Listener Questions on Craft: A Q&A Episode

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Welcome to the Inside Creative Writing podcast, the weekly discussion of craft and technique for writers of fiction and creative nonfiction. And now here's your host, writer and educator, Brad Reed. Episode 32. Today, we're taking a step back from our more formal explorations of a single dedicated topic and answering questions from listeners. It's time for some Q&A. And welcome back to the Inside Creative Writing podcast.

My name is Brad Reed, and I'm so glad that you're here with us today to spend some time talking about writing. And what a week it's been around here. As I record this, I'm just a couple of days away from the start of yet another school year.

Now, for some of you, you're thinking, wow, just now you're getting around to that. So here in Oregon, we start generally quite a bit later than other schools do across the country. But basically, that means that I've spent the last week or actually a couple of weeks fully immersed in curriculum planning, setting up my classroom, all of that stuff that you do for another great year of school ahead.

So with that in mind, I had to take a step back from the type of preparation that I usually do for very specific formal topics for the show. And I decided it would be a great week to take a little bit of a break from that and look back at some of the great questions that are coming in from listeners to the podcast. So there's every chance that this podcast will run just a little bit shorter today. And I think that's probably OK since last week we ran so much overboard.

So I think it kind of evens out in the end. I do want to give you a quick update on my own current work in progress, especially for those of you who've been following along in the real time revision videos that we do as kind of a companion piece to this podcast. You can find out more about those by going to Bradreedwrites. com.

So a quick update on the book. As you probably know, if you've been listening to the show, I finished my first draft of my latest book and I have just finally finished the process of going through the story grid system of editing that first draft. And I'm finished with that process now. It took about twice as long as I thought that it would, but I have absolutely no regrets about that. It was just kind of the new perspective that I needed on how to edit, how to revise a new perspective on structure that I felt like I needed to really bring this book to life. And when I say that, I don't even mean to life as in kind of a general overall plot sense.

I really mean on the scene level. The kind of work that you do when you play with that story grid system is scene by scene and really kind of beat by beat within your story. And that's a level of editing that I've done before, but I haven't had a formalized system to do that. And I really appreciated the story grid system. If you're not familiar with that, you can check it out at StoryGrid on Twitter, or I think it's just StoryGrid. com.

Listener Q&A Introduction

So starting this week, I am headlong into the full, not necessarily a page one revision of my work in progress, but essentially it's going to come down to pretty close to a page one revision. There won't be a sentence in the book that doesn't get tweaked, reworked, deleted, added to as I now understand the real goal of each of the scenes in my book, which is pretty exciting. So let's go ahead and jump into today's show. Questions that listeners of the podcast have sent in over the last few months.

Okay, so let's jump in. I love, love, love getting questions from you guys about writing. They often make me think more deeply about how I feel about a certain topic, or I begin to see the act of writing from a different perspective. And all of that is so valuable.

So please keep those questions coming. You can email those to BradReid at BradReidWrites. com, and I'll either get back to you personally, which I often do, or I'll do another show like this, kind of this Q&A where I'll take some of these questions, especially the ones getting asked more often, and go into them a little bit more in depth on the show.

So what's interesting is many of these questions relate to things that we've actually discussed before on the show. And my initial reaction would probably have been, before I was a teacher, that, oh, didn't you listen, right? Or didn't you get it the first time?

But I actually think that it's great when people ask additional questions about things that we've already covered. So one of the truisms of learning anything new is that we need to hear it more than once before we really own that knowledge. That's kind of a foundational truism of education, of teaching, right? Is that we need to have that repetition. And sometimes it's not just hearing the same thing over and over again. In fact, ideally, it's not just hearing the same things over and over again.

It's that we hear things repeatedly in different ways, right? With slightly different nuance, or from a slightly different angle. And that helps us understand that concept even more deeply and own it more deeply than we would otherwise.

So today, even if we're talking about something that you feel like you've got down, right? I know this thing. I don't really need to hear the answer to this question. I hope you'll still take the time to think deeply about it as we discuss it and see how you might gain a new insight or notice a new nuance that you didn't have before.

So actually, that whole concept is kind of a preview of this week's wise word. But we'll have to wait till the end of the show for that. So we're going to jump right into these questions today. I think I have about four or five of them here that are asked fairly commonly in one form or another.

