This snippet was pretty solid from the start. A few small tweaks and one HUGE rule for writers come into play in getting the story into its best possible shape.
Holly Lisle and the Case of the Subtle Secret
Previous post: Holly Lisle and the Case of the Ghostly Girls
{ 1 trackback }
{ 23 comments… read them below or add one }
Thanks Holly! Very helpful, as always. One quick question though: what if I want my character to do a smart, thorough search? This is a daily routine, so how does one make sure there aren’t any strangers in her small town?
–Bob
There is no reliable way to search for someone who is transient and doesn’t want to be found. There is no good way to hide in a small town, either.
Strangers call attention to themselves only if they choose to; if you’re clean, polite, and dress like everyone else (and are not physically remarkable in any way—very handsome, very ugly, disfigured, or of a different race than the majority, whatever it might be—you’ll blend.
It’s much easier for a transient to find someone settled than for someone settled to find a transient—and small towns are the absolute worst place to hide if you really want to hide.
This is an instance, however, of what people believe to be true (that small towns are safe) having very little to do with reality (that if you’re hiding from someone, big, anonymous cities are safer. No place is SAFE. There’s no such thing). So you don’t have to move your character to a big city. You just have to realize when writing her and her mother that what the two of them think is true is not.
The savvy, world-wise character who needs to hide will move to a big city, get a nondescript job, stay clean, have a regular haircut and and clean-trimmed fingernails, eschew tattoos, piercings and wild hair colors, avoid making friends, and scrupulously obey all laws, including minor traffic laws. (If this reminds you of a description of most serial killers, there’s a reason for that. Invisibility takes work.)
When I lived in Laurinburg, the owner of the bookstore there gave two of my fans directions to my house so they could get their books signed. I was lucky; they were fans, and I signed their books. (And then had a totally freaked-out heart-to-heart with the bookseller, about how not everyone is nice, and people who said they liked my work should not be sent to my house.)
Something that your characters don’t need to know but that YOU do—if you’re clean, well-spoken, have a good explanation for being where you are, and don’t call attention to yourself, people will tell you a lot of scary shit they shouldn’t, and in small towns, they know a lot more scary shit about you that they can blurt out. So the person they’re hiding from just needs to look nice and smile while talking to a small business owner to find out the who, what, and where of their hiding place.
Hey Bob,
Best source of info in a small town, the local women and wherever they hang out. If your character’s mother is a waitress, have the girl’s schedule be that she is dropped off at the diner and spends a few hours doing her homework in a booth while she waits for her mother’s shift to end. You can make the mother seem overbearing or over protective with her need to have her daughter with adults she trusts at all times. While the mother is busy with a table the girl can eavesdrop on some of the blue hairs as they gossip about the stranger Miss Hartlee is seeing and what a tramp she is. She can also sneak a paper from the Sheriff after he leaves it on the counter during his coffee break. Maybe the sheriff is talking to the waitresses and blue hairs about some weird happenings in town. All of this would be very thorough for a young girl (if you couple it with a search online at the library during school) and it still leaves it open for the narrator to be unreliable. Small town papers, like Holly said, are great if you want to know about Farmer Ned’s giant pumpkin – but if you’re looking for more you won’t find it there. Ps. If you mother/daughter duo is hiding out, Mom probably wouldn’t buy a computer and hook up internet access. The less services she is getting, the fewer ways there are to find her. Leave the home P.C. out. good luck.
Jeff
p.s. Bob – I kinda got carried away with specifics up top, the only thing you should take from my previous comment is “the local women and where they hang out.” That answer’s your question without drowning you in the should’ve, could’ve, would’ve rhetoric of a bad critique. Sorry.
Holly – feel free to delete my previous comment, I didn’t realize how annoying those suggestion might be until I got a similar crit from my dad. I was visiting my folks and he had to be nosy and go through my man-bag and read from my scene mock up notebook. Which was followed by a long list of “you should name this character this ” and “he should be a this” and “she shouldn’t be blonde” and “can’t this take place in present day [city]… it’s grittier”. Yes, he was that specific and has a thing against blonde female protagonists in a post renaissance era dark/fantasy. Oh well.
Holly, I have one quibble, and one or two more things bothered me here that you didn’t mention. I was a professional genealogical researcher, so this snipped touched on issues I understand very well. First, in most cases, a negative search result takes a long time to confirm. Say you type in a search term and find what you’re looking for right away, that’s quick. But if you don’t find it, especially with a term like “Rachel Waters”, which is not exactly uncommon, you’re going to have to sift through all those pages and pages of results. If you’re in danger, you certainly shouldn’t assume the people you fear aren’t using more sophisticated syntax to pull up the one right result, even if it is buried 10,000 results down.
