I’m writing incoherently lately. It’s annoying. I’ve got blog posts half-written and two short stories half-written, and I keep getting bogged down in questioning whether I’m making any sense. But I’d like to get back to using this blog to keep myself on track as a writer, always answering the question of whether I wrote my thousand words, so I’m going to do that, even if I can’t manage any other sensible words. So, have I made my 1000 words? Not for days. But today I’m going to try, and tomorrow I will report back.

And now back to Criteria-Based Content Analysis. I’ll try to manage coherency.

I group five criteria under one heading: The Weird. The actual criteria names are complication, unusual details, superfluous details, accurately reported details misunderstood and external associations (which refers to details unrelated to the current story).

Not all of those are likely to be equally useful to us as writers. For example, accurately reported details misunderstood may be very helpful to an adult investigator interviewing a child about a sexual assault (which is one of the major uses of CBCA) but your POV character is probably not going to be able to make use of this criteria very often. I’m reminded, though, of the first time my son saw snow. He was not quite one, and when the snow touched his bare skin, he said, “hot, hot, hot.” He’d never felt extreme cold before. I corrected him, of course, but first I felt the snow and was reminded that snow against your skin does feel a lot like a burn. If he’d been articulate enough to say, “I felt the snow and it burned me,” that would be an example of an accurately reported detail misunderstood.

Unusual details, though, are a powerful tool for writers. Harry Potter’s bedroom could have been a closet. Instead it was a cupboard under the stairs. In the different versions of the story I told about my house being burglarized, I lost, variously, “stuff,” “a camcorder,” and “my baby’s laugh.” The last is the unusual detail. It gives the story weight, makes the story stronger and more real.

Superfluous details can also be great, which may seem like an odd thing to say, given that we want to follow Vonnegut’s advance and make every sentence either advance the plot or reveal character. How can superfluous details do that? Well, it might depend on your definition of superfluous.

Let’s go back to the scene from A Gift of Ghosts. We left off with Rose, saying, “When I opened it up and that snake slithered out, I cried.”

Henry continues, with: “I went down to the springs and caught some brown snakes. Nice big ones, a couple feet long. Harmless, but easy to mistake for cottonmouths. Stuck ‘em in Tommy’s desk. When he opened his desk, you could hear the screaming half a block away.” Henry chuckled at the memory.

Rose smiled, too. “I wish I’d been remembering that snake when he asked me out. I might have thought twice.”

This entire incident—the whole memory of the past—could easily be considered a superfluous detail. It’s unrelated to the overall story of Akira and Zane, and doesn’t even have much to do with whether Henry and Rose should move on. 

But I spent hours of research time trying to find the right snake for Henry to put in that lunchbox. It felt important to me, even though I didn’t know why. Taking a closer look, I think it was worth it. The snake is a) a specific detail, that b) provides contextual embedding, setting the stage in the Florida swamps rather than the California desert, and c) includes interaction–action leads to reaction leads to action. And although it’s a seemingly superfluous detail, within the context of the story, it reveals character and a relationship between characters.

I could have told the reader that Henry loved Rose his entire life. Akira could have realized that and thought, “wow, he’s loved her forever,” and there you go. Instead, I showed it. That superfluous detail becomes a powerful demonstration of how far Henry was willing to go to take care of Rose.

So obviously, you want your weird, unusual, and superfluous details to be details that serve the story, not details thrown in at random—but they’ll make the story more plausible either way.

732 words in this blog post, so I owe myself at least a few hundred words of fiction now! Off I go to work on that. With any luck Akira will finally stop having tea with a ghost.

Filler words are words that writing blogs tell you to eliminate from your writing. Most of the time, it’s good advice. But not always.

Let’s start with some sample sentences.

If you need help, then ask for it.

If you need help, ask for it.

You know, I was going to write about interaction, but I’ve gotten totally bogged down in the way that “then” conveys emotion to me. Am I alone in finding that the first sentence contains exasperation while the second one is a simple statement? I can’t read the first one in my head without giving it a dose of impatient annoyance, while the second one sounds like a simple statement that could be delivered gently. And the only difference, of course, is the word, ‘then.’ Weird.

Ahem, but moving on, my point is that tighter writing is better writing and so most often, sentence #2 is the better sentence. The more filler words you can eliminate, the faster the read, and for today’s audiences, faster is better.

Except that interaction requires a reciprocal action or influence, a back-and-forth, and sometimes some of those filler words are good at making the relation between cause-and-effect clearer. Not always! But sometimes. Let’s take a look:

I tried to get away. He jumped in front of me. I turned and ran.

I tried to get away, then he jumped in front of me, so I turned and ran.

In the second story, the filler words show you the flow of the action, and how the actions influenced one another. In this case, (IMO) the more tightly-written story is not the better story. Some filler words are almost always bad (‘very’ comes to mind) but if the words you use enhance the sense of interaction in your story, of reciprocal movement, they may be worth keeping.

So, believable stories include interaction. They also include criteria #6, reproductions of speech. In other words, dialog. This is an important criteria, in my opinion, but also so obvious that I’ve got almost nothing to say about it.

A quick example:

We talked about what we wanted for dinner but couldn’t agree on anything.

I asked him, “What do you want for dinner?” but he said, “Oh, I don’t know, what do you want?” I answered, “Not again. Can’t you ever just choose?”

The latter is a more compelling story. To make your stories more believable, you should put words in people’s mouths. That said, in the example, I included conflict without even thinking about it, because conflict makes dialog interesting. A story where characters exchange several minutes of small talk might come across as true, but the truth can be boring.

