The Hazards of Writing What You Know

Write what you know.

It's perhaps the first piece of serious writing advice anyone gets, and it is one of the most repeated pieces of advice writers hear. It's good advice too, because after all who better to write about homicide investigation, psychological therapy, or murder than someone who's done it before?

Pictured: An expert in all three.

While there is a certain amount of logic to this line of reasoning though there are hazards that come with taking these four words too closely to heart and not balancing them out with anything else. Some of those pitfalls include...

Being Too Thorough

There's a fine line between doing your research and boring your audience. Crime scene investigation is a good example. Being a CSI tech is an important job, and there's a lot of work involved in the job. But if you get into the minutia of the chemical sprays involved, the layers of precautions taken to protect you from contaminating the crime scene, and the sheer amount of tedium involved in testing and re-testing the same evidence to be sure that your results are correct chances are your audience is going to stop caring in a big damn hurry.

And then you inject the mitochondrial membrane with...

There's a difference between being realistic and covering every, single detail of what your professionals do. Have a doctor, a medical examiner, or a hairdresser as the lead in your story by all means, but don't bog your reader down with unnecessary details that don't advance the story or which aren't necessary for your book to make sense. Just because you find the process of how a public defender gets assigned a case to be fascinating doesn't mean your audience really cares so long as a lawyer shows up to defend the character accused of manslaughter.

You'll Never Branch Out

It's a good idea to write about situations and events you can make believable. That doesn't mean you should write about the same thing over and over again though. For instance you might hit your stride writing novels that always involve horses, and if you manage to carve a niche out doing that then good for you. If you aren't Dick Francis though you're going to start getting pretty predictable pretty quickly, especially when every book is about a jockey tracking down someone poisoning horses, rigging races, or corruption on a race track. I call this Scooby-Doo Syndrome, and it's a great way for your work to get stagnant in record time.

I'm sure there's another example here somewhere...

You should indeed write about things you know; it is never a good idea to make things up when you can track down the facts and get it right, especially if people reading your story will point out that you botched something important that puts a big hole right in the middle of your plot. So write what you know, but make sure you branch out so you know as much as possible.

It Will Be Hard To Keep Yourself Out Of The Story

Nothing is more embarrassing than realizing you've accidentally put yourself in your novel (except perhaps trying to explain to people that no, it's totally necessary for you to be mentioned by name in your own damn novel). Authors can avoid doing this by writing characters who come from different backgrounds, or who have different religions, ethnicities, sexual preferences, gender, etc. One of the easiest ways to put that necessary barrier between yourself and your character(s) is to write something other than what you already know.

Like being eloquent and well-spoken, perhaps?

There's always going to be a little of yourself in your characters, it's something you can't avoid and something you shouldn't really try to. But when your author photo and bio reads more like your character introduction than not it might be time to back up and re-evaluate whether you're too close to the project and what effect that's having on the book. Unless you're Ian Fleming... seriously Ian Fleming was James Bond.

No Advice Is Universal

It's important to remember no writing advice is absolute. The reason for that is because every book, just like every author is unique. What might be good for one particular young adult novel about the son of a sea hag coming into his heritage won't necessarily be good for a particular gritty, hard-boiled thriller about a detective chasing down the terrorist splinter-cell who killed her partner. You should always take advice, even good advice, with a grain of salt. Even if you find it right here at the Literary Mercenary.

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From Galvanism to Google: Tropes That Are Killing Your Novel

Authors have to walk a very fine line between writing what they know and just making shit up. Unless you happen to be Ian Fleming (the guy who lived James Bond's life before he wrote the novels) you tend to rely on a combination of your own experiences and research. Unfortunately for a lot of authors "research" means reading books and watching movies written by people who didn't know what the hell they were talking about. As a result a lot of tropes which should really be put out to pasture keep cropping up again and again in a day and age where they really have no business being.

It is impossible for a single blog entry to cover every possible trope that needs to be brought to your attention; that's what TV Tropes is for. And, just so we're all on the same page, this entry is going to focus on tropes regarding technology and history (for those who want social tropes I already covered cultural appropriation and killing women as a source of motivation).

All right? All right.

Trope #1: Knockout Drugs

We've all read a book or seen a movie where these chemical miracles figured in. Just load up a hypodermic, put it in your crossbow or compressed air rifle, and you can bring down any subject with no muss and no fuss. Your hero might struggle valiantly to remain awake, but in a matter of moments it's going to be lights out no matter what happens.

