Cameron Montague Taylor

Fantasy Author & Fiction Editor

writing tips

Epithets in Fiction

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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.

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Worldbuilder’s Disease: Devil’s in the Detail

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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:

  1. 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:

  1. 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.

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Worldbuilder’s Disease: Infodumps

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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, or third posts right here on the AuthorShip.

Part four is all about What Comes Next after we’ve pushed past Worldbuilder’s Disease and gotten to drafting. Science Fiction & Fantasy writers with WBD face a particular set of problems when we finally put pen to paper. This post is dedicated to looking out for and troubleshooting those issues as they arise.

Most of our worldbuilding-related drafting problems can be boiled down to a single root cause:

We worldbuilders love our infodumps.

We’ve spent ages building a lush, interesting world. Now we want to show the whole thing to readers, and wow is it hard to resist the impulse to throw the story bible at their heads.

In my experience, there are two kind of infodumps:

  • The irrelevant exposition and backstory dump
  • The very-important-information drop that still somehow manages to be boring

And they’re often presented in one of several ways:

  • A fourth-wall breaking chunk of text from the narrator describing a thousand years of history
  • A tremendously boring story or lecture from a mentor or authority figure
  • Awkward “as-you-know” dialogue

Look, getting this information on the page is difficult—and ensuring readers have enough context to understand the story is critical, so SFF writers tend to walk a thin line between too-much and too-little exposition. I struggle to find that balance when writing my early chapters. It’s tempting to sneak in a paragraph here, a lecture there, an occasional “as-you-know”. But it helps me to remember that I take an enormous risk every time I incorporate worldbuilding information using any of the aforementioned techniques. A poorly-hidden infodump is one of writing’s cardinal sins. Why?

Because infodumps break immersion for the reader.

Thus, our goal is to figure out a crafty way of incorporating worldbuilding information on a need-to-know basis that doesn’t involve clobbering the reader with our story bible.

Why infodumping isn’t the answer

If this is the first time you’ve encountered this concept, lemme quickly get us all on the same page.

According to TvTropes:

“Infodumping is a type of exposition that is particularly long or wordy. Intensive infodumping about the world itself is most commonly used […] where the reader cannot necessarily make assumptions about the way the fictional universe works. […] most infodumps are obvious, intrusive, patronizing, and sometimes downright boring.”

In other words, this is not how to hook a reader.

This is hard to hear, because we think our worlds are amazing! Fascinating! And of course they are—otherwise we wouldn’t have put so much time and effort into building them. We know everything about these worlds and want to share them with our readers. So why aren’t readers interested?

Good in-story worldbuilding comes down to two major factors:

  1. What we choose to share, and
  2. How we choose to share it.

Get choosy with your worldbuilding integration

Here’s one of the most important worldbuilding lessons I’ve learned: readers tend to care only about the parts of our world that impact our characters.

The information in our story bible is irrelevant to the reader unless a character encounters it, or unless the reader believes that piece of information will soon become important to the story.

In other words: no one ever wants to sit through two pages of explanation about rainbow wyvern physiology… but readers are far more likely to tolerate a paragraph of it when the protagonist encounters a rainbow wyvern in the wild.

Think of it as Schroedinger’s Wyvern. The reader doesn’t care what exists inside the box until the character opens it.

Or, another silly metaphor:

If a bear is pooping in the woods and none of your characters are there to see it (and the bear poop has no bearing on the plot)…

The reader doesn’t need to know about the bear. If we’re getting choosy with worldbuilding integration, the bear won’t make the cut.

What does that mean for us?

What does Schroedinger’s Wyvern mean for us and our worldbuilding? Alas, it means that a heaping ton of it stays inside the box, only seeing the light of day in extras, deleted scenes, or companion books.

If readers don’t care as much about the behind-the-scenes worldbuilding, then we can only (or mostly) show them what our characters encounter in-story. Characters may come across lore, wisdom, and history … but we need to use these bits and pieces of our story bibles sparingly, and only for the sake of advancing one of the Big Three: setting, character, or plot.

