I often think that the kiss, rather than the sex scene, is the primary romantic force of the romance novel. For me, a sex scene is emotional, sure, but for the most part shows up as titillation for the reader. The kiss, though, is where the love comes from. A kiss can tell you a lot about how two characters feel for one another, how they approach this strange new thing between them.
And there’s nothing quite like kissing someone for the first time — the leading up to it, the uncertainty, the raw delight and aching tension in the “what if” and the “when.” If a book just brushes past the first kiss to get to something ostensibly more sexy… well, it just makes my little heart break a bit. That there is a missed opportunity to make your readers really feel the investment your characters are putting into this thing.
Here are some examples of my favorite kinds of kisses:
The slow approach. I mean really slow. Sam and Jill’s kiss in Gilliam’s Brazil? Fantastic. And my shame when it comes to loving the kiss-before-the-reveal in the 1995 Sabrina? Epic. If it takes two people five minutes just to close the distance, I am weeping with joy by the end of it. This works better on-screen than in text, I think.
The unexpected kiss. Yes, this is somewhat in contrast with the above. I first discovered my love of this many years ago in Rosemary Edghill’s Turkish Delight, when the female lead is ranting about something (perhaps English weather?) on the back of a horse, and immediately following the end of an impassioned speech from her, the next line reads, “He kissed her.” This works absolutely best in text, though on-screen is no slouch.
The kiss everyone is pretending means something else. My absolute favorite example of that right now is from Sophia Coppola’s Lost in Translation, when Bob and Charlotte (both married) are on the elevator in their hotel, returning to their separate rooms, and they’re both pretending that wanting to touch, wanting to be together, isn’t why they’re kissing goodnight — even though they both know it is. (4:10 in this fanvid shows a little bit of what I mean.) It’s awkward, it’s a little bit wrong, and it’s fooling no one, but you can feel every second of it on your skin.
Kissing as seduction. This would seem pretty straightforward, but think about it — usually you get stuff like “witty conversation”, “deep spiritual connection”, “shared history”, or, you know, “mutual feelings” as the way to get characters to fall in love. And those are all great, don’t get me wrong. But sometimes, I just want there to be kissing. Kissing for bad reasons, like bets, and kissing for no reason, like an empty terrace and boredom. Kissing because someone’s there, and the character just really wants to kiss someone. Basically, I want all the characters to be wearing the shirt described here when the book starts. And then… it becomes something more. Maybe it’s a really good kiss. Maybe it’s all a lot less boring than everyone thought it was going to be. Maybe it was an awful kiss, and everyone backs away and says, “Whoa, what? What happened there?” — and has to think about what they’re doing. Mary Jo Putney’s Thunder and Roses has kissing thrown in to shake up a bet; the heroine just wants to get through it without embarrassing herself, and the hero just wants to see what happens if he messes with her. That entire book (and a lot of Putney’s works, come to think of it) basically becomes an ode to “kissing is awesome”.
Finally, the memory of kissing. It’s not a kiss that happens onscreen — it’s the kiss that happened years ago that no one can forget. The kiss that’s been built up and worried over and made huge (sometimes even when it shouldn’t be) — the kiss that dulls every kiss after it, because nothing can compare. With movies and television, I like little sudden flash-cuts of hotness in the middle of mundane activity. With fiction, though, I like a good solid wallow. I want every detail, and then I want to know exactly what made this kiss the one that’s stuck. Everything builds from that. Yum.
So: Kisses! Those are my favorites — what are yours?
Here, have some really straightforward, practical thoughts about plots and plotting. Of which I have way too many, btw.
(Previous nuts and bolts caveats apply, naturally. Assume I have so many thoughts about this stuff because I’ve fucked it up pretty often.)
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1. A short story is a single idea, examined or played out. (Movies are also short stories. This is why turning books into movies leads to tears.) Figure out what your “idea” is – or the goal of your story, or the point you’re trying to make, whichever terminology floats your boat – and aim toward that without wavering.
2. Your plot and your characters go hand in hand. They inform each other – if you have one, you have the other. It’s one of the ways that storytelling is the least like real life. The entire plot might as well be a metaphor for whatever issues are going on in the characters lives – but once you realize that, you can use that fact to reverse-engineer your characters or your plot if you’re stuck without one or the other.
