonderfully obscure things we say to each other. The following is a classic example is of people communicating by using implication:

“Honey, what time is it?”

“The ice cream truck just went by.”

The answer does not, strictly speaking, answer the question. However, both people know it is four o’clock because they share history that involves the ice cream truck.

Consider once more the car and weekend problem from above. In order for the reader to get the full impact of the indirect statement made in response to the statement about using the car, the reader has to be aware of the same shared experiences of the characters that allow the characters on stage to speak to one another in indirect ways.

We use this kind of implication all the time when we talk. In fact, it turns out that when we are trying to cooperate and get something done, we speak pretty directly to one another. If you and I are building a dog house together, I can say, “Give me that hammer.” Your answer might be, “Okay.” It might also be to hand me the hammer. Either way, it’s pretty direct and clear.

However, if you and I have some personal history with home projects not getting done, you might answer differently. Consider this dialog couplet:

“Give me that hammer.”

“And the paint brush, broom, and shovel?”

Now, suddenly, you are telling me I have a lot more to do. Additionally, neither one of us is having a good time.

Turns out that we figure out what these kinds of non-responses mean because they differ from direct, cooperative responses in one or more of the following four ways.

• The response says more (or less) than is needed.
• The response doesn’t appear at the surface to be a relevant to the initial statement or question.
• The response isn’t clear.
• The response somehow lacks the needed quality to be a full response.

The short list is quality, clarity, quantity, and relevance. Even so, this kind of communication relies on shared experiences. Those experiences can be shared within culture, community, family, or individual association.

Given the above, getting dialog to be indirect so that it implies more than is said is a pretty direct process. Start with something direct and revise it until is drips with additional meanings.

Draft 1:

“Take me home,” she said.

“Okay,” he said.

Draft 2:

She says, “My bedroom ceiling is more interesting than these people.”

“That guy,” he said, “spent last year in Tibet.”

“And my bedroom is warmer than this field.”

“They’ll light the bonfire in a minute.”

“Two cuddled under quilts is the best warm.”

“Oh,” he said. “I’ll just say goodnight.”

In draft one, the two people are being cooperative and direct. In draft two, one is being too clever, and the other is being a bit dense. A lot more is going on in terms of the psychological interactions of the desires of the two people. Of course, the passage could be improved—a lot. That’s not the point. The point is the implied meanings. In this case, the reader gets them because of shared experience in cultural context.

If, as writers, we understand our characters, their growth, their needs, and their backgrounds well enough, we can manipulate the text so that multiple layers of meaning appear from this kind of indirect interaction.

Narrative, when compared to implication in dialog, is both the same and different. If the narrator is external, the narrator can be seen as engaged in a sort of dialog with the reader. What has come before in the main story or in back story can be used as shared knowledge (the ice cream truck). However, narrative is usually more powerful if it has moved into the heart/mind of character.

The following two passages represent a transformation from one of the great traps into which writing instructors fall, focusing on the use of “concrete details,” to the use of those same details to imply more about the life of the character than is strictly accounted for by the text.

Yes, concrete details are necessary. However, students of the written word often focus too tightly on the detail and miss the point that the story is about a character who inhabits the fictional world.

Passage 1 (concrete details):

He entered through the south door and paused. He wore J. C. Penney docksiders, pale blue argyle socks, tan cotton Dockers, a burgundy, button-down Bugle Boy shirt, and a thin gold chain around his neck. His build was medium and toned. He had a sharp jaw line, straight nose, blond hair and blue eyes. He wore a businessman’s haircut. He looked to his left. He looked to his right. He crossed from the door to the dining room table and placed a small pile of envelopes on the table. The table was made of stained cherry wood veneer over a pine base. In places, the veneer was worn through and the pine was visible. The table had brass screws holding it together. Three chairs were mission, two were Victorian, one was a folding steel chair. He walked around the table, called his wife’s name, and exited the room through the north door.

Passage 2 (implication through the use of details):

Squeaking hinges announced his arrival and reminded him that Sharon had a honey-do list for him this weekend. He crossed the threshold into neutral ground, the dining room, paused, and turned his head to better catch noises coming from the kitchen. Concentrating on the sounds of the house, the ticks and creaks and movement of air through dry, old cracks in the walls and floorboards, the mail he held nearly slipped from his sweating hand. He gripped it more tightly and crossed to the dining room table, careful to tread lightly on the white-rubber balls of his topsiders. He sorted the mail so the bills were on the bottom then set the stack in a neat pile at Sharon’s place, in front of her martyr’s chair, the folding metal church chair she insisted that she use so no one else would have to be subjected to its indignity. He wiped his palms on the burgundy Bugle Boy she’d given him for his interview, then he thought better of it and checked to see if he’d stained the shirt with his own sweat. Satisfied that he was presentable, he rounded the table and headed for occupied territory–her kitchen.

