Cindy Dees's Blog, page 15

LISTEN TO YOUR INSTINCTS...OR NOT

I've been working on a new book the past few weeks, and last week, I abruptly hit a wall where the story didn't feel right. It was as if the train just jumped off the tracks and refused to move forward any more.
I've learned over the years to recognize this as a sure signal that my story has taken a wrong turn. It's time for me to stop, go back to thinking about the plot of the story, the overall arc of the characters, and the relationship between the characters. There's a fatal flaw somewhere in the mix.
It's a waste of my time to keep writing forward until I figure out where I've gone wrong. I have to circle back and fix the problem before my story will flow naturally again.
Yay! I listen to my instincts and they save me every time. Right? Maybe not.
So here's the thing. You have to know enough about story structure and character development and relationship dynamics and a host of other technical aspects of story writing to correctly identify where the story has gone off track in the first place.
Some people have a sense of story rhythm developed from lots of reading, or maybe from a family of storytellers, or maybe from actual instinctive knack for it. But I humbly think this is the exception rather than the rule.
This is my pitch for reading books on how-to-write, for taking classes, workshops, or seminars on writing, and for learning the technical craft of storytelling. It's not fun, and it's not glamorous, but it is important to be able to deconstruct your story either before, during, or after the drafting process to discover its critical weaknesses.
Plotters, of course, will love this advice. They're all about being organized before they put sentences on paper.
Pantsers, however, may hate this advice. Thing is, I'm not telling pantsers to force themselves to write in a technical way. I'm saying pantsers need to have enough knowledge stored in their mental hurricane of creativity for their instincts to warn them when they're drifting off course.
Both types of writers would do well to develop an acute and sensitive feeling for when the story isn't going well. It's something to specifically watch out for as you write.
I think this sense of intuitively feeling problems in the story structure is one of the skills that distinguishes successful writers from those who struggle to get stories right.
How to develop it? Learn the craft! For most people, this "intuition" has nothing to do with actual intuition at the end of the day. It has to do with having enough knowledge to spot a big story problem right as it starts to unfold instead of writing hundreds more draft pages before realizing your story doesn't work.
Writers talk about this skill in words like instinct and intuition, but ultimately, it's a learned ability. It's a synthesis of technical knowledge and your creative "feel" for your story. You need BOTH.

LISTEN TO YOUR INSTINCTS…OR NOT

LISTEN TO YOUR INSTINCTS…OR NOT

I’ve been working on a new book the past few weeks, and last week, I abruptly hit a wall where the story didn’t feel right. It was as if the train just jumped off the tracks and refused to move forward any more.

I’ve learned over the years to recognize this as a sure signal that my story has taken a wrong turn. It’s time for me to stop, go back to thinking about the plot of the story, the overall arc of the characters, and the relationship between the characters. There’s a fatal flaw somewhere in the mix.

It’s a waste of my time to keep writing forward until I figure out where I’ve gone wrong. I have to circle back and fix the problem before my story will flow naturally again.

Yay! I listen to my instincts and they save me every time. Right? Maybe not.

So here’s the thing. You have to know enough about story structure and character development and relationship dynamics and a host of other technical aspects of story writing to correctly identify where the story has gone off track in the first place.

Some people have a sense of story rhythm developed from lots of reading, or maybe from a family of storytellers, or maybe from actual instinctive knack for it. But I humbly think this is the exception rather than the rule.

This is my pitch for reading books on how-to-write, for taking classes, workshops, or seminars on writing, and for learning the technical craft of storytelling. It’s not fun, and it’s not glamorous, but it is important to be able to deconstruct your story either before, during, or after the drafting process to discover its critical weaknesses.

Plotters, of course, will love this advice. They’re all about being organized before they put sentences on paper.

Pantsers, however, may hate this advice. Thing is, I’m not telling pantsers to force themselves to write in a technical way. I’m saying pantsers need to have enough knowledge stored in their mental hurricane of creativity for their instincts to warn them when they’re drifting off course.

Both types of writers would do well to develop an acute and sensitive feeling for when the story isn’t going well. It’s something to specifically watch out for as you write.

I think this sense of intuitively feeling problems in the story structure is one of the skills that distinguishes successful writers from those who struggle to get stories right.

How to develop it? Learn the craft! For most people, this “intuition” has nothing to do with actual intuition at the end of the day. It has to do with having enough knowledge to spot a big story problem right as it starts to unfold instead of writing hundreds more draft pages before realizing your story doesn’t work.

