Inauthentic Voice Undermines Your Narrative

It's the 17th of September in 2025. A right wing organizer and talking head was gunned down onstage. In the chaos, the shooter seemed to have gotten away. He was eventually brought into custody, and details emerge about this 22-year-old from a conservative background in Mormon country. And, in an attempt to solidify their case, the government presents a record of a supposed conversation had between this shooter, and their roommate who they may or may not have been in a relationship with.

This man grew up in the digital age, was a part of various online cultures, and marked the brass of his ammunition with memes and references. Yet when investigators released a transcript of what he supposedly said to his roommate, it reads like a combination between a Civil War-era love letter from the front, and a second-draft attempt by a middle-aged man who has no friends under the age of 40, and who doesn't have kids, so he has no goddamn clue how the young people talk these days.

In other words, it's about as convincing as the Steve Buscemi, "How do you do fellow kids?" meme.

You know the one.

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Make Sure Your Story SOUNDS Right To The Ear

How your characters talk is a complicated combination of tone, slang, time period, ethnicity, cultural background, and a thousand other things. And it's a lot like eating a carefully-crafted lasagna; when it comes together, all the disparate pieces form a singular whole. And sometimes when you have just one or two little elements off, it might be written off as a quirk, or a chef's decision. But when something is really off, it ruins the entire ensemble.

One of the easiest ones to screw up is when you have someone who is part of a certain demographic, but they sound like they're part of another one. For instance, a rebellious 20-something with contempt for his father might sneeringly refer to him as "my old man" in the 1970s, or even the 1980s... but not in 2025. If a character is supposed to be British, then it's likely they're going to give measurements in the metric system, or use Celsius for temperature, unless they're acclimated to doing things differently for some reason. Someone who was raised on Chicago's South Side will have a different local dialect than someone from Boston's south side... as well as completely different understandings of cuisine, culture, and everything in between.

You can always tell when something sounds off.

Speech is the manner we use to communicate, but beyond that, it's a road map of who we are, where we're from, and what experiences and interests we have. If you've ever heard veterans talk, then you know they have their own lingo and jargon, and it can offer some real insight as to who they were during their time in the service. If someone is terminally online, they'll have particular ways of speaking that might not making sense to people who aren't... and even if it doesn't crowd into their speech, they'll understand it when they see or hear it somewhere else. You can often tell if someone has been to therapy by the way they talk about issues, or if they read a lot of books without talking to too many people by how they mispronounce words they've only read before.

Writers often develop characters who have similar experiences to themselves, not just for ease of slipping into their skin, but for making sure their voice sounds authentic. But the further you're going to stretch outside of what you know personally, or places you've been and people you've heard, the more research you're going to have to do if you want to avoid the literary equivalent of your characters sounding like parents trying to be hip by drastically misusing their kids' slang in front of their friends.

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That's all for this week's Craft of Writing! For more of my work, check out my Vocal archive, or at My Amazon Author Page where you can find books like my sci-fi dystopian thriller Old Soldiers, the Hardboiled Cat series about a mystery solving Maine Coon in Marked Territory and Painted Cats, my sword and sorcery novel Crier's Knife, or my most recent short story collection The Rejects!

 

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Does Your Story Need a Bridge? Probably Not

Think of writing a story as a series of big rocks in the middle of a rushing river. Ideally you'll be able to step from one scene to another, until you get from where you started, to the other side of the river, and then the story will be told in its entirety. However, sometimes you'll find yourself standing on a big rock, and the next one is just too far away for you to reach it. When that happens you might be tempted to backtrack, and to find a different way to get to the other side, or even to give up entirely on this particular narrative.

However, if you close your eyes and just take a sidestep, you may find that you end up right where you want your narrative to be without a lot of extra trouble.

There's more than one path to success.

