Thursday Technicalities: Sentence Structure and Its Impact

February 24, 2020February 24, 2020 Ariel Paiement1 Comment

Introduction

This week, we’re going to take a look at sentence structure. This is where we’ll start for our discussions on the grammar side of writing. If you haven’t already, you should go read my last Thursday Technicalities post on grammar and why it’s important. Once you’ve done that, come back and take a look at sentence structure with me in this article.

Types of Sentence Structures

Some of you may have learned this while others may not have. So, I’m going to briefly discuss the types of sentence structures. Then we’ll take a look at how those structures can be used to create various effects in your writing. That’s the really interesting part that everyone’s actually curious about, right?

First on the list, we have the simple sentence. This consists of a subject and a predicate (one subject, one verb). This would include sentences such as “I run.” or “He plays.” These sentences shouldn’t have a conjunction or a dependent clause.

Next on the list, there’s compound. This sentence structure takes two independent clauses (these would be things that stand on their own as simple sentences), and combines them with a coordinating conjunction (ie: and, or, but, not, etc.).

Third on the list, you have your complex sentence. Here, you have your independent clause, but you tack on a dependent clause. It might read something like this: “If Stacy goes to the mall, I will come.” In this instance, If Stacy goes to the mall is dependent on the independent clause, I will come. So, it’s complex.

Last on the list, we have the compound-complex sentence. This one more or less combines the compound and the complex sentence structures, as the name implies. You’ll need at least two independent clauses and a dependent clause to form this type of sentence structure. The sentence contains both conjunctions and subordinators.

For example, “If Stacy goes to the mall, I will come, and Rob will too,” is a compound-complex sentence. If Stacy goes to the mall forms your dependent clause. I will come is an independent clause. And is the conjunction, and Rob will too is another independent clause. If, in this case, is the subordinator as it is introducing the dependent clause.

Using Sentence Structure for Impact

Now for the fun part. It hardly does much good to know what the sentence structure options are if you don’t know how to effectively use them. So, what does sentence structure do to your story?

Pacing

The first very obvious thing it will do to your story has to do with pacing. Imagine you’re working on a scene that’s tense. Maybe it’s a romantic scene where the couple has finally taken a leap and the guy proposed to the girl. Or, maybe it’s an action scene and there’s a car chase going on.

What kind of sentence structure do you think is best for this? What you choose will convey the urgency or take away from it. If you choose to use a lot of long sentences (such as your compound-complex sentence structure), you’ll bog yourself down. It doesn’t read quickly, and the reader starts to lose focus or interest without even knowing why.

Here’s why. Your writing may be good, but if you didn’t choose a sentence structure to convey the energy of the scene, it just feels off to the reader. It doesn’t grab their attention, and it quickly makes them fall asleep when they should be on the edge of their seat with anticipation.

As a general rule of thumb, you want to use more shorter and choppier sentences for fast-paced scenes and longer, smoother ones for the slower, richer scenes. This helps create a pacing that strings the reader along with you as you weave the story for them.

Changing Things Up

One thing that many beginning writers (and even more advanced writers, in some cases) struggle with is repetition in sentence structure. Maybe the writer prefers short, simple sentences or is prone to long-winded compound-complex sentences that span an entire paragraph. Likely, we’ve all seen authors who fall somewhere on that spectrum.

But there’s one thing that repetitiveness assures. Boredom and irritation. Sentence structure helps to alleviate that when used with variety and wisely.

If you’ve had a lot of short, choppy sentences all in a row, it helps the reader if you throw in a longer sentence to give them a minute to catch their breath. Going back to the earlier point about pacing, you don’t want to create the wrong feeling for the piece, but you also don’t want to entirely wear the reader out or put them to sleep.

Whether you’ve had long, elegant sentences or short, simple ones, using another sentence structure opposite of the previously used structure in the right place can help to give readers a chance to rest or keep them from falling asleep.

Sound and Feel

In a word, sentence structure affects your overall aesthetic. How you say things matters, and sentence structure is interwoven in the very fabric of what you’ve said and how.

This means that if you choose the right sentence structure, the piece will flow in the readers’ minds as they read. It will feel natural, not forced. It will be a beautiful thing, a work of art instead of some words slapped hastily on a page.

One thing I recommend to those who are wondering if their sentence structure feels right is to read it aloud. Doing this forces you not to skip words or try to insert things into the text mentally as you read. Your brain does these things automatically when you edit, so it takes time to train it not to. One of the easiest ways to do that is to read it out loud, either to yourself or to someone else.

It may feel awkward at first to do so, but I promise it helps. As a bonus, it helps you catch other problems or mistakes as well. I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve caught a spelling mistake or grammar error simply because I was reading something to someone else. Don’t be afraid of it not being perfect. It won’t be. Never will be, in fact. And that’s okay. You’re not the first to write an awful rough draft, and you won’t be the last. It’s a rough draft for a reason.

