From the Toolbox: Crying out Loud

A few weeks ago, I got involved in a truncated Twitter conversation with writer Robin Talley that went like this:

And so here I am (several weeks late) doing just that.

Writers, like folks of any profession, accumulate a collection of tricks and tools to help them in their work. A plumber will know how to fix a particular kind of clog. A writer will know how to convey a certain piece of story information in a dynamic and interesting way.

Some become so popular that they have names of their own (and entire books devoted to their usage), such as “the MacGuffin” or a “Save the Cat” scene. If I’m having a problem with a scene, I might move it to a more active location, or switch the POV, or perform some other trick that makes it come alive on the page.

A tool I’m particularly fond of is one I like to call “Crying out Loud.”

It works like this. You are trying to write an emotionally-charged scene. Characters are… arguing, or talking, or whatever. (For all values of “whatever.”) And the POV character thinks something rather powerful.

Fine. Okay. Not bad. But how much more powerful would that scene have the potential to become if instead of thinking it, the character actually says those words? The other character then has to respond (or not, which is its own drama and power).

Crying Out Loud accomplishes the following:

1) It deepens the relationship between characters: now they KNOW what the other person is thinking, and how it they would respond to it.

2) It forces change. Whereas before you could stretch the status quo out past the scene, you are now dealing with an entirely different situation. This moves the story forward.

This falls under the same  the writerly advice that posits that misunderstandings are false conflict and lazy writing. You know the old adage that stories aren’t interesting if everything could be resolved with a conversation? One way to find out if that’s true is to make the characters have that conversation and see if you’ve still got problems. If so, then you’ve got real conflict. And the reader knows it. So now, instead of the reader sitting there thinking, “Man, why doesn’t she just spit it out already?” She spits it out and has to deal with the consequences and the reader is thinking, “Whoa, now that he knows, what are they going to do now?”