craft of writing

Said-bookisms are crutches…right?

December 22, 2021 by Cameron Montague Taylor Leave a Comment

“I just read an article about writing dialogue and it said the only tags you should use should be said, replied, or asked. Anything else makes you look like an amateur. Do you agree with this?”

Pause.

Rewind.

There are two vitally important things we should recognize when reading a question like this on the bird app:

By virtue of being on the bird app, the question is snappy to the point it loses its utility. No, of course an author won’t look like an amateur for using a single ‘shouted’ tag in an 80k novel.
Always/never writing advice is reductive to the point of absurdity.

So, do I ‘agree with this’ statement? Yes. But also no.

Let me explain.

What are said-bookisms?

Said-bookisms are dialogue tags that identify the speaker and, usually, how the speaker delivers their line. Compare this with standard dialogue tags, which exist only to clarify the identity of the speaker.

To define said-bookisms, however, it’s easier to list what they’re not. While there’s some debate about whether only ‘said’ is an acceptable tag, I think the following three tags fall outside the said-bookism category:

said + asked + replied

In other words, said-bookisms are alternatives to the three most common dialogue tags, ‘said’ in particular. Writers often feel pressure to write anything other than said, either because ‘said’ becomes repetitive in the text, or because they’ve made the rounds on writers’ blogs and read somewhere the ‘said is dead’. Thus, they reach for more interesting alternatives to avoid using the same tag over, and over, and over again.

Here are some common examples of said-bookisms:

100 Colorful Words to use in place of "said". The chart includes words such as: advised, agreed, bragged, bawled, denied, fretted, barked, hissed, muttered, lied, and wondered.

What’s wrong with said-bookisms?

Many said-bookisms are considered a type of purple prose. When overused, they describe the stage directions in our writing with too much detail or melodrama. Writers who hear that ‘said is dead’ or fear they’re overusing ‘said’ as a dialogue tag tend to lean too much on said-bookisms as a solution. But the truth is, said bookisms don’t solve our dialogue tagging problems. They create different problems.

Let me first add a caveat:

There will be times when a writer will, consciously and intentionally, choose a said-bookism for a particular line of dialogue. This is fine. As with all things, it’s the overuse of said-bookisms that weakens our writing. Too many, and our readers focus more on our tags than our dialogue.

“Said-bookisms tell the reader it’s vital they pay attention to how lines of dialogue are delivered—and thus, their inclusion can pull the reader out of the story.”

Said-bookisms distract and detract from the prose.

More often than not, said-bookisms detract from the prose instead of adding to it. Words like ‘said/asked/replied’ are invisible cues—they tell the reader who spoke and help the reader keep track of what’s going on without intruding into the story. Said-bookisms, on the other hand, draw the reader’s attention to the author’s word choice. They tell the reader it’s vital they pay attention to how lines of dialogue are delivered—and thus, their inclusion can pull the reader out of the story.

Said-bookisms will always catch a reader’s eye. Thus, their overuse breaks immersion—the ultimate kiss of death for a writer.

But wait, doesn’t using said, said, said break immersion, too?

It can.

“That’s not what I meant,” she said.
“Oh yeah? Then what did you mean?” he asked.
“Now you’re being a jerk. You never trust me,” she said.
“I never trust you? Maybe because you always lie to me,” he said.

^That is objectively terrible dialogue. But the overuse of ‘said’ isn’t the disease; the structure of the dialogue itself is. Changing out ‘said’ for less repetitive words doesn’t cure a structural issue. Instead, it adds a second problem into the mix.

“That’s not what I meant!” she exclaimed.
“Oh yeah? Then what did you mean?” he demanded.
“Now you’re being a jerk. You never trust me,” she cried.
“I never trust you? Maybe because you always lie to me,” he hissed.

While there’s more visual interest to these lines and said-bookisms do give the reader cues re: tone and delivery, this is the equivalent of slapping a colorful band-aid on a gaping flesh wound. It’s distracting, but it won’t stop the bleeding.

If ‘said’ feels dead in our prose, it’s because our prose is the problem.

So when are said-bookisms appropriate?

There are going to be times when we as writers really want to use “shouted/growled/hissed” for stylistic purposes. How do we know when leaning on said-bookisms is appropriate? First, let’s get on the same page by identifying scenarios in which a said-bookism is almost always a poor choice.

The image reads: Ron ejaculated loudly. "Ron!" Hermione moaned.

Need I say more?

Look, I’m aware that most writers aren’t quite so egregious offenders and stick with words like “commanded, whispered, spat”. (Most writers also aren’t TERFs who weaponize their massive platforms to further their bigoted ends, either). That said, these two lines of dialogue do a fine job of showing us several Nos of said-bookism use.

For me, inappropriate said-bookism use falls into one of four categories:

The thesaurus

Why use a fancy synonym (ejaculated) when a much simpler one would do? Whenever we’re tempted to pick up a thesaurus for a better way to say ‘said/asked/replied’, we ought to ask ourselves why.

Do we feel the need to Elevate Our Prose? This isn’t the way to do it—not when the end result is confusing, or when the full meaning of the word doesn’t quite fit the situation. Worse still, nothing pulls the reader out of the narrative quite like ‘ejaculated’.

Are we concerned about overusing simpler dialogue tags? Remember, dialogue problems require structural solutions (we’ll get to them)—not a double-down with an out-there tag.

Adverbial tags

JKR used an adverbial tag with “ejaculated loudly,” which… no.

But let’s say she didn’t reach for the thesaurus and used a much more reasonable adverbial tag like “said loudly.” Why not show the reader how the line is delivered instead of telling them? Ron can slam a door, pound his fist on the table, stand bolt upright with jaw agape.

While I don’t think we should strike all adverbs from our writing, their use should raise a yellow flag for our editorial brains. Did we use the adverb where a stronger verb would do? If so, let’s make the switch.

Just… don’t switch it to ‘ejaculate,’ please.

That word. It does not mean what you think it means.

Here’s the thing about said-bookisms: verbs tend to have secondary meanings or colloquial usage that will confuse readers.

“Ron,” Hermione moaned.