Writers talk about this skill in words like instinct and intuition, but ultimately, it’s a learned ability. It’s a synthesis of technical knowledge and your creative “feel” for your story. You need BOTH.

BACKSTORY THAT POPS

Okay, so we’ve decided that including a little backstory in the right place and right way in your story won’t kill anyone. Now. What to share?

I would like to propose that the second half of the “it’s good to use some backstory” equation is, “But it needs to be the RIGHT backstory.”

In this world of commercial fiction, tight deadlines, and ever greater pressure to write faster, it’s not always possible to write out in grisly detail the entire life history of every character in your book.

Don’t get me wrong. That’s a great exercise in understanding where your characters come from and how past and present relate in story. All writers should try it a few times. But for me, writing upwards of a hundred pages a week when I’m working at full speed, I don’t have the time to spare.

So, what am I to do? I still want my characters to feel REAL. To pop off the page like rich, complex, plausible people. To have fully realized life stories. But I have to do something more efficient than write out the entire memoir of each character.

Here’s what I do.

I make a list for each of my main characters of the eight to twelve most important, life-changing, character defining events of their lives. You know. The big stuff. Births, deaths, marriages, divorces, losses, traumas, crimes, tragedies, and triumphs.

Then I ask myself what life-changing lesson my character learned from each of those events. I take into account how old the character was at the time the event occurred, and I’m not afraid to have characters draw unwise or even flatly wrong life lessons from these big events.

And then…and here’s the critical bit…whenever I dip into backstory for my characters as I’m writing, I ONLY take it off that list.

My reasoning is this. If a backstory detail is not important enough to make the Top Ten list of most important past events in this person’s life, why would I bother to interrupt my pacing and drag my reader away from the main story for it?

Go ahead. Use backstory. But don’t waste your reader’s time with it. Make sure it’s the really important stuff out of your character’s past.

LET'S TALK BACKSTORY

A writing friend wrote me in some distress yesterday because she'd been told that backstory was forbidden and against the rules and to be avoided at all costs in writing a novel.

I have two reactions to this. First, there is NO SUCH THING as a hard and fast rule in writing. You have permission as a writer to do whatever you need to in order to tell your story in the best possible way. If that includes backstory, so be it! Second, there's nothing wrong with using backstory, although I do have a couple of caveats regarding backstory.

Okay, a quick definition for the new writers among us. Backstory is when you pause in the middle of the current action of your story and digress into describing something that has happened to the character in the past.

Note the words "pause" and "digress". Those should be warning bells to any writer. Pausing means stopping your forward movement. As in slowing or even stopping your pacing. We live in a fast-moving, on-the-go world, and readers are exceedingly impatient at anything that slows down a story. Inserting backstory into your book can kill your pacing if you're not very careful about how you do it.

The trick is to keep your digressions into backstory as short as possible. Tell us what you need to, but don't wander around in endless reminiscences about the past that are not germaine to the current story you're supposed to be telling. With my apologies to Tolstoy, this is why that whole middle section of Anna Karenina that's essentially a treatise on the state of farming in Imperial Russia really had no place in the book.

Another potential land mine with backstory is where in your book you use it. Too many authors start their book with backstory. They feel a burning need to catch the reader up on everything in the past that they need to know to move forward with the story. Yeah. Don't do that. Except in rare cases (remember my no such thing as hard and fast rules comment?) it's usually a terrible idea to start the reader out in the past.

Why? Because if you're in the point of view of the character whose past we're exploring, they're obviously alive and kicking in the present time. They survived whatever trauma you're describing in their past. There's no suspense in it. There's no question of "Will they make it out of the mess? Will they be okay?" That's an elaborate way of saying Backstory KILLS your forward pacing in an opening.

Remember, openings are about sucking the reader into the story as quickly and deeply as possible. So fast and so far they can't put your book down. Backstories do none of this. It's fine to make references to past events that the reader doesn't understand, yet. It plants the question of, "What was that guy/gal referring to when he recalled that moment when XYZ happened?" Or "Who is XYZ whom the character just remembered with such terror?" You can drop in tiny hints at backstory and even confuse your reader a little. They'll frantically read forward to understand the events unfolding before them and around them.

So what purpose DO backstories serve? Usually, they tell us something about the character that makes us understand why a present situation has such a powerful effect on them, or why the character is acting in an otherwise inexplicable manner in the present time. There are, of course, other reasons to devolve into backstory.

