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Daily Archives: November 9, 2012

Set Pieces

Very similar to the ossuary under my house; except where this has skulls, candles and crucifix, mine has a water heater.

A set piece is a bit of description that doesn’t really move the story forward except to ground the reader in the location or give a physical appraisal of a newly introduced character. Set pieces can also be used, more rarely (and sparingly) for thematic tangents and rants. (Cough, Atlas Shrugged, cough.) Candidates for set pieces: 

– Locations

– Major Characters

– Minor (often Nameless) Characters

– Objects

– Thematic observations

You can write set pieces before you know where they will go in your novel. Let’s say that three important locations in your novel are going to be: the Ossuary, the Bedroom of Lady Astrid Kingwrecker, and the Hearty Wench Tavern by the docks. Before you ever write those scenes, you can start gathering relevant inspirational pictures, and then sit down and write a few paragraphs to a few pages of description. Go into extravagant detail. Describe smells, textures and sounds, even tastes, as well as sights. As many sensory details as you can. Also let your imagination meander to remark on previous events and free associations with this location. 

Do the same with the physical description of the characters. Describe their bodies, their hair, their eyes, their clothing, their fragrance, their stance, their tics, their speech patterns.
You can even describe a location that you already know won’t be in your book. For instance, you could describe your protagonist’s childhood bedroom, even if the book you plan to write is a Law Thriller that will take place in the courtroom and flashbacks to a crime scene in a rundown tenement building. The point is to gain insight into your character, not to use this description. If it shows up in your book at all, it might be a passing reference to his model airplane collection.

Another useful exercise is to have two or more characters, in particular the hero and the villain, but possibly also the best friend or romantic interest, describe the same place. If this is a locale in the novel and you have multiple viewpoint characters doing something here, you might even use these descriptions, but for now, don’t worry if it’s used or not. The point is to get a feel for the place and the perspective of different characters.

Set pieces work well to bring the five senses into your novel, and to enrich your setting. Set pieces can also encourage you to replace boring, cliche locations (or character types) with more uniquely realized locations and characters. If you’re writing a fantasy, you might find your characters served stew by a blowzy barmaid in a tavern. It’s a genre cliche. Take some time with your set pieces to brainstorm more interesting alternatives; or at least make your barmaid and tavern vivid and alive with unique details.
Just avoid the danger of falling so much in love with your set piece that you want to include every word of it in the novel, whether it fits or not. Be prepared to pare down or toss aside your set piece. It may or may not fit into any actual scene in the book. If you’ve written a three page description of the ossuary, with associated death histories of half the skulls there, don’t make the mistake of trying to cram all this into the book. Choose just a few juicy details to include. Sprinkle a few sensuous descriptions each time your characters are in the location, but don’t go overboard.
Do, however, keep all your set pieces. You might not be able to use them word for word in the book itself, but you may well be able to mine them for nuggets. 

Richer description should be more heavily weighted toward the beginning of the novel, when places and people are being introduced, and lighter toward the end, when the pace accelerates.

NaNoWriMo Tip #9: The Rule of Three

These are my personal tips for NaNoWriMo. You know the drill. Take only what works.
If you looked at your short story/synopsis or beat sheet and realized that it was too thin, that there wasn’t enough action to connect the beginning to the end, you might need more plot. There are several ways to thicken plot. I’ll discuss a couple different methods.
This is a quick and dirty method that relies on the oldest storytelling trick in the book: the Rule of Three. You can’t go wrong with this technique. It’s amazing how well this works, despite being so obvious. It must click with something deep in the human psyche. Jokes and fairytales and three-act plays all tap into the Rule of Three. The Rule of Three is, literally, storytelling magic.
You’ll notice that the Rule of Three is already embedded in my suggested short story/synopsis prompt. But if your plot is still thin, it’s worth giving deeper thought. Is the Rule of Three just another name for the Three Act structure? Yes and no. Yes, it melds well into a three act structure, but it’s a bit more specific way of thinking about your plot. You could have three acts of sitting around doing nothing. That’s not the Rule of Three.
There are three ways of employing the Rule of Three.
1.     Three Increasingly Worse Problems
First the hero confronts a henchman. Maybe he defeats that guy, but now he’s pissed off the Big Bad, so he sends his right-hand man after the hero. The hero defeats that guy too, and now the hero’s pissed, so he goes after the Big Bad and there’s a final confrontation.
2.     Three Increasingly Powerful (or Desperate) Attempts to Solve the Problem.
Think of the Billy Goats Gruff. There’s three goats, from tiniest to biggest. The first two barely escape the troll until finally the third goat is big enough to do the trick.
3.     Three Kinds of Problems
Another way to use the rule of three is to present the protagonist with three different kinds of problem. In Daughter ofRegals by Stephen R. Donaldson,  the heroine confronts an attempted rape, an attempted seduction and another type of attack from three different rivals to her throne. It’s a perfect use of the Rule of Three.
You can combine all three kinds of Three, as you show how both the antagonist and protagonist are increasingly committed to winning.
I admit, I fell back on the good ‘ole Rule of Three while I was writing Wing. The main focus of the book was on the changing relationship between Dindi and Umbral, but I needed something for them to do while their relationship developed. Since I wanted the fae to also be featured strongly in the book, I thought, why not have them face problems involving the lower fae, the High Fae and the Aelfae? That’s where I started. As the novel outline evolved, that changed to meet the story’s other needs, but at least I had something to start with so I wasn’t staring at a black screen.