Linda Maye Adams's Blog, page 5

The problem with Writing a “Shitty Draft”

portrait of a purebred jack russel terrier laid down on the grass in studio

Photo © cynoclub |Deposit Photps

I spent the day being driven crazy by ProWriting Aid’s AI. I used it to do a final cleanup of a submission to an anthology. The POV is from a dog’s perspective. That was challenging in itself because I kept having to find simpler wording.  A dog is not going to use the word adjacent.

But every time I did, PWA informed me that I needed to expand my vocabulary, or that there was a better word I could use. And it hated one made up word I used. The story was in first person, and present tense. I was surprised that present tense was easy to write.  This was a story for two of my strengths, Adaptability and Ideation.

Onto the topic.

With National Novel Writing Month coming up, “Give yourself permission to write crap” is going to be the mantra of many writers.

I also think it’s advice that should generally be ignored. (I even disagreed with Dean Wesley Smith on it!)

Though I understand the principle behind it.

The advice appears to have started with Anne Lamott’s Bird By Bird. I’ve never read the book before and am only now getting to it. I’m afraid I had an aversion to when everyone recommends a book (same problem with Stephen King’s book. I have read that and don’t understand why it’s in everyone’s top five.)

I’m finding it an interesting read, though nothing eye opening. It’s a deeply personal book. She started writing as a child, got published in her 20s, and eventually turned to teaching writing. 

She has an entire chapter on writing “shitty” drafts. The chapter in question has likely led to all the following:

Write straight through without stopping until you reach the end of the book (an attempt to outrun the inner critic/critical voice)Give yourself permission to write crap/shitty/suckAll first drafts are shitThe first draft is something distasteful to get out of the way.

A lot of this interpretation is because the people don’t understand exactly what she’s talking about, or they understand only pieces of it. Some of this may come from the wrong motivations to write. Like writing for validation, or getting published to solve all your problems.

And still other writers are merely repeating what they’ve heard from other writers. Ross Dawson talks about determining the provenance of information. Like a painting, it starts with who originated the information and reading the original source. Any time someone repeats it, they’ll add their own interpretation and opinion. Other people take that interpretation and add still more opinion and soon you have a copy of a copy of a copy…

Anne Lamott talks about “shitty drafts” in the context of the inner critic/critical voice. That’s the voice that says, “Why did you write that sentence? It’s terrible. Go fix it.” It leads writers to revise a sentence multiple times before moving on, trying to “perfect” it.

My former cowriter got stuck in a place of fear—fear of finishing—so he wanted to endlessly revise the opening chapter. Yet another writer I knew would write three chapters of a book, then ask for critiques, and use the comments as a reason to toss them out and start a new book. He never finished anything.

To some extent, you can’t outrun the critical voice. “Write straight through to the end without stopping” only gets you so far, especially with the critical voice is not really dealt with.

Instead, critical voice takes another route…and you can see it every meme or comments about first drafts from writer. Critical voice latches onto the incredibly negative “shitty,” “crap,” and “garbage.”

Instead of, “Don’t write perfect,” critical voice gets a foot—and maybe half the body—into the door. Because it loves the phrase “all first drafts are shit.”

It’ll happily encourage you to “write a shitty first draft” under the pretense of getting the writing done. Most writers interpret this as writing sloppily because “everything can be fixed on the revision.”  And critical voice encourages that, too.

Because, as M.L. Ronn notes in his Pocket Guide to Pantsing (I believe it’s this book, but it may be one of his others), when you get to the revision, you’re horrified at the problems you have.  And it reinforces both “first drafts are shitty” and feeds the critical voice. It promptly says, “See? I told you so.”

The minute you buy into “write a shitty first draft” or “all first drafts are shit,” you are handing the keys to the critical voice.

How do you get past the critical voice? It takes a lot of work, and more than one book; in fact, many more. But you start by jettisoning the negative words and thinking about what you say to yourself. Would you say “This is shitty” to your three year old self?

thinking about what you say to yourself. Would you say “This is shitty” to your three year old self?

Yeah, I thought not. It has to start somewhere.

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My book is in this year’s 2023 Novel Writing Tools Bundle. Please check it out!

Myths of Tracking Word Count

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If you’re wondering why I’m doing a lot of “better writer” posts, it’s because I landed in The 2023 Novel Writing Tools Bundle. This is only available for three weeks, so check out the amazing selection.

National Novel Writing Month is coming up. That’s where you try to write 50,000 words in a month. If you do the math, that’s 1,667 words a day.

I’ve never taken part in Nano. I tried writing a novel in a month, using a book guide that turned out to be written by a non-fiction writer, not a novelist. The act of trying to keep up with the pace caused poor decision-making in the writing. I pushed forward, rather than cycling and (though I didn’t know I need it then) doing thinking time. As I got near the end, I realized I was writing to get word count, not writing because the story was engaging me.