That’s not to say worldbuilding is unimportant. Fleshing out our worldbuilding is vital – it adds depth to our story, it makes drafting easier, it creates the toolkit we use to craft our arcs. But. Storytelling isn’t about finding a way to cram the entirety of our story bible into narrative form.

Think of it this way: if the world we’ve built in our heads is an iceberg, the tiny tip above water is all our readers ever see. That means most of the details we spent ages crafting will never make it out of our story notes. And that’s okay.

If we dream of being the next GRRM and having our readers keep wikis of our worlds—the iceberg in all its glory—we must first write a compelling story. We must fascinate our readers—enough so that they read our book and crave a look beneath the water’s surface.

Make no mistake: their curiosity comes not from the rainbow wyvern itself, but from the story we told with it. Readers want to see what lies beneath the surface because they sense there are more stories waiting to be told. They say, ‘hey, I heard the matriarch of the Blurgity line slayed a rainbow wyvern barehanded when she was fourteen—let’s have that story next, plz.’ They don’t say ‘hey, I just wanna know the name of every female heir of the Blurgity house for ish and giggles.’

(I mean, okay, maybe a few people do, but—they aren’t our majority audience.)

Most readers aren’t looking for facts.

They’re looking for more stories.

They’ll start sniffing around our world for more stories only when our primary plot and characters are so compelling that they, on good faith, assume everything else about our world must be that interesting, too.

But we can’t acquire this level of faith from our readers unless we tell a good story first—and alas, a good story isn’t an encyclopedia of the history of our world, no matter how cool it is.

It’s not just about what we share, but how we share it.

Let’s talk about guiding readers through our worlds—and the worldbuilding information they need to know in order for the story to work. For the rest of this post, we’ll look at what not to do, expanding on the worldbuilding pitfalls I listed in the intro. My next (and final, I promise) post in this series will break down tips on how to incorporate worldbuilding without infodumping.

This is by no means an exhaustive no-no list, but it should give us a good starting point for how our love of our rainbow wyverns could come around to bite us in the drafting phase.

A big fat caveat:

Sometimes, when we’re working on early drafts, the best (only?) way to get words on the page is to let it all hang out in an infodump to rival the Titanic AU fanfiction I wrote when I was ten years old. This is a totally fine and absolutely normal thing to do in our rough drafts.

We can throw all of that information at the paper to get it out of our systems. I do it every single time I start a new story! But if we’re going to infodump in a first draft, we must remember most of that information will be pruned out, rewritten, or rephrased during the editing process. Infodumping can be used as a crutch while drafting, but it ought never make it into the final manuscript.

Onward!

Here are a few examples of what not to do: ie: ways we might break reader immersion via infodumping when describing our rainbow wyverns:

  • By having the narrator explain everything about rainbow wyverns long before we encounter the first one on-page.

This tends to be a prologue or intro chapter problem. We, as authors, know the book will be about rainbow wyverns, so we want to give the reader full context on what wyverns are and how they came to be before the story even starts.

Problem? The story is what makes the reader care about the wyverns, not the other way around. A prologue or early-story infodump about wyvern history will make readers scratch their head the same way Bilbo Baggins’ 111th birthday party made all of us headdesk repeatedly during our first reading of The Fellowship of the Ring.

They will look at the prologue and say “why do I care?”

That is the absolute last thing we want our readers to ask.

And yes, there are absolutely writers who are the exception to this rule. Fantasy published in Tolkien’s time was famous (infamous?) for it. Some of today’s writers manage to do it and yet still hold their readers’ attention. These writers are not the norm. Until we’ve honed our craft and built a devoted reader following, it’s best not to play fast and loose with infodumping, and structure our stories accordingly.

  • Video game infodumping, and/or a lecture from an authority figure.

Our protagonist has encountered their first rainbow wyvern in the wild! Big! Scary!