What, this? It's perfectly safe. Just count backward from 10...

Have you ever wondered why anesthesiologists get paid so much money? You know, the people who take all of your vitals and then carefully administer you with a cocktail meant to keep you unconscious during surgery? It's because if they screw up by so much as a few milliliters it's possible for you to go under and never come up again. That means that unless the people chasing you and firing dozens of tranquilizer rounds at you have a concoction specific to your body chemistry you're either going to just get woozy, or die. Possibly one then the other if you're hit more than once.

While this trope might seem nit-picky it's actually a small representation of a bigger problem; namely authors who throw in science without making an attempt to figure out how it works. We're not talking hand-wavey sci-fi tech either, just everyday chemistry and physics that you can find explained on wikipedia if you need a fast and loose explanation of what you're trying to do.

Trope #2: Everyone Speaks Modern Colloquial Languages

Have you ever been scrolling through your list of TV options and inexplicably found yourself watching one of those ghost hunting shows? Well if you have then you might have been lucky enough to catch one where the crew went overseas to report on some foreign ghostly activities. Maybe they were looking into ancient battlefields in Romania, or creepy islands in Thailand. While it's flavorful, you can tell that the writers (yes, ghost hunting shows have writers) are running out of ideas. How, you ask?

All the ghosts speak English.

That's eerie... how did they know we're American?

Of course any author with a shred of craft would never screw something like that up so blatantly. He would at the very least go to a Google translator program and get a phrase from the ghost's home country. Sometimes that's all it takes, but sometimes authors forget that language changes over time. Put another way that Arabic phrase you're seeing now might work in modern day Dubai, but if your heroes have mysteriously traveled back to the 7th century then chances are good it would be gibberish to anyone who heard it.

Language changes and adapts, and if you're going to play with it then you're opening a big ole' can of worms regarding it. On the one hand it's good form not to have your medieval sword-swinging British badass call someone "dude" on page two of your book, but it's also a good idea to remember that words like warlock have a unique cultural and geographic origin before you start using them in the wrong cultural setting.

In case you're curious, warlock is a British term that was imported from Scandinavia and other parts of Northern Europe.

Trope #3: Everyone Has Cell Phones (And No One Uses Them)

Technology often dates the books we read, and the cell phone is just one of the latest revolutions we use to date when a story takes place. If they're big and blocky we're looking at a story in the 1980s or 1990s, and if they're sleek and computerized we have a modern day or future thriller. The problem with cell phones, just like the problems with any other form of mass-produced technology, is that it will change your story.

How's that you might ask? Well I'll give you a good example.

I wonder what other forms of technology everyone has?

Some time ago I was given a job editing a modern fantasy story. Our reluctant lead had gotten caught up fighting a dragon (long story), and during the "discover esoteric prophecy" part of the book he had to get a piece of information from the radio station he worked at (a co-worker's home phone number, to be precise). So he steals another character's car, tear-asses across town, gets into a wreck, and then has a tense cat-and-mouse through the station for reasons that are never quite revealed. The whole time I was reading this all I could think was "Why are you wasting all this time and effort when you could just call the station?"

The main character had specifically mentioned having a cellular phone. He had the Internet. He even had a home phone for whatever reason (but apparently so did his co-worker). There was nothing to stop him from dialing information to get the number, looking it up in a directory online, or just calling the station and asking the receptionist to give him the number off the piece of paper on the break room wall. All of these were approaches that would have taken less time, required less effort, and which anyone who grew up in the Internet age would have turned to first before getting in the car and driving across town.

The short version? If you introduce any piece of technology whether it's a radio in your wristwatch or a cybernetic Internet connection in your lead's left eye then you need to remember that technology is real to your characters. It's a tool they possess, and if it's something they use on a daily basis then of course it's going to be the first thing they turn to in order to solve a problem. Also, technology affects society. If everyone has cell phones with cameras in them, how hard is it going to be for a blood-soaked shoot out to stay quiet?

The answer, as modern governments have found out, is it can't be hushed up. Period.

Trope #4: Occult Books Just Sitting On Your Lead's Shelf

The plot device of the rare-and-occult-book is not new. It's the whole plot of The 9th Gate and a version of it drives the film Cigarette Burns. Books by their very nature have a certain mystique, and an occult book doubly so. After all if a book has a whole secret cabal associated with it then it must be really special, right?

