Mastering Language in Stories

Words matter. They are the passports to fictional worlds. But, oddly, the first duty of the writer is to make them invisible. That means using the right words (not just close enough) for the intended reader. It means sequencing the ideas they convey in a way that builds and is logical. Mostly, it means doing the task without making readers reread.

Heinlein wrote about a class he took at the Naval Academy where a situation was presented to the students, and they had to write an order that was unambiguous. Each day, if the order had perfect clarity, the student passed. But, if another student could find a way to misconstrue the order, it meant failure.

I faced a similar challenge in my first job. I had to write detailed instructions on purifying valuable biological components (monoclonal antibodies and enzymes for genetic engineering) without any mentoring. The readers of these instructions were often people for whom English was a second language. I wrote over 100 of these, which was good training for clarity.

New writers get beat up over misspellings and grammatical errors, but I consider this to be borderline hazing. You should not turn in a manuscript with such errors. It makes people suspicious about your seriousness. But, ultimately, you can hire someone to make fixes, and, if you pay attention to their work, your spelling and grammar will probably rise to a professional level (unless you have dyslexia or a similar disability). Mechanics are low on the list, far below storytelling, character development, and graceful prose.

I’ll deal with storytelling later, and character mastery has already been covered in this series. Now is the time for graceful prose.

I have a bias toward hearing words. My father was in broadcasting for many years, and, as a speechwriter, I came to appreciate the value of what language can do when it’s heard. (It is immediately evident to me when a written speech was never read out loud before presentation.) I believe it is essential to read most works aloud as a check.

Now, with that in mind, many writers are not tuned to hear the difference between good prose and great prose. I think this is one of the things Stephen King recognized, and it led him to be a strong advocate for writers reading. My advice is to read more and dedicate some time to reading great, lyrical prose aloud. Include poetry in the mix, but also monologues and speeches. Read the Jaws Indianapolis monologue in isolation. Read the Glengarry Glen Ross steak knives speech in isolation, too. Read a sonnet by Edna St. Vincent Millay.

The listening mind picks up the rhythms. The listening mind (except when spellbound by the sounds) finds skips, bumps, and inversions in the progression of ideas. The listening mind finds opportunities for beauty, emphasis, and deepening emotion.

Mastery of Language 1: Learn to write for the ear (even when the words are not intended to be spoken).
Practice: Make a habit of savoring passages with beautiful language. If you read a lot of good work, you’ll probably notice glorious language. As a first step toward making it yours, just go back and read it out loud. (Notice the pauses. Notice how the words might be spoken differently.) As you strive to master the sound of language, memorize these passages from time to time.

I make a point of reading diversely. English is wonderful for that because, in addition to its being interpreted by different cultures, it has gone through wonderful permutations over time. I also try to meet a quota for reading out loud and reading or listening to poetry on a weekly basis.

Beyond the sound value is the image value of language. Use words that create visuals. This means specific,  well-chosen, clearly described descriptions. General words (beautiful) and ambiguous words (tall) create a blur. Too many words overwhelms. Every good visual is a poem that is cut to the right length. Comparisons, when apt, can help. Texture almost always adds because it combines the visual with the tactile.

Of course, an effective metaphor has power, too. It can grab a reader’s imagination and reference webs of associations and levels of experience. (A bad metaphor distracts.) Lean into metaphors and imagery that connects emotionally (first with you, then with readers).

Mastery of Language 2: Learn to write for the inner eye.
Practice: Exercise your visual imagination by recalling an image from your grade school years. See if you can describe it in a few sentences in a way that might evoke emotion. As a followup, you might create a description in your story in such a way that can stand poetically by itself. Finally, create a metaphor that fits a character, a celebrity, or someone you know well.

Thomas Mann advocated the view of the artist standing apart. He consciously worked to create a voice that was measured, almost scientifically objective, and unlikely to be noticed by readers. His was an amazing, deliberate achievement that, nonetheless, created a recognizable voice in his works.

I don’t believe that’s a problem. My guess is that the most compelling voice is the one that emerges in a calm state that is not self-conscious. Teachers love the show-off voices. Sometimes, they can be entertaining. But I think the most reliable voices tend to closely reflect voices we use in casual conversation.

Oddly enough, writing tends to bring out the pleaser or poser in many people. Amateur writers want to be seen as someone who is glib, smart, and “good.” They don’t even suspect that the hesitant, fumbling, flawed, truer self, the self the friends know, is actually both authentic and more interesting. So, it usually takes a lot of writing before a writer drops the instinctual defenses and speaks with a normal voice. It’s odd, but it takes a lot of craft to be natural.