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Bridges and Jump Cuts

If you think of a story like a pearl necklace, the pearls are the major plot points and important scenes. The string that holds them all together are the bridges. However, while some scenes are easy enough to build a bridge between, others are so far apart that any bridge that could connect them is going to feel too big, too clunky, and just too much to get from point A to point B.

However, the magic of books means that you can just end the chapter at one place, and pick right back up somewhere else. Instant teleportation, no bridge required!

Onward, to the next chapter!

Let's say, for example, that you're writing a detective story. Your P.I. just ended up shooting a gangster who was trying to kill him. This is a major, pivotal moment in the case, and it shows that he's getting close to something. Unfortunately, the next scene you have involves your investigator back at his office and talking with a surprise witness who wanted to come clean, feeling that things had gone too far.

And sure, you could have a whole scene where your private eye talks to the cops, gives his side of the story, turns over his gun as evidence, catches a cab home, makes himself dinner, and turns in to bed... but if none of that is important to your narrative, you can end the chapter with the light bleeding out of the enforcer's eyes, and then start the next chapter with your P.I. kicked back in his desk chair, looking over his notes, and trying to put the details of the case together, and thinking about what went down last night.

This is the story equivalent of the old radio drama's classic line, "Meanwhile, back at the ranch..."

Now, I'm not saying that bridge scenes aren't useful, and that you should eliminate all of them entirely. However, the key to a bridge scene is that it needs to feel important to the narrative, and it needs to add to the ongoing story in an organic way. If your party of fantasy adventurers has important discussions while on the trail to their next destination, for example, or we get important character building moments, then that bridge is something you should definitely keep. But if it's just a bunch of text to walk your reader from one location to another, with nothing of consequence happening in between, then it's best to cut that text, and just do the textual equivalent of a jump cut.

Your book, and your readers, will thank you.

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That's all for this week's Craft of Writing! For more of my work, check out my Vocal archive, or at My Amazon Author Page where you can find books like my sci-fi dystopian thriller Old Soldiers, my sword and sorcery novel Crier's Knife, or my most recent short story collection The Rejects!

 

And to stay on top of all my latest news and releases, collected once a week, make sure you subscribe to The Literary Mercenary's mailing list. 

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Does Your Story Have Too Many Characters?

People love stories because of the characters in them. However, just as folks will often lambaste Tolkien for going on and on about the leave on his trees, I'd suggest there's a lesson we could learn from another big name in the fantasy genre. Because for all the good things one can say of A Song of Ice and Fire, perhaps one of the biggest issues that Martin puts on display is that when you expand your cast on every other page, you really dilute the interest of your readers.

In short, every story needs character. However, too many characters will make it impossible for your reader to see the forest for all the trees in their way.

Because it's really easy to confuse your audience if you aren't careful.

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How Big Does Your Cast List Really Need To Be?

Let's return to Martin's less-than-complete opus for a moment. There were a lot of changes made when adapting the books to the screen, but one of the more notable ones was eliminating minor characters from the story entirely, and combining different characters together as a way to boil down the number of names and faces the audience was expected to keep track of. It made for a smoother flow, and it was easier to digest the narrative that way.

If you can prune your character list by dozens of names and events, though, that really should leave you asking why you had so many characters in your book to begin with.

Though if they're going to be dying every other chapter, you may need them.

Generally speaking, characters need to serve a purpose in your story. Sometimes that purpose is a linchpin role (like the main antagonist, your protagonist or protagonists, etc.), and sometimes it's a supporting role (the witness who drops a clue in the detective's lap, the spunky sidekick who helps out, the oracle who provides the prophecy, etc.), but everyone has a role to play.

If a character doesn't really have a role to play, it's best to think of them as an extra.

For those not familiar with how movies are made, extras are all the fill-in folks in the background in film and TV. Those are the people filling up a café where the spy meets with the hacker to discuss stolen information, or all the people walking down the street before our hero comes pelting around the corner being chased by a tank. They're necessary to the scenes in question, but they aren't a part of the cast in a story sense. They are, if anything, like a living part of the set design. While you might find an occasional extra with a speaking line (like the waitstaff who take one's order in a restaurant scene, or nameless reporters firing questions around a murder investigation) they are still more a part of the background than the story.

