How to Write What's Not Written (Subtext)

Subtext: *tries to be invisible*

I've been seeing a number of stories lately that are lacking in subtext. And honestly, it's no surprise. writing subtext (or, I guess not writing it) is flipping difficult to 1) understand 2) do. I had read about writing subtext like over two years ago, and only now do I feel like I'm starting to understand it and have conscious control over it. So, I'm going to attempt to try to explain how to do it.

What is Subtext?

The best definition of subtext, in my opinion, is this: subtext is what's not said; it is what is implied. 

Remember my humor post from a few weeks back? I talked about how Lemony Snicket had a specific technique he employed for some of his humor. He states the obvious. And then strongly implies the un-obvious. 

So subtext is what is implied. Look at this example of it that I just made up:

Robert, not bothering to raise his hand, spouted out an inappropriate joke.

"Robert, I don't want to hear that kind of language in my class," Mr. Henderson said, but the ends of his lips twitched up. "That's very offensive." He failed to suppress a full-blown grin. 

Here, we can tell that the teacher found whatever Robert said funny, but neither he nor the narrator comes out and tells the reader that. Instead it's implied by his body language and behavior--what he doesn't say. What Mr. Henderson actually says to Robert is at odds with how Mr. Henderson acts.

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The Real Reason We Shouldn't Hide Our Talents

I had a realization last year that totally changed my perspective. Ready for it?

You always do more good in the world by sharing your talents.

Do you know why? Because the people who don't like your talents, the people who disagree with you, who don't think you're very good at what you do, who think your talent is stupid--they're just going to shrug their shoulders, maybe say a few things about it, and then be on their way.

But the people you do touch with your talent, the people you connect with, will be blessed because of you. You might inspire them to do something more, to be a better person. If nothing else, you've given them a moment of happiness and awe and enjoyment. You've made their life better, if only for a second, by sharing your talent.

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An Unsolicited Shoutout: James Duckett

Born helpless, nude and unable to provide for himself, James Duckett eventually overcame these handicaps to become a writer, a geek, and a lover of books.

Hey everyone! Once in a while I like to give a shoutout to some of my close friends in the writing world, and today I'm doing a special post on James Duckett. Why? Because he recently published his first book. Everybody celebrate! So, if you need an excuse to do something fun or a reason to make today spectacular, just remember, James Duckett has his first book out and you need to do something cool in his behalf.

His book, Pushing the Wall, is a memoir that follows the story of his first marathon:

What kind of idiot would run a marathon without training for it first? Me.

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Birthday Giveaway!!! Harry Potter, Sherlock, The Hobbit, Trigun, FMA

(This giveaway is now closed)

Fun fact: the more birthdays you have, the longer you live.

Today is my birthday! Yay!! I'm older than I've ever been!

To celebrate, I'm doing a pick-your-prize giveaway, where the winner gets to pick an item from one of my favorite stories. These are a few of my favorite things: Harry Potter, Sherlock, The Hobbit (but more than that, Lord of the Rings), Trigun, Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood. I tried to find a cool Hunger Games thing to giveaway, but had no luck.

Here's what the winner gets to pick from:

• Harry Potter Time Turner Necklace (Need a few extra minutes? No problem!)
• Trigun Decal (Meyaaaw)
• A key to 221b Baker Street--who wouldn't want that ;) --key chain, so you can entertain Sherlock when he's bored.
• (followers' favorite) Fullmetal Alchemist Pocket Watch (become a dog of the military)
• The Ring from The Hobbit/Lord of the Rings (Renders you invisible. Side effects include fleeing for you life from Ring-wraiths)
• A Dark Mark temporary tattoo (Become a Death Eater . . . temporarily)
• One of my favorite writing resources The Emotion Thesaurus. Learn how every mood is expressed physically, internally, mentally, and how it is suppressed, then learn how to write it! (This is an ebook copy, no a physical copy.) (I use this book almost every week.)

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Expand, Deepen, Create Motion: 3 Methods that Keep Details Interesting

Over the last six months or so, I've learned a few new things about writing scenes. Today, specifically I'm going to share some techniques that can tweak your scene here and there to make it more interesting and to keep it from going stale. They are, expand, deepen, and create motion.

