Virginia S. Anderson's Blog, page 39

How to Build Beats and Style in Your Writing!

Found this terrific piece on cadence and beats at the sentence level on Writers in the Storm. I especially like the rhetorical devices guest blogger Margie Lawson provides. As a rhetorician, I’ve encountered many of these in my research, and I’ve used many, even if only intuitively, in my writing.

I’ve written about some of these in my Novel First Lines series, and in my post on the effects of commas on cadence. Meter and rhythm are powerful lures in the first lines of a book or story. For a wonderful discussion of rhythm and cadence as persuasive devices, check out Martha Kolln’s textbook (find used copies), Rhetorical Grammar.

See if you use any already—and what you can learn to use.

Visiting Bryan Garner’s “Language Change Index” for Grammar Rules

When in doubt, I ask Bill.

Lurking around on an NCTE forum for English teachers, I learned about Bryan A. Garner’s Language Change Index and thought it nicely complemented some thoughts I’ve posted on this blog about grammar and usage. An interview and a critique discuss his efforts to do more formally what I did informally in ranking usage practices by how widely they’re likely to actually be noticed (see “split infinitive”) by the learned folks aspiring authors need to impress. What emerges for me, based on the examples in these articles, is how idiosyncratic grammar prescriptives can be. BTW, “hopefully” is now a Stage 5, not, in my view, because it ever was an “error,” but because it has been recognized as a perfectly good sentence modifier along the lines of “unfortunately” or Garner’s example of a “correct” sentence modifier, “regrettably.” No identifiable subject has to “hope” any more than an identifiable subject has to “regret.” So there.

Correction to 3 Lessons, 4 Resolutions from the Indiana Writers’ Workshop

An earlier version of my post incorrectly stated that Chuck Sambuchino was in charge of this one-day workshop in Indianapolis on Oct. 24. In fact, he was subbing for another volunteer. The workshop was actually coordinated by Jessica Bell, of Writing Day Workshops. I thought folks might appreciate learning about this organization, if they aren’t already familiar with it. It hosts a range of workshops at different locations around the country, and will definitely be on my list of possible conference options.

3 Lessons, 4 Resolutions from the Indiana Writers’ Workshop, October 24, 2015

It’s unusual to find a conference that changes the way I think about my novel and about myself as a writer. This one-day conference, less than a day’s drive away, did just that.

The Workshop was a Writer’s Digest production, run by Chuck Sambuchino, with presentations by Brian Klems, online editor for WritersDigest.com. The basic fee covered four all-group presentations by Klems and a “first-page” critique by four agents of randomly selected submissions. Participants could pay extra for ten-minute pitch sessions with up to six agents and for a personal query-letter critique by Sambuchino.

Klems’s presentations covered a huge amount of nuts-and-bolts information most valuable to writers who had not attended many conferences or mined the web for information on the business of writing. The pitch sessions were well-coordinated; all three of the agents I queried were generous listeners. The published schedule did not build in meals or receptions for the social networking that many writers find rewarding.

So what made this conference so productive? Two things: Sambuchino’s critique of my query and the “first-page” session, at which some 20 or so of the first pages submitted were thrown down and stomped upon.

First: Query-Letter Critique

I didn’t receive Sambuchino’s comments until the Thursday night before the conference, and Friday was hectic, so it was evening before I could settle into my motel room to digest the veritable armada of comments he had supplied. Everyone reading this can probably empathize with my stomach-twisting lurch when I realized that the back-of-the-book blurb I had workshopped over and over with multiple audiences was No Good. Basic questions—what is Michael’s wound, his need? What is at stake? How does this event lead to this one?—still loomed. Sambuchino wanted A LOT more information than any back-of-the-book was going to accommodate.

