September 3, 2018 • 36 mins
To write vivid descriptions, focus on one or two striking details rather than overwhelming the reader with long lists. Use sensory details—sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch—to make scenes come alive.
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(00:00):
Welcome to the inside creative writing podcast.
The weekly discussion of craft and technique for
writers of fiction and creative nonfiction.
And now here's your host, writer and educator,
Brad Reed.
Episode 32.
Today, we're taking a step back from our
more formal explorations of a single dedicated topic
(00:21):
and answering questions from listeners. It's time for
some q and a.
And welcome back to the Inside Creative Writing
podcast. My name is Brad Reed, and I'm
so glad that you're, here with us today
to spend some time talking about writing.
And, what a week it's been around here.
(00:42):
As I record this, I'm just a couple
of days away
from the start of yet another school year.
Now for some of you, you're thinking, wow,
just now you're getting around to that? So
here in Oregon, we start generally, quite a
bit later than other schools do across the
country.
But basically that means that I've spent the
last week or actually a couple of weeks
fully immersed in curriculum planning, setting up my
(01:05):
classroom, all of that stuff that you do
for another
great year of school ahead. So with that
in mind, I had to take a step
back from the type of preparation that I
usually do for
very specific formal topics for the show. And
I decided it would be a great week
to take a little bit of a break
from that and look back at some of
(01:25):
the great questions
that are coming in from listeners to the
podcast. So there's every chance that this podcast
will run just a little bit shorter today
and I think that's probably okay since
last week we ran so much overboard. So,
I think it kind of, evens out in
the end. I do wanna give you a
quick update on my own current work in
(01:48):
progress, especially for those of you who've been
following along
in the real time revision videos that we
do as kind of a companion piece to
this podcast.
You can find out about, more about those
by going to bradreedrights.com.
So a quick update on the book. As
you probably know if you've been listening to
the show, I finished my first draft of
my latest book.
(02:08):
And I have just finally
finished the process of,
going through the story grid system of editing
that first draft, and I'm finished with that
process now. It took about twice as long
as I thought that it would, but I
have absolutely
no regrets
about that. It was,
just kind of the new perspective that I
(02:30):
needed on how to edit, how to revise,
a new perspective on structure
that I felt like I needed to really
bring this book to life. And when I
say that, I don't even mean to life
as in kind of a general overall plot
sense.
I really mean on the scene level.
The kind of work that you do when
you play with that story grid system
(02:50):
is scene by scene and really kind of
beat by beat,
within your story. And that's a level of
editing
that I've done before, but I haven't had
a formalized system to do that and I
really,
appreciated the story grid system. If you're not
familiar with that, you could check it out
at story grid on Twitter or I think
it's just storygrid.com.
(03:11):
So starting this week, I am headlong into
the full,
not necessarily a page one revision,
of my work in progress,
but, essentially, it's it's gonna,
come down to pretty close to a page
one revision. There won't be a sentence in
the book that doesn't get tweaked, reworked, deleted,
added to, as I now understand the real
(03:34):
goal of each of the scenes in my
book, which is pretty exciting. So
let's go ahead and jump into today's show
questions that listeners of the podcast has sent
in over the last few months.
(03:55):
Okay. So let's jump in. I love, love,
love getting questions from you guys about writing.
They often make me think more deeply about
how I feel about a certain topic or,
I begin to see the act of writing
from a different perspective and all of that
is so valuable. So please keep those questions
coming. You can email those to bradreed@bradreedwrites.com
(04:17):
and I'll either get back to you personally,
which I often do,
or I'll do, another show like this, kind
of this Q and A where I'll take
some of these questions, especially the ones getting
asked more often,
and, go into them a little bit more
depth, in-depth on the show. So
what's interesting is many of these questions
relate to things that we've actually discussed before
(04:39):
on the show and my initial reaction would
probably have been, before I was a teacher,
that oh, didn't you listen? Right? Or didn't
you get it the first time? But I
actually think that,
it's great
when people ask
additional questions
about things that we've already covered. So one
of the truisms
of learning anything new is that we need
(05:01):
to hear it
more than once
before we really own that knowledge. That's kind
of a foundational truism
of education, of teaching, right? Is that we
need to we need to have that repetition.
And sometimes it's not just hearing the same
thing over and over again. In fact, ideally,
it's not just hearing the same things over
and over again. It's that we hear things
(05:21):
repeatedly in different ways. Right? In with slightly
different nuance
or from a slightly different angle
and that helps us understand that concept even
more deeply
and own it more deeply than we would
otherwise. So today, even if we're talking about
something that you feel like you've got down.
Right? I know this thing. I don't really
need to hear the answer to this question.
(05:43):
I hope you'll still
take the time to think deeply about it
as we discuss it
and see how you might gain a new
insight or notice a new nuance
that you didn't have before.
So actually that whole concept is kind of
a preview of this week's wise word, but
we'll have to wait till the end of
the show for that. So we're gonna jump
(06:04):
right into these questions today. I think I
have about four or five of them here
that are asked fairly commonly in one form
or another. So I've kind of
boiled those down into their essential questions so
we can explore them a little bit. So
our first question today,
how do I describe a person, a place,
or a thing
(06:24):
vividly
so the reader can see it in their
mind? And isn't that the goal of writing?
I often think of writing as a very
visual,
experience when you're reading, right? We're creating basically
these films. We're watching these films in our
mind
if the writer has done a good enough
job of creating
(06:45):
those opportunities, of giving us enough information that
we can then translate that into that film
or that experience
in our mind. So that's essentially what this
question is getting at, I think. How
do we do that? How do we create
that vivid
experience for the reader?
And, there's a bunch of different ways to
answer this. I wanna give you just kind
(07:06):
of my three or four bullet points to
think about when you are trying to describe
things in a way that will bring them
to life for your audience.
So one thing to stay away from is
over describing
something. Now that can be a style thing,
right?
One of my favorite authors, John Steinbeck, right,
when you read his description it can go
(07:26):
on for several pages. And that's his voice,
that's his style.
But in general, if you're not a John
Steinbeck, which most of us aren't,
you're better off to use just one or
two
really vivid details,
and then let the audience fill in the
rest. So when you're introducing a new character,
(07:46):
a new setting,
what is the one or maybe two things
that stand out the most about this, that
kind of define
the experience of being in that place or
the experience of seeing that person. And then
let that one or two,
those one or two,
most vivid details
just stand on their own because the human
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brain
has a way of taking a great descriptive
detail
and then filling in the blanks. Right? And
in that way,
your reader can become even more,
even more of the story,
because now they're helping you build out
the rest of that image. Sometimes they're connecting
it. If it's a place, they're connecting it
to a place that they've been before,
(08:29):
and so they're bringing all of these details
that are much more intimate and familiar to
them,
in concert
with the details that you've given them. And
they're having an even more vivid experience
because they're able to bring these, kind of
this library of experience that they have
into
work in concert with your details. So there's
(08:50):
kind of tip number one with this question.
Maybe the most powerful tip here though is
to remember the perspective
of the character,
who is seeing
this, person, place, or thing.
So, regardless of what perspective you're writing from,
your narrator,
(09:10):
sees the world in a certain way. And
they're going to notice different things about it.
In fact, one of the most fun,
activities that I do with my creative writing
students is I will take them out on
a nearby football field. And I will have
them do, just a couple of quick writes.
