5 Lessons From DREAMTREADERS

One series I read a while ago and decided to revisit is the Dreamtreaders series by Wayne Thomas Batson. I enjoyed it before, but on my reread, not as much. Don't get me wrong, I still like it, but the technical flaws glare at me. 

But the things I liked about it and continue to like about it is its charm. There's something refreshing in high school drama after epic fantasy. That's probably just me though. 

Let's get to! 

1. Referring to characters 

One of the most grating things I find in my reread is how the author refers to characters in the narrative. Specifically with title calling. 

What is title calling? It's when you talk about another character by what they do. I like to extend this to anything else besides their name or pronoun. 

First, a little context about the story. The main character, Archer Keaton, is a Dreamtreader, which means that he can do almost whatever he wants in the dream. It's basically a lucid dream, except reality. Kind of. If my memory serves me right, Archer is fourteen in the first book. 

You get a lot of fight scenes with large paragraphs, for the series at least. In it, you get Archer beating people up. A lot of it is Archer did this and Archer did that. But instead of saying Archer punched the Nightmare Lord or he punched the Nightmare Lord, you get things like the Dreamtreader punched the Nightmare Lord or the fourteen year old punched the Nightmare Lord. 

Batson probably did this to break up the monotony of Archer, he, him and so on. But the thing is, it's not that monotonous. Readers are used to seeing this. Because of their high usage, these are words that automatically slide away. 

By referring to characters by their title, you momentarily jerk your readers out of the story. It assumes that the reader needs to be reminded of the character's traits over and over again. Especially if you're halfway in the book, readers don't need to be reminded that your MC is a Dreamtreader. We were told that in the beginning. It's an important role in the plot. 

It also takes emotional attachment away. We learn to (hopefully) love Archer Keaton for his silliness, recklessness and his determination. We see Archer and go, "ooh, what's Archer doing now?" His name has emotional significance. The Dreamtreader doesn't. It's a profession. A special profession, but a study nonetheless. It has significance, but no emotional weight. 

Take this excerpt from Chapter One in the first book when Archer is fighting bad guys in the Dream:

"...forty-five short minutes before Archer's Personal Midnight [context: the Personal Midnight is the deadline for staying in the Dream. To stay in the dream beyond it means coma.]-and he still had serious ground to cover. He blazed through the outer borders... Finally, the Dreamtreader passed under the sprawling canopy and twisted boughs of..." 

We begin with Archer. It's good, it tells us who we're reading about. It goes on to use pronouns. That's fine because it slips under our radar but still lets us know who's doing what. The paragraph ends with the Dreamtreader. It interrupts the flow of the story. Replacing it with simply his name makes the paragraph flow so much better. 

2. Limitations in magic systems

SourceL Giphy

The Dream is like your normal fantasy world which is only accessible to certain people while they sleep. In the Dream, you can do anything you have enough will for. As our characters grow more powerful, they become more and more invincible. Especially with prodigy characters. 

Dreamtreaders get an extra boost by being more powerful than lucid walkers and any other Dream beings, maybe besides lucid walkers stuck in there. Pretty soon, the only way to defeat them is by Batson's version of Kryptonite, gort. 

The characters become invincible. It's easy for the characters to win. When we see defeat, it's either cheap or hard to believe. Like, why didn't they do this to stop the bad guy instead of that? They could've saved x and y. The stakes go down. Readers become less invested in whether the characters win or lose. 

To stop characters from becoming all powerful is to give their magic system limitations. Make it harder for them to win, so that when they do, readers care about it and can celebrate with the characters. 

3. Choosing typography

In my copy of the Dreamtreaders series, the Dreamtreader Conceptus chapters (exposition chapters made to look pretty) are written in a bolder, more decorative font. 

I talked about presentation two weeks ago in my 3 Stages Of Writing A Book post. Presentation is an important part of books, but is subjective. 

Personally, I enjoyed having the chapters in a different font. A lot of people will disagree with me. They say it's distracting from the actual story. I can see why they think that, this is just my taste. But the font was hard to read for length periods of time. 