It would, and that's why we create those plot devices that our protagonists chase after. Regular books that hold important plot information are just that though; regular, ordinary, garden-variety books.

Even these.

The problem with this trope is not the existence of fictional books that drive your plot. If you want to create a book specifically to advance plot and to convey information to your main characters that is fine and dandy. The Necronomicon and other tomes of its ilk are cherished relics in the halls of horror, after all. The problem arises when an author writes the phrase, "so he spent an hour reading through his occult books," or something similar.

There's no such thing as occult books. The word occult means hidden or secret, and the word itself has taken on a mysterious air because of how often it's been used in thrillers and horror stories. If something has been written down and mass-produced though that's about as far from secret as you can get. What most authors mean when they use the term occult books is books about rare, obscure, or mystical subjects. This can be anything from academic treatises on the European witch craze, to obscure tomes about the changes the early Catholic church made to the Bible when translating it from Greek to Latin, to diary excerpts from a cannibal who was arrested and executed in Texas in the year 1902. They're just books... books about weird subjects, but books all the same.

The problem is that when you call them occult books we find ourselves wondering how someone not in a cult managed to get his hands on a secret grimoire, a hand-written account of the life of Paracelsus, or some other truly rare and obscure tome. You can't buy occult books at Barnes and Noble, but you can buy The History of Occult Symbols in America if you're willing to check the bargain bin.

If you want to make your hero's search for specific information feel more real then all you need to do is throw out some titles and author names. Talk about some databases he looked through. If your hero is not an expert in the subject though it's always better to phone a character who is an expert and to let that character deliver the information your hero truly needs to progress the plot. Don't just say you typed some key terms into Google and found everything about an ancient esoteric order. If it was that easy to find then you should be done by chapter four.

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The Golden Rule of Good Writing: Don't Be Boring

As an author you can do anything you want. If you want to write a horror story, write a horror story. You want to write a rape scene, go right ahead (I already covered this here). You want your characters to say fuck all the time, feel free (I covered that here too)! You can be profane or prudish, disgusting or droll, biting or brazen... what you cannot be is boring. Nothing, and I do mean nothing is worse than a boring book. That's why this week The Literary Mercenary is here to help you pick up your prose's pace with a few, simple rules.

Rule Number One: Open With The Monster

No one cares about the building of the mead hall; we care about Grendel.

There's a phrase every writer should be familiar with; in medias res. It's Latin for "into the middle of things," and it was first coined by the poet Horace. The phrase refers to stories that start the reader out in the meat of the action instead of at the "beginning" of the story. Whether the hero is in the middle of a shootout, the heroine is chasing bad guys down a dark alley, or someone who might be our lead is sitting in a classroom and taking a stressful exam, the point is that we come in while someone is doing something. Details of the world and context for what we see are filled in afterward.

As always, examples work best. Some time ago I was chatting with a writer who was having trouble with her plot. I asked her to give me her elevator pitch. Her book was about a girl who was a high school freshmen, getting used to her surroundings, new classes, adjusting to new friends, etc. After about twenty minutes of telling me about her perfectly normal trials and tribulations she drops the bombshell that the girl is being stalked by a nightmare creature from the ether, and that in chapter five it slinks out of her closet and tries to kill her.

My advice to her and to you dear reader is this; open with the monster.

Rule Number Two: Short and Sharp

Say hello to my little friend!

You know that one family member who drones on and on at events, insisting on telling you every story in the most languid, roundabout way? The sort of person who could be regaling you with a story of a behind-enemy-lines covert kill mission in Afghanistan and make it sound as exciting as getting a root canal? That's the sort of prose you want to avoid.

Let's take another hypothetical example here. Say you're writing a hard-boiled detective story, and your hero went home and crashed after a long night on a big bust. You could eat up page after page of him preparing breakfast, showering, going through his closet, washing his dishes, and shaving. Or you could slam all of it together into a single paragraph of short, hard-hitting sentences. "I woke up with the afternoon bells, and stumbled into the shower. Once I was clean and shaved, with a few eggs in my guts and clean clothes on my back, I was ready to hit the streets."

That's an entire early afternoon in less than 50 words. What's more the reader internalizes it more easily because it's in handy, bite-size pieces. Your novel shouldn't be a meat loaf that someone has to slog through; rather it should be a bowl of M&Ms that when someone has eaten the whole thing they wonder how the hell that happened.