How should we use backstory, then? Once you've actually got your present action moving along, you've planted a bunch of questions in the reader's minds that will pull them forward all the way through the book to find the answers, and we're in love with the characters, or at least in firmly in like with them, then you can afford to reveal a little more to the reader about what makes the characters tick. You can drop in bits and pieces of backstory here and there to flesh out the person more fully. Sometimes, a bit of backstory may be a single sentence or even a phrase in length. As the character floats in an out of the present and of recollection of the past, you can insert glimpses of their backstory as appropriate.

Full-blown scenes in backstory are often differentiated by being printed in italics in their entirety. I also find that doing it this way makes me vividly aware of how long the backstory scene is running. Page after page after page of italics is a warning to me to winnow down that backstory scene to its essential and most important moments and to toss out all the rest.

So, in summary. Backstory is fine as long as you remember that it kills pacing. Be careful where you use it and how much of it you use. But don't be afraid to use it if your story calls for it. We can all climb down off the backstory bridge now and get back to our regularly scheduled writing...

Let’s talk Backstory

A writing friend wrote me in some distress yesterday because she’d been told that backstory was forbidden and against the rules and to be avoided at all costs in writing a novel.

I have two reactions to this. First, there is NO SUCH THING as a hard and fast rule in writing. You have permission as a writer to do whatever you need to in order to tell your story in the best possible way. If that includes backstory, so be it! Second, there’s nothing wrong with using backstory, although I do have a couple of caveats regarding backstory.

Okay, a quick definition for the new writers among us. Backstory is when you pause in the middle of the current action of your story and digress into describing something that has happened to the character in the past.

Note the words “pause” and “digress”. Those should be warning bells to any writer. Pausing means stopping your forward movement. As in slowing or even stopping your pacing. We live in a fast-moving, on-the-go world, and readers are exceedingly impatient at anything that slows down a story. Inserting backstory into your book can kill your pacing if you’re not very careful about how you do it.

The trick is to keep your digressions into backstory as short as possible. Tell us what you need to, but don’t wander around in endless reminiscences about the past that are not germaine to the current story you’re supposed to be telling. With my apologies to Tolstoy, this is why that whole middle section of Anna Karenina that’s essentially a treatise on the state of farming in Imperial Russia really had no place in the book.

Another potential land mine with backstory is where in your book you use it. Too many authors start their book with backstory. They feel a burning need to catch the reader up on everything in the past that they need to know to move forward with the story. Yeah. Don’t do that. Except in rare cases (remember my no such thing as hard and fast rules comment?) it’s usually a terrible idea to start the reader out in the past.

Why? Because if you’re in the point of view of the character whose past we’re exploring, they’re obviously alive and kicking in the present time. They survived whatever trauma you’re describing in their past. There’s no suspense in it. There’s no question of “Will they make it out of the mess? Will they be okay?”  That’s an elaborate way of saying Backstory KILLS your forward pacing in an opening.

Remember, openings are about sucking the reader into the story as quickly and deeply as possible. So fast and so far they can’t put your book down. Backstories do none of this. It’s fine to make references to past events that the reader doesn’t understand, yet. It plants the question of, “What was that guy/gal referring to when he recalled that moment when XYZ happened?” Or  ”Who is XYZ whom the character just remembered with such terror?” You can drop in tiny hints at backstory and even confuse your reader a little. They’ll frantically read forward to understand the events unfolding before them and around them.

So what purpose DO backstories serve? Usually, they tell us something about the character that makes us understand why a present situation has such a powerful effect on them, or why the character is acting in an otherwise inexplicable manner in the present time. There are, of course, other reasons to devolve into backstory.

How should we use backstory, then? Once you’ve actually got your present action moving along, you’ve planted a bunch of questions in the reader’s minds that will pull them forward all the way through the book to find the answers, and we’re in love with the characters, or at least in firmly in like with them, then you can afford to reveal a little more to the reader about what makes the characters tick. You can drop in bits and pieces of backstory here and there to flesh out the person more fully. Sometimes, a bit of backstory may be a single sentence or even a phrase in length. As the character floats in an out of the present and of recollection of the past, you can insert glimpses of their backstory as appropriate.

Full-blown scenes in backstory are often differentiated by being printed in italics in their entirety. I also find that doing it this way makes me vividly aware of how long the backstory scene is running. Page after page after page of italics is a warning to me to winnow down that backstory scene to its essential and most important moments and to toss out all the rest.