Mastery of Language 3: Develop a unique, authentic voice.
Practice: Oddly enough, the best shortcut I know to sounding like yourself is to mimic other people. There’s something about doing pastiches of other writers that provides the tools needed to find your own voice. Writing in a lot of voices reveals how you say things naturally. I’ve also found imitating well tweaks something inside that wants to be authentic. (Enough of writing like Melville, Cather, Hammett, and Morrison,  just let me be myself!)

The best alternative I know is to dictate. It takes some getting used to. It feels odd. But, by speaking, most people are drawn to their natural voice, even if that’s not their intent. The reason is the faux voice is a lot more difficult to maintain when the pace is that of speaking, not writing. And when your whole body already knows there’s an easier way.

Of course, it’s fine to create more than one voice that’s distinctive, as long as it’s true. An obvious example is first-person narratives, where two different books coming from two different characters should sound different enough to seem to have come from different authors. But, even in traditional third-person limited narrations, a comedy should have a different voice from a tragedy. And usually the voices across genres have differences, too.

Next, I cover dialogue. Much of this post applies, but there are other elements to consider.

(More) Mastering Story Setting

 The last post was about the essentials of setting, but this one covers some of the skills worth mastering because they can set your work apart.

For instance, there’s a lot of energy that comes from changing settings as the story progresses. This is part of the fun of Midnight Run, Lord of the Rings, and other road/quest stories. Even when there is a return to a setting (e.g., with returning home Almost Famous), the adventures can make it feel different. It really isn’t the same place.

That’s a clue. Even if you need to reuse settings, there is a value to making them feel different each time. The inclusion of a new character can do this. Or changes brought by time. (Think of Tara in Gone With the Wind, which practically goes through its own character arc.) I often noticed changes in the decor of sets in Big Bang Theory (though Sheldon’s place on the sofa only changed once as I recall). To push this a bit further, the setting can reflect the internal state of a character, the peril or the change in status. (I love stories where the escalation in danger is reflected in revisiting a setting. It makes it more acute.)

Sitcoms, of course, tend to have a few unchanging settings. The same is true for some series dramas (like Hill Street Blues) that rarely break out of a few established locations. Often, this is because of cost, but it also may be to set reliable expectations (who might be present, what actions might occur) and audience comfort levels. In The Dick Van Dyke Show, the home included family and neighbors (and only occasionally people from work), the office did something similar. (Did Mel Cooley ever set foot in the Petrie home?) If you were in Alan Brady’s office, he was almost always there (and rarely elsewhere).

But comfort can be taken too far. I hate it when the same people and conversations occur in different locations and the reason is just visual relief. For most Seinfeld episodes, Jerry’s apartment and the diner are interchangeable. Friends suffers from a similar malady.

One of the things a like about Pleasantville is how it subverts sitcom settings. A lot of standard, familiar places shift and get reworked as the story proceeds. Think of the art in the diner. Or my favorite is “Honey, I’m home!” where the character doesn't get its standard responses.

It degrades setting to never refresh it. It takes a tool out of the storyteller’s hands.

Mastery of Story Setting 4: Return to your setting with something fresh.
Practice: The first step is to watch for effective ways stories with limited setting renew them. Then either look at a story that could do this better or your own work and see if there are good options for making each visit fresh. Will it be changed in an essential way by including a different person? A person who has changed (status, experience, needs, health) between visits? Changes to the setting’s condition or artifacts included?

We’ve all seen films with title cards that present setting material. Often, it’s time and place (London 1887), but it can be just time (Three Years Later). Audience are trained to read these, and, if brief) they tend not to intrude on the immersive experience. They offer the great advantages of economy and clarity. Maps are also used to show location. (Check out Casablanca  and Raiders of the Lost Ark.) Geographic travel can also be shown with visual travelogues. What can be done with regard to time? A classic is dissolving from one time on an analog clock to a later time. Or the pages of a calendar can be torn off or blown by an unseen wind to move the to future. I think action provides the most elegant approach.

2001: A Space Odyssey begins a sequence with a title card (The Dawn of Man) and ends with action (match cut of a falling bone becoming a satellite). How’s that for elegance? Flowers sprouting or dying have been shown. Weather (snow to spring) can cue audiences. Best of all is using an action to convey a change in time. Putting up Christmas decorations (or, for a more melancholy mood taking them down) can be visually interesting, evocative and connected with a character. How can you beat that?

Sometimes simple is best. A title card does not distract. But applying imagination to the job of establishing a new time can move beyond the utilitarian to provide a deeper sense of mood and character.

