What to Include and Where to Put It

I’ve led hundreds of classes/workshops on writing techniques. Even for someone like me, who has published dozens of books, every opportunity to write is an opportunity to work on craft, and the more you do it the better you will get at it. Take Facebook. While much of what is posted there is just seat-of-the-pants reactive verbiage, many posts are carefully thought out mini-essays. I have several writer friends whose pieces I look forward to reading, not just as a way of catching up, but for the pleasure of the writing.

A few weeks ago I wrote such a small essay on Facebook because something meaningful had occurred, and I wanted to share it with my friends in a way that might help them feel what I had felt. I revised what I wrote several times, and when I had finished I realized I had put as much thought into the writing and rewriting as I would have into a magazine article or part of a book. The post was successful and acquired many dozens of likes, and the comments showed me that many people had grasped the point I was trying to make. But how did I do that? By combining several writing techniques. I believe the most important one, for the maximum impact of such a short piece of writing, was my choices of what to put in and what to leave out. 

A big part of choosing what to put in is to remember to keep it simple. I wrote about this technique--which I call Less is More-- in a previous post. I used another writing technique, Showing Not Telling, in this piece, as I try to do in all my writing. I looked at all the parts of this relatively simple story, then chose the order in which to tell them for what I felt was maximum impact. I tried more than one order, then decided to move from the general (what happened) to the very personal (how and why it affected me). You might try this with a short piece of your own writing, and see how changing the order of the parts affects the whole.

Here are the facts. My younger brother died of epilepsy sixteen years ago. My husband and I were in a restaurant when a young woman sitting across from us suffered a seizure. I wanted to reassure the girl’s mother that we were not freaked out, and to help if I could. My husband and I stayed until the girl could walk, then assisted the two women to their car.

Here is the post, broken into five segments for commentary:

1) Yesterday at lunch my husband and I were getting ready to pay when we became aware that a woman at the next table was having an epileptic seizure, while her mother held her and kept her from slipping out of her chair. The seizure went on for quite a long time. I asked if there were anything I could do, and the mother shook her head no, but my husband and I decided to wait and see if we could help.2) As the young woman began to come out of it, the waitress and the owner of the restaurant packed up their mostly uneaten food, and my husband and I helped the mother gather her things into her purse. Then, when the daughter could walk, slowly, I took one arm and her mother took the other, and we helped her out to the car. I leaned into the car seat and talked to the daughter while her mother talked to my husband, then ran to the bathroom.3) I was wearing my usual bandanna, and the young woman asked me if I had cancer. I said no, I just have bad hair so I shaved my head. I took off the bandanna and showed her. She ran her fingers over my fuzzy scalp and laughed.4) They eventually left, with many thanks. My husband told me the mother had said her daughter was forty-five (she looked twenty years younger, but had probably never been out in the sun much). So this has been going on a long time. I can't even imagine what a nightmare that poor woman's life is. I'm sure she lies awake at night wondering what will become of her daughter if she predeceases her.5) I began crying when I saw the seizure, and the mother thanked me for "praying" for her daughter. All I could think about was my brother, who died sixteen years ago this coming Monday, of epilepsy.

In segment 1) I introduce the scene very simply, setting out the facts--where we were and the basics of what was happening. I could have gone into more detail about the restaurant or the seizure itself, but chose not to. I felt that the detail about the mother holding the girl to prevent her from slipping out of her chair told all the reader needed to know about the nature of a seizure.

In segment 2) I tell the rest of the basic narrative. I could have described how shaky and pale the girl was; how she and her mother had abandoned their food to deal with the emergency, and so on; but I chose instead to SHOW the girl needing the help of two people to walk to the car, and to SHOW the kindness of the restaurant workers in gathering up the food for them.

In segment 3) I show the girl as she comes out of the seizure-induced fog, and her childlike demeanor as she asks about my bandanna, then runs her fingers over my head. I did not need to say that the epilepsy had apparently stunted her intellectually, or that she probably could not function well on her own.

4) Now I segue to the personal implications of the incident, and my thoughts and empathy for the mother and her daughter. I also come to the real point of the essay, about how tragic this entire situation is for these two women and how their plight touched me.

5) In the last two sentences I show why the incident meant so much to me, personally. I could have started off--as I did above--with the news that my brother had died of epilepsy, but I believe it makes the piece much more powerful to save it for the end.

Show and Tell

Every writer has been told by a writing teacher or editor to SHOW rather than TELL.

A simple way to understand this precept is to use synonyms. To “tell” something is to summarize  it. To “show” something is to illustrate it. In both fiction and nonfiction, if you want the reader to feel an emotional impact, show the reader what is going on. This is harder than simply summarizing, but always well worth the effort.

Here is an example of the difference between telling and showing from my first novel, Pandora’s Genes. The first passage is a summary of a short but crucial scene about halfway through the book. The second passage is the scene as it appeared in the published book.

