character tagged posts

By Ross B. Lampert

Wool is the title of both the first novella and the first five stories in the Silo series, and the book which rocketed Hugh Howey to science fiction stardom. Deservedly so.

WARNING: There are spoilers in this review. I’ll put them in a different font so you can spot and skip them if you wish.

Wool is the story of a large, thoroughly developed community of people (hundreds if not a few thousand) who have lived for a long time in a 144 story deep underground silo. One of many, as it turns out, but the residents of Silo 18 don’t know that there are other silos until late in the story. Until then, only a select few even know that they’re “Silo 18.”

The silo culture is divided into dozens of functional groups: the Mechanicals live in the “down deep,” the lowe...

If you’re looking for a book with a linear narrative, a clear and present protagonist, and a consistent point of view, N. Scott Momaday’s House Made of Dawn is not the book you’re looking for. If, on the other hand, you’re looking for occasionally beautiful writing, and an unusual style of story-telling, this 1969 Pulitzer Prize winner may be just the thing.

House Made of Dawn is the story of Abel (an obviously symbolic name), a young Native American from somewhere in southern California...

Put James Scott Bell’s The Art of War for Writers next to Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style on your bookshelf—or better, within easy reach! It’s that good.

Using famous and long-ago Chinese general Sun Tzu’s The Art of War as his model, Bell presents vital and valuable information for writers in bite-size chunks. These nourishing and digestible non-chicken nuggets add up to a lot of chapters, yet only two are longer than five pages.

That’s what makes them so useful: you can read a few, set the book aside to ponder them, and then come back without being overwhelmed with information. These chapter titles will give you a sense of what I mean:

• From Part I, “Reconnaissance”: 21. Put heart into everything you write.
• From Part II, “Tactics”: 36...

Debrah Strait’s The Sweet Trade is no Johnny Depp Pirates of the Caribbean romp. And that’s a very good thing.

Life in the Caribbean in the second half of the 17^th Century was anything but easy: “nasty, brutish, and short” might be a better description. Not just for pirates and other sailors but for the citizens in the many coastal and island villages, cities, and towns and the soldiers assigned to protect them. Death came often, and was often violent, brutal, and painful, whether at the hands of raiders or defenders or in the jaws of thousands of ants or a single caiman.

This is the world eleven-year-old Dirk van Cortlandt is thrust into when Spanish raiders attack the island he and his family live on and kill everyone except Dirk and four of his young friends...

Once a writer has convinced their reader with a great, or at least good, beginning that this is a story she wants to read, his next task is to keep her reading. That means the middle of each scene, chapter, and ultimately the whole story or book, has to keep holding the reader’s interest.

At the Scene or Chapter Level

There are lots of writing books that discuss the techniques for creating rising tension: plot twists, character revelations, obstacles revealed and overcome or worked around (or not), turning points, and so on...

Let’s be clear from the beginning about what point of view (POV), or viewpoint, is. Simply stated, it means whose eyes and other senses the reader is experiencing the story through. Said another way, if you think of the reader as being the proverbial fly on the wall, where is that fly? That sounds simple enough, but there are four main POV options, and many variations of each.

Four Main Points of View and Some of Their Variations

Omniscient

The word means all-knowing, and in this case, the fly really is on the wall. In this POV, the narrator stands back from the characters and reports on their actions and statements. But it’s also a telepathic fly: the author can tell the reader, as well as show him, what a character is thinking or feeling...

This article doesn’t have anything to do with drug-addled frogs (or any kind of frogs, for that matter), mid-twentieth century actress and gossip columnist Hedda Hopper, or some strange horror movie. Or some even stranger Addams Family-meets-Mitch Miller sing-along show: “Follow the bouncing head and sing along to….” (Man, that’s really weird.)

No, fortunately, head-hopping in the context of writing is a form of point of view (POV) shifting. What happens is the writer jumps from the viewpoint of one character to another within a scene or even a paragraph. This is an easy trap for new writers to fall into, although more experienced ones can do it too...

When we think about dangling things—in writing, anyway—we usually think of dangling modifiers, the grammatical fumbles that lead to sentences like, “After spending weeks in the forest, the town was inviting.” So, the town spent weeks in the forest, eh?

For this article, though, I’m thinking about a different kind of dangler: a story line, event, action, or character the author lavishes some attention on, then forgets. It’s never developed, it’s never finished, it’s just left—you guessed it—dangling.

This is a continuity problem and it can be hard to catch, for both the author and the reviewer...

This article starts a series on general story-telling problems and how to identify and critique them.

One of the worst things a writer can do is to write something that “pops the reader out of the story,” in other words, write something that so distracts or surprises them that they fall out of the “fictive dream,” the world of the story, and think, Wait… what?

Pop Starts

This can happen in many different ways.

The author can use an unusual term. As I discussed in Part 17, “unusual” can mean several different things.

• A foreign or slang word or phrase, a jargon term, or writing in dialect, especially if such words have not been part of the story before.
• A made-up wor...

Whenever characters speak, they’re transmitting information, to one or more other characters and/or to the reader. That information can be truth, lies, or something in-between; it can be emotional (a state of being or feeling) rather than factual; it can be directive (an order or warning) or informational; it can be direct or indirect; it can be any combination of these. This is nowhere near a complete list.

It can also be boring as hell.

What happens is that sometimes, with the best of intentions (or maybe just not knowing any better), an author will use a character to dump information on the reader, rather than doing it himself through narrative. No matter how it’s done, info-dumping isn’t a good technique.

This probl...