Creating Vivid Descriptions

So I've kind of boiled those down into their essential questions so we can explore them a little bit. So our first question today, how do I describe a person, a place, or a thing vividly so the reader can see it in their mind? And isn't that the goal of writing? I often think of writing as a very visual experience when you're reading, right? We're creating basically these films. We're watching these films in our mind if the writer has done a good enough job of creating those opportunities, of giving us enough information that we can then translate that into that film or that experience in our mind.

So that's essentially what this question is getting at, I think. How do we do that? How do we create that vivid experience for the reader? And there's a bunch of different ways to answer this. I want to give you just kind of my three or four bullet points to think about when you are trying to describe things in a way that will bring them to life for your audience.

So one thing to stay away from is over-describing something. Now that can be a style thing, right? One of my favorite authors, John Steinbeck, right? When you read his description, it can go on for several pages. And that's his voice. That's his style.

But in general, if you're not a John Steinbeck, which most of us aren't, you're better off to use just one or two really vivid details and then let the audience fill in the rest. So when you're introducing a new character, a new setting, what is the one or maybe two things that stand out the most about this that kind of define the experience of being in that place or the experience of seeing that person? And then let that one or two, those one or two most vivid details, just stand on their own because the human brain has a way of taking a great descriptive detail and then filling in the blanks, right? And in that way, your reader can become even more of the story because now they're helping you build out the rest of that image. Sometimes they're connecting it, if it's a place, they're connecting it to a place that they've been before.

And so they're bringing all of these details that are much more intimate and familiar to them in concert with the details that you've given them. And they're having an even more vivid experience because they're able to bring these, kind of this library of experience that they have into work in concert with your details. So there's kind of tip number one with this question. Maybe the most powerful tip here though is to remember the perspective of the character who is seeing this person, place, or thing.

So regardless of what perspective you're writing from, your narrator sees the world in a certain way. And they're going to notice different things about it. In fact, one of the most fun activities that I do with my creative writing students is I will take them out on a nearby football field and I will have them do just a couple of quick writes.

The first one is imagine that you just fell in love, right? Maybe you just have proposed to the person that you love and they've said yes, so you're going to get married. So you are in one of the best moods you could possibly be in. And for whatever reason, you find yourself now sitting out at this football field, not even a game going on, right? We're just sitting there and we're describing this football field. What kind of things would you notice?

And as they do this quick write, they begin to notice beautiful things, right? They will notice how blue the sky is or they will notice how green the grass is or they'll look off into the distance and they'll see the curve of a mountain and appreciate the beauty of that. Or they'll see the birds on the power line overhead and they'll listen to the song that they're singing.

So those are the details of that scene that somebody who's in a great mood is going to notice. And then I have them write again for about another five minutes from somebody who's just broken up with the love of their life, right? This is the person they thought they were going to spend the rest of their So those details are going to be as telling about your character's emotion and point of view as they are about that thing.

So always be thinking as you're describing a scene or a person or a thing, what mood is my character in? What mood do I want to have this scene feel like? And then find those details that stand out. Also, don't forget all five senses. Literally right here on my computer monitor, I have a little Post-it note that says the five senses, sight, smell, sound, touch, taste, because it's so easy to get into a rut where suddenly you're describing everything visually, or maybe you're describing everything auditorially, right? We have these senses that we tend to lean on.

Mine is definitely visual because I've done so much work and study and screenwriting that I think very visually and I have this Post-it note up to remind me, wait a second, sometimes it's a smell that defines a place, or sometimes it's the way something feels, that touch sensation. So try to work as many of those in as you can throughout your story and the world comes to life a lot more vividly. The last thing I want to say about this question is have some fun practicing this in the real world. When you are people watching, wherever that is, and I think most of us love to every once in a while sit around and people watch, just start noticing what is the first thing that you notice about a particular person, right? You're not describing how tall they are, what their weight is, what they're wearing, how they're walking. Just notice kind of that first detail that stands out and it's usually that thing that separates them from all other people that you've seen, right?