Passage A:

Zach was sent away as his wife, Leya went into labor. He knew that she was in danger of dying and was very upset. To take his mind off his anxiety and sorrow he chopped wood.

Passage B

    It was a cloudy summer day, not really hot, but so humid with an impending rainstorm that the least exertion left him sweating and feeling tired. He positioned a log on the chopping block, brought the axe up above and behind his head, then swung it, thunk. He did this again and again, the movements easy from long years of practice. Wood chips flew around him, stinging his bare chest and arms. Cut wood piled up around him, and his breathing grew heavy as his arms began to tremble with the effort. He did not dare to stop, afraid to lose the comforting sound of the axe blade biting into the wood.

   After a time, his muscles stopped responding, and he was forced to rest for a moment. The sounds of the woods became deafening. He heard birds calling their territorial limits to one another; insects scuttling in the leaves; the warm breeze before the storm, pushing the branches of trees. He shivered as the wind took the sweat covering his skin. Sighing, he sat on a log and examined the axe minutely. He had made it himself from an old pre-Change axe blade, and a stout piece of hardwood he had carved himself, carefully fitting it to hold the metal, and binding the two pieces together with strong new-vine ropes. The ancient blade was as shiny as it must have been when it was new: he took care to keep it clean with fish-oil, and sharp on his whetstones. There were nicks and scores in the metal, but it was probably, he thought, in nearly as good condition as when it had been made, untold years ago. He ran his fingers over the blade and looked for signs of wear on the handle. This was the fourth handle he had made for the blade, carefully carving and polishing during long nights in the cabin while Leya read or worked on her projects from the Garden.

   He stood, already feeling stiff, and began to gather the wood he had cut into bundles of seven to ten each, tying them carefully with new-vine, and placing them to the side of his work area, in a small shelter he had constructed. A squirrel suddenly clambered down from a tree behind him. He turned, startled, to see the little animal poised on its hind legs, its nose vibrating with its breath, every nerve in its body stretched as it tried to sense possible danger. It looked at him, its black eyes as shiny as the axe blade, then just as abruptly it ran up the tree and disappeared along a leafy limb.

   Zach picked up the axe and began again to swing it, cutting the wood as if he could cut out everything else that was happening. Never had he worked so long and so hard. Soon there would be enough wood cut to last the Garden through the entire winter. And there was already more than enough for him and Leya. He became aware of another sound and realized that it was his own breath, rasping, wet, and too rapid. Still he did not stop, not even when the raindrops finally began to fall, washing away the dirt and sweat, then soaking him as a summer cloudburst developed. He could scarcely see what he was doing through the falling water, but still he swung the axe back and up, then down, splitting each precisely placed log as he did so, stopping only to move more wood into position.

   "Zach!"

   He turned, the axe half-raised, poised to split another log. Her head and shoulders covered with a dark shawl, the old woman stood looking at him. Her face was composed and without expression, and as soon as he saw it he knew the worst had happened.

*****

When you have finished writing a story or novel, go over it for places where you can change summaries into illustrations. For example, if you have a character “crying hysterically,” think how you might show that. (Jodie’s chin began to tremble and her mouth turned white as she bit down on her lower lip. But the trembling spread, from her face to her throat, and then to her lungs as she began to gasp, tears now spilling down her cheeks and onto her hands.) 

One of the greatest compliments I've received about my writing was in a review by Eoghann Irving of my short, gritty novella, The Ptorrigan Lode, which begins: 

If you want a great example of showing and not telling, then this is it.

As a short story it doesn't have much space in which to both create a futuristic world and set up a plot and yet the author Kathryn Lance makes it looks easy.

It wasn't easy, of course, but I'm glad it worked. 

For more on the difference between showing and telling, see #2 in my five-point revision checklist.

Five Techniques for Effective Flashbacks

In a long work of fiction, what’s the best way to insert crucial background information without boring or confusing your readers? This common writing problem is especially acute when you are writing a sequel or a series. There is no one right answer for every scene, but each of the following techniques can be effective.

1. Use a straightforward flashback. In old movies, flashbacks were fairly common, and were usually introduced with a musical crescendo and a wavy dissolve to the scene being revisited. In fiction, the transition is often made with a character musing about something that happened in the past: “Jeb couldn’t help thinking about his brother, and how the two of them had often arm-wrestled to decide who would go first in a game of Risk….” [Seque to flashback scene.] The problem here is making the introduction to the flashback seem natural. I have found that a straightforward flashback works best if the transition itself has emotional resonance that the reader is aware of. For example, in my latest novel, Pandora’s Promise, Zach has been conscripted to fight a battle, and he doesn’t know what to expect. As he waits nervously in the pre-dawn with his fellow warriors,

Zach had a few bites of the porridge. He knew from experience that he fought better on an empty belly. After eating he sat on a rock just outside the tent, drawing on a pipe of newsmoke as he watched the early morning sky and thought of the battles he had fought.