My second thought, and it was very jarring to me, was this: why would it be dangerous to type her address into the search, but not her name? Unless it was a very specific type of search, it would mean little by itself. And if whoever they fear is monitoring what is typed into that search, wouldn’t they monitor for at least the original name, and capture the IP address of anyone who queried it? Is there a reason you didn’t consider this a “logic fail”? I know my first reaction was to think that if the kid and her mother were both that careless, they’d be caught within a page or two at most.
Finally, the quibble. I agree with your point about newspapers in this case, since the story is sent in contemporary times. (She uses a computer, for example.) There might be a local blog that would be useful, but not a paper. But, just so no one gets the wrong idea, there were times and places where watching the notices in a newspaper might have served some purpose.
The small-town newspaper where I worked published three times a week. This was in its heyday. No notice of the appearance of a stranger in town would have shown up in it. That simply isn’t news, and hasn’t ever been.
Other small-town papers might publish more regularly, but “If it bleeds, it leads” is still the standard, and “If it doesn’t bleed, it better be holding a trophy or a 200 lb. tomato” is still the follow-up.
In the crits, my objective is to hit about four of the biggest points and present them coherently, WITH fixes, in under ten minutes. (The length limit for posting on YouTube.) This is not easy, and a detailed analysis of the problems inherent in doing computer searches is simply not possible within the format I’ve chosen. And while I agree with your point about address searching, it is irrelevant in this case.
The fact is that people generally have a very poor understanding of how computer searches and computer tracking works, of what is and is not dangerous behavior, and of what can and cannot set off flags.
In this instance, the mother told the kid under no circumstances to search for their address. This may not be logical, but it does make perfect sense—in that, the mother may think searching for their address is a terribly dangerous thing to do. I had an ex-mother-in-law who thought the green circle in the middle of the old-style X-box was a device used by the government for spying on people, and who freaked out when my older son showed up there with X-box in tow.
The WRITER writing about computer searches is obliged to know how they work, and why. The CHARACTERS, however, can think and believe any dumbass thing they want. Just as the WRITER is obliged to know grammar inside and out, but the CHARACTERS are not required to speak as if they ever heard of it.
This is why I did not ding the writer for having the character attempt to use the newspapers and internet in the way he did. Characters are free to do things that don’t make sense. I simply pointed out that the writer must demonstrate in some fashion that he understands the character is doing things that will not work, or he will prove himself an unreliable writer, not a reliable writer writing an unreliable narrator.
Thanks; I assumed you must have a reason, it was just driving me crazy wondering what it was.
When I made my comment about newspapers, I wasn’t referring to your lifetime, or mine. True, they didn’t come out every day, but how useful that would be might depend on how well you laid low and how quickly you might need to know about a stranger poking about. But there were times and places where strangers in town made the news; I’ve done research in some of those papers. (I even saw a news item once about a toddler who scraped his knee… I think that was from the 1890s or so. That was a time when a lot of papers seem to have experimented with printing all sorts of trivia. Between the 1880s and 1920s is the period you’re most likely to find extremely strange tidbits in certain papers.)
Winchendon, Massachusetts in the early 1900s (admittedly an odd place in several ways) went even further than that. They even mentioned when people’s relatives visited them – and the family that sticks in my mind was not even an important one. They were poor, lived way out in the woods in a shack, but when Harold Young (one of the sons) came visiting from Cambridge, it made the papers. Not important in this case, of course, but I mention it as one of those odd tidbits that some writer someday might find useful. (I have no proof of this, but my guess would be the publisher was too cheap to pay for the filler content a lot of smaller papers got in stereotypes. Although Winchendon has a few other odd aspects, so the real explanation may lie elsewhere.)
First of all, I intended to note in my remark about a blog that such a detailed source would be a real stretch. I wouldn’t ‘buy’ it, it is just more likely than a newspaper at this point.
Second, Jeff has some good points, although he did miss one thing. Yes, a home PC would be risky – but public PCs are incredibly dangerous even for those of us with nothing to hide. They’d need a USB stick with proxies and lots of other goodies loaded up to use one safely. And hanging out in a very public place would probably not be a good idea if they’re afraid of strangers. Where will the stranger end up, after all? For that matter, a small town is the last place I’d choose to hide. Sure, a stranger would stand out more – but so will you.
I have to back Holly up on this one. I’m a systems admin by trade and could tell you hundreds of stories about the misconceptions customers and users have about computers. Maybe thousands, and yet with all of my knowledge and experience, the mom’s admonition to not search for their address piqued my imagination and left me with a strong feeling that there was something I wasn’t being told but needed to read more to find out.
