Returning to the New

Next week, school starts. I'm going back to college. Chemical engineering 'bout to get lit up in here. Woot.

Personally, I'm excited. I get to take physics 2, organic chemistry, statics, dynamics, health and the body, and stagecraft. It's gonna be a busy semester, a hard semester. A good semester.

In many ways, I'm going back to a second home. There are people there who I care about very deeply, and I can't wait to see them again. In fact, I can't wait for any of it. The math, the engineering, the writing, the theatre, the design, the campus itself, the people. Things will be amazing.

It's a return. I'm returning to things I know.
At the same time, it's all going to be new. A new year, new freshmen, new theatre productions, new classes, new subjects, new adventures.

It's a little intimidating.
But...


It's also good.


Today, I'd like to talk about a little about that idea: returning to new things.

The Importance of Going Home

Everyone needs a home. Home is a sense of belonging and purpose. At home, you mean something. Whether you something to someone or to some ideal, you have purpose. Without you, something's not right.

Adventures are good. Leaving home is important. Without those things, you won't grow as a person to be full and colorful and passionate. However, if you never come home, you don't have roots. You won't have a place to take that colorful passion and mature it into your art. Coming home gives you a chance to breathe, to evaluate the changes in yourself and keep those which benefit you and those around you.

Home is valuable. Having a home (or multiple homes) fills you up for the next adventure. I'm fortunate enough to have three or four places/groups I would call "home". That's so valuable to me. I need those places. I hope you have those places, too. How many can vary, but I hope you have at least one. 

Home is a wonderful place. Returning to it is wonderful.

But so is going out.

Striking Out into the New

Staying home is great, sure. Being able to be in a place where you are wanted, needed, and loved is precious. Nothing can compare to it, and nothing can replace it. 

Staying home forever is... well, not so good. New experiences feed our souls with passion. Adventures and lessons and forays out of our comfort zones push us forward in maturity. There is great power in stepping out of the known into the unknown and facing it head on. 

When you leave home, you gain. When you return home, you prepare yourself for the next great adventure.

For me, I'm about to do both at the same time. It's an exhilarating thought. I get to go home, and I get to go on an adventure. 

What about you? Where is your home? Where are you going on an adventure next? What do you hope to gain? I'd love to hear about it.

NOTE: there will be no post next week, as I transition into a new schedule at college. I'll be picking up two weeks after. See you then!

World Blip – Education (vol. 2)

Today, I’d like to go back to a type of post I haven’t done in a while: the world blip. Hey, remember these? Where I’d spout off about a part of worldbuilding people probably didn’t care about?

Well, sit back, cause I’m gonna do it again.

Today, I’d like to talk about something that can have a vast impact on the characters in your story. Not just the setting, but the people in it. In fact, your choices regarding this aspect of worldbuilding will hardly affect the setting at all.

Education.

Why Education Matters

Can you read?

If you can comprehend that question, then the answer is yes. Obviously.

Here’s a better question: can your characters read?

Ah, and have an interesting twist: if they can, should they be able to? You see, if you’re writing historical fiction or fantasy, the odds of characters being able to read are much lower than if you’re writing sci-fi or contemporary. Schools weren’t widely available in the past, nor might they be in fantasy settings. Or maybe they are.

And that’s why it matters. If your world is built to have few educational systems in place, your characters shouldn’t be able to read. That will directly affect what they can do in their story and how they interact with the world.

Now, education goes far beyond reading. It reaches into math, science, writing, philosophy, religion, and all aspects of life. These things can deeply affect what your characters do, think, and believe. If you look at people today, education is an integral part of their lives. Young people spend most of their days in school, and adults spend their lives working at a job they qualify for based on their education. Education affects the progress of technology and culture.

Characters Interacting with Education

Education is something you can develop very quickly, if you wish. You could also spend days creating complex systems for your world, but the speed is nice for those of us who don’t have days for it.

Answer these questions:

Who is educated?

What sorts of educations do they receive?

What establishments exist?

Answers to the first may include people groups like “nobles” or “nobles and merchants” or “first and second class citizens”, and so forth. The second question is more about the subjects focused on. For instance, most education in a society may be apprenticeship: trade school. Therefore, people may be educated, but not widely knowledgeable. Their experts in their fields and ignorant elsewhere. The last question is very simple: are there universities? High schools? Grade schools? Trade schools?

Once you have decided on these, you’re done. That’s all you need.

Nice.

The work comes in deciding how your characters fit into this education system and training yourself to write them according to their level of education. First, you have to match them: are they educated? Where? How much? What do they know? What don’t they know?

