When you’re having trouble with a certain craft element, one practical way you can try to get through it is by reading an author who has perfected that element in their work. Whereas a craft text can sometimes seem technical, cold, and confusing, there is something about really seeing it play out on the page in a writer’s work that you admire. I’ve started to collect a list of authors and their gifts here, in hopes that it will give you and me both a map for when we are lost on the sometimes deserted island that is being a writer. I’ve broken it down by five elements – voice, pacing, character, setting, and plot – and paired each with an author whom I believe is a master of this element. I hope that you will share in the comments who your north stars are, and together we can build a lexicon.
Voice
In order for an author to be identifiable by the voice in their work, it must be distinctive, recognizable, and consistent, all the while still finding ways to surprise the reader. Voice is just one element, but it does an incredible amount of work, setting the tone and atmosphere, and working with the point of view to draw the reader into the world of the story. The trick with voice is that it often seems effortless – which means it was crafted with painstaking effort.
One master of voice is Portland author Chelsea Bieker. Both her debut novel Godshot and her short story collection set in the same world, Heartbroke, are Bieker-branded. Using a signature cocktail of wordplay, surprising descriptions, and a twang that jumps off the page, Chelsea (instagram here) paints a striking and raw portrait of fictional town Peaches, California.
Here is the first sentence in her collection, from a story called “Mamas, Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Miners”:
“Now I didn’t know a thing about mining when I got into it with Spider Dick one night working at the Barge.” Heartbroke, page 3
She starts the story, the first of the collection, almost mid-sentence, like the reader has asked the narrator a question and the narrator is mid-musing. After a sentence like that, who would stop reading? You have to know everything – who is Spider Dick, what is the Barge, and say what about mining?! Having such a strong voice lead the reader into the story means that we’ll follow whatever out of this world thing the narrator says, because the text is full of intriguing detail, and it doesn’t over-explain.
Take another example, from “Cowboys and Angels.”
“I had me a cowboy once on a hot steam Friday night, on a hot go all the way time, just us together in his truck with old “Angel from Montgomery” playing way turned up. I wanted that cowboy but he had eyes for another, some slack-jawed Sally from the next town over, daughter of the dairyman. Me, I’d been out turning grapes as far back as I could remember but by then I was fixing to marry and I had long red hair down to my waist and I was one sunburn away from old age. After our first intimacy I wanted that cowboy to come to his senses and I decided he had about a week to do it before I’d tell his future bride all we’d done together, how he’d kissed me each and every place and we was one before the Lord and in the eyes of God we was already married and she ought to step aside and abide by our blessed salvations evermore.” Heartbroke page 61.
This tells us so many things in such a short paragraph – the narrator is in love, or in lust with a cowboy that doesn’t technically belong to her. He’s in love with someone else, and the narrator is jealous. She and the cowboy have been intimate, and she wants to hold that over his true love’s head.
A less skilled writer would have written that straight out – “I was in love with that cowboy, but he wasn’t in love with me. So I decided to trick him into sleeping with me, so that I could claim he’d stolen my innocence, and make his betrothed jealous. Then he would have to marry me, and I would win.” Or something like that. There’s nothing wrong with this, and not every writer has the same strengths. But the person who wrote this would have to have other strengths besides voice to keep the reader interested.
Let’s take a look at how Chelsea describes a part of town called Cadillac Flats. The name alone evokes such imagery – a once promised land turned “bad” part of town. Without being told, you know the people who named it had such big plans that never came to be.
“Cadillac Flats was a slum at the edge of town, a danger zone, a place where the walls were coming down, where the people drank sewage water and babies crawled around snot-nosed and crying, in charge of their own days.” Heartbroke, page 181
Through voice and word choice, the narrator paints a picture of despair and no-man’s land. “A place where the walls were coming down” evokes crumbling buildings, and the mind’s eye can see the babies crawling around, dirty and unattended. Bieker doesn’t need to tell me that the parents are working two jobs just to stay alive, and that’s why the babies are snot-nosed and crying. The voice, the word choice, the few sentences that do the heavy lifting, tell me the larger story.
Chelsea is an incredible writer overall, but what has drawn me to her stories again and again is the voice. I trust her, and so I will read her work blindly, not worrying if the plot is something I would normally be interested in. The words are captivating all their own.
Listen to Chelsea talk about writing on Otherppl, a great podcast by Brad Listi.