The first one
is imagine that you just fell in love.
Right? Maybe you just have proposed to the
person that you love,
(09:32):
and they've said yes. So you're gonna get
married. So you are in one of the
best moods you could possibly be in And
for whatever reason, you find yourself now sitting,
out at this football field. Not even a
game going on. Right? We're just sitting there,
and we're describing this football field. What kind
of things would you notice?
And
(09:52):
as they do this quick write,
they begin to notice
beautiful things. Right? They will notice how blue
the sky is, or they will know know,
notice how green the grass is, or they'll
look off into the distance and they'll see
the curve of a mountain and appreciate the
beauty of that, or they'll see
the birds on the power line overhead and
(10:13):
they'll listen to the song that they're singing.
So those are the details of that scene
that somebody who's in a great mood is
gonna notice. And then I have them write
again for about another five minutes from somebody
who's just
broken up with the love of their life.
Right? This is the person they thought they
were gonna spend the rest of their life
with, their soulmate,
but it didn't work out.
(10:35):
Now what do you notice? Now how do
you describe the scene? And it's so interesting
how suddenly they notice that the skies aren't
entirely blue,
that there are those clouds way over there
in the distance that look dark and foreboding.
And so they notice instead of that vast
blue sky, they focus on that dark storm
cloud rolling in. Or they notice that, yeah,
(10:55):
there's a bunch of songbirds over here on
this in this tree,
but look at that one isolated bird up
there on the power line. And they're gonna
identify with that one
lonely, maybe it's a crow, right? This dark
bird sitting up there on that on that
line that they didn't notice before.
So that is really the power
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of the vivid detail,
Is that it's not just describing a person,
place, or thing so that your reader can
see it in their mind. It's describing it
as
the person, as the character would see it.
What details would they notice? So think about
just walking up onto a tree.
If you're in a really good mood, life
is good, you're gonna notice the beauty of
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the tree. You might notice the life in
the tree, the squirrel kind of winding its
way up the trunk. You'll notice the how
green the leaves are. If you're in a
bad mood, right, if there's something terrible that's
happened,
you're gonna notice the gnarled
branches. And you're gonna notice that one
dead branch kind of hidden in there among
all the others that, you know, something has
(11:57):
happened to it and it's barren of leaves.
So those details are going to be as
telling
about your character's
emotion and point of view as they are
about that thing. So always be thinking as
you're describing a scene or a person or
a thing,
what mood is my character in? What mood
do I wanna have the scene
(12:19):
feel like?
And then find those details
that stand out.
Also don't forget all five senses. Literally right
here on my computer monitor, I have a
little post it note that says the five
senses. Sight, smell, sound, touch, taste.
Because it's so easy to get into a
rut where suddenly you're describing everything visually
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or maybe you're describing everything auditorily. Right? We
have these senses that we tend to lean
on.
Mine is definitely visual because I've done so
much work in studying screenwriting that I think
very visually. And I have this Post it
note up to remind me, wait a second,
sometimes it's a smell
that defines a place. Or sometimes it's the
way something feels, that that, touch sensation.
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So try to work as many of those
in as you can throughout your story and
the world comes to life a lot more
vividly.
The last thing I wanna say about this
question is have some fun
practicing this in the real world.
When you are people watching, wherever that is,
and I think most of us are, you
know, love to every once in a while
(13:24):
sit around and and people watch,
just start noticing what is the first thing
that you notice about a particular person. Right?
You're not describing
how tall they are, what their weight is,
what they're wearing, how they're walking.
Just notice kind of that first
detail that stands out and it's usually
that thing that separates them from all other
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people that you've seen. Right? This is kind
of the way the human brain works. We're
always kind of cataloging things. We're always trying
to differentiate things. What makes this person that
I'm seeing now
different in some way than every other person?
Right? And the first thing that comes to
my mind are maybe they have these crazy
bushy
eyebrows. Right? When you meet somebody like that,
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that's that defining characteristic. So practice that in
the real world when you're in a new
place, or maybe you're driving somewhere you haven't
been. Just look at a building and say,
what is it about that building
that makes that building unique? What is the
one thing that I notice
about that building? Or about this park, or
about that person, or about that bicycle,
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right? Whatever it is, what's the specific thing
that defines it, that makes it,
a singularity?
So, hopefully that's helpful for a question that
I get asked a lot here about how
to make our details vivid. So let's move
on to our second question, and this is,
essentially some iteration of this question. How do
I come up with the best title
(14:48):
for my novel?
Now again, like almost all of these questions
that we're gonna look at today, in fact,
all of them,
there's different answers for different people depending on
your own style, depending on your genre, depending
on your voice and your goals for
your writing. So all I can do is
give you some tips here and then let
you use those tips to go out and
discover the best title for your work.
(15:10):
The first thing I like to tell people
to do is take a look at some
of the most successful titles in the genre
that you're writing in. And see what's working
in that genre. So if you are a
mystery writer,
go look at the top 100 best selling
mystery books and look at those titles. Examine
them. What do they have in common?
(15:30):
What is their function? Right? How are they
working
to engage
a potential reader?
I think you can learn
good title writing
from studying other books just like you can
learn good writing
by studying and reading other people's books. There's
essential art to writing a title that isn't
(15:51):
that much different
than the writing that we do within our
book. So it's worth it to take some
time to study
what's working, right? What makes a title good,
especially in your genre?
Second thing is make sure your title is
unique. I talked about this a little bit,
I think it was just last week.
Once you think you've come up with your
(16:12):
title, a great thing to do is a
quick Google search just to see what else
will come up if somebody Googles your title.
If you get a whole bunch of things,
song lyrics, movie titles,
quotes, all sorts of stuff, maybe that's not
a good title. It's gonna be harder for
people to find your book. Plus, it's telling
you this isn't that unique of a phrase
(16:33):
or a word. So you might wanna dig
a little deeper and make sure that it
is actually unique. And then if you do
a go a Google search,
once your book is out there it's gonna
be the first thing or one of the
first things that pops up when people are
searching for it.
Another great technique is to mine your manuscript
for that line of either dialogue or prose
(16:55):
that might work as a title. This is
a really fun way, I think, to title
a book. It's almost like you've planted this
little,
this little mystery in your book. Right? I'm
I'm sure you've had the experience where you're
reading a book, and all of a sudden
you see the title right there in the
prose. Somebody says it or it's in a
line of description or something like that, and
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this little rush of adrenaline comes in and
you say, oh, that's that's why that's where
the title comes from. Right? So it's a
really powerful way to highlight,
something from your book. In fact, my favorite
book, The Grapes of Wrath, actually I shouldn't
say it's my favorite, it depends on the
day you ask me and what genre of
book we're talking about. But I truly love
The Grapes of Wrath.
(17:37):
That's essentially how it got its name. Right?
John Steinbeck's wife who,
worked as his editor,
most of the time,
noticed that that phrase that, you know, The
Grapes of Wrath that he had used within
his text, and it just resonated with her.
She said, oh, there it is. There's the
title of that book. So sometimes
we've already written the title of our book.
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We just have to go into our story,
mine it, and,
find that.