Conclusion

Well, that’s it for today! I hope this post has proved helpful. Do you have any other ways that sentence structure has affected your writing? If you do, feel free to leave it in the comments below! If you have any questions, you can leave them in the comments as well, and I’ll get back to you as soon as I can.

Thursday Technicalities: Grammar and Why It’s Important

February 24, 2020February 24, 2020 Ariel Paiement

Introduction

Hey, everyone! Today, we’re going to talk a little bit about grammar. I know, I know… It’s one of the least enjoyable things about writing for lots of people. In fact, I can’t think of any other area of editing or critiquing others’ writing where I’ve been told more times not to pay attention to it in favor of critiquing something else.

So, today we’re going to talk about it and why you need it.

Why Does It Matter?

Lots of beginning writers and even ones who have been writing for a long while seem to feel grammar isn’t as important as the story. In one way, they’re right. In another, they’re very, very wrong.

How can it be both at once? Simple. It’s true that a story with impeccable grammar but terrible plot and characters won’t go anywhere. But at the same time, it’s also true that how you use grammar to tell that story will either shoot your publishing dreams in the foot or make your book stand out that much more.

Grammar matters.

Plain and simple. Whether you hate it or not, it matters. If you can’t write proper sentences or follow the rules, you can’t break them. Or at least, you can’t do so in a way that makes anyone want to keep reading. A few grammar mistakes here and there may not cost you much, but if you decide that proofreading and grammar don’t matter, you’re going to pay dearly in readers.

In a way, grammar is the bedrock of your novel. You have to have it to form the structure and the framework that is the story. Sure, it’s not the part of the house everyone notices. It isn’t necessarily flashy or ornate. Maybe it’s not even fun to look at. But it is necessary or the house topples.

Conclusion

Take the time to really understand the basics of grammar. If you don’t already, do so. I understand that it’s difficult and can sometimes be a bit confusing, especially if English isn’t your first language. But if you’re going to write in English (or your native tongue, even) understand the rules for doing so. It’s going to be one more tool in your tool box, and it’s going to make your writing that much more pleasurable to read because the grammar won’t intrude on the story.

It will set the stage, just as it’s supposed to. But it won’t overshadow the actors on that stage because it is done correctly. That is the importance of grammar.

In upcoming Thursday Technicalities posts, we’ll go over some of the grammar rules that can have a big impact on your story. I’ll show you how these aspects can be used as tools to tell your story your way. Until next time, everyone! Have a great rest of your week.

Feel free to ask questions in the comments if you have them.

Thursday Technicalities: Dialogue Do’s and Don’ts

February 24, 2020February 24, 2020 Ariel Paiement1 Comment

Last week, we went over dialogue tags and action beats. This week we’re going to talk formatting and the do’s and don’ts when it comes to dialogue! So let’s get started.

Dialogue Do’s

Do make sure your dialogue is paragraphed properly. Each time the speaker changes, the dialogue of the new speaker starts a new paragraph. Ie:

“I don’t know why you’re being so stubborn, Damien.” Lucy crossed her arms.
“Because I can be? Seeing you upset is too much fun to pass up.”

Do use proper punctuation for dialogue tags vs action beats. Ie:

Dialogue tags:
“What do you mean she isn’t here? She promised,” Evan muttered.
or
“I thought you were going on vacation. You,” Jane said, “have a serious issue with sticking to your plans.”
Action beats:
“I don’t understand. You’re leaving?” Maria toyed with the hem of her t-shirt. “Why?”
or
“What’s the problem? You didn’t object before.” Carson leaned against the car door.

The key is that dialogue tags use commas to end the last sentence of dialogue before the tag while action beats use periods.

Do make sure to use action beats and dialogue tags only as needed. They’re not for propping up weak dialogue. For further discussion of this, read my post on Dialogue Tags vs Action Beats.
Do make it sound as natural as possible. You want it to mimic how people speak in real life without including redundant or pointless information. The occasional uh or um is fine, but the key is not to overdo it. We’re simulating real life, not copying it word-for-word.
Do read it out loud! This is the quickest way to catch stiff or otherwise bad dialogue. Your mind might not catch it, but your ear most likely will.
Do realize that dialogue tells us a lot about the character. Make good use of this as a technique to characterize your various characters and differentiate between them.