…interesting choice.

As readers, we logically know JKR meant ‘complained,’ which she’d use far more commonly than an American English speaker. That said, words like moan, groan, and ejaculate have unintended consequences when used for dialogue tags. Unless the situation and delivery are ultra-clear, they do nothing but muddy our prose.

Remember: a dialogue tag’s primary purpose is to add clarity. Some said-bookisms do anything but.

How is that even possible?

One of the biggest editorial complaints about said-bookisms lies in their physical impossibility. This includes common tags like ‘wept, fumed, smiled’ and more inventive ones like ‘husked’.

What’s wrong with those?

How do you weep words? How do you fume them? What is this, a séance?

You can’t smile words, either, though you can smile while speaking. And holy wow, don’t get me started on husked. What are we, shucking corn for the clam bake? No.

If our characters perform these actions while speaking, that’s fine. Including them in our prose is great, even! But we must do so with action tags, not dialogue tags. An example:

No

“You look more and more like your mother every day,” her father smiled.

Yes

“You look more and more like your mother every day.” Her father smiled.
“You look more and more like your mother every day,” her father said, smiling.

See the difference? Remember: a dialogue tag’s purpose is to clarify the speaker—not to tell the reader what the speaker is doing while delivering that line of dialogue. Those tags must be kept separate.

Despite this, the ‘said-is-dead’ community lives on.

At this point, I hope we’ve established that new writers ought to treat said-bookisms like adverbs. They’re crutch words that prevent us from developing our prose to a higher level, which is why the writing community cautions beginners to avoid them until they’re more comfortable tagging dialogue.

I’ve also seen editors bat statistics around and claim said-bookisms and other non-standard dialogue tags should account for less than 20% of all tags. (Read: tags, not dialogue as a whole.) Granted, if you quote that rule of thumb on the internet, someone will hop into your mentions to inform you that “YOU MUST HATE F. SCOTT FITZGERALD, THEN” to which I’d like to make the following point:

Literary conventions change with time. This is one of the conventions that has changed. There are many incredible classics that wouldn’t be published today because of stylistic change over time, and that’s okay. We’ve been there. We’ve done that. Time to move on.

Authors of the past, present, and future can, have, and will overuse said-bookisms. That doesn’t mean it’s a good idea.

While preparing to write this blog post, I also encountered a twitter comment thread that started: “BUT MY SIXTH-GRADE TEACHER SAID—”

Yes, I’m sure their sixth-grade teacher did. But their teacher aimed to help a middle-schooler write within the conventions of the genre and age category they read at the time. Middle Grade, YA, and Adult fiction all have different stylistic standards. Ditto Romance and Literary Fiction. Said-bookisms are way, way more tolerated in MG than Adult SFF. As writers, we must know our audience.

My least-favorite argument in favor of said-bookism usage is: “BUT I JUST READ AN ADULT ROMANCE ON AMAZON LAST YEAR THAT—”

Was the book self-published, or trad-published?

I’m a banner-waving, card-carrying fan of self-publishing, but let’s not call a spade anything but a spade: self-publishing is expensive, and many authors skip stages of editing that trad-published books always go through. Sometimes, skipping editing comes around to bite them—but not always. An author who hits the market with a fabulous idea at just the right time can do well in self-publishing without professional copy or line editing.

Some authors are pretty darn good at proofing their own work, so this doesn’t necessarily mean the aforementioned Adult Romance was littered with errors. However, I think it’s safe to say that said-bookisms are only ‘making a stylistic comeback’ in spheres where books aren’t required to go through rigorous rounds of edits before showing up for public consumption.

“There are few hard-and-fast rules in tagging dialogue, and even fewer ‘this always works’ or ‘this never works’.”

Alternatives to said-bookisms

Whenever a segment of dialogue gives me trouble, I break down my potential ‘fixes’ into four different options. These are structural options at their heart, and being able to flip between them with facility gives dialogue the depth, breadth, and contributes to the veneer of realism we chase with our writing.

Why do I think in terms of structural options instead of rules? As I mentioned earlier in this post, there are few hard-and-fast rules in tagging dialogue, and even fewer “this always works” or “this never works”.

(Aside from ‘ejaculate’. For the love of god, let’s stop using ‘ejaculate’.)

Redundant tags and crutch words in dialogue are structural issues—thus, I try to think in terms of structural solutions when I’m writing. The standard advice when issues crop up is to leave dialogue untagged. Sometimes, simplicity is the way to go! Yet for me, a white-room-syndrome writer, untagged dialogue isn’t always the answer.

Let’s say our character has stormed across the room, positively seething, to ask the POV character, “did you just call me a liar?”

Here are four ways to structure this line of dialogue:

“Did you just call me a liar?”
- No tag. Context already implies the identity of the speaker.
“Did you just call me a liar?” he asked.
- Simple dialogue tag identifies the speaker.
“Did you just call me a liar?” he demanded.
- Said-bookism, but not an outlandish one. It identifies the speaker and how the line was delivered.
A vein pulsed in his temple. “Did you just call me a liar?”
- Action tag replaces a dialogue tag to identify the speaker, provide information on the delivery of the line, and give a visual cue.

Depending on the lines preceding and following the dialogue, some of these options are better than others. In this case, I’d actually say the standard dialogue tag of ‘asked’ is the weakest given the character’s emotional state. Now, if he were miffed rather than truly raging, ‘asked’ would work better than ‘demanded’. In this case, however, ‘demanded’ is fine—providing said-bookisms aren’t overpowering the rest of the scene.

The other options—no tag, action tag—are also strong candidates. Which of the four we pick, however, is all about context. What does the POV character see? What is the speaking character trying to express? What do we want to communicate to the reader? What do we absolutely need to communicate to the reader?

Depending on the beats surrounding the dialogue, the action tag might prove unnecessary. Or, perhaps there aren’t enough action tags/descriptions in the surrounding lines, and “A vein pulsed in his temple” brings visual interest to an otherwise sparse scene. Here lies the structural fix to the repetitive use of said—and a far more nuanced one than simply replacing ‘said’ with more colorful verbs, or striking every single said-bookism from our writing.