One thing I want to mention
about,
about titles is remember that your title
is probably the most important
marketing element
of your book. Right? So the focus of
(18:19):
a title,
yes, you wanna be creative. Yes, you wanna
be unique. But really, the purpose of a
title
is to sell your book. Right? The purpose
of a title is for somebody to pick
up your book, read that title, and already
they're thinking,
this might be a book that I wanna
read. So think about titles like, the current
title from,
(18:39):
oh my gosh, his name isn't coming to
me.
You'll know it because it's a best seller
right now on the on the bookshelves.
It's called The President is Missing. Right? Now
that's a title that you know exactly what
you're going to get. So if somebody's in
a bookstore, somebody's on Amazon, they're looking for
kind of a political thriller that they wanna
read, and they see something called The President
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is Missing,
that's a great advertising piece so that they
know
exactly what they're gonna get when they pick
up this book. And they're more likely to
buy that one than a book with a
title that,
is more
creative in the word, but, you know, a
little more subtle might be a way to
look at it. So as you're thinking about
your title, one of the things you want
(19:21):
to bring in is this question,
does my title
tell my specific reader
something about the story? Right? Does it make
some kind of connection
with the reader that I'm going for? So
we're gonna leave titles there for a little
bit. There's four or five things you might
think about when coming up or, exploring for
your best title.
(19:44):
Onto our next question. This is a fun
one. It's one of my,
I'm guessing I'm gonna say it's one of
my pet peeves when I'm reading a book.
And this question is,
what is the best way to name characters?
Now everybody has a different take on this.
You talk to 10 different authors, you're probably
gonna get 10 different takes. So the best
I can do is share
my take with you on this, but I
(20:04):
think it's got some good general rules in
it to think about when you're naming
characters.
So the first one, one of the first
approaches, and I think one of the best
approaches, is to name them thematically.
So think about, find those names that resonate
with some element of the character
or something about the story. Now, a lot
(20:25):
of times these
thematic
names are not
obvious. Right? They don't jump right out and
slap the reader across the face and say,
hey, I'm named thematically.
But I really believe that there's something going
on subconsciously as a reader reads that they're
using
all of the information at their disposal
to try to make
(20:46):
inferences about your story, about your character. So
I think on that level,
thematic names can often resonate.
And here, let me give you an example
here of what I mean. So in the
first screenplay that I wrote, I had a
character and his name, I named him Paul
Carter.
Now this was a story of redemption. Right?
This was a story about a man who
screws up his life completely. He's kind of
(21:07):
a horrible person, but throughout the story
he comes around. Right? He redeems himself. So
what I did is I picked two names
that I felt
resonated thematically. So Paul, his first name,
resonates biblically. Right? You go back to the
apostle Paul,
this character who set out to destroy Christianity,
but ultimately he's redeemed and he becomes the
(21:29):
apostle Paul. So I felt like that word,
that name was really loaded
with a lot of thematic
meaning when it comes to redemption.
And then I chose his last name Carter
after president Carter. Right? Kind of the the
same story. Very different circumstance.
But Carter widely was not considered a great
president.
But he's gone on to do incredible things.
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Right? He's worked for Habitat for Humanity, a
whole bunch of other,
amazing projects that he's gotten involved in and
he's kind of redeemed his name in a
way. So I took two names
that I felt resonated thematically
and I put them together. Paul Carter.
And whether my reader gets that,
almost certainly they don't.
I think just culturally and kind of inferentially,
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we get that sense of these names that
are connected
to, thematic elements. So that's one way to
go about it.
The other way is to just name them
realistically. I've heard of people that literally go
through the phone book and point at names
until they find some that fit.
I like to be a little more intentional
than that,
but what I do like is that it
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keeps us connected to the real world.
Because here's my pet peeve when it comes
to naming characters, and it's my pet peeve
because I've seen it so,
so often,
especially with new writers,
that try to name all of their characters
creatively.
Right? Now this,
probably more than anything else, takes me out
(22:57):
of a story.
Now I'm I'm a school teacher, right? So
if I'm sitting in class of 30 to
35 students,
I'm looking at a whole bunch of Jacobs
and
Nathans
and Susans, right, and Alexes and all of
these names that we're familiar with. I'll have
maybe
two, three, or four
names in that class that are very creatively
(23:20):
named, right? Here's a name I've never seen
before or a spelling of a traditional name
that I have never seen before. But it's
by far the minority.
So the mistake I see a lot of
people do with their fiction
is that they wanna have too much fun
with names, right? They wanna create all these
interesting,
unique,
(23:40):
creative names, and all I can think when
I'm reading all these names is, this isn't
the real world, right? It's just kind of
a reminder that I'm reading a piece of
art from somebody.
Now, that's
fine and good if you want people aware
that they are always reading a book that
you've created, but I think the goal of
good fiction is that we forget
(24:02):
that this isn't real life, right? That we're
sucked into that world.
And so remember that. We want our names
to,
to feel
authentic to the world. Now we get a
little more license when we start to dip
into fantasy,
sci fi,
those kind of things. But still, think about
the way names
evolve.
Right? Just like language evolves,
(24:24):
names evolve. Like, right now, it's really getting
popular to spell
traditional names in a creative way. Right? So
when we hear them, they sound the same,
but there's some unique spelling. So I think
that's kind of where we're currently at, at
least with the age group that I work
with, for,
kind of that,
evolution of names. I don't know where it's
(24:45):
going next. I my guess actually is that
we're gonna start seeing combinations
of names
where we may hear the first part of
one name,
kind of blended with the the second half
of a different name. I can't even give
you an example of that, but I just
feel like,
that may be the way that we're headed.
So you can do some predictive work, right?
If you're creating a future world,
(25:06):
then make up a way that names have
evolved from where they are now
to connect with the world the way it
is in the future, and it's gonna seem
more authentic even though your names
are not, authentic to our current
time period. So please please please please please,
if you're going to use
a really creative, unusual name in your novel,
(25:30):
keep it to one or two characters, right,
at the most.
Or maybe you have all the characters from
a certain family that are named that way,
and that tells you something very unique
about this family. Right? Some background information. But
don't have all your characters with these, crazy
creative names.
Great way to turn your reader,
to basically kick your reader out of the
(25:52):
verisimilitude
of your story. So also don't name them
similarly. For some reason, when I'm writing a
rough draft,
this is what I do. Right? I I
realized a few years ago with the work
in progress I was working on that about
90% of my characters
started with the letter m. I have no
idea why. Right? Names were just coming to
me as I was writing, but I had
(26:12):
Matt, and I had Mark, and I had
Mindy, and I had Melody.
And it wasn't until I had somebody reading
through my draft that they said, I can't
tell these people apart. Right? There are all
these m names, which makes no sense because
in no world do you find a bunch
of random people that all start with the
letter m. I'd just gotten into this rut.
Right? So couple of, couple of things to
(26:32):
think about there is make sure that you
mix up the letters that the names start
with. In fact, if you can get away
with, don't share any characters that start with
the same first,
letter.
Also, mix up the number of syllables that
they have. Right? If you have three characters
in a story and they are Mike,
Mark, and Jim,
that's gonna be very different than if you
(26:54):
have Mike,
Alexander, and,
David. Right? Now we have three different names
starting with three different letters
with three different syllable patterns,
and they're gonna stand out.