Dialogue Don’ts

Don’t overdo it with the action beats or dialogue tags. It will make your strong dialogue look weak and the piece overall look like an amateur wrote it.
Don’t use it as a way to tell the reader everything. If you can show it in a scene, do so. Only tell things through dialogue when it’s essential to do so.
Don’t have every character speak in the same way. We should be able to differentiate between at least the main characters by the way they talk and act.
Don’t use single quotation marks for dialogue. As a general rule of thumb, double quotes are the appropriate way to denote something as dialogue.
Don’t italicize or bold individual words in the dialogue for emphasis unless it’s absolutely necessary. And it almost never is because you can usually find a way to word things that will make it clear what is important to the character speaking without the use of italics or bold words.
Don’t have dialogue that stretches over a page in length. As a general rule, readers will lose interest if a character is on a monologue for that long. Besides, pages of dialogue from one character or even a few usually indicates an imbalance in the writing and telling instead of showing, neither of which are good.
Don’t write it exactly how you or someone else would talk. The goal is to write something that sounds like it could’ve been said by a real person without all the extra fluff that often occurs in real, everyday dialogue. Basically, cut all the boring stuff and get straight to the good stuff.
Don’t use semi-colons or colons in dialogue. Just don’t. Dashes or commas work fine. Periods too. But not semi-colons or colons.

Conclusion

These should be enough to get you started on dialogue. There are more advanced concepts that I may discuss later on at some point, but if you follow the rules of thumb given above, you should be alright. Above all, writing good dialogue takes practice. It’s not easy, but it is worth investing your time into. So just spend time listening to how people talk and then translate that into dialogue snippets just to practice.

Have a question I didn’t answer? Feel free to leave it in the comments for me. I’ll do my best to help out!

Thursday Technicalities: Dialogue Tags & Action Beats

February 24, 2020February 24, 2020 Ariel Paiement

Introduction

This week, we’re going to take a look at dialogue. I’ve seen so many writers do this wrong, and to be fair, it’s hard to figure out sometimes. The rules don’t work the same way as regular sentence rules do. And then there’s the dialogue tags and actions beats to worry about!

Assuming a beginner knows how to use a tag or beat and when, punctuation often gets messed up. More often then not, beginning (and even intermediate) writers don’t know what a tag versus a beat is or when to use them, and punctuation is definitely a struggle.

So, for those of you who have always struggled with this topic or are just starting out and need direction, we’ll break it down one piece at a time and make this a little easier.

This week, we’re just going to focus on tags and beats because that’s already enough information to process without adding anything else. Next week, we’ll talk about some other aspects of dialogue that are important.

Tags vs. Beats

To start out, let’s cover tags vs beats. You can’t punctuate your dialogue correctly if you don’t know the difference because they aren’t dealt with the same way.

Beats

Now that we’ve covered what a dialogue tag is and when to use them, let’s take a look at beats. Beats are actions that the speaker performs. They go with the dialogue in the same paragraph because the dialogue and the action belong to the same person.

Consider the same example I used earlier but with action beats instead of dialogue tags:

“Megan.” Dane slammed his book down on the end table. “Megan, could you please calm down and listen? I can explain.”

“Dane slammed his book down on the end table” is the action beat here. Notice that you can use an action beat to break up sections of dialogue if it makes sense to do so.

Just like dialogue tags, beats have their own pitfalls. Using too many can be as detrimental to your dialogue’s pacing as too many dialogue tags are. Let’s look at the example I gave with the dialogue between Mary and Eric again with action beats added in.

“Anna said she couldn’t come.” Mary crossed her arms.
“Why not?” Eric leaned against the kitchen door-frame.
“Because she’s busy. Or so she claims.” She paced the kitchen with a sigh.
“She’s always busy.” Eric ran a hand through his hair.
“I know. But what am I supposed to do?” Mary stopped pacing and faced him. “Drag her out of the apartment?”
“Yes, if that’s what it takes.” Eric pushed away from the doorway and stalked off.

Exhausting, right? It doesn’t read smoothly at all, and it’s honestly an eye sore. So how could we clean this example up and use the right amount of action? The key is to use the action beats to help set the scene. They should be reminders of where the characters are or what they’re doing, but they shouldn’t intrude on your dialogue.

If they are, you’ve got a problem. Either your dialogue is too weak to stand alone, or it’s going to appear weak because you tacked on an action beat unnecessarily.

Let’s look at that example again and see how it might be done better.

“Anna said she couldn’t come.” Mary eyed Eric as he came in from the yard.
“Why not?”
“Because she’s busy. Or so she claims.”
“What’s new? She’s always busy.”
“I know. But what am I supposed to do?” Mary crossed her arms. “Drag her out of the apartment?”
He shrugged. “If that’s what it takes.”

In this case, you no longer use so many action beats, but the effect is much better. The middle sections don’t need the support of action beats because the dialogue conveys the speakers’ emotions and intent on its own. But you do need some clarification of what they’re doing on occasion just to remind the reader that the characters are more than talking heads.