But instead of jumping into the fight, we end up with two pages of solid text in which the full history and physiology of wyverns gets dumped onto the page either by the narrator, or through the story/lecture of a mentor figure. Oop! This is like seeing a Pokemon pop out of the grass and, instead of getting straight to the fight, cutting to Professor Oak reading a super-detailed entry out of the Pokedex. Boring.

Again: there are ways to use the mentor/neophyte trope to get information across to both our POV characters and the reader—but the volume of information and when that information gets dispensed is vitally important to consider.

Information transfers like ^that will immensely slow our pacing. This might work well after the fight with the wyvern to allow the reader (and protagonist!) time to process and recover from what just happened. A lecture immediately prior to the fight, however, will trainwreck the pacing and tension we’ve tried so hard to ratchet up in the pages leading up to it. Readers are smart! If we drop enough contextual clues, they’ll be able to follow along with the fight, hovering at the edge of their seat, until the fight is done and a broader explanation of What The Heck That Colorful Dragon Thing Was surfaces.

  • The dreaded “as-you-know” dialogue.

Hear me out: this is the mansplaining of the fictional world.

In “as-you-know” dialogue, the POV character and at least one other character explain the history and physiology of rainbow wyverns through dialogue. This seems like an immersive way to get around the infodumping rule, but it’s a trap. Why?

Because “as-you-know” implies just that: one character is telling the other something they know the other character already understands. Imagine a bunch of knights standing around and mansplaining rainbow wyverns to one another—

“Well, Bob, as you know, the rainbow wyverns have a variety of scale colors.”

“Yes, Bill, and as you’ve experienced, their venom is highly toxic.”

People NEVER talk like this—unless, of course, they’re condescending jerks. It’s as obnoxious in fiction as it is in real life. Unless our characters are inveterate mansplainers, why would they tell one another things they already know?

Because the author is trying to find a way to convey information to the reader without using either of the two ^above methods of infodumping. Unfortunately, this method doesn’t work either. It breaks 1) immersion, 2) characterization, and 3) maybe even the fourth wall. Why? Because our characters aren’t talking to each other—they’re talking to the reader.

This is eye-roll inducing. Don’t do it.

So how do we get important worldbuilding information across to the reader?

Join us next time for tips on how to properly incorporate worldbuilding details!

This post was all about what not to do when translating worldbuilding onto the page and why. Next week, we’ll look at:

  • How to tell when a worldbuilding tidbit should make it into the story, and
  • Examples of how to include that information based on why we want the reader to know it.

I look forward to seeing you there! Until then, you can check out my Morning Pages or, if you enjoyed the content, support the blog on ko-fi or find more of my writing Patreon. I’d appreciate it a great deal!

Fantasy Naming Tricks

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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: Writer’s Block

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Welcome to my series on worldbuilder’s disease: a Sci-Fi/Fantasy problem in which aspiring writers end up with notebooks full of history/backstory, but no drafted words on the page. This is the third post in the series – click to check out the first and second posts.

Last week, I wrote about draft-blocked and plot-blocked processes and how to overcome them to get a draft out. This week, we’ll look at strategies for overcoming revision-related blocks. While revision-blocked writing isn’t unique to the SFF landscape, it can certainly come as a result of worldbuilder’s disease, so I’ve included it in this series.

Revision-blocked writers come in two different flavors:

  1. The structure-blocked writer, and
  2. The perfection-blocked writer.

Structure-blocked writers

Structure-blocked writers start their projects with boundless enthusiasm, churn through the first several chapters of their manuscript, then abruptly lose interest (or: find it impossible to continue).

A close cousin of the plot-blocked writer, many structure-blocked writers don’t know where to go with their story after the opening chapters – or find everything between the opening and the ending too boring to write.

SB writers tend to either 1) abandon their project in favor of a shiny new WIP (work-in-progress), or return to the beginning and fuss, fuss, fuss with their initial chapters.

