Kelly McCullough

Something I’ve read recently has me thinking about a writer’s sense of space. The scenes in the piece range from OMFG perfect! to Why is this writer who is so good at this really difficult stuff over there having such trouble with this simple stuff over here?”

I have a working hypothesis on what’s going on and it looks like this: The writer has an as yet incompletely developed sense of narrative space.

I’m going to throw down a principal here and I’m not sure if it’s going to generate argument, because I don’t think I’ve ever talked about it with other writers outside the context of writing combat. Which is a serious weirdness, when I think about how much time I’ve spent talking writing over the past 15 years.

Spatial Sense:

By the end of any scene, no matter how complex it si, the writer must know exactly what the space of the scene looks like from the POV character’s perspective and where everyone is in that space and all of their movements during the scene.

Because, if the writer doesn’t know that, they’re not going to be able to show the reader, and the chances are very good that the reader will get lost. Or worse, the writer will get lost. You don’t have to know it all going into the scene. You can be surprised: Oh, I didn’t realize there was a window there. You can not know things the POV character doesn’t know: How did Johnny end up over there with a broken neck, if they’re not critical to the reader’s understanding of the story and the POV character never does find out how Johnny broke his fool neck. But if it matters at all to the story, you need to know it.

There are a lot of ways to do this:

1) Simple substitution like this is a duplicate of Granny Helen’s parlor in terms of shape and furniture placement. That way you know that when Hero Protagonist punches aunt Hilda in the nose, she’s going to fall and break that little chintzy end table you always hated. This also works on a larger scale like the manor house is identical to that place we took so many pictures of in Perthshire, only it’s on the Royal mile in the imaginary town of “Bipnreoip” which is by pure coincidence an exact replica of Edinburgh with all the names changed. Or for battles, such that every major troop movement mimics the patterns of the battle of Waterloo.

2) Making it up and keeping all of the pieces straight in your head. This is mostly what I do. By sheer happenstance one of the most valuable courses of my entire college career was stage combat, in which I spent a great deal of time learning multi-combatant combat choreography. If I’d stayed in theater it would have been useful. As a writer, it’s been absolutely priceless.

Why? Because it taught me how to keep very close track of the movements of multiple people through a very complex series of actions in a defined space. In combat choreography you have to know not just what everyone is doing but also how it looks from multiple angles, so that you can make punches that never connect with their target look absolutely devastating from the audience’s POV. Since we learned combat for proscenium arch, thrust, round, and street theater, this meant a lot of thinking about sight-lines and three-dimensional space. We even had to learn to create our own system of notation for tracking fights so that we could reliably recreate the scene later. Fantastically useful for a writer, though I no longer actually use the notation.

3) Simulation creating a scale model of the scene and moving figures through it physically or electronically. This can be as simple as drawing an appropriately shaped outline on a piece of paper, sketching in the rough position of the furniture, and then moving Monopoly tokens around so that you know where people are. It can be more elaborate lead miniatures in a three dimensional model, or articulated dolls of some sort that can be posed. You could even do the whole thing with wire frame figures on a computer.

How doesn’t matter. What does matter is that you the writer understand what happens in the space you create for the scene before the reader sees it. If you don’t know the way it is, how will you ever convince them?
(Originally published on the Wyrdsmiths blog February 9 2009, and original comments may be found there. Reposted and reedited as part of the reblogging project)

So, in the open thread Love Pickles asked: How would you advise an amateur writer who mainly writes poetry and journals, and while proud of it, it’d be nice to venture into new territory. I thoroughly love writing, but dialog and the process of character development is a little intimidating to me. I think it’d be a cool challenge to push myself further with writing, and am absolutely fine if it never goes anywhere.

Which is a fascinating question. I know how I started, which was pretty much, hey I have this shiny new computer, what can I do with it? I know, I’ll write a book. Then I leapt. But that’s not a terribly helpful prescription for anyone else. Sean had one good suggestion down at the end of that thread. After thinking about it in more depth I can think of a number of others. I’ll put one out there now.

I tend to start with an idea for a place or piece of magic. If you’re not writing f&sf, that latter’s not as useful, but stick with me for a little bit. On that front, think of something you’d really like to know more about. It can be something you already enjoy, or something you’ve always wanted to do or see but never got around to. The key is that it’s something you’d really like to spend some time with.

Go, take a look at your thing. Think about something that might happen there. It can be as simple as the meal you’d like to cook in the really great kitchen you don’t own with the ingredients you can’t afford. Build a scenario for whatever the idea is that runs from start to finish. If there’s only one person, add another so the two can talk about what’s happening. Spend some time building a little opening dialogue for the scene. Make sure to give yourself enough to really get a feel for the beginning of this cool thing that’s happening. Write it all down.

Got it? Good. Now imagine something going wrong. If you want a small domestic kind of story it can be a minor problem. The pilot light in the kitchen scene won’t start. If you’re writing epic fantasy, maybe this is the time for you to discover that the real gas source for the stove is a not very happy baby dragon whose really unhappy mom is about to arrive to set things right. The exact problem doesn’t matter. What matters is that it’s a problem you can work with.

How does the problem change the scene? What do your characters do and say? Are they calm? Do they unravel under stress? Spend some time thinking about it. Go ahead and start writing, but don’t finish it yet.

Why? Because they’re going to fail in that first attempt and you need to figure out how, and how they’re going to overcome the failure. Now, that may lead to another failure, or the solution of the overarching problem, or to something that solves a different problem entirely, perhaps one that’s been exposed by the way they deal with failure. Again, the specifics don’t matter. What matters is the way the characters are transformed or fail to be transformed by their interaction with the problem.

Figure that out, write it down, type “the end,” and you’ve got a story. Or, if it doesn’t end, if the problem builds into another and you want to keep following it, maybe you’ve got the opening chapter of a novel. Whatever you’ve got, hopefully you had fun getting there and will want to try another go.

Another approach for a poet might be to take something that you’ve already written that has a core story that interests you and expand it out into a short story.

You’ll probably find that writing the story is less work than writing the poem was. For me a good poem takes a week’s work and might run 200 words. A short story will probably take the same week and come in around 5,000 words. Or I can write 10,000-12,000 words on a novel in the same time.

(Originally published on the Wyrdsmiths blog February 7 2009, and original comments may be found there. Reposted and reedited as part of the reblogging project)

So, I’ve noticed something over the past few years. The differential in difficulty between editing my own stuff and editing other people’s has shifted radically.

It used to be that I found it much easier to look objectively at someone else’s words and make useful suggestions than to see the holes in my own sentences and stories. Now, I find the reverse is true. Not because editing other people has gotten harder—if anything it’s simpler now—but because editing myself has gotten much easier. There are two reasons for that.

The first is that I’ve gotten more objective about my work, more able to see the flaws, particularly at the sentence and paragraph level. I suspect that’s partially because my eye has gotten better, but mostly because I suck less in general and so the rough patches stand out more.

The second reason is that I can be utterly merciless with myself. I don’t have to make suggestions, or gently bring issues to the attention of the writer. I can just fix the damn things and move on without spending time on polite. I can scrap hundreds of words at a go without feeling the least bit like I’ve killed somebody’s brain child.

The funny thing about the realization is that it happened when I was editing two pieces of professional-quality writing.

(Originally published on the Wyrdsmiths blog February 6 2009, and original comments may be found there. Reposted and reedited as part of the reblogging project)