Writing Advice – Craft & Process

Collecting the posts I’ve written about the craft and process of writing

Boost Your Fiction: The Power of Objects and Objectives

PETERMBALL GenrePunk Ninja, Writing Advice - Craft & Process
Boost Your Fiction: The Power of Objects and Objectives

I spend a lot of time talking to writers about their work, whether it’s as an editor, a writing mentor, or someone who exchanges critiques with friends. Over the years, I’ve noticed that one of the most commonly used solutions I’ll offer when folks are stuck on a problem is simple:

What’s the object you can attach to this objective or goal?

Learning to use objects and objectives effectively in fiction is one of those tricks that really levelled up my writing, and it’s the thing we all overlook when in the messy process of creating a first draft.

Nine times out of ten, if a scene or story is feeling problematic or vague, it’s because the big picture goal or ambition is locked down, but there’s no way of confidently stating whether a character has achieved it.

Unfortunately, we read stories to see how characters solve problems. Having a clear sign that a problem is solved is one of the most useful things we can embed in our fiction.

OBJECTS MAKE THE ABSTRACT SPECIFIC

Transforming the abstract and intangible into the concrete and specific is a key skill for writers, and it manifests in different forms. It’s the same advice that lies at the heart of Chuck Palahniuk railing against the use of thought verbs, where he argues:

Your story will always be stronger if you just show the physical actions and details of your characters and allow your reader to do the thinking and knowing. And loving and hating. (Nuts and Bolts: “Thought” Verbs, Litreactor.com)

Similarly, objects can transform an ambiguous goal into something specific and tangible. Take, for example, a character whose long-term goal is “I want to be rich.”

Rich is a nebulous social construct, and it means different things to different people. There are people out there who believe that earning $100,000 a year is a fantastic income, and others who will decry that they earn that much and live paycheck to paycheck.

Ergo, the reader left pondering what “rich” means in this context: moving from poverty to a middle-class lifestyle? Becoming a titan of industry? Building an investment portfolio to rival Warren Buffett? Becoming your world’s equivalent of Tony Stark?

Even though your story will provide some context, the nature of wealth means there’s a sliding scale.

But look at what happens when we take that goal and attach it to a concrete action or object:

  • “Rich” means living in the $5 million mansion on top of McKinley Hill. The big, white-walled place that looks like a castle, which I used to stare at from the bedroom of my shitty shared bedroom as a kid.

  • “Rich” means having $10,000 in savings in the bank and enough money to send my kids on the trip to Disneyland they always wanted.

  • “Rich” means walking into the boardroom of my rival company after a final takeover and firing the board, particularly my hated father-in-law.

  • “Rich” means driving a cherry red Lamborghini to my fifteen-year high school reunion.

  • “Rich” means launching my experimental rocket, and funding a trip to Venus.

By attaching the goal to a physical thing, we immediately know what kind of rich the character is chasing, why it’s so important to them, and whether they’ve achieved it.

Does the character live in their mansion? No! Then the story isn’t over yet.

EVERYONE CAN INTERACT WITH AN OBJECT

Here’s the other advantage of attaching goals and objectives to an object: everyone can interact with it. An idea is shared by everyone without changing, but an object can be moved from person to person, and the ownership of it can motivate the character and show their progress through the story.

It’s hard to argue that someone has stopped your character from getting rich, but if their arch-nemesis buys the mansion or a hacker steals the savings buffer they’ve worked so hard to build up… well, now that characters is going to be motivated.

When they have a specific vision of what rich means attached to the object, they’ll immediately want that object back.

Similarly, you can change the object to show how a character is growing and shaping over the story. Physical objects become metaphors as they change over the course of the story. Dent a character’s Lamborghini, and we know their self-esteem is damaged. Wreck it, and we know they’re on the verge of burning out (or they’re about to learn their goal was stupid, and chase after what they need instead of what they wanted).

This interactivity can also show a character’s evolution. Take Episode VI of Star Wars, for example, when the long-term goal of “Stopping the Empire” is attached to a physical object: a small, unprotected exhaust port vulnerable to torpedoes.

The rebellion throws everything they have at the exhaust port, but technology won’t get the job done. It takes Luke Skywalker rejecting technology (turning off his targeting computer – another object serving as a stand-in for the wrong path) and trusting in the Force to actually take down a Death Star.

In doing so, he actually becomes a Jedi, worthy of the object that’s attached to that goal (the lightsaber he received in the first act of the film).