My anecdote: I’ve had numerous telephone support calls where the user assumed I could see what they were typing, or that I could see THEM, through their monitor. These weren’t dummies, either. They were doctors and dentists, school principals and teachers, even college educated corporate officers. Nobody is immune to ignorance, although I’d probably have used a real scenario to accomplish what Holly was trying to do because the reality of just how public our lives are these days is far scarier than the consequences of an innocent Google search. I’m more Tom Clancy than Stephen King.
Remember that any technology sufficiently advanced appears as magic to people who don’t understand it. It is safe to assume that half of your readers aren’t going to understand technology either, even if you explain it in detail. BUT, if you don’t bore them with the technical manual, you CAN feed on their uninformed neurosis quite nicely.
We live in an incredible age where people have grown accustomed to being surprised by what technology can do. Ask anyone who’s ever had their identity stolen and you’ll find lots and lots of surprise, mostly at how easy it was to do.
Have you ever considered writing “33 Mistakes Writers Make About Technology”? I’d buy that.
That’s not that bad of an idea, actually. My list would have to include:
1. Anything that can be used to do something really nifty (like power a ship to FTL velocity) can probably also be used as a weapon…
2. Is there anyone dumb enouogh to go back in time and actually try to kill their grandpa? Seriously? And do we need to be told this theory every time someone writes a time travel novel?
3. If you invent a really cool technology for a sci-fi adventure, like quantum communicators that work anywhere, any time, then be prepared to write about what would make them fail to work. Things that never fail cannot be used to create tension…
4. Artificial life is different than artificial intelligence. Know the difference before writing about it. Please.
5. If it takes 1 or more pages to explain how something works, forget it, unless you’re writing a cooking novel. Average readers will be bored and scientific readers are going to tear you to shreds, so you can’t win. “There was a shimmer and Bob materialized on the planet’s surface” is good enough for most people.
Lastly… I can’t imagine any species capable of FTL travel that would give a rat’s rear end about how many whales we have on Earth. Whoever wrote that was on LSD, or just a major panderer to people I wouldn’t go to dinner with.. imho.
Trust your reader, that’s very good advice. Never waste your suspense!
I am writing a novel from the POV of an unreliable narrator who has something huge she is hiding from the reader, and which won’t be revealed until the next-to-last scene, so I have a lot of careful planning to do, a lot of muse bombs to plant — and later explode.
But I had not consciously considered the reader as part of the equation.
Good advice.
Thanks!
Have you read Nabakov’s “Lolita”? Humbert Humbert is the ultimate unreliable narrator. The only real way the narrator can lie to the reader is if he’s lying to himself, and even then he can’t help but give himself away now and then. His unconscious won’t be silent. He won’t hear what it says about him, but the reader will. If that’s not happening, it may end up coming off as a gimmick.
I love unreliable narrators, so I found this episode very helpful in terms of how to keep your secrets until the proper time, and trust the reader.
Bob, I’m sure Holly will have a better answer, but — I think you’d have to do a lot of research to give convincing, correct details to the kind of search you’re thinking of. Would this be the time to be a little vague, to say she did the usual searches (or whatever) as she does every weekday after school? I too would be interested in how to convey that she IS doing a smart, thorough search without tripping over the details.
Weird verbs and adverbs… *sigh* They will be the death of me.
“He said/she said seem so dull and lifeless to me,” he commented dryly, a sad little frown tugging at the corner of his mouth. “If we’re really careful and promise not to get too carried away, can we toss in something colorful and leading, every now and then?”
“Only if you’re careful,” Holly reasoned. Sensing his disappointment, she offered, “the point is to tell the story through the actions and emotions of the character, not with emoticonic words plastered to everything they say.”
A glimmer of hope brightened his downturned eyes as the truth of what she said began to sink in…
Thanks Holly for Trust Crash. I need work there. Good points.
Great points all, although I don’t really agree about the whole ‘no weird verbs/ adverbs’ thing. Weird adverbs should be used sparingly, but wierd verbs are better than s/he said over and over again. They describe tone of voice, which can’t always be indicated perfectly through body language and actions (sometimes tone and body language will contradict each other, also).
I once read this book, where the only dialouge tag the author -ever- used was ’said’. I remember a bit about the plot and characters, but the only thing that sticks out in my mind was that one fact. The writing was solid, the characterization good, and there were surprisingly few plotholes, but I didn’t get the sequel because the lack of variation of vocabulary (that author reused a lot of words close to each other) and the dry tone of the chosen diction – she used mostly connotation nuetral words – annoyed me to no end. Maybe some people like plain dialouge tags, but my favorite books are the ones that use the wierd verbs.