So I called it done. And it was a big mess because of how I wrote it.

I’m a firm believer in not writing sloppily. It wastes so much time. In fact, it’s one of those things that looks like you save time. Then you discover all the problems it caused, and the layers and layers of problems caused by the fixes. Not pretty.

But everyone talks about tracking word count as a sign of progress.

Today, I was headed into the home stretch on a story for the familiars anthology. I realized I needed some breed details—the story is done from a dog’s POV. She’s not going to identify the three animals involved by breeds like humans would. The breeds are Jack Russell Terrier, Golden Retriever, and Siamese. So I need to add characteristics that people in the know would, well, know.

So I was off to research each of the breeds to find details I could use for those in the know. JRTs are very territorial; Golden Retrievers carry about a lot of toys; Siamese are supervisors.

But there’s no word count in research.

Not is there word count for thinking about the story.

Or if you revise it, do copy edits, proofread.

Or cycling the story. This one drove me crazy when I was attempting to track word count. Sometimes my cycling would cause me to lose word count, and I ended up with a negative number in Scrivener for Windows. Demoralizing! Especially when I had done a lot of work.

All of those have elements of creativity to them. When I run ProWritingAid on my story, I look for initial pronouns and work to reduce them when I write in first person. That means rephrasing sentences, and thinking about how I can word it differently. It’s writing, but I may add one or two or five words, while changing an entire sentence.

Over the years, I have tried tracking word count, because that’s what everyone talks about. Always…. always a few months later, I discover the forgotten spreadsheet with maybe six entries in it. Nothing helped. Not writing in a planner or on a calendar like Joanna Penn did (I know she says it works. No, not for me). Not getting a spreadsheet with beautiful graphics.

In my case, it’s a problem associated with two of my CliftonStrengths. The first is Focus, which is the strength where you create goals and follow them. On my list of 34 strengths, Focus ranks at #23. The second is Adaptability, which I’ll call the “Semper Gumby” strength (always flexible). It’s #4. Or, to put it simply: Focus is not a “we’ll figure out as we go along” strength; Adaptability is. Opposites.

Yet, tracking word count is presented—much like most writing advice—as one size fits everyone. Some writers will say that you lack discipline if you can’t get X number of words each day.

Adding to that are writers who brag about getting 10,000 words in one day or 3,000 every day. We hear that and think that’s every day, not an exceptional day.

But we also aren’t machines. Most of this thinking seems to come out of business and time management advice. Time management advice originated in Silicon Valley and was based on how a computer program runs (that’s why there’s so much advice on efficiency).

In business, metrics, tracking of data, is used to show if a project is successful. Like a campaign selling a certain amount of a product. But there are a lot of problems with it, especially when applied to writing!

When I was stationed at Fort Lewis, I got sucked into writing newspaper articles for the post paper because of this very problem. Our Group (which is similar to a Division) had a journalist slot assigned to them. But they couldn’t keep people. Why? Because to the leadership, if you weren’t doing manual labor they could see (busting tires, carrying boxes, etc.), you weren’t working. Their metric was eyeballing people and seeing they were working.

The result? The soldier couldn’t do his job writing because leadership kept putting him on lawn mowing detail.

Metrics are funny like that, too…and why business have a hard time with people who need thinking or creative time. I might take a walk around the neighborhood to think about a thorny piece of story. But someone—even another writer—might tell me that’s not writing.

Only the physical act of typing the next word is supposed to count.

All this is silliness.

A writer who writes a million words a year, but fails to use it to improve counts more than a writer thinking through their next scene. Or it counts more than a writer who needs to research a topic, which might inspire new writing.

Becca Syme’s Manuscript Time Block (MTB) is an alternate way of thinking about writing and tracking it. An MTB is anything to do with the writing process. It could be the actual writing, thinking about a scene (definitely more fuzzy to track), cycling, revising, researching, and proofreading.

What do you think of tracking word count?

The 2023 Novel Writing Tools Bundle

I’m in StoryBundle again! Please share. I’ve always found the bundles an excellent source of writing advice.

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Beyond Prince Charming—One Guy’s Guide to Writing Men in Romance, by M.L. Buchman. Why are men so often clichés on the romantic page? They don’t need to be. Not even when real-life men appear to be clichés of themselves.

Military Strategy for Writers, by Stephen Kenneth Stein. Written by an award-winning expert in military strategy, this book uses examples from literature, movies, and games to show how to incorporate strategic thinking into plots, characters, and structure.

A picture can launch a thousand words. In Making Story Models, let Martin L. Shoemaker teach you how to create visual models to plan and analyze your stories and to find new potential hidden within.

And editing: Blood from Your Own Pen, 2nd Edition, by Sam Knight is a practical guide on self-editing and common mistakes for beginning authors who intend to survive to publication.

