THE ICE PICK

Description, by Monica Wood. (Elements of Fiction Writing series) Cincinnati: Writer’s Digest Books, 1999. 171 p. ISBN 0-89879-908-2 pbk. $12.00.

Made up of the details you select that engage the senses and help readers "see" your story, description "is the creation of mental images that allow readers to fully experience a story."

Beginning with a chapter that explains how to choose the "telling detail" that makes a story come alive and drive it forward without overwhelming it, Wood discusses how to write good description and use it to make your prose fresher and stronger and your story better and more memorable.

She says that "showing and telling are equally powerful and important descriptive techniques." She explains their differences, their uses, and when and how to apply them, depending on the effect you want to achieve. In describing "something wildly disappointing or moving or confounding," for example, "a scene almost always does the trick better than narrative."

Wood discusses how to use description to keep your story moving and how to create "context" for a complex story, or one that has lots of characters or extends over a long period of time.

Through many examples, Wood shows the interrelationship of description with dialogue and how description can improve your characters’ dialogue. For example, the use of setting and character actions during a conversation can make the dialogue come alive and also influence what the characters say.

She discusses the impact of point of view on description. Age, gender, education, ethnic background, socioeconomic status, and occupation will all affect how your viewpoint character sees things. And she addresses the problems of describing your viewpoint characters without resorting to clichéd mirrors and ponds or having friends gush over your characters’ appearance.

Wood analyzes description in relation to style and shows how the two are interdependent.

The chapter on setting may be especially important for science fiction and fantasy authors, who must create whole worlds without boring their readers with large blocks of description.

Her last two chapters address special descriptive problems (animals, weather, emotion, and sound) and give tips and tricks you can use in revisions or when you’re stuck.

Each chapter has a summary "wrap-up" section to give you an overview and more examples, and there is an excellent index.

Wood explains things clearly and simply and with humor, making the book an enjoyable one to read.

No matter what kind of fiction you write, you have to be able to handle description and do it well, for "description is not so much an element of fiction as its very essence."

If you do not already have the 1995 hardback edition, I highly recommend this paperback reprint.

{Published in SF and Fantasy Workshop Newsletter, July 2002.}

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The Writer’s Complete Fantasy Reference, from the Editors of Writer’s Digest Books. Cincinnati: Writer’s Digest Books, 1998. ISBN 0-89879-866-3. $18.99.

I’m always suspicious when a book claims to be the "complete" anything, but this book comes as close as any I’ve seen to fulfilling its promise. In addition to European medieval culture, it covers the cultures of Africa, Asia, and Oceania, as well as North, South and Mesoamerica, and it does so in enough depth to let you decide if that is a culture you might want to use.

You may want to research more about some particular aspect that interests you or about daily life, e.g. how homes were heated and lighted, how fires were kindled or cooking done, but the basic overviews are done very well. And enough information and terminology is given so you can proceed with your research in an efficient manner.

For the traditional, medieval fantasy, the authors discuss in depth: arms, armor, clothing, punishments for crimes, military information, and economics, including fascinating details, like what colors were typically worn by different classes and what kinds of animals were used to carry messages.

The chapters on magic and witchcraft discuss everything from rituals, symbolism, and terminology, to the "tools of the craft" and include information from many different world cultures. Lists of "power animals," herbs, and the sounds, gestures, and materials used in various rites are given.

There is a chapter on the various fantasy races from dwarves and elves to the Maoris’ tipua and David Weber’s Hradani. And another chapter discusses "creatures of myth and legend" from the Irish banshee to the Tibetan yeti.

The final chapter is devoted to castles and even includes a brief description of Japanese castles. Castle life, terminology, construction, and defense are covered.

The index is excellent, as are the illustrations and the commentary with them. You can learn a great deal just by studying the pictures.

If you write fantasy or medieval romance, you should have this book. Not only might it keep you from making blunders, but the information may spark wonderful story ideas for you.

{Published in GPIC, the Oklahoma Science Fiction Writers Newsletter, Mar. 2001. Reprinted in AuthorShowcase, Aug. 2001; and in SF & Fantasy Workshop Newsletter, Jan. 2002 & Mar. 2002.}

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Word Painting: a Guide to Writing More Descriptively, by Rebecca McClanahan. Cincinnati: Writer’s Digest Books, 2000. ISBN 1-58297-025-4. $14.99.

