Being a Better Writer: Red Herrings · 9:28pm Jun 25th, 2018
Welcome back readers! It’s Monday again, and you know what that means. But first, some news.
For starters, Shadow of an Empire continues to do well both in sales and in reviews. It’s a Fantasy-Western, so it doesn’t quite appeal to everyone, but those who have picked it up have loved it, and it’s sitting nicely on Amazon with a 4.7 Star rating out of 5. It’s success has also given a bit of a boost to Colony as well, which has matched its sales almost one for one this month. Even better, Shadow of an Empire‘s footprint continues to grow! This is one that I think will end up very fondly remembered.
Second bit of news? Oh, nothing much … just 18,000 words of fiction written between Friday and Saturday! That’s right, the next writing project has begun, and once I put my fingers to the keyboard, it was like a dam had burst inside my head. Writing again, after so many months of editing; how I missed it!
Point being, while this pace probably isn’t sustainable (I still have the part-time because I have to worry about rent or bills that my royalties don’t fully cover yet), it is moving along quite rapidly now that I can finally work on it. A month or two, and I could be done, if that pace keeps up!
And in other news … actually, there isn’t any other news. I’m ready to get to today’s post now. And then onto working on Hunter/Hunted!
Right, so, red herrings. If you’ve missed the two posts prior to this one, on Chekhov’s Guns and Chekhov’s Armory, this post is definitely one that builds off of those two. With those, we discussed … well, Chekhov’s Guns and their usage. The whole idea that if you present the audience with a “gun” that’s hung on the mantle, they expect (and a good author will deliver) that at some point it will come down and be “fired.”
Really quick, this doesn’t have to be a literal “gun.” It’s a metaphor. Read the last two Being a Better Writer posts if you’re out of the loop.
But building off of that, this week I want to talk about the inverse of the Chekhov’s Gun (well, sort of). We’re going to talk about the “Red Herring.”
Thanks for writing this. It was informative as always, and confirms that the big red herring I was planning in my now-scrapped story was indeed set up properly (grab the big fancy rifle a few times when it looks like trouble is brewing to get the audience's attention, but the gun that actually goes off is the unassuming pistol) so I'm confident I have the thinking and planning behind this one down.
...Yeah, there's no way I'd be able to do a proper critique on that in a full week given my current schedule. Staying off your list was definitely the right choice.
Also, for some reason the video clip in this one didn't want to appear for me (I just got white space) which is odd since the last one you posted of the flying wing fight worked fine.
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One word of warning I would offer in that case is that if the red herring is much cooler than the actual gun, you can also disappoint readers there, too.
The video clip works on this end, though it doesn't do the time stamp. The time stamp, I'm guessing is the root of the issues. Ah well.
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Thanks, that's a good point I'll definitely keep in mind. That said, I did have two other cases of the cool gun sort of going off (once to drop a major piece of character information and once as an industrial seed) so it's not like it was a total let down, just not the gun that was actually going to go off in the literal sense in spite of the implications.
As for the clip, that timestamp does seem like the most likely explanation, although it's always hard to be sure.