Advice for a Prospective Novelist
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148.46544
Summary
In this episode of Arno's Insight, I discuss how to be a good writer by breaking down my advice for aspiring novelists into three points: 1. Write about what you know. 2. Live an interesting life. 3. Do research.
Transcript
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This episode of Arini's Insight is brought to you by Brandon, who asks,
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what would your advice be for an aspiring novelist?
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And he actually goes on to break it down into more specific questions, which is excellent.
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But we can just get to those as we go through the video.
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Now, the very first topic, to be a good writer, you need to write about what you know.
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So, if you're writing about stuff you don't know anything about, you're going to be basing
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And quite frankly, movies and television are very unrealistic.
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The reality is with film is that even though we experience it as reality, to the point that
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TV Tropes even has a page about how reality is unrealistic because guns don't sound like
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they do on TV, cars don't squeal their tires constantly.
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And the way that things are filmed has more to do with the realities of being on a set
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and having cameras around and having to do stunts that look really good but aren't too
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It has more to do with all of that than it has to do with realism.
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You know, for one thing, there's the knockout blow.
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In reality, if somebody gets permanently knocked out from a fist fight, they need to go to a
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They are in dire, dire need of medical attention.
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And another one is simply how flashy and Jackie Chan the fights look.
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A real world fight, and if you watch UFC, especially the old stuff, you'll notice this, in the real
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But if you're a writer, and you've done some sparring, you've done some wrestling in high
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You can write the scene of the characters getting into this non-flashy, non-Jackie Chan fight,
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and you can make it interesting because you know the experiences.
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You know what it's like to be straining, to be feeling the pain of it all, that blinding
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flash any time you get hit in the nose, for example.
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If you're writing a book, however, and you write about that blinding flash, the white and
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black sparks that you see when you get hit in the nose, that's not funny all of a sudden.
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If you haven't experienced something, you just can't write about it all that well.
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So, focus on what you know, which leads to the next point.
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If you want to be a good writer, live an interesting life.
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Now listen, all of those formulaic cop shows and all that other pablum that comes out of
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Hollywood writers are the sort of writers that don't leave very interesting lives.
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So they just write the same tired, derivative stuff as the rest of Hollywood.
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You want to actually write passionately and descriptively.
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You want to bring people into a world they haven't seen before.
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Go rent a cabin on a transport ship and go visit Europe.
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Whatever it is you're interested in, go do that stuff.
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If you want to be a good writer, you need to lead an interesting life.
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Like, there's going to be scenes in your books where it's going to be something...
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Inevitably, you're going to run into something you don't actually know anything about.
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And just trying to get a real-world experience of that is unfeasible.
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For example, imagine you have a scene in your book where there's some terrorists in a nuclear power plant.
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How many of us have ever been in a nuclear power plant?
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You know, like, maybe you could feasibly go and, you know, talk to somebody in a nuclear power plant.
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You know, if there's a gunfight and that gets punctured, what would actually happen?
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You know, you cannot write a novel without doing a lot of research into just all the little bits in the background.
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Because if you have a reader that does know about that and you screw it up, it's going to make you look like an idiot.
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Now, almost inevitably there is going to be somewhere that that happens, but you want to minimize that.
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Live an interesting life so you know a lot of stuff worth writing about.
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And research the stuff that you're not familiar with.
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I'm going to break this one down into three points, too.
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The technical, the characters, and the dialogue itself.
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When you're writing dialogue, the last thing you want to do is end every statement with,
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Bill said, and then Joe said, and then Bill said all over again.
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So, one of the techniques I use, instead of saying, he said, or he shouted, or he screamed, or he whispered.
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Because there's only so many variations of the word said.
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Is, I'll have a character make a statement and follow it up with, Bill smoked his cigarette.
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I'll do that to offer environmental description.
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It's identifying who said the sentence, who's speaking, so that the reader doesn't lose track.
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And, second of all, it's giving you a mind's eye picture of what's going on.
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Without you having to write a bunch of clunky expository dialogue explaining what they're doing.
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If you put these subtle little cues throughout the dialogue,
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you can absolutely skip having to have a paragraph of environmental description.
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And, also, with the technical thing, when you're reading,
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and, of course, maybe this should have been the first point of advice.
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Don't worry about, you know, that it's going to ruin your idea.
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But, while you're reading, look for clunky dialogue.
