In Today’s Journal
* Quote of the Day
* One More Use for Cycling
* Of Interest
* The Numbers
Quote of the Day
“It’s such a relief to just let the characters take me where they want to go and trust the process as I write. And get to the end and be done! Also, it’s a whole heck of a lot more fun.” USA Today Bestselling Author Diane Darcy
in a comment on “Emma Kok, and Writing Fiction and Learning”
One More Use for Cycling
This is more next-level stuff.
I actually wrote this post a few days ago, so it isn’t ‘up to the minute,’ but it still will be important to those of you who are ready.
I’ve been making use of cycling for this purpose for some time now, but this is the first time I’ve written about it.
In previous issues of TNDJ, I’ve mentioned two uses for cycling:
The first use is to cycle over what you wrote during the previous session (or the previous day).
In that way, cycling is great for spotting little errors (and letting the characters correct you) and/or slowing down to let the characters add what you might have missed as you raced through the story with them.
The second use of cycling I’ve talked about before is what I call ‘spot cycling.’ The example I used most often is when the character surprises you.
When Aunt Marge pulls a revolver from the pocket of her robe as she confronts a burglar—only she didn’t even have a revolver that you were aware of—you can cycle back right then and show her slipping the revolver into the pocket of her robe earlier.
So when she suddenly produces the revolver and the burglar wets himself, the reader won’t think it’s a ‘miraculous resolution’ of the scene or subscene. Then you return to the white space and keep writing.
Today I’m talking about another form of spot cycling, though as you’ll see, it’s a little more involved.
To make any scene real for the reader, it’s important to let the characters layer in a lot of detail.
In other words, write what happens, how the characters react, and what the POV character notices during that reaction.
The downside is, then you have to keep up with the detail as you continue writing.
I’ve touched on this before when I wrote that if characters are talking in a home library, they can’t, suddenly and without a transition, be walking down a hallway.
First you have to show them leaving the library and going into the hallway, right? Otherwise you’ll jerk the reader’s senses around and interrupt the reading.
So let’s study a situation:
If Character B knocks on a door and Character A opens the door, neither character should be only a disembodied voice or a talking head.
To avoid that, it’s important that the reader be able to ‘see’ the two characters, their facial expressions, at least vaguely how they’re dressed, and any meaningful gestures or mannerisms.
I’ve been doing this fiction thing for quite a while and for a lot of words. Yet fortunately for some of you, the ‘talking heads’ flaw occurred in my current novel recently.
That’s what prompted this post, and I actually stopped writing in the novel and came here to write this. I hope it sinks in for some of you.
To set the scene, the two characters (we’ll call them Character A and Character B) are not romantically involved—he’s an operative and she’s his contact on an assignment—but they had walked on a beach together earlier in the day to discuss his assignment privately.
Character A is the POV character.
When they were on the beach, Character A, who has a good build and a chiseled jawline and chin, was bare-chested and dressed in otherwise undescribed huaraches and a pair of blue shorts. Good enough.
Character B, whom Character A described as tall and trim ‘like a runway model,’ also had ‘flawless dark-mocha skin’ and was dressed in leather thong sandals and a lime-green bikini.
Do you see them?
For the sake of appearances (a few dozen other people were around but distant) the characters also held hands as they walked on the beach. That was Character B’s idea.
When they got back to Character A’s hotel, they had lunch and continued talking, but more casually. Then Character B left.
Okay, so here’s the example:
That evening at around 8 p.m., Character B knocked quietly on Character A’s door.
Character A—having just finished some rattling, unnerving research on his target—opened the door, grabbed B’s arm, and pulled her through the opening. Then he quickly closed and locked the door.
Character A then launched into a bit of dialogue without even noticing, much less describing, how B was dressed. And the scene progressed.
But at one point, he shoved a weapon (which B had brought to him) into the back waistband of his jeans.
Wait. The last time we noticed, he was on the beach, then at lunch, and wearing blue shorts.
So I stopped, cycled back, and let the reader see Character A (after A and B had enjoyed lunch together and B had left) going into a shower and then slipping into jeans and a t-shirt.
Okay, good. So then Character A was able, after he pulled B into the room, to put the pistol into the back waistband of the now-existent jeans.
But what about B? Was she still in her bikini?
Of course not. As they walked along the beach earlier, they’d also swum in the ocean, so after lunch she’d probably also showered at her place and changed clothes.
So I cycled forward a little. And four paragraphs after A had opened the door and pulled her into the room, he finally realized B was more than just the face and the arm he’d pulled into the room.
So I recorded (wrote) his reaction to that realization:
For the first time, I noticed she was in lime-green leather-thong sandals, lime-green shorts, and a lime-green peasant blouse. The tails were tied in a knot over her enticing, exquisitely flat tummy. A small, dark-grey duffel dangled from her left hand, and in her right was a lime-green clutch.
As revealed by the dialogue exchange in the few paragraphs before that, A was too rattled by what he’d learned in his research to even notice how she was dressed.
But once he (the character, not I) did notice and let the reader see how Character B was dressed through his description, all was once again well and they continued through the scene.
If you’re wondering, that whole exercise added only 30 or 40 words to the scene, but it added a ton of clarity for the reader.
Any questions, feel free to ask.
Or you can wait a week or so and buy a copy of Blackwell Ops 36: Temple’s Dream (and study it) when I release it on my StoneThread Publishing online store. Or do both.
Talk with you again soon.
Of Interest
Fertility’s next frontier? Customizable kids. SF anyone?
The Numbers
The Journal…………………………… 1170
Writing of Blackwell Ops 36: Temple’s Dream
Day 1…… 2476 words. To date…… 2476
Day 2…… 1484 words. To date…… 3960
Day 3…… 2837 words. To date…… 6797
Day 4…… 4223 words. To date…… 11020
Day 5…… 3366 words. To date…… 14386
Day 6…… 3123 words. To date…… 17509
Day 7…… 1289 words. To date…… 18798
Fiction for January…………………… 105991
Fiction for 2025………………………. 105991
Nonfiction for January……………….. 29530
Nonfiction for 2025…………………… 29530
2025 consumable words…………….. 135521
Average Fiction WPD (January)…….. 3785
2025 Novels to Date…………………….. 2
2025 Novellas to Date…………………… 0
2025 Short Stories to Date……………… 3
Novels (since Oct 19, 2014)…………….. 106
Novellas (since Nov 1, 2015)…………… 10
Short stories (since Apr 15, 2014)……… 274
Short story collections……………………. 29
Disclaimer: Whatever you believe, unreasoning fear and the myths that outlining, revising, and rewriting will make your work better are lies. They will always slow your progress as a writer or stop you cold. I will never teach the myths on this blog.
Writing fiction should never be something that stresses you out. It should be fun. On this blog I teach Writing Into the Dark and adherence to Heinlein’s Rules. Because of WITD and because I endeavor to follow those Rules I am a prolific professional fiction writer. You can be too.
Hi Harvey, thanks for the mention! Just wanted to chime in and say I work this way too. As I cycle back through, my subconscious usually nudges me—oh, she needs to be wearing clothes, or their conversation needs to stretch to 30 minutes, so let’s add some long pauses. You explained it way better, though!
Thanks. Hey, maybe ‘way better’ for some writers, but definitely not for all of them. That’s why I keep coming back from a different direction with the same nonsense. 🙂