How I approach storytelling. Part 2

Back at the beginning of 2024 I wrote How I approach storytelling and I've decided it needs an update with things I've learned in the last two plus years. Nothing there is invalid, but it keeps things basic.

The general disclaimer when providing writing advice: I'm not Writing Jesus. Everything I say is an opinion. There are only two hard truths for writing: First, you need to read. Second, you need to practice.

My Writing Journey

I haven't talked much about my stories here, especially the wider arch. The basic premise of my lore: An AI controlled brain uploading system, created by a mad scientist, becomes sentient and gives everyone a really bad day. Each installment in the series focuses on characters from the mad scientist's family, and how they deal with the societal upheaval created by the invention. I started writing this in 2011, though it has some ideas from a short story I wrote in college. It didn't go far between 2013 and 2023. I was busy, and looking back, I wasn't ready to tell the story.

By the middle of 2024, I'd revised my way into a single epic, decided it was too much, and opted to expand Part 1 into The Architects of the Revolution. Feeling good about the draft, I paid a professional editor to review and suggest fixes. She suggested my story wasn't ready, and offered some great tips on how to make it better. Hopefully, some of these pointers can help you.

Controlling Your Story Length

Why say in 100 words what you can say in 50? I'm wordy and it becomes a problem. My editor's first advice was to cut 20,000 words.

If you're new to writing you might wonder why we talk about word counts. Page count is manipulated by formatting. Font sizes, margins, line-spacing, all change the total, making it an ineffective measure of length. Works, whether they be novels, short-stories, or something in between, are best measured by the number of words. Different writing programs may count words slightly differently, but it's close enough not to matter in most cases. Most publishers ask for the number rounded within 100 words, so the discrepancies don't matter.

A lengthy debut is a difficult sell.^[1] While I struggled to get enough words in the beginning (the original story was barely 70k words), by 2023 I experienced the opposite problem. The combined story weighed in at 160k words. There are large novels out there, but the majority are from established authors. In all things, the establishment gets their own rules.

I took Part 1 of the epic and expanded it into Architects. The draft I submitted to the editor still weighed in at about 120k words.

Sci-fi and fantasy get a little pass for world-building. For a debut the target is 100k words. I've seen a few guides allow for up to 120k for epic fantasy but we're splitting hair. Most other adult genres range from 70k to 90k. Young Adult^[2] 60k to 80k and Middle Grade ^[3] at 40k to 60k. There are many articles to split hairs over the subgenres, so I won't get into those here.

My editor helped me improve word count in two areas:

Conciseness

Every part of a story must answer this question: Does it progress the plot or develop a character? I tend to write scenes as mini-stories within the whole. In my first stab at Architects, I wrote scenes with my feelings around specific issues. So much so my editor called it an "issues book" (She said it was mostly a good thing.).

For example, I wrote three chapters about one of my side characters visiting a church, encountering people who formed a cult-like following of their pastor and acted in hypocritical ways, including a whole sequence where they kidnapped the side character. None of it progressed the story, and involved characters were in a few scenes and then discarded.

My entire middle of the story involved the important side characters trying to locate the main character who disappeared. There was no real development, and the premise was to fix a muddled timeline—which I failed to do. The latest drafts of Architects remove several side characters and refocus on the development of the main characters in the story.

Filter Words

Filter words are extra fluff added to a sentence. They can take the reader out of a story by hiding concise action. They make the prose wish-washy.

The easiest example is adverbs. I'm not anti-adverb, but there are many cases where it's better to use a stronger verb, or omit the superfluous word. Consider:

• She spoke softly ➡️She whispered^[4]
• He eyed her lustfully ➡️He leered at her.
• They argued loudly ➡️(Omit. "Argued" is strong enough.).

"Hedging words". Words like "just", "almost", "started". These words take away from the action. Consider:

• He almost ran into the wall. ➡️He stopped short of the wall.
• She started sewing a new sweater. ➡️She sewed a new sweater.
• They moved just a little. ➡️They moved a little.