The fights against the President’s men had been the easiest, in a sense, because he and Will had been so certain they were in the right. He still remembered his first battle—a skirmish, really—a carefully-planned assault by Will on one of the President’s more remote, but strategically located, outposts to the west by the river.

The plan had been for Will’s men to surround the installation before dawn, then storm it before the defenders were fully awake…. [Seque to the scene, which is crucial to understanding Zach’s attitude toward fighting as well as his relationship with his brother Will.]

    This simple technique can work well, as long as it isn’t overused.

2. Reveal crucial information in a conversation. This technique is very common, both in printed fiction and in movies and television, and the temptation to use it is often overwhelming. However… and it’s a big however, it must be used with care. If you want to impart background information by having two (or more) characters talk about it, don’t have one character tell another something they both know. Ever. Under any circumstances. This elementary rule of good writing technique is frequently violated,  especially in television shows, and especially in soap operas, to often ludicrous effect. For more on what I call “The Soap Opera Rule,” see How to insert background information in dialogue.

If you want to reveal information in a conversation, it’s essential to have one character remind or reveal information that he and we, the readers, know is new to the other character.

3. Write a prologue. A lot of writers use prologues, and I have done so myself, most notably in Pandora’s Children, the second novel in my Pandora’s Trilogy. At first glance, a prologue--incorporating a summary of what came before the new book begins--seems like the perfect way to join the previous book with the new one. Soon after Pandora’s Children was published, however, I read that most readers do not like prologues and simply skip them. (You mean to tell me that all the care I lavished on that prologue was wasted?) With some distance, I re-read the beginning of the novel and realized that the prologue hadn’t been necessary after all; that the bits of crucial info were few and could have been done another way that was more organic to the story.

I wrote a prologue to my new novel, Pandora’s Promise, but no matter how carefully I tried to craft it, I realized that it was simply slowing the story down. Yet the information--an event that takes place between the end of the previous book and the beginning of the new one--was crucial to the entire plot and had to be imparted somehow. But how?

4. Use a physical object to connect two points in time. The more I thought about the information I had to get across, the more I realized that Zach didn’t need to be present for its revelation. The information, that an important character from the previous two books, had committed suicide, rocks Zach and sends him on what turns out to be a life-changing quest. But though we readers know that something emotionally wrenching has happened to Zach, we don’t find out what until a scene that takes place six months later, between the other two lead protagonists, Will and Evvy. The physical object that ties the two points in time together is the suicide note the dead man left for Zach, which is reproduced in full in this scene. In the note, he talks about a “trinket” he had found that he left for Zach. That trinket proves to be key to the book’s most important plot point.

Toward the end of the book I used another, more startling, physical object to lead to an important flashback. In this scene, the Principal (Will) is sitting alone in his office, awaiting an important meeting:

On his lap, where he could easily drop it into a desk drawer in the unlikely event that someone should enter without knocking, was a long, soft coil of hair... Evvy’s hair, which was all that remained of her.

This hank of hair, which (erroneously) has convinced him that Evvy is dead, is the gateway for a lengthy flashback that ties up all the plot points that are not directly connected with the ultimate conclusion of the story.

5. Find a unique way to bring the past into your story.

Since Pandora’s Promise is the third of three novels, there was a great deal of earlier information that I felt had to be included sooner or later in the new book. But I didn’t want to stupefy my readers with flashback after flashback. And then I hit upon the idea of the empathic elephants, who are able to read the “sense-images” in Zach’s mind and project them to other humans who are present. This perfectly solved my problem, because not only was I able to incorporate several scenes that would otherwise have seemed out of place, but because the elephants themselves turned out to be warm and believable companions--several readers have told me their chapters are their favorite parts of the book. Here’s an example of how I used this technique. In this scene, [Rushing River], the elephant, expresses curiosity about how Zach and Evvy first met.

Zach had never before shared the story with anyone. He paused to set his thoughts in order, then began to tell [Rushing River] how the Principal had sent him to procure Evvy from her parents, nearly seven years ago, when Evvy had still been a very young girl. At first Zach simply spoke aloud, so that Jonna and Billy could hear him too, but as soon as he formed words, [Rushing River]’s curiosity opened a series of vivid sense-memories, as if his words had created a library of images for [Rushing River] to peer into. Though he had participated in the events, he was shocked at how detailed the memories were; not only could he see all that had happened, he could hear and taste and smell as he had done at the time. He realized that his memories must have been formed in far more detail than he was consciously aware of. Next to him Jonna gasped. “I can see it, Zach! I can see everything you remember!”

Throughout the rest of the elephant scenes, the humans and elephants continue to exchange thoughts and memories and even philosophical musings.

As for what the elephants are doing on the Great Plains and how they became empathic, you will have to read Pandora’s Promise to find out.