For productivity and inspiration, 52 Ways to Get Unstuck is a comprehensive guide to overcoming writer’s block that helps writers get unstuck—or avoid getting blocked in the first place—with innovative exercises, real-world examples, and practical advice from dozens of authors.

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In Write Faster Using Your Word Processor, Geoff Hart will teach you how to use your software more efficiently—both the tools you’ve used previously and new tools you haven’t yet tried. The skills apply equally well whether you write fiction or non-fiction.

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Struggling to write fiction on the side, around your day job? Time Management for Fiction Writers, by Linda Maye Adams offers strategies to manage your time without feeling overworked and overwhelmed.

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Does “Read A Lot” Help You Improve as a Writer?

Cute business cat wearing glasses reading notebook (book)

Image © vvvita / Deposit Photos (I’m writing a story with a Siamese cat in it.)

This post is inspired by a StoryGrid video on YouTube. I thought it was interesting advice to question because it is recommended everywhere. If there’s a top ten list of writing advice, this will be on it. Many best-selling writers recommend reading everything.

But is it true?

Like anything in fiction, it gets a “Well, maybe…”

Probably the reason it gets recommended is because there are people who have a skewed view of writing. They hate their day job and envision writing a best seller as a way to “win the lottery.” After all, how hard can it be?

And they decide to write a novel…but don’t read much fiction. Or with a writer I knew, working endlessly on a novel, didn’t read anything at all. He was decent enough with the words, but absolutely no concept of story. He always claimed he didn’t have time to read. Always made me wonder how he had time to write.

You need an inkling of what story is going into a novel.

You also need to know what current in the genre you’re writing in. Another writer complained that nothing she wrote was selling, so she was thinking of trying a “bodice ripper.” That told me right away she hadn’t read romance since the 1980s. And she wanted to write one that would sell?!

Then there’s the third type. That writer sneers as best sellers as being “for the masses,” and therefore assumes they’re all terrible (sight unseen). They might think they can write a book like a master from forty years ago or even a century. It’s elite thinking, and lands solidly in not knowing what today’s reader wants.

So reading fiction is important.

But simply reading a lot of books is probably not going to teach you anything, especially at first. Most writers start critiquing published books as a result. This is a terrible way to learn!

You end up viewing books negatively, thinking no one is writing anything good anymore. Because every book is flawed. It’s part of the creativity! If it were perfectly written, following every proper grammar rule exactly, it’d be boring!

The problem is that you need some skills under your belt to understand what you’re looking for.

We have Renoirs and Monets at the National Art Gallery, including my favorite, A Girl with a Watering Can. Artists set up easels and paint what they see to learn from the masters.

But if I were to set up an easel and try to paint Renoir, I wouldn’t be able to learn anything at all. Why? I don’t know anything at all about painting. I’d sit down at that easel and make a mess of it that looked nothing like Renoir.

That’s where reading lots of books won’t help if you don’t know how to use it. Which results in critiquing sentences—complete waste of time when there are so many better things to learn.

So you have to do a combination of writing, even if you think it’s awful or you don’t know what you’re doing, and learning.

The learning is tricky. Everything’s for beginners, and it actually may not be the best thing to learn. Plot is easy to teach, works with an outline, so it’s a common skill. Yet, it’s such a big, complex topic that it’s not something black and white you could learn simply from reading a book. You might not be able to learn it by returning to the book and trying to identify the plot (especially as ill-defined as it usually is).

Plus, it’s so big that it’ll be overwhelming. I’ve done an analysis of story structure (another way big thing); it takes a lot of time and effort. Plus, like the Renoir, you have to know what to look for.

Better might be to start with small skills. The first step is to read the entire book first. Just enjoy it. They try something like:

In a mystery, after you’ve read it, picking out all the places the killer appears. You might discover he inserts himself into the investigation, which is a pretty cool discovery.Metaphor usage. I did this as a week long challenge and was amazed at how many phrases and words we use that a metaphors.Identify the sentences showing the main character’s emotions.In a fantasy, track one element of the world building that you like. You could try typing paragraphs of the word building, for example (like the artist painting Monet).

Key is to keep the skill small and manageable. It’s awfully easy to think that you have to do ten things, then you get overwhelmed and do none of them.

Any other small things you’d recommend?

Misconceptions About Pantsing

mugshot of a wanted dog holding a banner

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The reason I talk about being a pantser (a writer who doesn’t outline) is because I wished I run across writers who talked about how to do it. The writing community generally treats anyone who doesn’t outline as:

They don’t know what they’re doing.They’ll see the truth and get with the program.They don’t understand outlining.

With National Novel Writing Month just a month and change away, we’ll see a lot of “Do you outline or pants?” Pantsers will get a side eye for not following the rules.

Having received the side eye, I decided to tackle the misconceptions about being a pantser (the misconceptions are usually about outlining).