The font was bold and curly, two of the biggest culprits in bad typography. For short phrases or words, fine. For full chapters of boring exposition, not fine. It's already a slug to read through these chapters, don't make it harder for readers with a bad font.

Related post: 7 Typography Sins

4. Dialogue tags vs action beats

After your character speaks, you are left with three options as a follow up. 

• A dialogue tag. Things like she said or he yelled. You know what I'm talking about. 
• An action beat. After speaking, your character proceeds to do something else, like comb their hair or something. 
• Nothing. It moves on from the dialogue to a new beat.

In the Dreamtreaders series, the majority of the dialogue is followed by dialogue tags. There's several "rules" I apply to dialogue tags which is something I'll have to cover in another blog post. But here's a few pointers specific to Batson.

The author tends to use dialogue tags when an action beat would make more sense. There are moments when the characters will be angry and yell at someone. While having the character say their line followed by an aggressive act is completely doable and perhaps even better, the character will say their line, followed by the dialogue tag he yelled (for example) and an action beat. 

Another trend is that Batson uses less common tags, like "quipped", when a simple "said" is not dead. Likely to spice up his writing, it's another thing that distracts the reader from the plot. And like a name or pronoun, "said" is a word used so often it is read and forgotten. There's nothing wrong with using something apart from "said", I highly recommend it, but use it wisely.

5. Character voices   

Source: Tenor

I added this last point in here because this is something I loved and still love about the series. It's the character voices. 

Reading reviews on Goodreads, I know many people disagree. They say they hate it, it's inaccurate or something along the lines of that. With some of these points, I agree. Some of their character voices are stereotyped and cliche. I still love it. 

One of my favourite characters is Nick Bushman, an Australian Dreamtreader. He speaks with stereotyped Australian slang. As an Australian, I can guarantee that it's rare to find people who uses some of the slang Nick does, except in Queensland. But it's hilarious. I enjoy it. At the end of the day, as long as people enjoy your story, that's all that matters. 

Every main character in the series has a different voice that makes it recognisable, even without their name being stated. You know those games where you have to guess which character said what? You can't do that with this book because it'll be too easy. 

What Batson does is to write in accents, add in speech tics, use different slang and have unique exclamations. I wouldn't recommend writing accents in because most people find it hard to understand. This is a problem I can't relate to so I'm not qualified to talk about why it sucks. 

An example of written in accent is Rigby, an English character who speaks with a British accent. Yes, dropping his h's and having a cuppa. For speech tics, an example is Amy. In almost every line of dialogue she has, it's followed by "yep". This is recognisable and being young enough to remember teenage years, accurate. 

I've given one example of a character's slang, but here's another one for good measure. Buster, Archer's brother, is portrayed as a typical Californian surfer who uses "dude" a lot. And I mean a lot. Archer himself has unique exclamations, like "snot rockets". Many people complain it's immature, but hey, he's a fourteen year old. How mature do you expect him to be? Besides, it's recognisable. That's what matters. 

I have read one other series by Batson and the complete cast has a different voice type to the ones in Dreamtreader. I can attest to how well Batson develops a character's voice. This is probably the best technical feature about the series and I recommend reading the series for yourself to see how amazing it is.

~ 

That's five lessons from the Dreamtreaders series by Wayne Thomas Batson! There's other minor complaints about the writing itself, but I couldn't figure out how to add them under this format of blog post while making sense. 

While it's far from perfect, as evidenced by Batson's technical difficulties in referring to characters, unlimited magic system, typography and dialogue tag problem. But it does have its positives too. Apart from unique character voices, there's many more I neglected to mention for time's sake. Yay procrastination!

Have you read the series before? Did you notice these points? What did you think of them? What are some other thoughts on the series? Leave a comment below. If you liked this post, be sure to share, follow and eat chocolate for more content! (Eat chocolate anyway.)

Edit 31/10/2020: There will be no update this week. (2 November)