Writing Submission Materials for Kindle Scout

This post is about writing VERY short passages, inspired by Kindle Scout, a crowd-sourced contest in which the first few pages of unpublished novels are posted online and potential readers vote on which book(s) should receive a publishing contract. I entered my recently-completed novel, Pandora’s Promise (the third book in the Pandora’s Trilogy), and it was accepted right away. But it took me several days and much feedback from friends and colleagues to complete the entry.

                        

The two hardest parts of the submission process were writing a 45-character one-liner and a 500-character description of the book. Note that it is character, not word. Characters include punctuation and the blank spaces between words. You must write these minuscule passages in a way that will both explain what the book is about and entice potential readers to nominate it. The saving grace is that the one-liner, the description, and the cover should all work together to give a true picture of what readers will find in the book.

In any writing endeavor, be it an article, an email, or a novel, your prose will read better if you focus on what is truly important. With stringent space limitations, you can’t include all the main points, or even most of them. You’ll need to decide which ones best characterize the book and are most likely to interest potential readers.

In the case of Pandora’s Promise, there are so many important elements to the story it felt impossible to choose. It is a post-apocalyptic adventure with the fate of the human race in doubt. There are three main characters, each with her or his own story line. There are several important subplots, which seemingly have nothing to do with each other until all is tied up at the end. There are a number of hard-science fictional elements as well as subplots involving the emerging telepathic abilities of mutant animals. How could I possibly convey all this in only 45 characters? And how could I summarize such a complicated story in any number of words, let alone 500 characters?

As it turned out, having a tight space limitation was a good lesson for me in focusing on what was truly important in the novel.

Example: one of the most important subplots is the main hero’s interaction with a clan of telepathic elephants. This section, which had been read by several beta readers, was unanimously popular, so I felt it had to be included. Also, though the story is an action-packed adventure, it is also, at heart, a very intense love story, and I wanted to at least mention that. The fate of humanity, if not the world, is indeed in doubt due to a combination of genetic mutations and climate change. There are many other subplots and elements, including a section on how all these disasters came to be.

I decided right away that I wanted the one-liner to be a question: “Can X and Y save the world?” This gives a flavor of the importance of the stakes.  But what should I put in the blanks? These are some of the things I tried:

Can human love and ancient wisdom save the world? (49 characters)

Can courage and telepathy save the world? (41 characters)

Can human daring and sentient animals save the world? (53 characters)

Can love and telepathic animals save the world? (47 characters)

The only line that comes in under the cut-off is the second one, and to me it was too general: whose courage? What telepathy? Neither “human love” nor “love” conveys the idea of romance. Daring and courage give some hint of the action segments of the novel, but only a hint. I eventually realized that I was trying to put too many ideas in my one-liner, and should leave other ideas to the summary. I decided instead to focus on only two of the main ideas: the elephants, who are characters in their own right, and the love story, which, though it mostly remains in the background, is a strong motivating force for much of the action.

Thus I finally arrived at “Can true love and elephants save the world?” Which happens to be 43 characters.

The summary, in which I had the luxury of writing a 500-character passage, fills in many of the blanks. It implies that the elephants are sentient, and also offers a flavor of the action, as well as the hard-science fictional nature of the book, lest it be dismissed as fantasy. To see what I ended up with, go to my book’s page on Kindle Scout. If you do so before January 16, 2015, please also nominate my book. If I win publication, you will get a free advance copy of the e-book.

 

Technorati Tags: Kindle Scout,Pandora's Promise,Pandora's Trilogy,Simplifying writing,Writing to length

49. How to Keep Readers Turning Pages. Part II: Make life tough for your protagonist

In the last post I talked about building suspense into your novel by using cliff-hanging chapter endings. Another, even more important technique, is to make sure readers identify with your main character, then thwart that character every chance you get.

In a mystery or thriller, a good way to thwart your character is to place her in physical danger. In a romance, make sure that the would-be lovers misunderstand each other’s intentions, like many of the heroes in Jane Austen novels, or that there are serious outside pressures against the romance (as in Romeo and Juliet). Assuming your readers care about your characters, they will keep reading to see how the characters overcome these obstacles.

                                      

After all, if the two love interests in a novel meet, get along great, and don’t even have opposition from their families, why should anyone keep reading? If the dauntless detective follows one clue to another, in a straight line, and catches the villain without any peril or hassle, what’s the point in turning pages?

Here is the catch: working out a series of believable obstacles can be hard. But it is worth it if it keeps your readers reading.

In my third Pandora’s book there are plenty of major twists and turns in the plot, but I’m trying to focus on the small twists to keep the suspense going. For example, Zach and his traveling companion will confront major perils when they reach the Western West, but it’s a long and arduous trip there. A relatively minor obstacle that I have already written about is crossing the Mississippi river. 

As I’ve worked on revising this scene, however, I have come to realize that my original conception was too easy, so I’ve added the following obstacles: suspicious, hostile  townspeople; the necessity for the protagonists to prove they are who they say they are (which they are not, by the way); an exorbitant demand for money to use the town’s ferry; and the sudden, possibly calamitous recognition of Zach and his companion by one of the townspeople. (This last, by the way, makes an excellent chapter-ending cliff.)