I showed these passages to one of my writer friends. Their response was, “Eric, that’s just close, subjective narrative.”

Well, yes. It is.

That’s sort of the point of close, subjective narrative. We know the characters, their needs, their current desires, their underlying desires, their changes, their emotions, their back stories, their relationships, and their minds. Because of that knowledge, we can write in a way that implies many things that are not explicit in the text.

For example, we can write narrative that reveals levels of marital tension, the nature of personal fear, levels of social dominance, tacit agreements about control of territory, habitual behavioral dynamics, and the psychological underpinnings of two people who have driven one another to estrangement. Later, the reader will share this understanding with character and narrator. If done well, the reader won’t even know they have picked up on these cues. These things can then be exploited more deeply through indirect dialog and subjective narrative as a story moves forward.

The subtext of the opening paragraph, based on shared experience with my friends in Texas, is, “Thank you.”

I suppose I should stop now. This blog entry is late, and I have said a lot more than I needed to say in order to fulfill my responsibility to my cohort of shared bloggers.

Since I have written more than was strictly needed, there is subtext. The subtext is, to be explicit, that I believe this idea of implication (subtext) is very important for writers who want to enhance the reader’s experience of story.

Realerism: Why Does This Story Feel More Real Than That One? By Eric M. Witchey

Source: pboehringer. Purchased under license @ istockphoto.com for use in this blog.

Realerism: Why Does This Story Feel More Real Than That One?
By Eric M. Witchey

Text that evokes the heart, history, and physical experience of character while managing dramatic timing and avoiding reminders that the story in the mind of the reader is actually coming from text on the page tends to “feel more real.”

I’m writing this the weekend after Thanksgiving, and I am thankful for my many writing friends, and I’m especially thankful for people who ask me questions that help me think about what I do and how I do it.

This week, Chris Pence, one of my online writing buddies, asked me a question that got me thinking. A while back, Chris read my original ED ACE article from Writer’s Digest, and he’s been working with that tool for a while. As most writers know, if you work with any specific technique for a while, you find its edges and new questions to ask. This week, Chris asked me about the illusion of realism. Specifically, he said, “I’ve been re-reading Stephen King lately, mostly early stuff, and I’m struck with how realistic he was able to make those stories feel. Too many stories I read never quite shed the “fiction” feel. What advice do you have on increasing the realism in a story?”

Before answering, focusing on two things in this question is important. First, Chris is asking about “feel.” Second, he is asking about the reader’s experience rather than the concept of realism as it is used in literary criticism.

The question is simple enough, but the answers are complex.

Note the plural of answer.

The factors that mix in order to create or detract from a sense of realism are myriad.

First, consider that each reader brings their genetics, early life imprinting, personal history, family culture, community culture, regional culture, national culture, religious background, gender experience, sexual experience, travel experience, etc. to their reading. Therefore, realism for one reader is different than realism for another. In Jungian terms, while there are culturally recognizable archetypal images and symbols, each specific image and symbol has its own much more particular meaning for any one individual. In fact, Jung believed that it was not possible to decode an individual’s relationship to their own symbolism until extensive personal history and background had been fully understood. As writers, we don’t get to sit down with each reader and explore their background. We get to write from our experience and with a general sense of our audience’s experience in mind. If we all wrote the same way, from the same experience, and with the same sense of the symbolic, we would all have the same audience. Luckily, we don’t.

The written word, in fiction, is a guided meditation–a sort of hypnosis–in which the writer is the guide and the text is the voice the guide uses.

The reader begins with trust that allows them to slip into the illusion. In fact, the opening of a book is a ritual of trust. If the writer does nothing to violate that trust, readers allows themselves to be immersed in the experience. Once the writer violates the trust, the reader breaks free from the illusion.

Realism, in the case of Chris’s question, is a term that describes the reader’s ability to completely believe in the experience of the reading.

If the above is all true, which is debatable, then the mix of techniques employed by the writer interacts with the set of experiences and expectations of the reader to create a completeness of belief—a feeling of realism.

