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| This episode of Arena's Insight is brought to you by Brandon, who asks, what would your advice be for an aspiring novelist? | |
| And he actually goes on to break it down into more specific questions, which is excellent. | |
| Make sure I cover everything for him. | |
| But we can just get to those as we go through the video. | |
| Now, the very first topic. | |
| To be a good writer, you need to write about what you know. | |
| If you're writing about stuff you don't know anything about, you're going to be basing it upon movies and television. | |
| And quite frankly, movies and television are very unrealistic. | |
| The reality is with film is that even though we experience it as reality, to the point that TV Tropes even has a page about how reality is unrealistic, because guns don't sound like they do on TV, cars don't squeal their tires constantly, on TV we expect things to be a certain way. | |
| And the way that things are filmed has more to do with the realities of being on a set and having cameras around and having to do stunts that look really good but aren't too dangerous. | |
| It has more to do with all of that than it has to do with realism. | |
| If a perfect example is fights on television. | |
| Fights on television are utterly unrealistic. | |
| You know, for one thing, there's the knockout blow. | |
| In reality, if somebody gets permanently knocked out from a fist fight, they need to go to a hospital. | |
| They are in dire need of medical attention. | |
| And another one is simply how flashy and Jackie Chan the fights look. | |
| A real-world fight, and if you watch UFC, especially the old stuff, you'll have noticed this. | |
| In the real world, fights don't look that interesting. | |
| They don't look that exciting. | |
| But if you're a writer and you've done some sparring, you've done some wrestling in high school, you can actually write the scene. | |
| You can write the scene of the characters getting into this non-flashy, non-Jackie Chan fight, and you can make it interesting because you know the experiences. | |
| You know what it's like to be straining, to be feeling the pain of it all, that blinding flash anytime you get hit in the nose, for example. | |
| Getting hit in the nose looks funny on TV. | |
| If you're writing a book, however, and you write about that blinding flash, the white and black sparks that you see when you get hit in the nose, that's not funny all of a sudden. | |
| That's pretty serious. | |
| It's exciting. | |
| If you haven't experienced something, you just can't write about it all that well. | |
| So focus on what you know. | |
| Which leads to the next point. | |
| If you want to be a good writer, live an interesting life. | |
| Now listen, all of those formulaic cop shows and all that other pablum that comes out of Hollywood, this is, Hollywood writers are the sort of writers that don't live very interesting lives. | |
| They don't know how any of this stuff works. | |
| You know, they haven't done anything exciting. | |
| So they just write the same tired, derivative stuff as the rest of Hollywood. | |
| You don't want to be that. | |
| You want to actually write passionately and descriptively. | |
| You want to bring people into a world they haven't seen before. | |
| So go do interesting stuff. | |
| You know, learn to fight, learn to shoot a gun, go get a job in the oil patch, go rent a cabin on a transport ship and go visit Europe. | |
| You know, learn to ride a horse. | |
| Whatever it is, whatever it is you're interested, go do that stuff. | |
| If you want to be a good writer, you need to lead an interesting life. | |
| So go out there and do all that. | |
| And the third point with this, even like there's going to be scenes in your books where it's going to be something, inevitably, you're going to run into something you don't actually know anything about. | |
| And it just trying to get a real world experience of that is unfeasible. | |
| For example, imagine you have a scene in your book where there's some terrorists in a nuclear power plant and the good guys are chasing, whatever. | |
| How many of us have ever been in a nuclear power plant? | |
| You know, like maybe you could feasibly go and talk to somebody in a nuclear power plant, go on a tour of one. | |
| Or you could go on Wikipedia or you could go on the internet, start looking up pictures. | |
| What do these actually look like? | |
| You know, what do all the systems do? | |
| You know, if there's a gunfight and that gets punctured, what would actually happen? | |
| Go and do the research. | |
| You know, you cannot write a novel without doing a lot of research into just all the little bits in the background, the little stylistic elements. | |
| Because if you have a reader that does know about that and you screw it up, it's going to make you look like an idiot. | |
| Now, almost inevitably there is going to be somewhere that that happens, but you want to minimize that. | |
| So, write about what you know. | |