The resolution to each obstacle in this journey to the Western West is always created by the protagonists themselves; and my hope is that each should feel satisfying and move the story along at the same time.

Technorati Tags: creating suspense in fiction,Pandora's Genes,writing the novel

48. How to keep your readers turning pages. Part I: the Cliff

In coming posts we’ll take an in-depth look at suspense—the plot element that keeps readers turning pages. Today we’ll examine one of the most venerable techniques for creating suspense: the cliff-hanger chapter ending.

                                        

The term “cliff-hanger” originated with old movie serials, which sometimes featured the hero dangling from a literal cliff before the film faded to black. Naturally, viewers would rush back the next week to discover how the protagonist escaped. In modern fiction, the same device is often used to end a chapter, especially in genre and children’s fiction. Instead of literal physical danger, the peril is often psychological (a horrifying secret is revealed, the protagonist receives shocking news).

Whatever the nature of the “cliff,” as we used to refer to them when I wrote my children’s suspense series, it is designed to keep the reader going for “just one more chapter.”

I used the cliff technique in my first two Pandora’s books, which each had three protagonists with alternating stories. I often ended one character’s story on a very dramatic cliff, and in the next chapter switched to  another character, describing how she or he got out of the peril that had ended his or her previous chapter.

Here are some examples of cliffs. Note that any type of cliff can contain elements of other cliffs, combining, for example, scary and thwart. The more dramatic the chapter ending, the more likely your readers will turn to the next chapter. 

SCARY CLIFF: It was so foggy she couldn’t see, but she heard the relentless pounding of feet behind her. Her breath was now coming in ragged gasps, and she couldn’t help slowing her pace. In desperation she glanced back—and saw a looming shape, now only a few yards behind her.

THWART CLIFF: As the zombies continued to pound the door, he glanced frantically around the room. A small window near the ceiling—would he be able to fit through it? He’d have to. Quickly, he pushed the heavy table to the wall under the window and climbed onto it. He could just reach the window. He ripped off his jacket and covered his hand, then smashed it into the window, hearing the satisfying tinkling as glass fell. Just as the door splintered and fell into the room he heaved himself up onto the sill… and saw the bars on the outside of the window.

SURPRISE CLIFF: When she glanced up, she felt her heart stop. It was Leigh—come back from the dead.

EMOTIONAL CLIFF: He continued to sit there, tears in his eyes, and I realized that everything he had ever told me had been a lie.

CHEAP THRILL: This is a special kind of cliff, used mostly in children’s thrillers. At its most raw, it’s a kind of cheat, and involves a false cliff. The Scary Cliff example above would be a Cheap Thrill if the first sentence of the following chapter were: She felt a familiar hand fall on her shoulder and a gruff voice said: “Tag! You’re it.”

Technorati Tags: novel writing,how to create suspense,cliff-hangers

40. Finding a great opening line

Last week we talked about WHERE to begin a novel. Now let’s take a look at HOW.

In the beginning of your novel ideally you should introduce your main character, illustrate his or her central problem, and do so in a way that grips potential readers.

Here’s a great first line from the Kafka classic Metamorphosis that does all those things at once:

                                             

As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a monstrous vermin.

This line also establishes the mood of the story—claustrophobic, dreamlike, and horrifying.

Here is a more mundane example from my young adult novel Going to See Grassy Ella. I had determined that my actual story begins when Peej and Annie, the heroines, decide to run off to New York City so Peej, who has cancer, can visit a faith healer. The first chapter shows them making that decision, along with the necessary background information. To draw the reader in, I decided to make an immediate reference to the most exciting (and comic) part of the novel:

“This is the true story of how my sister and I got kidnaped and broke up an international drug ring,” Annie tells us, adding, as a segue: “But it didn’t start out like that.”

Many novels begin with a  provocative sentence that raises immediate questions. I began Pandora’s Genes: He knew they had been expecting him. This raises the questions, “Who is HE?” “Who are THEY?” “WHY are they expecting him?”

Take a look at the classic opening to Catch-22:

It was love at first sight. The first time Yossarian saw the chaplain he fell madly in love with him.

This opening accomplishes quite a lot: it introduces the main character, sets up a number of questions readers want answered, and establishes the comic voice that Joseph Heller uses throughout the novel.

Here are more ideas to keep in mind for the beginning of your novel:

Know your genre. Mysteries, romances, and sci-fi each have their own conventions. The opening of a mystery often focuses on a crime; romances usually begin by introducing the lovers; and science fiction often throws the reader into the midst of a strange and provocative world.  From George Orwell’s 1984:

It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking 13.

Ask yourself, would *I* want to keep reading? If the answer is yes, you’re on the right track.

Don’t start with a prologue, except possibly for a sequel in a series. Readers tend to skip prologues—because they are looking for the action.