This is kind of the way the human brain works. We're always kind of cataloging things. We're always trying to differentiate things. What makes this person that I'm seeing now different in some way than every other person, right? And the first thing that comes to my mind, or maybe they have these crazy bushy eyebrows, right? When you meet somebody like that, that's that defining characteristic.

So practice that in the real world when you're in a new place, or maybe you're driving somewhere you haven't been, just look at a building and say, what is it about that building that makes that building unique? What is the one thing that I notice about that building or about this park or about that person or about that bicycle, right? Whatever it is, what's the specific thing that defines it, that makes it a singularity?

Choosing Effective Titles

So hopefully that's helpful for a question that I get asked a lot here about how to make our details vivid. So let's move on to our second question. And this is essentially some iteration of this question. How do I come up with the best title for my novel?

Now again, like almost all of these questions that we're going to look at today, in fact, all of them, there's different answers for different people, depending on your own style, depending on your genre, depending on your voice and your goals for your writing. So all I can do is give you some tips here and then let you use those tips to go out and discover the best title for your work. The first thing I like to tell people to do is take a look at some of the most successful titles in the genre that you're writing in and see what's working in that genre.

So if you are a mystery writer, go look at the top 100 bestselling mystery books and look at those titles, examine them. What do they have in common? What is their function, right? How are they working to engage a potential reader? I think you can learn good title writing from studying other books, just like you can learn good writing by studying and reading other people's books, right? There's an essential art to writing a title that isn't that much different than the writing that we do within our books.

So it's worth it to take some time to study what's working, right? What makes a title good, especially in your genre? Second thing is make sure your title is unique. I talked about this a little bit, I think it was just last week. Once you think you've come up with your title, a great thing to do is a quick Google search just to see what else will come up if somebody Googles your title. If you get a whole bunch of things, song lyrics, movie titles, quotes, all sorts of stuff, maybe that's not a good title.

It's going to be harder for people to find your book. Plus, it's telling you this isn't that unique of a phrase or a word. So you might want to dig a little deeper and make sure that it is actually unique and that if you do a Google search once your book is out there, it's going to be the first thing or one of the first things that pops up when people are searching for it.

Another great technique is to mine your manuscript for that line of either dialogue or prose that might work as a title. This is a really fun way, I think, to title a book. It's almost like you've planted this little mystery in your book, right? I'm sure you've had the experience where you're reading a book and all of a sudden you see the title right there in the prose. Somebody says it or it's in a line of description or something like that. And this little rush of adrenaline comes in and you say, oh, that's where the title comes from, right?

So it's a really powerful way to highlight something from your book. In fact, my favorite book, The Grapes of Wrath, actually I shouldn't say it's my favorite. It depends on the day you ask me and what genre of book we're talking about.

But I truly love The Grapes of Wrath. That's essentially how it got its name, right? John Steinbeck's wife, who worked as his editor most of the time, noticed that phrase, the grapes of wrath that he had used within his text and it just resonated with her. She said, oh, there it is. There's the title of that book.

So sometimes we've already written the title of our book. We just have to go into our story, mine it, and find that. One thing I want to mention about titles is remember that your title is probably the most important marketing element of your book, right?

So the focus of a title, yes, you want to be creative. Yes, you want to be unique. But really the purpose of a title is to sell your book, right? The purpose of a title is for somebody to pick up your book, read that title, and already they're thinking, this might be a book that I want to read.

So think about titles like the current title from, oh my gosh, his name isn't coming to me. You'll know it because it's a bestseller right now on the bookshelves. It's called The President is Missing, right?

Now that's a title that you know exactly what you're going to get. So if somebody is in a bookstore, somebody is on Amazon, they're looking for kind of a political thriller that they want to read and they see something called The President is Missing. That's a great advertising piece so that they know exactly what they're going to get when they pick up this book. And they're more likely to buy that one than a book with a title that is more creative than the word, but a little more subtle might be a way to look at it.

So as you're thinking about your title, one of the things you want to bring in is this question, does my title tell my specific reader something about the story, right? Does it make some kind of connection with the reader that I'm going for? So we're going to leave titles there for a little bit. There's four or five things you might think about when coming up or exploring for your best title. On to our next question. This is a fun one.