Rule Number Three: When in Doubt, Cut it Out

Editing, in its natural form.

What do Kathy Reichs, Michael Crichton, and Tom Clancy all have in common? Well aside from being bestsellers, all three of these authors have habits of including reams of information in their books that read like technical manuals which are not necessary for readers to understand the story. Reichs presents jargon-filled run downs of murder wounds rather than just telling us the victim took an ax to the head, Crichton provides abstracts of scientific theory on everything from gene-splicing to time travel that have no impact on being chased by a T-Rex or life-or-death sword fights in medieval France, and Clancy often waxes on for pages about naval culture which seems completely unconnected to the book you're reading. This information may be fascinating to some readers and tedious to others, but the point is that if you don't need it to clarify the story you should cut it out.

Put another way, we're all very impressed that you're an aficionado of 15th century Renaissance artwork. If we don't need to know the name of a particular artist, an official term for a certain brush stroke, or the value of a given painting then don't waste page space on it. Don't break stride while we're running pell-mell after terrorists to remark on the architecture; focus instead on where characters are going and what they're doing.

Rule Number Four: Don't Waste Our Time

You have precisely 20 seconds before your reader self-destructs.

Most people have fairly scheduled lives. Students go to class, then come home. People with 9-5 jobs go to work, then come home. Maybe they take in an occasional concert or go see a movie, but their lives are routine. Characters are people, and many of them have equally boring, scheduled lives. That said, a novel is a series of points of interest strung together on a chain like a pearl necklace. We're interested in the pearls, so don't waste time telling us about the chain holding it all together.

Look at Harry Potter. The bulk of the story takes place during sessions at what amounts to a wizarding boarding school, but we don't slavishly start every day with Harry getting out of bed and end every day with him going to sleep. We don't mention anything he does or learns in class unless those incidents build the story. You cannot tell the reader every action a character takes, so focus only on the important parts. If readers can't tell the difference between a plot-relevant scene and non-plot relevant scenes then they're more likely to shut your book and move on than read every scene for fear of missing something crucial.

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Profanity in Fiction: When it's Okay to Say "Fuck"

Anyone who loves banned books week as much as I do (at least partially because it always sneaks up on me) is aware of what the top three reasons for books being deemed "objectionable" are. In no particular order they are; sex, violence, and profanity. While we could go on endlessly about the first two, let's focus on the third. Profanity.

What's the Big Fucking Deal?

If I had a nickel... I sure as fuck wouldn't put it in there.

Profanity causes a lot of arguments in fiction. On the Don't Say That side of the line we have people who consider profanity to be low-class, cheap, and offensive. These readers may shut a book and refuse to finish it if the author uses profanity in the book, and they may also attempt to get the book banned from a library. Readers on this side of the line also tend to trumpet the defense of the young and impressionable, claiming that if they aren't old enough to use that kind of language then they shouldn't be reading books with those words in them either. Whether one agrees with these sentiments or not they're important to consider because there are a lot of readers who feel this way, and pissing off readers is a good way to shoot your career in the foot.

The other side of the argument is made up of the That's How People Talk camp. Think about when you watch a rated-R movie on TV, and the hero's profane one-liner is turned into a kid-friendly ad lib. Cleaning up the language characters are using in a book is sort of like that; readers know what they mean, but the characters are denied their preferred forms of verbal punctuation. I call this pulling the punch, and it refers to taking any action that alters a story with no intention other than making the person reading it feel less uncomfortable. Generally it doesn't serve to make the story better, and many times it can make what was a poignant exchange seem juvenile. This side of the line tends to be readers who admit that while the use of profanity is vulgar, it is still a tool that can be used to great effect in a book.

How Profanity Has Changed Over The Years

There was an old piece of writing advice from Mark Twain that suggested writers replace every use of "very" with the word "damn" because the editor will simply delete all the unnecessary terms. It was meant to show that "very" is a lazy word choice (which it is), but it also let people know that "damn" would rarely if ever be allowed into a completed manuscript.

That changed in the 1960s.

Along with pretty much everything else.