Also consider
the ethnic flavor
of the names, right? If you can bring
more and more diverse ethnicities into your story
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and do that in a natural way, then
you're going to be able to bring in
more diverse names that are easier
for your reader to keep track of
and are more realistic to the world that
you're writing in. Essentially the goal with names
is to make it as easy as possible
for your reader
to remember those names and to associate them
(27:38):
with the traits of your character. For some
reason,
that's the hardest thing that I the biggest
challenge I have when I'm reading a book
is just keeping the names of people straight.
In fact, I've gotten in the habit that
I will, keep a post it note in
a book I'm reading. And I'll jot down
the names of new characters as I meet
them and maybe just a, you know, a
couple little of identifying words so I can
(27:59):
keep them straight in my mind. So I
know it's a challenge for people to keep
names straight. So make it easier
on your reader
and choose
realistic
but varied
names.
Now one last little caveat to that.
Sometimes it's fun to work against the grain.
Right? Sometimes it's fun to name that character
(28:19):
something and then have them be the total
opposite
of what your reader expects. That can be
a really powerful way
to get them to remember it. So, you
know, have a super
bitchy character whose name is Grace. Right? Because
you you meet somebody named Grace, you expect
them to be nice and loving and caring,
(28:40):
but go against the grain. Right? This person
is the opposite of that. Or maybe, you
you know, you meet this muscle bound meathead
sort of tank top wearing
dude, and he introduces himself and his name
is Winston.
Right? Something you would never expect,
but boy, I wanna meet that guy. Right?
That's an interesting character who has that kind
(29:01):
of name that is so juxtaposed
to the person that he is. So that
can also be a powerful technique.
Still rings true. Right? It still feels like
it's in the reality
possibility because
honestly, if we look at the way we
we name people, it doesn't make a lot
of sense. Right?
I think my wife and I spent,
you know, probably a couple of days, ultimately,
(29:23):
if you put it all together, thinking about
what we were gonna name our children.
So if you boil that down to a
certain number of hours, that's maybe twenty four
total hours. And that that even seems like
way more right now. I can't imagine sitting
around for twenty four hours straight deciding on
a name. So it's probably much less than
that. And yet here our children are taking
these names through
(29:43):
seventy, eighty, ninety, a hundred years of life
with this name. So sometimes the names
don't fit the person, right, at all. So,
we can have some fun with that in
our fiction. You know what? I've got a
couple of more here that we're gonna do
as I look at the time. I thought
we were gonna run short today but we
are right about there. So I'm actually going
to let these, these questions
(30:06):
hang on for another month or so until
I get back to doing another one of
these q and a sessions.
In the meantime, if you have a question
that you would, like to talk about on
the show or or hear me explore, please
send it to bradreed@bradreedwrites.com.
I'd love to take some time and, go
through those questions with you.
(30:32):
So our wise word today comes from Stephen
Hawking. Don't really think of him necessarily as
a writer, of course, but of course he
does a lot of writing, not necessarily fiction,
but writes a lot of his nonfiction
informational
work or at least wrote that.
So his wise word today says this.
The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance.
(30:54):
It is the illusion
of knowledge.
Now I love this quote because I see
it day in and day out, whether I'm
teaching high school, college, whether I'm teaching writers
that have long been out of school. The
greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it
is the illusion
of knowledge.
So one of the things that I see
that really hold writers back,
(31:16):
especially if they've been writing a while,
is this idea that they've become an expert,
right? As soon as you decide you're an
expert on something,
you have stopped learning
about that topic. Now, that's a little bit
of an overstatement, but I think at the
heart of that, that is true, right? So
when we reach that point where we feel
(31:36):
like we know everything about a topic and
we are no longer open to hearing other
opinions, other perspectives on it,
that's where we, have this illusion of knowledge,
but not the truth of knowledge. So I
love that from Stephen King. It's always a
or Stephen King, Stephen Hawking.
It's always a great reminder to me
that when I start to get confident,
(31:58):
or start to feel confident in a certain
thing,
that that's the time for me to take
a step back and say, wait a second.
There's more for me to know
about this topic. I need to be open
to
other experiences,
other
perspectives
on this topic and keep pushing myself deeper
to learn more and more about it.
(32:24):
And finally, our weekly challenge this week is
kind of related to our whole Q and
A session and Stephen Hawking's quote. Our weekly
challenge this week is I want you to
re examine
your life as a writer
and begin to identify
questions
that you need to ask as a writer.
So maybe these aren't literal questions like we
(32:46):
talked about today. How do how do I,
you know, title my book? Or how do
I create a vivid scene?
Maybe these are questions,
that are deeper, that are more craft level.
Like, if I were to write out my
question right now, my question would
be, how do I write better subtext?
Right? So that acknowledges a certain level of
(33:07):
expertise. Right? I understand that I that I
do know how to write subtext. I know
what it is, But I feel like that's
still a bit of a weakness in my
own writing. And then what I want you
to do, once you have come up with
those questions for your life as a writer,
what what is that area that you need
to know more about to push yourself deeper
in?
Once you've identified one or two of those,
(33:29):
I want you to make a plan
for how you're going to get your answers
for that. So how
am I going to be better at writing
subtext? So my plan is to go back
through
a great book by Robert McKee called Dialogue
and I wanna reread that book and take
that deeper. And then
I wanna look at some more screenplays. I
(33:49):
love reading screenplays,
for lessons in subtext. So that's my plan.
Have a concrete plan for how you're going
to take this area of your writing
that you feel a little bit weak in
and work on it to make it a
strength. So there's our weekly challenge for this
week.
That's gonna wrap it up for this week.
If you are enjoying the podcast, I would
(34:12):
love it if you would,
tweet about it if you're on Twitter or
just mention it to some of your writer
friends. Maybe even leave us a review over
on iTunes
or whatever app you listen to. That helps
us out so so much.
Also, please consider joining the Patreon team. For
just a couple of bucks a month, you'll
be helping to support the podcast and, all
of the other resources that we produce here.
(34:34):
As you know, I do Patreon backwards.
I don't,
limit anything so you can see everything. You
can see all of the resources that we're
creating on Patreon right now for free. And
then, if you find value in those, we
just ask that you help support the show
a little bit with that few dollars a
month, so we can keep up and running.
And you know what? It's not even all
about helping us pay the bills even though
(34:56):
it certainly does that.
It's actually a huge emotional boost for me
as the producer and the host.
It's actually kind of a validation, right, that
that we're doing good things here that you
appreciate. It's a great way to,
think of it almost like a tip. Right?
Not,
you know, we we love to go out
and see live music,
(35:16):
on the weekends, you know, especially in restaurants.
We're having a nice dinner and the band's
playing. You know, you're gonna leave them a
couple of bucks just to say, hey, thank
you.
You're playing music here today made our experience
better, so here's a little bit of a
thank you. You can think of it kinda
like that. Right? If what we're doing here
is making your writing life a little more
interesting,
a little bit better, then, consider supporting the
(35:36):
show in that way. That would mean so
so much to us and allow us to
continue to do it.
So until next week, remember the best way
to improve your craft is by writing. That's
what I'm off to go do, and I
hope you're off to do the same. Let's
get some words on paper this week, and
we'll meet up again next week for another
episode of the Inside Creative Writing Podcast.
(35:58):
Thanks for listening to the Inside Creative Writing
Podcast with your host, writer and educator, Brad
Reed. We'll be back next week.