Oh, and it -is- possible to hiss something without a ’s’, because when you’re hissing a word/ sentence, you’re -not- drawing out the ’s’. That makes you sound silly. You hiss something by saying it in a confrontational, furious, threatening, and kinda quiet tone of voice so it conveys the same emotions as a snake hissing at someone. You can also ‘laugh’ a word, although that is a bad way of describing it – what you’re doing there is saying the syllables/ words -between- laughs.
Cas—If you noticed all the saids, then the writing was NOT solid, and in fact was almost certainly really bad.
That’s an objective standard: if some part of the writing is so glaring that the only thing you remember about the book is the writing, the author failed. Writing should be so transparent to the reader that what he remembers is your story, not the words you use to tell it—if, in fact, you have a story to tell. If the writer has no story, then he has to fall back on the pyrotechnics of playing with words to hide the fact, and will live or die on how well he can do this. In which case, with no story to remember, all you can remember is how well he played with words—and even by that standard, the book you describe would fail.
Character attributions (he said, she said) should be used sparingly. You only need them in there enough to make sure the reader is following who is doing what, and if you’re writing well, the reader will be able to follow your conversation by its content and by character actions, and not just tags. Weird verbs as dialogue tags call attention to themselves. “I don’t believe you!” he ejaculated. comes immediately to mind as an example of this. While it’s okay to toss in murmurs, yells, growls and so on very sparingly, when used instead of doing better development on the content of the dialogue, they are simply crutches for sloppy or lazy writers.
Hissing requires an S. The word is defined by its use of the sibilant. I don’t care what your tone of voice is: if you didn’t have an S in the sentence, you didn’t hiss. And no, you cannot laugh a word. You can, as you noted, laugh between words.
Mental sloppiness permits writers to write, “You’re such a doofus,” he laughed, rather than “You’re such a doofus.” He laughed. Or even, He laughed. “You’re such a doofus.”
Better would be, He laughed and tousled my hair. “You’re such a doofus.” The first sentence is simply wrong. The second and third are okay, but vague in their meaning. The speaker could be an asshole, or could be angry, could be harsh. The added action in the final sentence demonstrates the context of the words.
I have very little respect for writers who don’t get this right.
Hey Holly,
I had been reading a series since 1994, and the author reverted to lazy character attributions. That, on top of his “magic wand” solutions to the major conflicts, and I was done. I invested a decade and a half in reading and rereading his novel’s and now I wouldn’t even recommend them (hence not naming him or his books). His “phoning it in” even ruined the novels he did right. I can’t pick up the start of the series, knowing where it would end up.
I agree one hundred precent. He said/she said should be banished to where it belongs – elementary school yard fights and political debates (same thing).
I totally agree with Holly on the character attributions fix.
Out of sheer curiosity, I took a peek inside five random novels on my bookshelf. Of those five, four books used character attributions only at the beginning of conversations. The fifth book, one of my guilty pleasure series, used them a lot, even when the conversation was well-established. (FYI: a “guilty pleasure” for me is a story that might not be written very well, but the characters and/or world are so interesting that I overlook the poor writing.)
I’d rather take the time to (learn) and write stronger dialogue than be considered a lazy writer. I’m definitely taking that fix to heart.
Holly- Do you use Scrivener’s full-screen feature for the Crash Tests? I use Scrivener, and I was thinking about what you used for them, when I realized that it looked like Scrivener.
For the crash tests, I use Apple Keynote and Screenflow. My Scrivener full-screen is set to black background and amber text, mimicking my old Kaypro 8088’s tiny amber no-graphics monitor screen that was my first (and least intrusive) computer writing environment.
Hi, I’ve just started Holly’s course and I’ve already got heaps out of it. These Crash Tests are fabulous. I’ve never thought I was a very visual learner but I love the way these and the movies for the lessons are presented. it feels weird though, not to have anything written to refer to with the Crash Tests. (unless there is and I missed it?)
As for speech tags. I hate them!! With a passion. This is just my personal opinion obviously and when I’m reading I guess I can overlook them if I enjoy everything else about a book, but basically I really don’t like them. I want to get a sense of how someone is talking (or what they mean or don’t mean) from body language and context. You can create subtle subtext and conflict. As Holly mentioned in her Dialogue lession. Bob is stitching a saddle quite violently which is at odds when he’s trying to remain reasonable. (If I remember right)
For example: someone’s trying to appear relaxed while they are waiting for something. ‘He leaned back on the sofa, spreading his arms out wide. “I’ll wait, no problem”. He crossed his legs. The foot resting on his knee jiggled, making his shoelaces jump.’
You know, I now find myself wanting to write stuff even in posts like this. Which is definitely your fault, Holly
After along time of feeling too emotionally exhausted to write, I’m getting back to it. I’m in the middle of the first lesson and already I’ve learnt a lot and finding these Crash Tests is great. Thanks