Timothy Johnson

Tag: Craft

  • Four (Argumentative) Questions to Ask for Better Storytelling

    A statue of Aristotle holding scrolls

    All stories are arguments.

    I know what you’re thinking. That’s a bold claim, and what’s a fiction writer doing talking about argumentation anyway? Well, I’ll have you know I taught it at the university level, thank you very much, but that’s beside the point (actually, no, it isn’t; it speaks to ethos, which is a fancy word I’ll get to momentarily). If you disagree stories are arguments, that’s okay. How about we let that particular statement stand for the time being? If nothing else, we can use argumentation as a framework to look at storytelling through a new lens.

    Aristotle, the great Greek philosopher (maybe you’ve heard of him), conceived of the rhetorical appeals (ugh, I know, booooooooring, but stick with me as I crash you through a rhetoric lesson). Those appeals are logos, ethos, and pathos. Aristotle envisioned three different modes any speaker or writer uses to appeal to an audience. He also conceived of a fourth, kairos, or the moment in which the speech or writing takes place, which can affect the speaker or writer as well as the audience. We also often refer to this concept as context, and especially in writing, we consider the context in which the writer is or was writing as well as the context in which the audience receives that writing, which can sometimes be extremely different. Aristotle also considered logos, ethos, and pathos as wisdom, virtue, and goodwill, respectively.

    Got all that? Good. Now how does it apply to storytelling?

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  • How to Develop Your Characters on the Page

    A doctor shows a patient a chest x-ray and points approximately to where the heart is located.
    “You see, your character’s heart should be right about here.” (Photo by Skintone Studio from Freerange Stock)

    My last craft post covered how to develop characters for your understanding as the writer. I’ve split this crash course in character development into two parts because characters develop in two main spaces. Well, three, actually: the writer’s head, the page, and the reader’s head. Your perception of your character is inevitably different than the one that exists on the page and is further invariably different from the one that the reader comes to know. I won’t be going into readers’ heads because that would be presumptive and rude.

    In my previous post, I made another critical separation. I split you planners and pantsers into your respective groups, and I gave the former a whole heap of questions to consider in your logic-centric minds. For the latter, I gave you some tips that almost resemble exercises, and they are focused on helping you get the feel of your characters. For both groups, it all was work for you to do for yourself, work intended to pour the foundations for your characters so you could write from a place of intentionality instead of wandering and wondering what the heck you’re writing about (an affliction that plagues us all, I promise).

    Now, let’s look at developing your characters on the page for the reader’s understanding. How does character development actually work on the page anyway?

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  • How to Develop Your Characters off the Page

    A black cat reaches out to touch a human finger in a reference to the Creation of Adam painting
    Photo by Humberto Arellano on Unsplash

    Last time I wrote about craft, I directed you to the starting line. In that post, I wrote superficially about getting to know your characters, kicking off the plot, building your world, and the search for information. Someone asked me about developing that stuff, and I realized I’d glossed over it. I’d told you it was important work but took for granted you’d already done it.

    Oops!

    So let’s talk about character development. When we talk about character development in a story, we typically refer to the ways in which that story develops its characters on the page. How do the characters develop for the reader? What does the reader come to learn and understand about the characters, and how do the characters change through their arc? What story does that arc tell, and what significance can the reader derive from it? Those are questions I won’t be addressing in this post but will in a later one. This time, I focus on developing your characters off the page for your understanding. How do you create a character so that you understand and know them well enough to then insert them into a story for the reader to meet and follow?

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  • Finding Your Story’s Starting Line

    Track athlete in a light blue track suit crouching at a starting line and preparing to run
    Photo by Gratisography / Ryan McGuire from Freerange

    I was on a panel once that was taking questions from the audience, and a guy raised his hand and asked how to know when to start a new chapter. He said he’d written hundreds of pages, and it was only chapter one. A silence fell over the room as the audience waited with rapt attention and those of us on the panel had no idea how to respond to that. Without seeing that guy’s manuscript, I was certain his problem was he hadn’t found the beginning of his story yet.

    To the guy’s credit, he’d started writing his novel, and that’s admirable. Moreover, he’d started doing the work, and that’s progress.

    I don’t remember how we, the panel, responded to him, but the point here is, again, without seeing that manuscript, I would expect to find pages and pages and pages of world building and information about characters, places, customs, traditions, etc. That stuff is important, but it’s not the story.

    Finding the starting line is a very common problem for us writers because we are (and this is true—unless you’re using generative AI, which is bad and I’m going to get to someday) human beings, and it’s natural for human beings, when beginning any creative process, to search for information. Even legal cases start with a discovery process. As storytellers, we begin by asking questions like, Who is this person? What is this place? We build a foundation.

    I’m here to tell you, while that stuff is incredibly important and you need to work on it because everything rests on it, the story starts elsewhere.

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  • How I Define Bad, Good, and Great Writing

    A book lays open with some of its pages folded over to create a heart shape.

    In my last post, I wrote about some practical tips and approaches for writing better prose. Then someone asked me about the qualities I think make writing good or even great. It was an earnest question, but the question, itself, is a bit of a trap, I think.

    My tips, generally speaking, will be broad or even unbearably mechanical. Some might consider them vague or esoteric. Others might consider them unhelpful.

    Without turning this post into one about creative writing pedagogy, I think it’s vital to grant writers the space to be themselves, to explore their own tastes and desires in literature, to become the writer they were meant to be not the writer the world thinks they should be. (I acknowledge there are writers who want to write to market, and that’s great, but I’m not the best teacher for those writers.)

    Which is to say I’m never going to tell you what to do. I’m going to try to guide you toward figuring that out for yourself.

    So when I was asked how I see the lines between bad, good, and great writing, I felt a little wary of defining bad, good, and great writing for others. I think saying the lines between them are subjective is a bit of a copout, and I think it’s wrong. I think we can define good art, though importantly, I think the bar for what constitutes good art should be set perhaps shockingly (to some) low.

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  • Practical Tips for Writing Better Prose

    A frustrated man at a typewriter with many pieces of crumpled paper nearby.
    Photo by Andrea Piacquadio, Pexels

    I think it’s important to know your strengths as a writer. That way, you can embrace them and lean into them but also challenge yourself to grow in other ways.

    One of the most common pieces of positive feedback I get is about my prose. It’s nice to hear, because I’ve worked very hard to develop that as a strength.

    Now, I’m not claiming I am the best proser that ever did prose. I’m simply saying I think my ability to construct a sentence is one of my strengths. I have many weaknesses. Believe me, no one knows my weaknesses as a writer better than me.

    I attribute some of my prose acumen to one of my other artistic loves: music. There was a time in my life when I considered myself a musician, and for many reasons, I shifted focus to fiction. However, I think the time I spent studying, composing, and thinking about music tuned me toward the melody of words. Some writers struggle with voice and tone in their writing. Those are elements that come naturally to me. I often tell people I can’t write a character until I hear them speaking to me. I usually get a funny look for that, but it’s true. Every character, at least the way I write them, has a voice, a musicality that gives their personality color. Once I hear them, my job is to help readers hear them, too, using text. That’s the goal, anyway.

    I do think some writers are naturally inclined toward writing good prose. Writers are, and this is true, people, and every person has natural abilities. That isn’t to say I believe in the “it” gene for anything, really. I think everyone can write good prose if that is what they want from their writing.

    What are your strengths? What are your goals? How can you leverage your strengths to achieve your goals?

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