(Star Wars is often a masterclass in using objects. Consider, for example, what the Millenium Falcon means to Han and Londo, or receiving his first X-Wing means to Luke. Also Princess Leia’s iconic hairdo, the chase after Death Star plans, and the way Darth Vader’s mask represents his character growth).

SHORT TERM OBJECTS

The examples above revolve around long-term objects and objectives, but often the fix to a scene that’s not working is figuring out the short-term object the character is chasing in the moment.

For example, an abstract goal like “to get married” can be made concrete by giving the character a suitor to pursue, which in turn suggests a series of short-term goals: get a date; make it through the date without embarrassing yourself; fending off the interest of the wrong guy; making big mistakes that may alienate your paramour; showing the object of your affections that your intentions are real after pissing them off.

Each of these can have an object attached. “Get a date” might mean “get the phone number” or “use these tickets to a theatre event to coax them into going out”. Success and failure are built in – do you have the phone number? Have they agreed to the date?

Similarly, great romance stories often attach the highs and lows of a relationship to objects or information that can be shared to destabilize a relationship (or stabilize it, in turn). 

But this is not just a romance tactic. I would argue most scenes should have an object the character wants or an objective they’re trying to acquire, a short-term step on the path to the longer term goal. I often find myself distilling from goal to objective to object. For example:

“Find out who murdered my sister?” is a big, abstract goal.

“Get information from Detective Maury about my sister’s murder?” is an objective that might be at the heart of a scene – a small step towards that larger goal.

“Get Maury go give me my sister’s case file?” turns the objective into a concrete object the character is pursuing.

More importantly, attaching the objective to an object opens up tactics. If the investigator can’t convince Detective Maury to share the file or get access to it through the courts, they might break into the police station or hack the files or even smuggle the file out of the police station.

The genre and tone of the story will guide the exact actions, but the object gives us options. More importantly, it makes it clear when a scene is over, because the character has either taken possession of their object or been thwarted so badly they need to regroup and try another tactic.

OBJECTS AND STAKES

The flip side of a character’s goals are stakes – the things the character is afraid of losing, rather than the thing they’re chasing. My favourite method of figuring these comes from a workshop by Mary Robinette Kowal, who suggests thinking about the things that could happen that would really make your character feel like the worst person in the world.

The worst way to approach stakes is to treat them as the inverse of the character’s goal – if the character wants to be rich, then their stakes are not being poor. But once again, attaching these to objects can be incredibly useful.

For example, if our character chasing wealth would feel like shit if the antique watch he inherited from his grandfather was destroyed, then we immediately have an object that suggests what this character values.

The watch is a connection to family, and he feels value in protecting the one nice thing he was given as a child, and its destruction is meaningful to him.

Once again, attaching the character’s stake to an object makes it easy to motivate them and show where their character is at:

  • What happens if another character steals the watch?

  • What if the price of getting the home they always wanted is sacrificing the watch they love?

  • What does it mean if he shows another character the watch and tells them the story behind why it means so much?

  • What does it mean if he sacrifices the watch for another character’s goals?

OBJECTS MATTER

As writers, ambiguity is the enemy. We work in an in-exact art form where words suggest and shape, but never actually represent what we’re trying to describe. We manipulate and reshape the reader’s memory, and provide context to guide them towards the points and themes we’re trying to make.

There are very few problems in writing that aren’t improved by sitting down and asking how to incorporate meaningful objects into the scene, how to attach meaningful objects to the character, and how to transform goals and objectives into something tangible.

Done well, you can create metaphors and icons that last for generations. From lightsabers to Indiana Jones’ hat and whip, from the light on the end of a dock in West Egg to the myriad rings, swords, and Mithril shirts that dominate Lord of the Rings.

Objects matter to us, in stories and real life.

Deploy them at will to level up your writing.

Don’t Write What You Love

PETERMBALL Writing Advice - Craft & Process

My birthday is the 18th of March. The anniversary of my father’s death is the 19th of March. This one-two punch often catches me off-guard, a double-whammy of anxiety and guilt that throws me off my game despite my belief that I’m feeling fine. As mentioned in the authors note for this week’s Saturday Morning Story, I honestly figured this would be the first time in thirty-eight weeks where I could not produce and post a story for my patrons.

Then Vulture did an article on Kelly Link, and I decided to spend Friday hustling to get a new story done.