Pacing, Profluence, and Reveals
Another captivating writer is Anna Dorn. Anna’s premises are intriguing on their own (Vagablonde is about a slacker attorney turned rapper hooks up with a group of drug dealers and misfits; In Exalted, an instagram tarot reader’s life collides with that of a down-on-her-luck waitress), but what she is even better at is pacing, profluence, and reveals.
I will do my best to be as vague as possible, but there are spoilers ahead. Please read with caution!
Pacing is, in my opinion, one of the hardest parts of writing to master. Pacing is about intuition, and knowing when to stretch out a situation, and when to make it go so fast the reader thinks they hallucinated it. Dorn’s books take off at a gallop – every chapter, every sentence is brimming with new information and scenarios. There is no time to get bored, her characters are self destructing every moment.
She also uses perspective to keep the pace up. Since the chapters alternate perspective, it makes you want to read further – because at the end of each chapter there is something that happens that makes you want to read on – and if you want to read that character’s next chapter, you have to read the other’s first.
For Dorn, pacing and profluence meet like crashing waves. Profluence is anything that keeps the reader in a state of flow, wanting to keep going and find out what happens next. Cliffhanger chapters can be an example of profluence. You want the reader to find it almost painful to put in their bookmark and walk away, because they just have to know what comes next. Anna always gives just enough information to make you wonder, but never enough to answer your questions until she is ready to reveal.
In Exalted, we know that Emily and Dawn are going to be connected in some way. Dorn builds this up from the very first pages. She gives a lot of hints along the way, but there are always twists. The reader is a detective, following clues and building a case. Throughout the book, Emily ruminates on a crush she has on minor character Beau, who also appeared in Vagablonde (you can read the books in either order). In the opposite chapters, Dawn thinks about her son, Bo. If you have not read Vagablonde, the connection is less apparent. But if you have, you’re clued in right away that something interesting is going on. Either way, you’re in for a treat.
There is another coincidence, having to do with a tea shop called the Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf. Dawn, on a smoke break from work, stares around at the suburban shopping center her employer is located in when she sees “a familiar figure – a figure [she] will never forget […]It’s Bo’s father.” (Exalted, page 155). Later on, she finds the driver’s license he dropped inside the tea shop. A bit later in the novel, Emily meets her dad at a coffee shop, where they discuss her career and she writes an article about astrology. Throughout all of this, the coincidences are growing, as is Emily’s obsession with Beau.
As we make our way toward the climax of the novel, Emily finally consummates her desire for Beau. I had assumed that Dorn would have shied away from this and given myriad excuses as to why the characters would never hook up. By this point I had figured out who Beau really was, and I was devastated for him and Emily, and angry at the life circumstances that had led them to this point. The plot grossed me out – but Anna Dorn’s willingness to “go there” made my admiration grow.
If you are having trouble with pacing or pushing yourself to go further or get more vulnerable with your work – not to shock, but to be true to the characters and their story – reading Anna Dorn will surely help you. As for me, she is an automatic read now that I know I can trust her with a good story and impeccable craft.
Character
When Mary HK Choi’s first novel, Emergency Contact, was coming out, she said in the New York Times that she had “wanted to write a book where high-key nothing happens.” And while it may be true that her stories don’t have giant, century-spanning, multi-timeline plots, the simple backdrop of her novels lends to her true strength and heart as a writer-character.
One way that Choi writes such incredible characters is that they have incredibly observant, funny inner monologues that tell us what they see in the world and how they process it. What someone notices or thinks about is what’s important to them. What’s important to them is who they are.
Yolk specifically features an honest and beautifully written relationship between two sisters (and their parents), and she does a fabulous job of writing each character as a whole individual, which is part of what makes the relationships and interactions work on the page. Here, Choi tells us a lot about the dynamic between somewhat estranged twin sisters Jayne and June through Jayne’s ruminations on their names.
“You could be twins,’ says everyone when they find out that June’s name is Ji-hyun and that mine’s Ji-young. “Both your names are Ji.” As if anyone would ever name twins the same thing. Nobody would do that. Not even sadists.
Mom and Dad thought June would be easy for an American name. It’s basically a portmanteau and it’s a breeze to pronounce in Korean and easy to say in English. For June, Ji means ‘meaning,’ rather, ‘purpose.’ And the Hyun means ‘self-evident.’ It’s a strong name. No wonder she’s had Columbia banners on her wall from infancy. She’s known what she wants since in utero.