So far, none of what I have said is particularly helpful to a writer attempting to place little black squiggles on a white background and call it a story. Execution is very different from theory. However, the above is important to understand in terms of background for what follows.

Here’s a piece of the execution side of realerism.

For me, and I stress that this is a description of my experience, the sense of the piece being “a piece of fiction” lingering in the background results from slight violations to my sense of immersion as a result of character depth, timing, and attributions. This is a fairly simplistic description, but those three things can be used as categories for larger and more complex subjects. However, it is important to keep in mind that many more factors can influence the reader’s belief in the fictive dream. For example, I won’t be talking about objective correlative, clinching details, telling details, concrete imagery, and many other things.

Traditionally, narrative immersed in character experience is called “close subjective narrative.” Personally, I prefer the more descriptive phrase, “reader experiencing through the character filter.” What I mean by that is that every moment and everything in the story within the perception of character is selected and interpreted based on character psychology, physiology, social history, emotion, and agenda. That experience and observation is grounded in the sensory and reactionary experience of the character.

You can say:

He felt the warmth of the sun on his cheek and wondered why she had left so abruptly. No matter. He would find her that evening at her mother’s house and prove his love.

Note that the character in question has a sensory experience. He has emotion, curiosity followed by determination. He considers and decides. The lines can be mapped to the ED part of ED ACE. The character has an Emotion that drives a Decision.

Aside: For people not familiar with ED ACE, it is an acronym for an emotional logic cycle that often functions in the mind of the reader as they experience story: Emotion drives Decision, which results in Action, which initiates Conflict, which results in a new Emotion. The new Emotion initiates the next cycle. I’m sorry, but I don’t have space here to provide a more detailed exposition of the concept and how it can be used and abused.

However, the sun on the character’s face may not have anything to do with his deeper psychology and emotion. Consequently, the reader will feel that he is false–not real—because he is paying attention to something that violates the reader’s internal sense of who that character is and how they “would” behave in this moment. Additionally, he is “feeling” the sun, which means that the reader is not in his skin experiencing the world through him. This creates another level of distance that is “unreal.”

Here’s a revision of the lines. This time, I’m making the world something that is experienced through the selection caused by his truer emotion and interpreted from the perspective of his specific psychology and emotional state.

He had loved the summer sun warming his cheeks when they had played on Aunt Sophie’s beach as a children, but this sun, the sun of the midland forests, was an insult to life and love. This heat in his cheeks raised his hackles and made unwelcome goose flesh crawl up his arms.

He abandoned their driftwood bench, rejecting any place where she had turned her cold cheek to him. Heading through the forest toward the parking lot, he kicked through the fern-choked undergrowth, imagining himself a god striding through delicate ice castles in her heart. The crack and slap of each frond was another wall falling, another defense against him dying.

She could not hide her heart from a god. Tonight. Tonight at her mother’s house he would make her understand his love.

Okay, what has happened is that every object in the experience of the character has taken on significance to him in the context of the emotional experience he is living through. A small amount of back story created contrast between an earlier life innocent state and a current obsessive, tainted state.

This is what I mean by depth of character. Every detail that is selected, recognized, interpreted, and experienced by character is a result of the character’s psychology and their emotional state and agenda in that moment of the story.

Strained Example: Given the above character in setting, consider how the reader would respond to the following.

He had loved the summer sun warming his cheeks when they had played on Aunt Sophie’s beach as a children, but this sun, the sun of the midland forests, was an insult to life and love. The white sand back then had been a mystery, and he had more than once set out to count all the grains on the beach. Once, he had even tried to take a bucket of sand in to the kitchen table so he could count grains while it was raining outside. Of course, nobody had helped him at the time, and his mother had gotten angry. Luckily, his sister had been willing to help him clean up the mess. Now, the heat in his cheeks raised his hackles and made unwelcome goose flesh crawl up his arms.

He abandoned their driftwood bench, rejecting any place where she had turned her cold cheek to him. Kicking through the fern-choked undergrowth, he imagined himself a god striding through the ice castles in her heart. The crack and slap of each frond was another wall falling, another defense against him dying. Each fern matched his sense of order in the way that fiddleheads and fronds confirmed nature’s use of the Fibonacci sequence. It would have been good to sit down and unwind a few fiddleheads just to count the curls and see the numbers and symmetry. He supposed that he wouldn’t be able to explain that to a poet or a songwriter, but what did he care about people like that?