Welcome to the inside creative writing podcast.
The weekly discussion of craft and technique for
writers of fiction and creative nonfiction.
And now here's your host, writer and educator,
Brad Reed.
Episode 32.
Today, we're taking a step back from our
more formal explorations of a single dedicated topic
(00:21):
and answering questions from listeners. It's time for
some q and a.
And welcome back to the Inside Creative Writing
podcast. My name is Brad Reed, and I'm
so glad that you're, here with us today
to spend some time talking about writing.
And, what a week it's been around here.
(00:42):
As I record this, I'm just a couple
of days away
from the start of yet another school year.
Now for some of you, you're thinking, wow,
just now you're getting around to that? So
here in Oregon, we start generally, quite a
bit later than other schools do across the
country.
But basically that means that I've spent the
last week or actually a couple of weeks
fully immersed in curriculum planning, setting up my
(01:05):
classroom, all of that stuff that you do
for another
great year of school ahead. So with that
in mind, I had to take a step
back from the type of preparation that I
usually do for
very specific formal topics for the show. And
I decided it would be a great week
to take a little bit of a break
from that and look back at some of
(01:25):
the great questions
that are coming in from listeners to the
podcast. So there's every chance that this podcast
will run just a little bit shorter today
and I think that's probably okay since
last week we ran so much overboard. So,
I think it kind of, evens out in
the end. I do wanna give you a
quick update on my own current work in
(01:48):
progress, especially for those of you who've been
following along
in the real time revision videos that we
do as kind of a companion piece to
this podcast.
You can find out about, more about those
by going to bradreedrights.com.
So a quick update on the book. As
you probably know if you've been listening to
the show, I finished my first draft of
my latest book.
(02:08):
And I have just finally
finished the process of,
going through the story grid system of editing
that first draft, and I'm finished with that
process now. It took about twice as long
as I thought that it would, but I
have absolutely
no regrets
about that. It was,
just kind of the new perspective that I
(02:30):
needed on how to edit, how to revise,
a new perspective on structure
that I felt like I needed to really
bring this book to life. And when I
say that, I don't even mean to life
as in kind of a general overall plot
sense.
I really mean on the scene level.
The kind of work that you do when
you play with that story grid system
(02:50):
is scene by scene and really kind of
beat by beat,
within your story. And that's a level of
editing
that I've done before, but I haven't had
a formalized system to do that and I
really,
appreciated the story grid system. If you're not
familiar with that, you could check it out
at story grid on Twitter or I think
it's just storygrid.com.
(03:11):
So starting this week, I am headlong into
the full,
not necessarily a page one revision,
of my work in progress,
but, essentially, it's it's gonna,
come down to pretty close to a page
one revision. There won't be a sentence in
the book that doesn't get tweaked, reworked, deleted,
added to, as I now understand the real
(03:34):
goal of each of the scenes in my
book, which is pretty exciting. So
let's go ahead and jump into today's show
questions that listeners of the podcast has sent
in over the last few months.
(03:55):
Okay. So let's jump in. I love, love,
love getting questions from you guys about writing.
They often make me think more deeply about
how I feel about a certain topic or,
I begin to see the act of writing
from a different perspective and all of that
is so valuable. So please keep those questions
coming. You can email those to bradreed@bradreedwrites.com
(04:17):
and I'll either get back to you personally,
which I often do,
or I'll do, another show like this, kind
of this Q and A where I'll take
some of these questions, especially the ones getting
asked more often,
and, go into them a little bit more
depth, in-depth on the show. So
what's interesting is many of these questions
relate to things that we've actually discussed before
(04:39):
on the show and my initial reaction would
probably have been, before I was a teacher,
that oh, didn't you listen? Right? Or didn't
you get it the first time? But I
actually think that,
it's great
when people ask
additional questions
about things that we've already covered. So one
of the truisms
of learning anything new is that we need
(05:01):
to hear it
more than once
before we really own that knowledge. That's kind
of a foundational truism
of education, of teaching, right? Is that we
need to we need to have that repetition.
And sometimes it's not just hearing the same
thing over and over again. In fact, ideally,
it's not just hearing the same things over
and over again. It's that we hear things
(05:21):
repeatedly in different ways. Right? In with slightly
different nuance
or from a slightly different angle
and that helps us understand that concept even
more deeply
and own it more deeply than we would
otherwise. So today, even if we're talking about
something that you feel like you've got down.
Right? I know this thing. I don't really
need to hear the answer to this question.
(05:43):
I hope you'll still
take the time to think deeply about it
as we discuss it
and see how you might gain a new
insight or notice a new nuance
that you didn't have before.
So actually that whole concept is kind of
a preview of this week's wise word, but
we'll have to wait till the end of
the show for that. So we're gonna jump
(06:04):
right into these questions today. I think I
have about four or five of them here
that are asked fairly commonly in one form
or another. So I've kind of
boiled those down into their essential questions so
we can explore them a little bit. So
our first question today,
how do I describe a person, a place,
or a thing
(06:24):
vividly
so the reader can see it in their
mind? And isn't that the goal of writing?
I often think of writing as a very
visual,
experience when you're reading, right? We're creating basically
these films. We're watching these films in our
mind
if the writer has done a good enough
job of creating
(06:45):
those opportunities, of giving us enough information that
we can then translate that into that film
or that experience
in our mind. So that's essentially what this
question is getting at, I think. How
do we do that? How do we create
that vivid
experience for the reader?
And, there's a bunch of different ways to
answer this. I wanna give you just kind
(07:06):
of my three or four bullet points to
think about when you are trying to describe
things in a way that will bring them
to life for your audience.
So one thing to stay away from is
over describing
something. Now that can be a style thing,
right?
One of my favorite authors, John Steinbeck, right,
when you read his description it can go
(07:26):
on for several pages. And that's his voice,
that's his style.
But in general, if you're not a John
Steinbeck, which most of us aren't,
you're better off to use just one or
two
really vivid details,
and then let the audience fill in the
rest. So when you're introducing a new character,
(07:46):
a new setting,
what is the one or maybe two things
that stand out the most about this, that
kind of define
the experience of being in that place or
the experience of seeing that person. And then
let that one or two,
those one or two,
most vivid details
just stand on their own because the human
(08:08):
brain
has a way of taking a great descriptive
detail
and then filling in the blanks. Right? And
in that way,
your reader can become even more,
even more of the story,
because now they're helping you build out
the rest of that image. Sometimes they're connecting
it. If it's a place, they're connecting it
to a place that they've been before,
(08:29):
and so they're bringing all of these details
that are much more intimate and familiar to
them,
in concert
with the details that you've given them. And
they're having an even more vivid experience
because they're able to bring these, kind of
this library of experience that they have
into
work in concert with your details. So there's
(08:50):
kind of tip number one with this question.
Maybe the most powerful tip here though is
to remember the perspective
of the character,
who is seeing
this, person, place, or thing.
So, regardless of what perspective you're writing from,
your narrator,
(09:10):
sees the world in a certain way. And
they're going to notice different things about it.
In fact, one of the most fun,
activities that I do with my creative writing
students is I will take them out on
a nearby football field. And I will have
them do, just a couple of quick writes.
The first one
is imagine that you just fell in love.