Character's senses. A sign of good writing is to vary between all five senses when writing descriptions. However, the character's physical experience can be omitted. Consider:

• Gretchen smelled the perfume. ➡️The perfume smelled like sweet blossoms.
• Darius heard the thunder. ➡️The thunder rumbled across the fields.
• They felt the satin fabric. ➡️The satin fabric was smooth.

Your narrator should state the facts of the world to the reader, rather hiding behind your character's senses.

Stage Directions. In my previous article I talked about not writing a novel as though it's a movie, but I didn't touch on stage directions. This is an area I've always struggled with. For example, you shouldn't say the character "sat down" or "stood up". Up and down are inferred from sitting and standing. "They sat." vs "They sat down."

Another example is over describing movement.

Someone knocked on the door. Justice stood up and placed his drink on the coffee table; then he walked over and turned the handle.

Tension is lost in describing every little action. The scene could build tension by showing fright at an unexpected knock, or happiness if Justice was expecting a dear friend.

Justice smiled, and answered the door.

The shorter passage moves the story forward by telling us how the character feels, rather than getting lost in pointless detail.

There are many articles on the web which include a full list of filter. One of my editing strategies is to search the entire document for problematic words. The more I write, the more I'm able to be concise on the first pass.

Knowing Your Audience

Regardless of political affiliation, different issues appeal to different people. Even as a pinko-communist-liberal, I don't have the cognitive strength to care about every problem in the world. Yet I shoved a ton of different issues into my work, to the detriment of both the story and the messages I wanted to convey.^[5] The rewrites focus on narrowing the scope to the evils of Christian nationalism and crony-capitalism.

I hoped I could gain a wider audience by working in more pet issues, but not everyone will engage with a given work. The author's job is to make a story the best it can be for the people it will land with.

This section isn't just about changing a work to appeal to traditional publishing, or even about selling more books (though it should be a side-effect); but identifying who the work appeals gives you a roadmap for writing a better story. In my opinion, the first audience is yourself. Write what you love and you'll be surprised by the number of readers who join you on the journey.

Finding Your Voice

First of all, if you're thinking of tossing your idea at AI, you're not writing! Ideas are like butt holes, everyone has one, most aren't terribly interesting. Execution and craft are what count. Even if a thousand authors have works with the same ideas^[6], your unique execution makes your story interesting. LLMs are glorified autocorrect. They cannot follow themes, they cannot create anything new, and they cannot provide you a voice.

You find your voice in the themes you tackle, the structure of your sentences, the emotion you inject. My writing started out angry, I wrote several dark narratives, but as I matured in my writing, and went to therapy, my stories softened. It's dystopian with rays of hope.

The best way to develop your voice is to read. Read stuff in the genre you're writing. Read stuff in other genres. Read and keep reading. Pay attention to how other authors construct their stories, the patterns in their sentences, and the words they use. Decide what you like, or what you don't like.

For example, I'm not a fan of dialogue tags—the "she said" / "he said" parts. I omit them where I can, or use other verbs to describe the speech. I tend to write longer, more complex sentences, chaining ideas together. I use concise wording with few adverbs.

Going larger, I write medium sized paragraphs and lots of dialogue. My chapters tend to be 3000 words, broken into multiple scenes with different points of view. I'm not strictly a 3rd person omniscient writer, but it's where I'm most comfortable. Chapters are structured as mini-stories which fit into the whole, but have their own rising action, climax, and resolutions. I jump in with action in short early chapters to set a hook my readers.

None of these examples are a formula. This is what works for me. Practicing writing, reading other works, and engaging with other authors will develop your voice.

Tropes

"There's nothing new under the sun." So the saying goes, or as an old friend of mine put it "Good artists copy, great artists steal!"

In either case, very few ideas are completely original and that's okay. I've been reading Toward Eternity by Anton Hur, which features AI, brain uploading, nano-tech bodies, and the apocalypse. My story features AI, brain uploading, nano-tech bodies, and the apocalypse. I hadn't read Hur's work before I started, but arrived at the idea independently. My brain uploading ideas came from Asimov's short story The Last Question, and I don't recall where I got nano-tech bodies from, but they are mentioned in many sci-fi stories.