I like to think of SB writers as folks who have a partially-assembled piece of Ikea furniture sitting in the corner of their living room. A bag of all the spare bits and pieces they couldn’t figure out how to fit into the furniture – let’s call it a bookshelf – sit in a bag on top.

How do we go from a structural disaster to an immaculate Kallax unit?

By reading the directions. Or, to zoom out of this weird furniture metaphor and apply it to our writing: by having a roadmap.

Structure-blocked writers often start writing with an idea for the beginning, an end, and an empty wasteland of a middle. This is a plot-structure problem. In order to fix it, we need a roadmap.

You may say, “But Cee, I hate plotting!”

That’s fine! Remember, plotterßàpantser is a wide spectrum. Plotting work =/= scene level outlines if you don’t want it to.

If you’re a structure-blocked writer who needs to find a workable way to build a scaffold for the sagging middle of your novel, here are two different techniques to try. Each involves a different level of pre-plotting intensity to help you get past the black hole that opens up the moment you draft chapter four.

  • Low-intensity plotting: flashlight/waypost method

If plotting sucks the life out of you, try the flashlight/waypost method (aka Plotting Lite).

The flashlight method = working towards the end.

Working towards the end means taking a look at the current drafted chapters and asking ‘ok, given what I’ve already got on the page, what interesting thing can I make happen next?’

Or, as some authors put it, “how can I leave the most blood on the floor?”

When you’re stuck and all of the options you come up with seem boring, that’s when you want to wreck your character’s life. Throw them an unhittable curve ball. Burn down their house. (Sometimes literally.)

‘Boring’ comes from a dearth of compelling conflict – so create some. Think of an event (a breakup, a death, a horrible loss) that will propel the character forward and give them something to fight for/against/toward.

It may yet be unclear how that conflict will fit into the greater narrative, but hey, that’s why flashlight-method writers are often called “discovery” writers.

You’ll think of something.

And even if it winds up being the wrong turn, or a scene you need to tweak for it to sit right – it got you writing, didn’t it? You can fix wrong turns. You can’t fix a blank page.

The waypost method = working towards the middle.

Working towards the middle is the same concept, but turned on its head. Instead of putting blood on the floor right away, you try to find the mid-point between the last chapter you have drafted and the next major event set in stone in your book.

This might very well be the climax/ending. If that’s the case, you want to focus on the midpoint.

(Side-note: I absolutely swear by the midpoint as one of the most, if not *the* most, important parts of a book. If you dread the middle, try to think of it as an opportunity instead of a chore.)

What huge event happens halfway through your novel? The midpoint clarifies and raises the stakes, changes the game for the protagonist, and adds a plot twist to show the protagonist the true nature of the enemy they’re facing.

What kind of event would do that?

Once you have that event, cut the story in half again – go between the last chapter you wrote and the midpoint. What has to happen halfway between those two points to get the characters to the Midpoint Event?

Then cut it in half again, and again, and again – until you have a roadmap of how to get yourself to the halfway mark. These are your major plot points. Instead of writing into a sagging, soggy void, you can write your way from waypost to waypost, adding more as necessary whenever you come upon a big blank chunk of time.

To summarize:

Pros: flashlight/waypost will get you writing! It’s better for pantsers and plantsers who find the will to write sucked out of them when adhering to a strict plotting structure. Best for those who enjoy the editing and revisions process, because…

Cons: The end result could need a lot of revision.

Caveats: It’s still possible to get stuck! In that case, it’s safe to assume the story has taken a wrong turn somewhere. This could require zooming out and looking at the story structure with a plotting, revisionist eye to spot what’s tripping up the plot.

  • High intensity plotting: aka using beat sheets and story structure

If you’re a plotter (or if you’ve tried pantsing, but it doesn’t work for you), the best way to unstick yourself is to have a roadmap. In other words, you need to dust off the instructions that came with your Kallax unit and use them for assembly.