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Look for sentences in your favorite author's book that kind of jump out at you.
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And, think about how you would rewrite those to be a little bit smoother.
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Because, I guarantee you, every book you are going to find bits that you could improve on.
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The next aspect is that you need to have good characters.
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Some of the bad writing I've seen has, it has dialogue that is purely in service to the plot.
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But, it's almost utopian dialogue, where there's, in real life, when two people have a conversation,
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they're both coming into it with different goals.
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Even if you're just talking to your roommate in the morning, you both have different goals for the conversation.
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Now, as the author, you have a purpose for this dialogue.
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You want it to lead to them becoming an adventuring party to go slay the dragon.
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But, that's not how the characters are thinking.
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The characters each have their own goals and motivations going into it.
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And, the utopian dialogue that just perfectly serves the plot is the most boring, terrible, driest thing that you will ever read.
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Because, dialogue, ultimately, stories are not about the plot.
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What's hard to find is a writer that can write real characters.
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That can really make them pop out of the words and sentences and become real.
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You know, it's like, science fiction, we explicitly read for the ideas.
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Even there, the good science fiction has characters that are larger than life.
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That, that we can feel them breathing through the pages.
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You need to understand, you know, like, look into Freud.
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You know, what are the hidden motivations people have?
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What, what are the, their secrets, their biases?
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They're, are they grumpy right now, because it's early in the morning?
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You know, think about people in your own life, and how they would respond in these situations.
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Don't ever have a character do something they wouldn't, just to serve the plot.
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And the third point on this, once you have real characters, and once you're, you're writing
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good, good dialogue, um, good, uh, technical dialogue, is realize that your characters are
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going to be different in every situation, in every conversation.
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And this is actually a good advice from Orson Scott Card, which is just brilliant.
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Um, you are not the same person when you hang out with your parents, versus when you hang
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You are a slightly different person in both scenarios.
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A, a dialogue is created by the two people, a meshing of both their personalities.
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So, when you write this dialogue, make sure that it's unique to who they're speaking to.
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And if you really nail this, uh, a reader, familiar with your characters, would be able
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to figure out who was speaking, even without having to see the names.
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So, yeah, so for characters, for writing dialogue, one, vary, vary the words that you use.
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Uh, number two, you need to really know your characters.
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You need to know facts about them that aren't even going to come up in the story.
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Make them real people with their own goals, their own desires, fears, etc.
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And three, make sure that they change somewhat depending on who they're talking to, the same
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All right, now the next question that he was asking is, how do you motivate yourself to finish
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And, you know what, I'm going to address myself right now because I need to finish the sequel
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But I finally got myself into a stable situation again.
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And honestly, what this boils down to, it's Stephen King's advice.
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So what you need to do is figure out where you like writing, where it is that you get
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the best energy flowing, what allows you to produce truly good content, and dedicate yourself
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You know, like for me, it's very late at night is when I'm at my most creative.
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And so set up a schedule, dedicate yourself that at this portion of the day, I am writing.
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And so sit yourself down in front of your computer, and if nothing comes to you, nothing
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Because if you sit there for long enough, you will eventually start writing.
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If it's garbage, you can throw it out tomorrow.
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Dedicate yourself that I am sitting here for an hour or two hours in front of the computer,
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Because remember, if you don't finish your books, your characters, they just disappear
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And the final question was, how do you improve as a writer?
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And it all boils down to finding somebody who's willing to critique you.
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There's lots of different writing communities on the internet.
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And if you go into them and say, like, listen, people, I want you to criticize my writing,
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And accepting critique as a writer, as any sort of artist, really, accepting critique is
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Because it all, like, it's such a personal thing when you put yourself out there and write
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a story, that any sort of criticism just feels like a personal attack.
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You know, sometimes you have to ignore certain opinions, but hear them out.
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Figure out where they're coming from and why they're criticizing your work.
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Being dedicated to actually writing and accepting criticism when it comes.
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Live an interesting life so you know a lot of stuff worth writing about.
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And research facts for anything you don't know about to make your story as realistic as possible.
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And make sure that their conversations are unique to them.
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These are not perfect people that say, hey, you want to go out tonight?
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They don't know where the conversation is going.
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Well, we've got three more Arini's Insight videos on the docket.
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They're all pretty, very related to one another too, which is cool.