Interested in writing fiction that explores cutting edge scientific disciplines such as artificial intelligence, life extension technology and quantum computing? Author and scientist Dan Koboldt’s series of blog posts will light the path.
This story, a few years old, reports on the differences in brain activity between beginning and experienced writers. The former seem driven by images, the latter by words.
Platform building is the name of the game at this blog which offers advice on blogging, maintaining a social media presence and more.
Can novels compete with modern entertainment sources such as 1000-channel television and the internet, or are they, to quote writer Will Self, “doomed to become a marginal cultural form, along with easel painting and the classical symphony”? Quillette magazine offers an upbeat (for novelists) assessment.
If you’re selling your book on Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP), one of the key decisions you must make is whether to activate Digital Rights Management. This article explores what’s at stake.
Writers can spend years fine-tuning the text of their novel and then be baffled when it comes to organizing the collection of copyright, dedications, table of contents and more that exists at the start of the book. The Book Designer has a single, clarifying blog post on this topic.
This writing advice site tackles a number of esoteric writing concerns such as maintaining enthusiasm for your work, ethical plagiarism, and the importance of a BOB file.
This site is unlikely to win any web design awards but author Wells delivers his advice with comic charm.
Penning a sci-fi or fantasy story incorporating a fictional religion? This article from the Mythcreants web site breaks the creation process down.
This blog covers many topics of interest to authors, moving from the writing craft into the often confounding realms of publishing and marketing.
The writing advice section of this small publishing firm focuses on the technical challenges facing authors such as setting up web sites or navigating the realm of social media promotion.
The name says it all, doesn’t it? Penned by a veteran author and publishing consultant, this blog covers all the bases related to the writing game.
Author and author-helper Derek Murphy blogs extensively on how writers can balance the joys of creativity and the demands of the marketplace.
Perhaps more information than you could ever need about this controversial question of punctuation.
Website Pen & the Pad covers all styles of writing from fiction to non. Their article on the art of writing a character study offers a paragraph by paragraph breakdown of the process. Other links of interest can be found on the same page.
Offering advice applicable to fiction and non-fiction writing, this Atlantic article pontificates on preventing procrastination and breaking large goals down into smaller ones.
Author and marketer Derek Murphy blogs extensively on the tools and techniques of book promotion, such as managing email lists, being an introverted entrepreneur, and writing to the market.
Perplexed over how to finish your novel while balancing the needs of your job, spouse and kids? This writer-advice blog has a particular niche: time-management.
This blog shies away from marketing and promotion advice and instead focuses in on the details of crafting immersive speculative fiction.
Metaphor is a tool that frequently floats to the surface during discussions on developing writing style. This post reverse-engineers the metaphor creation process.
Design site 99designs offers advice on creating covers that draw potential readers in while maintaining aesthetic appeal. Numerous example illustrations are provided.
“Flashy” does not come to mind while perusing the bare bones design of the blog for Amazon’s book publishing service, CreateSpace. Nonetheless, it has worthwhile advice about author interests such as grammar, storytelling and book marketing.
This site tackles what some authors view as their least favorite subject: marketing. Blog posts explore individual the tools and techniques long found in the arsenals of salespeople and show how to apply them to self-pubbing.
Get an editor’s-eye-view of common writing/storytelling mistakes at this author advice blog.
This blog covers common topics such as book marketing and promotion but also explores less familiar subjects such as ebook piracy and the future of e-reading devices.
While this writing advice site is overly focused on numbered lists, it does have useful information such as “45 Ways To Avoid Using The Word ‘Very’”.
Interested in writing the kind of dialogue people actually speak as opposed to what gets written into novels? This article examines the psychology behind the various expressions and word tics that pepper real conversations.
This writing advice site, aimed at authors who choose to create high art over commercial product, offers many in-depth articles on the challenges of the writing craft and lifestyle.
This writing advice site focuses on fantasy and sci-fi storytelling, with posts and podcasts on designing exotic creatures, choosing a character’s weapons, and identifying a story’s “throughline.”
