Linda Maye Adams's Blog, page 36

Taking the muse out to go potty

The muse is sometimes like a dog.  The dog wants to go outside to go potty.  But once he gets out there…oh, wow!  So many interesting things!

That tree needs to be sniffed!

The wind blew and made a whooshing noise. I must bark.

Hmm.  Someone’s been here.  You been seeing anyone, human?  Can I meet them?

The muse gets silenced

All the muse wants to do is play, and explore.

But the world gets impatient.

“Get down to business,” it says.  “Time is money.  We can’t afford to waste it with wandering.”

The muse slinks off with its tail between its legs and hides.

The ideas disappear

Bud Sparhawk was joking when he said a man would write an idea on a postcard once a week and send it to him.

Writers came up after the panel and asked for the address!

Once ideas are shut down, it’s hard letting them romp free again, much less go potty.

The Writer Nerd strikes again

The nerd has to get out some statistics about how much creativity we actually lose from childhood to adulthood.  Check out the chart from Idea to Value.  The number is shocking, and horrifying.

We lose creativity because of evolution.

We lose it because we self-edit–“that’s a terrible idea!”

We unlearn how to be creative, how to come up with ideas.

That’s not good for the story.

Practice taking the muse out to potty

Go a to a museum
Take a short workshop (i.e., library, lecture, etc.)
Take a walk in nature
Follow the front of the car
Just see something new

Be like the dog wandering outside and stop and sniff the tree.

More Reading

Daring to Live Fully
Training yourself to be creative
How to train your brain to be more creative

 

 

 

 

 

 

How to hide a unicorn in plain sight

How the heck do you hide a unicorn anyway?

It has that pointy ice cream cone for a horn and a glorious, flowing mane.  A horse with sparkles.

Hardly something that would be easy to hide.

So you’d do it with a fish.  A red herring, to be precise.

What is a red herring?

A red herring is a false trail in a book, designed to distract the reader from the actual clues.

It’s like being a magician when you write!  While you are showing the trick to the audience, you’re also slipping in the actual trick under the radar.  Pretty cool, huh?

The real clues are actually right in front of the reader, but the red herring is really shiny.  It screams: “Look at me. I’m important!”

Might only be a squeaky voice, since fish don’t really talk.

Clue hide-and-seek

Take the clue out of its frame of reference.  Makes it hard to realize the clue is important without the context.
Make something else the obvious choice–that really shiny thing.  You can play up on the reader’s expectations here…like the guy with the violent criminal background has to be the killer and then–BANG!  He’s the victim.
Bury it in a list.  Human brains can only take in three things at once.  If you give them four, they’ll probably forget the second or third items.

But always play fair with the reader.  It’s no fun to have the detective know something and the reader doesn’t.  That’s the fastest way to get a book thrown across the room.  We like being given information and not seeing it.  We don’t like being tricked.

What’s fish got to do with it?

Nerd me had to ask where the term “red herring” actually came from.  Was it a popular mystery story now lost to time?

Dons my black belt in Google Fu.  Ee-yah!

Turns out a journalist in the 1800s wrote a story about a boy using red herrings to mislead the hounds.

More reading about red herrings

International Thriller Writers on Hiding Clues from the Reader

Gillian Roberts on Playing Fair with the Reader

Let me hear from you about a red herring you spotted in your travels!

Busting Writing Rules: No Dream Sequences

This is going to be the last post in this series.  Next up will be Writer’s Toolkit: 7 Secrets No One Tells Pantsers.

No Dream Sequences

This one has shown up on numerous agent blogs as a top ten of what not do.  When I was considering one for my book Rogue God, I asked writers what makes a good dream sequence.  They sternly told me to never use one, even though I was planning for one in the middle of the book and it would be fifty words.  When I said I was doing to use it, they thought I was crazy.

A form of a dream sequence is in the book.  The character got hit with too much magic from a god and he starts hallucinating.  The bad part is that he can’t tell if the monsters are real or fake.