My biggest influences have always been short fiction writers, and Kelly Link rates up there as one of the biggest. Stranger Things Happen and Magic For Beginners are two of my favourite collections ever, and half the reason I attended Clarion South in 2007 was the chance to get taught by Kelly.

In a lot of ways, her work and mentorship gave me a way into speculative fiction—2007 Peter had spent years in university writing programs, deeply immersed in poetics and post-modern narrative experimentation, and the fact I loved Conan the Barbarian and the critical work of Roland Barthes frequently left me feeling at odds with fans who argued “just turn your brain off and enjoy it” as a short-hand for “don’t critique or deconstruct the stories we love, lest we have to tackle the implications of such examination.”

(As if deconstruction and experimentation didn’t hold enjoyment of their own—I find it infinitely more fun than passive reception of a story)

There’s a really interesting aside in the heart of the Vulture article, which resonated with me heavily and got me back to the keyboard:

She said she doesn’t enjoy writing and only does it because she finds it “interesting.”

Vulture Profile: The Fabulist in the Woods

Rhetoric aimed at writers often makes a big deal of loving what you do. We’re encouraged to write for love, because there’s no real money in the craft of writing. We produce the books of our heart, because to write towards the demands of the market is to be labelled ‘crass’ or ‘a hack’. The subconscious message every writer hears is that you must love what you do, that you are not a ‘real writer’ unless you’re consumed by the writing process 24/7 (possibly to the point of self-destruction).

I’d spent two weeks feeling very grumpy with my short fiction and the Saturday Morning Story project prior to reading the Vulture article, vaguely dissatisfied because I didn’t enjoy what I was doing very much. The lock of enjoyment, thirty-eight weeks in, seemed to indicate a failure on my part. A good reason to think about winding things up and shifting my focus to something more fun.

Thing is, I undertook the Saturday Morning Story and the related Eclectic Projects releases to satisfy my curiosity: around whether it was still possible to create at the pace akin to the pulp short fiction writers of old; how doing so might change the shape of my career; what the impact would be on my process. I wanted to reset my relationship to finishing stories after several years of producing very little and thought pushing myself to hit a weekly target might yield some benefits.

Here’s an interesting thing about writing: it’s very easy to fight against your own instincts in the name of doing things “better” or “properly”. Writers who produce perfectly serviceable stories by pantings their way through the process feel the lingering need to plan and ‘doing things right’. Authors with a talent for fast-paced, commercial stories feel the need to write something fancy in order to achieve critical acclaim. Folks whose natural pace is 500 words a day, produced consistently and without a break, pick up a book like Stephen King’s On Writing and burn themselves out trying to match his 2,500 words a day.

Or, if you’re anything like me, you’ll fight against your natural interest in exprimenting with forms and voice in an effort to finally master the art of writing a chronologically consistent, vaguely realist story in third person, past tense (although every successful story I’ve written is anything but).

Not long after finishing the Vulture article I dug out Kelly Link’s collections, the Fabulist edition of Conjunctions magazine (issue 39) which introduced me to so many writers working in a similar vein, and a host of similar short story collections. I flicked through several stories which eschewed a clean, straightforward approach to voice and structure and embraced the stylised, discontinuous approach to narrative I’ve gone back to again and again since I began writing fiction. I found myself re-reading Link’s story The Hortlak three times, soaking in the voice.

Then, after weeks of working on a relatively straightforward story that played with a style I enjoyed when other people used it, I went back to a toolkit that interested me and started playing with a new idea. Twenty-four hours later—and ninety minutes before I was scheduled to post my weekly story—I had The Birthday Party finished and ready to upload.

None of this is an argument against pushing yourself or trying to master a new skill set as a writer, but it’s useful to remember that when you’re stuck and fighting against a piece, there’s something to be said for leaning into your comfort zone.

Raymond Chandler’s Lists

PETERMBALL Writing Advice - Craft & Process

One of my favourite pages from Raymond Chandler’s notebooks, where he plans out a list of similes and descriptions that will later find their way into books. There’s similar lists scattered through the notebooks where he describes outfits, makes a note of potential titles, or golden comebacks for his dialogue. Once used, he’d go back and make a note on each list, so he wouldn’t repeat it in a later story or book.

It’s easy to forget that writing is a multi-stage process involving ideation, actually putting the raw components of plot on the page, then layering in details like voice and tone that make the work unique. Often, writers approach this as a single task, sitting down at the keyboard and hammering words until a scene feels right.

Reading through Chandler’s notebooks and realising you didn’t have to do all three at the same time was a revelation for me as a young writer.