Penned by amateur author Alicia Butcher Ehrhardt, this conversational and popular blog ruminates on the challenges and charms of writing.
By Wil Forbis
So far in this series, we’ve discussed how we parse the meaning of words and word order in sentences. But when we read we do not merely perceive sentences as constructions to themselves. Rather, each sentence builds upon sentences that came before it, leading to the construction of a story within our heads. Sentences are the trees to a story’s forest.
Following a grand story is very different from parsing mere words or syntax. With stories, we must track character motivations, temporal flow, the physical action described on the page, the use of symbolism and metaphor, and much more. And when interpreting stories, we deal not with concrete and defined rules of grammar and syntax, but with softer and more ethereal tenets of psychology and mentation. How does our reading brain accomplish this?
This section attempts to answer that question by using some concepts born in evolutionary psychology and related disciplines. I’m the first to admit that there’s a speculative element here (as there is with all things psychological).
Brains Are Prediction Machines
A popular view among psychologists is that brains evolved to be prediction machines. Consider that life, at its core, is a series of questions. “Where can I find food?” “How can I attract a mate?” Animal brains, including ours, evolved as tools for forming hypotheses, i.e. predictions that can be tested. “I think I will find food by the river bank,” a gopher might surmise (though not by actually using language) and she could then test that theory out. “I think that doing this funny dance will attract a mate,” a bird might muse and then put such speculation to the test. In all cases, a plan of action is considered in the mind before being put into practice.
Creatures whose predictions match events in the real world thrive and pass on their genes. Thus good predicting is rewarded by evolution.
Humans are great at generating remarkably complex and even convoluted predictions. We can postulate complex scenarios where one event sets off a chain of other events. “What if this and then this and then this and then this and then this happens?” Often we use these complex predictions to guide our path in romance, business or other parts of life. But sometimes we create these scenarios for our own pleasure. We call these scenarios “stories.”
Stories are, according to this line of thinking, a means of testing the prediction engines in our brains. When we read stories and follow the exploits of the characters, we are constantly making predictions as to what will happen next. Stories are a kind of game and we follow along to see how it all turns out.
You might think that we would prefer stories with easy to predict outcomes. Of course, that’s not the case; we like stories with twists and surprises. But these harder-to-predict events need to be within reason. A story where the husband turns out to be the killer in the third act is engaging. A story where the husband turns out to be the killer, then is revealed to be an alien, then is revealed to be an incarnation of the angel Gabriel and then explodes is just plain silly. Readers want a balance between novelty and predictability. They want a “fighting chance” at guessing the outcome of a story.
To be clear, when reading, we are not necessarily consciously predicting where a story is going (though we might be, especially when discussing the story with a book club or friends). Instead, we subconsciously parse the flow of the story and can sense when something feels “off.”
Theory of Mind
We make predictions about many things during the course of a story: what events will occur, how luck will come into play, who will live and who will die, and so on. One major target of our prediction engines is what characters will do. These predictions are particularly interesting because they require an understanding of a character’s motivations. They ask us to get in a character’s head.
Guessing at people’s motivations is something most of us do all the time, so much so that we may be unaware of the deep skill set it utilizes. To predict motivations we first need to understand that other people possess their own subjective wants, needs and goals. This function, called “theory of mind,” does not develop in children until around the age of five (and, in some cases, never fully develops).
Theory of mind gives our brains powerful tools to be used during social interaction. It enables us to predict what other people are thinking or planning based on their current and past actions, appearances, stated intentions, and so on. A strong theory of mind is key to the survival of our genes, both from the perspective of avoiding threats (”I think that person wants to kill me”) and finding mates (“I think that person finds me attractive”). Figuring our what our fellow humans will do is a major brain-teaser, one we are addicted to.
