Top Seven Signs of Good Writing

01 Thursday Oct 2015

Posted by Jessica Wood in Common Criticism, culture, fairy tale, fantasy, film, musings, story, writing, writing advice

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backstory, creative writing, exposition, good storytelling, good writing, novel, novel writing, storytelling, the hobbit, villain, worldbuilding, writing, writing advice, writing tips

Last time I talked about the warning signs of bad writing, so I thought it only fair that I also talk about the signs of good writing. It’s much more difficult to define, as ‘good’ writing is subjective and it isn’t always possible to identify why we find something enjoyable. Years of Hollywood films and creepy book fads has also taught us that what is good isn’t necessarily the same as what is popular or financially successful. Still, these are the things I’ve discovered which set great novelists apart:

Exposition done right.

Exposition is one of the hardest things for writers to learn. It is far too easy to dump all of your worldbuilding into the novel all at once or forget about it completely. Writers who can figure out the right balance are amongst the most skilled.

Something unique.

No novel can be 100% original, unless you want an incomprehensible avant-garde mess, but all of the best novels contain something that is different from the rest. It doesn’t matter if it’s a relationship, a setting, or a little seen perspective. If the book can beat a reader’s expectations in a good way then it is doing something right.

Diverse cast.

Most authors and publishers are beginning to wake up to the issue of diversity in fiction (or lack thereof), but there is still a long way to go. For many writers it still means shoehorning in a black side character then not knowing what to do with them and killing them off about a third of the way through. This is why there is nothing more refreshing than an author who accurately and sympathetically portrays a diverse cast of characters fitting for the novel’s setting.

Villains with backstory.

And by backstory, I mean more than just ‘tragic past’ or ‘they were created evil’. I often think that a story is only as good as its villain and a good villain is more than just a guy sitting on his black throne laughing about how evil he is and how much he loves suffering. If we can find out why they are bad, why they genuinely think that what they are doing is right, and how they react when everything they’ve been working for is ruined then that alone makes for a great story.

Active characters.

For God’s sake Aurora, get off your lazy ass and do something!

I’ve talked before about characters who exist in a story only to have things happen to them and not actively take charge of their own story. One of Pixar’s rules of storytelling is ‘Coincidences to get characters into trouble are great; coincidences to get them out of it are cheating.’ Stories need characters who will use their own skills, experiences, and qualities to make something happen and cause their own happy ending, not sit around and wait for somebody to do it for them. These characters gain much more sympathy than characters who just drift from scene to scene barely doing anything.

Actions have consequences.

Everything that your characters do or experience in the story must have some kind of reaction or consequence, be it positive or negative. The reason The Hobbit has remained a beloved story for 60 years and made a killing in the box office is that it isn’t a standard ‘Go on quest, defeat dragon, get gold’ story. Thorin Oakenshield goes across Middle Earth pissing off just about every person he meets and has to meet the consequences of this later on when he almost dooms the kingdom he’s been working so hard to retake. Almost everything that Bilbo and company encounter on their journey comes together in the climactic battle.

The story leaves you with something.

This doesn’t have to mean a tacked on last minute lesson or moral. Whether it is an emotion, a memorable character, or just the feeling of a really good story, the novel should leave the reader with something other than just the thought ‘is that it?’

While I was putting together this list, I found out that what I have put here is actually just a small selection of what makes a good story. I wouldn’t be able to list all of them. Most bad novels use the same cut and paste formula as all the others. A great novel can be anything.

How to Write Love at First Sight

04 Thursday Jun 2015

Posted by Jessica Wood in Common Criticism, culture, fairy tale, fantasy, film, musings, romance, story, writing, writing advice

≈ 3 Comments

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fairy tale, fantasy, fiction, historical fiction, love at first sight, romance fiction, story, storytelling, writing, writing advice, writing fairy tales, writing fiction, writing tips

Can you guess how this is going to work out?

People seem to be in one of two camps when it comes to love at first sight. Either it’s the ultimate epitome of romance and true love or it’s a creepy, unhealthy fixation that will never work out. This is why the fairy tale image of love at first sight leading to an instant happy ever after is going through a deconstruction in recent years and most modern readers are turned off by it.