Conclusion

That’s a crash course in dialogue tags versus action beats. For those who are just starting out or aren’t completely solid on this, I hope this has helped. For those of you who already know how this works, next week’s article on dialogue may provide more useful information.

I know this can be somewhat confusing at first, so if anyone has questions, please feel free to drop them in the comments below! I or someone else who’s comfortable with the topic can help answer them for you.

Flash Fiction Fridays – Intergalactic Space Tours

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My most recent writing post on Pinterest was a prompt about someone who goes on an intergalactic space tour only to discover there’s more to the guide assigned to them than meets the eye. Since it got a lot of views and attention, I thought you guys might enjoy seeing my spin on it. Here it is!

~~~

Elmora peeked around the corner of her bathroom door at the man sitting on her room’s couch. He didn’t notice her. Too engrossed in checking his personal holo while he waited for her to come out of the bathroom. He was supposed to take her to the ship’s dining hall for dinner and then out onto the surface of the planet they’d landed on. Shyn, was it? Or maybe Shryn? She couldn’t keep the places straight anymore. The things she’d seen just blended into a kaleidoscope of colorful cultures, new foods, and a few unpleasant surprises.

Unpleasant surprises were the reason she was now hiding in the bathroom. Thryen was one of the unpleasant surprises, to be more specific. Well, maybe not unpleasant. She couldn’t really decide if it was pleasant or unpleasant to run into him here. But she definitely didn’t like the fact that he’d lied to her about what he’d been up to the last few years. She sucked in a slow breath and pressed her back to the wall. Should she confront him about it? Ask him why he’d left a life of luxury and peace to be a tour guide, of all things, aboard the InterGalactic?

Well, it had to be faced at some point, didn’t it? Equally pressing was the small matter of his interest in her and the utter lack of subtlety he exercised in showing it. Heat rose in her cheeks. It wasn’t fair. She shouldn’t be assigned a guide that couldn’t hide his interest and kept secrets. To think she’d thought they’d be good friends when they’d first met during on of his assignments on Earth.

She shook her head and smoothed down her skirt before stepping out of the bathroom. Thyren looked up at her, and one of his rare smiles spread over his lips. “Ora, the dress looks lovely on you.”

The heat in her cheeks rose to the tips of her ears. “Thanks. I guess… Thyren?”

He shoved his holo into his pocket and raised a brow. “What? You look like you’re going to faint of fear. Is something wrong?”

She played with one dangling earring. “Maybe. I don’t know…”

“You don’t know?” Confusion flitted across his face. “What does that mean?”

“You lied to me,” she blurted out.

The color drained from his face. “I lied to you about what?”

“You said you were a nobody when we met. You told me you wanted a quiet life and that after your task on Earth was over, you were going to find a quiet place in the woods to have that life.” She bit her lip and held in the tears. “But you weren’t telling the truth. You knew how I felt about liars when you said it, and you still lied!”

“I… I may have left some things out,” he murmured. “But I wasn’t lying about what I wanted.”

“Then why are you here? I don’t get it! You grew up with a silver spoon in your mouth. The acclaimed half-breed child, the first half-human and half-alien that survived from a breeding between humans and your mother’s race. And you left it all to what?” She waved a hand at the room as a whole. “To do bounty hunting and then give tours to air-headed women and arrogant men who want to see all the galactic wonders?”

“I hated being there. Out here, I’m free to be me.” Thryen’s lips twisted into a bitter smile. “Out here, I don’t have people demanding that I be what I’m not just to suite their needs. I don’t have women of both races trying to trick me into marriage just in the hopes of having their own exotic baby.”

Her heart ached for him, but her rational mind only saw the lies. How could she excuse this? True, his secret wasn’t really bad or good. But it hurt that he hadn’t chosen to trust her during the entire time they were friends on Earth or even now, when she’d come under his protection and guidance for the duration of the tour. “And you didn’t think I’d get that?”

He sighed. “I wanted to leave it behind, Ora. I wanted you to see me for me and just enjoy our time together without thinking about everything back home. Is that so bad?”

She lowered her head with a half-hearted shrug. “I don’t know, Thyren. I really don’t. But I think I’d like to skip dinner. I’m not really hungry.”

“And the tour on Shyren?”

She shook her head. “I… I don’t want to go. I want you to leave me alone, please.”

“Ora…” He reached out and rested his hands on her shoulders.

She should shrug him off, but she didn’t have the energy.

“I know you’re mad. And I should’ve known you’d be upset if I didn’t tell you and you found out some other way. I’m sorry.” He pulled away and shuffled to the door. “If you change your mind about dinner, you know I’m just next door.”

She nodded but didn’t look up. The door banged closed, and she stood there, trying to understand everything that had just happened. Her heart hurt so badly that she wasn’t sure she could bear it another second, but since she couldn’t escape her own feelings, she just shambled to the bed and dropped onto it. Curling into a ball, she lay there and hoped sleep would put her out of her misery soon.