Right? Maybe you just have proposed to the
person that you love,
(09:32):
and they've said yes. So you're gonna get
married. So you are in one of the
best moods you could possibly be in And
for whatever reason, you find yourself now sitting,
out at this football field. Not even a
game going on. Right? We're just sitting there,
and we're describing this football field. What kind
of things would you notice?
And
(09:52):
as they do this quick write,
they begin to notice
beautiful things. Right? They will notice how blue
the sky is, or they will know know,
notice how green the grass is, or they'll
look off into the distance and they'll see
the curve of a mountain and appreciate the
beauty of that, or they'll see
the birds on the power line overhead and
(10:13):
they'll listen to the song that they're singing.
So those are the details of that scene
that somebody who's in a great mood is
gonna notice. And then I have them write
again for about another five minutes from somebody
who's just
broken up with the love of their life.
Right? This is the person they thought they
were gonna spend the rest of their life
with, their soulmate,
but it didn't work out.
(10:35):
Now what do you notice? Now how do
you describe the scene? And it's so interesting
how suddenly they notice that the skies aren't
entirely blue,
that there are those clouds way over there
in the distance that look dark and foreboding.
And so they notice instead of that vast
blue sky, they focus on that dark storm
cloud rolling in. Or they notice that, yeah,
(10:55):
there's a bunch of songbirds over here on
this in this tree,
but look at that one isolated bird up
there on the power line. And they're gonna
identify with that one
lonely, maybe it's a crow, right? This dark
bird sitting up there on that on that
line that they didn't notice before.
So that is really the power
(11:16):
of the vivid detail,
Is that it's not just describing a person,
place, or thing so that your reader can
see it in their mind. It's describing it
as
the person, as the character would see it.
What details would they notice? So think about
just walking up onto a tree.
If you're in a really good mood, life
is good, you're gonna notice the beauty of
(11:37):
the tree. You might notice the life in
the tree, the squirrel kind of winding its
way up the trunk. You'll notice the how
green the leaves are. If you're in a
bad mood, right, if there's something terrible that's
happened,
you're gonna notice the gnarled
branches. And you're gonna notice that one
dead branch kind of hidden in there among
all the others that, you know, something has
(11:57):
happened to it and it's barren of leaves.
So those details are going to be as
telling
about your character's
emotion and point of view as they are
about that thing. So always be thinking as
you're describing a scene or a person or
a thing,
what mood is my character in? What mood
do I wanna have the scene
(12:19):
feel like?
And then find those details
that stand out.
Also don't forget all five senses. Literally right
here on my computer monitor, I have a
little post it note that says the five
senses. Sight, smell, sound, touch, taste.
Because it's so easy to get into a
rut where suddenly you're describing everything visually
(12:40):
or maybe you're describing everything auditorily. Right? We
have these senses that we tend to lean
on.
Mine is definitely visual because I've done so
much work in studying screenwriting that I think
very visually. And I have this Post it
note up to remind me, wait a second,
sometimes it's a smell
that defines a place. Or sometimes it's the
way something feels, that that, touch sensation.
(13:03):
So try to work as many of those
in as you can throughout your story and
the world comes to life a lot more
vividly.
The last thing I wanna say about this
question is have some fun
practicing this in the real world.
When you are people watching, wherever that is,
and I think most of us are, you
know, love to every once in a while
(13:24):
sit around and and people watch,
just start noticing what is the first thing
that you notice about a particular person. Right?
You're not describing
how tall they are, what their weight is,
what they're wearing, how they're walking.
Just notice kind of that first
detail that stands out and it's usually
that thing that separates them from all other
(13:44):
people that you've seen. Right? This is kind
of the way the human brain works. We're
always kind of cataloging things. We're always trying
to differentiate things. What makes this person that
I'm seeing now
different in some way than every other person?
Right? And the first thing that comes to
my mind are maybe they have these crazy
bushy
eyebrows. Right? When you meet somebody like that,
(14:05):
that's that defining characteristic. So practice that in
the real world when you're in a new
place, or maybe you're driving somewhere you haven't
been. Just look at a building and say,
what is it about that building
that makes that building unique? What is the
one thing that I notice
about that building? Or about this park, or
about that person, or about that bicycle,
(14:26):
right? Whatever it is, what's the specific thing
that defines it, that makes it,
a singularity?
So, hopefully that's helpful for a question that
I get asked a lot here about how
to make our details vivid. So let's move
on to our second question, and this is,
essentially some iteration of this question. How do
I come up with the best title
(14:48):
for my novel?
Now again, like almost all of these questions
that we're gonna look at today, in fact,
all of them,
there's different answers for different people depending on
your own style, depending on your genre, depending
on your voice and your goals for
your writing. So all I can do is
give you some tips here and then let
you use those tips to go out and
discover the best title for your work.
(15:10):
The first thing I like to tell people
to do is take a look at some
of the most successful titles in the genre
that you're writing in. And see what's working
in that genre. So if you are a
mystery writer,
go look at the top 100 best selling
mystery books and look at those titles. Examine
them. What do they have in common?
(15:30):
What is their function? Right? How are they
working
to engage
a potential reader?
I think you can learn
good title writing
from studying other books just like you can
learn good writing
by studying and reading other people's books. There's
essential art to writing a title that isn't
(15:51):
that much different
than the writing that we do within our
book. So it's worth it to take some
time to study
what's working, right? What makes a title good,
especially in your genre?
Second thing is make sure your title is
unique. I talked about this a little bit,
I think it was just last week.
Once you think you've come up with your
(16:12):
title, a great thing to do is a
quick Google search just to see what else
will come up if somebody Googles your title.
If you get a whole bunch of things,
song lyrics, movie titles,
quotes, all sorts of stuff, maybe that's not
a good title. It's gonna be harder for
people to find your book. Plus, it's telling
you this isn't that unique of a phrase
(16:33):
or a word. So you might wanna dig
a little deeper and make sure that it
is actually unique. And then if you do
a go a Google search,
once your book is out there it's gonna
be the first thing or one of the
first things that pops up when people are
searching for it.
Another great technique is to mine your manuscript
for that line of either dialogue or prose
(16:55):
that might work as a title. This is
a really fun way, I think, to title
a book. It's almost like you've planted this
little,
this little mystery in your book. Right? I'm
I'm sure you've had the experience where you're
reading a book, and all of a sudden
you see the title right there in the
prose. Somebody says it or it's in a
line of description or something like that, and
(17:15):
this little rush of adrenaline comes in and
you say, oh, that's that's why that's where
the title comes from. Right? So it's a
really powerful way to highlight,
something from your book. In fact, my favorite
book, The Grapes of Wrath, actually I shouldn't
say it's my favorite, it depends on the
day you ask me and what genre of
book we're talking about. But I truly love
The Grapes of Wrath.
(17:37):
That's essentially how it got its name. Right?
John Steinbeck's wife who,
worked as his editor,
most of the time,
noticed that that phrase that, you know, The
Grapes of Wrath that he had used within
his text, and it just resonated with her.
She said, oh, there it is. There's the
title of that book. So sometimes
we've already written the title of our book.
(17:59):
We just have to go into our story,
mine it, and,
find that.