Then it’s a “simple” task of writing them that way.

I’d like to give you an example before I end: in Agram Awakens and its sequel, my character Deyu is a slave. She has no education. She cannot read or write, and she knows the numbers one, two, three, four, and ten (though she doesn’t understand what ten actually is). She doesn’t know what science is, nor philosophy, and has a hard time understanding how religion works.

She’s also fifteen.

It’s difficult to write her, sometimes, because her education makes her sound like she’s four. In fact, she often acts like she’s four, because she doesn’t know better. No one taught her how to act less like a four year old.

However, it’s also a very interesting character detail that I’ve had several beta readers congratulate me on. They love the details when she refers to things in groups of four, when she gets frustrated at not being able to read a sign, and when she confuses herself with religion and philosophy.

That’s a powerful thing. It makes us empathize with her. Even though most of us can read, we can empathize with ignorance. That’s a powerful tool.

Simple Stories

Well, I’m back.

Today, I’d like to talk about something that most people don’t seem to think about as something worthwhile.

Simple stories.

Stories that are short, straightforward, innocent. Simple.

Many of us place excessive emphasis on complex plots and twists that are “unexpected”. Nowadays, if we can guess the ending, then it’s suddenly described as “cliché” and “predictable” which is automatically frowned upon.

However… what is wrong with a story you know?

One of my favorite stories to tell is a story I’ve told a dozen times (for the record, it’s about how my sister and her husband first interacted before they liked each other). Every time, however, it makes me smile, makes me feel emotion. That’s what story is supposed to do, isn’t it?

Is the story I’m telling predictable? Fairly. If you heard the first half, you could guess the second half pretty easily. Does that make the story any less interesting?

No.

Heck, I told that story for what must be the fiftieth time as part of my speech at their wedding. A good half of the people there (and we’re talking a big wedding reception… my sister knows too many people) already knew the story.

I told it anyway.

They all smiled and laughed and felt emotion because of it.

So let’s talk about simple stories.

The Importance of Simplicity

What does simplicity allow you to do? After all, simplicity seems rather limiting. A story that goes from point a to point b without much happening in between sounds kind of boring, doesn’t it? That sounds like a story your Aunt Matilda might tell you at Thanksgiving that you didn’t really want to hear but have to anyway because it’s impolite to just walk away mid-conversation.

However, simplicity can also have great power. Believe it or not, simplicity grants the reader more imaginative power. When the story is simple, there’s more dead-space for the reader to fill with their own ideas. Even if the story has very little storyline and character arc, the reader is more than willing to put their own ideas into it.

Co-creation.

Simple stories can also be the most poignant. For most of us, our lives aren’t overly complicated. Even if we claim they are, they really… aren’t. Things are less complicated from the outside looking in; most complications only feel complicated due to a lack of perspective and distance. Therefore, simple stories resonate with the stories of our lives. They build on our experiences and sting us with something simultaneously sweet and sour.

This small power is still power-full. The poignancy of simple stories is like the strength of an ant. It may not seem like much from afar, but up close it’s astounding.

Sweet, Sweet Themes

What sort of themes do we find in most literature nowadays?

Darkness.

Evil.

Wrong.

Defeat.

Hopelessness.

A lot of themes today reflect the way we feel about the real world. We feel hopeless. We feel defeated. We see evil and darkness and wrongness all around us. It comes from so many places, and we want to feel empathy from elsewhere. We want to feel like we’re not alone in seeing these things. So we write them. We read them.

This is important. It’s so, so important. If stories don’t tackle the themes of reality, they lose their power to reach readers with any true and lasting impact. However, if darkness is the only theme we write, it’s the only thing we’ll ever see.

Simple stories free us from those themes. Can you write a dark, foreboding simple story? Sure. I have. Those are important, too. But you know what you can do with a simple story?

You can make people smile the whole time.

There is no need for extreme variance in emotion when the story is short and simple. One emotion is fine. When I tell the story of my sister and her husband meeting, what am I wanting to elicit from my listeners? Joy. That’s it.

When I tell the story of Agram Awakens what emotions am I wanting to stir up? I can list a good dozen off the top of my head from just the first act.

There it is.

The power of a simple story: joy can’t usually carry a story. When a story is complex, innocently singular emotions aren’t enough to carry all of that weight on their shoulders. Simple stories can be carried like that.

Simple stories give room for innocence.

Writing Simple Stories

Don’t be afraid of simple stories. Don’t be afraid to write a cliché. Any cliché can be well-written enough that readers don’t care.