3. Frequently problems with plots are just problems with structure. Go find your favorite book (or rather, your favorite book that is most like the kind of book that you’re trying to write) and break it down, section by section, until you’ve got something really basic like “meet-cute” and “things go bad” and shit like that. Then see if you can’t just drape your plot right on over that structure like a brand new Sunday suit.
4. It’s okay to borrow structures. It’s okay to borrow stories, for that matter. Plots can come from a lot of places. “Write what you know” clearly meant “steal every anecdote in England” to Chaucer, and he became the father of English literature, so.
5. Middle sections of books are terrible. They just are. Everyone wants to give up. This is the number one reason to have an outline or at least a game plan, oh my god. You want to see some hope of a way out, because the middle of a book lasts twice as long as the end of infinity.
6. To that end, once I’ve got some characters and a vague idea of what I want to do with them, I like to put together a list of “adventures”. It’s just stuff I’d like them to do during the course of the story. Sex scenes, car chases, dress fittings, amusing adventures with food, anything like that. Just stuff that I think would be fun to write, and that I know I will need to fill the endless fucking wasteland of the middle of the book.
7. (Those adventures? Should reflect the issues of the characters. Because characters and plots are the same thing. See point 2.)
8. For short stories, have an end point to aim toward, along with a general emotional zone to wallow in. I had a short story whose working title was literally “and then somehow, making out,” which was indeed the end point I was aiming at. The emotional zone I wanted to stay in was fairly light with some emotional dips into heavy stuff for contrast. But mostly what it said on the tin.
9. For books, writing the last scene right at the start of your process is sometimes nice, because it gives you a sort of mark to aim for. (You can always rewrite it later.)
10. Try to capture some really vivid mental pictures of strong scenes. Add those to your “adventure” list, or, better, just write them down. It doesn’t have to be perfect – if you want, just bro it out like you’re describing your favorite badass robot move from Pacific Rim to someone who’s never seen it. At that point there are barely any characters, there’s just the broad sweeps of movement across the page.
+1. Remember: You are the god-king of the book. If worse comes to worst, have a plague of shrews suddenly appear and make your characters deal with it. You can do anything! If you don’t know what to do, do anything. It’s better than doing nothing, and frankly, if it doesn’t work, at least you’ll have written something. You can always delete it tomorrow.
+2. No, seriously, I was writing a book and I could tell there needed to be some kind of big turn in the narrative (because of structure!), and I couldn’t think of what, so I literally wrote down a list of random shit I could make happen to the characters. Just because I could. That list included:
set house on fire airplane explosion hunting accident heatstroke
I was willing to set a house on fire, possibly by having a plane explode on it, just to get my characters doing something for another twenty pages. And the best part was: All I had to do was write the consequences, and add some foreshadowing, and I’d get away scot-free. The perfect crime. GOD-KING, Y’ALL.
When building a spear, what matters: you, building or the spear?
At the recent FSNNA conference (were you there? Did we meet? If you’ve been there, the panel recordings and the discussion space is still available for a week.), Katherine Crighton, Dr. Naomi Jacobs and Shivhan Szabo introduced an online game where you can create new fanworks for your blorbo for the newest fannish sensation: Blow the Man Down. The catch is, this fannish sensation is not a TV show. The story is reverse engineered through the fanworks created for it, but in a sense, it doesn’t exist. Your blorbo also doesn’t exist. My blorbo is real cool, though, their name is Bogdán.
When it comes to fannish creation, there are some key theories to reference. Participatory culture is one, we also talk about gift economy, affective labor; can they possibly explain why we are able to act fannishly when there isn’t even a canon to be fans of? Are we experiencing real feelings for a fake blorbo because we participated in their creation, committing to this silly man? Or is it because of the nature of the work, we used fannish practices to create them, which is inherently affective? Or is it, as the presentation already points out, due to the spear theory: we build our blorbo by piercing many blorbos through and that creates our type? I dare you; play the game and let us discuss our experiences. Or if you’ve ever gonched, what did you think of it?
Awesome little write up of a project I did with coauthors Dr. Naomi Jacobs (Lancaster University) and Shivhan Szabo (York University in Toronto)!
(I, meanwhile, was representing the Interactive Media and Game Design program at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, where I’m currently pursuing my MFA– which is a post for a whole other day.)