| Live an interesting life so you know a lot of stuff worth writing about, and research the stuff that you're not familiar with. | |
| Next question was about writing good dialogue. | |
| I'm going to break this one down to three points too. | |
| The technical, the characters, and the dialogue itself. | |
| So the technical aspect. | |
| When you're writing dialogue, the last thing you want to do is end every statement with Bill said, and then Joe said, and then Bill said all over again. | |
| That's just absolutely terrible and clunky. | |
| You don't want to be doing that. | |
| So one of the techniques I use, instead of saying he said, or he shouted, or he screamed, or he whispered, because there's only so many variations of the word said, is I'll have a character make a statement and follow it up with Bill smoked a cigarette or Joe leaned back in his seat. | |
| I'll do that to offer environmental description. | |
| So now it's doing two jobs. | |
| It's identifying who said the sentence, who's speaking so that the reader doesn't lose track. | |
| And second of all, it's giving you a mind's eye picture of what's going on without you having to write a bunch of clunky expository dialogue explaining what they're doing. | |
| If you put these subtle little cues throughout the dialogue, you can absolutely skip having to have a paragraph of environmental description. | |
| So that's a technical thing. | |
| And also with the technical thing, when you're reading, and of course, maybe this should have been the first point of advice. | |
| If you want to be a writer, read. | |
| Read a lot. | |
| You need to understand how books work. | |
| Don't worry about, you know, it's going to ruin your idea. | |
| You're actually going to steal an idea. | |
| Don't. | |
| Just read. | |
| Read as much as you possibly can. | |
| But while you're reading, look for clunky dialogue. | |
| Look for sentences in your favorite author's book that kind of jump out at you, that don't seem to fit properly. | |
| And think about how you would rewrite those to be a little bit smoother. | |
| Because I guarantee you, every book you are going to find bits that you could improve on. | |
| So pay attention for that. | |
| So that's a technical aspect. | |
| The next aspect is that you need to have good characters. | |
| It has dialogue that is purely in service to the plot. | |
| It's almost utopian dialogue, where there's, in real life, when two people have a conversation, they're both coming into it with different goals. | |
| Even if you're just talking to your roommate in the morning, you both have different goals for the conversation, different things you want to bring up. | |
| Now, as the author, you have a purpose for this dialogue. | |
| You want it to lead to them becoming an adventuring party to go slay the dragon. | |
| But that's not how the characters are thinking. | |
| The characters each have their own goals and motivations going into it. | |
| And the utopian dialogue that just perfectly serves the plot is the most boring, terrible, driest thing that you will ever read. | |
| Because dialogue, ultimately, stories are not about the plot. | |
| Okay, plots are a diamond dozen. | |
| Anybody can come up with a plot. | |
| Plots are not hard to find. | |
| What's hard to find is a writer that can write real characters, that can really make them pop out of the out of the words and sentences and become real. | |
| And that's why we read stories. | |
| Is the characters not the plot? | |
| Even science fiction. | |
| You know, it's like science fiction we explicitly read for the ideas. | |
| Even there, the good science fiction has characters that are larger than life. | |
| That we can feel them breathing through the pages. | |
| So you need to understand people. | |
| You need to understand basic psychology. | |
| You need to understand, you know, like look into Freud, look into the medieval humors. | |
| Get a grasp of why people do what they do. | |
| You know, what are the hidden motivations people have? | |
| What are their secrets, their biases? | |
| Are they grumpy right now because it's early in the morning? | |
| Are they extroverted? | |
| Are they introverted? | |
| You know, think about people in your own life and how they would respond in these situations. | |
| Don't ever have a character do something they wouldn't just to serve the plot. | |
| Have them be real characters. | |
| And if that changes the plot, then so be it. | |
| And the third point on this, once you have real characters, and once you're writing good dialogue, good technical dialogue, is realize that your characters are going to be different in every situation, in every conversation. | |
| And this is actually a bit of advice for Morrison Scott Card, which is just brilliant. | |
| You are not the same person when you hang out with your parents versus when you hang out with your friends. | |
| You are a slightly different person in both scenarios. | |
| A dialogue is created by the two people, a meshing of both their personalities. | |
