Writing Challenge - Write to Your Opposite (SEX)

[robert walker]

THE PERILS of PAULINE IN THREE-PART HARMONY–

CRAFT COMPELLING FEMALE & MALE LEADS NO MATTER YOUR GENDER

PART ONE

To pull off the so-called “impossible” –getting into the head of the opposite sex and understanding from this point of view, surprisingly enough, surrounds elemental, fundamental reliance on a “woman OR a man of substance” that you embed and imbue inside the VOICE that you create for this character.

VOICE in any dramatic, commercial fiction relies on strong Active Voice over weak passive textbook, WAS/WERE-riddled voices (leave the qualifying voice to the politicians). These basic grammatical decisions (word choice, exorcising qualifiers for absolutes, using active verbs over passives and cripplingly slow helping verbs, and exorcising the verb to be) are the crucibles of language about which E.B. White wrote in The Elements of Style and supported by the fine book Writing Shapely Fiction by Jerome Stern.

Style comes out of extremely small elements you choose to make work for you—like any electrical plug in the wall. Or items you fail to utilize.

As small as the choice difference between say the word before and ago, maybe and perhaps, this is “shaping” voice. This “becomes you”--BECOMES your style. If you choose a folksy or shoddy or simplistic or complex or formal or informal voice, your reader will know it from the outset, and is normally willing to follow it, so long as this voice remains consistent and consistently believable. But a blowhard voice, a whining constant victim voice, or a wishy-washy narrative voice—no, nah, no way.

So is VOICE the single most important element of your story? Absolutely, and yet it is created of all the other elements and choices you make, from setting to dialect to no dialect to the difference between between and betwixt, leaped and leapt, or using a comma for a dash. I personally make a habit of using contractions, dashes, and mixing sentence types from simple to compound to complex to compound-complex. All my choices…all lessons we continually need to relearn with each book.

All good writing relies on the reader ‘falling for’ your Feminine or Masculine authorial\narrative voice, the point of view speaker, the mind you set your reader down into comfortably or awkwardly. If it is an ill fit, little wonder. The holy all of it is this: an author is a trick cyclist on the unicycle juggling twenty four plates in the air, spinning each ‘choice and decision and element’ at the end of long sticks all at once! Each plate, each stick, each prop is an important element, but they all culminate in the overall greatest EFFECT or illusion we writers create. The effect that your story has on the reader’s ear and mind’s eye. (A story is only as good as the lasting effect it has on a reader. Do you recall the details of your favorite child’s book?)

If I had said the writer is LIKE a trick cyclist rather than stating it as a fact, it rings a different bell, sends a different and less powerful blow. The use of LIKE and AS is terribly overdone in some “voices” in female-lead crime fiction. As are adjectives. As are adverbs. As is the use of passives, especially the WAS/WERE verb—a major killer of action and visualization. These mistaken choices riddle even a great deal of published fiction, and especially in the first person narrative along with the personal pronoun references to the narrator: I, me, my, mine, myself, often using the personal pronoun three and four times in a given sentence.

What a reader hears and pictures comes about as result of our giving him a believable SOUND in his head—along with images. The author’s voice, or the narrative voice (not always the same) or the character’s voice creates that sound. A “qualifying” character’s voice can be filled with qualifiers, but you are damned if your narrator or main character’s voice is riddled with qualifying, iffy, wishy-washiness. An absolute gives the same sentence the mental Kodak moments that look, feel, taste, smell, and sound like IMAGES. Images are made of this; they are not made of lines like: He was standing as if in a trance, and was soon climbing through a reddish fog that seemed to be lifting amid the treeline that almost acted as a filter to the sunlit Georgia hills.But rather: In a trance, Mick stood and climbed through a coppery red fog filtering through the Georgia treeline.

No, no no... It should read: He stood in a trance but momentarily climbed through the red fog that lifted amid the treeline that acted as filter to the sunlit Georgia hills.

These words of advice are excerpts from my how-to Dead On Writing which is a paper book at www.wordclay.com and a Kindle ebook at amazon.com

thanks - robert w. walker

[robert walker]

Jon - thanks for the alert; I wrote Crimespace here to ask if they could fix the darn link; I have no idea how this got tangled as I know no one in Russia or how such comes about. I kid you not.

[Jon Loomis]

Robert--the link on your homepage here sent me--twice--to a hot Russian babes site. Seriously. You might want to check it.

[robert walker]

Allie - read your story and aside from it being a charming tale, as I recall those nervous days on first date at that age, I think you captured the boy's POV perfectly. Well done. Hope you find a place for the story. I am impressed. The snow cones, popcorn, and roach all worked for me.

[Allie]

Here's a good short by a female writing a teenage boy:
http://www.fictionaut.com/stories/susan-tepper/cockroach

[robert walker]

are you going to the right site - www.robertwalkerbooks.com or are you just puttin me on? No use WW in middle as that is an OLD taken down site.

[Jon Loomis]

Hey, Robert--your website seems to have been eaten by one of those "want to meet hot Russian chicks?" spam sites. Which was interesting, but didn't contain the list of your published books I was hoping to find.

I write from both male and female POVs. The thing that works for me is asking my wife to vet the bits in female POVs; she's a fine fiction writer (way better than me), and a lot smarter and hipper than I am--so if she tells me I've screwed something up, I take her word for it. It's a great system.

[robert walker]

I do everything in my power to replace words like stuff, things, get/got with more meaninful words, more sophisticated words in general, and I do all in my power to cut down on the verb to be for an action verb. Was built by is not as active as GM built. But more importantly, when an author using first, second, or third person overuses any word to distraction, and WAS can certainly come into play twenty times in a pargraph if we allow it, then I get hives and cannot read on. Same is true of I...I..I Iyitis in using I througout a first person narrative; a writer needs to reduce the references BACK to I,me,my,myself, mine...me, me.me....else it begins to sound like home movies. The action verb has a mental image put up on the screen the reader watches in his head and aciton verbs can even carry sounds and odors for the reader to pick up on, Kodak moments I call them. Whereas what visual image or soudtrack or odor comes along with the verb Was or is or were or has/had? Are? No visual or sensual buttons are pushed. That is what I mean by active vs. passive and it take far more work on the part of the writer than narration riddled with helping verbs and passive constructions in my humble opininon

[I. J. Parker]

I have no problem with the men writing women and vice versa (my own protagonist is male). I was only commenting on the stylistic aspects. The voice business is, of course, quite different if you have first person narrative.

[robert walker]

General Motors built the cars -- is for me then. I write multiple POV. I need to be able to write from the POV of anyone on the planet. I personally am bored to death by middle class American monologue only narratives/and I believe you mis-read my inent in looking at men doing women, women doing men here. It can be done badly as in so and so's work, and it can be done well in so and so's work but it takes work.


rob

[I. J. Parker]

Nah. That's pretty simplistic. Many voices are possibly. And I do like "passive voice" confined to its proper grammatical meaning, that is the verbforms used when the subject is passive, as in "The cars were built by General Motors."