Dealing With "White Room Syndrome" In Your Writing

When it comes to writing, it can often feel like you're trying to keep a dozen and more balls in the air at the same time. You have to remember your plot, your characters, the relationships between them, the rules of your magic or sci fi technology, who actually committed the murder, and so on, and so forth... and sometimes you end up dropping a ball.

And if you're not careful, this is how you can wind up with a story that suffers from White Room Syndrome.

Where is this story happening... exactly?

Before we get into the nitty gritty this week, don't forget to sign up for my weekly newsletter to get all my updates right in your inbox. Lastly, to be sure you're following all of my followables, check out my LinkTree!

Lastly, don't forget to check out my Vocal archive for additional fiction, articles, explorations of weird history, and more!

Could Your Story Be Happening In An Empty White Room?

The meaning of this phrase is pretty simple; if the story you're telling has no details about where it is, or the environment around it, then you're basically setting your tale in an empty, white room. And that can be a problem because while the characters, interplay, plot, dialogue, etc., are all very important, they need to have a background to put them all into context for your reader.

Is your story set in a Victorian asylum? A remote mountaintop cabin during a snowstorm? The crumbling back alleys of a major city? Harlem during the 1930s? All of these things are details that we need to know as the people reading your story.

The where and the when is often just as important as the who and the why.

I've found two, reliable ways to avoid White Room Syndrome. The first is to make sure you inject a little bit of scenery and context as the story goes. This works best when it comes to stories that are very action-forward, so you want your audience to focus on what your characters are doing rather than explaining where they happen to be. So in this instance you might focus on a car chase, filling in the details as you go. While the banter between the cop and her partner, the exchange of lead, etc. is clearly front-and-center, you can fill in descriptions of the city they're driving through, names of the streets, and even pointing out iconic buildings or landmarks if they're germaine to the directions. Even working it into dialogue, such as when handing off the bank robbers to uniformed officers, having a character say something like, "New York's finest, late to the party as usual."

The second method (and the one I use most extensively myself) is to front-load your audience with a description of the location your story is in as a way to really set the mood. Whether it's the fantastical streets of Kintargo in my story Devil's Night, or the bowels of the corrupt starship in my Warhammer 40K tale The Final Lamentation, I grab the audience by the shoulders, and hold them face down in the place they happen to be. And the reason for that is that both of these stories start in the calm before the storm, just before the action really starts to take place. So it acts in the same way as an establishing shot, rather than opening up a story in the midst of a an action scene's frenetic pace.

Neither method is better than the other, and you should experiment with both. It's just that the former gives your readers flashes of information in between action beats, and the latter is the central focus of the stage before the play actually begins. Both are quite functional, but it's all about choosing the best tool for the best job.

Also, for folks who are curious to hear about the problem of White Room Syndrom from a tabletop RPG perspective, check out episode 27 of my show Discussions of Darkness below. And if it's something you find you really jive with and you want to support, then consider subscribing to the Azukail Games channel, sharing the video link around on your socials, and maybe leaving a comment or two to let me know how you found the show!

Support The Literary Mercenary

If you want to see me produce more work, consider some of the following options!

- My Facebook

- My LinkTree

- My Weekly Newsletter

- The Azukail Games YouTube Channel (where I contribute video content)

- My Rumble Channel (longer videos that won't show up on YouTube)

And if you happen to have some spare dosh lying around, and you want to be sure my supply doesn't run low, consider become a Patreon patron, or leaving a tip by Buying Me a Ko-Fi!

Also, if you're curious about how to write for tabletop RPGs, don't forget to check out my show Tabletop Mercenary, which you can find on both the Azukail Games channel, as well as my Rumble channel listed above!

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 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!

 

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!

Authors Are Viruses (And We Need Help Infiltrating The Wider Population)

We've all had that moment in our lives where we have seen something infecting the population. It started with just a few people, or maybe in a particular region, but then it started spreading. Maybe your younger siblings picked it up from their friends at school, and brought it home. And you and your parents, no matter how you tried, couldn't avoid it forever. Maybe it didn't get past your defenses, but maybe it did. And then you were a carrier, passing it on to your friend group, your extended family, and so on, and so forth.

Maybe it was a boy band whose catchy lyrics infiltrated your brain like an ear worm. Maybe it was a book series you didn't have an interest in, but the more you heard about it, the more you wanted to know what the fuss was all about. Or it might even have been that movie everyone had an opinion about, and you just had to figure out what it was for yourself.

Authors (and other creators) pass from person to person like viruses... and if we can't find a hold, and spread to the point where we've infected a sizable enough population to sustain us, we fade away and die.

