Author: Tom

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Craft

When Anthony Hopkins Asked For Advice

Imagine Sir Anthony Hopkins, most known for his role as Hannibal Lecter in Silence of the Lambs.

Now, Sir Anthony Hopkins was  once just Tony Hopkins, starting like all of us. He was 17 or 18, doing shows wherever he could. In one play, he worked with Sir Laurence Olivier, considered the greatest classical actor of his generation. Hopkins, playing a minor role, mustered the courage to ask Olivier for advice on his performance.

Imagine Sir Laurence at his makeup table. Hopkins asks for advice, and Sir Laurence turns and says:

“When you speak, you are the star.”

Then continues with his makeup. This is a real anecdote told by Anthony Hopkins. And the advice is crucial.

When you speak, you are the star. On stage with 30 people, if you deliver a line, the audience focuses on you. In that moment, you are the star. This applies to your prose dialogue.

In a story or script, when a character speaks, they become the star. For example, if you’re reading a novel and a cab driver says, “Follow that car? You bet!” you don’t skip reading that line. The cabbie is the star in that moment.

If you’re going to have a character speak, then what they say needs to reveal character or move the story forward.

Consider a scene in an IHOP. Two characters are conversing, and the server comes over and says, “Can I get you some more coffee?” Does that move the story forward or reveal character? Probably not. However, if the server says, “You look like you could use some more coffee,” it reveals a bit more.

Even better, if she says, “You look like you could use something stronger than coffee,” it reveals something about the characters in the scene.

The key word to remember is “deliberate.” Make deliberate choices when your characters speak. Ensure their dialogue either moves the story forward or reveals character. This approach will enrich your writing and engage your readers.

I hope you found this helpful! If you’d like to take a deeper dive into writing awesome dialogue, take a look at my book on the topic!

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Craft

Improve Your Sensory Description to Bring Readers Back For More

Here’s an exercise I highly recommend doing outside, but you can do it wherever you are.

It’s a simple exercise about being present in a place, centering yourself, and using your entire body to take note of the world around you. Use your eyes, ears, nose, and fingertips to observe everything. What does the place smell like? What does it feel like? What are the textures? Be specific in your descriptions.

Just make a list. You don’t need to write lush, vivid sentences right now—just be as specific as possible. If you hear birds singing, try to identify what kind of birds they are. If you notice flowers, determine their type. If you smell an herbal scent, figure out if it’s lavender, oregano, or something else.

The goal is to dig deep into specifics.

Just this morning on my walk, I brushed a hand over a short pine tree and came up with the following sentences on the fly, which might open a novel someday:

Despite their name, pine needles are actually soft, almost silky, to the touch when caressed the right way. Rub them the wrong way, and they’ll stick you. My mom was the same way.

Will it win a literary award? No, but it’s a vivid image, ain’t it?

For example, one of my students went out to her front porch and sat on the “red brick step” off her porch. Just those three words already create a vivid image.

Then she noticed she couldn’t sit there long without a pillow for her back, which tells us a lot about her if she were a character. Imagine opening your story with such a specific detail: “Frances sat on the red brick front porch steps, thinking she would need a pillow before too long.” This one sentence reveals much about the character.

Another student mentioned going out to her back porch and watching a neighbor hosing down beach furniture. While not highly specific, this detail suggests proximity to a beach. Instead of saying, “Frances lived on the beach,” you can show it through specific observations.

In crafting your story, choose which details to keep and which to trim. You might start with specific details and then refine them in revision. For instance, instead of saying someone walked a dog, specify the breed, color, and characteristics. A detail like “a white hypoallergenic Labradoodle” tells us much more than just “a dog.”

Allow your sensory memory to influence your writing. One student described a ceiling fan’s pull chain tapping against the base, a sound many of us recognize: tick tick tick tick tick. Such sensory details can draw readers deeper into the story. Consider what memories those sensory details evoke—whether they bring warm, fuzzy feelings or negative associations. Does that ticking sound take you back to grandma’s kitchen baking cookies? Or does it take you back to terrible room in a terrible house where terrible things happened?

There’s no right or wrong response, only that you banking that sensory memory for later use in a story.

One student mentioned jasmine bushes around her house. A lovely detail, but it wasn’t the plants themselves that stood out to me as she talked about this exercise. What captivated me was when she said her husband planted them after their trip to India. This detail reveals so much about their relationship and evokes a powerful memory. A simple line of description like that in a story would give the reader instant insight into the character of the husband.

When crafting your scenes, decide what emotions you want to evoke and use sensory details to achieve that.

So: go outside (if it’s safe for you to do so) and immerse yourself in your surroundings. If you can’t go outside, use your immediate environment to practice sensory observation. The more you practice, the richer and more vivid your descriptions will become, resonating deeply with your readers.

I hope this helps!