Said is not dead

In conclusion, no, said isn’t dead. Yet deviating from the standard tags ‘said, asked, replied’ won’t necessarily stamp our work as amateur. As with all things fiction writing, balance is paramount.

Do our word choices suit the needs of the story? That is the question we must ask when tagging our dialogue. Anything else simply feeds into a sensationalist social media cycle meant not to stimulate nuanced discussion, but to garner likes and retweets.

How do you tag your dialogue? Do you think ‘said is dead’? Let me know in the comments!

Epithets in Fiction

July 3, 2021 by Cameron Montague Taylor 1 Comment

Since the beginning of the summer, I’ve casually worked on a challenge called 100daysofwriting, posted daily by @the-wip-project on Tumblr. I don’t do the challenge daily–I dip in and out, occasionally answering prompts on my Pillowfort account–but one of their questions really got me.

What’s a pet peeve you have, that you try to do differently in your own work?

Um. EPITHETS, folks. Epithets.

There are loads of things I focus on when I’m writing, and to be fair, this doesn’t quite answer the question properly (because I no longer have to focus keeping epithets out of my writing, though I did at one time). But a “pet peeve” is by definition a small thing, not a big one, so I don’t want to throw down one of my Top Three like 1) pacing or 2) overwriting or 3) believable ethical conflicts.

No. It’s the epithets for me today.

Whatever kind of fiction you write, if you’ve ever ended up with two same-gendered characters in the same room and struggled to figure out how to let the reader know who you’re referring to every time you write ‘she said,’ this one’s for you.

Wait, so what are epithets?

For anyone unaware of what I mean when I say epithets: I mean the title / descriptor by which a character is known — one that doesn’t involve their name, often preceded by the article “the”.

ie: “the soldier” / “the young man” / “the doctor” / “the tall girl”

Obviously, there are characters who will only go by epithets, and that’s okay in certain circumstances, like when the POV character doesn’t know their name, or wouldn’t feel comfortable calling them by their name. This is often the case with royalty, doctors, people of high rank… epithets are super useful when they cue the reader into a power imbalance or other unique interpersonal dynamic.

Why the hate on epithets, then?

Because the place epithets are most commonly BUT SHOULD NEVER be used…

…is to escape the Gay Pronoun Problem.

Have two dudes in a scene together? Don’t want to call them by their given names (let’s say Dan and Josh) for 2k straight words? “He” isn’t clear enough because both of them ID as male? Just refer to them by other attributes! Dan is “the blonde,” “the wizard,” “the taller man,” and Josh is “the brunette,” “the soldier,” “the stocky man.”

What could go wrong?

What goes wrong is this: at no point in your life have you ever thought of one of your friends as “the stocky man” in your head, nor would you ever narrate a conversation with one of your friends that way.

So if we’re in Josh’s POV and all of Dan’s dialogue is tagged ‘said the blonde’ and ‘the wizard replied’ and ‘the taller man shouted’… instead of telling me something important about the relationship dynamic between Josh and Dan, the narrative does the exact opposite. It tells me Josh is so unfamiliar with Dan that he won’t refer to Dan by either his 1) given name or 2) his simple pronoun. Which is untrue, out of character, and (honestly?) weird.

Epithets break immersion and do the story a disservice.

And don’t even get me started on when they’re used in sex scenes.

Solving the Gay Pronoun Problem

There are a few technical solutions to the GPP. Clarity of prose is a craft-level skill, which is why I suspect epithets are a crutch used primarily by new writers (I certainly used them when I first started writing!). This kind of clarity has also become a subconscious habit in the intervening years. That said, I do have a handful of tips for making it clear who we’re writing about when there are two (or more) same-gender characters in a scene.

(These tips should also be helpful when writing characters who use they/them pronouns, which can get weedy in certain narrative contexts.)

I continue using their name or pronoun, even though I’ve been using it a lot.

Readers ignore names and pronouns (especially pronouns) more than you’d think. Unless the rhythm of the sentence results in a heavy prose echo, “he/she/they” is an invisible word, much the way “said” is when tagging dialogue.

If there’s a prose echo, I either rephrase the sentence, or delete it entirely. (I’m a stubborn overwriter, but years of beating my head against narrative walls has eventually helped me realize that, when something is impossible to phrase without sounding terrible, it usually means I don’t need to keep it in the story.)

I use paragraph breaks when I switch the focus to a different character.

In one paragraph, I’m talking about what Josh is thinking. Josh, therefore, is the subject of that paragraph, and “he” will refer to Josh. When I switch from internalizing to externalizing, and Josh starts describing what Dan is doing, I’ll use a paragraph break to make it clear that “he” could now refer to a different character in the room.

There’s only one ‘he’ in a scene.

Especially when two same-gender characters are interacting (ie: the scenario that puts the Gay in the Gay Pronoun Problem), I’ll call the POV character by their pronoun and the other character by their name. Obviously this isn’t a hard-and-fast rule. It’s not foolproof, and I don’t stick to it the whole time, but it does help the reader figure out who’s talking (or doing) by associating a shared pronoun with a single character.

tldr:

Epithets are for tombstones. Let’s keep it that way.

Looking for more content? Find me on Patreon!

Worldbuilder’s Disease: Devil’s in the Detail

June 3, 2021 by Cameron Montague Taylor Leave a Comment

Welcome back to my series on Worldbuilder’s Disease! If you’re looking for the other parts in the series, you can check out the first, second, third, or fourth posts right here on the AuthorShip.

Part five is all about how to incorporate worldbuilding details to enhance (rather than detract from!) our stories. Those of us with Worldbuilder’s Disease have often spent long, long tracts of time dreaming up everything about our world. Some of us have story bibles with thousands of words inside. The hardest thing for us to remember when getting started on the actual writing, however, is that these details don’t tell a story in and of themselves.

Worldbuilding =/= plot:

Setting isn’t plot. Or: epic worldbuilding does not a story make.

Setting doesn’t drive plot, either. Setting drives character, which drives plot. Our world isn’t the main attraction. Our characters are.

