books | Bertram's Blog

Can the Setting Be a Character in the Story?

March 13, 2008 — Pat Bertram

The setting of a book should not be static, a mere backdrop for the story, but should have personality, emotions, strengths, weaknesses, scars, and moods. At least that’s what books on writing tell us.

In my previous novels, I tried to make the settings necessary to the stories, to show how they couldn’t have happened anywhere else in exactly the same way. Because my stories all take place in Colorado, by the very fact of geography, mountains play a part if only to shadow the humans living at their foot.

My current work in progress is different in that the world changes constantly. The mountains are always there giving my hero a reference point, but cities change to plains and plains change to seas. My hero has to try to come to terms with his constantly changing environment, which creates most of the conflict for the first part of the story. Because of this, I’m wondering if I can turn the environment into a character. It would certainly make the first part stronger because during much of it the hero is alone. It would give the book an entirely new dimension. And it would be a challenge for me.

Despite its changeability, though, the environment doesn’t want anything, so I’m not certain it can be a character. Doesn’t a character have to be dynamic with its own wants and needs? Even if it is possible for an environment to be a character, can I create one that has wants and needs without my anthropomorphizing it? Maybe the environment, like my hero, wants to be left alone. Maybe, the environment, also like my hero, stoically endures what is happening to it. But how would I show this from only my hero’s point of view?

I remember discussions in literature classes about those very things, and I didn’t get it. No matter how dramatic a setting was and how much it influenced the characters, it still always seemed to me to be static. Yet here I am, trying to put something more into my setting than perhaps needs to be there.

The only thing to do, I suppose, is keep all this in the back of my mind as I am writing, and if I can make the setting more alive, do so. If not, leave well enough alone. The story is already developing too many depths for what was supposed to be a silly little tale.

Posted in books, life, writing. Tags: character, mood, personality, Setting, story, strengths, weaknesses, writing. Leave a Comment »

Describing a Character the Easy Way

March 12, 2008 — Pat Bertram

The tendency today is for authors to keep character descriptions in a novel short and focused by using brand names, and some books on writing recommend doing so. Obviously, a character who wears named designer suits or dresses is different from one who wears discount store clothing. And a character who eats a certain boxed cereal is different from one who eats plain old oatmeal. (Another recommendation is to describe characters by comparing them to celebrities, which, in a way, is the same thing — a celebrity is a name brand person.)

Most readers, perhaps, can more easily identify with a character who uses the same brands they do, and such descriptions give the book immediacy, but it seems to me like blatant advertising. Brand names have so encroached on our lives that we no longer realize we’ve become walking billboards. Even worse, we pay for the privilege of donating our personal space to the major corporations for free advertising.

But that doesn’t mean I have to embrace the trend in my writing. Sometimes there is no getting around a brand name. Saying a character put a Band-Aid on a cut has a completely different connotation than saying the character put a bandage on the cut. (For me, bandage summons a vision of gauze wrapped around an arm with the ends tied in a knot.) And I once used the phrase “Popsicle colors” to describe northern Wisconsin in the autumn. (If you’ve ever been there when the leaves are changing color, you will know how apt that description is.) Outside of that, I don’t think I’ve ever used brand names.

So, like writers of fantasy, science fiction and historical novels, I have to fall back on the old-fashioned way of describing and defining a character — by the colors they prefer, the style of clothing they wear and, most importantly, their actions. In the end, these descriptions are more enduring than brand names. Brand names, however entrenched, do become defunct, which would make our books passé, and us along with it. This perhaps defeats the purpose of writing. After all, don’t we all harbor the unrealistic dream of future generations reading our immortal works?

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Posted in books, life, writing. Tags: brand names, defining a character, describing a character, description, walking billboards, writing, writing: characters. 1 Comment »

Filling the Needs of the Story

March 11, 2008 — Pat Bertram

Almost all novels tell the same basic story: a character wants something and someone or something prevents that character from achieving his goal. While telling the story, many authors throw in incident after incident to fill out the book. After a while, these incidents seem incidental, as if they are simply filling space and not filling the needs of the story.