One thing I want to mention
about,
about titles is remember that your title
is probably the most important
marketing element
of your book. Right? So the focus of
(18:19):
a title,
yes, you wanna be creative. Yes, you wanna
be unique. But really, the purpose of a
title
is to sell your book. Right? The purpose
of a title is for somebody to pick
up your book, read that title, and already
they're thinking,
this might be a book that I wanna
read. So think about titles like, the current
title from,
(18:39):
oh my gosh, his name isn't coming to
me.
You'll know it because it's a best seller
right now on the on the bookshelves.
It's called The President is Missing. Right? Now
that's a title that you know exactly what
you're going to get. So if somebody's in
a bookstore, somebody's on Amazon, they're looking for
kind of a political thriller that they wanna
read, and they see something called The President
(19:00):
is Missing,
that's a great advertising piece so that they
know
exactly what they're gonna get when they pick
up this book. And they're more likely to
buy that one than a book with a
title that,
is more
creative in the word, but, you know, a
little more subtle might be a way to
look at it. So as you're thinking about
your title, one of the things you want
(19:21):
to bring in is this question,
does my title
tell my specific reader
something about the story? Right? Does it make
some kind of connection
with the reader that I'm going for? So
we're gonna leave titles there for a little
bit. There's four or five things you might
think about when coming up or, exploring for
your best title.
(19:44):
Onto our next question. This is a fun
one. It's one of my,
I'm guessing I'm gonna say it's one of
my pet peeves when I'm reading a book.
And this question is,
what is the best way to name characters?
Now everybody has a different take on this.
You talk to 10 different authors, you're probably
gonna get 10 different takes. So the best
I can do is share
my take with you on this, but I
(20:04):
think it's got some good general rules in
it to think about when you're naming
characters.
So the first one, one of the first
approaches, and I think one of the best
approaches, is to name them thematically.
So think about, find those names that resonate
with some element of the character
or something about the story. Now, a lot
(20:25):
of times these
thematic
names are not
obvious. Right? They don't jump right out and
slap the reader across the face and say,
hey, I'm named thematically.
But I really believe that there's something going
on subconsciously as a reader reads that they're
using
all of the information at their disposal
to try to make
(20:46):
inferences about your story, about your character. So
I think on that level,
thematic names can often resonate.
And here, let me give you an example
here of what I mean. So in the
first screenplay that I wrote, I had a
character and his name, I named him Paul
Carter.
Now this was a story of redemption. Right?
This was a story about a man who
screws up his life completely. He's kind of
(21:07):
a horrible person, but throughout the story
he comes around. Right? He redeems himself. So
what I did is I picked two names
that I felt
resonated thematically. So Paul, his first name,
resonates biblically. Right? You go back to the
apostle Paul,
this character who set out to destroy Christianity,
but ultimately he's redeemed and he becomes the
(21:29):
apostle Paul. So I felt like that word,
that name was really loaded
with a lot of thematic
meaning when it comes to redemption.
And then I chose his last name Carter
after president Carter. Right? Kind of the the
same story. Very different circumstance.
But Carter widely was not considered a great
president.
But he's gone on to do incredible things.
(21:51):
Right? He's worked for Habitat for Humanity, a
whole bunch of other,
amazing projects that he's gotten involved in and
he's kind of redeemed his name in a
way. So I took two names
that I felt resonated thematically
and I put them together. Paul Carter.
And whether my reader gets that,
almost certainly they don't.
I think just culturally and kind of inferentially,
(22:14):
we get that sense of these names that
are connected
to, thematic elements. So that's one way to
go about it.
The other way is to just name them
realistically. I've heard of people that literally go
through the phone book and point at names
until they find some that fit.
I like to be a little more intentional
than that,
but what I do like is that it
(22:35):
keeps us connected to the real world.
Because here's my pet peeve when it comes
to naming characters, and it's my pet peeve
because I've seen it so,
so often,
especially with new writers,
that try to name all of their characters
creatively.
Right? Now this,
probably more than anything else, takes me out
(22:57):
of a story.
Now I'm I'm a school teacher, right? So
if I'm sitting in class of 30 to
35 students,
I'm looking at a whole bunch of Jacobs
and
Nathans
and Susans, right, and Alexes and all of
these names that we're familiar with. I'll have
maybe
two, three, or four
names in that class that are very creatively
(23:20):
named, right? Here's a name I've never seen
before or a spelling of a traditional name
that I have never seen before. But it's
by far the minority.
So the mistake I see a lot of
people do with their fiction
is that they wanna have too much fun
with names, right? They wanna create all these
interesting,
unique,
(23:40):
creative names, and all I can think when
I'm reading all these names is, this isn't
the real world, right? It's just kind of
a reminder that I'm reading a piece of
art from somebody.
Now, that's
fine and good if you want people aware
that they are always reading a book that
you've created, but I think the goal of
good fiction is that we forget
(24:02):
that this isn't real life, right? That we're
sucked into that world.
And so remember that. We want our names
to,
to feel
authentic to the world. Now we get a
little more license when we start to dip
into fantasy,
sci fi,
those kind of things. But still, think about
the way names
evolve.
Right? Just like language evolves,
(24:24):
names evolve. Like, right now, it's really getting
popular to spell
traditional names in a creative way. Right? So
when we hear them, they sound the same,
but there's some unique spelling. So I think
that's kind of where we're currently at, at
least with the age group that I work
with, for,
kind of that,
evolution of names. I don't know where it's
(24:45):
going next. I my guess actually is that
we're gonna start seeing combinations
of names
where we may hear the first part of
one name,
kind of blended with the the second half
of a different name. I can't even give
you an example of that, but I just
feel like,
that may be the way that we're headed.
So you can do some predictive work, right?
If you're creating a future world,
(25:06):
then make up a way that names have
evolved from where they are now
to connect with the world the way it
is in the future, and it's gonna seem
more authentic even though your names
are not, authentic to our current
time period. So please please please please please,
if you're going to use
a really creative, unusual name in your novel,
(25:30):
keep it to one or two characters, right,
at the most.
Or maybe you have all the characters from
a certain family that are named that way,
and that tells you something very unique
about this family. Right? Some background information. But
don't have all your characters with these, crazy
creative names.
Great way to turn your reader,
to basically kick your reader out of the
(25:52):
verisimilitude
of your story. So also don't name them
similarly. For some reason, when I'm writing a
rough draft,
this is what I do. Right? I I
realized a few years ago with the work
in progress I was working on that about
90% of my characters
started with the letter m. I have no
idea why. Right? Names were just coming to
me as I was writing, but I had
(26:12):
Matt, and I had Mark, and I had
Mindy, and I had Melody.
And it wasn't until I had somebody reading
through my draft that they said, I can't
tell these people apart. Right? There are all
these m names, which makes no sense because
in no world do you find a bunch
of random people that all start with the
letter m. I'd just gotten into this rut.
Right? So couple of, couple of things to
(26:32):
think about there is make sure that you
mix up the letters that the names start
with. In fact, if you can get away
with, don't share any characters that start with
the same first,
letter.
Also, mix up the number of syllables that
they have. Right? If you have three characters
in a story and they are Mike,
Mark, and Jim,
that's gonna be very different than if you
(26:54):
have Mike,
Alexander, and,
David. Right? Now we have three different names
starting with three different letters
with three different syllable patterns,
and they're gonna stand out.