These are the booster shots that help keep us vital.

Before we get into the nitty gritty this week, don't forget to sign up for my weekly newsletter to get all my updates right in your inbox. Lastly, to be sure you're following all of my followables, check out my LinkTree!

Lastly, don't forget to check out my Vocal archive for additional fiction, articles, explorations of weird history, and more!

All About "Going Viral"

We've been hearing the phrase "going viral" for years. Artists or properties are, "viral sensations," and that's how we hear about them. And it makes sense. The idea is that a piece of art, a book, a story, a video, etc., has infected an audience. People who witness it, whether they become genuine fans or they're merely participating "ironically," spread the material. They share it with their friends and family. They post it on their social media pages. They put links in the comments section of articles and videos, and they talk about the thing in question on forums.

They are acting as carriers, and the more people they expose to the book, creator, etc., that they like, the more of a chance there is that new people will get infected as well. Not everyone, of course. Some people just don't get infected, no matter how many times they're exposed... but enough of them will.

For the love of god, shut up about that book, already!

The problem that a lot of us are running into these days is, well, it's becoming harder and harder for us to spread our signal, and it is having a real, detrimental effect.

Consider, for a moment, the way social media worked 5, or even 10 years ago. It wasn't perfect, but the algorithms at least attempted to make sure that people who followed you would see the posts you made. Facebook groups, subreddits, and even YouTube as a whole was focused on doing things that kept users connected to the creators and contributors on their platform. Twitter was, arguably, the king of this era because it allowed you to have direct access to creators and celebrities, no matter their status.

These days, though, social media platforms are focused more on promoting sponsored content, and creators who give them money. If you are one of those influencer-level folks (100K subscribers/followers or more) you are still surviving and spreading a bit, but even those operating at this level are having their signals throttled.

And all of the new-fangled social media platforms that have come out? They quarantine users, making it impossible for you to spread to them unless someone brings you and your content inside their bubble.

Whether we're talking about Discord, BlueSky, or a lot of other, similar platforms, they separate users from one another. Unlike platforms like old Twitter, which could have popular posts absolutely rip through the feeds of its users, spreading from person-to-person extremely quickly, Discord and its close family have everyone separated onto their own servers. So while you might have localized outbreaks if a particular piece of media gets popular within a particular server, you are not going to have the sort of spread you could have on open platforms with active discoverability, where people can rapidly transmit something to one another across groups, friend connections, etc.

All of this is to say that the modern landscape we're all trying to survive in is not the one that existed even a few years ago. If that old landscape was one where hordes of zombies ran roughshod over the whole of the land, we're now in one where obstacles stop populations from coming into accidental contact. What that means is that, if we want to get an old-fashioned virus going, then someone has to purposefully go into communities where people are, and start biting them.

Sadly, if we do that as creators, people will often do their best to shut us down or kick us out because they don't want to be our Patient Zero for what we're making. Which is why, at the end of the day, what we really need are other people to start the infection going for us. And that is really hard to get folks to do.

So if you're one of the many folks out there who are wondering what you can do to help a creator you like, just bite someone on our behalf today! Make a social media post, leave a review, subscribe to a channel, and tell your friends and family about a thing we made that you think is cool. Maybe they won't succumb to your bite and become one of our fans... but maybe they will. And if you bite two friends, and they bite two friends, then pretty soon you'll be responsible for your own viral event... and we need all the help we can get!

Support The Literary Mercenary

If you want to see me produce more work, consider some of the following options!

- My Facebook

- My LinkTree

- My Weekly Newsletter

- The Azukail Games YouTube Channel (where I contribute video content)

- My Rumble Channel (longer videos that won't show up on YouTube)

And if you happen to have some spare dosh lying around, and you want to be sure my supply doesn't run low, consider become a Patreon patron, or leaving a tip by Buying Me a Ko-Fi!

Also, if you're curious about how to write for tabletop RPGs, don't forget to check out my show Tabletop Mercenary, which you can find on both the Azukail Games channel, as well as my Rumble channel listed above!

Like, Follow, and Come Back Again!

That's all for this week's Business 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!

 

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. 

People Don't Sit Around Thinking About How They Look (Self-Descriptions in Your Story)

I swished my razor in my shaving cup, reapplied a layer of foam, and then dragged the warm metal up my neck. The sound of it scraping away an entire weekend worth of stubble was loud in my ears. I relaxed into the routine; shave, swish, lather, repeat, until I'd done three passes. I ran cold water, cupped it in my hands, and splashed my face. I toweled off, and gave myself a once over. It was about as good as I was going to get.