Somewhere between the beat generation and the creation of the hippie language was allowed to be more honest. Rather than characters "swearing oaths" or "cursing under their breath" the author would simply tell us what was said. People said "shit", and "goddamn", and even the previously-unpublishable "fuck". The spirit of the times was reflected in the books produced, though as mentioned in this article by Jo Walton featured on Tor.com here, it took genre fiction until the 1980s for space opera soldiers and fantasy knights to say fuck with some real confidence. Part of that was that people dropped metaphors that had commonly been used in fiction up to that point, and part of it was that profanity was much more commonly used in day-to-day language. So there was really a two-pronged evolution going on in regards to the profane.

So What The Fuck Should I Do?

Oh for fuck's sake...

What you should do as an author when it comes to profanity varies depending on the book you're writing. For instance, if someone is writing a modern-day story then it's important to use the language of the day, complete with slang. If you're writing from the perspective of a character then the observations we see will be colored by that character's personality and thought process. On the other hand, it's entirely possible to make characters that are terrible people without making them vulgar. Annie Wilkes, the main character of Stephen King's Misery is a horrifying character whose abuse of the lead Paul Sheldon borders on the level of atrocity. She never swears though, and in fact finds the whole notion of putting profanity into a book to be offensive even if she's perfectly willing to cut someone's legs off so he can't escape.

If you've invented your own world though, then what is considered profane is also up to your discretion. Whether it's the manufactured swear word "frell" in the television show Farscape or it's the particularly vicious swear word "bags" preferred by the wizard Zedd in the Sword of Truth series, you don't have to use a real-world four-letter word to let the reader know what's going on.

Put the "Profane" in "Profanity"

In 1944 the infamous observer of American culture H.L. Mencken noted that cursing had been going out of style since the Civil War. According to Mencken the problem was the anything truly profane had been seeing less use, and that people were replacing blasphemous oaths with short, four-letter words that lacked any real profanity in them. Sure "fuck" and "shit" are short, punchy words that can be easily barked, but are they really profane?

Where the fuck are you going with this?

One way to avoid a lot of the fist-shakers and wrist-slappers is to get truly old-school with your oaths. Whether you're writing fantasy or sci-fi, historical romance or a period piece, take a few gems from this article on old-timey swear words. Phrases like "Gods wounds" (shortened to Shakespeare's infamous "zounds") or one of my favorites "God's nails" are unique and visceral. Other old-fashioned oaths starts with "by the", which is part of the formula of someone actually swearing to do or not do something to a divine figure. This is particularly poignant in fantasy, where such oaths can be binding ones.

In order for something to be profane it has to invoke the divine somehow. Worlds with more colorful divinities will simply have more colorful profanity to go with them.

Profanity is Just a Tool

I've referred to profanity as verbal punctuation, and that's very true. To paraphrase Lewis Black, these are the words that adults use to express rage, frustration, and anger. As an author it's important for you to paint as honest a picture as you can. Does that mean you need to linger on every torn apart corpse in a murder scene, or every moment of passion between two lovers? No, not if it isn't making a point.

Profanity is the same way.

Do you have to use profanity to make a point in a story? Is it required to make a character properly repulsive, or hard-ass, or rebellious? No, you don't have to, but sometimes profanity is just the simplest, most straightforward way to make a fucking point.



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The Mary Sue: What It Is, And How To Avoid It

A quick announcement before we begin; the new anthology Shadows of a Fading World from Long Count Press went live today. This collection contains tales of dying worlds, and among them is my story "Paths of Iron and Blood". If you're interested, check it out here on Amazon.

Now then, where was I? Oh yes...

The Mary Sue

Mary Sues; even if you don't know the name, you know these characters. They're the youngest, the smartest, the prettiest, and they just have the cutest eyes and the most tragic back stories. Everyone loves them, and those who don't hate them only out of jealousy and spite.

These characters are, no exaggeration intended, the things editors see in their nightmares.

And this. Editors have nightmares about this.

Some authors strain with every fiber of their being to avoid creating these types of characters. Some of us are in denial about the problems with our own, imaginary children and won't see them until beta readers set our manuscripts on fire on our front lawns in protest. To avoid this, there are some easy ways to make sure all your characters, not just your leads, avoid becoming one of these shallow gateways to wish fulfillment.

Step One: Take the Test

There are dozens of tests out on the Internet which can give you feedback on how much of a Mary Sue your character is or isn't. One of the most reliable tests I've come across is the Universal Mary Sue Litmus Test, which can be found here. Running your character through this test should always be your first step, even if you're positive he or she is clean.