Naming Characters

It's one of my, I'm guess I'm going to say it's one of my pet peeves when I'm reading a book. And this question is, what is the best way to name characters? Now, everybody has a different take on this. You talk to 10 different authors, you're probably going to get 10 different takes.

So the best I can do is share my take with you on this, but I think it's got some good general rules in it to think about when you're naming characters. So the first one, one of the first approaches, and I think one of the best approaches is to name them thematically. So think about, find those names that resonate with some element of the character or something about the story.

Now, a lot of times these thematic names are not obvious, right? They don't jump right out and slap the reader across the face and say, hey, I'm named thematically. But I really believe that there's something going on subconsciously as a reader reads that they're using all of the information at their disposal to try to make inferences about your story, about your character.

So I think on that level, thematic names can often resonate. And here, let me give you an example here of what I mean. So in the first screenplay that I wrote, I had a character and his name, I named him Paul Carter.

Now this was a story of redemption, right? This was a story about a man who screws up his life completely. He's kind of a horrible person, but throughout the story, he comes around, right? He redeems himself.

So what I did is I picked two names that I felt resonated thematically. So Paul, his first name, resonates biblically, right? You go back to the apostle Paul, this character who set out to destroy Christianity, but ultimately he's redeemed and he becomes the apostle Paul.

So I felt like that word, that name was really loaded with a lot of thematic meaning when it comes to redemption. And then I chose his last name, Carter, after President Carter, right? Kind of the same story, very different circumstance, but Carter widely was not considered a great president, but he's gone of good fiction is that we forget that this isn't real life, right? That we're sucked into that world.

And so remember that. We want our names to feel authentic to the world. Now we get a little more license when we start to dip into fantasy, sci-fi, those kind of things.

But still think about the way names evolve, right? Just like language evolves, names evolve. Like right now, it's really getting popular to spell traditional names in a creative way, right?

So when we hear them, they sound the same, but there's some unique spelling. So I think that's kind of where we're currently at, at least with the age group that I work with, for kind of that evolution of names. I don't know where it's going next. My guess actually, is that we're going to start seeing combinations of names where we may hear the first part of one name kind of blended with the second half of a different name. I can't even give you an example of that, but I just feel like that may be the way that we're headed.

So you can do some predictive work, right? If you're creating a future world, then make up a way that names have evolved from where they are now to connect with the world the way it is in the future. And it's going to seem more authentic, even though your names are not authentic to our current time period.

So please, please, please, please, please, if you're going to use a really creative, unusual name in your novel, keep it to one or two characters, right, at the most. Or maybe you have all the characters from a certain family that are named that way, and that tells you something very unique about this family, right? Some background information.

But don't have all your characters with these crazy creative names. Great way to turn your reader, to basically kick your reader out of the verisimilitude of your story. So also, don't name them similarly. For some reason, when I'm writing a rough draft, this is what I do, right? I realized a few years ago with the work in progress I was working on that about 90% of my characters started with the letter M. I have no idea why, right?

Names were just coming to me as I was writing, but I had Matt, and I had Mark, and I had Mindy, and I had Melody. And it wasn't until I had somebody reading through my draft that they said, I can't tell these people apart, right? They're all these M names, which makes no sense because in no world do you find a bunch of random people that all start with the letter M. I'd just gotten into this rut, right?

So a couple of things to think about there is make sure that you mix up the letters that the names start with. In fact, if you can get away with, don't share any characters that start with the same first letter. Also, mix up the number of syllables that they have, right? If you have three characters in a story and they are Mike, Mark, and Jim, that's going to be very different than if you have Mike, Alexander, and David, right?

Now we have three different names starting with three different letters with three different syllable patterns, and they're going to stand out. Also, consider the ethnic flavor of the names, right? If you can bring more diverse ethnicities into your story and do that in a natural way, then you're going to be able to bring in more diverse names that are easier for your reader to keep track of and are more realistic to the world that you're writing in. Essentially, the goal with names is to make it as easy as possible for your reader to remember those names and to associate them with the traits of your character. For some reason, that's the hardest thing that I, the biggest challenge I have when I'm reading a book is just keeping the names of people straight. In fact, I've gotten in the habit that I will keep a post-it note in a book I'm reading and I'll jot down the names of new characters as I meet them and maybe just a, you know, a couple little of identifying words so I can keep them straight in my mind.

