Tag Archives: short story writing

Replete With Jargonosity

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Simply put: I hate jargon. It’s a cheap language trick feeding on lazy minds that’s slowly destroying descriptive speech as well as the written language. It’s both deceptive—giving the user a faux brilliance that might actually be found lacking if their comments were put into simple terms—and safe, since no one wants to appear out of the cool loop by stopping the jargon-spouter and asking them exactly what they mean (and isn’t it great when you actually call them on it and they struggle for answer?).

And before you mistake my meaning, I understand the importance of industry terms—screenplay direction, set lingo, etc.—as a method of saving communication time in a short attention-spanned world, and as a means of demonstrating how well you understand your area of expertise.

The jargon I hate is of the screenwriting variety in a non-professional setting when it comes to peer review. Not only for my work. In general. But that wasn’t always the case. When I first got into screenwriting I was, quite naturally, greener than a Granny Smith and eager to soak up as much knowledge on the subject of crafting the perfect script as possible, which included industry speak. I mean, who doesn’t want to learn the buzzwords of their aspiring trade and toss them into casual conversations with industry professionals to prove to that they’re with it and they dig the scene, man?

Then I joined several screenwriting groups that met online and at a physical location and attended screenplay review seminars and began to notice how some people hid behind parroted catchphrases in order to avoid the conflict of offering an honest opinion.

I don’t expect my hatred of jargon to change the way things work—hell, I even jargonate (the act of using jargon in verbal conversation) myself, more often than I’m comfortable with—I’m simply saddened by the slow death of Plain English as a method of conveying clear meaning without unnecessary complexity. Particularly when used to offer constructive criticism.

Sally forth and be writeful.

— Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys

Your Writing Says More About Your Character Than You Realize

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Creating worlds? That’s the easy bit. Populating them with three dimensional characters… that’s a bit trickier. Whether you write for a living, a hobby, for sport, or just to have a laugh, you will eventually reach a point in your storytelling where you’re forced to pluck the innocent bystanders from your life and slap them smack dab in the middle of your literary dreamscape. Don’t be embarrassed. It happens to us all.

But just because a fictional character has a fleshy counterpart, imbued with their quirks, verbal crutches and personality tics, it doesn’t always mean they’re actually memorable.

So, how do you combat that? Dig, my friend. You need to burrow underneath the surface layer affectations and unearth the true source of their core character and examine what piqued your interest in the first place.

Even the most boring person you know can be a source of inspiration in your writing if you scratch the surface carefully enough. As corny as it sounds, we all carry within us a wealth of creativity and inspiration. Your job is to look deeper.

One of the most important parts of being a writer, aside from textual flourishes and clever turns of phrase, is the ability to see the world, both the one you’re creating and the one you live in, through their eyes. What are their views on major and minor things? Are they blessed or cursed with odd perceptions of the way the world should and/or actually works? Do they engage in activities that exist outside social norms?

Once you’ve identified these tidbits, you have the first building blocks for your memorable character’s foundation. But it’s only the beginning. You’ll need to build on this in order to make your newly birthed person dynamic.

Since you’re not creating a clone or an exact replica of your best bud or the nosy neighbor down the hall who tracks you via her peephole every time you leave or enter your front door—seriously, lady, get a life—you’ll want to take a few pages from Baron Victor von’s notebook and Frankenstein your creation up a bit.

If you do your job properly, your patchwork person will seem more believable because they contain traits your friends have that you secretly covet—we covet what we see everyday, Clarice—family member habits that absolutely drive you up the wall, as well as the little insecure bits of yourself you pray nobody really notices (FYI: they do, they’re just too polite to bring it up in conversation). Stop moaning, you’ll always be a part of the mix. You can’t help it. You’re the person you know the best. Yup, it’s true and you heard it here first.

The best thing about your ethereal Prometheus is only you will be able to see the stitches that hold the monstrosity together. To everyone else, the jigsaw pieces fit together seamlessly. But you’re still not done.

You can’t have your bouncing baby entity walking around all starkers—well, you can if you’re writing one of those 50 Shades thingies—so you’ll need to dress them with your imagination and layer in true life details like articles of clothing, substantiating them as a new independent life form while better solidifying your understanding of them.

Then, to top things off, dab them with a little Eau de real desires—just behind the ears—and spray obstacles in the air and have them walk through the mist, before you powder them down with motivations.

And voilà! Take a step back and view your bonafide multidimensional, absolutely-fictional-but-seems-so-damn-real-it’s-scary character. Now all you have to do is repeat the process several more times.

Hey, I never said this would be easy.

Sally forth and be writeful.

— Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys

What Lies Beneath

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I always love reading authors introductions to short stories and sometimes find the inspiration for writing the tale more interesting than the story itself. And just so we’re clear, I don’t mean the opening line and/or paragraph of the story. I’m talking about the preface, and a well-written introduction in the right hands is like the director’s commentary or behind-the-scenes footage or Easter eggs on your favorite DVD.