Misconception #1: Outlining doesn’t kill your creativity

This gets told to pantsers when they say outlining ruins the story for them. Misconceptions About Outlining Your Novel – Helping Writers Become Authors brings this up (items 2 and 3). Here’s the problem—and a source of frustration:

This is true for that author. It may not be true for someone else.

I’ve been learning a lot over the last year with my Clifton Strengths. I have six in my top ten that are Strategic strengths. Strategic likes to puzzle out the story. What does an outline do? Puzzle out the story! Why then would I write the story? I’ve already figured it out.

This is not something I understood for years. All I knew was that I tried a “pantser-friendly outlining” class years ago and destroyed a decent idea by outlining it.

But I also know I’m on the extreme end of pantsing. Some pantsers need plot points, or do an outline after a certain point. There isn’t any right or wrong in this (unless you talk to other writers on a message board).

Misconception #2: All pantser novels are a mess

I hate sweeping generalizations like this. The writer saying it is parroting what someone else said (after all, it’s not like they’ve read many pantsed novels). I believe most of this comes from developmental editors (there is one I won’t name, but he ranted about pantsers in a popular book).

Yes, some pantser books may be a mess, particularly for a writer doing their first book. You have to write and mess up to discover what skills you need to work on.

And if there are significant skill weaknesses, pantsing can make it look a lot worse. Because it takes some time to figure out how to make the pantsing work for the individual writer.

Misconception #3: Pantsers are outlining and not calling it that

This one irks me because it’s so dismissive. A well-known writer who markets outlining informed me that my first draft was my outline and my second draft was the writing. So I said, “You write an outline, then do a first draft with characterization and dialogue and you have a story. But I write a first draft with characterization and dialogue, and all I have is an outline?”

This bizarre thinking implies a variety of things, like:

“You’re lying about how you write.”“You’re in denial about how you write.”“You don’t know what you’re doing.”

Really?

All things aside, though, I get why this comes up. These people can’t wrap themselves around how someone would write a story without doing an outline first. That’s fair. I don’t understand how someone gets a story by outlining either.

Misconception #4: There’s only one way to pants

This comes out of the Writing in the Dark crowd. The term comes from a book by Dean Wesley Smith, and discusses his method of writing. However, a lot of dedicated WITD writers have done what outliners have done: dismissed writers who don’t follow WITD exactly as described.

One lectured me as being stuck in the myths because I don’t cycle in the prescribed way, stating that I was “revising” when I wasn’t. Sometimes I wish people could see inside my head and they would see why some of these things don’t work the same for me.

In my case, I can’t reverse outline for the very reason of how I cycle. My brain makes constant connections to the different parts of the story. I might be writing Chapter 6 and my pinball machine brain lights up, telling me I need to add something to the first chapter. Going back only five hundred words—the prescribed method—meh.

I’m glad Dean wrote the book. We needed something for the pantsers, and it inspired Michael La Ronn to write one as well. But there’s still too few pantsers writing about the process (there are only about five books).

But the “rules” thinking leaves out the writers like me who cycle differently or have to outline halfway through, or just think about the story.

All of this circle to three points:

It’s hard to understand that someone else will have a different way of writing. Even I’ve previously had problems with this. I’d always assumed that pantsing meant absolutely no outlining. That’s not true.Many of the “rules” come from someone who is marketing to us. They have to sell their system, or services. Developmental editors are marketing their services and/or books. Even Dean Wesley Smith is marketing his system. He has a workshop and a book on it; he speaks at conferences. There’s nothing wrong with marketing; however, you have to know that it’s happening.

Always, always stand up for yourself and how you write. Don’t let other people’s comments cause you to change because you thinking something is wrong with how you write. If you wonder if you should change something, think about it for a while. Let your subconscious chew it over. It might find a launch point into something different.

Because if you don’t stand up for your writing process, no one else will.

Characters Acting, Well, Out of Character

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As I write this, we’ve already begun the slide into fall (autumn being the British term!). The days are cooler, though that’ll change the minute the air conditioner is turned off. We’ve also got the long tail of the hurricane—overcast, some rain.

This topic was inspired by Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I love the first three seasons. Fourth season, okay. After that, it ran into trouble and veered away from who the characters were. It was like the producers said, “Okay, Buffy needs a romance. But she can’t get it.” So, instead of thinking about character and story, they threw random bits together. Buffy and Spike. Really?

But the worst was Willow. In the sixth season, she turned evil and killed a man. It amazes me that no one asked, “How would she come back from this?” The answer is that she can’t.

There are some things, once a character steps over that line, it’s done, and irreversible. None of the gang should have accepted her back, or trusted her. Ever again. As a work acquaintance once said, “Trust is hard to gain and easy to lose.”

I read a formerly enjoyable fantasy series. Had a character with special powers and she could also talk to her Jack Russell Terrier, and he talked back. Then she got hooked up with her father, who dragged her into black magic territory. She sunk so deep, she killed her dog with magic. That shook her off the path, but that irrevocably changed the character to this reader. It didn’t matter that another character did a hand-wavy thing and brought the dog back to life. I stopped reading at the point; I wouldn’t have been surprised if the author thought all was well, especially since the dog was okay.