Don’t be afraid of innocence. It’s okay to have a story that tells of good, positive themes.

Don’t be afraid of shortness. It’s okay to write novellas and short stories. Not everything has to be a novel. Not everything should be.

Don’t be afraid of the darkness in our world. Write your simple story. Fight that darkness. Fight it with everything you have and light your little spark. Fight.

Win.

Examining Styles – Dialogue and Narration

If we had to divide prose into two categories, the two that make the most sense are these: dialogue or narration. If it’s not being spoken by a character, it’s narration.

These two parts are very, very important to the feel of your style. In particular, the way you write them and the ratio between the two. Let’s discuss them shall we?

The Importance of Dialogue

Without dialogue, your characters have no voices. They’re mute. Dialogue allows the readers to hear the story world play out. It provides a way for characters to pass information and gives the reader a break from reading the information of narration.

Without dialogue, prose can feel heavy handed, wordy, and cumbersome. Now, it is possible to write with very little dialogue. It’s done all the time, and quite well. However, dialogue is interesting. Readers like dialogue. They like the chance for imagination. Dialogue breaks from description to give us sounds and voices.

We have to maintain a mental image with our imagination while we also balance the voices of two or three or four or seventy people. It stretches the mind and creates a satisfied feeling in the reader’s exercised imagination.

In addition, dialogue provides white space. If your book is completely narration, the pages are filled with long paragraphs and chunks of text that go on and on without any space for the reader to fill. Dialogue, on the other hand, shortens paragraphs.

It breaks them up.

Sometimes, there are one-word

Lines.

These are followed by longer sentences with stronger vocabulary and feeling that soar with the reader to new heights of description before returning to

Shorter, choppier

Paragraphs

Which provide rest.

Do you see what I did there? I left some white space (well… black space, here). The spaces between the three longer paragraphs gives you space. It gives the reader space. That white space gives their eyes a break and allows them to breathe. More importantly, that is space the reader gets to fill. They become co-creators with you in creating the world.

The Narrative Experience

Narration, on the other hand, gives the reader a baseline for their imagination. It gives them action, motivation, thoughts, and emotions to build off of. If you wrote only dialogue, the reader has nothing to build off of. All they see is voices floating in a formless void. That’s a daunting place for a reader to have to fill.

Instead, you help direct their imagination to the right details. That’s why unexpected details are always superior to cliché ones. Unexpected details fill in the parts of the scene that the reader couldn’t have thought of themselves. Your job isn’t to describe everything, but to create a structure around which your reader can add their own input.

Narration is co-creation.

How does your narrative do this?

First, narrative provides emotion. Emotion is the fuel of story. It fuels conflict when there is conflict, and it carries interest when there is no conflict. Narration conveys the emotions of characters through thoughts, emotional tags, word choice, and character actions.

Secondly, narration provides action. Without action, your story is static. Nothing happens. No one moves, the scene never changes. Action creates a moving picture in your reader’s mind and creates tension, conflict, and consequences. Without action, your story is stuck in a rut of motionlessness.

Finally, narration provides description. Like I mentioned above, unexpected details are the best way to help your reader to build a scene. Another way to help in co-creation is sensory details. Giving your readers tangible senses beyond sight goes a long way in their construction of your story.

Finding the Balance

Now. If both narration and dialogue are important to the reader, how much of each do you put in your book? What ratio?

Is it fifty percent?

Something else?

Is there a magic number?

Here’s the deal: there is a magic number.

That number, however… changes.

In fact, it changes by writer and by book. It can even change by character in a book with multiple characters.

Let me explain:

The ratio of dialogue to narration is dependent on three factors: the last chapter, the current chapter, and the next chapter. If the last chapter was narration heavy, this chapter may need some dialogue to give the reader some white space. Or perhaps this chapter needs more narration to describe the scene so that the next scene can be primarily action and dialogue. Chapters with lots of character interaction require more dialogue than chapters with only one character.

The ratio can also depend on your personal style just as much as it shapes your style. Your use of descriptions to paint emotion in your reader may result in your using more narration than dialogue. Or perhaps you’re better at writing conversations and making voices sound real, such that your ratio is dialogue over narration.

It is important not that you have some arbitrary fraction, but that you find a balance which fits the style your current book is written in. Create the baseline for your reader’s imagination, fill it with vivid, emotional characters, and provide them with noise and action and white space. 

ANNOUNCEMENT: There will be no post on 7/21/17, because my older sister is getting married on the 22nd and I won't have time next week to write up a post for y'all. Any complaints can be taken up with her. ;)