Writing instructors and how-to-get-published books remind authors to hook readers with a great beginning. The hook should be captivating, but that’s not the end of it; the rest of the book needs to be rewarding, too. If the author fills the book with insignificant incidents, readers feel as if they are wasting their time.

I am concerned that my current work in progress is becoming a series of incidents that go nowhere. My hero keeps reacting to the world changing around him, but he isn’t proactive. He wants to be left alone, to be free, but that is a passive goal. I keep thinking he should be acting, planning, taking charge, but what can he do when each day, each hour the world is different?

Eventually, of course, he will take charge of his destiny when he escapes the human zoo, but first I have to get him there. His world needs to become so threatening that he will give up freedom for safety, but it hasn’t reached that point yet. And the only way I know to reach that point is for him to continue reacting to the changes around him. And to do that, I need to keep adding incidents. Round and round it goes.

These incidents serve the needs of the theme, they serve the needs of the story, and they serve my needs as a writer by allowing me to stretch my imagination, but I don’t know if they are significant enough to offset the hero’s lack of resolve to do something. I would hate to have future readers finish the book simply because they don’t want to waste the time they invested.

In the end, I suppose, I need to concentrate on the flow. If the story flows smoothly, then everything else will fall into place, seeming as right and as inexorable as the sun rising in the east. And if by chance an incident disrupts the flow, I can edit it out later. Or perhaps I can have the sun rising in the west. Hmm. Could be interesting. I wonder how my hero would react to that?

Posted in blogging, books, fiction, life, writing. Tags: character, character goal, hook, plot, story, theme, writing. 5 Comments »

Words Yipping at My Heels

March 9, 2008 — Pat Bertram

I just finished taking a look at two thrillers, both big, slick, well-touted works. Although they had interesting plots, there were so many point-of-view characters and so many incidents that the stories never seemed to go anywhere. I finally got tired of the words yip-yip-yipping at me and closed the books.

Ahh. Silence.

Three-hundred-page manuscripts used to be common, but the size of books grew along with the influence of corporate booksellers. Not only did large books make people think they were getting more for their money, they were well suited for mass displays. As with other merchandise, perception of worth apparently supersedes true value.

Big books are divided into short chapters and those chapters divided into smaller and smaller segments that make the book easy to put down and pick up at odd intervals for attention-challenged readers, but those small segments make it hard for a reader who wishes to identify with a character and be pulled into another reality.

Some books don’t lose anything by being big and thick. Although toward the end I did get a trifle tired of Stephen King’s Duma Key, he managed to keep my attention all the way through. No mean feat. But most big books today can do with some serious editing to better focus the plot and give some depth to the characters and stop that incessant yipping.

One of the more enjoyable books I read recently was a mere two hundred and sixty pages, but it didn’t seem like a short book. The character’s plight engaged my interest, and I didn’t keep flipping pages in an effort to finish the book quickly.

I used to feel guilty that my own books were only about three hundred pages long; obviously something is wrong with me if other writers can churn out words by the hundreds of thousands. But I want my words to signify something, to be worth the time it takes to dig them out of my psyche. And I want my characters to be more than mere types. I don’t know if I will ever become the writer I wish to be, but I know one thing: I won’t be creating overblown, yippy works; the words come too hard. Besides, I would rather readers complain that my books are too short than slam them shut to get a bit of silence.

Posted in books, fiction, life, writing. Tags: books, booksellers, size of books, Stephen King, thrillers, words, writing, writing: characters. Leave a Comment »

Grubbing For Readers

March 6, 2008 — Pat Bertram

I met a well-known novelist on Gather.com (if you can call a few written exchanges meeting someone). My first communication with a successful author, and he contacted me. So what if it was only a comment he left on one of my articles, he did contact me, and it left me feeling a little strange. I couldn’t figure out what I had done to draw his attention, and I couldn’t figure out why a writer such as he would have signed up for Gather where the newly published and the wannabes hang out.