But there’s that pesky line of not being a heroine anymore.

Still another book, a very long-standing series, had a heroine who desperately needed answers from someone. It was in the “all is lost” portion of the story. So she tortured someone. Didn’t think twice about it. I think that author painted herself in the corner where it became the only way the story could resolve itself. And some non-magic hand-waviness…just pretend like it never happened in future books.

But J. D Robb (Nora Roberts) did it right in one of her In Death books. Sorry, there’s so many that I don’t know which one. Except that a killer got into a place that should have been safe. The fight triggered Eve’s childhood memories, and she turned more animal than human. In that state, she would have crossed the line and destroyed herself. But Roarke talked to her and brought her back from the brink. That’s powerful…because of what didn’t happen.

Why do you think writers have their characters step out of character? Is it influenced by TV and film, where this is a frequent occurrence as a series ages? Is it looking for bigger and more impactful? Or is it something else?

Note-taking for Fiction Writing

curly coated retriever, golden retriever, labrador, nova scotia duck tolling retriever and flat coated retriever dogs sitting together outdoors

Photo © ots-photo | Deposit Photos

Before I go to the topic, please check out the Humorous Science Fiction and Fantasy book giveaway I’m participating in. Humor is hard for most writers to do, but when it’s done right, it’s great for readers. Onward!

This topic was inspired by a podcast from Asian Efficiency questioning the worthwhileness of note-taking apps. I’m going to extend into notes themselves, because the way we take notes may have problems.

For me, I’ve always roamed around, trying to find the “right way” to take notes, and store them. Toolwise, I’ve tried Evernote. Hugely turned off when they got bought out, discontinued any free options, and wanted to charge $17.99 a month. Pass. OneNote? Meh! It’s for school. Obsidian? No objections to it, nor am I in love with it. Then there’s MyBrain, which is like mind-mapping on steroids. But I found that typing short thoughts was, well, too short. (Writer. Duh.). So I’m sticking with paper.

Then there’s the note taking methods…

Everything, it seems like, is rooted in school. You know, take notes to study for tests. The digital Note-taking crowds claim that you dump all your notes into one place and the articles “write themselves” (hmm. Not the creator.).

All this comes from a book published in the Slip Box method. That’s a professor who kept index cards in a box and wrote an amazing number of academic papers. He passed away, and people went over his boxes, trying to understand his system. They couldn’t ask him, obviously, so they tried to derive the methods of how he did it. His method was like the MyBrain method I tried. Index cards would drive me crazy because I have to file and organize them. With Adaptability, I’m lucky if the cards get into the box…

But the one thing I see is that everyone talks about taking the notes, gives their method on the physical taking of the notes. That could be Cornell, PARA, mind mapping, etc. But they don’t really talk about the actual note-taking, other than capturing information. Usually this is for a variety of reasons, including losing out if the information disappears, or for ideas.

Me? When I tried Evernote, it turned into a junk drawer of random notes. I never went back to them to look up information. Granted, I’m high input, and I’m more likely to seek more on a topic because I may find something different.

However, I spend a lot of time learning about fiction writing. I’ve taken online courses, and I’ve also read craft books and sought old issues of The Writer Mag. I’m also going to 20Books Las Vegas—lots of workshops—and Superstars. Except for the craft information, everything else expires. A workshop I took on keywords is no longer valid because Amazon changed their system.

So I have notes on writing action scenes, writing a story set on a spaceship, emotions in fiction, the five senses, tags (not dialogue tags) and a lot more.

Yet, for what I’ve taken, I haven’t always taken notes on it. The first thing Dean Wesley Smith says for all his classes is to take notes and then refer to them later. And I watch the videos and don’t always take notes.

I’ve never really referred to my notes from writing classes, at least not very often. Once I take them, they mostly fall to the wayside.

Writing is a strange area. I just took the class on Show Vs. Tell, which was an interesting take on Depth. I took a few notes to help process my thinking on the topic.

For example, I liked the different examples of the five senses. They were very specific, and sometimes I need very specific to help me learn better. However, I also didn’t always agree with being that specific. Especially with taste. I don’t want my novel turning into Food Network. Just saying.

The pronoun discussion also had me thinking, because I had been pondering that topic previously. There was a blog post on first person and the problem with using too many “I” and particularly, sentences that start with the pronoun. I also remember reading Mickey Spillane, done in first person, and very few “I” in the story. Might have to revisit a few of those to investigate further.

So this circles me back to the question that no one has answered effectively: What is note taking for?

Is it for coming up with ideas? The writer in me says, no. It’s not that hard to come up with ideas. Though it looks enticing to people who struggle to find ideas. But that’s a more complex issue. Note taking won’t help without solving the underlying reasons coming up with ideas is a problem, and not with coming up with original ideas.