Never let believable trump interesting. 🙂

Next time: Five criteria in one shot, because they all boil down to “weird.”

And days later… I finally show up again. Bad blogger, bad, bad, bad.

But I emailed my editor last weekend with a list of things that I intended to fix in my manuscript so that he wouldn’t waste time telling me to fix them and he told me he hadn’t started yet and gave the manuscript back to me to make the changes. Yay, yay, YAY! I made those changes and many, many more. Read the whole thing out loud to myself Monday through Wednesday—getting totally hoarse in the process—and finally sent it back him Thursday morning. I’m hoping he’ll still be able to get it back to me by June 1, but I’m definitely more satisfied with it, so that’s good.

So getting back to Criteria-Based Content Analysis– interaction, criteria #5, seems so obvious that I sort of skimmed over it in my original presentation about CBCA, But when I was thinking about writing this post, I decided maybe it deserved a closer look.

Two sample stories:

I came home and watched my favorite television show, Grimm, before going to bed.

I came home and chatted on the phone with my brother before going to bed.

Same number of details, same contextual embedding, so two equivalently true stories, right? Not if you’ve added criteria #5, interaction, to your toolkit. The second story should sound more truthful. For law enforcement, the subliminal reasoning might be that the second story contains a witness and witnesses make lies much easier to disprove. If you’re being deceitful, including other people in your story increases the risk that you’ll get caught.

But as writers, we don’t need to care about the subliminal reasons why interaction sells stories—the fact is, CBCA tells us that it does. A story where two people (or more) are interacting is more believable than one where a single person is on their own.

Doesn’t that seem weird, though? If I tell you, “I was home alone and I ate pizza for dinner,” why would that be less believable than saying, “my awesome kid was home for the weekend and we ate pizza for dinner”?

And yet—those two stories aren’t equivalent. One of them is a boring story, a “so what?” story. And the other is a Story. Okay, sure, part of that is the adjective, but even without the adjective, one of those stories makes you wish I’d stop talking (writing) and the other one makes you want to ask questions. (Well, maybe they don’t—I shouldn’t be speaking for you! But that’s how I’d react to those two stories!)

The difference between them is interaction.

Google defines interaction as “reciprocal action or influence.” I’m thinking of it as back-and-forth, cause-and-effect. Interaction is dynamic—movement by one causes movement by another. That movement can be concrete—“I pushed him so he punched me”—or it can be… well, less concrete. If your character says something and another character’s feelings get hurt, it might seem as if no action has happened. But it has. Action doesn’t have to mean explosions and drama–as long as you’ve got interaction, and reactions with weight, you’ve got action.

One of the books that I started this weekend was published by a small press. It was… well, some editor somewhere thought it was good enough to publish. And a list of people on the first page claimed to have edited, copy-edited, and proofread it. But it was unbearable reading. My stepmother gave it to me with, I think, a subliminal “you should try to find a publisher, look at what’s getting published!” message. The reason that it was unbearable, though, was because it lacked interaction, except in the most superficial way. For the entire first chapter, the heroine was alone. She had a brief conversation with a butler—which might perhaps have been her story editor saying, “you need a conversation here, something needs to actually HAPPEN in this chapter”—but the conversation didn’t work as interaction because it was irrelevant to the story. It wasn’t a reciprocal back-and-forth, cause-and-effect: he was just a stage prop, there to open the door.

And, OMG, it was tedious.

I sort of figured out the importance of interaction when writing A Gift of Thought. Dillon’s scenes were such a challenge. As a ghost who couldn’t really communicate, he spent all his time watching and thinking, and his scenes kept feeling flat and dull. I didn’t have an explanation for it at the time—I just concluded, “Don’t write ghosts who are alone all the time!” but now I know that what was missing was interaction.

One piece of advice given to beginning writers is to start as close to the action as you can. Newbie writers, including me, start in the car on the way to the important meeting. (A Gift of Ghosts, anyone?) Or waking up in the morning. Or at home making coffee the morning before the plane crash that changes the character’s life forever. We start before the action begins, when instead we should be dumping our reader into the action immediately. But finding out where your story begins can be far more difficult than it sounds to people who aren’t writers. We need to realize that what makes action is interaction: your stories are active when you focus on your point-of-view character’s interactions with other people.

But wait, you protest! (Or at least I did, when I was thinking about this.) Lots of great stories have characters who are alone. What about The Hunger Games? Katniss is off in the woods by herself. Except that she’s really not. The moments when she’s alone are brief: she’s fighting the others, meeting up with Rue, searching for Peeta, finding Peeta, getting caught by Thrash—she’s hardly ever alone. All right, what about Castaway? An entire movie about a guy alone on a desert island. Nope. He interacted with Wilson, the ball. That was almost the point of the movie. What kept him sane was interacting, even when it was just interacting with his imagination. My Side of the Mountain? Again, no. He’s interacting with the hawk, with the kid from town, with his visitors. The Old Man and the Sea! Honestly, I’d almost give this one to my imaginary opponent in this discussion, except a) he’s interacting with the fish and b) what an insanely boring book. It proves the point: interaction makes stories interesting. Lack of interaction makes readers enjoy pleasant snoozes.

Takeaway: if you want your writing to feel real and to interest readers, you will focus on interaction, avoiding ever leaving your characters alone and making sure that the interactions you write create cause-and-effect movement.

I’m not quite done with interaction yet. My next post (which will not be tomorrow, because R is graduating from high school tomorrow and might not be Sunday, because it’s his last day home before he goes back to Seattle, but will, I hope, be soon-ish) will take a look at how we express interaction and how filler words (so, then, etc) might not be as bad as conventional writer wisdom says they are.