Description can create the illusion of reality and establish our characters, our point of view, and our setting. It can speed up or slow down our stories or provide the needed links between scenes and summaries. It can be anything from a transitional device to a unifying thematic one. And nowhere is the challenge of writing description greater than for the writer of "non realistic" fiction. "We’re trying to render and maintain a world . . . that we’ve not experienced firsthand." In doing so, "we can’t assume that [our reader] will enter our fictional dream as easily as the reader of a contemporary realistic novel would."

McClanahan begins by explaining how we can sharpen our powers of observation, because our ability to describe things depends on our ability to see, smell, hear, touch, and taste them and to interpret and understand what we have observed. In the following chapters she discusses the tools a writer can use in description and how to create the effects we want in mood, plot, pacing, characterization, point of view, and setting. She also explains how to organize the description of a setting or a person and how to introduce a story’s setting.

Throughout the book there are exercises designed to help us understand and apply the ideas McClanahan introduces. For example, within the section on characterization, she asks us to imagine what container our characters would pack for a weekend away and what they would put in it. What would their grocery list would look like? What would they put out for a yard sale?

There is a selected bibliography for further reading and study, plus a good index, and the book is very well organized.

Packed with practical advice and information, this is a wonderful book. But it is not an easy book, nor one to be skimmed quickly. You need to take your time with it, working through the exercises and seeing how you might apply them to your own writing.

{Published in GPIC, the Oklahoma Science Fiction Writers Newsletter, Dec. 2000. Reprinted in SF & Fantasy Workshop Newsletter, Apr. 2006.}

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Never Be Lied to Again : How to Get the Truth in 5 Minutes or Less in Any Conversation or Situation, by David J. Lieberman. New York : St. Martin’s Griffin, c1998. ISBN 0-312-20428-0. $12.95.

To accurately portray characters in your stories, books on popular psychology are always valuable. You can use such books to create believable stereotypes to populate your story’s background or to make more rounded major characters whether the books are on body language; handwriting analysis; male-female differences; the effects of divorce, adoption, birth order, or a nomadic life on children; or some other hot topic of the day.

This book is particularly helpful. In many stories someone is trying to hide something, and someone else is trying to find it out. Whether it is your hero or your villain who is trying to learn the truth, you can use this book to set up dialogue, to create credible body language, and to make your stories more realistic.

For example, among the forty-six clues to deception that he offers in the first part of the book, Lieberman states that a person being deceitful "will rarely touch the other person. . . . Touch . . . is used when we believe strongly in what we’re saying." You can use such information either to help show that your character is lying or to help your character throw off other characters.

In addition to showing how to tell whether someone is lying or not, Lieberman provides ways to find out the truth "without beating it out of them," tactics which may be useful to your characters whether alien or human. He also includes sections on self-deception and tricks used by people to block your ability to detect deceit.

And while creating aliens or other creatures and different societies, you may want to invent your own signs of deceit for your worlds.

With a book like this it is important to know the credentials of the author. Lieberman is a board-certified hypnotherapist with a Ph.D. in psychology, who offers programs, training, and workshops to governments, businesses, and law enforcement personnel and who represents corporations in various negotiations.

The book is clearly and simply written and loaded with scenarios and examples. The table of contents is very complete, but the book lacks any kind of an index, which is frustrating and means that you are better off owning your own copy, which you can mark up.

It is a fascinating book, and although you may upset your friends and family if they see you reading it, I recommend it highly.

{Published in GPIC, the Oklahoma Science Fiction Writers Newsletter, Nov. 2000. Reprinted in SF & Fantasy Workshop Newsletter, Feb. 2006.}

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Setting, by Jack M. Bickham. Cincinnati : Writer’s Digest Books, 1993. (The Elements of Fiction Writing series) ISBN 0-89879-635-0. $14.95.

Especially important in SF/H/F stories, "setting is a topic seldom discussed at length in writers’ workshops or addressed in any detail in texts for creators of fiction." It is not merely the physical backdrop, but the historical and cultural background including the mood of the place and time, and the attitudes and even the language of the characters involved.

Bickham begins by discussing the use of the five senses in creating sharp realism in your story, and how important accuracy is in convincing your reader. He also emphasizes accuracy when he talks about the pitfalls of making up a town or other place without knowing the factual background that makes that place believable. There must be "an internal factual consistency" in both the background and your characters’ responses to it even in fantasy and science fiction.

One thing he recommends, which is very helpful to beginners, is to keep files of interesting clippings, personal research notes, pictures, and so forth. Most of us who have been writing any length of time do this automatically because we’ve found that you never know when something may be useful. He includes more details about organizing (and gathering) this information in his final chapter. I would have preferred these items closer together, but the excellent index links them for you.