When readers open our books, they don’t have a reason to care about the mountain range we’ve built, or how that range is actually the spine of an ancient sleeping dragon.

I mean, that’s a super cool detail, but how does it impact the characters?

Beware irrelevant worldbuilding details

If the sleeping mountain dragon doesn’t impact the plot, but is a cool idea we really want to mention in-story, a little yellow flag should wave somewhere in the back of our minds. While there is wiggle room for irrelevant, but cool in SFF, only so many of these details can make it onto the page before we stop enriching our setting and start detracting from our story.

The most important rule of irrelevant-but-cool is:

The more we describe something on-page, the more readers will think it’s an important part of our plot. Over-described but irrelevant details will ultimately frustrate our readers. They spend time learning and conceptualizing these details, expecting them to connect first to our characters, and then to the plot. If we never deliver on those connections, they’ll begin to lose faith in our ability as storytellers. This could have two possible outcomes:

Our readers succumb to information overload

Information overload—or an ultra-steep learning curve—is a common issue for SFF writers (and one I’m constantly grappling with, myself). Adding in too many irrelevant details will make it difficult for the reader to keep track of what’s going on. Frustrated, they may simply shut the book and walk away before reaching the “good parts”. And that’s the worst case scenario for a writer, isn’t it?

Our readers can’t see the forest for the trees

Even if readers stick with us through information overload, scatter-shotting our description across too many irrelevant details will make it hard for them to hold onto all of that information. At that point, they’ll start missing out on important details, too.

Failing to draw the reader’s eye to the plot-important worldbuilding details will create a foreshadowing problem. When the plot-twist comes, it will fail to hit, because we gave the reader too much irrelevant information for them to follow the main track of the plot.

How do we avoid these unfortunate outcomes? By limiting the number of irrelevant-but-cool details, and limiting the amount of time we spend describing those details. We ought to use our narrative space to draw the reader’s eye to the most important parts of our story: bits and pieces that will become increasingly relevant as time goes by.

So—how do we draw the reader’s eye to important worldbuilding details?

When worldbuilding impacts character

Let’s return to the example of the sleeping mountain dragon. Let’s say this mountain dragon will directly impact the protagonist—it’ll wake up and torch the protagonist’s village, killing most of their loved ones, and driving them on a vengeance quest.

Now we’re talking.

This is a major story event in which a worldbuilding/setting detail drives the character, which in turn drives the plot. This major story event will require setup/foreshadowing, but most of the specifics (where did the mountain dragon come from? Why did it come back to life now?) will only interest the reader after the protagonist’s village burns.

Thus, we must balance the worldbuilding details and how we distribute them to the reader. A handful of mentions of the mountain dragon range can come before the dragon returns to life. Think of these most important details as, again, the tip of our narrative iceberg. Everything under the surface can be discovered by the protagonist after the village burns, or, after the reader has skin in the game and wants to know more about the monster that killed our protagonist’s family.

To prologue, or not to prologue?

SFF writers often try to get around the infodump problem by including the history of the sleeping mountain dragon in a prologue. But prologues are an iffy choice.

While they often do an adequate job of foreshadowing and laying out the story’s main conflict, they also attach the reader to the wrong character—a character who is often long-dead by the time the real story starts. It shows too much detail. It crosses way past that iceberg boundary and explains history to the reader in a way that won’t matter to them until the protagonist’s town burns down, which doesn’t happen until chapter four.

The Great War that happened 1,000 years prior doesn’t matter until its legacy directly impacts our protagonist.

We must filter our details in order to expose what’s necessary, and use only the Necessary to motivate our characters and drive the current plot.

What are Necessary detals?

Worldbuilding is a bit like sending Indiana Jones into a booby-trapped ancient temple.

We understand what the ancient temple is. We have just enough backstory on the temple to know why Indy is going into it, and suspect that Bad Things Will Happen in the temple. What we don’t know is where all of the booby traps are, and what they’ll be like—until Indy trips over them.

In fact, none of those booby traps (read: worldbuilding details) are shown on-paper until Indy activates them.

If we were to write an Indiana Jones novel, we wouldn’t start the temple scene by writing “there’s a giant rolling ball, a pit of snakes, death knives, and poison spray between Indy and the Object He’s Looking For. There are also spiky gates, alligators, and a team of death-cult guards, but Indy won’t see any of those because he takes a different tunnel.”

For one thing, that’ll suck the tension right out of our story. For another, why does the reader care about the booby-traps Indy doesn’t encounter?

We find out about the booby-traps—aka, the worldbuilding details—because Indy sets them off, then has to wrangle his way out of them.

That’s what good worldbuilding looks like. We may have a story bible full of backstory, history, and magic, but the reader ought to only see what the protagonist steps on. Doing this creates the illusion, the knowledge, that we’re standing on the tip of a very large iceberg. We don’t need to see the rest of the iceberg to believe it’s there.

It also lets us reveal relevant details as they come up instead of throwing them at the reader all at once and hoping some of it sticks.

But how do we incorporate major worldbuilding details without infodumping?

Let’s return (again) to the dragon-mountain-range detail.

There are loads of plausible ways this sleeping dragon mountain range could impact our characters, and therefore impact our plot—and it doesn’t have to be the most dramatic (dragon burns the town down). I’ve picked the three most likely off the top of my head—three different reasons we decide the mountain range must be mentioned in-story:

We’ve already mentioned this one: the ancient sleeping mountain dragon is a legend, and one day this mountain dragon is going to awake.

In this case, we need to foreshadow that the dragon will awake. In order to decide how to spread our worldbuilding details, this is the question we must ask ourselves: prior to the dragon awakening, what does the reader need to understand?

There is a legend that the mountain range overlooking the village is actually a sleeping dragon.
At some indeterminate time in the past, that dragon rained fiery terror over the land.
People may or may not believe in and fear this legend.
In the days/weeks leading up to the dragon awakening, things aren’t quite right in the surrounding lands.

How can we expose those worldbuilding details without infodumping?

