Apokedak Literary Apokedak Literary

Reading Time: 6 minutes

Your first goal, if you’re a novelist, is to draw the reader into your storyworld and keep him there. There may be several things you want to do with the reader once he’s in your world. You will want to move him emotionally because you want him to consider a new worldview, You may want to cause him to question his view and you may want to persuade him to come over to your view. Or maybe you just want to make him laugh–you want to entertain him for a while. Whether you are writing to change the world or merely to entertain, you need to, first of all, draw your reader into your storyworld.

Paint a Logical World that Feels Real

Writing teachers say you need to make the reader enter the fictive dream. By that they mean the reader buys into the world. If you say the characters live on Mars, the reader suspends their disbelief and buys into your story. OK, the characters live on Mars, the reader says. I can buy into that scenario.

Writing teachers also say that you never want to bump your reader out of the fictive dream. And that means your storyworld needs to be consistent. If the characters live on Mars, then they need to live by a certain set of rules. If you set up a dome with oxygen then the characters need to live in that dome and if they go out of the dome without their spacesuits they die. You can’t have them living for 200 pages in a dome and then suddenly have them go out and, hey presto, there’s a magic plant they can hold to their noses and that allows them to breathe in the Martian atmosphere.

So that’s the first thing you need to remember when you are describing your world—you must be consistent and logical.

Visualize Characters Moving Through Your Storyworld

This means you must see the world in your own mind before you describe it for the readers. And this is a universal need for writers. Whether you are a seat-of-the-pants writer or one who plots laboriously, you need to think about description. And you need to think about it long before you sit down to write.

You don’t necessarily need to tell all the minor details each time your characters enter a new room, but you had better be sure you see all those details, whether you are going to describe them or not. Because if you can see them then you will describe them consistently.

Let’s do a little experiment. In a moment I’m going to ask you to stop the recording if you are listening to the audio here–or stop reading–and close your eyes and think about your kitchen. Picture the kitchen in your mind’s eye. And then have a character walk into your kitchen from the garage or from the living room, or the dining room and have her get coffee from the cupboard and make herself a cup of coffee. She needs to get coffee, water, and a cup at least. So I want you to picture her doing all those acts in your mind. Go ahead and do that now. I’ll wait.

OK, you back?

Here’s what I saw in my mind.

Jenny, still half asleep, bumped her hip on the counter by the dishwasher as she walked by. Coffee. She needed coffee.

She crossed to the coffee maker, poured beans into the grinder, and pressed the button. The kitchen filled with the smell of the rich Colombian beans. She filled the basket in the coffee maker, stepped to the right, grabbed the pitcher of filtered water from the fridge, filled the coffee pot, and flicked the switch to brew.

She crossed to the sink, filled the pitcher up, crossed back to the fridge to put the water away, grabbed the half and half. Took a cup from the cupboard above the coffee pot, poured some half and half. Stepped to the right again to put the half and half away.

The coffee was not done, but she pulled the pot out anyway.

Reading Time: 2 minutesSorry for spamming you all this week. I published some audio files on my site, thinking I was publishing them privately. Instead I published them publicly with a password.

And not only did the post publish to my blog, but Mailchimp sent it out to my list.  

It got worse because I was meeting an old friend today–had to go out of town. Had no time to fix the blog. So people have been sweetly emailing all day asking for the password. And I’ve been seeing the mail pop up on my phone but haven’t been able to answer.

Oops. 

Could have been worse, I suppose: I could have been arrested for drunk driving or something. Well . . . not really, because I don’t drive drunk, but you know what I mean.

Anyway. I’m so sorry I spammed you all this week!

This is what comes of working in the middle of the night when you’re braindead. 

To make it up to you, I’ll give you one of my audio clips. I kind of hate to share these because I taped them back before I learned how to edit out all the dead space—this must be how writers feel when they are sharing the first book they published. I bet they all want to apologize and tell readers, “But I’m a much better writer now. Really!”

But it’s late and I have no blog post for you and I owe you for the spam post I sent, so . . .

Here you go. Have at my High Concept audio lecture.

High Concept