Step Two: Scrub Off Some of The Special

Your characters are not beautiful, unique snowflakes; they're people. Every person, and every character, has a list of abilities, skills, and a history that's led them to become who they are in this moment. Even the waiter whose name we never learn on page 75. However, if your character is a little too remarkable for the world you've created, a lot of readers are going to get turned off right quick.

Guess which section is responsible for this?

Here's a little history lesson for you. The Mary Sue, according to the eminently reliable source of a Wikipedia article, is the direct result of Star Trek fan fiction. The actual character by the name of Mary Sue was created and published in the fanzine Menagerie #2 in a 1973 story titled "A Trekkie's Tale". This story set out to deliberately show how ridiculous a fifteen-and-a-half-year-old lieutenant, the youngest and brightest ever to graduate from the academy and to be given a field commission, was. This story was in response to a huge number of tales with similar self-insert characters who, despite their youth, were precocious enough to save the day in addition to getting in bed with canonical, adult-aged characters.

Firstly, I'm sure there's a regulation somewhere against that kind of thing in any navy. Second, no.

So, if your character scored too high on the Mary Sue Litmus Test (again, you can and should take it here), then you need to look at what makes him or her too special. Is the character too young to be established in a certain field? Does the character have impossible-colored hair, eyes, or other features which mark him or her out as obviously special and different? Has the character mastered some skill or discipline uncommon to the world, such as being a disciple of an ancient martial art known to a chosen few or being one of the most naturally talented spellcasters in existence?

Whatever it is, ask yourself if it's necessary to the character. For instance, does your lead have to be an ex-special forces soldier, or would simply being someone who served in the military do? Must this character have pink, blue, or fuchsia hair, or is it a minor, cosmetic thing that can be done away with without altering the story?

Step Three: Make Your Character Work For It

When you watch a lead guitarist shred on stage, an expert marksman put two rounds right next to each other at a half a mile in a high wind, or hear about someone who climbs buildings like a human fly, you see something amazing. What you don't see is the countless hours of practice, training, study, blood, sweat, and shouted swear words that went into that final product. You need to make the reader aware of how your character became what he or she is.

All right wuss, if you make good time I'll take the razor blades out of the grips.

That said, do not, I repeat, do not just list a character's bona fides up front; instead, show them gradually to the reader. I did a post about this here too, but examples always work best. So, say you have a character who is the most talented sorceress the realm has ever seen. Magic comes naturally to her, and she's able to weave spells that should be years beyond her with nary a thought.

That's boring. Even if a character is born with talent, that talent has to be beaten, hammered, and refined into real world skill. Anything worth having takes work.

Take the same character and the same power set, but this time show how hard she worked to be where she is. Have her use jargon unique to magic, and show how intimately she understands the process of manipulating the power. If she does it naturally, treat her more like an athlete than an academic. Point is, she's had to refine what she does to be that good. More importantly though, you need to show us how attaining that level of mastery has marked her worldview and her skill set. Perhaps she can weave fire with a single breath, but does she know how to dance? Maybe she can call lightning from a cloudless sky, but does she understand how to relate to other people? Especially people who don't see the world in terms of elements and power, but rather in terms of growing seasons and harvests?

By dedicating a character so fully to achieving mastery of one area, she has had to sacrifice learning in other areas. She may find it hard to understand the viewpoints of those who are not as learned as she is, or who can't perform even simple magic. You see this in everyday professions as well; what people do shapes their perceptions of the world. Police officers, even when they're off duty, pay attention to faces and movements just in case something goes wrong in their presence. Medical professionals may find it impossible not to see people as collections of tissues and bones, or symptoms and issues, even when they're at home or at a party. By showing us where a character lacks, we find it easier to accept where he or she succeeds.

Step Four: Take the Test Again

I already gave you the link twice. You're not getting it again.

At The End of The Day...

It's important to remember that not every character who looks like a Mary Sue really is one. Run characters like Batman, Morpheus, Doctor Who, and a dozen others through the test, and they'll be rated as irredeemable Mary Sue characters. People love them despite that rating, and they're all million-dollar institutions.

Why, you might ask? Is it because deep down people really love over-powered escapist fantasy? No. The reason any characters with ridiculous powers and trope-laden backgrounds are popular is because they're compelling. They have depth, emotion, and they suck the readers in. It's also very clear that these characters are their own people; they aren't just super-powered stand-ins for the author, the reader, or anyone else.