If this article was helpful, I know you’ll find my book on improving your dialogue a HUGE benefit! Pick it up Amazon here:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00WZWMW5W

Or other retailers here:

https://books2read.com/u/bWZY2z

 

Categories
Craft

Battling Writer’s Block

Battling Writer’s Block

6 Tips and 1 Big Secret

Photo by Bernard Hermant on Unsplash

Before we address your writer’s block, we need to consider what kind of writer you are and what kind of writing you do.

More specifically, where do you want your career to go?

If you are currently at the hobbyist level, meaning you love writing for fun and have these characters you enjoy working with, that’s great. Maybe you make maps and character drawings and post them on your favorite website. But today, you’re stuck, and you’re looking up how to fight writer’s block.

Or are you are a writer who fully intends to get paid for your work? We have to address writer’s block from a differently if so.

Here’s the reality:

If you are someone who writes fiction to make money, you don’t get writer’s block.

You don’t have the luxury of writer’s block. Whether you are going the traditional route, the indie route, or hybrid, you’re doing it at a professional level in exchange for funds. You are a professional writer.

You may experience “project” block, as my friend Michael Stackpole says. You might be working on a project and get stuck for a moment.

The solution? Go to another project.

Most of my writer friends in the indie world have more than one project going at any one time. Maybe your urban fantasy isn’t working for you this morning, so you shift to your YA romance. For those in traditional publishing, if you’re doing a book a year, you still probably have more than one project going because you don’t know which one will sell.

In any case, you’re a professional. You are expected to craft fiction for your audience. There’s no time for writer’s block.

I recently wrote a 90,000-word novel in three months. The first month was for research and outlining. The other two months were for writing. Almost every day, I got up, looked at where I was, figured out what part of the story I was in, and dove in. I wrote 2,000 to 3,000 words a day.

And I followed an outline.

When you’ve crafted a really good outline, you don’t get writer’s block. You’ve already prevented it by spending the time up front to test your story.

You might get tired, which is different. Physical or personal setbacks are not writer’s block.

When under contract for that novel, I overwrote as much as I could. That way, I built in time for unforeseen events. I wrote as much as I could when I was in “the zone.”

I beat my deadline by a week.

Let’s talk about the more fun side: What if you’re working on something as a hobbyist, enthusiast, or apprentice? When you’re stuck, here’s what I recommend.

Get out of your space.

You probably have a space that you typically write in. If the routine isn’t working for you, you need somewhere new. Go to a library, a park, a coffee shop, or even a different room in your home. Change your visual and sensory perspective to kickstart your creativity.

Get to the good scene.

There’s no rule that says you have to write in order. Write what excites you the most. If you find some scenes you dread writing, maybe those scenes should not be in the story.

Engage with your favorite media.

Watching favorite movies, reading favorite books, listening to favorite music, or reading poetry can be really good for breaking up a solid logjam in writer’s block. But don’t mindless scroll online. Be deliberate in your engagement. Choose media that you truly love.

Your Voice was influenced by movies, by media, by songs, by other things that you’ve read. So invest back into those. Go read your favorite book. Take an hour, make your favorite food, sit in your comfy chair and get back into the thing that led you to today.

Other authors, other storytellers, guided you to today. Revisit them, hang out with them, read them, watch them.

Which is not the same thing as, “Well, Tom said take a couple hours…” and look at YouTube.

No, no, no, no.

Don’t go to YouTube. Don’t go to TikTok. Don’t go to any of these places. Don’t mindlessly scroll and call it work. That’s not work. You know it and I know it. I’m talking about the deliberate, intentional act of taking an hour or two hours to relax, get back in touch with your self, get back in touch with your heroes, your mentors, and then see how the scene progresses.

Go outside.

A ten-minute walk or just being outside can change your mindset. Engage with your surroundings deeply, using all your senses. Be safe, obviously. But get out. Get out and get moving. A ten minute walk. A 30 minute walk can change all kinds of things.

Put your phone away. Don’t put your earbuds in. Just walk as you’re walking.

Or if you can’t walk for any reason, be outside and just sit. But as you’re sitting or as you’re walking, notice and take note of the things around you. But dive deep! Don’t just look at the pretty flowers. Stop. Literally smell those roses. Smell the snapdragons. Touch them. What’s it feel like? What does it remind you of? Listen to everything.

If you break off a twig from a tree,  what does that sound like? What is the texture of that little stick that you just broke off? What does it smell like?

Get that stuff into your brain. Don’t worry about your book. Don’t worry about the scene. Just get those sensory things going. I’m confident that when you sit back down, you will find a new sort of freshness to the writing.

Write something else.

If you’re stuck, work on another project or take one of your characters and put them in a new, challenging situation. This can reveal new aspects of your characters and invigorate your creativity.