Many writers operate under the misconception that story structure – and adhering to it – will leave you with a cookie-cutter story that’s ‘been done’ before. That’s not true! Creative problem-solving can always lead you to an original, fresh take. The secret to writing with a structure is to use each ‘beat’ in the structure as an opportunity to put a twist into your story.

There are many different kinds of story structure, but I use (and recommend) three-act as a fantastic jumping-off point.

Earlier in my writing journey, I came across a breakdown of three-act by Paranormal Romance author Jami Gold. I don’t write ParaRo, but her blog (and description of structure) helped immeasurably when I was slogging through early drafts of my first books. She also offers downloadable beat sheets that you can use to workshop your books.

If you’re interested in a detailed dig into three-act, though, I cannot recommend Save the Cat Writes a Novel by Jessica Brody enough. STC is a cornerstone of how I conceptualize story structure. Although it’s not the only resource I use to plot my work, Brody’s book helps me create the scaffold for everything I write.

I’m a self-identified plotter, so I do all of my scaffolding as pre-work before I get writing. That said, books are wild things, and tend to go off-script on us. When that happens, I often end up running my current draft back through beat sheets (or STC exercises and worksheets) to diagnose my story structure problems.

Beat sheets (and a familiarity with story structure in general) can help you reverse-engineer almost anything: a character arc, a relationship arc, an external plot, a climax sequence, a solid midpoint. Most importantly, it can help you figure out why you have pacing issues (huge for me!), or even (!!!) why you’re struggling to get past chapter four.

Story-structure is a big-picture, front-loaded cousin of the flashlight/waypost method. It will help you pinpoint each place a Major Event must occur within your writing, and guide you as you work out what the best event could be to keep your story moving in the direction you want.

Early in my writing life, I used to get blocked four to six chapters in all the time. I was a structure-blocked writer: I pushed through the conflict and worldbuilding exposition in the first chapters, then stared at the yawning void between there and the climax with no idea how to make it through. Three-act structure helped me map the space between the beginning and the end, creating interesting conflict, twists, and turns along the way.

As soon as I knew where those twists and turns were, the fire to write always reignited for me. Suddenly, instead of having to find a way to get through 50k to reach the climax, I only needed to write 2k to get to the next major plot event – and the way was so much clearer.

So… what if you’ve picked a method (plotting, pantsing) that works for you, hammered out a structure… and still can’t get past those first few chapters?

You might be a perfection-blocked writer.

Perfection-blocked writers

A close cousin to the draft-blocked writer, perfection-blocked writers may have made it out of the draft-blocked stage only to get hung up four or five chapters in. Why? Although perfection-blocked writers are super excited to write their story (and know exactly what they want to put down on paper!), they can’t get past their perception of the quality of their early chapters.

In other words: they think their first chapters suck, and it prevents them from moving past the beginning to continue the draft.

Instead of writing their way to the middle and end they’re so excited about, perfection-blocked writers will redraft, and redraft, and redraft the beginning. They feel that they can’t move past the beginning until it’s perfect. Of course, once they reach the end of the beginning, something else is wrong with it – or perhaps they draft chapter six only to realize it creates a plot hole in chapter two.

Back they go to fix it, never making it to chapter seven, never reaching the end.

Many of the perfection-blocked writers I know are parts of writing groups or critique circles. They send the same chapter (or series of chapters) in over and over, returning to the drawing board with their feedback to redraft instead of moving forward.

Here’s the problem, though:

It’s impossible to know what the perfect beginning is until you’ve written the end.

We can hazard good guesses at it based on our story structure, of course, but even our esteemed critique partners might give feedback that misses the mark because they’re looking only at one chapter and not at a complete story.

No matter how stringent a plotter you are, the story will change between chapter one and The End by the time you get there, often necessitating a different first chapter.

Think of those early chapters as placeholders – your best guess at what groundwork you need to lay for the rest of the book to stand upright. It’s normal to need more foundation work after laying the roof. That may seem counter-intuitive (we never build houses on broken foundations!), but it’s a fundamental truth that’s worth swallowing about writing fiction, otherwise you’ll never build anything but a foundation.