Use flashbacks rarely and sparingly, if at all. Again, readers will often skip them. I once read a student novel that started a flashback on the first page that went on for four chapters. By the time the story snapped back to the present, I was completely lost.

Don’t start out with a character sketch. That was how authors often began their novels in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but today’s readers don’t have the patience for it. Instead, drop in information as needed throughout the book, and SHOW us who your character is through her actions and words.

Technorati Tags: first lines of novels,writing techniques,1984,Metamorphosis,Catch-22

39. Where does a novel begin?

There are two main considerations in beginning a novel. First--WHERE do you begin? And second, HOW do you begin? This week we’ll look at the first consideration.

A rule of thumb is to begin your story in a place where something compelling happens. A friend of mine who writes young adult adventure novels advises: “Begin the day after everything changed.”

One way to look at it is to decide what the most important conflict in the story is and begin with an illustration of that conflict. That is what I did when I began Pandora’s Genes. As I mentioned in a previous post, it started with a dream, in which I saw a good man reluctantly doing something that he knew was wrong.

You could argue that the story actually begins when he makes the decision to go against his conscience, but the real story is in the consequences of that action as they unfold, and therefore that is where I started the novel.

Peter Falk as Columbo

In many murder mysteries, the story begins when a body is found, or at the moment of a murder. This decision can vary depending on the sort of mystery it is. If it’s a procedural, you may well begin with the murder, or the events leading up to the murder. Think of the old TV show Columbo, in which all the suspense lay in seeing how Columbo would figure out the events that we, the viewers, had already witnessed.

In other mysteries, the story may begin when the detective first learns of the murder, which may even have been committed long in the past. In this case, readers will see clues as the detective does and put the pieces together with him.

In my science fiction novella, The Ptorrigan Lode, I began with the main character already in trouble, in danger of dying from drug withdrawal on a space station. It is only in the course of the story that we learn how he became addicted in the first place, and why he is on a space station.

A story that begins like this is said to start in media res—in the middle of the action, and it’s long been a common technique with science fiction. Experienced science fiction readers know to be patient and the questions they have about technology or terminology will eventually be answered, either directly or implicitly. This technique is often used in mainstream fiction as well.

Other genres have other conventions for where to begin a story. Romances often begin either at the time or just before the first meeting of the star-crossed lovers. Here again, it’s important to get the story going before worrying about the events that led up to it.

The most important thing to keep in mind is that you must begin with some sort of action—physical or emotional. It’s tempting to want to explain how your main character arrived at the action or decision point that actually starts the story, but that’s a tactic that is likely to lose your readers. The best way to explain your character is to show us how she reacts to events throughout the story.

Next week: HOW to begin a novel.

Technorati Tags: novel writing,beginning a novel,novel structure

35. Self-editing I: Five Ways to Get Distance from Your Work

Have you ever noticed how much easier it is to edit other people’s writing than your own? This is because you start out with an automatic distance from another person’s work. Here are five ways to distance yourself from your own work, which will make editing easier and more effective.

                                                

1. Be a reader, not a writer. Try to read what you have written as if someone else had created it. I used to do this by pretending I was reading it in a magazine. As I read, I pictured my words in one of my favorite magazines already set in type. Very often, in that frame of mind, the “non-professional” parts of the writing became apparent to me. I would see, for example,  that I had started the piece too slowly, or that I was digressing--both common writing flaws of mine. I did this both when I was first writing professional nonfiction, and then again when I made the leap to fiction. To tell the truth, I still do it sometimes.

2. Let some time pass before you start to revise. By “some time” I mean “as much time as possible.” Ideally, wait at least a week or longer before revisiting material you have just written. This is not always practical, and certainly not for material that has a deadline, but even setting something aside overnight can give your subconscious time to rework the material.

3. Don’t revise as you go along.  I have a friend who is working on her first novel. She has spent over a year on the first chapter. I quizzed her about this, and as I suspected, she goes back and revises the beginning over and over. For each new sentence she adds, she probably spends time honing six previous sentences. No wonder she hasn’t moved on to chapter two!

This is a common problem among new writers. I believe it is caused by insecurity, and the belief that what you write MUST BE PERFECT. Guess what? No writing is perfect. The most you can hope for is the best you can do. But you won’t know what that is if you don’t finish it. In most cases the best way to finish a piece of writing is to write it as quickly as you can, and only then go back to make changes.  

4. Read out loud. In the comments to my post on revising blog entries, two commenters mentioned reading their work aloud. Journalist Jennifer Willis, who does this with all writing, points out that “It's amazing how many typos and awkward turns of phrase I'll pick up this way that my eyes alone might miss.” Reading aloud is a technique I use also, for both fiction and nonfiction. It is particularly helpful if something just doesn’t quite seem to work and you’re not sure why.