We presented at the Fan Studies Network North America 2023 panel discussion “Transmedia and Remediation”. Our talk in particular “Faking and Re-Making: The Use of Emotional Responses and Creative Resonances in Communal Multimedia Storytelling”, described the imaginary works Goncharov (a fake mafia movie that developed organically through meme culture) and Blow the Man Down (a fake pirate TV show that was intentionally developed and managed as part of a larger ARG), both of which do not exist but nevertheless have developed real fandoms around very scant “canon” details. By studying the development of these fandoms in parallel, we outlined a replicable method for encouraging audiences to collaboratively self-create their own canon, resulting in authentic emotional investment and fan engagement in nonexistent media.
By playing a pirate trying to regain lost memories of their captain and crew, the audience can experience one method for inviting collaborative play and fan development of an imaginary work. Building the Spear is available free to play; players are welcome to visit a linked slideshow version of the FSNNA presentation, read a more in-depth introduction to the principles being demonstrated, or skip directly to the game, after which they are highly encouraged to publicly share their final results and further expand a fake work’s real fandom.
My new-canon pirate blorbo? I thought you’d never ask:
Because I just did this, here you go: Some simple ways to start a story, particularly if you don’t know what you want to write about, but you know you need to write something. (For money, for practice, for mental health, for whatever.)
Standard caveats apply. 1. The reason advice looks contradictory is because it literally is different for everyone — shit that works for one person won’t work for someone else. Just stick it in your toolbox and move along. 2. I will say obvious shit that you already know. Because it’s possible somebody else doesn’t. 3. You may totally disagree with anything/everything I say, oh my god, that’s fine.
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1. A line of dialogue. Particularly one that makes no sense, so you have to then have a second character explain it.
“You said what to the Queen?”
—Instantly you have to answer who said it, what was said, why it was scandalous, who the queen is, what she’s queen of, and who actually spoke the dialogue. Getting all that exposition in gracefully is at least 150 words right there.
2. (All of my points are going to boil down to variants of point 1, so, you know, grab a soda or something.)
3. A sudden burst of action. A nice explosion, maybe, or someone getting knocked unconscious unexpectedly. In medias res is always a pleasant place to start. You’ll want to start with a brief sentence that makes the reader empathize with whatever you’ve decided to blow up, and then destroy it in the second sentence, as that’s more fun.
“The Manor had been in the Candleford family for generations, a bit more curly-topped and hodge-podge than most stately noble homes. It burned for three days before anyone could put it out.”
—Now explain how that happened, or what happens next, or who’s affected, or who did it.
4. A vivid description. This one can be a bit tricky, as it can all too easily go on too long. I’d stay away from vivid descriptions of landscapes or weather or other (dare I say it) fairly boring things. Corpses — those are fun. Terrible kisses. A really interesting tentacle that maybe is touching something else that’s about to become interesting because, hey, tentacle.
“The running shoe was worn along the edges, and had a rubbed patch in the heel. It was pink and grey, and the laces were still tied, clearly toed off after a return to the house. The inspector stared at the shoe that lay on its side on the landing, and wondered where the other one was.”
Once you’ve got a couple of sentences of vivid description, stop and backfill with exposition — why are we seeing this thing? Who’s seeing it? What are they going to do with this information? As you can see, I couldn’t help but add in the inspector looking at the shoe — it just sort of starts to fill itself in.
5. A terrible secret that you don’t want anyone to know about yourself. Writing is frequently auto-cannibalism. You take parts of yourself and you write them into your stories to make them real. So if you need to write something, and you’re not sure what to write, dig out one of your secrets and give it to a character.
I wrote a horror story (still haunting some editor’s slushpile [eta 2023: it was bought!]) about the weird urge I had when I’d had abdominal surgery to dig around in there afterward — I didn’t actually follow through in real life, but I decided to write a story about a character who did. Use first person POV if you have to, but it’ll definitely get something on the page.
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+1. After you’ve got a story going, you can go back and delete whatever you started with. Nothing says you have to keep what got the motor running.
+2. If you’re interested, my sentence for this evening was: “It would be a bit much to say that the kiss was magical.”
A friend of mine awhile back asked the aether for some practical, straightforward writing advice, which I assumed meant nuts and bolts stuff.
This is what I ended up writing to her.
(Caveat emptor: 1. The reason advice looks contradictory is because it literally is different for everyone — shit that works for one person won’t work for someone else. Just stick it in your toolbox and move along. 2. I will say obvious shit that you already know. Because it’s possible somebody else doesn’t. 3. You may totally disagree with anything/everything I say, oh my god, that’s fine.)