Mastery of Story Setting 5: Evoke the passage of time.
Practice: The best place to study how the passage of time is presented in films is to watch biographies that depict years (Walk the Line, Coal Miner’s Daughter) or epic films (Gladiator, Doctor Zhivago). Look for good examples to emulate. Could any of these have been done more elegantly? Then, look at your own work and, even if you love what you have, come up with a few alternative ways that are clear and contribute to the story.

In a film script, all the setting material is present in the scene header. And I’ve seen many novels (especially from the 1800s) that provide place and time in detail in a block of text (or even in pages of set-up.) For a film, this is usually mitigated in a shooting script where camera angles, titles, and character comments meter out the information in a sequence that doesn’t bring the story to a complete stop (and may even build tension).

Many contemporary books do something similar, taking advantage of the limited point of view of a character to sequence attention in a realistic manner without creating opportunities for readers to skip pages or put the book down. (I have a friend who takes advantage of contemporary approaches to hook the reader, then provides an 1800s approach in chapter 2 to add richness — very clever.)

The idea is to integrate setting (both time and place) into the rest of the story elements so attention is held and the pace doesn’t suffer. A less elegant alternative is to severely limit setting (and other narration). When I teach, I encourage students to highlight every bit of narration in the first chapter (or first 30 pages) and get rid of anything that isn’t absolutely essential. It makes it better, but integration can be both immersive and fast paced. It’s also very hard to do well.

Mastery of Story Setting 6: Integrate setting into the rest.
Practice: My biggest recommendation is to find an author you love who does this sort of integration and highlight every reference to setting (time and place) in the first 5-10 pages. Really fine writers do this well (which is not to say there aren’t engaging writers who don’t do it at all). The process of discovery can make their lessons real and more accessible. Seen in isolation, the techniques reveal themselves. 

Then, if you dare, try to do it in your own work. Ideally, it becomes a tune that gets stuck in your head, making the rhythms easy to emulate. I recommend writing five fiction pages on a new story, not trying to make an old work match this rhythm. It may be tough at first. Ten tries may still feel inferior to the work of your favorite author. But, once you own this approach, you can make it your own when the story call for it.

I’m done with settings, but I’ll have more fiction techniques to master next time.

Mastering Story Setting

In stories, “where” usually matters. “When” usually matters. And it goes beyond “a dark and stormy night.” The setting — both time and place — does at least five things:

1. It orients readers (and audiences). It’s difficult to connect with characters floating in a void, unstuck in time.
2. It sequences the story. I think of The Graduate. Ben Braddock needs to reach the woman he loves (Elaine Robinson) before she is married. His car runs out of gas, leaving him (what seems to be) miles from his goal as the clock toward “I do” ticks away. Even a flashback (if clear) connects moments ties to urgency and provides revelations that matter against the real time of the story.
3. It creates the mood. We feel differently about sunshine and blizzards. A jail cell is confining. A view from a mountain peak is freeing and maybe inspiring. Note: Often the writer’s voice provides a key contribution to adding mood to setting. Think of the dread that underlies Poe’s setting descriptions or the dark humor that permeates Joseph Heller’s Catch 22.
4. It provides context. We connect periods of history with assumptions of danger, etiquette, rank, and ignorance.
5. It exposes the characters. Personal items in a space often say things about who the character is or who he/she aspires to be (or maybe what the character wants to leave behind). But setting can also be used to show the values, emotions, and desires of a character by reflecting the interior or standing in contrast to it. Weather has often been used to suggest characters’ feelings.
   

Sometimes setting can even become a character. This is especially true for survival tales. Or it may create wonder and a sense of possibilities. Think of Oz. Think of 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Yet, setting is often the most neglected part of a story. The mortal sin is a talking in white spaces scene. But almost as bad is putting people in a generic office. Or shoving characters into booths in diners. Or police stations that have plenty of stuff, but nothing distinctive. (A detailed description of a cliche is still a cliche.)

Overdoing setting can be just as bad. “Literary” writers seem particularly vulnerable to the temptation of painting pictures that don’t serve the story. Beauty in the service of nothing. Those paragraphs (or pages) often get skipped.

What’s too much? What’s too little? It depends. My preference is to do just as much as is needed to get the job done. Orientation is a necessity, but, in a longer work, it can often be evoked by context (following a pattern or suggested by the section before) or with a cue rather than reiterating details. Place and time may be entwined with a specific character or a goal. (In the film The Wizard of Oz, the first visit to the city of Oz is a full tour. The second visit jumps right to the Wizard’s hall, with Dorothy holding the singed broom.)

How much description is provided depends on the needs of the story and the expectations of readers. Mysteries need to plant clues. SF needs to present an unknown world. Historicals and romances have traditions of providing rich, sensual details.