5. Recopy in a different medium. I discussed this technique in a recent post. If you wrote your first draft by hand, type the second draft. If you composed on your computer, try recopying problematic paragraphs or sections by hand. Or use voice-recognition software to re-enter the material. I’ve been experimenting with the dictation software that came with my computer, and find it gives me a completely different perspective on my work.

Next post:  Self-editing II: revision checklist

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33. Active revision

There’s no question that revising is the most important part of writing. But I believe that few writers today truly revise. Because we use word processing technology, we no longer go to the root of the word “revision” and literally re-see our work.

In a previous post I mentioned that I wrote and revised Pandora’s Genes on a typewriter. In fact, I went through at least six complete versions of the novel—around 100,000 words. After typing, I made changes in pen or pencil and retyped again.

Something I noticed while working was that EVERY TIME I retyped a page, section, or chapter, I made changes that neither I nor an editor had penciled in. Some of these changes were as simple as fixing a typo nobody had previously noticed, but more often they were subtle changes of word choice, for accuracy or rhythm. Sometimes they were cuts, to avoid wordiness. Sometimes I added a sentence or two, for clarity or verisimilitude.

Let me repeat: This sort of change went on EVERY TIME I retyped.

I used to joke that my fingers were smarter than my brain, and there is a grain of truth in this. I think that in some way the fingers access the subconscious—the part of the brain that does most of the work—in a more direct way than the thinking brain does.

In a recent interview in the New York Times, the novelist John Irving says that he writes in longhand, and also revises in longhand. He had previously fed his original copy into a typewriter for subsequent drafts, but prefers the slower approach of longhand. I too slow myself down with longhand, sometimes, even today, when I am confronted with a particularly difficult passage.

Those who write only on word processors never give themselves a chance to slow down, or to re-see their work. Does that mean that today’s published prose is less elegant than that of only twenty years ago?

I’m not sure that question has a definitive answer. In my current work on the sequel to the two Pandora’s books, I’m working from a large stack of handwritten pages I wrote several years ago and then forgot about. I am feeding them into my computer, one page at a time, much as I used to do in the old days. I am editing as I go. In a future post I’ll show some examples of how that is working out. 

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32. Three ways to make readers identify with your protagonist

What is the number one thing we novelists want readers to do? (I mean, of course, in addition to actually buy our books.) If you think about it, the answer is that we want them to identify with our main character or characters.

Note that I didn’t say we want them to LIKE our main characters. They may dislike a character, or disapprove of his or her actions, but if you, the writer, can get your readers to root for your characters, they will keep reading.

Here are three surefire ways to get the reader on your character’s side.  

1. Start the character off with a big problem. In The Wizard of Oz, Dorothy is quickly whisked off to the Land of Oz by a cyclone. She’s alone, in a strange land, and has no idea how to get home.As readers, we can’t help but cheer her on.

In the first chapter of Pandora’s Genes, we learn that Zach is faced with a moral dilemma--to do something he knows is wrong (buy a young girl from her family), but feels he must do out of loyalty to his leader. Anyone who has ever faced a conflicting set of choices will root for Zach to resolve his problem one way or another.

In The Ptorrigan Lode, my science fiction novella, Jay Irice, the protagonist, is immediately revealed to be a drug addict who will die if he does not get a fix. I was concerned when I wrote it that readers would find Jay’s situation so distasteful that they would not want to read about him, but apparently many readers became hooked on Jay just as he was hooked on chappa.

                                                                           

2.   Pile on the difficulties. As soon as she gets to Oz, Dorothy discovers she has a mortal enemy in the Wicked Witch of the East. The farther she goes down the yellow brick road, the more perils she and her friends face. In chapter two of Pandora’s Genes, Zach becomes paralyzed by a fly-borne illness, and after he recovers is assaulted and left for dead by robbers. Poor Jay Irice is confronted with one threat  and betrayal after another by a number of other characters, including two that he has deeply trusted. In each of these examples, we as readers want the characters to get out of trouble, and we want to see how they do it.

3. Make the character the agent. This is the most important of the three rules. After going through all the twists and turns of your plot, when the character finally reaches the denouement make sure that he or she SOLVES THE PROBLEMS THROUGH HIS OR HER OWN ACTIONS. Dorothy herself throws water onto the wicked witch. Though Glinda the Good tells Dorothy how to get home, she also points out that escape from Oz was always in Dorothy’s own power. In Pandora’s Genes, Zach undergoes many trials, always escaping from them through his own actions. Where he has help, it is help that he has initiated or earned. He resolves the moral dilemma that began the book through coming to a new self-understanding.

As for Jay Irice, he escapes his seemingly inescapable difficulties through his own efforts in a very surprising way that—for such a short tale-- I cannot give away here. (There is a link to The Ptorrigan Lode on Kindle in the column on the left.)

If there are any writing topics you would like to see in future posts, please either leave a comment here or email me. I will post every week on Wednesdays, and sometimes more often.