| So when you write this dialogue, make sure that it's unique to who they're speaking to. | |
| If you really nail this, a reader familiar with your characters would be able to figure out who was speaking even without having to see the names. | |
| So, yeah, so for characters, for writing dialogue, one, vary the words that you use. | |
| You know, make it interesting. | |
| You know, try and avoid being clunky. | |
| You want it to be smooth. | |
| Number two, you need to really know your characters. | |
| You need to know facts about them that aren't even going to come up in the story. | |
| Flesh them out. | |
| Make them real people with their own goals, their own desires, fears, etc. | |
| And three, make sure that they change somewhat depending on who they're talking to the same way people in the real world do. | |
| All right, now the next question that he was asking is, how do you motivate yourself to finish a book? | |
| And you know what, I'm going to address myself right now because I need to finish the sequel to Broken Roads. | |
| It's been lingering for way too long. | |
| But I finally got myself into a stable situation again. | |
| And honestly, what this boils down to, it's Stephen King's advice. | |
| If you want to be a writer, you need to write. | |
| So what you need to do is figure out where you like writing, where it is that you get the best energy flowing, what allows you to produce truly good content, and dedicate yourself to doing that. | |
| You know, like for me, it's very late at night is when I'm at my most creative. | |
| And so set up a schedule, dedicate yourself that at this portion of the day, I am writing. | |
| And so sit yourself down in front of your computer, and if nothing comes to you, nothing comes to you, but you're still sitting there doing nothing. | |
| Because if you sit there for long enough, you will eventually start writing. | |
| And it doesn't matter if it's garbage, you can throw it out tomorrow. | |
| But write. | |
| You need to dedicate yourself for this. | |
| Set up a calendar, set up a schedule. | |
| Dedicate yourself that I am sitting here for an hour or two hours in front of the computer and I am writing whether I like it or not. | |
| This is a job. | |
| Because remember, if you don't finish your books, your characters, they just disappear into the ether. | |
| They deserve to live. | |
| And the final question was, how do you improve as a writer? | |
| How do you get better at it? | |
| And it all boils down to finding somebody who's willing to critique you. | |
| There's lots of different writing communities on the internet. | |
| You know, lots of fanfic sites. | |
| And if you go into them and say, like, listen, people, I want you to criticize my writing, they will do it. | |
| And you will want to cry. | |
| When you finish a story, it is your baby. | |
| It is precious. | |
| And accepting critique as a writer, as any sort of artist really, accepting critique is one of the hardest things you have to do because it all, it's such a personal thing when you put yourself out there and write a story that any sort of criticism just feels like a personal attack. | |
| It hurts. | |
| It hurts a lot. | |
| But that is what makes you better. | |
| You know, you need to get a variety of opinions. | |
| You know, sometimes you have to ignore certain opinions, but hear them out. | |
| Figure out where they're coming from and why they're criticizing your work. | |
| That's what it boils down to. | |
| being dedicated to actually writing and accepting criticism when it comes. | |
| So, quick recap. | |
| Write about what you know, live an interesting life so you know a lot of stuff worth writing about, and research facts for anything you don't know about to make your story as realistic as possible. | |
| Number two, don't write clunky exposition. | |
| Don't write clunky he said, she said. | |
| Make it interesting, make it flow, make it poetic. | |
| Make sure you know your characters and make sure that their conversations are unique to them. | |
| You're not just writing exposition. | |
| These are not perfect people that say, hey, you want to go out tonight? | |
| Yes, let's go out tonight. | |
| Then we will slay a drain. | |
| They are people, they don't know where the conversation is going. | |
| You do. | |
| They don't. | |
| Make it organic. | |
| Make them real characters. | |
| And finally, write. | |
| If you want to be a writer, you need to write. | |
| Sit down, force yourself to do it. | |
| Reward yourself if you need to. | |
| Pour yourself a glass of whiskey. | |
| That always helps with writing. | |
| And get it done. | |
| And then seek out and accept criticism. | |
| All right. | |
| Well, we've got three more Arena's Insight videos on the docket. | |
| And these ones are all very heavy philosophy, but I think you guys are going to like them. | |
| They're all pretty, very related to one another, too, which is cool. | |
| So those will be coming out over the weekend. | |
| Stay tuned for them. |