Tropes allow readers to ease into your world with something familiar, and there's nothing wrong with using them. The trick is to add your own flavor to the trope. For example, in Slow Gods by Claire North, faster than light travel is possible, but pilots who do it often, go mad. The idea is brilliant in its simplicity and her execution is beautiful. FTL travel is a trope—it's hard to have a good space opera without it—but North's twist becomes a major point in the overall plot.^[7]

Tropes happen naturally as you're writing, even if you don't know what they're called. They're often baked into our culture, because we build on the things we consume, and readers gravitate toward what they like. The only caution is to keep your usage consistent, and avoid falling into cliché. Common clichés are endings revealing the events were all a dream, a villain explaining their evil plan (with optional cat), or a variety of deus ex machina plots—literally "God in the machine", describing a narrative in which an external force saves the heroes in the last second.

Consistency

Your voice won't stay consistent over time, but I recommend staying consistent within single works. Less about your structure but more about how your characters interact with the world. Even as they change, they should still react to their world in predictable ways.

Secondly, balancing tone. There's nothing wrong with funny moments in serious narratives, or negative emotions explored within a lighthearted story. The trick is to introduce those moments when the reader expects them. Imagine characters at a funeral, where it makes sense for people to cry, but then tell a funny anecdote about the deceased. It makes less sense for clowns to jump from the casket, if everything else was serious up to that point.^[8]

Sensitivity

In Architects, I introduced a trans-fem character, Iris. Iris becomes the main character, Adoniram's moral compass. Adoniram is a preacher, he looks down on her for being queer, but she shows him love and acceptance to the point he can't help realizing his point of view is bigoted.

In early versions, Iris sacrificed herself to save Adoniram's young son. I was going for the idea of a Messiah figure, who despite the hatred they received, acted for others out of pure love. Unfortunately, the plot fell into the "kill your gays" trope, and came across as insensitive. It's a way to signal the queer person is still not accepted, even when giving up everything.

I appreciate my for editor pointing this out, and it's made me think about how I write characters who are not like me.

Some people take "write what you know" to mean you can't write about experiences you haven't had. I reject this argument, because then most writing would be bland. That's not to say we don't learn, research, and handle differences with the utmost respect. In other words, don't go make something up about a culture or difference.

I'm a cis, white dude who—even though I lived overseas in Africa—spent most of my time growing up around patriarchal white culture. My parents are not perfect, but they generally preached the idea that God loves every race. (Sexual minorities and religious differences are another issue.) They stated men and women were equal as well, never suggesting my sister couldn't do anything I could do.

I wrapped myself in a comfortable fiction—I loved people as God loved them, as I was taught. I ignored the system my privilege was built on, and justified exclusion of certain people because "they were against Christians." This is obvious in retrospect, but the brainwashing is highly effective, especially when you're never exposed to actual people.

The point: the trick to writing about things you haven't experienced is to know people who have experienced them. Once I left home and was exposed to people of color, LGBTQ+, and women^[9]—I got to know them and took their experiences at face value. I'll never know first-hand what they experience, but I can believe the stories, and understand where they come from. With time and trust, it's possible to write characters with those experiences, drawing on your friend's stories.

Friend is the most important word. I don't recommend seeking out someone different and launching into "Twenty-Questions" to satisfy your book. Earn some trust, show some empathy, build relationships for the sake of building them. The writing can wait.

Where I'm Heading Next

I'm close to entering the query trenches, where I'm sure I'll learn even more about how not to tell a story. Be on the lookout for a future Part 3!

1. I'm interested in trad publishing for a variety of reasons I'll get into in another post.
2. Teen literature.
3. Stories for kids old enough for chapter books.
4. Someone argued "speaking softly" and "whispering" are two different actions. I think both convey a meaning similar enough to encourage "whisper" though I've also used "breathed"
5. Watch the second season of Picard to see this problem in action.
6. I wrote in the first article every story is some version of the Hero's Journey. Still going to argue this just to annoy those of you with literary degrees.
7. Seriously, Slow Gods is some of the best recent sci-fi I've read. Go read it, you won't be disappointed.
8. One of my best friends would find this surrealism great. There really aren't rules.
9. Outside my church's concern I'd have impure thoughts about them.