I finished getting dressed, and turned my back on the mirror. I didn't have time for some long-winded inventory of how I looked. I had a killer to catch, and a case to close.

Who needs to know what I look like, anyway?

Before we get into the nitty gritty this week, don't forget to sign up for my weekly newsletter to get all my updates right in your inbox. Lastly, to be sure you're following all of my followables, check out my LinkTree!

Lastly, don't forget to check out my Vocal archive for additional fiction, articles, explorations of weird history, and more!

How Often Do You REALLY Look At Yourself?

It's an author's job to communicate important information to the audience, and one of the things that we often get hung up on is how our characters look... and specifically how our protagonist (or at least the POV character) looks. Now, if you're in a third-person omniscient view, this isn't really a problem as you can turn the all-seeing eye of the narrator on anyone you really want to. However, if you're settled firmly into a single character's perspective, it can be tough to find a way to explain to your audience just what they look like.

Even if their appearance is particularly unusual... for folks who read my novel Old Soldiers, our protagonist Pollux is a 9-foot-tall albino supersoldier. It was important to convey that, but it was tough to do so in a way that felt natural.

Seriously, go check it out!

How do you bring across the important things about your character's appearance without just having them look in a mirror and give the audience a description of what they're looking at? Well, there are some things you can do:

- Mention Things Matter-Of-Factly: If your character strokes their beard when they're thinking, or they nervously rub a scar between their knuckles when they're thinking, just mentioning those details cements them in your audience's mind. Whether your character wears glasses, they sport a Rolex watch, they have thinning hair, or they have a naked patch where they used to wear a wedding ring, all of these details can just be mentioned as part of the story as your prose unfolds.

- Describe The Environment From Their Perspective: If someone is a tight squeeze into a car, we can infer that makes them physically large. If they have to duck through doors, they're probably very tall. If they're constantly looking down on or up at people, that also implies their height. And so on, and so forth.

- Describe What They're Doing: Characters who jog regularly tend to have a certain amount of physical fitness. Those who put a lot of plates on at the gym likely have a powerful build. If going up stairs is difficult, we can infer they're physically weak, or that they're dealing with some kind of physical problem that's hard for them to overcome (leg injury, old age, heart condition that makes activity difficult, etc.). The way someone walks, the things they're capable of, etc., helps us paint an image of them.

- Have Someone Else Comment On Them: What other people say about a character reflects a lot about what they notice. Is it a woman in a romantic scene saying something like, "I could lose myself in those blue eyes of yours," or a cage fighter sizing up your private eye by saying, "You ever thought about getting in the ring?" implying that they have the build of a fighter? This can be a useful way to bring things across without stating them outright. Even something like a movie or play director remarking on your protagonist's features, while overblown, can be a way to give an impression of them.

All of these are ways to give your audience an impression of your character's looks. What you shouldn't do is have your character breaking the flow of your story to wax poetic about their bodies in a way that feels unnatural, and is just in the text to tell your audience what they should be picturing. Whether it's a man looking himself over in a mirror at the gym, or a woman commenting on her body in the most Men Writing Women sort of way (typically complete with full breast and hip measurements), these descriptions can take your reader out of the flow of your story, and leave them rolling their eyes.

Lastly, consider this question; does your audience need to know what your protagonist looks like? Is it important for the story that the audience know they have a craggy face after a lifetime of exposure to the elements? Does it matter if they know your POV character is exactly 6'2" and 210 pounds? Or is their personality coming through in the way they carry themselves, the choice of their dialogue, and the way the people around them react?

Support The Literary Mercenary

If you want to see me produce more work, consider some of the following options!

- My Facebook

- My LinkTree

- My Weekly Newsletter

- The Azukail Games YouTube Channel (where I contribute video content)

- My Rumble Channel (longer videos that won't show up on YouTube)

And if you happen to have some spare dosh lying around, and you want to be sure my supply doesn't run low, consider become a Patreon patron, or leaving a tip by Buying Me a Ko-Fi!

Also, if you're curious about how to write for tabletop RPGs, don't forget to check out my show Tabletop Mercenary, which you can find on both the Azukail Games channel, as well as my Rumble channel listed above!

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 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!

 

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!

The Insincerity of Crowds (Trying To Separate Genuine Demand From Hot Air)

Most authors pay at least a modicum of attention to the audience when they decide what projects they're going to work on next. Whether it's figuring out what kinds of blog entries are popular, what sort of novels people want to read, what kinds of YouTube videos get the most views, etc. we are all (whether we like it or not) paying attention to what kinds of projects succeed, and what kinds of projects fail.