What it Actually Means

Writers are often fascinated by dreams, quite understandably.  Dreams can be strange and surreal.  But the result is that writers also use them badly.  So we all get told simply to not use them, rather than learn how to use them correctly.

Busting the Writing Rule

This a rule where it helps to know what NOT to do and avoid it.

A dream is not an excuse for backstory.

Dreams frequently get used as a flashback.  The writer has backstory they feel is essential so they have the character dream it in full detail.

Not very interesting.


A dream shouldn’t generally be the start of the story.

The last thing you want is the reader getting into the story and then finding out it was all a dream.  Just like a TV show where the producer does a “reset” of an entire season.  Instead of being satisfied, the viewer feels like the show just wasted an entire year of time.

For a reader, it’s enough to put down a book.

But this guideline can be broken, if it it works.

What You Can Do

Veer into the surreal for the dreams.

Just like in real dreams, have your character be in his body but it’s not him.  Or he’s in once place and then it’s another place.  Have a person walk into the dream who’s not supposed to be there.  Just embrace your inner weird.


Have fun!

Dreams can be a very interesting place to experiment with.

Busting Writing Rules: Show, Don’t Tell

General Business

Got a name change for my upcoming pantser book: Writer’s Toolkit: 7 Secrets No One Tells Pantsers.   It’s all the things I wished I’d known decades ago.  Several of the secrets are almost never talked about, which is astounding.

Onto the next installment….

Show, Don’t Tell

Like the “no adverbs” rule, this one showed up on all the top ten writing lists in the major writing magazines.  In critiques, writers are lectured sternly on it and scratch their heads, trying to figure out what exactly they’re doing.

What it Actually Means

 This rule boils down to a basic concept: Use specific details in your descriptions from the character’s perspective and include the five senses.

Busting the Rule

This is a rule that has been oversimplified to the point of making it meaningless.  Unfortunately, not everyone understands it really well to start with.

How can you figure out if you tell too much and don’t show enough?  There are some clear signs:

You’re keeping your description to a bare minimum.
You’re abusing adverbs.
You’re abusing dialogue tags.

It’s pretty hard to show a character is angry if there isn’t any description available to do it.  That results in telling to explain that the character is angry.

But does that mean telling should be entirely done away with?

No!  And that’s why the absolutes of a rule are such a poor choice.  Saying something like “It took two and a half hours to drive to Santa Barbara” is telling…but really, would your story actually need to show a road trip where nothing happens?  It’s a matter of common sense to figure out where to use telling.

What you can do

Be specific in your details

This does mean ramping up the description skills.  If the room in your romance novel is “perfect,” what does that entail?  Does it smell of main character’s other half?  Why does she like the furnishings?  What memories might they evoke?

There are a lot of places here where you can get specific and have some fun building the characterization.

Just remember—when doing details, use only three at a time.  Then switch to something else, like an inner conflict or a puzzle, and then switch back for details.  You can study this technique in pretty much any bestseller.  In Elizabeth Moon’s Oath of Fealty, the new king wakes up for the first time in his palace room.  We learn what the room looks like and also how uncertain he is about this new place, all at one time.

This is a skill that simply takes practice.  Have fun doing it! You’ll be digging deep into who your character is and that makes the best stories.

Busting Writing Rules: Only Use Said for Dialogue Tags

This rule lands on my list because it’s often treated like a black and white issue when it actually has shades of gray with shades of gray.

What it actually means

The definition is pretty basic: Don’t rely on dialogue tags to do anything other than identity who is speaking.  That’s their purpose.  We’ve all run into a page entirely of dialogue and it can be hard to tell who’s talking.

Said is generally an invisible word.  It’s mostly fine, except when it isn’t.

I can feel your eyes crossing.  More on that below…

Busting the Rule

This rule shows up even from professional level writers for the following reasons:

Too much emphasis on dialogue tags.  

Writers will collect lengthy lists of tags to refer to.  So we end up with tags like ejaculated. That conjures up a very different image than is probably intended.