I can, however, see using notes to think about an idea. I’m doing that with a short story for the familiars story call. That’s instead of “just starting.” I may use none of what I think about (often the case), but it helps form a bridge to where I want to go.

Is it to keep information? Much has been made of a note taking system being a “Second Brain.”  You know, recording information so you don’t have to keep it in your brain. But if it’s not important enough to think about, then why would you store it?

And besides, if I’m taking the notes for writing, I should be using it, not storing it.

Is it to learn information? This one’s stickier. There are a lot of studies that apparently have been done, claiming that note taking doesn’t help as much as everyone believes. It’s multitasking and is hard to do. If you’re listening to a presentation on world building, you’re doing that, processing what’s important, and then writing it down. While more information is coming in.

Is it any wonder that people default to writing everything down?

Most of the resources, including Asian Efficiency, advise that you do a weekly review of your notes to “distill” them. I should note that many people use distillation and I don’t think they know exactly what it means. It’s probably a metaphor, but the first thing this makes me think of is a still and moonshine, not refining notes. Okay……

But this advice focuses on capturing everything (like we’re in school) and then cleaning it up and revising them. All for something you’re supposed to dump out of your mind so you don’t have to think about it…?

We haven’t gotten out of school for notes.

The first step is to be picky about what we want to save. It shouldn’t be everything (high input grumbles here: “I want to collect it ALLLLL!”).

That’s the hardest thing I’m finding in studying the craft. What’s important? All of it—without a doubt—is opinion. One person says five senses every five words. Another says at the very least touch, sight, hearing. Still another lists the order they should appear in. (The only thing everyone agrees on for this is that it immerses the reader in the character.)

So the notes become a way to assess the information. You can write down this author says one sense per page and three emotions and if you agree with him. And why or why not, which is very important. Because that helps with figuring out your opinion.

Because you can disagree. Or disagree in part. Or be not sure. I’ve now heard many ways of doing the five senses and I’m not sure what I agree with. Of course, I’m still thinking about it.

The notes can also be a way to process how you would try out the skill. Sometimes I’m in the middle of a conference and a comment from the panelist takes me down a path where I’m writing ideas for the story.

Maybe note taking isn’t about collecting and keeping information. Maybe it’s about thinking.

Recommended Course on Show Not Tell

Two curious dogs stand on pond dock watching over water.

Photo © ccestep8 } Deposit Photos

Sometimes things just drop right into your lap.

I’ve been hot on the trail for other writers who present different viewpoints on how to do craft. The problem with only having Dean Wesley Smith teach is that if I don’t understand a skill from his explanation, I’m stuck. It’s why I’ve hit the old Writer Magazine archives. And, craft advice is opinion and sometimes I need different opinions.

This week, I picked up a copy of How I Got Published and What I Learned Along the Way eBook by Lyn Worthen – EPUB Book | Rakuten Kobo United States. One writer caught my attention with his essay, and the comment in the bio at the end that he had classes. His name is Maxwell Alexander Drake.

He made the rounds at conventions, teaching a panel packed with information. Like me, he was frustrated with the information available on the craft.

He ventured into online classes on his site, DrakeU | Exceptional Training for the Discerning Writer, including Show Vs. Tell. The course isn’t expensive. Nor is it beginner-basic that made me feel like I wasted my money afterward. It’s an advanced class for a piece of advice given to beginners.

He highlights four areas where any writer can end up doing telling instead of showing. He also defines passive voice in a way that makes sense for fiction. And, he also offers an alternative to the Depth method of five senses every 500 words. If you’ve struggled with Dean Wesley Smith’s Depth, this might be another avenue to explore.

Also on tap as we head into fall, I’m taking part in the Fantasy, Sci Fi, and Other Comedy group promo. If you like humor in your fiction, check it out for some good books.

Enhance Your Fiction with the Magic of Aroma

Nose of chihuahua, my lovely dog

Photo © bimka1 | DepositPhotos

I picked the sense of smell to start with first because it’s one of the hardest senses for me to add to the story.

Moreover, it’s not always well-described how to do it. Most of the examples I found associated it with a memory.

Yet, if you add it every 500 words, or once a scene, memory cannot be the only way to add it.

I think it’s challenging for a lot of reasons:

There are only three words that describe what something smells like. That’s it. Every other word is based on the other five senses, or nouns. How would you describe the scent of flowers? Sweet (a taste)? Floral (sight)? Yet, a rose smells different than a cherry blossom. Describing it…we just don’t have the vocabulary the way we do for sight or touch.We unlearn using it. The book An Immense World eBook by Ed Yong discusses the powerful sense of smell a dog has. It’s a way of communicating with each other. Yet, dogs can forget how to use it. Owners take dogs out of walks that are to get from Point A to Point B, not allowing the dog to stop and investigate everything. So I think we lose our connection to it as well, for the same reasons.

