Back in the Stone Age my professor at The University of Oklahoma, the late Jack Bickham, strongly advocated dissecting stories—your own as well as others—to examine them and learn what makes them tick. Jack called it, “lab work.” His idea was to use colored pens or highlighters to mark words and phrases to take apart and identify the techniques a given author uses in different aspects of writing.
For example, to analyze the way an author portrays a character’s internal viewpoint the student—YOU—might pick a random chapter and, say, highlight physical senses in Red, thoughts in Blue, emotions in Green, and intentions in Purple. Hopefully you would see a bright mix of colors, especially if you’re marking your own work. But a preponderance or absence of one or more colors likely indicates a problem.
No Red means the reader won’t be able to envision, experience, or put themselves into the scene. No Blue means the characters run around meaninglessly, with no motivation or understanding, and the reader will be lost. No Green would mean the characters are emotionless robots, and no reader would care. No Purple means no plot.
Who says my college education went to waste?
This system of dissection is a great tool to study all the various aspects of writing, whether as broad a subject as pacing or viewpoint, or as specific as writing a battle scene.
Bernard Cornwell is widely thought to write the best battle scenes in historical fiction. I wanted to know what made his so much better than everyone else’s. So I put this system to work, though over the years I’ve dropped the colors and simply use a pen to underline and write notes in the margins. Picking two of Cornwell’s vivid battle scenes, I dissected them line by line. What I discovered is that the master storyteller wrote almost to a formula: an action movement (say, firing a rifle), followed by a sensory perception (say, the sulphurous stench of black powder), and after every third or fourth such pairing, an inner thought or emotional reaction from the viewpoint character. By coupling the action with the sensory perception, Cornwell puts the reader in the scene the way no one else does.
Dialogue is an excellent object for dissection. Find an exchange you really love, dismantle it down to the various parts, and examine its minute pieces. Then do it again. And be sure to put the late Elmore Leonard on your list, because no one did it better.
DO NOT limit yourself to your favorite genre, or only to authors you like. Learn from them all! Great authors write in every genre.
Patricia Cornwell (no relation to Bernard that I know of), for me, is a prime example. I’m not a big fan of forensic “whodunits.” But I am a fan of hers. She dots every “I” and crosses every “T” a fiction writer should—in pacing, dialogue, viewpoint, tension, description, you name it. More than anything she writes great characters. Every single character—even the minor ones—have their own deep backstory of life and experiences that have brought them not only to where they are in the story, but also to their attitudes and views of themselves, other characters, and their surroundings.
Harlan Coben is another I’ve studied. Thrillers like his are exciting, but not really my cup of tea. What excites me more is the way he plants us in all his many settings, each and every time. Settings are basically an extra character in his stories—a skillset I long to match.
Anne Rice has taught me a great deal. She does write historical fiction, which is my genre, but hers are period mysteries, whereas I prefer (and write) action/adventure. (Historical fiction is a VERY broad genre.) Frankly, the pacing of her stories tends to be a little slow for me. Nevertheless her setting and description are stellar, the intricacies of her plots compelling, her scenes crisp, and her characters emotionally deep. She doesn’t settle for superficial emotions. She digs for the feelings that lie beneath the surface emotion. But she doesn’t stop there; she expands further into the character’s feelings that underlie and buttress even those. And she has one technique I’ve stolen outright. Her characters can look into another’s eyes and see the feelings bubbling underneath, from the surface level to the hidden, and occasionally even to the deepest, surprising emotions.
You can certainly learn what NOT to do by reading other authors, as well. A couple of years ago I read a period piece romance by Janet Evanovich. Whereas historical fiction incorporates actual people and events, a period piece is wholly fiction, set in an historical time and place. Evanovich is a famous, successful author with a horde of enthusiastic followers. Not me. While I enjoyed the setting and the story, her “head hopping”—switching viewpoints within a scene—were so numerous and jarring it almost made me seasick. She actually switched viewpoints, not just in the same scene, not just in the same paragraph, but IN THE SAME SENTENCE! A reader is hard pressed to identify with a point-of-view character when the viewpoint continually shifts. (It’s my impression that head-hopping and viewpoints by many or incidental characters are more acceptable in Britain than the US.)
Contrast that with Stuart Woods. Woods is a highly successful author (my mother’s favorite) who writes a very clean manuscript. His characters are strong, his pace fast. Certainly his viewpoints are clear and never shift. But his stories lack a theme, and—to me—have no depth. He relies on excellent wordsmithing and minute description of the upper class environment. Which is great, if you merely want entertainment. But it’s easily forgettable, and I want my stories to resonate, so the reader will think about them long after they put my book down.
My point of all this is, don’t just read other authors, study their work. All authors, good and bad, of every genre. Dissect their passages into their tiniest pieces and analyze both what they do and how they do it. Furthermore, study your own writing in the same way to eliminate shortcomings and enhance your stories.
And don’t ever stop!