But moreover, these collections force the tag to do something else other than identifying the person talking.  They try to explain how the dialogue was spoken.

Which leads to the second point…
Not enough emphasis on description.

Even up to intermediate writer level, description is largely dismissed, with writers advising, “Keep it to a minimum.”

Except that it’s very hard to convey how words are spoken if there isn’t any description.  Pushing it on a single word in a dialogue tag is a throwaway device.  In most cases, the reader will eventually start noticing the goofy tags when they should be immersed in the writing.

What you can do

Work on your description skills.

Yeah, I’m repeating this one because so many skill areas like adverbs and show not tell connect to this.  Because once you change all the dialogue tags to said, you’ll realize that said is repetitive if that’s all there is.

So you veer to using action tags.  But if you’re keeping description to a minimum, suddenly you’re showing a character is angry by having him wave his fist.  And then you discover ten instances of characters looking at each other on one page (guilty).

Beefing up description is going to help here, a lot.
Use common sense and don’t overthink it. 

You’re writing along and it makes sense in the story to say “He whispered.”  You probably won’t have too many of those, and as you work on your description skills, you’ll need fewer tags anyway.


Don’t collect tags.  Seriously.  Just no. 

You have better things to do with your time like writing your story that worry about dialogue tags.

 

 

 

Back in time to September 11, 2001

A year after the attacks of September 11 happened, Holly Lisle did a call for an anniversary anthology she published as Together We Stand.  I saw the call, said to myself, “No way.”

At that point, in 2002, I hadn’t even been able to wrap myself around Desert Storm (that happened in 2015).  Yet, the anthology call nagged at me.  I finally sat down and wrote this, which was published in the anthology.

# # #

The world started on Tuesday, September 11, 2001, and it slowly began to peel away like the layers of an onion.

The first layer, the top one, peeled away when the two planes crashed into the Twin Towers. There were murmurings around work as we tried to sort out what was happening. All we had were vague news stories as reports continued to come in. We could not comprehend anything other than it was a terrible accident.

Then the third plane came in. It struck the Pentagon, sixteen miles from my work. We were evacuated to the basement. My boss immediately found each of us and made sure we were all right.

We sat in the basement, waiting, not knowing what was happening, and imagining all kinds of things. After about half an hour, we were told to evacuate the building and go home.

Home for me was in Arlington. Home was about two miles from the Pentagon. I didn’t even know what would be there when I arrived. Or if I would be able to reach it.

I sat on the freeway with thousands of other cars in the sweltering heat. It was not a typical Washington, DC traffic jam. No one cursed. No one honked. No one fussed. We all had a moment of perfect understanding.

On the shoulder next to me, police car after police car raced toward the Pentagon. And when the shoulder ended, we all moved out of the way as one to let a military convoy through. One soldier hopped out of his truck to help direct us.

While I sat in traffic, I continually tried to call my grandmother on my cell phone. Others were doing the same, so the networks were all tied up. Finally I got through. I kept it short: “Tell everyone I’m okay.” She would get the word out to the rest of the family.

Four hours later, I discovered home was still there. As I stood out on the sidewalk, I saw the smoke rising from the Pentagon. The streets were deserted. The atmosphere was subdued.

It stayed that way until Sunday, when the next layer peeled away. I remember it was a beautiful day outside. The sky was bright blue, and the temperature comfortable. I emerged from my shell, and it was suddenly very important that I do something for myself.

I discovered I wasn’t the only one. Everyone in the county of Arlington seemed to wake up at the same time, and step into the sunlight to take in the day. We were cautious, but we weren’t going to hide any longer.

One email from Canada and two from England arrived—friends checking in to see if I was all right. Their emails were short, as were mine. I don’t think any of us were ready to talk too much about it yet.

It was still hard enough just to do normal everyday things. I hadn’t looked at a newspaper since September 12. I knew I wanted to save them, but I simply couldn’t deal with reading them. Instead, I tossed them on the sofa each day.