There is a reason why it emerged as a literary trope and even why it still appears in some stories today. First meetings are emphasised in fiction because they are important in real life as well. Our first meeting and first impressions of someone will determine what our future relationship with them will be like. As much as we’d like to think we’re completely objective, scientists do say that it takes as little of one tenth of a second to decide if we like someone upon first seeing their face.

From a historical standpoint, it’s easy to see why this used to be a more acceptable form of storytelling. People used to die sooner and were expected to marry young so they had to latch onto the first piece of marriage material they came across and not let go. Divorce was also frowned upon so they were expected to be happy with their chosen partner for their whole lives, or at least pretend to be.

As society has changed, the idea of love at first sight has changed with it. Just as we aren’t expected to settle down with someone we’ve just met, so we don’t expect fictional characters to either.

Even so, there are still people who believe in love at first sight and it apparently does happen to some people. Some of these relationships do work out but others end horribly. So can it ever be pulled off in fiction? I’ve found that there are some cases when it can:

When to write love at first sight.

Short time frame. This is why love at first sight is so often associated with Disney films. The writers only have an hour and a half to make you buy into a relationship and love at first sight saves them a lot of time on development. This is why it rarely if ever works in a novel or long running television series because there is plenty of time to develop a relationship naturally.

A legitimate reason. To use Disney as an example again, Frozen did a very good job of establishing why Anna would fall instantly in love with Prince Hans – she’s spent most of her life isolated from her sister and only has one day to find a husband to keep her company throughout the rest of her lonely days. Of course it doesn’t work out but her reasons for falling instantly in love still make a lot more sense than the classic Disney Princesses.

Magical power. Maybe a character can predict what their true love’s first words to them will be or they were star crossed lovers in a previous life and have been sub-consciously drawn to each other. There is some room for creativity here. Magical powers can be a satisfactory explanation but if done badly they can come across as lazy writing, obvious plot devices and an excuse to skip out on the development of the relationship. In the worst cases they can also be downright creepy. Remember how appalled everyone was by the ‘imprinting’ scene in Twilight?

It’s not supposed to work out. Maybe the reasons why people are against this trope are the very things you are going for. It could be a villain with an unhealthy fixation on someone or a clueless romantic with no idea how true love really works. Even Romeo and Juliet, the most famous and glorified example of love at first sight was actually supposed to be a warning against hasty marriages.

Lust at first sight. This is a legitimate excuse because it does happen and lust is different than love. A crush at first sight is also understandable. I think all of us can say we’ve gotten a crush on someone just by looking at them, even if we later found out that their personalities weren’t as great as their looks.

Historical fiction. As I said, people’s attitudes to love at first sight have changed so you might be able to explain it in a historical context. But keep in mind that aside from different attitudes, people in the past were still the same as us in every other way and their hasty marriages didn’t always lead to happily ever after.

So there are some instances when you can write a character falling in love at first sight, but these are just starting points to the development of a relationship. In stories, build up is everything so you have to make your readers believe why somebody is worth going through a whole book’s worth of trials for.

I mentioned in a previous article that love triangles only work if they are written well. This is perhaps even truer for love at first sight. It’s not that writers can’t use it but it needs to be handled in a precise way to work effectively. Sometimes it can be done successfully but it is very rare and attempts to do so more often fail. If your character does fall in love at first sight and you want the readers to support their relationship then at least spend time developing it and the characters properly and have the characters decide if they want to make the relationship work in the long term.

Why I Hate Love Triangles

17 Friday Apr 2015

Posted by Jessica Wood in anime, Blog, writing, writing advice

≈ 15 Comments

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anime, character, character development, drama, plot, romance, story, storytelling, villain, writers, writing, writing advice

When I was at school and just getting started with writing, I devoured shojo manga and anime. This somehow got the idea into my head that love triangles and complex love charts were the key to drama and therefore great storytelling. As such, I made sure that all of my stories had love triangles in the hopes that they would become better.