Bickham includes a chapter on the needs of specialized settings in romances, suspense stories, historicals (much of which applies to fantasy, as well), and science fiction.

The next seven chapters contain practical techniques on how to create and use setting in your story, in advancing your plot, in characterization and viewpoint, in adding ideas, depth, and meaning to your story, and in creating mood.

Bickham ends the book with substantial exercises to help the beginner and with an appendix on research sources and techniques. And then he includes "Nancy Berland’s Setting Research Form." Berland is a romance writer, and the form is for a real-life place you might visit and want to use as a setting. But I found it a fascinating tool to use in creating an imaginary place, and it quickly became my favorite part of the book.

As Bickham says, "Even if you’re writing a science fiction tale of an alien universe, you’ll have to know the prevailing attitudes there, and you’ll have to invent a history that would credibly create those attitudes."

{Published in SF & Fantasy Workshop Newsletter, Nov. 2000.}

THE ICE PICK

The Worst-Case Scenario Survival Handbook, by Joshua Piven and David Borgenicht. San Francisco : Chronicle Books, 1999.

Fourteen dollars and ninety-five cents for a 176-page paperback is a lot of money in my opinion. But gems have never been cheap, and this is one of them. No matter what genre you write in, this book can give you some wonderful material for creating believable scenes in your stories.

Compiled of information from dozens of experts, and filled with "simple, step-by-step instructions for dealing with 40 life- and limb-threatening situations," this nicely illustrated book is intended to help people cope with and survive all kinds of nasty situations. For example, it tells how to escape from quicksand, survive the attack of a poisonous snake, win a swordfight, jump into a river from a height, perform an emergency tracheotomy, treat a knife or bullet wound, or land a plane. And it gives you enough detailed information that you could actually do it. Or, better yet, write about your characters doing it.

You can adapt a situation to your own world by, for example, changing the attacking mountain lion--or other wild animal--into the alien creature of your choice and using the information given here to make your character’s encounter more realistic.

Or your character might need to jump from the wall of a castle into a moat or a midden heap instead of from a bridge into a river or from a building into a dumpster.

The doors in your world may be constructed differently from the doors discussed in the book, or the vehicles may be wagons or spacecraft instead of automobiles and planes, but the facts provided here can aid you in creating authentic scenes.

If your characters are adrift at sea, lost in a desert or in the mountains, caught in an avalanche, an earthquake, or a crossfire, or just need to make a fire without matches, this book can really help you help them.
And "you just never know," someday the information in here might even save your life.

{Published in SF & Fantasy Workshop Newsletter, Aug. 2000.}

THE ICE PICK

Make That Scene: a Writer’s Guide to Setting, Mood and Atmosphere, by William Noble. Middlebury, Vt.: Eriksson, 1988. ISBN 0-8397-5708-5. $17.95.

One of the first questions readers ask is "Where am I?"

This book shows how to create the physical setting to develop a sense of place, a background, against which your story will play, and how to develop the mood within that setting.

Noble explains how setting can be used to add vividness, develop a plot, establish or influence a character, build tension, or act as a major character itself. He shows how to use details, time, dialogue, and action to establish setting.

He specifically addresses stories where you cannot "write what you know," namely those set in the future and those in the past. Too often, he says, writers load their scenes with description to achieve authenticity, when two or three telling details might be all that is needed. "The important details, no matter what kind of story we write, involve specific colors, shapes and textures."

He explains that to choose the most telling details, you can imagine yourself there and see what two or three things strike you the most. Or you can remember a similar experience in your life. If you are writing about a first date, for example, ask what things stick in your mind about your own first date.

"Atmosphere (or mood) is what the reader feels as the effect of the setting settles. It is the writer’s way of injecting life into the stiff details of the locale."

It is generally not good to have the setting and the atmosphere match--an argument in the midst of a thunderstorm, for example--but Noble explains when you can do that and when it is better avoided.

He says that what you see, hear, smell, feel, and taste make the difference between the "one dimensional" and the "imaginative scene." Describing scenes, clothes, and a different way of life is not enough. "To take us alive into another period of time, the senses must be invoked. . . . History, the future, other worlds, other mindsets, it doesn’t matter. The senses make it all come alive."

Noble shows how you can influence mood and atmosphere not only by the five senses, but by physical description, point of view, change of pace, tone, the music of your words themselves, and even the nostalgia your characters express.