So, in summary. Backstory is fine as long as you remember that it kills pacing. Be careful where you use it and how much of it you use. But don’t be afraid to use it if your story calls for it. We can all climb down off the backstory bridge now and get back to our regularly scheduled writing…

TICKETS ON SALE for…ME!

If you’re near Little Rock, Arkansas on the evening of May 6th, please join me for dinner, drinks, and an evening of talk about books, writing, and life as I tape NPR radio show, Tales From the South. I’ll read a short story about a true incident in my life, Paula Morel will interview me, and then we’ll open it up to Q&A. Here’s the link to buy tickets now. I’m told it usually sells out, so don’t wait to get your tickets. Would love to see you there!

http://talesfromthesouth050614.eventb...

WHAT BOOK TO WRITE

I get asked this one a lot. What book should I write? It's usually followed by dithering about what's selling in the marketplace right now, and what type of book spouses, relatives and friends are telling that person to write, and then…heaven forbid…the dithering devolves into rambling descriptions of three or four partially thought out premises for possible stories.

To all of which, I say, WHATEVER.

At the end of the day, you need to write the book that's burning a hole in your gut demanding to be let out.

I don't care if the market is saturated with exactly the type of story you've always been jonesing to write or if all the experts are saying that the kind of book you want to write is dead and never coming back.

Where great books come from is the heart. Great books are written with passion. And here's another secret…great books sell, no matter what the market is or isn't doing in that genre.

My writing partner and I wrote a 700 page epic fantasy novel at a time when the epic fantasy a la Lord of the Rings had been declared officially defunct. The editor who bought that book and two sequels even said she hadn't bought one in a decade and never expected to buy another one. And then along came ours. And voila. A book of the heart sold. (And to forestall a lot of queries, it's called THE SLEEPING KING, due out in hardback from Tor in Fall of 2015.)

Above and beyond the fact that books you write with love will sing to readers, they're fun to write. They nourish your soul. They cleanse you. Heal you. Make you reach deeper inside yourself and learn more about yourself.

With the advent of self-publishing and ebooks, market trends are going to shift monthly or even weekly in the future. As for chasing trends, down that path lies madness. They'll will come back around to whatever you're writing soon enough if you just wait a few months.

Screw chasing market trends or following anyone else's advice. Find the story you WANT to tell. That you're dying to read for yourself. That's shouting at you to put it to paper. THAT's the book you ought to be writing.

WHAT BOOK TO WRITE

I get asked this one a lot. What book should I write? It’s usually followed by dithering about what’s selling in the marketplace right now, and what type of book spouses, relatives and friends are telling that person to write, and then…heaven forbid…the dithering devolves into rambling descriptions of three or four partially thought out premises for possible stories.

To all of which, I say, WHATEVER.

At the end of the day, you need to write the book that’s burning a hole in your gut demanding to be let out.

I don’t care if the market is saturated with exactly the type of story you’ve always been jonesing to write or if all the experts are saying that the kind of book you want to write is dead and never coming back.

Where great books come from is the heart. Great books are written with passion. And here’s another secret…great books sell, no matter what the market is or isn’t doing in that genre.

My writing partner and I wrote a 700 page epic fantasy novel at a time when the epic fantasy a la Lord of the Rings had been declared officially defunct. The editor who bought that book and two sequels even said she hadn’t bought one in a decade and never expected to buy another one. And then along came ours. And voila. A book of the heart sold. (And to forestall a lot of queries, it’s called THE SLEEPING KING, due out in hardback from Tor in Fall of 2015.)

Above and beyond the fact that books you write with love will sing to readers, they’re fun to write. They nourish your soul. They cleanse you. Heal you. Make you reach deeper inside yourself and learn more about yourself.

With the advent of self-publishing and ebooks, market trends are going to shift monthly or even weekly in the future. As for chasing trends, down that path lies madness. They’ll will come back around to whatever you’re writing soon enough if you just wait a few months.

Screw chasing market trends or following anyone else’s advice. Find the story you WANT to tell. That you’re dying to read for yourself. That’s shouting at you to put it to paper. THAT’s the book you ought to be writing.

PEELING THE SOCIAL MEDIA ONION

I admit it: I’m a latecomer to the whole social media thing. I avoided it as long as I could, telling myself I was too busy and it wasn’t my thing, and if I just wrote great books they would sell themselves.

Not.

Then last May, my publisher gently informed me that, whether I liked it or not, I HAD to join the 21st century and get my happy  self online. So, I took a deep breath and dived in. And learned a few things along the way.