The protagonist or one of their relatives can tell a younger sibling to behave, or the mountain dragon will come to eat them.
A religious service could give a sacrifice to the sleeping dragon to appease it and keep it from raining fiery terror upon the land.
An older sibling looks at the dragon-shaped mountain range, scoffs, and says “that doesn’t even look like a dragon, that’s stupid”, but the protagonist feels icky about talking smack about the dragon.
Animals have started acting strange. There are sightings of dark things in the forests. Smoke has begun to rise from the place where the dragon’s nostrils would be.

The above examples are all ways that the dragon slowly coming back to life can be foreshadowed. Worldbuilding details are peeled away piece-by-piece in a way that compels and interests the reader, because these worldbuilding details are viewed through the protagonist’s eyes and delivered in a way that impacts the character personally.

These details also give just enough context that when the protagonist wakes in the middle of the night to screaming and their village lighting on fire, the reader knows immediately what happened. The reader might not understand why the dragon awoke, what the dragon wants, or how the protagonist will defeat it—and that’s okay. But we’ve drip-fed the reader enough information that they understand the protagonist’s terror and fear when they wake to an ancient mountain dragon’s attack.

We’ve walked the delicate balance between giving away too much information (thus boring and overwhelming the reader) and not giving away enough information (thus preventing the reader from understanding the context and stakes).

The ancient sleeping mountain dragon will never awake, but the range itself is a hint that dragons exist in this world.

In this case, the mountain range itself is foreshadowing for a plot-relevant event. Perhaps, in this case, the protagonist is fated to become a great dragon rider.

This is foreshadowing of a different kind, but the mechanics of foreshadowing would be very similar. This mountain is very important, these dragons are important, and they’ll be mentioned in passing multiple times.

Here, the mountain itself is the foreshadowing. We’re using the mountain to:

Put the idea of dragons in front of the reader.
Transmit lore about dragons or dragon riders.
Foreshadow that something big is about to happen to the protagonist.

How can we do that without infodumping?

The protagonist’s village celebrates a holiday honoring the Dragon Mother—the mountain from which all dragons were born.
The protagonist sneaks away from the village to get a closer look at the mountain and has a close encounter with a baby dragon.
The protagonist sees or senses something about the mountain that none of the other villagers can perceive.

These examples don’t foreshadow that the mountain itself is about to come back to life, but can transmit information about the world and foreshadow that something dragon-related is about to happen to the protagonist—which is why we’d include the detail of the dragon mountain in the first place. In this scenario, the dragon mountain drives the characters—to celebrate, to sneak away from the village, to question their reality. Thus, setting drives character, which drives plot.

The ancient sleeping mountain dragon will never awake, and dragons aren’t real, but the characters in this story superstitiously (or religiously) believe in dragons

This could be plot-relevant—especially if these belief systems get called into question, or cause conflict further on in the story. Why might we include mention of such a belief system?

To enrich our world by showing characters with a diversity of religious beliefs.
To create a storytelling tradition that allows characters to orally pass on pieces of their history and culture to young members (and thus, the reader).
To build a cultural or ideological conflict between characters.

And how might we show this diversity of belief?

The most important question we need to ask ourselves: does this diversity of belief directly impact the plot, or is it meant only to flesh out our setting and characters?

If the first is true, we’ll spend far more time ensuring our readers have an intimate understanding of how this belief system works—because knowledge of the system will help them understand the tension and stakes in future religious conflict. If the second is true, explanation becomes less important than passing description to build a vivid setting.

For example, if the practice of dragon-worship is plot relevant, we could explore it by:

Showing a religious ceremony.
Getting a window into our character’s religious life or holy studies.
Show an argument between our protagonist and someone with different beliefs.
Show a greater conflict that has taken on sociopolitical dimensions (ie: the hanging of a heretic in the square, discrimination against a minority population, etc.).

A plot-relevant practice of dragon worship would also touch on some of the following examples, which will enrich our setting and worldbuilding to make it feel real and unique. In other words, if dragon worship is plot relevant, we’ll use both types of examples, above and below. If it isn’t, we’d focus only on the examples below rather than the ones up ^there.

How to enrich our setting? (a handful of ideas)

Show a character praying.
Show how a character’s religion impacts their diet, clothing choice, and vocabulary.
Have the character interact with artwork or architecture reflective of society’s religious beliefs.
Show relics or items of worship in the character’s home.

Most importantly: we shouldn’t describe all of these at once. A world develops its richness when the reader experiences the character’s repeated interactions with their setting—not through hearing about these worldbuilding details as part of a long litany of descriptions in chapter one.

Remember Shroedinger’s Wyvern from previous posts? Readers will care about rituals of prayer, celebration, food, art, clothing, etc. inasmuch as they influence the daily life of our characters. Even if a protagonist’s religious beliefs don’t have much of a bearing upon our overall plot, they will show up as part of our character’s day-to-day life. Occasional mentions of time spent at prayer, in-universe swear words, or even introspective questioning of faith during difficult times are all ways for us to inject worldbuilding into our stories.

We can mention these setting-enriching details as our characters encounter them, but must resist the temptation to dump a page-long explanation of their religious beliefs when they first appear on the screen—an explanation that reads more like an encyclopedia entry than a story.

In conclusion

Those of us with worldbuilder’s disease have an incredibly broad and deep world to draw from as we write. The hardest thing for us, at a craft level, is editing—picking and choosing which details make it through to the page.

Our goal isn’t to shoehorn the entirety of our story bible into our narrative. Rather, our goal is to select which details to focus our readers’ attention upon in order to build the illusion of an immersive, real world.

This takes time (and practice!). It’s extremely rare to strike the right balance during the first draft. But in order to keep improving our craft, we must go through successive drafts with a critical eye and a creative mind, looking for ways to ground our worldbuilding details in the protagonist’s POV and show them to readers as part of an immersive setting—and not a laundry list of details they have no reason to care about.

Thanks for sticking through the whole of the series, friends! If you’re looking for more posts where I write about writing, you can check out the Craft of Writing category in the sidebar, or follow me on Patreon where I’ve begun the #100daysofwriting challenge. You can find all of those challenge posts right here.