Reading, of course, employs our theory of mind functionality all the time. What’s driving the actions of this bad guy? Can this side character be trusted? What is really motivating the romantic interest to sleep with the protagonist? All these questions engage our abilities to put ourselves in the shoes of others and predict their actions.
Feeling Empathy
To really understand a character’s motivations we need to understand their emotional state. This draws on our empathy—our ability to feel, to varying degrees, what other people (real or fictional) are feeling. When you feel tightness in your chest as a co-worker recounts her near fatal car crash, you are feeling empathy. So too do you experience empathy when your body relaxes as you read a description of a character drifting off to sleep in the arms of a lover. The psychologist Norman Holland discusses this in a blog post for the Psychology Today web site. He states, “When we read fiction or see a movie or a play and even when we see a painting, we map these fictional humans’ actions, emotions, and sensations onto our own brains’ visceral, motor, and sensory representations.”
We can also increase empathy by experimenting with point of view language (first person, third person, etc.) and tense (present tense, past tense). First person, present tense is considered effective at putting the reader “in the driver’s seat” of the story.
In Conclusion
From this perspective, what can writers do to make sure their readers have an engaging reading experience? First, we need to build fictional worlds that—while containing some surprises—are believable and predictable. Even if we write in the sci-fi or fantasy genres, our created realms should follow their own internal logic. A character can’t suddenly develop the ability to fly when it becomes convenient.
Secondly, we should create characters who tease the brain’s theory of mind component. Character motivations should be clear and make sense… at least once the dust has settled and all character goals and personality traits are revealed.
Third, we should use language that promotes empathy—don’t just say a character is sad, describe the hot tears streaming down their face or how they feel on a visceral level. Make readers feel what the characters are feeling.
Humans have been endowed with several mental tools to help them navigate their environment, particularly their social environment. A good story should give readers an opportunity to use these tools in challenging and creative ways.
Serialization is said to free authors from the confines of predictable structure and word limits. But as they say, freedom isn’t free.
By Wil Forbis
In part one, we looked at how writers use words to construct mental movies in a reader’s mind. In this installment we’ll look at how the syntax of writing—the word order and the logic of sentences—affects the reading process. As a writer, you are likely familiar with the most basic rule of syntax that states that a sentence must have a subject, verb and object.
Interpreting Word Order
Let’s revisit one of our example sentences from part one.
Col. Tom McDaniels reached for the Berretta M9.
This sentence makes perfect sense and evokes a scene that plays out in our mind’s eye. Let’s switch the words in the sentence around a bit.
Col. Tom McDaniels Berretta M9 the for reached.
Hmm, doesn’t make much sense anymore, does it? It’s doubtful you can construct a mental movie for this sentence. So we easily can see that the order of words—the sentence syntax—is key to the process of decoding a sentence’s meaning.
When we read, we are constantly applying the rules of language syntax to the text. We rarely do this consciously (perhaps only when we are learning a new language) and we don’t necessarily know the rules of syntax in the sense that we can explain them. We simply know that one sentence works and another one doesn’t. Linguists such as Noam Chomsky and Ray Jackendoff have spent decades formulating theories about how and why these intuited rules of syntax live in our brains.
This is not to say there’s only one way to write a sentence. Consider…
The Berretta M9 was reached for by Col. Tom McDaniels.
Or….
Reached for the Berretta M9 did Col. Tom McDaniels.
The first sentence is an example of the much-derided passive voice and the second sounds like it was spoken by Yoda, but they do convey meaning. We instantly switch the syntactic rules we are using to match these new sentences.
While it might seem that reading a single sentence is the easiest thing in the world, in fact, quite a lot is going on under the hood. Our brain has to map each word to the concept it represents and we also have to understand each word’s role in the syntactic structure of the sentence. The human computer is hard at work here.
The computer can be tricked though. The aforementioned linguist, Ray Jackendoff, in his book “Consciousness and the Computational Mind,” has an example of a sentence that befuddles the brain. It reads, “The horse raced past the barn fell.” The phrases “The horse raced past the barn” and the “the barn fell” make sense, but when glued together in this way their meaning collapses. It’s only by stopping and reading again from the beginning do most people get the implied meaning: The horse, the one had been raced past the barn, fell.