Technorati Tags: Pandora's Genes,The Ptorrigan Lode,creating fictional characters

26. Less is More: how to keep your writing clear and simple

In a guest post on The Writing Well, on May 14, I discussed showing (dramatizing) vs. telling (summarizing) in fiction writing. In order to dramatize without over-dramatizing, it helps to make your language as simple as possible. LESS wordiness almost always means MORE impact.

Be stingy with adjectives and adverbs. The fewer you use, the more powerful your writing. The trick is in choosing the one or two best modifiers.

He angrily slammed his fist on the bar. "Get out of here, you son of a bitch!" he snarled rabidly, his face contorted in rage.

                                      

See how much simpler—and more effective—this passage is if you get rid of some of the indicators of anger:

He slammed his fist on the bar. "Get out of here, you son of a bitch!"

Trust your readers... and trust yourself. Sometimes, as writers, we are unsure of our ability to convey strong emotions, so we tend to overdo it. With simple, clear writing, you only need to make your point once--you needn't beat your reader over the head with it. Compare these passages with their simplified revisions:

Her eyes filled with tears of joy. "Oh, Michael," she breathed softly, her face full of love. "It's... it's beautiful," she added, her voice trembling with emotion. Never had she felt such love.

Her eyes filled. "Oh, Michael," she breathed. "It's beautiful."

A sense of power surged strongly through him and he raised his fist in the air, pumping it three times. "Yes!" he cried triumphantly. He would make all the small, petty little people cringe and pay for what they had done to him.

A sense of power surged through him and he raised his fist. "Yes!" he cried. He would make them all pay.

Bear in mind that the context usually gives plenty of hints about what is going on. For example, in the first example above, we would know it is a love scene. In the second, we probably already know how he feels about the people he will "make pay"--and what he feels they have done to him.

Finally, a personal bugaboo, don’t EVER use the word “hysterically” in describing how someone weeps.

“Leave me alone!” she screamed, sobbing hysterically.

All you really need here is:

“Leave me alone!” she sobbed.

Tomorrow: Give yourself credit as a writer.

Technorati Tags: writing techniques,revision,simplifying writing

 

 

24. How to get from Point A to Point B: the logistics of moving characters from one spot to another

The big sex scene, the revealing moment at the end of the book—these are the scenes most novelists look forward to writing. But over the course of a novel, there’s a lot of mundane movement that has to be handled as skillfully as the high drama.

I am talking here about the mechanics of maneuvering your characters through imaginary time and space in order to further the plot. A mistake often made by my novel-writing students (and sometimes by pros) is to include every boring detail.

Say, for example, we have to get John from his workplace to his bedroom/office at home, where an important plot point will occur. Although the following example is exaggerated, it’s not that uncommon to read passages such as:

John came home from work. He parked the car, climbed the flagstone steps, and entered through the kitchen door. He placed his briefcase on the counter, then shrugged out of his suit coat and hung it on the back of a chair. Tired and thirsty, he walked over to the refrigerator and opened the door. He saw a carton of milk. He found a glass in the dish drainer, took out the milk, and poured some of the creamy white liquid. He drank the milk, rinsed the glass, and placed it back in the dish drainer. Then he headed for the front hall and climbed the steps toward his upstairs office.
                                         

Boring, right? In many novels or stories, there would be no need for anything more than a brief statement: “When John got home he headed for his bedroom office.”

BUT, depending on what John will do or find in that upstairs room, the seemingly boring passage above may turn out to be very important. The key is to choose which parts of it to emphasize, depending on what is going to happen

For example, suppose the milk is poisoned, and John is destined to collapse when he gets upstairs. In that case, we would want to linger on the details of John’s arrival home. Especially if we the audience KNOW that the milk is poisoned, we may be thinking, “No, John, don’t drink it!” As the author, I’d want to add some details such as, “The milk tasted a little old. He checked the expire-by date, and saw it was still good for another week, so he poured another glass.”

What if, instead of a mystery, this is a thriller or sci-fi novel, and John will receive a horrifying message on his home computer? In that case, we’d want to gloss over the details until he reaches his home office:

As soon as John arrived home, he grabbed a soda and headed for his home office.  It was going to be a long night of working on the taxes and he wanted to get an early start. But as soon as he turned the machine on, he knew something was wrong.

At this point, the computer may start talking to him, or a terrifying message pops up, or he receives a threatening email.

In a mainstream novel or a romance, John may discover that his wife has left him. In this case, we might have a few more details downstairs:

He noticed that Sarah hadn’t washed the breakfast dishes as she usually did. But he didn’t think much of it till he saw the envelope lying on the top of his laptop.

                                                                        

Or perhaps he notices that some drawers are open downstairs, but it’s not till he gets to his upstairs office that he realizes there is a burglar in the house.

Such seemingly basic details as logistics can make a big difference to the readability—and success-- of your novel.

Tomorrow we’ll look at a biggie: how to handle strong emotions in fiction.

Technorati Tags: Writing techniques,logistics in writing,fiction writing