As some of you know, I work for David Farland, so his writing tips and lessons obviously have an impact on me, which is why I make sure to mention him right there on the right-hand column of my blog. Well, one of his writing tips led me to come up with the contents of today's post. This is just like a little hypothesis of mine that has developed over the last few months.

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Picking the RIGHT Details

If you've been writing very long, you'll know the importance of mentioning details in your writing. Appealing to the senses and attention to detail is what will ground your reader and bring your story to life. Details often make it so that your reader experiences your story, instead of just reading about it.

So as writers, we might want to mention what a character is wearing, the color of her hair, the smell of a river, or the texture of a tent. Usually we want to tag our character's with a particular description. If you read Harry Potter, you'll know the Minister of Magic, Fudge, always has a bowler hat, that Dumbledore has twinkling eyes and half-moon spectacles, that Professor Trelawney wears shawls and smells like sherry. J.K. Rowling mentions the same details for these character regularly to tag them (or in a future post, I'll refer to them as "anchors"). It helps us remember who the characters are and reminds us of their demeanor.

But sometimes as writers we don't pick meaningful details. We just pick something. We might say that "the man wore a white shirt." Okay. But that's so generic, we might as well not even mention it. It's so generic, that the reader is going to forget it almost immediately after reading it. It's not even characteristically interesting enough to be a tag. So it won't even help us remember the character.

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Writing Relationships Readers Can't Resist: Crafting Duos, Trios, Groups

There are loads of resources about creating great characters. But when it comes to creating great relationships--the perfect tag team, the favorite couple, the best friends--the writing world is lacking. Whether your characters are romantic partners, coworkers, best friends, siblings, or what have you, audiences eat up a wonderfully crafted duo, trio, or group.

People love Sherlock and Watson's relationship so much, that there is an entire fan community that roots for them to actually be together. Agents Mulder and Scully from The X-Files fit each other so well, they inspired the term "shipping." I was once watching Harry Potter with someone who turned to me and said, "You know, I love how Harry, Ron, and Hermione work so well as a trio."

Some kinds of relationships would still be entertaining to watch if the whole story revolved around the characters going to the grocery store--their relationship is that amusing. (In fact, one of my favorite X-Files episodes is where Mulder and Scully have to go undercover as a married couple living a normal life together. It's hilarious.)

So how do you create a tag team that readers can't get enough of? Well, here are some things to consider.

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15+ Tactics for Writing Humor

A monster-length master list of over 15 tactics for writing humor, with examples from The Office, Trigun, Diary of a Wimpy Kid, Emperor's New Groove, The Fault in Our Stars, Harry Potter, Pink Panther, The Series of Unfortunate Events, Elf, Enchanted, The Amazing Spider-man, and more. Be prepared to laugh.

Introduction

I've been to a few workshops on writing humor, and I've read about writing humor, but the funny thing is, none of them really taught me how to actually write humor. But yet they all said the same thing: Writing humor is hard, harder than writing seriously, because if you fail at humor, you fail horribly.

I heard it so much, it made me fear failure rather than strive to develop that writing talent. For years I avoided writing humor, period. But the catch to that is that I also often hear how humor is a huge draw for an audience.

I read recently in Showing & Telling by Laurie Alberts that humor is hard to teach and that some writers believe it can't be taught at all. If you know these writers, send them to this post, send them to this post.

People think writing humor can't be taught because they don't know how to teach it. Some people can write humor, but can't teach it. They don't know how they are funny because it's just intuitive and natural to them. I was at one workshop on humor, and the only "how-to" tip they gave was that humor had to just come up naturally in the story. But professional comedians slave away and work their butts off writing their jokes, and then practicing them. That's not natural. Sure, some comedians do improv (Whose Line is it Anyway? was one of my favorite shows), so they're more natural, but I believe most comedians have to work to be funny.

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How to Break Writing Rules Right: "Don't Use Adverbs, Adjectives"

As I promised last week when I talked about using cliches in your writing, today, I'm talking about using adverbs and adjective in your writing. When it comes to breaking the rules for adverbs and adjectives, you've got at least five great reasons to do it. 1) The verb or noun you need doesn't exist in your language. 2) To control pacing. 3) To communicate interesting or unusual situations. 4) To create a specific tone or character voice. 5) The adverb or adjective is doing double duty.