My Ji means something else. That’s a thing with certain Korean families, that siblings’ names have the same first syllable. Homonyms. My Ji’s not as good. It means ‘seed.’ It’s diminutive. I’m a fleck, a crumb, a mote of something but not my own thing: It sort of reminds me of the way people are named in The Handmaid’s Tale. I’m Ofmyparents. OfJune.” p128
You can tell that Jayne has thought about this a lot, and it’s affected the way she sees herself within her family dynamic. Jayne as a character wants to be different and independent, but she feels completely tethered to the way it’s always been, and she can’t get out of the trap she’s built herself through the stories she tells herself. She cannot escape comparisons to her sister, because she is “of” her sister – she would not exist without her, or so she believes.
A few pages later, Jayne gets to the heart of it:
“There’s no need for a mnemonic device to distinguish you from your sister when the difference is so apparent. With sisters, like twins, there’s always a better one. Around our house and certainly at church, June’s and my assets were public knowledge to be debated right in front of us. June’s grades. My hair. The paleness of my skin. June’s coding camps. My lissome limbs. Her accelerated math courses. With us, there was a smart one and a pretty one.” p.130
Now we are getting somewhere – Jayne admits that she believes June is the “better” sister, and the way she tells us she believes it shows us so more than what is on the page. It’s clear that, maybe without intent, their parents and elders have placed them into roles, and the girls have been performing these roles for so long that they believe it’s all real. Jayne can’t be smart if she’s the pretty one. June can’t be pretty if she’s the smart one. And if they choose to break out of their assignments, how will their family relate to them, and them to their family?
There is a plot here, but it melts away. The reader is able to sink into the story because they empathize with the characters, and feel their pain and their delights. In another book by Mary HK Choi, the superb Permanent Record, we are introduced to Pablo, a bodega worker. The first thing he tells us is,
“I don’t care what any of the assholes I live with tell you. I don’t work at a bodega. It’s a health food store. Says right there on the sign: M&A JUICE BAR DELI ORGANIC GROCERY CORP.
Whatever. It’s implied.
In any case…” p1
From there, Pablo goes on to justify why where he works is a health food store and not a bodega. Because Bodega’s suck, right? (Bodegas do not suck.) Because he is feeling classism around his employment, and his lifestyle. From the first page, we start to learn about Pablo’s financial woes, and how he sees himself because of them. So it’s not a surprise when later, he lies about being in school, because he doesn’t want to seem inadequate to his new friend. And even while we are facepalming, we the reader understand, because we’ve spent so much time inside Pablo’s brain and the minutiae of his daily life, that we get it.
All of Choi’s characters elicit this kind of empathy, because they’re so vivid and real. You care about what happens to them beyond the page, and it keeps you invested in her books. Her writing makes me itch because I want so badly to claim it as my own. If your professor, or critique partner, or anyone reads your WIP and tells you they’re having trouble connecting to the characters, I implore you to read Mary HK Choi. Any of her novels will do, but you’ll want to read them all.
By the way, Mary has her own podcast, on creativity and mindfulness. You can find that here. I also really love her interview on First Draft with Sarah Enni.
Setting
One of my favorite authors in the entire world is the brilliant Mona Awad. If she writes it, I will read it. Her novels Bunny and All’s Well have me in a chokehold. Her candy-coated worlds are so sweet until you take a bite and discover the taste of rancid, spoiled milk. I can close my eyes at any moment and be inside Ava’s house in Bunny, or inside the Canny Man bar having a drink, or reciting poetry with the bunnies at Smut Salon.
Her novels take place on the precipice between Wonderland and Zombieland. Nothing is ever as it seems. Her settings are lush, and evoke all of the senses. While her ethereal way with words leaves the reader floating, the settings help ground us in time and place… sometimes. Because a lot of the time, the setting is time, is an in-between, is a portal to another world.
Here is a rather straightforward setting from Bunny. The main character Samantha has been invited to the Smut Salon, taking place at Kira’s house. Here is how Awad, through Samantha’s eyes, describes the house:
“I look around her bedroom – the walls lined with her many typewriters, her various prints of fairy-tale wolves and mythical creatures, an altar that is billowing a strange-smelling smoke.” p80
So now we know that Kira is a writer, which is obvious if you’ve read the book. But now we see a little bit more about her – she likes to live in a fantasy world of her own making, and surround herself with the romantic archetype of “fairy-tale wolves and mythical creatures.” This is the private place of Kira, the heart.
Here is a scene that takes place in her living room – where a person would have company, a less private extension of the self.