Because unless you are extremely wealthy, most authors don't want to spend 1-3 years on a passion project just to have it met by thunderous indifference.

To help hedge our bets, most of us will reach out to members of our audience, as well as potential members of our audience, and ask what it is they'd like to see. It sounds like a good practice, since it should take the guesswork out of figuring out what people want, allowing you to make sure that at least part of your audience is going to be ready and eager for your project when it drops.

The problem is that a lot of people will say one thing, and then do another. And I mean a lot of them!

Which makes giving the stamp of approval to one thing over another a difficult choice.

Before we get into the nitty gritty this week, don't forget to sign up for my weekly newsletter to get all my updates right in your inbox. Lastly, to be sure you're following all of my followables, check out my LinkTree!

Lastly, don't forget to check out my Vocal archive for additional fiction, articles, explorations of weird history, and more!

Put Your Money Where Your Mouth Is

I cannot count the number of times I've spoken with fellow creators who've had fans stridently demand something, given them what they asked for, and then found that no one was willing to actually support that project once it was completed. For example, I've had people say that they don't read short stories, but they'd love to hear an audio drama version of my book The Rejects... despite that, though, those folks didn't check out the audio versions of either the Weird Western Dead Man's Bluff or the dark modern fantasy story Suffer The Children, even though both of them are from that book, and they are free to listen to on my channel The Literary Mercenary. My partner and fellow author Alice Liddell (whom you should go follow on YouTube at Alice The Author if you haven't yet) has had readers tell her with enthusiasm that they'd love her to write something darker, more historical, and with vampires... yet when her book Succumb To Darkness dropped, there was only a fraction of folks who loudly proclaimed it was exactly what they wanted who showed up to buy a copy.

Every author, RPG designer, YouTuber, blogger, and general creator that I know has had to deal with this problem, and it is one of the most exhausting things that crops up time and time again in this profession. Because if you have hundreds (or sometimes thousands) of people who all say they'd love to see X, Y, or Z project made into a reality, then you would expect them to actually turn up to check out the project when it's done. And even if all of them don't, you'd expect maybe half of them to give it a look, right?

Well, as I said in my recent Tabletop Mercenary episode, Audience Support is a Reverse Iceberg, you're lucky if 1 in 10 people in your audience sees that something when it exists, and then if as much as 1 in 10 of those people actually does something to support it.

This is where I'm going to repeat something I've said time and time again on this blog, and which you likely heard in the video above if you watched it (which you should, it's an important topic). In short, creators need the support of their audience if we're going to keep making art. Period, full stop, end of story. If you don't show up for the artists you love, then eventually they're going to give up, and you won't get anything else from them. All we can do is make the art... we depend on you to actually appreciate and consume it so we can get paid at the end of the day.

Now, to be clear, I'm not saying that you need to subscribe to every Patreon for the creators you like, or that you need to buy every book and every piece of art they come out with. That's ridiculous. Yes, it's always good to directly support artists by throwing money at us (we appreciate it very much), but that's not the only way to show your support.

Other things you can (and should) do include:

- Engaging with things creators make (watch videos, read articles, etc.)

- Subscribe to their social media pages, channels, etc. (so your presence weighs on the algorithm scales)

- Boosting their social media signal (leaving comments, heart reacts, sharing posts, and so on)

- Leaving reviews and ratings on the things you do buy

Lastly, and this is perhaps the most important... if you're going to lend your voice to a call for a project, please be sincere about it. You don't have to throw a handful of Benjamins at someone's Kickstarter, or be the first one to get their new art print or plushie, but don't pull a Morbius and say you really want something, only to be a no-show when the creator puts in the work to try to give you what you asked for.

Because Sony might be able to eat that kind of ghosting... but most artists, authors, and others who are just trying to scrape by really can't.

Support The Literary Mercenary

If you want to see me produce more work, consider some of the following options!

- My Facebook

- My LinkTree

- My Weekly Newsletter

- The Azukail Games YouTube Channel (where I contribute video content)

- My Rumble Channel (longer videos that won't show up on YouTube)

And if you happen to have some spare dosh lying around, and you want to be sure my supply doesn't run low, consider become a Patreon patron, or leaving a tip by Buying Me a Ko-Fi!

Also, if you're curious about how to write for tabletop RPGs, don't forget to check out my show Tabletop Mercenary, which you can find on both the Azukail Games channel, as well as my Rumble channel listed above!

Like, Follow, and Come Back Again!

That's all for this week's Business 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!

 

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.