~~~

Thanks for reading, everyone! I hope you all enjoyed and are having a great end of your week so far! See you next week.

Behind the Scenes with Ariel Paiement and Joanna White

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Hi guys! Interested in finding out more about my writing process, books, and philosophy for writing? Curious about Joanna White, who has been interviewed on my blog before? The two of us did an interview format question and answer where we asked each other questions about writing, books, and more. You can watch it below or on YouTube here. Thanks for watching!

Saturday Setup: Creatures – Creating Your Own

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Introduction

Any discussion of creatures and fantasy would be totally remiss if I didn’t cover creating your own creatures. After all, while we’ve got a plethora of well-established fantasy creatures, creating your own is one really fun way to put a unique spin on your world, and plenty of authors do it. There’s a variety of ways to achieve this goal, and we’re going to talk about some of the options available to you.

Option #1: Entirely New Creatures

First off, you have the option to create creatures that are entirely new. They’re not based on anything in existence, and they are all their own thing. When I think about examples of this, you’ve got the telfies from my book Bane of Ashkarith or some of the creatures in Brandon Sanderson’s works (though most modern fantasy creatures couldn’t be placed in this category, some of his could be, in my opinion.).

With the telfies from Bane of Ashkarith, they aren’t really based on any particular creature. I just kind of decided on the general appearance based on their diet and what I wanted them to be able to do. Some people have asked if they were dragons of some sort. The answer is a resounding no. (No offense to anyone who wanted them to be dragons. I like dragons, but these guys just aren’t it, and they’re not based on dragons either.) Given the fact that they have fur that can change color with their moods, a tubular body with no legs, horns, and no big nasty teeth (oh, and acid slobber if they decide they don’t like something), they’re not really based on anything recognizable. So, arguably, they’re pretty much entirely new creatures because of this. You could strip it down to basic components and claim they derived from some Earth-based animal or mythological beast, but that’s true of just about any creature.

For Sanderson’s work, the most clearly unique creature he created that doesn’t seem to be really based on anything clearly Earth-related is the chull. These are lumbering beasts with carapace covering their bodies. They’re herd animals that often get used in place of horses in terms of functionality, but that’s where the similarities in appearance pretty much end. The creatures definitely look unique. Depending on who’s doing the art and which type of chull we’re talking, some of them look sort of more like crabs than anything else, but others look as if they’re some sort of strange dinosaur with giant shells on their backs. I’ve put pictures below so you can have a better understanding on this one, but when you read the descriptions of them in the books, they definitely seem otherworldly and unique.

Axehounds are another creation from Sanderson’s Stormlight Archives that are pretty unique. On first glance, you’d think they’re basically just a type of dog, but when you get a look at the creatures, it’s hard to decide if they were based on dogs or something else. Arguably, this one isn’t quite as unique to itself as some other things, but it’s not a terrible example.

This is from StormlightArchive.fandom.com. As you can see, they do sort of resemble crabs. Kind of. But they’re not always this crab-like in appearance. The larger they are, the more different they look.

Option #2: Based On Mythological or Real Creatures

This is probably the most commonly used option for fantasy creatures. With this one, you just pick a mythological beast or a real animal from our world and tweak it so it’s different. Arguably, some would say, Sanderson’s chull are an example of this. Of course, this depends a bit upon which type of chull we’re talking about. That case could easily be made for at least the smaller varieties, at least. However, even if that example doesn’t hold true entirely to this category, there are plenty of things that do. I mean, just look at dragons. How many times have those been done? Thousands, right? And everyone has a slightly different spin on it, even if there are lots of similarities when you look at all the representations as a whole. So, they’re a perfect example of this category!

oPTION #3: cOMBINATIONS

Don’t feel like creating an entirely unique creature but also don’t want to just alter the usual suspects from Earth? Combinations are probably your best bet, then. With this third and final option, you take interesting features from other animals and blend them together. (You can do the same with mythological creatures or with animals and mythological creatures.) Some combinations are going to produce some pretty odd or grotesque creatures, but if that’s your goal, it’s easy to accomplish. Otherwise, you’re going to want to choose features that go well together or animals that wouldn’t look too strange when combined.

One example of this that I can immediately think of would be the Numahi from my novel, Pathway of the Moon. This creature shows up later on in the book and is described as having somewhat feline features like those of our big cats on Earth mixed with those of a bear. An odd combination? Maybe. But the different features of a cat and bear are not so bad that they would make an ugly creature either.