Getting the measurements just right so they fit the story generally comes from rewriting, not drafting. Since it’s easier to cut than to add, overdoing it in a draft may be best. But if the words are flowing, with dialogue and action coming to mind at a speed almost too fast to write down, do what script writers do. Use headers before each scene.

The first three scenes from The Shawshank Redemption are set up like this:
INT. - CABIN - NIGHT (1946)
EXT. - CABIN - NIGHT (1946)
INT. - PLYMOUTH - NIGHT (1946)

While action lines develop these, scene headings provide the essentials — place and time — with economy.

Unless you skip the scene headings, it’s hard to get lost in a screenplay. But that’s just the start of making sure readers don’t get lost. In a story, other information is needed. Setting includes the people present in the scene. It’s irritating and distracting to come across action or dialogue from a character you didn’t know was there. Essential information needs to be included well before it becomes important. If someone is going to fall off a cliff, that bit of dangerous landscape can’t become an “oh, yeah.”

“As Marilyn backed up to avoid his embrace, her foot came within inches of the (oh, yeah) forty-foot cliff.”

Mastery of Story Setting 1: Orient your reader.
Practice: Go to a beloved contemporary story in a genre you know. Chances are, the first page or two will provide much of what is needed to orient a reader to the story. Check to see if you can pick out the following:

What’s the period, season, and time of day?
Whether the scene occurs inside or outside and at least three descriptive ideas related to place.
Who is present in the scene at the opening of the scene?
What’s the point of view? Usually, the setting is experienced through the senses and memories of one character.

Now consider how the author might have selected the details. To take this practice further, you might rewrite the scene to orient with different details. Or do this a few times with good stories and then look at your own first pages.

Note: In the 1800s, lots of novels begin with an omniscient point of view. This is less common today (except in literary fiction) because it tends to work against immersing readers in the scene. There’s nothing wrong with it and it can be fun to explore, but using omniscience may limit your audience.

A messy workspace. A collection of action figures. A cupboard under the stairs that serves as a bedroom. Often the settings we remember most clearly are those that connect to the values and circumstances of a character. It’s not just a place. It’s a special place. It’s not just a time. It’s a special time (birthday, exam day, the last day of freedom or exile). We experience stories through what they mean to characters, so it’s not surprising that memorable settings are intertwined with characters. This doesn’t mean they need to be congruent. Fish out of water stories depend on settings that become vivid because they are at odds with characters.

Mastery of Story Setting 2: Create a connection between the setting and a character.
Practice: Look at the work of fiction you admire or explore one of your own, and consider what about the setting matters to the character. A night owl might be grumpy in the morning light. A fancy ballroom might make a character feel underdressed. Machine gun turrets might dissuade a character who wants to rescue his or her beloved. See if there are missed opportunities to connect with the task at hand or goal. Find the element in the setting that is most emotionally engaging (fear, envy, anger, curiosity) to the viewpoint character. Depending on the story, there may be opportunities for irony. A character may be lured in by bait or act foolishly because he or she misconstrues what something is.

In addition to connecting to the plot and the character, a setting can engage readers because of its details. One reason people come to stories is to learn something new. Sometimes, it’s just fun facts to know and tell your friends. But it can be more basic, often arising from research. I find that the tools set out for a profession, the irritations of a workplace, the surprise (a Monet print hung in auto repair shop) can keep readers reading.

When all else fails, dazzle them. An apt, poetic description can hold readers even when it brings a story to a complete stop. But it has to be special. It has to become a set piece that enthralls readers so thoroughly that it will entertain despite interrupting the story.

Mastery of Story Setting 3: Make your setting engaging.
Practice: A great starting point is to turn to the work of a writer whose voice captures you every time, perhaps because the language is poetic (George R.R .Martin) or distinctive (Hunter S. Thompson) or full of personality (Austen). Focus on how setting (time, place, items and people present) is handled, and how the language adds to engagement rather than distracts. Once you’ve noticed alls this, put what you’ve learned to work. (f you have the facility to imitate a writer’s voice in a scene you create, that can be a great way to internalize high-level skills. Otherwise, just jump from your analysis to writing a setting for your own story.

For those with well-developed styles, a good exercise is to move beyond voice to details noticed. If you can write about the room you are in (and time and people present), no matter how mundane, and make is interesting and distinctive by picking out something new, that’s powerful.

One more thing: see if in a setting you can surprise readers (fairly). Surprises delight and raise questions that can keep pages turning.

These three elements of setting are unavoidable. They must be done well. Next time, we’ll level up with a few more focus areas that can help settings bring more to storytelling.