The fact that our reading brain can be tricked in this way suggests that we are assembling meaning from a sentence as we go as opposed to reading the complete sentence and then parsing its meaning. Jackendoff’s sentence makes perfect sense until the last word, at which point it disintegrates.
Clauses
We should note that that these intuited rules of order apply not just to individual words but to groups of words, i.e. sentence phrases and clauses. Observe the following.
While his chest was pumping with adrenaline, Col. Tom McDaniels reached for the Berretta M9.
We associate the first clause (“While his chest was pumping with adrenaline”) with the subject of the sentence, Col. Tom McDaniels. If we move that clause to the end, the sentence becomes unwieldy.
Col. Tom McDaniels reached for the Berretta M9, while his chest was pumping with adrenaline.
We have to read that final clause and then retroactively apply it to the subject of the sentence. While the sentence is still readable, our intuited rules of syntax complain.
Changing Styles of Syntax
The preferred style of English language syntax has changed dramatically over the years. Take a look at this sentence, penned by Edgar Allan Poe in 1842, from his story, “The Masque of the Red Death.”
When his dominions were half depopulated, he summoned to his presence a thousand hale and light-hearted friends from among the knights and dames of his court, and with these retired to the deep seclusion of one of his castellated abbeys.
This is not, I think you’ll agree, a sentence you would see written now. Poe demands that the reader keep several observations in mind while parsing the sentence. We might say the syntax/word order here is very advanced, though some would say it’s too advanced.
For contrast, let’s look at the first sentence in Elmore Leonard’s 1981 novel, “Split Images.”
In the winter of 1981 a multimillionaire by the name of Robinson Daniels shot a Haitian refugee who had broken into his home in Palm Beach.
By today’s standards, this sentence is much smoother and digestible.
I’m not saying one style is better than the other, but merely that the style of sentence syntax has changed dramatically over the years. We’ve gone from ornate, multi-clause syntax to a simpler, more direct style. Poe’s sentence above would likely be broken into two or more sentences today.
Write for Your Audience
As a writer considering syntax style, you have to know your audience, much the way you do when choosing vocabulary. Dense, complex sentences will turn off certain groups of readers but be appreciated by others. And the reverse is true. Are you writing for the literary crowd, or readers picking out a novel in an airport bookstore? And what are the limits of your abilities with syntax? These concerns all have to be taken into account.
Word semantics and syntax are the nuts and bolts of the reading process. But, while readers’ brains are absorbing the basic meaning of sentences, they are also tracking the larger narrative—who the characters are, what their goals and personalities are, what their tools and possessions are, how is time is progressing in the story, etc. We’ll discuss this is our next and final section, posted in seven days.
Some blogs focus on the granular tasks of writing such as word choice and grammar, but WITS analyzes higher-level challenges like plotting and symbolism. And they earn double takes with post titles like, “Evaluating Sexual Tension on the Sentence Level”.
By Wil Forbis
“While we read a novel, we are insane—bonkers. We believe in the existence of people who aren’t there, we hear their voices… Sanity returns (in most cases) when the book is closed.” ― Ursula K. Le Guin
Writing is an insular experience and it’s easy to forget that it’s part of a transactional process between at least two people. A writer writes to have his or her work read by a reader. Without this communication, writing is just simple onanism.
Most writers understand this point, yet many obsess over the writing process while making little attempt to understand how texts are read. But it is during the reading process that a writer’s efforts succeed or fail. Without readers, there are no bestsellers.
In this article, I’ll ask you to observe some of what goes on in your mind when you read. Then we will examine how those observations can better the writing process.
Mental Movies
Peruse the following sentence and pay attention to what you see in your mind’s eye.
Tom reached for the gun.