The combination possibilities are literally endless though. You can come up with so many different things, and this is a ton of fun. If you’re an artist, you can sit down and just sketch up some different ideas for how to combine things to see it visually. Even if you’re not an artist, you could do this if it helps you to visualize. No one else has to see it, right? Even if you don’t do that, if you can get a good mental image on it, you should be all set because you can write the description down to help others visualize it too.

Conclusion

Hopefully this has been helpful to those of you wanting to create your own creatures. There’s a lot that goes into it, especially if you’re creating your own creatures, so on upcoming Saturday Setups, we’ll be talking about things like determining habitat, types of animals, and creating your creatures around what their environment and feeding habits are (since these are the two most important factors that determine what a creature will look like and what features it needs.) Until then, happy writing, and thanks for joining me on today’s Saturday Setup!

Flash Fiction Fridays: Someone Else’s Scars

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This week’s flash fiction is based on a prompt I saw on Pinterest. The prompt is pretty simple: her skin is carved with scars that someone else earned. It seemed interesting, so here we go.

~~~

Anorah gritted her teeth and squeezed her eyes shut. The knife dug deeper into her arm, avoiding any arteries but inflicting more than enough pain. That would scar. Tears slipped down her cheeks, but she didn’t open her eyes. It would only be one more scar out of dozens.

Dozens of scars that she hadn’t earned but bore for love. These days, she wasn’t even sure why she suffered this anymore. Was he really worth her long-suffering and her silence in the face of pain he himself allowed to be inflicted?

“Give up on him. He isn’t worth this, Anorah.” Her tormentor’s breath was hot on her cheek. “He’s letting us do this. He’s too apathetic to do anything. You’re just taking the punches for him. For a man who doesn’t even care.”

She swallowed hard and opened her teary eyes. “I’m not going to give up on him. You want me to give him up? To let him fall into your hands? To let you drag his soul into the darkness?”

“You know what we want. We’ve told you. Why do you keep fighting? He’s going to end up under our sway eventually whether you die or live.”

She shook her head, a cry sticking in her throat. “I won’t give up on him. You can do whatever you want to me. You can even tear me to pieces or rip my heart out of my chest. But you can’t make me step out of the way or tell you how to get to him.”

“So you’ll die to protect him?” The man’s dark features twisted into a snarl. “What calls on you to do such a thing, hmm? He. Is. Not. Worth. It.”

“He is.”

He dug the knife deeper. “He’s not.”

She choked on her sob and shook her head. “You’ll never understand because you only know how to take. You don’t know how to love.”

“Love? Don’t think that nonsense means anything. He doesn’t love you, so why suffer for him?”

She smiled past the pain, the ache in her heart worse than even the pain in her arm. This man just didn’t understand. “He has hurt me more than you ever could. He destroyed my heart. You’re just destroying my body. But I forgave him anyway. I forgave him because I love him. I don’t love him because he’s good or perfect. I love him because I chose to, and I won’t change that choice. Ever.”

He growled and drove the knife through the fleshy part of her arm. “What could possible inspire you to love him? He’s a monster!”

Her voice strangled as the pain overwhelmed her, but she got the words out anyway. “I love him despite what he’s done because I have been loved unconditionally despite what I’ve done.”

Her tormentor twisted the knife, and white hot pain seared through her. Her mind blanked, and blackness fringed her vision. In the distance, she could hear herself screaming, but the pain no longer touched her. Then the blackness swallowed her.

~~~

That’s it for this week’s Flash Fiction Friday. Hope you all enjoyed. Have a great weekend, everyone!

Thursday Technicalities: Weaving World-Building Into Your Story – Through Your Character’s Eyes

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Introduction

This week, we’re going to talk about weaving world-building into the story through your character’s eyes. There are multiple ways to go about weaving your world into the story, but one of the best ways is through your character. So let’s talk about how.

dISCOVERIES

The first way you can go about weaving your world into the story is to allow your readers to discovery it alongside your characters. When you have characters who haven’t experienced the world before, it’s a lot more acceptable to show more of the world in a way that’s overt instead of hidden in the lines between the action. Characters’ confusion over things in their world suddenly make sense because they don’t know anything about what’s around them to begin with.

Interactions

What if you don’t have a character who’s new to the world just like the reader is? You can still world-build and weave that building into the story. One great method for this is to develop the reader’s understanding of the world via interactions between your world and your character.

This method strongly goes back to the idea that your world is its own character with its own personality. No one person or world will interact the same way with each other. This method requires you to know a few things. You need to know your character, know your world, and know how your character views the world. These three determine how your character and your world will interact together.