A functional website of my own was the place to start. It won’t generate a lot of book sales, but it’s the starting place for jumping off into all the other social media. I hired a friend to design my site, and he was great to work with. Gave me exactly what I wanted. In the past I’d had a website that I never updated because I had to send my updates to an HTML coding expert to upload to my site.

LESSON LEARNED: Build your website on a simple platform, and learn how to update your own website. It’s a royal pain to have to pass on every little update you want to add to a website expert and then to wait for them to upload it to your site. You need to be able to toss something up in a few minutes and get on with your life.

I realized quickly that I would get overwhelmed if I tried to tackle all the major social media sites at once. So I just chose one and ignored the rest, initially. I dived into Twitter first. There’s no magic to Twitter having been the first big social media platform I chose. I knew I would hit them all, eventually. I chose Twitter because of its restrictive following algorithms. I figured it would take some time to build momentum, so I got going first with it.

LESSON LEARNED: Pick one social media platform to start with and create a presence there, get comfortable with it, and start building a friend/fan base there before you move on.

The next step in my journey was to build an author page on Facebook. I had no clue how to do that, and had to poke around and play by trial and error for a while to get my page set up and figure out details like how to make my own banners and add BUY MY BOOK widgets. By doing it myself, though, now I understand FB well enough to do what I need to on my pages pretty comfortably.

LESSON LEARNED: Take an hour (or a couple of hours) per week to drill down into something social media related online and learn more about it. You’ll never know enough, but over time, you can learn enough to be comfortable with it all.

At about that point, I realized that I can link all my social media platforms such that when I post on one site, the blog or entry cascades to several other sites. Talk about a massive time saver!

LESSON LEARNED: As soon as you’re on a couple of social media sites, figure out how to link them to one another so that one site feeds another.

My social media numbers started to build, and all of a sudden, bunches of people were interacting with me, asking questions, commenting, and just saying hello. It was a lot of fun, and I happen to be a big extrovert and enjoy talking with all kinds of folks. But abruptly, I realized I was spending three to four hours every day on social media sites. And worse, it was cutting into my writing time. Hard.

LESSON LEARNED: Write first. Do social media at the end of the day when your brain is fried and you can jump around to not mentally stressful tasks and messages online. Don’t waste your most productive brain time on social media. Save that for your writing!

I’ve learned a whole lot more lessons along the way, but something else I learned early on in my social media journey is that it’s really easy to get overwhelmed. I try to take small enough bites of the whole social media world that I don’t choke on them. With that in mind, I’ll shut up now and wish you luck on your own journey. And I’ll catch ya ’round the Web!

 

PLOT IS NOT STORY

A mistake I made for many years was to confuse plot with story. At the end of the day, the story is about the characters. What lessons do they learn over the course of the book? What changes do they make? How do their lives change, and how do they change each other? The plot is merely the stuff that happens that acts as a catalyst/cause/provocation for these changes.

Plot is the skeleton of events that the actual story hangs on. Example: I cooked up a dastardly plan to destroy Las Vegas in a terrorist attack that a Homeland Security Officer actually asked me not to write into a book because it would  a) work,  b) give bad guys ideas, and c) Homeland Security didn’t want to pay to fix the problems I had discovered and exploited. Pretty cool plot, huh?

So, I told Homeland Security I was going to write the book anyway because hey, I’m a housewife in Texas. If I can think of this stuff, a bad guy surely can, too. They should go ahead and find a way to fix the security problems. Then I sat down to write the book. And that’s when it hit me…the horrible realization that, as cool as this plot might be, it was NOT what the book was about. The book is about the hero and heroine and how dealing with this crisis and stopping this attack affects them.

Ta daa. Epiphany moment. The book was not about my brilliant plot. It was about the people affected by my brilliant plot. It wasn’t even about how those people were affected by my brilliant plot. It was about how those people grow and change in the context created by my brilliant plot. The looming terrorist attack is merely the background within which my characters face their inner demons, learn about themselves and each other, and ultimately, fall in love.

I wish I had known this earlier, and I admit that the hardcore plotter within me grieves a little at this realization.

It’s possible to be a plotter and still write a terrific story. It’s just that now I turn much of my plotting energy toward cooking up interesting, compelling, emotional character arcs, internal crises, and fascinating, triumphant changes in my characters’ souls. I have embraced the mantra that plot is external and story is internal.

My new mantra for writing:  IT’S THE STORY, STUPID.

(And by the way, the book is called FEVER ZONE and comes out in March 2015)