Read more on Patreon! Find full novels, flash fiction, merch, artwork, livestreams, extended posts, and more by clicking this image or going to patreon.com/ceemtaylor .

Morning Pages: Tattoo

April 6, 2021 by Cameron Montague Taylor 5 Comments

Welcome to Morning Pages — it’s time for a monthly roundup. I hope you’ve got your pencils sharpened and ready to write. Wanna join in on the fun? Read the prompt, set your timer* and get ready to let the words flow. Feel free to post the results of your work in the comments below where we chat about writing and (if the mood strikes us) get a craft discussion going.

If you want critique from other commenters, use #YESTHANKS in your comment. Otherwise, you can tell us about the flash fic and the process you went through to write it. And of course, I’m always open to hear what you think about my excerpts!

*you can write for as long as you want, but most folks choose 15-30 minutes.

What I learned this month: My subconscious mind is plotting against me.

After my first three months of Morning Pages, I assumed future work would shake out to have a similar ratio; about half of my pages were in known universes (prior or future works of mine), while the other half were completely new. This month not only disrupted that ratio *hard* (all but two fics were in known universes), it went after much rarer characters — all of them from stories I have yet to write.

I know I’m ready to write a story when I start daydreaming about it. Eventually, I get to a point where my mind can’t hold onto all the little scenes I’ve played out like movies in my head, and I start to write — jotted notes, at first, just so I don’t forget what I’ve been picturing. Those notes become the scaffold for what eventually becomes a novel (or an epic, in Oceana’s case). Imagine my surprise — and horror! — when not one, but three different universes clamored for attention throughout the month. All the power in the world to the multi-drafters among you, but I’m absolutely not one of them, so although I’ll never look the inspiration gift horse in the mouth, friends, I am nervous.

Why are all of them talking to me right now?

What do they want?

And at what point will they be ready for me to start writing?

(Fiction writers, I know you feel me on this one.)

The Prompts:

“Tattoo”

A priest has the legacy of conquest and oppression inked into his skin.

“There was a rumor that the driftwood on Blacksand Beach was once a man.”

“Driftwood“: Sometimes shapeshifters get desperate.

“For thirty pieces of silver, he sold out his handler.”

Neveshir from Dark Arm of the Maker didn’t have it easy in his military days. He fought back.

“Talisman + Symphony + Gold”

Val from the Oceana Series hates the symphony, but there’s one person who can persuade him to go.

“If they only knew…”

Max Battista isn’t so easy to intimidate.

Picture Prompts

↑ The last army to march through the gate had disappeared.

← That night, the string sextet played at the waterfront.

Get Involved!

Answer the prompts or dive straight in and respond to others’ comments — let’s share our knowledge, our experience, and have a discussion we can all learn from! Don’t want to miss a post? Subscribe to the blog in the sidebar to get notified about new posts.

Today’s questions:

How long do you spend ‘marinating’ on story ideas before you write about them?
Do you need your characters to live with you for a while before you can get them onto the page?

Fantasy Naming Tricks

April 5, 2021 by Cameron Montague Taylor Leave a Comment

This morning, I read an article called The 5 Finger Fantasy Rule: A Plea for Mercy from SFF Writers. The article writer delved into a worldbuilding and story craft issue many SFF writers struggle with: how to help readers learn the vocabulary of our worlds without setting their brains on fire.

As a SFF writer, I’ll readily admit the steep learning curve that comes with starting a new SFF novel. Our books tend to throw terminology at the reader fast and furious, including but not limited to:

Large casts of named characters, many of whom are called by multiple names
Second-world geography which adds a host of place-names
New political, economic, religious, and social structures which add descriptive names and titles
Stuff. Just a lot of magical, second-world stuff.

Vocabulary is part of what immerses readers in our stories. Good SFF writing can blend new vocabulary into storytelling in a way that’s seamless and easy-to-understand, allowing the reader to define each word (and cueing them to remember names) in context. That’s a serious skill to learn how to build, though, and new writers tend to overexplain their worlds as a result.

As we start to learn more about writing and worldbuilding, however, we end up swinging in the other direction. This is the battle I’m currently fighting with my writing: underexplaining definitions or not giving enough contextual clues or reminders to the reader to allow them to follow who does what/when/where. Sometimes, I throw too much information at the reader in rapid succession, asking them to absorb more than they can reasonably handle.

The first paragraph hit me in the face with a series of words I didn’t recognize. City name, person name, country name, rank, etc. I felt like I bounced right off the story. I couldn’t get a grip to get into the actual meaning of the words. I ended up having to read it almost phonetically to get through it. Soon, I got into the meat of the story, but it was a challenge to get started.
Ellis, The Five Finger Fantasy Rule

That learning curve is no joke. It’s hardest to handle in the early pages when we’re laying the most groundwork for worldbuilding and introducing the bulk of our cast. If we don’t work to mitigate its steepness, we run the risk of bouncing readers out of our story.

I’m not quite like Ellis in this case — I have an ultra-high tolerance for dense SFF jargon, and am willing to forge on for quite a while if the premise of the story or the protagonist is interesting enough to draw me in. But not all readers are or should be like me, and it’s important for me to recognize places where I’m making the learning curve so high that I suck all the enjoyment of reading away from a segment of my target audience. Though my primary audience comes from the high/epic fantasy segment and are used to getting thrown into the deep end of a new world, I want my writing to have broader appeal to newer SFF readers, too.

This is where the five-finger rule comes in.

The five-finger rule writing rule

The five-finger technique is most often used with children as they’re learning to read. Educators assess whether a book is a good fit for the child by having them read (aloud or to themselves) and put up a finger each time they come across a word they don’t know. If they hit five or more fingers before they’ve reached the end of the first page, that could be a sign that the book is too difficult for the child. While we want kids to challenge themselves, we don’t want the experience to be so infuriatingly difficult that they come to hate reading, so educators will pick a book at an easier reading level to start off with.

Here’s Ellis’ recommendation:

“Don’t introduce more than three new/world-specific words — or maximum four — on the first page of your novel, and that includes people and place names.“

Seems reasonable, right?