The feeling of utter inadequacy that settled over me produced a complete rewrite. Was that the right strategy? All I know is that when I sat across from agents and talked from the notes they were glad to let me use, not one broke in with a confused frown to tell me I wasn’t making any sense. (Believe me, this has happened.) There’s no experiment that could tell me whether my response to Sambuchino’s comments made the difference. But I do know that when I revise my query letter, the pitch itself will look a lot more like the one I wrote Friday night than the one I have now.

Lesson learned? First let me talk about

First Page Armageddon

Of the 20 that were pulled from the stack and read aloud, only one would have kept these four agents reading past the first paragraph. Yes, mine got selected, and no, it didn’t fare well.

Disheartening? Absolutely. Only one of the agents regularly said, “I would scroll down to see if things improved.” For the others, one strike and you’re out. Looking for a way to say “yes”? Uh . . . no.

I’ve workshopped my first page with my writing group; I’ve done the beta-reader route with colleagues who are educated readers. No one has ever read my prose as closely and as intently as these four women did. At least not as far as I know, because this is the kind of information you don’t get back from a query: when the agent or editor stopped reading and why. And it’s the most important piece of information you can receive.

Unlike my colleagues and writing group partners, these agents’ jobs depend on spotting the snags on the first page that signal a tough row ahead. After all, that first-impression first page shows what you think good writing is. Learning your ear has been dead wrong is heart-wrenching. If I couldn’t hear those mistakes, how can I hope to hear all the others I’ve made?

But the only thing worse than finding out you made them is not knowing you made them so you keep making them again and again. And the good part, the formative part, of that session is that not only did the agents flag the missteps, they explained them. An agent who won’t even send a rejection email is not about to do that.

It was the seeming triviality of the mistakes that was so helpful. Starting a novel with dialogue, a slight shift of voice between paragraphs, too much detail rather than not enough. . . . But the explanations made sense. Too much dialogue on the first page prevents your reader from locating and forming connections with your characters; too much detail slows your reader’s approach to the actual story; science fiction that starts out big and abstract leaves readers floating untethered in the cosmos. I found myself nodding and wondering, have I done that? Have I done that?

So: lessons learned:

You can sit in a room and listen for hours to someone exhorting you to “show, don’t tell,” to use active voice, to clarify your setting and your characters’ motives. You can read example after example. But until someone specifically and concretely applies those concepts to your writing, they mean zilch. Until Sambuchino said to me, “You still haven’t told me exactly what Michael needs,” all the instruction in the world didn’t connect. So writers must fight for hands-on feedback on their work.
And this feedback must come from real agents and editors whose jobs depend on recognizing effective writing. It’s the rare beta reader who is going to think like an agent: “Do I really want to spend the next year of my professional life on this?”
So writers must vet conferences to make sure they promise an actual agent’s eyes on our work. The first-pages model is one option; the two-pages/two-minutes model I participated in at Backspace a few years back has the advantage that everyone who signed up for a slot got a critique. Paying book doctors to read three chapters has been less effective for me. Conference book doctors get paid just for reading—and for making us happy. They’re not looking for those all-important reasons to say no.

For me personally, I’ve resolved:

To remember all those mistakes all of us made and apply that knowledge to a revision of my first three chapters before I send them to agents.
To explore the beta-reader option more thoroughly, to find strong readers and see whether there are areas on which they agree.
To get back out on the conference trail, looking for the ones where an agent can tell me why he or she says no.
And above all, to take heart. I have a great premise and strong characters, and repeated work on my synopsis has clarified for me what’s at stake and why. I can write, and I’m disciplined. And I persevere. And above all, I no longer have any deadline. If neither of the two submissions my pitches earned works out, I’ll do what I’ve always done and what earned me five publications: keep learning and honing. I’m not in the least afraid of a complete rewrite if I’m confident about my goal.

And now I value rather than fear readers who are looking for a reason to say no.

You must read this article

vanderso:

Found thiis today on Jean Cogdell’s blog, jeanswriting.com. It’s a guest post on Jane Friedman’s site, so you can be sure it’s good. It addresses something that’s been plaguing me since I republished my horse-racing mysteries: how any book can stand out in a daily barrage of dozens of titles spammed (it feels like) at random. Targeting markets has made more sense to me from the start, and this article provides some specific steps to get that done. Let me know if you have any additional ideas!