“The room is spinning. Kate Bush is still singing “Wuthering Heights.” How long is this song any-way? The disco ball turns uselessly above our heads. I take some huge sips of punch.” p84 Bunny
Kira employs a disco ball, or a mirrorball. She wants to be seen as a shimmery, shining thing. She’s put out fruit punch for her guests, ever a good hostess. Compare this to the home of Ava, Samantha’s best friend:
“In some ways it’s as though I never left. As though I was always here, lying on her dark silk cushions, staring up at the tapestry of one-eyed birds perched among the twisting vines, holding her Drink Me flask filled with mulled wine in honor of the season. My feet sinking into the faux-fur rug that caresses my heels like so many soft grasses. In this living room that smells like a thousand old frankincense sticks, always a new one burning. The scent of her rain perfume lingering in the rooms like a thread I can’t help but follow. The turntable playing tango or some weird French sixties stuff that sounds exactly like the music you dream of but can never find. The lady-shaped lamps lit all around us–more than ever before, it seems, were there always this many? The red velvet curtains parted. In the window, the serious moonlight shines in a way that it never shines where I live.” p219 Bunny
The description of Ava’s home is more full, because Ava is more important to Samantha than anyone else, and Samantha has spent more time with Ava than any of the other friends or foes in the novel. Similar to Kira’s fairy-tale posters, Ava has a tapestry of “one-eyed birds perched among the twisting vines,” which evokes Ava’s eyes – she has one blue and one brown. Her rug “caresses [Samantha’s] heels like so many soft grasses.” Samantha feels at home, sentimental, in the presence of Ava. She is able to “sink into” her home rather than simply observe. I love the description of “weird French sixties stuff that sounds exactly like the music you dream of but can never find.” When I read this, I know exactly what she means in my heart. It’s a faded sense, on the tip of your tongue, just beyond your clutches. Nostalgia for a place you’ve never been.
Awad’s other novel, All’s Well, is equally visceral, although the characters and settings are vastly different from those in Bunny, even while sharing similar motifs. All’s Well follows Miranda, a chronically ill theater teacher who longs for a way out of her pain, and finds it (or does she?) in the back of a dimly lit bar. Here is how the bar is described:
“I’ll Never Smile Again” swelling on the jukebox. How appropriate. Makes me misty. Makes me dreamy. Maybe just the pills, the alcohol. Wasn’t supposed to mix. Mixed anyway. Too late now, Miranda. Enjoy the ride in this misty, misty room with its dark red walls. Room suddenly seems redder somehow, is that possible?
Lots of animal heads on the walls, I notice now. Stags. Black goats.
Regarding me with their glassy black eyes that glint. Never noticed that before.
[…] It’s just me here now. At this high table for two by the bar. My hands cupped around my empty drink like it’s a flame about to go out. […] Sounds like soft rain, moonlight on moving water. […]
I need a drink, but all the waiters seem to have disappeared.
How did that happen? Are you guys closed or open? Hello? The lights are still on, though they’re dimming, dimming. “Stardust” on the jukebox now. Nat King Cole and his bewitching voice.
Louder than it should be. Is this a trick? How the light keeps dimming? How the light’s gone out everywhere except at the bar. Just one bartender behind the bar now, a man, pale-faced and wearing a pirate shirt. There are a lot like him in this town. Probably reads tarot cards to tourists in his spare time, though I can tell he’s not the sort to predict that all will be well. He’s the sort that tells them terrible, thrilling fates. And they actually tip him more for this. I’ve seen it.” p36-37 All’s Well
All of our senses are provoked by this passage. We see the animal heads on the wall, we feel woozy as the faint taste of alcohol dances on our tongues, we feel the glass in our hands, we hear the music, we see the lights dim. Awad gives not just the right amount of description – enough to keep us engaged but not so much we get bored – but she also gives us the right kind. The kind that wakes up our senses and places us firmly in the world of the story.
Later in the novel, Miranda visits the same bar.
“I park outside the entrance to the Canny Man […] There’s the carved wooden figure of a suited man hanging just above. The Canny Man himself, I guess, swinging in the wind from his metal hook. I never noticed him before. My head was always bent too low, I suppose. I was too eager to go inside, too bowed down with pain, too desperate for wine. How many skies and suns did I miss that way?