Of course, it’s not a hard and fast rule. There are going to be times when we have to break it out of necessity. Even calling it a rule gets my hackles up. I’m a “tools, not rules” type, so I’d rather think of this as a self-assessment tool than any kind of metric I’m meant to meet. As we’re writing, if we’re concerned the writing is too dense, we can check to see how many new words (or relatively new words) we’ve dropped per page. If we see that number climbing up towards the double-digits, it might indicate a readability issue.

The five-finger rule can help us with our vocabulary learning curve, but what about reader memory and retention? Especially for epic writers who may go hundreds of pages without seeing a particular character, setting, or concept, this is important. Once we’ve spent enough time away from a side character, seeing their name anew is functionally a reintroduction. Earlier on in a story, readers may also tend to confuse two characters (or words, or settings, or, or, or).

In part, this is a five-finger rule problem: the way we introduce these characters is important. If it’s a side character, linking that character to a particular title, item, physical attribute, or personality trait will help the reader remember them. They might not know who Alexandris is when he’s mentioned for the second time on page 342, but they’re more likely to remember the tall chancellor with the bulbous nose.

These are grounding techniques for the dissemination of worldbuilding information that are great tools to practice in our writing, but sometimes they’re not enough to save us. Why?

Because the very vocabulary we use — the names we chose! — are working against us.

Our minds work in funny ways…

If you’ve spent much time on the internet since, oh, about 2003, you’ve probably seen this image kicking around:

Or: According to research at Cambridge University, it doesn’t matter in what order the letters in a word are, the only important thing is that the first and last letter be at the right place. The rest can be a total mess and you can still read it without problem. This is because the human mind odes not read every letter by itself, but the word as a whole.

There are obvious caveats to this: learning disabilities, how many words are in a sentence, the relative complexity of words, etc. Newsletter headlines tend to be more difficult to read when scrambled because they cut out a lot of cue words (as, the, if, to, a) that help make a sentence decipherable to save on space.

Yet for most readers, the general principle holds true. The most important letters in a word for us are the first and last letters. What happens in the middle is a total jumble.

Now think about how this might apply to the second-world vocabulary in your SFF story.

When we write — especially if we’re using conlangs! — we tend to limit ourselves to a narrow subset of starting letters. In my series, my crutch letter was A. I have so many A-names (and A-words) my readers have noticed and make a running joke out of tallying them each time they show up. When I was writing, the words all looked different enough to me that I didn’t notice what I was doing at the time. Now, I realize that my readers can’t be asked to remember whether it was Arin or Arod who once sent his brother to his death. Not when I also have an Arden, an Armathia, an Aleksan…

…you get the picture.

Scrutinize your names. Do you have a Mario and a Macuro? Those are too structurally similar to be used in the same book! Or, do you have an Arauz and an Eras? Those might not look similar on paper, but try saying them out loud. Is there a difference in pronunciation? Sure. Is it different enough that someone listening to an ebook would have an easy time remembering who is who? Probably not.

This goes beyond names for people and crosses over with place names, spell names, title names, etc. I can’t name my capital city Nurisia and name a character Nausica; I’d drive my readers nuts.

That’s why, in the planning phase of my new novel, Tombs of Glass, I tried a simple trick that helped me avoid making the same repetitious naming mistakes I’d made in the Oceana Series. The trick is a simple: list-style chart that tracks names in different categories (people, places, things) to prevent me from tripling up on letters. I also created a (somewhat) alphabetized name pool for the first time before I started naming characters this time around — a cheat that I highly, highly recommend if you tend to fall into this trap.

Want to see how I did it? You can find the rest of this post on my Patreon, where I share pages of my writing notebook (and loads of other content) with supporters.

How do you avoid overloading your readers with a too-steep learning curve? Do you have any tips or tricks for making your character names (and other vocab) memorable? Tell me about it in the comments below!

Worldbuilder’s Disease: Getting Started

February 17, 2021 by Cameron Montague Taylor 1 Comment

In my first post on worldbuilding, I talked about worldbuilder’s disease: what it is, and why it keeps SFF writers from getting their stories onto the paper. This week, we’ll look at strategies for overcoming worldbuilder’s disease and getting started on our manuscripts.

Help! I’ve built a massive world and have no idea where to start

A missing starting point comes from one of three issues. Either:

We’re draft blocked: we know what story we want to tell, but have no idea how to write chapter one, or
We’re plot blocked: we have 10,000 years of global history and don’t know how to focus on a book-sized idea, or
We’re revision blocked: we know the story, we know where to start, we’ve started writing… but we can’t get past the beginning (one of two reasons: structure or perfectionism.

While 1) and 3) aren’t problems exclusive to worldbuilder’s disease, they crop up often enough I think they’re worth including in the greater discussion. Even if you’ve never struggled with worldbuilder’s disease, you may see yourself in these problems/solutions.

This week, I’ll explore tips for draft-blocked and plot-blocked writers.

Draft-blocked writers

Draft-blocked writers tend to struggle because they don’t know where to start… and therefore assume they’re not ready to get drafting. Instead of putting words on the page (which feels so big! so final!), draft-blocked writers noodle endlessly with worldbuilding details, plot structure, character bios, etc. – anything that delays the inevitable.

The defining feature of a draft-blocked writer is how much about their story they already know. A draft-blocked writer could probably narrate the entirety of their plot off the top of their head. They can tell you all about their characters, their world, the central conflicts in their story… and yet they still don’t have a draft. This isn’t a writer at a loss for where their story goes. They have the beginning, middle, and end (imagined in a whole lotta detail) sitting in their head.

(They’re also the kind of writer who wishes they could download their thoughts onto the page and be done with it – though I suspect we’ve all wished for that superpower at some point!)

Does this sound like you? If so, here are some tips for ripping off the band-aid and forging into that first draft:

Give yourself permission to suck.

I’m serious. First drafts are always a little wonky, no matter how much experience you have as a writer. If you’re brand new to the novel-writing thing (or the SFF novel-writing thing), your first draft is going to be wonkier than, say, a career writer who has spent thirty years in the business.