When we're discussing whether your story has too many characters, these aren't usually the characters we're talking about... except when they are.

We Don't Need The Backstory on Every Tree Branch

When we introduce important members of the cast we usually give the reader a bunch of details about them, along with more information than they get about other characters. We get a full description, a name, maybe see things from their perspective a little, stuff like that. And while academically we know that every person is the main character of their own story, if you treat too many members of the cast like they're main characters in this story you're going to overload your audience.

Wait... why is Gerald Finn, the Gate Captain with the iron hand, important again?

Look over your story with a critical eye, and ask how many characters actually serve a narrative purpose. Great or small, you should be able to tell us what part of the story pocket watch they represent, and what their job is in the narrative. Even if it's something as small as, "Humanize the main character by showing their relationships outside of tracking down serial killers," that's still an important purpose.

But if the character doesn't have an important role, ask what happens if you scale back their involvement in a scene. Does it change anything? For example, do we need to know that Suzy Delgado is working a double at the diner, she's very stressed, but she's trying to keep a brave face? Or is that information just being dumped on us while Sly Goodman and assassin Alicia Carmine have a meeting, only involving Suzy when they want to order black coffee and some scrambled eggs before getting down to the nitty gritty on their current job?

What happens if you eliminate a character from the story entirely? Does that have any effect on the narrative at all? Because if their presence makes no impact on the story, shows us nothing about the rest of the characters, and serves no function, then you may be able to kill that particular darling without worrying about getting too much blood on your typewriter.

As the author, think of yourself as the head of stage lighting, or camera direction. You are the one who tells the audience where to look, what to pay attention to, and what is important. If you try to show the audience everything, though, you're going to end up with them paying attention to the wrong things, or getting bogged down in details that may confuse your story rather than clarifying it.

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That's all for this week's Craft of Writing! For more of my work, check out my Vocal archive, or at My Amazon Author Page where you can find books like my sword and sorcery novel Crier's Knife, or my most recent short story collection The Rejects!

 

And to stay on top of all my latest news and releases, collected once a week, make sure you subscribe to The Literary Mercenary's mailing list. 

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Let's Talk About Conflict in Your Story (3 Simple Tips)

Most of us think we have a pretty decent grasp on how a story works. We understand character and description, goals and motivations, tropes and world building... but something we often don't think about very much is conflict. Which can be a problem, because conflict is the central part of basically any story. Without it you just have a bunch of people standing around for no particular reason.

And since I've come across my share of stories that didn't seem to have any conflicts, or had ones whose conflicts felt flat and empty, I wanted to take some time to talk about this topic.

Seems basic. But that's why it's important.

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Now then, let's get to it!

Tip #1: Make Sure It's Clearly Defined

Brevity is the soul of wit, as they say. Even if your story is a huge, sprawling affair you should be able to summarize your conflict succinctly. This both shows that you understand the nature of it, and it can help you generate a solid elevator pitch when you need to sell someone on your story.

As an example...

Old Soldiers is the longest novel I've ever had published, weighing in at close to 100k words. The central conflict of it is pretty damn straightforward, though. "After surviving an assassination attempt a de-commissioned supersoldier re-activates his old squad, and uncovers the conspiracy that targeted them in order to yank it out by the roots."

While there are a lot of twists and turns in this book, and it takes its sweet time building relationships, laying out the world, and unveiling the mystery, that's the central conflict; a race against time, and unknown assassins, to uncover why it is they're trying to kill our protagonists.

Tip #2: Ensure It's Immediate

Folks often say your conflict should be interesting, but interesting is subject to taste. However, if a conflict has immediacy then it is something that is actively going on in your story. It's not a background element, or something that could simply be sidestepped; it's an oncoming train.