There is also a section on the special mood requirements of genres, like horror.

The index is excellent and there is a great bibliography for further exploration.

I highly recommend this book.

{Published in GPIC, the Oklahoma Science Fiction Writers Newsletter, July 1999. Reprinted in SF & Fantasy Workshop Newsletter, Sept. 2000.}

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Conflict, Action and Suspense, by William Noble. Cincinnati: Writer’s Digest Books, 1994. (The Elements of Fiction Writing series) ISBN 0-89879-634-2. $14.95.

"Action means happenings. Suspense means uncertainty."

We know that short sentences speed things up, while long, leisurely sentences slow things down, and that putting a time limit on things (e.g., "You have five days to save the Earth!") cranks up anxiety, but this book goes way beyond that. Noble shows different ways "to collar the reader" with our openings; "keep ‘em hanging" through pacing, scene cuts, and transitions; and make "plot-hypers" by subtlety and indirection. Two of his methods to create dynamite conclusions are: "make the climax the hottest action scene (or the most intense suspense scene)" and "leave the final confrontation to the last scene, if possible (the last page would be even better)."

He explains how contrasts in setting and personifying nonliving elements (e.g., the wind) increase tension and drive action. Through vivid physical description and the step-by-step build-up of details, we create anticipation and dread and make the reader suffer along with our characters. We can build suspense through dialogue--including the "threat of the unsaid"--and by contrasting different characters’ physical and emotional makeup. Or we can amplify action or suspense by using different points of view.

While he says that the immediacy of writing about the present time gives the writer advantages, he does include a chapter about creating suspense in both historical and futuristic settings, where "the truths are few and the opportunities unlimited."

The index is good, but it annoys me when, for example, I look up flashbacks, and run into "Flashback. See Writing technique, flashback, for creating slow-paced time." Why couldn’t it have just said, "see page 154"?
I’ve found this book helpful. It’s not your average how-to-write book. Some may argue with certain things he advocates, like quick scene changes, shifting points of view, and passive voice. Nevertheless, it is a powerful book that should make you think about what you’re doing and help you improve your writing skills.

{Published in GPIC, the Oklahoma Science Fiction Writers Newsletter, June 1998. Reprinted in SF & Fantasy Workshop Newsletter, Aug.-Sept. 1999.}

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The Joy of Writing Sex: A Guide for Fiction Writers, by Elizabeth Benedict. Cincinnati, Ohio : Story Press, 1996. $16.99. ISBN 1-884910-21-1.

This book "is not a primer for writing pornography" or "a collection of tips for writing hot sex scenes." Nor is there anything in it about rape, which is an act of violence not sex. But if you want to write a romantic scene and leave the rest to your readers’ imaginations or follow your human or alien characters into the bedroom, this book will show you how to get the most out of the scenes you choreograph. Too many writers (not you, of course) throw in a sex scene simply to spice things up, wasting a valuable tool for characterization or plotting.

There should always be at least "two things happening at once [in] a sex scene. . . . Sex needs a purpose in your story beyond the momentary frisson it brings to your characters. It needs to reveal something about them, act as a metaphor, a symbol, or an illustration of an aspect of your theme, your plot, and/or your characters’ desires and dilemmas." Benedict helps us see the differences in female and male expectations and experiences and tells why you must know what your characters want from the encounter. She discusses the difficulties in writing sex scenes and explains how to keep them exciting and original. Yes, original. Your sex scenes "should hinge on the freshness of your characters, dialogue, mood, and plot and not on the sexual mechanisms," lest they all sound alike.

As she says, "a good sex scene does not have to be about good sex," but "a well-written sex scene engages on many levels: erotic, aesthetic, psychological, metaphorical, even philosophical." And it should fit with the setting and tone of your overall story, not just be tacked on there to shock your mom or get people to read your stuff.

In separate chapters, Benedict discusses how to handle writing adulterous, first-time, illicit, married, recreational, and solo sex, as well as the impact of AIDS. She quotes writers from different genres and analyzes the juicy parts of their works. (Warning: After reading this book, you may never read a sex scene in quite the same way again.)

"Sex scenes should be approached with the same attention to craft and to function in the larger work . . . [as] every other scene."

If you write romantic or sex scenes, you should read this book.

{Published in GPIC: the Oklahoma Science Fiction Writers Newsletter, Jan. 1998. Reprinted in SF & Fantasy Workshop Newsletter, Mar. 1999.}