1. Use the word “said.” Throw in a “she declaimed” every once in a while if you like, but don’t do it all the time. Feel free to put in no dialogue tags at all, if it’s clear who’s speaking. But “said” is free and generally invisible to the reader (and the goal is to not remind the reader that they’re reading).
2. Writing advice for short fiction and writing advice for novels are and writing advice for one genre versus another are all going to tell you slightly (or wildly) different things. So, you know, watch out for that. I suggest switching mediums entirely, and try reading up on screenplays or three-panel comics.
3. Stick your finished draft into a Kindle or some other robot reader, and have a mechanical voice read the story to you. It’s a step removed, and you’ll hear where it clunks. Make notes as it goes.
4. If you don’t have a robot reader, read it out loud to yourself. Actually out loud. Put check marks wherever you cringe. It’s where the reader will likely cringe too.
5. Start your story at the point of change. It’s more interesting. Backfill with exposition a couple of paragraphs later.
6. Sometimes, if I’m writing a one-off, I pick a motif and stick with it as a lodestone for all my descriptions. It’s a way of creating a sort of subliminal mood and atmosphere for the reader, while at the same time maintaining a nice sense of continuity.
7. The English language likes to hear things in threes. Three bears, three nights, three wishes, and what with one thing and another, three years passed. English also likes iambic pentameter and any other rhyme or rhythm scheme it can get its hands on. Readers want language to both have a pretty meaning (three brothers seek their fortune) and a pretty sound (now is the winter of our discontent). The fastest way to do this, and not have it be totally obvious, is to combine the two. Have three lines of description, three examples of something, three jokes — and do it semi-regularly. It creates a rhythm in your work, like a heartbeat. Study other people’s stories and see if you can find where they’re doing the same or similar things. Count stuff.
8. Then, later, fuck with your readers by breaking the rhythm. Stop the heartbeat. Miss the step. The reader will get nervous and uncomfortable and have no idea why. Makes for good tension.
9. Other things that make readers uncomfortable: Set dressing. We’re used to visual mediums. If you want to set up a really uncomfortable scene, describe key things around it going in, and make it clear that it’s Not Okay. A pair of scissors that have been left half open. A door that is not entirely shut. A radio caught between two stations, the garden hose still left running. Nothing overt, nothing obvious – just stuff that feels uncomfortable to read. Do enough of those in a row, as you head toward a confrontation, and the reader will be a ball of avidly reading tension by the end of it.
10. Graphic sex scenes are equal to action scenes. In both instances, know where everybody is, and what everybody’s doing. Describe with more physical action than you think is necessary. If the reader doesn’t know where everybody’s limbs are and what tools are being used, then they’ll get confused and bored. You can always edit later.
Something different for me: I’ve coauthored a poster/presentation (“Faking and Re-Making: The Use of Emotional Responses and Creative Resonances in Communal Multimedia Storytelling”) with Dr. Naomi Jacobs and Shivhan Szabo that’ll be presented tomorrow, October 15, at Fan Studies Network North America 2023!
It’s connected to my overall recent move toward academic pursuits (that I should, uh, really write a post about…), but a big reason to drop in to this virtual conference if you have the chance is that our “poster” was invited to be multimedia… so, naturally, we decided to write a text game:
Folks who attend the conference will have first shot at reading/playing “Building the Spear,” where:
The year is 1718…
…And this is the world of Blow the Man Down, where clever pirate captains Olivier Levasseur and Sam Bellamy, each pursuing the same vast treasure of Spanish gold, meet up and—through storms, enemy fleets, and their combined delight in codes and hidden messages—eventually fall in love.
You, though, are just a simple pirate who’s woken up in a strange place—and with no idea who you are or how you got there. Through your choices, you piece together your memories…and create your own place within the BTMD universe.
(For those who listen to the No Story Is Sacred podcast, we talked extensively about Blow the Man Down there as well, including its origin as an element in an alternate-universe game.)
Naomi, Shivhan, and I intend to link the game-poster and presentation publicly afterward, but if you want to see yours truly live (and have a chance to share your game results early) FSNNA 2023 is the way to go.
things haunt, joshua jennifer espinoza // giovanni’s room, james baldwin // through me (the flood), hozier // flowers in the attic, v.c. andrews // i am in eskew, jon ware // anatomy,kitty horrorshow // the haunting of hill house, shirley jackson
Katherine Crighton 