Originally posted on jean's writing:

If you want to get the word out to your target audience, click and read how.

A must read post byAngela Ackerman

How Authors Can Find Their Ideal Reading Audience


Posted onOctober 12, 2015 on Jane Friedman’s blog is one of the best blog posts I’ve read in like forever.


I understand the importance of connections. But where do I make the right ones?

How do I find who my target audience is?

Pixabay Image

Angela gets specific and provides links to get us started.

At our house, ask a question and the answer is automatic. “Google it.” But now the question is “Google what?” Angela explains how to expand your search to reach the right targets.


Okay, now how about Soovle it?


This website takes it to a whole different level. Thank you Angela!

I’ll add one more tip I use, Twitter search. You’ll be surprised how…

View original 86 more words

Why Writing is Better in Longhand

vanderso:

One of my favorite topics: the benefits of writing in longhand.

I write in spiral notebooks. They must be college-ruled, however. Not only do I love the tactile sense of the pen making letters on the page, I love being able to scribble notes and reminders and questions in the margins. An added bonus: you get an extra edit when you keyboard what you’ve written. When you have to type something, you find it much easier to ask, “Do I really need this?”

Hardest thing has been writing instruments. I hate throwing away whole pens or even refills when the ink is gone. I used to use Schaeffer cartridge pens, but the cartridges got hard to find, and I still had to throw them away. Now I’m using a refillable fountain pen, and really liking it. (You can get a “fine point” by turning a medium nib upside down.)

And writing more slowly gives ideas time to begin to build ahead of me as I write, so that when I get there, they’re just waiting to spill onto the page!

Anyone else write this way?

Originally posted on Gavin Zanker:

Yesterday, unable to face the monster word document of my second draft lurking away in my hard drive, I pulled out a notepad and started scribbling. An hour later, I found I’d rewritten an entire chapter of my book from scratch. It had been so long since I’d written anything more than post-its and quick notes that I had entirely forgotten the benefits of writing longhand.

It’s interesting to think that every author until recent times has written out their work by hand. The computer screen has only existed for a relatively short amount of time. In fact, many writers still make the decision to write longhand in favour of using a computer. Quentin Tarantino said as much in an interview with Reuters a few years ago.

‘My ritual is, I never use a typewriter or computer. I just write it all by hand. It’s a ceremony. I go to…

View original 433 more words

Review: Ann Patchett, State of Wonder

Visit my Goodreads site to read my review of State of Wonder: It’s a five-star read!

Note to Self: Four Editing Rules to Follow THIS TIME!

Do you have rules for your own self-editing sessions? Can you suggest some I ought to apply?

Editing a manuscript that I wrote some time ago has actually turned out to be quite a bit of fun. The story’s there, almost solid; now it’s time to make sure nothing in my style, my pacing, my voice, keeps it from getting across. Line-editing this novel is a lot like cleaning out a closet and finding out which of my old treasures really are treasures and which ones are junk.

And the thing that’s great about cleaning up the text of your novel: it’s not quite as likely as a closet to get cluttered again.

Actually, “self-editing” is a little bit of a misnomer. A lot of what I’m doing as I revisit the manuscript of my long-shelved “Sarah” novel is responding to the comments and suggestions of my wonderful Green River Writers critique group (see here, for example, to learn more about how and why they’re wonderful). But at the same time, coming back to my writing after a hiatus changes the way I see and hear it. Distance makes the heart grow smarter? Or am I just hearing myself through other people’s ears now?

Since those of us who want to be read (and published) need more than anything to know what we sound like outside of the wind cave of our own brilliance, I hope I’ve assimilated the collective wisdom of my writing group, in which people just plain tell me when I’ve made them start checking the number of pages to see how much more of my brilliance they have to take.