She could not hide her heart from a god. Tonight. Tonight at her mother’s house he would make her understand his love.

In this example, the reader’s sense of character is either strained or broken because the interpretation of the images contradict one another in terms of their support for his emotional state and psychology. Because they are not quite resonant, they also create a violation in the reader’s sense of timing. Even though a case could be made that the passage on Fibonacci reinforces his obsessive nature, such a passage strains the reader’s sense of belief in how he “should” think and behave if he is experiencing the suggested emotions.

Now, a few words about timing.

Each genre has expectations. Story is story, but the mix of techniques for rendering story changes from genre to genre. On a more subtle level, the mix of technique also changes from writer to writer. Timing is a function of the way in which the writer provides narrative content, character experience, conflict, and detail. When the timing is right, the reader never considers the components of story in any way. When the timing is off, the reader becomes aware of the words and how they are organized on the page. While the writer can manipulate timing, they cannot control the reader’s sense of how the timing should be managed.

Have you ever heard someone say, “Once I got used to the language, I was able to read (insert classical author name here).” For me, that’s an apt description of how I feel when I read Tolstoy, Jane Austin, or Henry James. I have to get used to the rhythm of the narrative and the movement of narrative distance in and out of character experience. I have to get used to the flow of the syntax that was used at the time the tale was written. Only after I choose to spend some time reading such stories do I relax into the experience of the worlds they render for me.

Consider if in the passages above the character had, in addition to considering fiddleheads and Fibonaci, waxed poetic on the carpet of fall leaves beneath the ferns and the way in which some were already damp and rotted while others were caught in fern fronds as if immune to the natural mortality of the earth and the cycle of life. Imagine if he had moved from that little internal essay into an assessment of his own relationship to the woman in question and how she wanted him to be a damp, moldering leaf while she remained green, and full of life on the tree as if the coming winter were a mere inconvenience. . ..

This type of introspection might function well for one type of reader. They might consider it quite wonderful and part of the realism of the psychology of the character. Another reader (me, for instance) might consider it overwritten crap that gets in the way of the truer, more terse interior truth of character. For me, the timing would suck, and I would stop reading after one or two passages like that.

Interestingly, however, I would not stop listening if the book were in audio form and the reader were accomplished. Different input experiences create different tolerances.

In the timing category, issues of presented detail during the Decision in the ED ACE cycle and narrative overburdening of the E tend to be where problems demonstrate themselves. In fact, in terms of ED ACE, the decision is often implied by emotion and context in order to manage timing and not violate the reader’s sense of realism.

Timing problems also often result from inconsistency in how the E and D moments are handled. If the character is prone to the poetics described above, the writer has to be careful to make sure that the poetics occur when action, conflict, and emotion are equal in tension and speed. When, for instance, action is frantic, the poetics will disappear to an extent. In a moment of peace prior to a reversal, the poetics might go on for a while in order to create the idyllic lull that will be violated by the coming plot turn.

So, what about attributions? Most writers develop a sense of when to, and when not to, use dialog attributions (he said, she said). If at all possible, I like to allow scene business, character action, diction, and dialog implications to provide attribution. These techniques help keep the reader in the experience of the dialog. Of course, it is not likely that a writer will get rid of all dialog attribution.

In the same way, sensory attributions are occasionally necessary. Example of sensory attribution:

He felt the heat of the sun on his cheek.

He felt, saw, heard, tasted, wondered, etc….

All of these are sensory attributions.

A common error in developing writers is constantly, and without reason, narrating at a level outside character. One of the markers for that type of narration is sensory attribution. If “he felt the heat,” then the narrator is watching him feel it, which means the reader is experiencing it second hand through someone telling them about it. Refer back to the second passage above in order to see how the “felt” got replaced with direct experience and interpretation that was more true to character psychology, desire, and immediate experience.

These sensory attributions are, at times, necessary. However, text that relies entirely on them always “feels like fiction.” In addition, scenes that only allow the reader to “see” the scene and not to smell it, hear it, feel it, taste it, and have an emotional sense of the ambiance also cause the reader to feel outside the reality of the story.

So, text that evokes the heart, history, and physical experience of character while managing timing and avoiding reminders that the story in the mind of the reader is actually coming from text on the page tends to “feel more real.” Of course, how real depends on the skill of the writer and the mix of personal characteristics and expectations that the reader brings to the text.

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