Also consider
the ethnic flavor
of the names, right? If you can bring
more and more diverse ethnicities into your story
(27:16):
and do that in a natural way, then
you're going to be able to bring in
more diverse names that are easier
for your reader to keep track of
and are more realistic to the world that
you're writing in. Essentially the goal with names
is to make it as easy as possible
for your reader
to remember those names and to associate them
(27:38):
with the traits of your character. For some
reason,
that's the hardest thing that I the biggest
challenge I have when I'm reading a book
is just keeping the names of people straight.
In fact, I've gotten in the habit that
I will, keep a post it note in
a book I'm reading. And I'll jot down
the names of new characters as I meet
them and maybe just a, you know, a
couple little of identifying words so I can
(27:59):
keep them straight in my mind. So I
know it's a challenge for people to keep
names straight. So make it easier
on your reader
and choose
realistic
but varied
names.
Now one last little caveat to that.
Sometimes it's fun to work against the grain.
Right? Sometimes it's fun to name that character
(28:19):
something and then have them be the total
opposite
of what your reader expects. That can be
a really powerful way
to get them to remember it. So, you
know, have a super
bitchy character whose name is Grace. Right? Because
you you meet somebody named Grace, you expect
them to be nice and loving and caring,
(28:40):
but go against the grain. Right? This person
is the opposite of that. Or maybe, you
you know, you meet this muscle bound meathead
sort of tank top wearing
dude, and he introduces himself and his name
is Winston.
Right? Something you would never expect,
but boy, I wanna meet that guy. Right?
That's an interesting character who has that kind
(29:01):
of name that is so juxtaposed
to the person that he is. So that
can also be a powerful technique.
Still rings true. Right? It still feels like
it's in the reality
possibility because
honestly, if we look at the way we
we name people, it doesn't make a lot
of sense. Right?
I think my wife and I spent,
you know, probably a couple of days, ultimately,
(29:23):
if you put it all together, thinking about
what we were gonna name our children.
So if you boil that down to a
certain number of hours, that's maybe twenty four
total hours. And that that even seems like
way more right now. I can't imagine sitting
around for twenty four hours straight deciding on
a name. So it's probably much less than
that. And yet here our children are taking
these names through
(29:43):
seventy, eighty, ninety, a hundred years of life
with this name. So sometimes the names
don't fit the person, right, at all. So,
we can have some fun with that in
our fiction. You know what? I've got a
couple of more here that we're gonna do
as I look at the time. I thought
we were gonna run short today but we
are right about there. So I'm actually going
to let these, these questions
(30:06):
hang on for another month or so until
I get back to doing another one of
these q and a sessions.
In the meantime, if you have a question
that you would, like to talk about on
the show or or hear me explore, please
send it to bradreed@bradreedwrites.com.
I'd love to take some time and, go
through those questions with you.
(30:32):
So our wise word today comes from Stephen
Hawking. Don't really think of him necessarily as
a writer, of course, but of course he
does a lot of writing, not necessarily fiction,
but writes a lot of his nonfiction
informational
work or at least wrote that.
So his wise word today says this.
The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance.
(30:54):
It is the illusion
of knowledge.
Now I love this quote because I see
it day in and day out, whether I'm
teaching high school, college, whether I'm teaching writers
that have long been out of school. The
greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it
is the illusion
of knowledge.
So one of the things that I see
that really hold writers back,
(31:16):
especially if they've been writing a while,
is this idea that they've become an expert,
right? As soon as you decide you're an
expert on something,
you have stopped learning
about that topic. Now, that's a little bit
of an overstatement, but I think at the
heart of that, that is true, right? So
when we reach that point where we feel
(31:36):
like we know everything about a topic and
we are no longer open to hearing other
opinions, other perspectives on it,
that's where we, have this illusion of knowledge,
but not the truth of knowledge. So I
love that from Stephen King. It's always a
or Stephen King, Stephen Hawking.
It's always a great reminder to me
that when I start to get confident,
(31:58):
or start to feel confident in a certain
thing,
that that's the time for me to take
a step back and say, wait a second.
There's more for me to know
about this topic. I need to be open
to
other experiences,
other
perspectives
on this topic and keep pushing myself deeper
to learn more and more about it.
(32:24):
And finally, our weekly challenge this week is
kind of related to our whole Q and
A session and Stephen Hawking's quote. Our weekly
challenge this week is I want you to
re examine
your life as a writer
and begin to identify
questions
that you need to ask as a writer.
So maybe these aren't literal questions like we
(32:46):
talked about today. How do how do I,
you know, title my book? Or how do
I create a vivid scene?
Maybe these are questions,
that are deeper, that are more craft level.
Like, if I were to write out my
question right now, my question would
be, how do I write better subtext?
Right? So that acknowledges a certain level of
(33:07):
expertise. Right? I understand that I that I
do know how to write subtext. I know
what it is, But I feel like that's
still a bit of a weakness in my
own writing. And then what I want you
to do, once you have come up with
those questions for your life as a writer,
what what is that area that you need
to know more about to push yourself deeper
in?
Once you've identified one or two of those,
(33:29):
I want you to make a plan
for how you're going to get your answers
for that. So how
am I going to be better at writing
subtext? So my plan is to go back
through
a great book by Robert McKee called Dialogue
and I wanna reread that book and take
that deeper. And then
I wanna look at some more screenplays. I
(33:49):
love reading screenplays,
for lessons in subtext. So that's my plan.
Have a concrete plan for how you're going
to take this area of your writing
that you feel a little bit weak in
and work on it to make it a
strength. So there's our weekly challenge for this
week.
That's gonna wrap it up for this week.
If you are enjoying the podcast, I would
(34:12):
love it if you would,
tweet about it if you're on Twitter or
just mention it to some of your writer
friends. Maybe even leave us a review over
on iTunes
or whatever app you listen to. That helps
us out so so much.
Also, please consider joining the Patreon team. For
just a couple of bucks a month, you'll
be helping to support the podcast and, all
of the other resources that we produce here.
(34:34):
As you know, I do Patreon backwards.
I don't,
limit anything so you can see everything. You
can see all of the resources that we're
creating on Patreon right now for free. And
then, if you find value in those, we
just ask that you help support the show
a little bit with that few dollars a
month, so we can keep up and running.
And you know what? It's not even all
about helping us pay the bills even though
(34:56):
it certainly does that.
It's actually a huge emotional boost for me
as the producer and the host.
It's actually kind of a validation, right, that
that we're doing good things here that you
appreciate. It's a great way to,
think of it almost like a tip. Right?
Not,
you know, we we love to go out
and see live music,
(35:16):
on the weekends, you know, especially in restaurants.
We're having a nice dinner and the band's
playing. You know, you're gonna leave them a
couple of bucks just to say, hey, thank
you.
You're playing music here today made our experience
better, so here's a little bit of a
thank you. You can think of it kinda
like that. Right? If what we're doing here
is making your writing life a little more
interesting,
a little bit better, then, consider supporting the
(35:36):
show in that way. That would mean so
so much to us and allow us to
continue to do it.
So until next week, remember the best way
to improve your craft is by writing. That's
what I'm off to go do, and I
hope you're off to do the same. Let's
get some words on paper this week, and
we'll meet up again next week for another
episode of the Inside Creative Writing Podcast.
(35:58):
Thanks for listening to the Inside Creative Writing
Podcast with your host, writer and educator, Brad
Reed. We'll be back next week.
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