His latest book is coming out in March, so perhaps that answers the question of what he’s doing there — publicity — but still, as the author of more than twenty published books, including a couple that have been made into movies, why would he need to do it on such a basic level?

Out of curiosity, I looked for his books in the library, and found only one, which had been published five years ago. What shocked me was that his name appeared below the title, and his picture was not on the back of the book jacket. (Big name and even not so big name authors are regularly featured above the title.) And the mystery of what he is doing on Gather became a little clearer.

No matter how successful writers are, if they aren’t among the elite who bring big bucks to the publishing houses, they have to grub for readers. It seems a sordid business, this grubbing, and I wonder how often it pays off. One author who is contstantly grubbing says her book, which has been out a year, is doing well. It sold between one hundred and one thousand copies.

For many years now, my dream has been to become a published author, but I’m no longer certain it makes any difference if I get there or not. Published authors have to spend a lot of time publicizing themselves and their books, and that time is subtracted from their writing time. And if they do reach the pinnacle, they become something completely different, not an author but a celebrity, which also takes them away from writing. (I am beginning to see why brand name authors often degenerate into mediocre writers: they do not have much time to write.)

In a perfect world, I would be a published author and make enough money to live on so I could devote my life to writing. But this is not a perfect world, and the publishing industry is not always the answer to a writer’s dream. I don’t think self-publishing is the answer either, at least not for me. It seems that self-publishing becomes a matter of eternal self-publicizing, and again, little time is left for actual writing.

I don’t know where my answer lies. I will, of course, continue pursuing publication, but more importantly, I will continue writing. That’s what I want to do — write — not spend my life trying to get my name known.

Posted in books, culture, fiction, life, writing. Tags: brand-name author, Gather.com, novelist, publicity, publishing, self-publishing, writing. 2 Comments »

Storytelling and Storytellers

March 5, 2008 — Pat Bertram

My previous post about goals (my 100^th post, by the way) made me consider my goals and how they pertain to my work-in-progress.

I haven’t been adding many new pages to the novel. I realized Chip my hero believed the accounts of the world coming to an end, yet when he came home from work to find his mother gone, he didn’t think anything of it, just assumed she finally went back to her place. I’ve been spending the past few days reworking the first chapters so that he stops believing the accounts long enough to make his blasé attitude believable.

I could have waited until I finished the first draft to do the rewrite, but I need a solid foundation on which to build my story, or I lose my focus. As I get deeper into the story, I will be making other changes, but for the moment I am satisfied that Chip, at least, no longer believes the world is ending. Now when readers get to the place where Chip comes home to find his mother gone, they won’t roll their eyes at his stupidity, or worse: slam the book on my stupidity.

Although we constantly change our minds or act on a whim, we cannot allow our characters the same leeway. Everything they do must be motivated, or else the story falls apart. Because I have a silly premise, I have to be particularly vigilant.

Yesterday I started to read a book where the main character got fired first thing. Besides that beginning being as much of a cliché as a dream or a weather report, it wasn’t believable. Well, the firing was believable, perhaps even the boss suggesting that the woman find herself a rich husband by attending funerals was believable. What wasn’t believable was the fired woman saying no way and then, for no apparent reason, deciding to do it. It wouldn’t have taken much to motivate her; looking for a job and not finding one would have done it for me. But the author, who should have known better, had her acting on a whim. That’s when he lost me, which was okay since it meant I didn’t have to waste any more time plowing through his self-conscious prose.

Many writers today, especially new writers trying to get published, think they don’t have to follow the rules of storytelling. Perhaps not. In the end, who am I to say? All I know is that to keep from jerking their readers out of the reality they are creating, writers must make sure their plots are interesting, characters real, actions motivated.

