PULP! Hugo the rat.

Nothing really from me today, mainly because I saw this excellent post by Nathan over at Castalia House. It’s a fascinating read, and well worth ten minutes of anyone’s life to read.
Enjoy!

Hugo the Rat

Purple Prose, by Ian Thomas Healy

There are always holes in a writers skill set, and writing action sequences was definitely one of mine. I’d get cold sweats at the thought of writing the damned things, and they always came out in a horrid porridge-like mess. It was like my protagonists were walking through molasses, and although swords were swung and guns were fired there was no snap, no fizz of a good rollicking fight scene.
Which is where Ian Thomas Healy and his excellent book Action! came in. It didn’t solve all my problems, let’s face it, no book ever will, but it did provide some answers, and at the end of the day that’s all you can really ask for isn’t it? Below are his thoughts on the dreaded Purple Prose, and yes, this is a terrible sin of mine, and I make no bones about it!

PURPLE PROSE
We’re all writers, and we love words. It can be tempting to reach into one’s thesaurus to come up with beautiful and unusual words to perfectly capture the essence of our intent. Unfortunately, there’s no place for this in an action scene. Overwriting drags the pace of a scene down to a crawl as the reader has to try to follow the flow of action through a muddle of rich language. Along the same lines is the problem of the odd word choice. You may love the word conflagration, but a typical reader may not know it also means fire. I’m not saying don’t use rich language at all, but if a reader doesn’t know a word, it’s like hitting a roadblock as they look at it, go “Huh?” and have to deduce its meaning from the language around it.

Healy, Ian Thomas. Action! Writing Better Action Using Cinematic Techniques

PULP! The importance of characters, by Marion B Cockrell.

Characterisation used to terrify me, mainly because I found myself writing the same one over and over again. Two dimensional and more than a little Mary-Sueish, a stage perhaps that all writers go through on their journey. Good advice is hard to find, most of it next to useless, so when you find something that really makes you think … good days!
With that in mind, I never tire of reading wisdom passed down from those who worked in the Pulp Era. These guys and gals wrote to put food on the table, to excite and entertain their readers and they did so with skill and talent. Marion Cockrell’s essay in
Bryce Beattie’s collection of articles is an excellent primer on the subject, proving that good advice ALWAYS ages well.

In writing any kind of story it is important to remember that in fiction nothing is important except in relation to the people it happens to. Anything can be important if it happens to, or is done by, the right person. If a writer has a character, or characters, who are interesting and unusual personalities, they can go through the most commonplace actions and incidents, and hold the reader’s interest completely. Or an unusual or exciting plot can be written about the most ordinary run-of-the-mill people, and if they are real and alive they can produce an absorbing story merely by their reactions to an unusual situation.

Beattie, Bryce. Pulp Era Writing Tips. (Available from Amazon for a very reasonable price)

What is the purpose of a scene, by Larry Brooks.

Learning to write has been a real journey for me. I was a typical rookie; I thought I knew everything when in reality I knew very little at all. Structure was a surprise to me, and Larry Brook’s trio of excellent books, Story Engineering, Story Physics and Story Fix really drive home just how important it is. Now I have no beef with either pantsers or plotters, I can see the pros and cons of both ways of writing. Honestly, I suspect that most writers are a combination of the two anyway. That being said, structure is inescapable, ignore it and you always, always end up in a mess. At the heart of structure is the humble scene, and here Brooks gives valuable insight into what you need to get across.

… every scene needs to deliver a piece of story information, also known as exposition. A scene that merely describes a place, or even something about a particular character, yet nothing really ever happens in the scene—no decision, no information, no action, no change or forward motion to the story whatsoever—the scene violates one of the most basic and empowering of storytelling principles. Every scene has a mission to accomplish. Or it should have. And that mission—in addition to lovely descriptive language about setting and place—is to move the story forward. Not to take a snapshot of it. That said, here’s the golden little secret that is rarely spoken aloud, and just as rarely broken: each scene should contain only one such piece of exposition. The mission of each scene is to deliver a single, salient, important piece of story to the reader.

Brooks, Larry. Story Engineering (p. 233). F+W Media. Kindle Edition.

 

PULP! Giving the audience what they want, by James Scott Bell.

I started reading JSB round about the time I was getting serious about the craft of writing, once I realized that if I wanted to be good at it I needed a better grasp of both the basics and the more ‘advanced’ aspects of it. JSB is a great place to start, covering most of the ground a new writer needs when he’s setting out on this adventure, and he’s easily available both on the net and in the bookstore.

I’m sometimes asked how to keep plot and structure from devolving into formulaic writing. My answer is similar to what (Tobias) says above. You don’t cook an omelet with a watermelon. If I want an omelet, I want it made with eggs in a pan with some ingredients and spices. What those add-ons are and how they are proportioned make up the distinctiveness—the originality if you will—of the dish. In the same way, eggs are the basis of the formula. It’s what readers expect from a story. They don’t want to be confused or frustrated. Of course, an author is free to write experimental fiction, which is also known by its unofficial name, Fiction That Doesn’t Sell. But if you’re in this game to make some dough, you’ll use familiar ingredients but you’ll spice them up with your unique brand of characterization, dialogue, and voice.

Bell, James Scott. How to Write Pulp Fiction (pp. 40-41).

Writing advice from The Hulk! that you never knew you needed.

I love craft books, I’m always looking for that little piece of advice that I can use to make my own stories better. I came across this one by accident, while researching five-act instead of three-act structure. ‘Hulk’ had some great points where that’s concerned! (A big thank you to @DaddyWarpig for pointing me in his direction.)  Below is a piece of advice that really resonated at the time, I hope it will for you too.

A story is a multifaceted thing. If you want to structure your story, remember to have both act structure for the main plot and act structure for each of your characters’ personality developments. By having all these varying structures, each with their own beats, with each character making active decisions, it creates a constant sense of moving forward for your movie. That’s why they call it “development,” as it is the key to bringing your audience along for the journey.

FILM CRIT HULK. Screenwriting 101 by Film Crit Hulk! 

Jack Ketchum-Empathy

I discovered Jack Ketchum late, just a couple of years ago in fact. I read Crossings first, and then everything else of his that I could get my hands on, the man could really tell a tale and tell it so that the truth came out of it wholesale. His secret?
See below.

But I think it’s impossible to really know another person fully no matter how close you are. There are always places in the heart and mind you’re never going to reach. But what you can reach and must reach is into yourself, where that character you’re creating exists somewhere. And that’s what empathy’s all about. If you can’t empathize, if you can’t or aren’t willing to put yourself into someone else’s place with all the compassion and insight you can muster—to find their character through your own character—you have no business calling yourself a fiction writer.

Jack Ketchum

Horror 101: Making Contact