Another layer peeled away when I was finally able to look at a few of them again.

One day, I opened The Washington Post to discover a list of the people on one of the hijacked flights. I found myself automatically scanning the lists, not expecting to see anyone I knew. Then a name caught my eye and I stopped, staring. Was that who I thought it was? Did I know him?

Yes, I did. I’d met him nearly twenty years ago. I looked at the picture of him in the paper, thinking how different he looked from the man I’d met in California. He looked happier. Now he was dead. Just like that.

I tried not to think about what his last minutes had been like.

My cowriter called me about the novel we were working on. Same book time, same book place? I didn’t need to think about it. I needed to write.

Gradually, we began to distance ourselves from the events of that day. It was a sort of setting aside, a moving on—a necessary part of the process. The layers were now flaking away in bits and pieces.

In August 2002, actor David Hedison was starring in a play on Cape Cod. [ETA: He passed away July 2019.] One of my friends from England flew down so we could both attend his performance. We drove up from Virginia, and as we crossed Rhode Island, we began to see American flags on the overpasses. One had nearly thirty of them, of varying sizes, all carefully arranged.

Seeing that peeled away another layer. We started talking about September 11 and what we had each experienced. You know what? Even though we were an ocean apart, we had gone through the same thing. It happened to the United States, but the whole world felt it.

Was that the final layer? Not yet. I know there will be more.

Busting Writing Rules: No Adverbs!

A little bit of business before the post:

I’ll be guest posting on Anne R. Allen’s blog this Sunday, so tune in for how to conquer your fears of doing a pitch session (or at least not sabotage yourself).
My next book in this writing series, to start in November will be Writer’s Toolkit: 12 Tips and Tricks for Pantsers.  No cover yet, but soon.
Also drop in and follow me on my eNewletter.  I have one writing link and one Hollywood or science link each week.

 

Busting Writing Rules: No Adverbs

I used to subscribe to all the writing magazines and “No adverbs” was on every top ten list.  The articles always made it sound like you could zip through your manuscript, searching for words that end in “ly,” zap them, and publication happens.

The truth is something entirely different…

What it Actually Means

First up, if you need a refresher of what an adverb is (and an adjective), head on over to the Owl at Perdue.

If you look for definitions like this, always start with original sources like college sites.  There are a lot of writers who try to define terms without truly understanding what exactly they’re defining (passive voice is an example of that).

The rule itself exists because some writers veer into adverb abuse.  Especially in the beginning of learning how to write, it’s hard figuring how to convey that a character is angry.  That’s the most common example, but you can pick your flavor.

So a story ends up with something like this:

He slammed the door angrily.  “How are we supposed to do this?”

She scowled bitterly.  “What am I supposed to do about it?  It’s your fault.”

“My fault?  If you hadn’t—” He furiously grabbed the magazines off the table and threw them across the room.

By the way, that hurt.  The writing was horrible!

In fact, I think once it’s pointed out, it becomes obvious how bad it is.  So the writers veer from too many to none at all.

Busting the Rule

Our tendency with rules is to isolate an item like “no adverbs” and follow it.  But everything in writing fiction connects to something else.  This rule connects to all of the following:

Characterization
Description
Dialogue

It also picks up the following rules:

Keep Description to a Minimum
Show, Not Tell
Avoid passive voice

What makes it so complicated? It’s just a bunch of words that end in “ly.”

Okay, let’s your character is angry.  How do you show that if you’re keeping description to a minimum?

With adverbs!

But if you eliminate all the adverbs, we circle back around to the original question: How do you show the character is angry?

Both the description, which is a chunk of characterization, and adverbs work hand in hand to build what you’re trying to show.  Zero tolerance is like leaving the salt entirely out of the food and have no flavor at all.

What you can do

Identify if you’re overusing adverbs

Run a search and replace for ly and add a space after it.  Replace it with a bolded or highlighted version.  If each page lights up like a Christmas tree, then it’s time to figure out why you put them in there in the first place.  But don’t panic if you see a lot of them.  Just refer to the next two steps.
Work on finding adverbs that you can replace with stronger words. 