All that said, perfection-blocks can battle with our logical understanding of story structure, compelling us to keep rewriting our beginning.

Here are a few tools that can help you manage your inner perfectionist while holding you back from redrafting the beginning ad infinitum.

  • Find a way to organize and structure the critique you’re receiving.

This could be critique you’ve given yourself (sudden realizations! Changes in the plot! Lightning bolts of inspiration!) or crit from others. Either way, part of the compulsion to go back and edit the beginning comes from suddenly knowing what to fix and being afraid to forget how to fix it.

Different writers organize and retain this information in different ways. You could use a writing notebook with separate sheets of paper for each scene, listing changes by hand. (I recommend disc binders for this – they’re my personal favorite – but any system that functions for you will do.)

You could use an excel spreadsheet that helps track scenes, chapters, arcs, characters, or any number of data points through time, letting you take notes on how those aspects of your book develop (and what needs to change when you enter revisions).

You could copy your draft into an entirely new document – one only meant for future edits – and compile inline comments from crit buddies (or your own critical brain!) for later review.

The most important thing is to have your information and ideas safe, organized, and ready for when it’s time to start that draft. That way, you don’t feel the need to hold every single scrap of revisions information in your head while you’re writing.

  • Find a different writing group.

If you’re receiving critique on early chapters that jumpstarts your perfectionist brain and makes it impossible not to go back and make changes… you may need to reconsider membership in your writer’s group.

I know several amazing, successful writers who absolutely cannot show early chapters to anyone – who won’t show anything but a full first draft to their alpha and beta readers. Why? Because as soon as they receive crit, or explain later events of the story to critters in order to facilitate crit, they lose all motivation to complete the draft.

Critique and writer’s support groups are amazing ways to build connections and make friends, but don’t feel obligated to get your early chapters critiqued before you’ve gotten to a comfortable place in your work. Some writers can take crit on half-baked books. Others can’t – and that’s okay! Figure out where you fall on that spectrum and take the necessary steps to protect yourself and your work.

There are writer’s communities based on socialization, craft chat, and support, too – not just critique exchanges. Plenty have popped up on discord that are searchable through social media sites like twitter or tumblr. NaNoWriMo also has a forums section that gets busy in April, July, and November, but has activity all year round.

  • Ignore the processes of writers who don’t have this problem.

I’m not (and never have been) a perfection-blocked writer. If you ever see me post about my drafting and editing process… ignore me.

Writing advice is never one-size-fits-all – hence the myriad debates in the writersphere about The Definitive Way to Write Things (a debate I’d love to see die one day, but alas, I suspect that day isn’t forthcoming). Among those debates: whether or not a writer should go back and make changes to the manuscript during draft one.

There are many writers (myself included) who hit a particular milestone in their story structure (usually the midpoint or somewhere just past it) and go back to clean up the plot, foreshadowing, and character motivations/arcs in the first half of the book.

Do not let yourself get drawn in by their methods. These writers aren’t perfection-blocked writers. They don’t have the same temptation to rework, and rework, and rework those early chapters. Their methods will not work for you until you’ve broken your blocked habits and completed at least one (possibly several) manuscript drafts.

Scrutinize where your writing advice comes from (this blog included). Not every successful writer’s process will work for you. And certainly, beware of the temptation to use advice from non-perfection-blocked writers to justify continued tweaking.

Could this tweaking become a part of your process in the future? Perhaps. For now, however, it’s time to break a habit and get a draft on the page.

Up next week: craft and worldbuilder’s disease

Come join me next week for part four of my series on worldbuilder’s disease. I’ll break down the common problems worldbuilders run into when translating their worlds into draft form: exposition, info-dumping, and backwards causal chains between setting and character.

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.

Worldbuilder’s Disease: Getting Started

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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:

  1. We’re draft blocked: we know what story we want to tell, but have no idea how to write chapter one, or
  2. 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
  3. 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.

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