Interactions can happen a lot of ways. It can happen through the character’s meeting with various creatures in the world. Or, maybe your character is a healer and spends much of their time gathering plants and supplies from nature. They might be an adventurer who has to brave the elements and the difficulties of terrain to reach their goal. Really, the possibilities are endless and allow you plenty of room to show the world to your reader. But the key with this method is that you should treat it the same way you treat an interaction between two characters. You won’t info dump on the reader because an interaction between two characters only reveals bits and pieces of both individuals, not everything. Instead, you’ll reveal only what is relevant to the interaction/scene and the story as a whole. Reveal what needs to be revealed then and no more.

The one difference between this method and an interaction between characters is that you may reveal things about the world that aren’t necessarily serving a specific purpose to the plot. At times, you may choose to reveal things about the world in interactions simply to make the world itself feel richer and more alive or even to reveal something about the person interacting with the world.

Happenings

The final main method for weaving world-building in has more to do with sentence-level inclusions and events. These may not be interactions with your main characters specifically, but they typically affect the character in some way or another. Otherwise, we wouldn’t be seeing it as the readers since you can’t show us what your viewpoint characters don’t see unless you’re using omniscient POV.

With this method, your world-building will be less obvious. It might be a common phrase that’s used by the inhabitants of the world or a common creature that is seen all over the place. It might be some sort of distant report of a creature terrorizing villages on the outskirts of a kingdom. Maybe it’s a brief mention of terrain in an area a character is occupying. One way or another, this world-building method usually doesn’t involve intrusive or overt mentions of the world. This is more subtle and is like the spice added to a dish. It makes everything read better, but your reader won’t notice the individual additions: only the whole of the writing’s flavor.

Conclusion

This type of world-building is more complex than what we often think of as world-building, but it’s also vastly more effective than what we usually see in most writing these days. It takes practice and instinct to do this well, but the instincts surrounding what type of weaving to use and how can be developed the more you write using the methods I’ve given here and in the previous post on this topic.

Thursday Technicalities: World Building Tools – Weaving Together Plot and World

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Introduction

This seemed like a fitting place to begin a new series on Thursday Technicalities since we talk about world building tools on Saturday Setups and since I was just discussing where I learned most of what I know in my newsletter this week. So, yes, we’re going to talk about more world building tools, but this time, we’re going to start examining ways to really weave world building into your story and how you can bring your world to life.

A lot goes into world building writing. There’s lots of room for failure, but it’s not always so easy to succeed at this. Sure, there are lots of ways to weave world building into the story, lots of ways to show your reader this world you’ve built, and lots of ways to world build and many more tips for world building. But more often than not, those methods aren’t used by authors. Worlds either end up flat because the author decided they wanted to flavor their romance/adventure/thriller/etc with fantasy instead of flavoring their fantasy with those other things, or they end up flat because the author didn’t weave the world into the story well and ended up info-dumping, which drives readers nuts. Neither way is a pretty way to die. So, let’s start into how you can avoid this.

Beginnings

For world building to truly work well, you have to understand that what you choose to do outside the story will probably be way more than what you’ll ever show in the story if you take the conventional approach. Now, it doesn’t have to be that way, but usually it is, and there’s nothing wrong with that. But while a series might have room for you to show your reader a picture of your whole world and all the cool things you put into it, a single book will not. This means that when you’re actually considering your world building in light of your novel, you need to do so with the very beginning of the book: when you start working on that kernel of an idea known as your plot.

There are really two, maybe three, ways this happens.

First, you may have a plot but not necessarily the world. In this case, you’re able to start building the world and the plot together. If you’re taking this approach, you can use an approach that Holly Lisle’s world-building course calls SANE world building. You build what you need when you need it and no more (unless you’re just doing it for fun). This approach is good if you’re the sort of person who feels like you can’t start writing until you have every detail of the world nailed down. You’ll never get anywhere doing that, so approaching world building writing as a part of building your plot can help you to tie the two together without going insane or never writing a single word of the story on paper.

Second, you may have the idea for a world, but not a story. This can happen to those of us who love world building writing because we conceive an idea for some sort of power system, magic system, or other world-based structure, but we don’t necessarily have the characters and the stories that are going to populate it. However, in this instance, the world building itself often gives rise to the story. When I was doing my undergrad in accounting, a friend and I came up with a story idea and were co-writing. However, she was taking a long time to do anything on her end, and I was bored, so I started doing world building writing for a bunch of random things and history-related stuff for the world. (Yeah, I know. Nerdy. But I was in accounting, and that was really, really boring.) Long story short, as I was developing the history, I ended up with the idea for Rith’s Disciple, which led to a vague desire to fill out the history following it. When I joined Wattpad’s ONC contest, that desire combined with a really good prompt resulted in Bane of Ashkarith.