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"Sexy" and Other Words Writers Need to Stop Using

As an author who doesn't have his own marketing department, I tend to use a lot of social media. This means I belong to a lot of promotional groups on Facebook, I follow a lot of writer-themed blogs on Tumblr, and in general I try to stay plugged into what my fellows in the field are doing. The advantage is that sometimes I find really intriguing books, such as the Gonji trilogy by Ted Rypel, or Ghosts in the Yew by Blake Hausladen.

Because holy damn, that's why.

The disadvantage is that my feed gets crammed with promotion for a lot of books I'd really rather not see. Books that, when I pause to read the description, give me barking fits. After destroying a dozen chew toys and getting a calming belly rub though, I finally figured out what all these bad book summaries I keep seeing have in common. It isn't genre, it isn't plot, and it isn't even the target audience. It's the shallowness of the language used to describe the story.

Huh?

That's what I thought you were going to say. Since examples tend to work best, and I don't want to name names and earn the enmity of fellow authors, I will give you a paraphrased version that I keep seeing over and over again. It goes something like this.

Sexy female lead, getting involved in a dangerous or personally distressing situation, must seek help and join forces with sexy, alpha male lead. Will the two of them find the answer, and will their raging libidos get the best of them?

If you don't feel this is an epidemic then I urge you to go to your local bookstore and read some dust jackets. Romance, erotica, mystery, thriller, suspense, modern fantasy, classic fantasy, science fiction, it's showing up everywhere. The pacing might be slightly different, the plots might vary, but there are certain buzzwords that are showing up repeatedly. This is a plea to my fellow authors, and a warning to future ones; stop it. You're making us look stupid.

What's Wrong With Sexy?

As a concept, not a damn thing. Some genres are predicated entirely upon telling sexy stories about sexy people. The problem is the word itself. What is sexy? I guarantee you that whatever you're thinking, the next person to pick up the book and read the same sentence will not be thinking the same thing. It's lazy writing, pure and simple.

What is it that makes someone an alpha male?

Don't get ahead of me, stock photo philosopher. The term alpha (it's just assumed that the character is male, which goes to show we need more alpha females in our fiction) has the same problem from a completely different angle. What is an alpha? Is it a man involved in the leather and BDSM scene? Is it a wolves-of-Wall-Street type in a ten thousand dollar suit with a watch that cost more than most people's cars? Or is he a muscle-bound noble savage, free from the constraints of your society who makes his own rules? Those are just three images that came to mind off the top of my head, and there are likely a dozen more where they came from.

So What Do You Suggest?

I'm glad you asked that, bolded, italic type face. My suggestion for all my fellow authors out there is when you're coming up with your dust jacket hook that you cut the fluff. Language that tells us nothing about the characters, or is misleading, sensational, or flat out lazy needs to go. Period. It's the modern day equivalent of saying "and she meets a tall, dark stranger." Even if she does (or he, let's be inclusive here), could we perhaps come up with a better reason for us to care? Do a little more showing, a lot less telling?

What more do you want?

I want character descriptions that tell us who we're actually dealing with. I want robust language that draws me in and makes me want more. Honestly I'd prefer if writers stopped trying to be edgy and let their stories speak for themselves, but I'm not asking for miracles. Mostly I'd like a carefully crafted hook that makes me sit on an uncomfortable floor in a bookstore for hours just to find out what happens. What I want to see less of is writers using empty shorthand to convince me that these characters are different from every other pair in the genre. I'm also tired of my fellow writers showing off their leads' toned abs and curvy hips just to persuade me to buy their books. I have the Internet, I can see all the sexy I want any time on demand. What the Internet isn't providing me with are deep characters that inspire me, and whose stories I genuinely care about.

Next time you're describing your plot or your characters, sit down and ask yourself how you'd feel describing real people this way. Is the most noticeable feature of a dedicated, hard-nosed police detective that she's sexy? Or is it that she takes dangerous assignments and never quits until the job is done? Is the most dominant personality trait of a business tycoon that he's mysterious? If so, you might need to dig a bit deeper because you've only scratched the surface. If there is more to them, then show us. Give us an elevator pitch that makes us skip our floor.


As always, thanks for dropping by the Literary Mercenary. If you'd like to help us keep going then remember to like, share, discuss, and follow us on Facebook and Tumblr. If you'd like to take a more direct hand in helping us out there's now a Patreon page for you to pledge a certain amount each month, or you can click the "Shakespeare Gotta Get Paid, Son" button in your upper right hand corner. Now go forth, and write well!