This is just a skill that takes a bit of practice.  It’s unfortunately too easy to put in two words describing something when one would be more powerful:

Original: He ran swiftly.

Try: He bolted.

This is NOT about economy of words.  It’s about what words will best convey the image you’re shooting for.
Practice your description skills.

We all are told to keep description to a minimum because it’s boring.  But it’s only boring if you write it that way.  More tips on writing description are on Rule Five.

Adverbs are an important part of writing.  Use them as a tool.  Your story will love you for it.

Time Management and Fiction Writing

General Business

I’m guest posting on Anne R. Allen’s blog today, 1:00 EST.  The post is on how not to mess on your pitch session.  I ran the pitch sessions for a writing conference and saw a lot of writers sabotage themselves.  Drop on by!

My fantasy short story Words of Rain and Shadows is featured in the RabbitBundle Here Be Magic.  You can get a lot of great stories and discover new writers with RabbitBundles.

And a reminder that you can sign up for my newsletter.  There’s always something about writing for the writings, and a topic about Hollywood or science.

Making Writing A Priority

Every writer talks about finding the time to write.  Some of that is actually putting it on a priority list and doing it.

Most of the time when someone tells me “I’m writing a novel,” it’s taking ten years to write because they surface periodically when inspiration strikes and add a few hundred words.

Everything else is important.

With some people, this is going to be the case.  They want to write one book, and that’s all they want to do.

Indie’s tricker because producing more words is important, especially if you want to write full time.  James Hunter at Superstars said that you have to produce a minimum of four books a year to be successful.

For that kind of goal, writing has to be on the priority list.

Writing and a Day Job

I’m in a periodically crazy and chaotic day job.  Originally, I was breaking under the weight of it.  It was a four-person job on one person.  It made it very hard to write when I came home because the job sucked the energy out of me.

I used as much of the job as I could to learn process and practices that would help me on my writing side.  In fact, I was so desperate to solve the deluge of information that I read every time management book I could lay my hands on.

But time management is a scam.

Yeah, it really is.

All right, you get this guru who gives you a system to follow.  Doesn’t matter which one.

The majority of the systems are about jamming as much as you can into the time you have.  I remember on the Harvard Business Review, when I posted a comment about to-dos (which I despise, by the way), another writer popped up and bragged that she had a tracking system with 900 to-dos.

900?

Bragged?

Been there at work.  Don’t want to be there.

I think if I hadn’t been focused so much on keeping up and instead let everything fall behind, I might have gotten an extra person much earlier. I’d complain about being overwhelmed, but all people saw was that I was getting things done.

I did get help eventually.

What It Taught Me

This year seems to be the year of thinking strategically.

It means turning some things down to do more writing.  Not on the personal side though—I still go out and have fun and yesterday was entirely lazy because of the gorgeous late summer weather.

But it means maybe not taking any classes for a while.  Dean Wesley Smith offered a licensing course, and all I could do was look at that and no…the time would have to come from writing.

It simply didn’t have any value for me at this time.

I also looked at the number of projects I could do at one time: It’s three.

I have the primary manuscript I’m working on (currently Golden Lies), a promotion-focused one (that’s the Busting Writing Rules now), and a floater.  Last week, the floater was a short story for an anthology call.  The floater has also been the short story refresh, which I’ll be getting back to later this year.

It’s hard because I look at the number of words I’m doing and totals I have for Golden Lies—it’s doesn’t feel like I’m making enough progress for the number of words.

But it’s because I’m working on three projects at once.  It’s possible when the Busting Writing Rules finishes up, I won’t have one book done but two.

Alternating between the project requires management of my priorities.

The short story, Alien Pizza, bubbled up to the top last week because I wanted to get it in when the anthology call opened.

Busting Writing Rules bubbles up because of the weekly deadlines to get a blog post up.

Golden Lies fits in the rest of the time.