So how do we add it to our writing and use it for emotions?

The challenges we face mean everything else around it has to contribute to it.

We’ll start first with the word smell and all its synonyms. Not all synonyms mean exactly the same thing. Merriam-Webster says smell “implies solely the sensation without suggestion of quality or character.” So maybe smell is a little generic.

Other, similar words will have more of an emotional punch associated with it (yay! Emotion!). Fragrance reminds us of perfume, potentially romance. Stench is foul. Stink is definitely an opinionated word.

I read Green Rider and still remember when the main character fell into the rose bushes. She’s trying to hide from the sentry. He walks past, complaining about the stink of the roses, not understanding why the smell is so strong.

Next up is the aforementioned memory. Smells can trigger memories, sometimes good, sometimes bad. That’s something you can use with your character to bring out powerful emotions.

When I was growing up, we had a leaking facet on the corner of the house. Wild mint grew around the facet, drinking up all the water. When I turned on the facet to play in the water or give the dogs some to drink, the redolent mint filled my nose. Every time I buy mint—my favorite among the herbs because of the fragrance alone—I think of those summer days and dogs lost past.

Surprise can help with the characterization. Your character catches a scent they don’t expect and instant memory.  Their reaction could be a punch to the gut or a moment of nostalgia. I think you probably only get one of these in a book, though.

Context is another great way to bring smell into the story. If your character is in a forest, running from the bad guys, the first hints of wood smoke might be pretty alarming. Or if they’re lost in that forest and starving, the smell of venison cooking might elicit a different reaction entirely.

Tags are another way to bring smell into the story. Tags are a shortcut for the reader that they can associate with a certain character or place. L.K. Hill talks about them in Losing Track of Fiction Details? My #1 Hack for Not Embarrassing Yourself with Story Contradictions (authorlkhill.com) (she does not realize that’s what they are, though).

J.D. Robb uses them in every one of her books. There’s a nostalgic feeling of “home” when Eve takes in the smells of a futuristic New York street. She also compares the smell of different places to the smell of her homicide bullpen.

Other senses can be a way to bring in different smells as well. Taste is probably the most obvious, because smell and taste are closely associated. I think this combination can be challenging though; we don’t want it to sound like we’re channeling Food Network. But if you see or hear something, it may also have smell. A car grinding out a plume of gray smoke, for example. All you need to do is add “acrid” to that and you’ve got smell, sight, and hearing.

The last one’s probably the most fun, and hard to do: Dialogue. Characters can discuss the smell. I’ve seen this best used to J.D. Robb (she gets mentioned a lot here because she is really good at this). It shows up when the characters are under stress from the time pressure and investigating a scene. They will find something strange at the location and spend the entire scene discussing it. I can’t tell you the book, but Eve and Peabody discuss “boy farts” as they search a room. In Brotherhood of Death, it’s a large collection of dolls (sense of sight). It brings in a lot of humor and characterization, and dives into a sense to do it.

Obviously, it’s a challenging sense to do. But if you can make your readers smell the pine trees in a forest, it adds to their experience.

Ginormous Guide Adding Emotions to Fiction (Part 2)

Cute dog in room with operating electric fan

Photo © serezniy | Deposit Photo. The humidity is so high that even air conditioning doesn’t help.

This is part 2 of a freaking huge topic: adding emotions to fiction. The foundation skill for it all I discussed last week in Part I is description.

When I was on writing message boards, a writer would ask how much description to do.

Another popped up and declared, “I don’t do description (or describe characters). I leave that up to the readers’ imagination.”

You could almost hear them sniffing at what they thought was a stupid question.

They’re deceiving themselves. The reason readers imagine a scene or character is because the writer provides the details so they can do so.

“The purpose of description is to make a reader believe in the story.”

Walter S. Campbell, The Writer, October 1939

Readers don’t come to a story for the plot (which might be a horrifying thought for those fixating on plot). They come to the story for the characters, and that comes through description.

Onward to the next skill to add emotion to your writing: Setting.

Setting is also a big foundation skill.

A lot of writers treat it like it’s not important if the book isn’t a fantasy or science fiction novel. They pay scant attention to the setting, like in one I started reading. The first scene opened in a mine.

That was all the author told the reader. Two pages in, and I put the book down. Setting was that important. Was the mine drilling into a mountain or an open pit? Was it dangerous? You know, like dry rotted timber, collapsing walls? Flooding? Were there spider webs? (and readers have emotional reactions when we mention spiders.)

A big red flag is having trouble with your characters always looking, nodding, or smiling. (Guilty, guilty, guilty. I once found eight ‘lookings’ on one page). These become alternatives for repetitive dialogue tags and become repetitive themselves. It isn’t enough to replace look with glance (which may be incorrect itself, since they don’t mean the same thing). I once read a book where critique groups must have told the author everyone was smiling too much, so she did a search and replace with smirk. Sigh.