What's the Rule?

The Rule:

Don't use adverbs because it weakens your writing. Use adjectives rarely for the same reason.

Why it's a Rule

Take a look at these sentences:

She laughed happily.

The yellow sun was beating down on us.

Jasper pulled hard on the door knob.

"Get your butt to your room right now!" Cynthia said, angrily.

I quickly put on my beautiful, silky pointe shoes and with my thin, spindly, little fingers tie the ribbons around my bony ankle, so they fit constrictingly. I walk awkwardly to the dark, dim wings of the huge stage. I think about one fun evening at a local theater where I lovingly watched a ballerina dance gracefully across the stage and into the soft air. Happy and thrilled, everyone there smiled with joyful eyes.

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Using Cliches in Your Writing: Why, When, and How

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Update on Writing Life

I was driving home from church and realized it had been a long time since I'd just done a blog post updating people on my life and endeavors and what's going on with me. So I looked on my blog and lo and behold, it's been almost a whole year since I did one of those types of posts!

I guess that's because I've been doing pretty much the same thing for the last year. That, and I just have so many other posts about writing and reading and thoughts on life that I'd rather put up. But I know some of my followers follow me because they want to know what's going on with me, specifically.

Well, I'll be honest, a better place to find that info would be on my Facebook . . . but I've also become much less active on there too.

But that's because it's better for me to spend time on writing stuff when I'm at a computer!

Got some new pictures done for a Christmas Present.

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Northern Lights, Daemons, and Soul Experiments: The Golden Compass

Is it Evil?

I've resisted reading Philip Pullman's The Golden Compass for years because of everything I've heard about it being "evil." Anti-Catholic, anti-religion, anti-God, anti-whatever. The author is a self-proclaimed atheist who I heard wanted to write a fantasy series that didn't deal with God and spirituality in the same way most fantasies do.

I should have known better than to let the fact that people said a book was "evil" to stop me. After all, most of my favorite books, like Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, The Hunger Games, and heck, let's throw the Book of Mormon in there, have been considered "evil" by one group or another.

Then in my college YA lit class, we received a template for one of our assignments and the template used The Golden Compass for an example. And I read that in The Golden Compass, people's souls lived on the outside of their body in forms called daemons, and the template posed the question, "But what happens when people try to separate a soul from its body?" The concept blew my mind.

Should I read it? I shouldn't read it. Should I read it? I shouldn't read it. I didn't know if I wanted to support a book that was anti-religion and anti-God.

But I couldn't stop thinking about it. In fact, I dreamed about the book and concept all night, and a few nights thereafter. It sounded right up my alley.

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Corny Quotes vs. Wise Quotes

Today's topic comes from my friend Michael. He says:

I like it when books have wise quotes that can apply to life in general. We all know them. Gandalf and Dumbledore have plenty. Have any of you put such quotes in your books? How has it turned out? I could imagine it turning out kind of obvious or corny if not done correctly?

I actually have thought a little about this topic. But I thought about it some more when I saw Michael's post, specifically about how quotes can become corny. I haven't come to a completely sound conclusion about how to write wise quotes the right way, but here are my thoughts so far.

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Resources for Writers, 2014

Last week I posted about the best books I found this year. Today, I'm listing all of the valuable resources I've found for writers this year. But first, I have a small announcement--I finally have an online alias! I've been wanting one for ages, but couldn't decide on a name I liked. So, it's now September C. Fawkes. I'll be switching the name of my blog over to it too. I'm switching the name on my Tumblr and Facebook. I had to get a new Twitter account, you can follow it here (I'll try to be more active on it than my old one, but no promises.) I've kept my profile picture the same to help with the transition.

Okay, here are this year's resources:

References for the Creative Process

Writers Helping Writers Thesaurus Collections

Last year I praised the Emotion Thesaurus by Angela Ackerman and Becca Puglisi, a thesaurus that lists all kind of moods, and ways to show them in writing. It's totally brilliant, and I still use it several times a week.

Well, on their website, Angela and Becca have plenty of other writing thesauri in-progress that you can access for free:

Need help describing your character's physical attributes? Don't worry, the Physical Attribute Thesaurus lists basically every physical attribute:

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