Write Like A... Designer

When I was in college, we did a play called A Chorus of Disapproval and it was designed by a fabulous designer who trained in England. The play involved a play within a play. A group of amateurs in a small English town put together an awful period piece. 

One of the most significant pieces of the design was the enormous false proscenium arch, which for those who don't know, is sort of the frame of the stage. 

There were other scenes, too, that didn't involve the community theatre within the story of the play. Now, how do you hide the enormous, pale green proscenium when you want the scene to take place in someone's house?

The designer explained, you focus red light on it, and it melts away. 

The moral of this story isn't exactly the application of color theory to draw the audience's attention away from the hulking pros, but that sometimes there are things your story requires, but that you don't want your audience paying attention to because it will pull them out of the story. 

Invisible Fly Lines

When you go to see a stage production of Peter Pan, you know there will be wires holding Peter up as he soars across the stage. Unfortunately, it takes a little more than faith, dust, and pixie dust to get a person off the ground safely. But no one goes to Peter Pan expecting spontaneous flight. You know there are wires. The trick is having the audience so engrossed that they forget they're their at all. And part of the trick is not drawing attention to it. Keep the lights from shining off the cable, playing music over the sound of the rigging. 

And don't hang your actor from a glitzy, shining boa. 

You wouldn't attract attention to a structural requirement, so why do authors insist on attracting attention to their structural requirements?

By this, I mean the elements your story needs to make sense to the reader: dialogue tags. They serve a purpose as important as a safety line. Without them, your readers don't know who is speaking. The trick is designing a story that distracts from all the structural, necessary elements of your prose. 

The argument over 'said is dead' or 'said is all I use' is eternal, but what said is an invisible word. It becomes so bland that your eyes scan right over it, processing that a specific character is talking, but not jarring the reader from the narrative. It's as invisible as Peter's fly line. And that's a good thing! Said, asked, and replied are invisible words. No one notices them. When you start to use words like BELLOWED and ENUNCIATED in a well-meaning attempt to mix up your vocabulary, what really happens is you're pointing a big old sign at the mechanics of your story. The magic is gone.  

There are occasions when a said alternative is necessary, but never feel the pressure to use a different word every time a character speaks. 

She Felt a Hand...

Over-excited dialogue tags are not the only culprits of nasty little mood-breakers running amok in your story. There are other nefarious little words keeping your readers from diving head first into your character's story. 

They are: I looked, I felt, I heard... and almost any other word associated with a sense. Particularly in the case of first person, what these words do is remind the reader that they are reading a book. It's the difference between following the narrator around and being the narrator in that moment. 

The upside of these little parasites is they are the easiest thing in the world to remove. I felt the brush of a ghostly hand on my shoulder. I watched as the goosebumps rose on my skin SO easily becomes A ghostly hand brushed against my shoulder. Goosebumps rose on my skin. Easy as that and it's already better. 

I looked out the window, seeing the blue birds fluttering on the wind is better as Out the window, blue birds fluttered on the wind. When you are living in the protagonists thoughts, we see everything they see. When there are blue birds fluttering on the wind, we know the MC sees them because what the MC sees is the only thing we see. There's simply no other option in first person and the same is true for limited third person. The only case where the character might not see the bird is in omniscient narration where the narrator sees and knows far more than any character in the book. 

But as a general rule, see if you can't cut out those weasely little 'looked's and 'felt's out of your book, trying to remind your readers that your MC is a being of make-believe. Some are necessary, but a lot more are not. 

The Devil in the Details

Not only is the designer's job to draw attention away from the mechanics of the method, whether a book or a play or TV, it is, of course, their job to build the world. 

We've already talked about settings and characterization a great deal. What we haven't talked about too much is directing attention. The designer may be responsible for telling a story without words, but they also have to be conscious not to step on the toes of any other important aspect of the world. 

I used to stare and stare and stare at the monitor in the middle of a shooting day on a TV show looking for anything that drew my attention away from the characters. I wanted things to look good, but I also wanted the audience to be paying attention to what was really important. Maybe it's a plot point that the MC always has flowers in their house, but in TV, if the characters are sitting on the couch having a deep conversation and the angle is juuuust the right way so that the flower vase looks like it's sticking out the back of the love interest's head... the audience might not be paying enough attention to the heartfelt conversation going on. 

It just doesn't work. Don't be drawing attention to the setting when more important things need to happen. In TV, the first thing you see in a scene is the master or an establisher: it shows you the lay of the land, lets you know where the characters are. It usually only lasts a couple seconds before the shots move into coverage on the characters. A lot of that does translate to books. You set the scene and then move into the real meat of it with conflict or dialogue, focusing back in on the characters. 

On another note, be careful that all your details add up to the picture you want to create. On my TV show, we had an ex-soldier character. We built him this trailer and put together all the pieces of this guy--and then the truck another department picked for him rolled up with a shattered mirror and blacked out tail lights. After we put so much effort on building a visual backstory for this guy, the truck rolls in and says 'this is the kind of guy who blacks out his tail lights'. I was livid. Likewise, I once read a story from an instructor of some kind. The student wrote this story about a poor family, but the story described the teenage boy a very specific brand of basketball shoes. The instructor came back and said 'this boy is selfish' and came to that conclusion because the boy had these shoes and a room full of other nice things, but the family was supposed to be struggling. So, the boy must hoard all his money to buy sneakers while his family rations meals? 

All your small details need to work in with all your other pieces to build an uncontested image of the qualities of your world and your character. Every word is taking up space and should speak something about your story!