The odd thing about me is I can’t actually write an introduction to my own work until after I’ve completed the story, which I guess makes it more of a postmortem than an actual preface. I think the primary reason is if I write the introduction first it feels like I’m writing the story twice, instead of offering a quick glimpse at the man behind the curtain.

On more than one occasion, I had no idea what served as the impetus for the story I’d just written. Not immediately anyway. It usually comes to me later, sometimes days or weeks, when I’d wake with the story and characters stuck in my head, unraveling plot and dialogue in my mind until I uncovered the parallels to some half-forgotten event.

They’re like finding buried treasure, aren’t they? Those memories stored in neurons on seldom traveled synaptic pathways. Which made me think about a new project. Normally I don’t write drama pieces, I tend to gravitate towards speculative and science fiction, religious fantasy and horror, but I think I’d like to write a collected book filled with nothing but prefaces. Inspirations for stories without including the stories themselves.

I haven’t quite worked all the bugs out of the idea yet and I’m not sure how marketable it would be, but some projects we write for ourselves and not the quick buck, don’t we?

— Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys

URSULA K. LE GUIN on an Artist’s Passion

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Ursula K Le Guin
The choice to train to be an artist of any kind is a risky one. Art’s a vocation, and often pays little for years and years — or never. Kids who want to be dancers, musicians, painters, writers, need more than dreams. They need a serious commitment to learning how to do what they want to do, and working at it through failure and discouragement. Dreams are lovely, but passion is what an artist needs — a passion for the work. That’s all that can carry you through the hard times. So I guess my advice to the young writer is a warning, and a wish: You’ve chosen a really, really hard job that probably won’t pay you beans — so get yourself some kind of salable skill to live on! And may you find the reward of your work in the work itself. May it bring you joy.

Ray Bradbury on Being a Sublime Fool

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To sum it all up, if you want to write, if you want to create, you must be the most sublime fool that God ever turned out and sent rambling.

You must write every single day of your life.

You must read dreadful dumb books and glorious books, and let them wrestle in beautiful fights inside your head, vulgar one moment, brilliant the next.

You must lurk in libraries and climb the stacks like ladders to sniff books like perfumes and wear books like hats upon your crazy heads.

I wish for you a wrestling match with your Creative Muse that will last a lifetime.

I wish craziness and foolishness and madness upon you.

May you live with hysteria, and out of it make fine stories—science fiction or otherwise.

Which finally means, may you be in love every day for the next 20,000 days. And out of that love, remake a world.

Anton Chekov Addresses Adjectives

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Cross out as many adjectives and adverbs as you can. It is comprehensible when I write: “The man sat on the grass,” because it is clear and does not detain one’s attention. On the other hand, it is difficult to figure out and hard on the brain if I write: “The tall, narrow-chested man of medium height and with a red beard sat down on the green grass that had already been trampled down by the pedestrians, sat down silently, looking around timidly and fearfully.” The brain can’t grasp all that at once, and art must be grasped at once, instantaneously.

George Orwell’s Scrupulous Writer Questions

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George Orwell

According to George Orwell, a scrupulous writer, in every sentence they write, will ask themselves these questions:

  1. What am I trying to say?
  2. What words will express it?
  3. What image or idiom will make it clearer?
  4. Is this image fresh enough to have an effect?
  5. Could I put it more shortly?
  6. Have I said anything that is avoidably ugly?

What lasts in the reader’s mind…

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“What lasts in the reader’s mind is not the phrase but the effect the phrase created: laughter, tears, pain, joy. If the phrase is not affecting the reader, what’s it doing there? Make it do its job or cut it without mercy or remorse.”

― Isaac Asimov

The 10 Rules of Writing Elmore Leonard Lives By

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From 1953 to present, Elmore Leonard, the king of gritty realism and strong dialogue, has written 49 novels, 9 screenplays, and more than a few short stories, so it’s fair to say the man knows a thing or two about writing. So, even if you aren’t a fan of his work, it couldn’t hurt to take a couple of tips from a man who’s been there, written that:

  1. Never open a book with the weather.
  2. Avoid prologues.
  3. Never use a verb other than “said” to carry dialogue.
  4. Never use an adverb to modify the verb “said.”
  5. Keep your exclamation points under control!
  6. Never use the words “suddenly” or “all hell broke loose.”
  7. Use regional dialect, patois, sparingly.
  8. Avoid detailed descriptions of characters.
  9. Same for places and things.
  10. Leave out the parts readers tend to skip.

Almost makes writing a novel sound easy, doesn’t it? Truth is, it’s only as hard as you allow it to be.

Sally forth and be writeful.