You’ll find writing advice on the internet that goes something like “Don’t worry about your first book, it will suck and you will be ashamed of it.” That’s absolutely not what I’m trying to say.

You can and should be proud of the first book you write.

But even the best writers don’t get it perfect on the first (draft) try. Many of us struggle with beginnings. It’s okay if the dialogue isn’t sparkling. If the setting is a little wibbly. If you feel like you aren’t getting your character voices right.

It’s okay if you start in the wrong place and realize, after writing, that the first scene is boring. It’s okay if you write it out and decide that, actually, you want to switch from first to third person narration (or vice versa).

It’s okay if you write chapter, after chapter, after chapter, thinking ‘wow, this is harder than I thought, and I’m not very good at it’.

Let go of the fear of failure – of the words on paper falling short of the magical world that lives inside your head.

You can fix the words on the page in revisions. You can’t fix a blank page.

Every mistake you make in the drafting process is one you can learn from – and those mistakes will, ultimately, make you a stronger writer so long as you do the work needed to fix them.

It takes 10,000 hours (or 1,000,000 words, depending on who you ask).

If you’ve taken advice on subject mastery from Malcolm Gladwell or Stephen King, you might have run across either of these two figures. Gladwell champions the 10,000 hours approach (ie: that’s how long it takes to master a discipline). Stephen King believes the first million words of written fiction are practice.

That’s a lot of practice.

Where are you in your writing journey? If the words you’re struggling to squeeze out are the very first you’re putting to paper, take some solace in those numbers. Is the road to mastery a long one? Yes. Can it seem daunting at times? Of course. The upshot, though, is that the book you’re writing is a practice round. It doesn’t have to measure up to published works in your genre. It doesn’t need to be groundbreaking or profound.

It doesn’t need to be perfect.

The clock on that 10,000 hours starts the moment you put those first words to paper. All writers have a long way to go before achieving mastery of their fields, so get started!

Plot-blocked writers

So you’ve built a world with 10,000 years of consecutive, fleshed-out history. Perhaps there’s no single, definitive conflict, but rather, lots of cyclical conflict. That’s very cool – very true to life! I love SFF that serves as both an escape from the real world, and a mirror through which we can explore real-world issues.

But.

These epics can be a beast to plot.

The defining features of a plot-blocked writers are twofold: first, in how much of the world they’ve developed. (If you know the name of every king to sit on a nation’s throne for a 2,000-year dynasty, you might fall into this category.) Second, in how much of the plot they don’t know.

You might be a plot-blocked writer if you stare at all your worldbuilding notes and think ‘But where do I even begin?’ Not just where to start your opening chapter – that concern might not even cross your mind. Plot-blocked writers often don’t know who their protagonist is. Do you focus on the king in the year 523, or the draconic invasion in year 1278?

Do you set the story in Nriian, the elvish forest, or among the coastal mountain dwarves?

The world is your sandbox, and you have no idea what kind of castle you want to build.

You’ve put in a whole lotta hard work into this incredible, rich world. So much work, in fact, that your issue isn’t the lack of possible plot points, but a surfeit of them. That’s an amazing problem to have, even if it might not feel that way right now. Why not reward yourself for all of that hard work by letting yourself play in your sandbox for a little while?

No pressure. Just messing around.

How does one ‘play in the sandbox’ of an epic, multi-generational world?

Flash fiction.

There’s a ton of writing advice championing short fiction (particularly short stories) as a great way to get to know characters, hone voice, and strengthen your plot and setting ideas before forging into the novel itself. I agree with that advice in theory, but want to sharpen it further in practice.

Don’t worry about writing a complete short story. Those can range up to 20k! Instead, focus on short, exploratory writing bursts: aka flash fiction.

The definition of flash fiction varies depending on which source you consult, but for the purpose of this post, let’s say that flash fiction is any story less than 1500 words. When I write flash fiction, especially when I’m doing exploratory writing, I try to use time-based goals instead of wordcount goals.

In other words, I sit down at my computer, set my timer for fifteen minutes, and start typing to see what comes out.

Want to write about an elf in year 214 when the empire was still young? Set your timer and do it. Want to skip next to the orphan farm boy in year 2783 when the apocalypse is nigh? No worries. And of course, if you skip back a thousand years the following morning, that’s fine.

Continuity isn’t an issue. Changing characterization between flash fics is fine. You can alter your history, change names, play with conflicting ideas – anything is fair game in these exploratory shorts. You’re poking at ideas in writing exercises. There’s no such thing as a plot hole, here.

What a relief, right?

Try to set these fics in super-deep POV. Resist the temptation to retell history from an authorial perspective (you already know the history! That won’t teach you anything new). By getting inside different characters’ heads, you can start sniffing out where the interesting stories are. Eventually, you’ll start to see trends emerge – ideas you keep noodling with, time periods you prefer, or characters you return to time and again.

Even the characters, time periods, and setting details you don’t see the relevance of will work their way into your story in surprising ways. Flash fiction is, above all, a brainstorming exercise. Instead of daydreaming by looking out the window, though, we’re daydreaming directly onto the page in short narrative ‘thoughts’. Expressing these thoughts via written word – and having record of them! – will help tremendously when you eventually start the drafting process.

Double bonus? You’ve finally gotten words onto the page, at last! You’ve broken the seal! You’re doing it!

Triple bonus? You’ll have a wealth of short stories to use in newsletters, as promo, or to start a Patreon someday.

If you’d like to try writing flash fiction but need a push to get started, why not join me for my Morning Pages? I write to SFF prompts in the morning several times a week. Sometimes I dip into universes that already exist in my head. Other times, I write whatever idea jumps into my mind. They’ve been a tremendously helpful way to flex my creative muscles and explore different writing styles, skills, and ideas. I’d love to see you there!

Up next week: revision-blocked writers

Come join me next week for part three of my (now four-part, eek) series on worldbuilder’s disease. I’ll break down the problems facing revision-blocked writers and offer solutions for those of us who catch ourselves revising our first four chapters ad infinitum instead of finishing our novels.

As always, if you’re enjoying the content, please consider liking this post or dropping your e-mail in the subscribe box in the side bar so you don’t miss an update.