Here are four editing moves that give me consummate pleasure. Who would have thought that slashing a big X across half a page or a black line through a sentence could be so fun?

1) Whenever you enter a character’s soul, keep an eye out for exits. This dictum is closely related to that ubiquitous adage, SHOW, DON’T TELL. I’m a sucker for the long inner monologues in which the character rows readers through the jungle of her psyche, taking them up and down intricate, sleepy tributaries of self-analysis, where lovely metaphors drip off trees like exotic orchids and the heady scents of my verbal genius finally lull everyone to sleep. (Sort of like this passage. :-))

The solution? Dramatize! Girl, don’t let Sarah tell us how she felt about her ex-husband, Eric, whom she suspects of having murdered their child. Show Eric acting in ways that stoked her suspicion. Let her speak her resentment that he seems to have taken over her daughter’s affection—to him. In other words, write scenes.

I’m making myself look for blocks of text where there’s no dialogue, where there’s only one person’s voice on the page, where no one performs physical actions. Or, conversely, where one or two lines (“I realized my daughter had started ignoring everything I said”) encapsulate rich opportunities for getting readers involved in the sensory moment. Sometimes moving the story along means summing up hours of action with a single sentence. But not when what’s being skimmed past is central to character development and drama.

2) Opt more often for direct language. Are you listening, Me? In reading others’ writing, I actually more often see a sort of opposite problem: not enough effort to search out a fresh way of describing, a lively verb, an original—and apt—metaphor. Yet there are those of us who have the over-writing virus. We can’t stand to just say what we mean when an ornate metaphor will do. Sometimes those metaphors, clever though they may be, serve more to dilute the emotion than to fuel it.

3) Cut things that “take readers out of the story.” Not every thought that passes through a character’s mind really advances the plot. Is there value added in that nice touch that you, the writer, have come up with to illuminate a character? Do readers really need it? If it really adds information they don’t already have, maybe. But if it just confirms what they’ve already figured out, or tells them something that’s not really going to affect the outcome of the story, cut! E.g., it’s great that your heroine preferred gray kittens to orange ones. Do your readers have a reason to care?

They have their opinions, too!

4) Resist the temptation to tell readers things they already know. For example, if you’re going to establish an emotion through backstory, visit that moment once and make it count. After that, allude, don’t retell. A corollary to that dictum: it isn’t necessary to find three ways to describe things when you make it perfectly clear the first time.

Here’s an example from my draft that I think illustrates my commission of all these sins and my efforts to uncommit them this time around. (And I’ve even made more cuts in the process of pasting the passages into this post.)

Context: Sarah has just heard racing footsteps and shouts, heading down the hall toward her office where she sits behind a closed door, entering semester grades on her computer:

I could have just sat there. All common sense, all the weight of my history, told me to sit still. But no. I set down the paper, pushed back from my desk, turned from the sleeping screen of my computer. Made the fateful choice of stepping out of my office and into Tommy Pierce’s path.

She slammed into me, a hard dark missile, on the surface a painted hoyden, in tights and a dismal T-shirt, her hair a nettle-garden of jagged purple spikes. But tears were melting the Bride-of-Frankenstein make-up, and under the sooty wash her cheeks, wan but downy, made me think of a young bird soaked black with smothering oil. Her shriek collapsed like glass shattering, and maybe I was the only one close enough to hear it die to a sob.

She wheeled away, fighting, but I snared her shoulder, spinning her to face me. Holding onto her was instinctive. The others came thudding toward us, Davenport in the lead, a round little man in a pale blue shirt that tended to gape, puffing and snarling. “Wait’ll I get my hands on that little devil!” Not adding my voice to theirs was also instinctive. And so was kicking my office door open behind me and swinging her around and inside.

I shut it with my shoulders seconds before Davenport could wedge a pudgy elbow in the crack. The squirming girl in my arms reached up to rake black-and-blue nails across my face. I dodged. She wrenched away with a gasp and fell against the computer, knocking it out of sleep and into a frenzy of error beeps, all the open programs sorting through the keys she had hit for coherent commands.