Beyond the Purple: Dealing With Purple Prose in Your Fiction

Books are a unique kind of magic. They use words, sometimes written by people thousands of miles away and decades in their graves, to reach into the hearts and minds of readers to tell stories. The best books will run their fingers through the readers' minds, and play merry hell along their heart strings before grabbing hold of their collective guts and yanking. Good books do this by creating realism, using beautiful language, and many times through particularly vivid imagery.

Bad books, on the other hand, tend to fall victim to the disease of purple prose.

What is "Purple Prose"?

A three-lobed burning eye.

Generally speaking purple prose refers to a style of writing that is far too flowery and overdramatic. It's characterized by unnecessarily complex words, long running metaphors, and multiple spurts of description all in the same sentence. Purple prose, like pornography, is often tough to define. Most writers know it when they see it, though. So for that reason, here's an example.

"Jack stepped forward, punching Rob in the face."

This is normal prose. It's simple, straightforward, and it lets the reader know exactly what happened. It might be a little bland, but sometimes that's the sacrifice a story has to make to get the point across.

"Jack brought his right fist down, smashing Rob with a hammer-blow to the back of the head."

This is a little more vivid, and it gets the blood flowing. It's more specific as to the type of blow, where it landed, and the amount of force behind it. It's edging toward pulpy wording, but it's meant to excite the reader. This kind of language is typically good for action scenes.

"The blond giant snarled, the war cry of a lion, before swinging a mighty blow at his enemy that left his opponent staggering, reeling, blood spattering from his nose and mouth like a crimson rain."

Ummm... what? Because you read the previous two incarnations of this sentence you can take a guess what's happening. However, in this throbbing, turgid third sentence we have no names to describe who is doing what. There's entirely too much symbolism and description packed in, and the whole thing has become one big mess. That is typically what people mean when they're talking about purple prose.

Kill Your Darlings

With the strictest of prejudice.

Sir Arthur Quiller-Coach originally gave this fantastic, three-word piece of advice. It's since been repeated by William Faulkner, and it was the constant refrain of Stephen King's book "On Writing". These and other writers have fully endorsed pen monkeys the world over putting all of the pulsing purple prose they want on the page. Writers just need to delete it once they've gotten all that purple out of their systems. No matter how proud you are of a sentence, a turn of phrase, or a really great metaphor, you might still need to drown it in the Editorial River.

How Much Purple is Too Much?

Just give me a goddamn checklist already!

One person's purple prose is another's vivid imagery. It's why there are still arguments about whether authors like H.P. Lovecraft or Robert E. Howard were literary geniuses, or pulp-magazine hacks. As with so much else in writing it's largely up to the writer, the editor, and the beta readers to come to an understanding over how much purple is too much. It often comes down to personal style, the genre someone is writing in, and a dozen other factors.

That said, there are some things writers need to watch out for to make sure they don't bruise their language too badly.

#1: Does it Make Sense?

Whenever you finish writing something, leave it for a few days. A week if you have the time before a deadline. During that time start a different project, read a new book, watch a movie, and then come back to your story. It will shock you how many phrases or descriptions you used that were brilliant at the time, which completely snap the thread of your narrative and leave you asking "what the hell does that even mean?"

#2: Does it Fit With Everything Else?

Have you ever been reading a story or article, and right in the middle the writer gets really erudite for no reason? That happens a lot in purple prose. It feels like the author learned a new word, and wanted a chance to show off that he or she knew it. If you're writing about high school kids chances are you should use the word "backpack" or "messenger bag" instead of "valise". By the same token, if you've been using very straightforward prose for everything, don't start slapping a bunch of metaphors and similes down on the page.

#3: Does it Add Something?

Perhaps the most important question concerning pulsing prose is whether or not it adds to the story. In a fight scene or a love scene this kind of language might be used to increase a reader's pace, and to get the blood pumping. In a chase scene, or a confrontation with a squamous monstrosity, getting a little purple might churn readers' stomachs, or make sweat pop out on their foreheads. But if a writer is using this kind of language to describe getting ready for work in the morning, catching the city bus, or going out to get a newspaper then it can quickly become boring. Much like exclamation points, writers shouldn't go beyond the purple too often. Doing so will reduce the power this kind of prose possesses.


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