Finally, though perhaps not always as common, sometimes you have the idea for a world and a story idea, which leads to further stories. This happened with Bane of Ashkarith. I already had the world established, as I mentioned above, but the history I’d developed for the world gave rise to Bane of Ashkarith and the rest of the series that I’m working on. All of the stories are literally just histories of the famous people from the world’s past. Readers wouldn’t necessarily pick up on that right away unless they knew me and had read about the background behind the series, but because of the combination of the idea for a world and a story together, I ended up with an entire series. Nice when that happens, right?

Expanding our Understanding

I think the other important world building tip for world building enthusiasts (and those who hate it too) to realize is this: world building is more than creating languages, building races, and making up fantastical creatures or cool tech. It’s way more.

Have you ever thought about how strange it would be to us if metal striking stone made a hissing sound instead of a clink? Or what if, when you stepped on grass in the summer, it crunched like gravel but stepping on gravel was soundless? What if the sky was purple, not blue?

When you’re creating a world, building it includes little details. These details can be split into three areas, really. Set, objects that act as props for the set, and mechanisms/methods by which things work.

tHREE aREAS OF pLOT-oRIENTED wORLD-bUILDING

Set is pretty straightforward. Having a sky that’s purple instead of blue is a set item. It sets your world apart from others. Lots of things could be part of the set. Anything from the color of the sky to the way water looks lapping on the sand to the sand itself could be a part of set. To clarify, set is different from your prop objects in that props are things people bring onto the stage. They’re objects like pens, candles, food on a table, or the table itself. Your set is anything that occurs there naturally like trees, bushes, deer paths, bodies of water, and so on.

Your props and objects are just as varied as set. But they’re also a part of world building writing, something Holly Lisle points out in her course on the topic. People don’t often think that props are as important to the stage you’re building for the story as the story or the big flashy fantasy creatures being installed, but they are. The objects around us say a lot about who we are and why we are the way we are. They are our insight into those around us and even into the world. What is there can sometimes be as important as what’s not. If everyone uses candles and not flashlights, that tells you something about the world. If stone doesn’t exist much of anywhere, but people build everything with wood, it says a lot about the set without you ever having to come out and say anything. Objects can also help us to understand the more immaterial mechanisms and rules in place surrounding the world. Those rules have to act upon an object, person, or part of the set. So we can often see them in action and learn those rules of order by observing what they act upon. This can help us to avoid info-dumping or becoming too obtrusive with our world.

Objects carry a lot of weight in the world, though. In a story, if you show us an object, particularly if you show it to us independent of any human interaction, we’ll assume it’s important. Now, maybe you put it there intentionally to tell us what kind of person occupies the space it’s in. Or, maybe it plays some larger role in the story as a whole. Only you know that and can decide. But, the fact remains that if you put it there, it needs to serve a purpose. If it doesn’t serve one, don’t put it in. That’s what leads to overwriting, purple prose, and bored or confused readers. None of those are good, so just don’t do it.

Mechanisms and rules are far less obvious than the first two, but no less important. Mechanisms and rules are what tell us that on Earth, when you drop a coin on a concrete surface, it clinks or gives off a ringing noise. It doesn’t purr because that would be breaking the rules. Mechanisms tell us that healthy grass should bend under our feet and spring back when we step on it in the summer time. It isn’t going to turn into a bunch of deadly spikes and stab the bottoms of our shoes or our feet. If we didn’t have mechanisms and rules to keep things organized and somewhat predictable, then everything would devolve into chaos. Your world is no different in this regard.

The main method for showing mechanisms and rules, however, is different than it was for the first two categories of practical, plot-oriented world-building. For mechanisms and rules, you generally end up showing them when they’re in use on objects, interacting with the set, or affecting a character. They’re seen subtly, but even though most readers don’t immediately pick up on it all the time, they’ll expect it to be a trend unless you’ve made it clear what just happened was really weird.

For example, in the first chapter of Pathway of the Moon, I show my main character, Leo, scaling a wall using shadows to stick himself to the wall. He proceeds to do the same on the way back out of the castle after a successful execution of his target. This sets a precedent or a rule for his magic. Shadows allow those who can use them to stick themselves to different surfaces. I didn’t represent it as an odd thing or something that other shadow users couldn’t utilize, so the reader will anticipate that it’s normal for the world and the character, and if I use it again, they won’t find it odd. These kinds of encounters help to flesh out and build the world for the readers without them even noticing or realizing that you have.

Conclusion

In upcoming posts, I’ll go into some more specific writing tips for slipping world building into your story and talk about the techniques. The point of this post was simply to help you to understand some basics on how you can begin weaving the two together. It is by no means an exhaustive thesis on the subject. I hope that it’s been useful to you, and I hope you’ll stick with me as we explore some of the various ways myself and other authors utilize to develop worlds that readers can delve into and enjoy in their own rights because of their individuality and fresh perspectives.