I reached for her but she rolled away, scrambling to her feet. Lila’s perpetual-crisis screech made the door rattle. “Sarah! Sarah! What are you doing? Let us in!”

I ignored her. The girl was inching backward again, hyperventilating now, the light from my lamp glinting on a minefield of silver rings and studs. I was used to kids frantic for grades but not to this stark-eyed terror. My rote teacherly speeches, the careful depersonalized authority with which I talked about academic expectations, would not serve now. I tried to think where she was, though I hadn’t a hope of going there to save her. “Tommy,” I said.

What strikes me now, reading this, is how hard I make readers work to get where I want them to be.

Here’s the revision.

All common sense, all the weight of my history, told me to sit still. But no. I pushed back from my desk, turned from the sleeping screen of my computer. Made the fateful choice of stepping out of my office and into Tommy Pierce’s path.

She slammed into me, a hard dark missile in tights and a dismal T-shirt, her hair a nettle-garden of jagged purple spikes. Tears melted the Bride-of-Frankenstein make-up; her cheeks under the sooty wash made me think of a young bird soaked black with oil.

She wheeled, fighting, but I snared her shoulder. The others came thudding toward us, Davenport in the lead, a round little man in a pale blue shirt that tended to gape, puffing and snarling. “Wait’ll I get my hands on that little devil!” I kicked my office door open behind me and swung her inside.

I shut it with my shoulders seconds before Davenport could wedge a pudgy elbow in the crack. The squirming girl in my arms aimed black-and-blue nails at my face. I dodged. She wrenched away with a gasp and fell against the computer, knocking it into a frenzy of error beeps.

I reached for her but she rolled away, scrambling to her feet. From the hall, Lila’s perpetual-crisis screech made the door rattle. “Sarah! Sarah! What are you doing? Let us in!”

I ignored her. The girl was inching backward, hyperventilating. The light from my lamp glinted on a minefield of silver rings and studs. I was used to kids frantic for grades but not to this stark-eyed terror. I tried to think where her head was, though I hadn’t a hope of going there to save her. “Tommy,” I said.

And what always strikes me after making this kind of edit—more than 100 words shorter—is how little I miss my flourishes after they’re gone.

Do you have rules for your own self-editing sessions? Can you suggest some I ought to apply?

Business, Business: Author Resources

vanderso:

This looks like a wonderful resource! Enjoy!

Originally posted on Wind Eggs:

Updated October 13, 2015

I spent the last couple of weeks combing through Goodreads posts looking for review sites for my new novel Cigerets, Guns & Beer, available in paperback and eBook. Here’s the plug:

Dodd breaks up a convenience store robbery on his way through the tiny Texas town of Sweet Water Falls Texas. What’s the thanks he gets? The sheriff won’t let him leave, the car lot can’t find the parts for his vintage Mustang and he seems caught in a rivalry between women looking for some new blood.

It seems a family named Dodd were killed robbing the bank in the forties and a half million dollars was never found. Everyone thinks Dodd returned to find the missing money and no one intends to let him leave until he recovers the missing money and maybe, just maybe, a long lost flying saucer.

During that time I compiled…

View original 2,589 more words

How to Use Facebook for Authors

vanderso:

Natasha Orme offers good thoughts about using Facebook to connect with readers but suggests not creating new Facebook pages for individual books. Do you agree?

Originally posted on Natasha Orme:

I’ve spoken to quite a few authors with regards to their marketing strategy and they’ve asked me whether they should have a Facebook page. They’ve also asked about different types of Facebook pages and whether it’s worth having one for a book. Now a lot of people will give you different advice on the subject, after all we are human. So today I’m going to give you my advice.

Should I have a Facebook page?

If you’re serious about your writing career then the simple answer is yes. If you would like a more complicated answer, then here’s why…

View original 613 more words