If you don’t have another project on on the back burner, take one of your characters from this current project and put them in a locked concrete room with some of their character, either one of yours or a character that you like from literature or movies

Lock them in this room and let them start talking to each other and just see what happens. One of my favorite stories about this, about breaking writer’s block, is I took a 17 year old girl who was an artist from my novel ZERO. I put her in a room with a 30 year old space pirate and locked them in a concrete bunker just to see what would happen.

You’re never going to read that scene, because it’s never going to be published . It was just a three-page thing that I wrote really quickly. But the dialogue revealed so much about both of those characters that there are still little elements of that scene in those two books. It’s weird, but it works. Just throw them in a room, see what happens.

Remember, if you’re a professional, you need to think about writer’s block differently. If you’re just a hobbyist, don’t worry about it too much. You’ll get there. But if you’re at the professional level or planning to be, your approach to getting through writer’s block will change because your livelihood depends on it.

I hope some of this is helpful. Leave me questions or comments. I’m just glad you’re here, and we’ll do this again soon. Take care.

If you found this article helpful, may I point you to STORYCRAFT. Ten hours of hanging out with two successful hybrid authors, talking about everything from story structure, to approaching agents and dealing with traditional contracts, to the highs and lows of indie pub. Check it out: https://tomleveen.store/b/storycraft

Categories
Craft

First Words Matter

First words matter!

 

Opening number one in my WIP “Red Planet Gunsmoke” goes like this:

 

“Approaching the Treaty’s new war cruiser filled Cadet Ramona Keegan with something like religious awe.”

 

This sentence works and is functional. However, it forms part of a very chunky paragraph, spanning seven lines. It’s not typical for me, but it’s a different genre, something I’m trying a little differently.

 

Given that, let’s try a different one. Here’s the opening of chapter one from the same story:

 

“Pirate Captain Ramona Keegan ran a calloused hand over her bald head, palm lingering over the crimson hourglass of a colossal black widow spider tattoo, whose tarsi ended at the corner of the captain’s ice-blue eyes.”

 

The second line follows: “‘I want that ship,’ she said to her crew, ‘and I mean to have it.’”

 

In this version, we already have two paragraphs. The first line, though long, is only three lines. By comparison, the first example is seven lines on my Word document.

 

Neither is necessarily better or worse, but there is an adage in advertising and marketing that you want to attract the right people and repel the wrong ones. The same is true of our fiction.

 

In a bookstore or on a website like Amazon, you have the benefit of a cover and blurb, which help attract readers. On a website, you might also have reviews. But most readers, whether browsing in a store or online, will look inside the book. The first thing they’ll likely see is the first page. While most readers won’t make a decision based solely on the first sentence, it’s beneficial to make that first sentence remarkable.

 

If you’re a writer seeking traditional publishing, that first sentence matters even more. An agent will only read so much, and if the first sentence doesn’t grab them, they might move on. Agents have piles of submissions, both physical and digital. You have mere seconds to capture their attention and compel them to keep reading. For book readers and purchasers, there’s a bit more leeway, but why not make that first sentence exceptional? It can make the difference in hooking your reader.

 

For example, I was working with a student who had a solid opening about a creature in the bushes. It was intriguing, but not as engaging as it could be. A few paragraphs down, the student mentioned the character imagining a gunfight with Jesse James. By moving that line to the top, the opening became much more compelling. Immediately, it created curiosity and made me want to read more. If you’re not interested in Jesse James or the Old West, you can put the book down, which is fine because it means the book isn’t for you.

 

It’s important to realize your book isn’t for everyone.

 

It might appeal to millions, thousands, or even hundreds, but it won’t appeal to everyone. Writers, particularly those pursuing traditional publishing, need to understand this. Telling an agent your book will be a bestseller because “everyone will love it is unrealistic.” Focus on finding your actual audience. Crafting an irresistible first line can help attract the right readers and repel the wrong ones.

 

For instance, starting with “Pirate Captain Ramona Keegan” grabs attention. It hints at a space opera setting without explicitly stating it. Even though the cover might show a spaceship or a woman in a spacesuit, the narrative needs to establish the genre quickly. The first sentence doesn’t need to reveal everything, but it should hook the reader and be honest about what to expect.

 

Consider the difference between the two openings: the first, “Approaching the Treaty’s new war cruiser filled Cadet Ramona Keegan with something like religious awe,” is functional but doesn’t grab you. In contrast, “Pirate Captain Ramona Keegan ran a calloused hand over her bald head, palm lingering over the crimson hourglass of a colossal black widow spider tattoo, whose tarsi ended at the corner of the captain’s ice-blue eyes,” is much more engaging.

 

Take the time to write your story, but also craft that first line, paragraph, and page meticulously. Consider paragraph breaks, word choices, and every detail. A well-crafted first page can attract the right readers and, crucially, literary agents.

 

I hope this advice is helpful. Stay in touch and take care.