So I know it's a challenge for people to keep names straight. So make it easier on your reader and choose realistic but varied names. Now, one last little caveat to that. Sometimes it's fun to work against the grain, right? Sometimes it's fun to name that character something and then have them be the total opposite of what your reader expects. That can be a really powerful way to get them to remember it.

So, you know, have a super bitchy character whose name is Grace, right? Because you meet somebody named Grace, you expect them to be nice and loving and caring, but go against the grain, right? This person is the opposite of that. Or maybe, you know, you meet this muscle-bound meathead sort of tank top wearing dude and he introduces himself and his name is Winston, right? Something you would never expect, but boy, I want to meet that guy, right? That's an interesting character who has that kind of name that is so juxtaposed to the person that he is.

So that can also be a powerful technique. Still rings true, right? It still feels like it's in the reality possibility because honestly, if we look at the way that we name people, it doesn't make a lot of sense, right? I think my wife and I spent, you know, probably a couple of days, ultimately, if you put it all together, thinking about what we were going to name our children.

So if you boiled that down to a certain number of hours, that's maybe 24 total hours. And that, that even seems like way more right now. I can't imagine sitting around for 24 hours straight deciding on a name.

So it's probably much less than that. And yet here our children are taking these names through 70, 80, 90, a hundred years of life with this name. So sometimes the names don't fit the person right at all.

So we can have some fun with that in our fiction. You know what, I've got a couple of more here that we're going to do. As I look at the time, I thought we were going to run short today, but we are right about there.

Weekly Challenge and Wise Word

So I'm actually going to let these, these questions hang on for another month or so until I get back to doing another one of these Q&A sessions. In the meantime, if you have a question that you would like to talk about on the show or, or hear me explore, please send it to bradreed at bradreedwrites. com. I'd love to take some time and go through those questions with you.

So our wise word today comes from Stephen Hawking. I don't really think of him necessarily as a writer, of course, but of course he does a lot of writing, not necessarily fiction, but writes a lot of his nonfiction informational work, or at least wrote that. So his wise word today says this, the greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance. It is the illusion of knowledge.

Now I love this quote because I see it day in and day out, whether I'm teaching high school, college, whether I'm teaching writers that have long been out of school, the greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance. It is the illusion of knowledge. So one of the things that I see that really hold writers back, especially if they've been writing a while, is this idea that they've become an expert, right? As soon as you decide you're an expert on something, you have stopped learning about that topic.

Now that's a little bit of an overstatement, but I think at the heart of that, that is true, right? So when we reach that point where we feel like we know everything about a topic and we are no longer open to hearing other opinions, other perspectives on it, that's where we have this illusion of knowledge, but not the truth of knowledge. So I love that from Stephen King. It's always a, or Stephen King, Stephen Hawking. It's always a great reminder to me that when I start to get confident, I start to feel confident in a certain thing, that that's the time for me to take a step back and say, wait a second, there's more for me to know about this topic. I need to be open to other experiences, other perspectives on this topic and keep pushing myself deeper to learn more and more about it.

And finally, our weekly challenge this week is kind of related to our whole Q&A session and Stephen Hawking's quote. Our weekly challenge this week is I want you to re-examine your life as a writer and begin to identify questions that you need to ask as a writer. So maybe these aren't literal questions like we talked about today. How, how do I, you know, title my book or how do I create a vivid scene? Maybe these are questions that are deeper, that are more craft level. Like if I were to write out my question right now, my question would be, how do I write better subtext?

Right? So that acknowledges a certain level of expertise, right? I understand that I, that I do know how to write subtext. I know what it is, but I feel like that's still a bit of a weakness in my own writing. And then what I want you to do once you have come up with those questions for your life as a writer, what, what is that area that you need to know more about to push yourself deeper in? Once you've identified one or two of those, I want you to make a plan for how you're going to get your answers for that.

So how am I going to be better at writing subtext? So my plan is to go back through a great book by Robert McKee called Dialogue. And I want to reread that book and take that deeper. And then I want to look at some more screenplays. I love reading screenplays for lessons in Inside Creative Writing Podcast with your host, writer and educator Brad Reed. We'll be back next week.