At a bare minimum, I presume you saw a man reach for a gun. Can you describe what the man looked like? The color of his hair? What he was wearing? What kind of gun he reached for? (Was it a handgun or a rifle?) And where was the gun? On a table? In a chest or belt holster? Was anyone else with Tom?
We can ask broader questions as well. How detailed was your overall view of the scene? Did it seem elaborate, like a realistic dream, or fuzzy and undeveloped? Different people, after all, have different capacities for mental imagery*.
* British philosopher Aldus Huxley famously bemoaned the fact that he was a “poor visualizer” and that words did not evoke pictures in his mind. It was only through the ingestion of hallucinogenic drugs that he opened up what he called the “doors of perception.”
There are no right or wrong answers here. And we should understand that the image I see in my mind upon reading the sentence is different from the image you or any other person sees. If a hundred people read the sentence, a hundred different mental movies will play in the Cartesian theaters of a hundred minds.
What can we observe from all this? That reading is a process during which mental imagery is constructed by words on a page. Writers are ultimately in the business of creating mental movies.
Let’s look at a different sentence.
Col. Tom McDaniels reached for the Berretta M9.
Ask yourself the same questions as above. Has the scene changed in your mind? Do you visualize a different appearance for this man, a different type of gun? It’s likely that some elements have evolved in your mental movie. All because we added some slight detail to the Tom character and to the gun.
We can start to see the power words give us as writers. With simple tweaks, we can change the mental imagery projected in a reader’s mind. The adage, “chose your words carefully” takes on added weight.
Now is a good time to consider use of vocabulary. Simple, common words will always be understood, but they might bore some members your audience. On the other hand, arcane, exotic words will confuse some readers while captivating others with richer vocabularies. Not everyone may know what a Beretta M9 looks like, for example, and this may be a point of confusion, effectively blurring parts of a reader’s mental movie. Conversely, readers familiar with military matters may experience a slight ping of pleasure as their interest pays off. We need to select our words with our intended audience in mind.
Other senses
So far, we’ve discussed how these sentences affect our internal sense of vision—our mind’s eye. Other senses can be affected as well. Prose describing an engine roar will produce a ghost of a sound in the reader’s mind. A sentence detailing a delicious steak dinner will evoke a taste sensation and may even prompt salivation. This speaks to the common advice that writers should use sensory words.
Words will also evoke other sensations, sensations that might be thought of as emotions. For some people, the inclusion of the word gun might elicit a certain tension or fear. This could be a subtle tightening of the gut, a partial pause of breath, or a stillness in the body. Very effective writing may create more overt sensations—a chill down the spine, for instance.
Readers construct mental images by reading words and deriving semantic meaning from them. But this is only one part of what happens when we read. We also apply rules of syntax to pull meaning out of sentences. We will discuss that and more in our next installment, to be posted in one week.
This aesthetically designed group blog tackles many issues facing authors, focusing in particular on the interactions between writers and the publishing industry.
Not quite a thesaurus (in some ways better), this site allows you to find words by typing in a definition.
While not exactly hopping, this forum does have a established brain trust available to answer questions about CreateSpace, Amazon KDP, cover design, formatting and everything else related to self-pubbing.
The philosophy site Aeon investigates the origins of the “good versus evil” framework that supports many popular, modern stories.
Over at sci-fi/fantasy zine, Uncanny, author Tim Pratt ruminates on creating fictional alien cultures that are rich and robust, complete with their own diverse sub-cultures. (No monolithic Borgs here.)
The famed writer of the breakout Wool novels argues that authors will one day compete with self-pubbing software.
Focused on book promotion and marketing, Magnolia offers secrets of social media, analysis of Amazon trends, and more.
Many writers write about writing, but not all do it well. Allen uses whit and humor to dress up topics such as “secret” writing rules, author bios, and the dangers of NaNoWriMo.
As a web tool, K-lytics does analysis of book marketing data. Some of this information spills out to their blog where they offer advice on author promotion, profitable Kindle categories and more.