The Biggest Takeaway?

Do less, not more.

Busting Writing Rules: Keep Description to a Minimum

For September, we’ll have chapters on well-entrenched rules:

Keep description to a minimum
No adverbs (is that like “no wire hangers”?
Only use said for dialogue tags
Show not tell

And a reminder that you can sign up for my newsletter.  There’s always something about writing for the writings, and a topic about Hollywood or science.

Off to the first one…

I cringe when I see this advice show up on blog posts and even in a recent craft book. The writers say the following:

Keep your setting description to a minimum. No one wants to read about the setting.
Don’t describe your characters. Let the reader imagine them. Or, if we are to describe the characters, do it in quick bits here and there, like “she tossed her blond hair.”\
Don’t bother with the five senses. Those don’t add anything to the story.

The problem is that it’s really bad advice.

If you’re getting form rejections, this is one of the reasons. It’s not that comma on page ten.

What it Actually Means

This rule exists because of how description is taught. If you go to a writing class, you’re assigned an exercise like “Describe a village marketplace.”

So you dutifully form a picture of it and describe it like a TV camera panning over the scene. Five senses get wrapped up in this description.

It’s boring.

For a character’s description, this lands us in mugshot territory: He was six foot one, with a medium build. His hair was black and curly, his eyes gray. He wore jeans and a t-shirt.

That’s boring, too!

So what’s a writer to do?

Busting the Rule

No one mentions that description is a big piece of characterization.

Let this sink in for a moment.

If you keep description to a minimum, you undercut your characterization. Writers starting out tend to think characterization is identifying a favorite color, what time the character drinks her tea or the name of her parents.

But if your heroine meets another character and the heroine’s first reaction is that the other character’s hair looks like she put a finger into a light socket–suddenly you know a lot about your heroine from a few lines.

Or let’s suppose your character is out walking and gets a smell of a skunk. His first thought is a memory about his Golden Retriever coming into the house with skunk stink and giving it to everyone in the family. That one even does duty as backstory for the character.

And setting? One person might walk into a room with 1950s decoration and think it’s dated and another finds it a fond memory of their grandparents.

But if you don’t believe me, pick up Donald Maass’ Writing the Breakout Novel Workbook. He talks about it as the “telling details.”

Also bear in mind that if you don’t describe something, you hand over control to the reader.

If you don’t describe your spaceship, the reader is likely to imagine the one they are most familiar with from TV or film. So when your story does pull in the setting for a battle scene, the reader gets thrown out of the story because you didn’t do your job in the first place.

For characterization, common wisdom is that the reader will imagine themselves as the character—except that not everyone does. If you leave it off for this reader, I’m going to feel a lack of characterization. I might or might not stop reading, but I probably won’t pick up another book.

What You Can Do

This one’s pretty simple.

Have fun describing everything–all from your viewpoint character’s perspective.
Huge paragraphs can really slow down your story.

To keep pacing under control, write a description and hit three aspects. Then have the character talk, or their mind wanders to the problem troubling them. Then swing back for some more description. You can see this is best-selling books. Michael Connelly’s done it to describe Los Angeles while his character drives from one location to another.
All five senses should appear every five hundred words.

This is really hard to do. But human beings constantly interact with their background. As I write this, a TV is running the news, I hear voices echoing all over the halls, and behind me, air rushes out of a big vent that stands eight foot tall. A man just walked by, his heels clicking on the floor, and a door banged closed. And this is just the sounds!

Immerse your reader in the world around the character right from the start.

For more to read on this topic, check out Do Sweat the Small Stuff from Wylie Communications.

On September 8…

I’ll be doing a guest post over on Anne R. Allen’s blog.

Everyone always talks about doing the elevator pitch at a conference.  No one talks about how to deal with the actual pitch session.

When I was still thinking of going to traditional route, I ran the Washington Independent Writer’s Conference pitch sessions for about seven years.  I saw all kinds of things writers did to sabotage themselves.

So wander by and check it out.