You can't just walk away. Not in these alleys.

The plot of Painted Cats, for those who haven't checked out the second novel in the Hard-Boiled Cat series, is Leo is trying to find a friend of an old flame that's gone missing. One of the main conflicts of the story, though, is that a lot of street beasts are going to an inordinate amount of trouble to steal a kitten named Trouble, who happens to be the missing cat's kitten. Trouble is under Leo's protection, so we have alley scratchers, bruisers, and back biters all coming out of the alleys trying to take Trouble away, which only complicates Leo's attempts to find out where the kitten's mother went.

Think of a conflict like a thrown punch; when it's rocketing at your face, you're paying attention to it.

Tip #3: Assign Stakes To The Conflict

Conflicts come in an infinite variety of shapes and sizes. With that said, a conflict needs to have understandable stakes underwriting it so that your audience can get a sense of why it matters. Because even if a conflict is immediate, one without stakes is going to just slap like a fat drop of rain instead of hitting you like a truck.

Time's running out in the north country.

The plot of my sword and sorcery novel Crier's Knife is that Dirk Crier is dispatched by his witch grandmother to retrieve his cousin. The boy wandered afield, and is in over his head. The stakes, though, are set up right in the introduction to the book, where we see his cousin Teller trying desperately to escape from a cult that has taken him captive. He's recaptured by the end of the prologue, and we the audience know that if he isn't dead yet, he's got an extremely limited amount of time before he will be.

Stakes is what makes the conflict matter. Because if there's no real negative that comes with the lose condition, then who cares how it turns out? But if the protagonist loses someone they care about, has to leave their home, or might lose their life, these are stakes that add serious weight to the conflict... what was a trapeze act is now being performed without a net!

Crisp, Clear Conflicts Work Best

Conflicts often drive the plot in convoluted ways, and depending on the story may force characters to make hard choices, or to come up with intricate strategies in order to come out on top. However, the conflict itself should be easy for the audience to grasp.

Think of conflict like a fight scene in a movie. You want the audience to be focused on the action you want them to see, and no matter how involved the maneuvers on display, you want it to be easy to witness. Shaky cam, in this case, is the equivalent of a shaky storyline that can leave your reader confused and disoriented about what's happening, and why. And just like a fight scene in a film a conflict can have clear winners and losers, it can be left ambiguous, or it might remain unresolved for a time as the forces clash again and again to determine who is the ultimate winner.

Just something to think about for your next story.

Like, Follow, and Come Back Again!

That's all for this week's Craft of Writing! For more of my work, check out my Vocal archive, or at My Amazon Author Page where you can find books like my cat noir novel Marked Territory, its sequel Painted Cats, my sword and sorcery novel Crier's Knife, or my most recent short story collection The Rejects!

 

And to stay on top of all my latest news and releases, collected once a week, make sure you subscribe to The Literary Mercenary's mailing list. 

If you'd like to help support my work, then consider Buying Me A Ko-Fi, or heading over to The Literary Mercenary's Patreon page! Lastly, to keep up with my latest, follow me on Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, and now on Pinterest as well!

Don't Barrage Your Readers With Fantasy Terminology (It Doesn't Help)

"My name is A'lashan Fai'r," the Dowindra said, smiling. "Welcome to Sar'boran."

I nodded, and adjusted the corfan at my side. I looked around the Fenuril, and saw other Redanda standing at their posts. Shu'fi moved among them, heads bowed as they attended to their tasks. I touched the dinfar just behind my ear, and felt more than heard the chirping affirmative it gave.

"Thank you," I said. "Please, take me to the Umbrine. I have news that will not wait."

What the shit did I just read?

