By Ken Farmer
Storytelling is as old
as mankind itself. It has evolved from petroglyphs and hieroglyphs to stories
around the campfire and finally to the digital era. That evolution has also had
several side effects…attention span and discerning tastes.
Today’s reader wants his
information delivered in a succinct and efficient manner…get to the point and
don’t play games, thank you.
Now as far as fiction
goes—and that’s what I write—the first thing an author has to be aware of is
the suspension of disbelief. That means or is defined as a willingness to
suspend one’s critical faculties and believe the unbelievable.
In other words,
how do you suck the reader into the story so they perceive it as real, no
matter how implausible?
It’s called storytelling.
If the writer himself doesn’t see, hear, feel, taste and smell what’s going on
in a given scene…he can’t expect the reader to. He has to create a bubble to
surround the reader. How do you do that?
The primary tool of the
writer in storytelling is emotion. The writer is the brush; Emotions are the
Colors; the Character is the Canvas; the palette…your Imagination. As a writer,
I’m acutely aware of how I’m emotionally responding to the story even as I
write it. In one particular novel I wrote (Haunted Falls), there was a sequence
that took me three days to write. It was probably less than three hundred words
and yet I would write and have to stop until the tears dried up enough for me
to see the keyboard and screen before I could continue. It was literally one of
the most emotionally exhausting scenes I’ve ever written, but I knew that if I
didn’t respond that way…neither would the reader. I call that creating the
bubble.
One of the things I’ve
found that can instantly take a reader out of the bubble is poor or unrealistic
dialogue. I see far too many writers writing dialogue like writers and not like
people speak. Now, I guess I have a bit of a leg up as an author because I was
first a degreed, trained and experienced actor. I had
forty-four years behind me as a film/TV actor before I ever wrote my first novel.
I did, however, write numerous screenplays and believe me, there’s not a lot of
difference in dialogue between the two.
Since my favorite genre
is the western, I write dialogue honest to the period. As a writer, that means
I also read a lot of other writers. Many western writers try to write all
dialogue phonetically. Example: Ah believe ah’m goin’ ta the town over the
hill. Do ya need ‘nythin’? Gag, puke. As an actor, I know when I see ‘Ah’ for I
and ‘ta’ for to and ‘ya’ for you, I know the writer doesn’t have a clue.
Let’s take a common word
that it’s almost impossible to make a sentence without…the word ‘the’. If you
listen to people talk in conversation, they actually say ‘thuh’ they don’t say
‘the’ with a hard e sound, but I don’t have to write it that way. Why in the
world some writers think they have to write ‘ta’ and ‘ah’ and ‘ya’ is beyond
me. They risk taking the reader completely out of the story trying to figure
out what the characters are saying. That’s my story and I’m sticking to
it.
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Ken Farmer didn’t write
his first full novel until he was sixty-nine years of age. He often wonders
what him so long. At age seventy-five…he’s currently working on novel number
sixteen. Ken spent thirty years raising cattle and quarter horses in Texas
and forty-five years as a professional actor (after a stint in the Marine
Corps). Those years gave him a background for storytelling…or as he has been
known to say, “I’ve always been a bit of a bull---t artist, so writing novels
kind of came naturally once it occurred to me I could put my stories down on paper.
Ken’s writing style has been likened to a combination of Louis L'Amour and
Terry C. Johnston with an occasional Hitchcockian twist…now that’s a mouthful. In
addition to his love for writing fiction, he likes to teach acting, voice-over
and writing workshops. His favorite expression is: “Just tell the story.” His
Social Media links are Website: http://www.kenfarmer-author.net
Blog: http://www.kenfarmer-author.net/blog.html
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