Even more than being a good writer, I want to be a good storyteller. If I follow those simple rules, maybe someday I will achieve my goal.

Posted in books, fiction, life, writing. Tags: goals, motivation, rewriting, rules of storytelling, story telling, writing, writing: characters. Leave a Comment »

One Word at a Time. That’s All It Takes.

March 3, 2008 — Pat Bertram

Writing is all about goals. For most of us, the primary goal is to become a published writer, though we all envision that goal differently. Some dream of being the next Stephen King or John Grisham or (insert name here); some dream of making lots of money, and some just want to make a living at it. Except for a very few, that dream is out of reach, at least for now.

But that is not the only goal. Nor is it the most important. That primary goal beckons, but unless you actually write a book, it is not a goal but a fantasy. So, the next goal is to write a book. (If you have written a book, the goal could be to write another one.) This goal is better than the primary goal, because it is in your hands. You can write a book. But this goal is so general as to be almost worthless.

So, the goal would be to decide what story to write. That goal is easy to achieve. Just think of a character, something that character wants, and who or what is going to keep the character from getting it until the end.

The next goal is to write the book. Now this is more difficult. That empty screen, those blank pages — how do you fill them all? By setting more goals. Decide how many pages you would like to write each day or week or month. That still sounds like too much to get your mind around? Fine. Then decide to write a page, a paragraph, a sentence.

Still too much? Then set your goal to write a single word. I can hear your snort of derision: that’s not much of a goal. But in the end, it is the only goal. How do you think every book all through the ages got written?

One word at a time. That’s all it takes to write a novel.

By stringing single words together, you get sentences, then paragraphs, pages, chapters, an entire book. After that, who knows, you might even reach the pinnacle and become a published author. All because you set your goal to write one word.

Posted in books, life, writing. Tags: books, chapters, character, pages, story, writing, writing goals. 1 Comment »

Characters Butting Heads

February 28, 2008 — Pat Bertram

When I wrote the first draft of my novel More Deaths Than One (and the second draft and the third) I had the hero Bob meandering around his world trying to unravel his past all by himself, and it was boring. Did I say boring? It was moribund. The story went nowhere because there was no one for Bob to butt heads with.

As an aside: this is my current metaphor for a good story — characters butting heads with each other and spinning off in new directions. Too many authors today have their characters butting heads, moving straight back and butting heads again. If the characters don’t ricochet off into a different direction each time, you have characters that don’t change and hence you have a static story.

In the fourth draft of More Deaths Than One, I gave Bob a love interest, a waitress he met at a coffee shop. (Hey, so it’s been done before. The poor guy spent eighteen years in Southeast Asia, and didn’t know anybody stateside. How else was he supposed to meet someone?) That’s when the story took off. He had someone to butt heads with, someone to ooh and aah over his achievements, someone to be horrified at what had been done to him.

From that, I learned the importance of writing scenes with more than one character.

So why am I mentioning this?

Well, I’ve hit a hole in my work-in-progress, a possible weakness. The hero of this whimsically ironic apocalyptic novel, Chip, loses one person after the other until he is alone. (I’m not giving anything away here. I already told you the work was apocalyptic.) There will be plenty of conflict as he contends with his new environment, but it might get boring without other characters for him to interact with.

There will be no problem once he ends up in the human zoo in the second part — his problem there (though not mine as the writer) is that he will have too many people to contend with. The same holds true for the third part of the book when he escapes. So there will be only about sixty pages where he is alone.

I do have one thing in my favor. I am a much better writer than I was when I wrote the first draft of More Deaths Than One, so perhaps I can keep the story going with Chip alone. (Saying I am a much better writer now is not necessarily saying I am a good writer. The first draft of More Deaths Than One was laughably bad. That I found an agent for it says more about the agent than it does my writing. No surprise — he couldn’t sell it.)