This problem results from not having enough setting in the story.

Every moment of every page, your character is interacting with a setting, just as we do in real life (unless you have your nose buried in your cell phone while walking your dog.).

The writer’s job, and pleasure, is to pick specific details about the setting to share with the reader.

But it’s also not a check-the-box and tell the reader it was hot outside. According to Writing For Impact, readers get engaged when you, or in this case, your viewpoint character, gives opinions.

I had a lot of trouble getting setting into my stories for a while. Unfortunately, many of the writing resources I ran into didn’t give it much importance.  In fact, I had to unlearn some very bad habits that had been developed over many years.

It was so hard that I got stuck on every scene trying to come up with what I needed for my setting. So I just typed at the top of my chapter (that placeholder method!) what I knew about the setting in that scene. In some cases, I drew it in PowerPoint, mainly when I realized that I had differing pictures in my head. I’ve gotten better at it, but it took a lot of work to unlearn what the beginner culture taught me.

Setting things to think about:

1. What’s in your setting? If a room, what kind of furniture? Carpet? Air conditioning? What does it smell like? If outside, where? What kind of plants are around?

2. Time of day. This will change the lighting of the scene. Dave Farland recommends establishing the light in each scene.

4. Day of the week: Different things happen on different days of the week. Your character could be complaining about getting over the hump. At least identify it to yourself so your teenage protagonist doesn’t go to school seven days a week!

5. Month, time of the year. Make sure of holidays, seasons. Fall colors are fun to do.

6. Weather. In 318R, Dave Farland talked about writers who simply say, “It was raining.” Well, what kind of rain is that? Is it a thick curtain coming down? Is it drops hitting the hot pavement and drying immediately? Is it just enough to annoy you when you turn on your windshield wipers? (And that is emotion). Can you imagine a character in a crisis…has to get somewhere now. Gets in his car, roars out, and a downpour starts? This is how setting can bring out your character’s emotions.

Start first with establishing the setting at the beginning of every scene. A good rule of thumb is to hit three unique things and make one of those have movement. And of course, do the fun part, put your character’s opinion in there.

Then, as your character moves through the scene, instead of “he said,” have them interact with the setting. They sprawl in a chair and slouch. They eat food.

Or two characters talk to each other about the setting. Don’t we all complain when the weather’s bad?

But setting is incomplete without the five senses. Most writing skills are taught as separate parts. When I took a Forward Motion writing class, the instructor said, “Here’s the setting. Put in the five senses.” No mention at all that it should be from a character’s viewpoint. Most of the writers promptly trained a movie camera on the scene and described everything.

You can’t do setting without the five senses. ALL setting comes from the five senses.

You can’t do five senses without a character who experiences them.

If you do the five senses right, down into the viewpoint, the reader will be experiencing the same emotions. This is gold.

But if you’re following the minimalist trend of description, it’s nearly impossible to get enough of the five senses into the story. You’re fighting the uphill battle, and it’s a steep hill that eats snowplows.

My early, meager experiments started with the Margie Lawson Academy’s Edits System (I purchased it years ago, so this version may be updated). One piece of it is using highlighters to mark the various senses. Just an audit to see how much you were doing.

Of course, I discovered a lot of “yellow” (sight), and only sporadic other colors. You could try this either by printing your manuscript or using Microsoft Word’s fill tool. The fill tool has more options for colors than the limited ones on highlighter.

I tried adding it manually, but it was surprisingly hard. Felt mechanical. It wasn’t until I took Dean Wesley Smith’s Depth class that I began to understand that I needed to better connect characterization to it.

Five senses aren’t simply checking off that you got them into the story. It’s about your character’s interaction with the setting, and they are always surrounded by setting. Every scene, every moment.

It’s the Law and Order Rule again. If you focus entirely on plot, your characters turn into talking heads. If they’re interacting with the setting, they can do all kinds of things that will help bring emotion into the story (and we will have two more big skills coming that no one talks about in this context: Action and Reaction and Context).

What’s curiously absent on topics about the five senses is how much you have to add to your story.  I went through a bunch of links, all describing adding the senses adequately—except for how much.

Figure all five every 500 words, or about every three pages. That’s a lot!

There’s other conflicting advice, so you’ll have to pick what you think is right.

In his 318R class, the late Dave Farland said to do them in this order:

1. Emotions

2. Actions

3. Sounds

4. Sights

5. Smiells

6. Tactile

7. Thoughts

In Writing For Impact, the author recommends targeting these three (though doing all five):

SightHearingSmell

Edward Amejko from The Writer, July 1949 recommends:

SightHearingTouch

Obviously, there’s no one way to do this. It also sounds like a lot, but not when you filter it in throughout the scene.

Next up I’ll be diving into each of the senses. Anyone got a sense they want me to cover first?