If you've read your share of fantasy novels over the years, chances are good you've come across passages like this more than once. Ideally you'll only see nonsense like this later on in the novel (or hopefully down the line in the series) when the reader already knows what all these terms mean so they can properly picture a scene. Too often, though, authors will just dump barrels of fantasy terminology onto their readers' heads, forgetting that while they have lived in this made-up world for years, the reader just got here, and they have no clue what you're talking about.

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What The Hell is That?

If you review the paragraph I opened with, you realize that there's no context for almost any of the names and terms getting thrown around. What is a confar, for example? Is it a weapon? A badge of office? Both? Neither? And the person our protagonist is talking to is referred to as a Dowindra. Is that a profession? A species? A social position? What the hell is that thing behind his ear? Is it an actual cricket, like a magical creature, or some kind of bonded enchantment that connects to his brain?

You're introducing your reader to a world that's foreign to them. If you just dump them in the deep end, though, they're going to feel like they're reading an upper-level science textbook with absolutely zero foundational knowledge to understand what they're looking at.

And what the hell is this nonsense?

In order to ease the reader into your world you need to give them a sense of the familiar first. Allow them to get their bearings. For example, is your setting more urban, or agrarian? Cities and farms are concepts that readers can easily grasp, and it will give them some kind of context before you come down to more confusing details like the made up name of a city or country, districts, the ranks of the rulers, etc. Even with smaller elements, you get far more if you focus on descriptions before you assign names to things so that your reader actually knows what they're supposed to be envisioning later on when the name pops up again.

As an example, consider the following.

The stranger glanced around the room, his eyes taking in everything and everyone. His right hand never strayed far from the blade hanging from his hip. Short and curved, with a heavy guard, the steel practically hummed with power; a sleeping dragon waiting to roar into life. Though the stranger seemed a hard, dangerous man on his own, the confar announced that he was there on the orders of the guild.

This sort of thing gives your audience a much clearer image of what a confar is (a potent sidearm), and the sort of people who wield it (professional fighters in service to a particular guild). But before the item was named it was described, and given an association with an individual to help put what it is into context, and why seeing it might be kind of a big deal.

Once you've established what something is, you can just refer to it by name. Whether it's a particular fantasy species, an ethnicity, a magic item, a social rank, once you've given your audience a tutorial/introduction to it, you can cement it as part of the lexicon.

Easing The Reader In

Most folks who write genre fiction understand that they need to explain some things to readers. Common tropes and elements can usually be put in without much explanation (we get what a troll, or an orc, or a goblin is, so you only need to fill in the blanks if it differentiates from "standard" fantasy tropes), but anything that has an unfamiliar word attached to it needs an explanation to make it stick in the reader's minds.

There's another thing to remember, though... you need to pepper these things in here and there. Don't try to make your reader's do the cinnamon challenge to try to swallow everything at once.

Just three more schools of magic... you can do it!

If your readers get a lot of terms just thrown at their face right out of the gate, it becomes a distraction from the story you're actually trying to tell, and the world you're trying to build. Then instead of falling in love with your protagonist, or getting invested in the threat imperiling your setting, they're just trying to remember the difference between the Alfashni and Kekouri, and which ones have beaks, and why they're so sensitive about jokes regarding coconuts.

Space out how often you introduce new elements to the world, and try to feed them to your reader in some kind of sensical order. The easier it is to chew the lessons, the less they're going to distract or frustrate your audience as they try to get into your story.

Like, Follow, and Come Back Again!

That's all for this week's Craft of Writing! For more of my work, check out my Vocal archive, or at My Amazon Author Page where you can find books like my cat noir novel Marked Territory, my sword and sorcery novel Crier's Knife, or my most recent short story collection The Rejects!

 

And to stay on top of all my latest news and releases, collected once a week, make sure you subscribe to The Literary Mercenary's mailing list. 

If you'd like to help support my work, then consider Buying Me A Ko-Fi, or heading over to The Literary Mercenary's Patreon page! Lastly, to keep up with my latest, follow me on Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, and now on Pinterest as well!