Chip does have to be alone at the end of the first part; he has an important step to take and must be by himself to take it. He also has to go through some experiences alone because they are essentially in his mind (or at least he thinks they are), but who will he be butting heads with the rest of the time? I’ll have to think about this.

If you want to take a look at the first chapter of More Deaths Than One, click on My First Chapters off to your right.

It will not be on the test.

Posted in books, fiction, life, writing. Tags: apocalytic novel, conflict, weakness, work in progress, writing, writing: characters. 2 Comments »

Sex in Books is Like Serial Killing

February 26, 2008 — Pat Bertram

Thomas Harris’s book Red Dragon really blew me away when I read it years ago. It was the first book of its type, or at least the first of its type that I read. Since then, hundreds of books about serial killers have been published, each one more grotesque than the last in an effort to excite the interest of a jaded public. Thomas Harris’s Hannibal, written years after the Red Dragon, was so bizarre it was almost ridiculous.

Sex in books in like serial killing in books. In an effort to make what is essentially a reproductive act ever more interesting, authors keep coming up with different positions, different euphemisms, different ways to describe the act and the necessary anatomy. At times, the descriptions are more gruesome than titillating.

Maybe I’m jaded, too, but I find myself skipping over the sex scenes in books. And, since I have a strict rule not to write what I don’t read, each book I write has less sex in it than the last. In fact, in Light Bringer the characters didn’t have sex at all. But what can you expect from aliens? Still, it never occurred to me that I left off any mention of sex until it was pointed out to me. (I also left out the violence. Hmmm. No sex or violence. Is this a clue as to why I can’t find a publisher?)

Last night I had the hero of my work-in-progress, Chip, go out on a date and they ended up at his place. (His mother was finally gone, hallelujah! I was getting a bit bored with her. She really wasn’t nice.) Chip and the girl weren’t in love, though they knew each other; so without the love/romance angle all that was left was sex. And since I couldn’t think of a single thing new to say about it, I closed the door and left them alone.

Maybe when Chip does meet his life mate, I will let them be intimate, make love, copulate, possess each other, sleep together, but until then, poor Chip will need his strength. The world is about to come to an end.

Posted in books, culture, fiction, life, writing. Tags: descriptions, Hannibal, Red Dragon, serial killers in books, sex, Thomas Harris, writing, writing: sex scenes. 8 Comments »

Dialogue Envy

February 25, 2008 — Pat Bertram

Books on how to write dialogue often suggest we listen to people talk. Sounds like good advice, but have you ever truly listened? “We . . . um . . . we, like . . . you know . . . we stammer and like we repeat ourselves and um . . . you know.”

Even when we speak coherently, we don’t converse. We lecture. We tell long, boring, convoluted stories. We interrupt others and talk over them. We use clichés. We tell jokes that take forever to get to the punch line. None of which helps us write dialogue. If characters in books talked the way we talk in real life, who would bother reading? We want our characters to sound like us, just not talk like us. We also want their conversations to be witty, to the point, and conflicted.

Many authors seem to think bickering is a way of showing that conflict, or maybe they think it is witty and to the point, but it isn’t. At least not for me. I find it distracting, especially if the two bickerers are supposed to be a romantic couple. The more they insult each other, the less it seems like foreplay and the more it seems like plain old-fashioned meanness.

Last night I watched But Not for Me, a romantic comedy written by Rob Lipton, starring Clark Gable, Lilli Palmer, and Lee J. Cobb. And I got dialogue envy. Every word those three spoke shimmered brightly. When the romantic couple got together at the end, even though they’d been in conflict during the entire movie, I could believe they were in love.

Watching the movie, I discovered a few things about Lipton’s writing. He did not write dialogue that rambled, going nowhere. He did not write dialogue that distracted from the story; it was the story. And he most assuredly did not write dull dialogue.

Now if only I could figure out what he did write, rather than what he did not!