It was only when I became a little better at writing that I looked at my plots and realised that the love triangles I had shoehorned in for the sake of drama were completely unnecessary. They did nothing but add unneeded subplots and worst of all made my characters seem unlikeable.

Now I avoid love triangles as much as possible, or at the very least the ‘which boy should I choose’ variety (and yes, it is almost always a girl who has to choose between two boys). I also started to avoid reading stories that rely solely on love triangles for their drama. I’m clearly not the only one who feels this way; just look at the backlash against Twilight and its ‘Team Edward’ and ‘Team Jacob’ camps. But then again, there are also books like The Hunger Games which subvert the trend and make a love triangle work. So is it really possible?

These are the reasons I’ve found why love triangles seldom work:

Creating unnecessary drama. As I mentioned above, many newbie writers, myself included, fall into the trap of thinking all love stories need love triangles to give them more drama. In fact, most of the time they merely create a pointless obstacle to the main couple getting together.
Telling us who the ‘right’ type of love interest is. How many times have you read a book and wished that the protagonist got together with someone else, instead of the partner they ultimately chose? Even if that person is obviously wrong for them and in the worst cases abusive, they are meant to be together because the writer said so. If the protagonist had a fling with the ‘wrong’ person then they are punished for it before realising the error of their ways.
There is always a backup boyfriend. The worst implication of love triangles is that if something happens to the chosen guy, it doesn’t matter that much because the girl has another guy who’s madly in love with her who she can run to. That person has to live with the knowledge that they were ultimately the second choice and only with the girl because they got lucky.
And a backup love interest for the losing partner. How many love triangle stories have been resolved with a forgotten minor character showing up at the last minute and making an instant connection with the losing partner? The writer wants everyone to have a happy ending but can’t consider that a character getting over someone and doing something else with their life is an option. One of the reasons that even hardcore fans turned away from Twilight (I promise this is the last time I’ll use that as an example) was when the losing partner Jacob imprinted on Bella and Edward’s newborn daughter. I suppose the implication was supposed to be that he could tell that she would grow up to be his soulmate, but it came across as incredibly creepy and probably the worst possible way to end his story.
The characters are turned into horrible people. The moment I stopped putting love triangles in my stories was when I realised that the characters I was trying to portray sympathetically were coming across as horrible because they were jealous of each other. It’s hard to like a character who will string along two different people and put them both through hell just because they can’t make up their mind who they want to be with. If done incorrectly, love triangles can make characters seem indecisive, cruel, malicious, and uncaring. There is also the trap that one of the love interests will be painted as a villain just to make the other look better by comparison. Think of Rose’s fiancé in Titanic for an example. It’s not particularly good writing when you need to show a character being mean to emphasise that the other character is nice.
It’s obvious that one partner is going to either fail or be the villain. It’s not so much drama if we know that only one love interest will be chosen. Nine times out of ten that person is obvious from the outset, making the whole idea of a love triangle seem pointless. Love triangles involving villains or the above example of one partner being nasty are also far too common. These stories make it clear that the protagonist will be pushed into the loving arms of the person they were obviously going to end with while the other will spend their nights crying and eating ice cream.
Everybody loves someone who doesn’t deserve it. Most of us are lucky to have just one person fall in love with us, so why does your protagonist get two or more? If your character is just such a nice person that many people would realistically be in love with them then fine. But chances are they aren’t, or your character isn’t as special as you think they are.

So is it possible to make love triangles work? It’s difficult but if your writing is good enough, then yes. The most important way I’ve found to do this is with good character development. Give both of your potential love interests clear goals, motivations and both positive and negative character traits to show genuine reasons why your protagonist would want to be with them. Develop your protagonist equally well so that the reader can believe why they are so beloved. If you are going to introduce a backup love interest for the losing party, develop that character as well and give them their own story arc. Unless you’re intentionally going for tragedy, leave every character in a good place by the end of the story with something they genuinely wanted and needed.

Writers, how do you make love triangles work in your stories? What do you think are the best and worst examples in fiction?