Inside, it’s dark and dead as usual. Some nothing music play-ing. The usual couple of tables occupied by the usual lone souls.[…] I walk up to the bar now. Long walk. Farther away than it seems tonight. I walk and I walk and it feels like I’ll never reach the bar. It feels like I walk miles down the dark red room to get to the end. The floor beneath my feet sloping downhill, then uphill.[…] I pass a sign written on the blackboard with white chalk.” p221 All’s Well
Through the sight of the sign, Miranda awakens to all she had missed before in the stupor of her illness. When she walks, “miles down the dark red room” we walk with her. She takes us along with her through her descriptions, and we have no choice but to follow, even feeling the ground underneath our own feet.
Awad may not write incredibly likable characters. In fact, her characters are often self-involved, and unkind. However, through the settings of her worlds, she asks us as readers to dig deeper and read beneath the surface. How do the places we spend time in affect our inner worlds, and how much of that can we really control? And once you involve the body – in Miranda’s case, there is chronic pain, and in Samantha’s there is the literal creation of bodies – the reader is forced to see, feel, taste, touch, and experience the world as the characters – and therefore develop an altogether different kind of empathy for them than we feel for, say, Choi’s characters, who are more sympathetic and well-meaning.
Plot
VE Schwab has been publishing since she was in college, so it doesn’t come as a surprise that the majority of her novels are intricately plotted and masterfully crafted. Published about a decade into her career, in October of 2020, The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue begins in 2014, then takes us back to 1698, and covers many years in between following the same character. The reveal of how she’s come to be immortal (and forgettable) is a slow burn. But one day, we meet someone who remembers her, which shocks us into a new series of events.
Something I love about Schwab’s plots – and something this novel in particular does exceptionally well – is that past and present are always dancing, melting into each other. And it never feels like whiplash. Our memories, our thoughts, our feelings, are non-linear. So why couldn’t plot be non-linear as well?
Like many authors, Schwab explores similar themes throughout her body of work. Addie LaRue shares themes with Gallant, for example. But yet all of her stories, while together they make a whole picture, are all unique and self-sufficient. Something they have in common for me is that her stories tend to reach out from the page and have a supernatural grip on my heart as I read. I can get lost in her books for hours, staying up late and waking up early to get to the end of the story, because I have to know… Schwab writes such intricately plotted stories that read like spiderwebs translated into words. She can write about pirates in magical lands who can master the elements, shadow spirits that are capable of procreating with humans, and girls who make deals with devils to be invisible – and all of it is masterfully plotted.
While I won’t be sharing quotes from The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue (how can a few [albeit beautiful] lines really show how to plot?) I would like to share a resource. Schwab has an amazing outlining method she has spoken about at length, and it’s incredible how she marries her wild imagination with her organized, down to earth plotting and outlining.
I understand that not everyone is an outliner, and I’m not here to tell you that you must be a plotter in order to succeed, although for me, plotting does come with a lot of room for surprise and enchantment. However, even for the staunchest pantser, I think there might still be some relevant information that will add to your understanding of plotting and writing in general.
Throughout the video, Schwab breaks down her unique plotting process that she calls the “Story Corpse,” working from the “bones” (initial scene list) of the story through the “makeup” (the prettification of the words!). Essentially, she starts with the most basic plotlines of the story (the initial ideas popping into her head of where things could go) and then, pardon the pun, fleshes things out from there, adding layers to each beat, until she has a fully formed body that is basically a zero draft.
What I love about this method is that it’s easy to understand and take the parts that serve you and leave the parts that don’t. I’m one of those writers who gets frustrated, for example, when the prose that’s flowing on the first draft or so is not beautiful. Schwab gently reminds us (and it’s been my own experience) that a lot of what we write in the first draft gets thrown away anyway. So as painful as it is, it can be a timewaster. But beyond that, it’s a way to build a story up when it seems so daunting.
I highly encourage any writer who has about 40 minutes, even non-consecutive, to watch this lesson and see what you learn! In addition to this educational video, Schwab puts out a monthly newsletter in which she often talks about her writing process. I believe that the newsletter is only in email form without a landing page to view past posts, so I highly recommend subscribing now! (It’s free).
For any of the elements discussed, there are so many wonderful authors whose work I could have chosen, and of course, all of the authors I did choose have many skills beyond the ones discussed today. But as I said in the beginning, it’s my hope that we can start to build a lexicon of where to turn when we feel lost as writers. I hope this article has inspired you, and given you new authors to explore, or old favorites to read with fresh eyes. I implore you to check out any or all of these from the library, or pick up a copy at your local independent bookstore. Happy reading, and moreover, happy writing!