Jane Friedman's Blog: Jane Friedman, page 103

Writing About Acts of Violence

As an editor who has seen countless first pages over the years, I’m familiar with the go-to scenes (and cliches) that often end up there. Alarms buzzing, phones ringing, and sun shining through the bedroom window make for common and often boring openings. In an effort to avoid that everyday boredom, some writers end up on the other extreme: sexual violence, murders, fatal car wrecks. They can pose some of the same problems—because they’re used so often and without distinction.

In the latest Glimmer Train bulletin, writer Kim Brooks discusses how her creative writing students have been producing stories with shootings, stabbings, overdoses, and other TV-inspired physical insults. When she asks her students to avoid adding to the body count, their response: “Violence is interesting.”

But is it? Brooks explores the issue:

[Violence can be] too sanitized, too tamed into a generic, pre-packaged mold, and so it can’t yield the kind of interesting questions or meditations readers crave, and writers must eventually confront.

Read her full essay.

Also in this month’s Glimmer Train bulletin:

Guts by Amy X. Wang

The Stories That Must Be Told by Terrence Cheng

Copywriting 101: How to Earn Money By Writing for Businesses

Today’s guest post is excerpted from How to Launch a Freelance Copywriting Business by Jules Horne. Jules is an award-winning playwright and fiction writer from Scotland who runs a copywriting business, Texthouse.

Writing for businesses is a way for skilled writers to earn a good, dependable income. Someone is responsible for writing all the websites, brochures, and marketing materials out there. Why not you?

In business, the people who write copy often aren’t trained writers. They may be business owners, or an employee who got stuck with the job. They probably don’t love writing as you do. They’re probably less than good at it. In truth, their writing may be letting down their business badly. This is where you come in, with your magic pen and professional writing skills.

Businesses large and small need writers. They need them to make a connection with customers, to get the message out about their products, to sell and to survive. But copywriting has changed massively in the past few years, and different kinds of work keep emerging. Most writing for business used to be print work; now the emphasis has shifted to web. 
Though most copywriters do both, it’s important to recognize that they draw on different skills and styles.

The emphasis on “content” in the digital world has also changed how writing skills are perceived and marketed—something to be aware of when reaching out to client businesses. Print and web writing also differ in the kinds of team members you’ll collaborate with. Print writing partners are usually graphic designers, while web writing partners may be web designers or SEO specialists. Here’s a breakdown of the main differences and challenges.

Writing for Print

Despite the rise of digital marketing, print is still important. One of the reasons is the longevity of print. It’s easy to close a website and forget it – out of sight, out of mind. But a brochure or leaflet is harder to discard. Many online retailers, particularly in fashion and lifestyle, still invest in print catalogues. Their book-like form makes them attractive – something for customers to hang onto, and return to. Color printing is also getting cheaper, thanks to digital technology opening up small print runs and print on demand. This puts print material within the reach of even tiny businesses. So print is here to stay. 

The longevity and prestige of print has implications for copywriters. Clearly, whether you’re writing for print or web, perfect spelling and grammar are vital. But with print, your creation may stay around for a long time. I found one tourism leaflet I wrote still being used ten years later, even though some of the places it mentioned had closed.

Particularly for print jobs, if you can, it’s a good idea to work closely with the designer, respecting their process and responding to their drafts. The client will get a far better result, and you’ll have a great portfolio piece, which will do good business for you.

Writing for the Web

People reading on the web are often looking for information, usually as quickly as possible. So web copy has different features to print copy, including:

shorter sentences, for easier flow on small devices
headers, bullet points and paragraphs to break up the text
hyperlinks
non-linear flow, with more jumping around for the reader.

Distracting ads and animations also make it much harder to retain a reader’s attention, so reading is experienced as less immersive than in print. This means writers need to cut to the chase, and avoid introductory scene setting. Overall, writing for the web uses all your usual strategies, but with even greater emphasis on clarity and brevity.

SEO copy

SEO stands for “search engine optimization.” SEO copy is the art of writing content that is ranked high by search engines. In the early days of the web, this was something of a dark art. Shrewd web developers and writers could game the system by loading the copy with search terms—a process known as “keyword stuffing.” If you were marketing a disposable widget, the words “disposable widget” had to appear as many times as possible within the text. This led to shouty, unnatural web copy with a high keyword density. Thankfully, Google and other search engines now penalize these practices.

If you’re technically and analytically minded, you may want to consider specializing in SEO, and go on to learn about Google Analytics and digital marketing. Most SEO specialists aren’t trained writers—and lack skills to disguise SEO tactics—so this could give you a lucrative niche.

Search engines are evolving all the time, so SEO tactics that work one month may not work the next. Companies sometimes put their efforts behind a specific SEO strategy, only to find their sites taking a big dive in search rankings, when Google changes its algorithms. The only consistently powerful strategy is fresh, relevant, well-written content that people want to read. This is good news for writers.

A complete SEO copywriting primer is a book in itself, but the good news is that a few basic principles will get you a long way. Search engine-friendly writing means writing for two different conceptual spaces:

Body content. This is the copy on the actual web pages and blogs, clearly visible on the web, to both people and search bots.

Structural content. This is the behind-the-scenes text that helps search engines. It includes meta descriptions, tags, headlines, titles and other structural elements of a site. Some of these are invisible to people, and planted solely for search bots.

Search engine bots are truffle-hunting the best words relevant to each search. You don’t need to write code, but if you can write the basic bot-friendly elements, you’re on your way to being an SEO copywriter. 

Meta descriptions

Meta descriptions are the two-line elements (“snippets”) of text that appear in search results. If you haven’t inspected them before, take a look now, by opening your browser and doing a search.

Meta descriptions are a mini taster for the web page. They help visitors to decide whether to click on the site—essentially a free advertising space—so they need to be specially written. If you spot a meta description filled with incoherent text, it’s because the bots didn’t find a pre-written snippet, and used whatever was at hand. An SEO copywriter will supply separate meta descriptions for each page. This is typically a customer-friendly sentence or two, of no more than 140 characters. 

URLs

URLs are the web address at the top of every website page. Any words they contain need to be carefully considered from a marketing and keyword point of view.

This isn’t really a copywriter’s job. It’s an SEO job. Ideally, your client should either hire an SEO expert, or do their own research. However, some awareness of SEO considerations can help you give a valuable steer to clients.

For example, a URL that includes “cheap-flights” is likely to get more hits than one with “low-cost-flights,” simply because it’s a more intuitive, easily typed search term. You can help clients and web designers to make better choices by making sure the URLs include words customers might use in search. These may not be the words most used by companies, who are often steeped in expert vocabulary.

If you’re working with an SEO specialist, they should supply you with a list of site URLs containing keywords agreed with the client. If not, check in with the website designer, for a clear understanding of the site map and intended URLs. 

Content

“Content” is a rather maligned term amongst writers. It conjures up the unfortunate image of bottomless digital vats waiting for “stuff” to be poured into them, whatever the quality. However, it’s really just a matter of terminology. People searching the internet are looking for something, mostly information and entertainment. “Content” is whatever meets their needs. Content farms deserve special mention because some writers have been lured into writing for them for ridiculously low pay. Don’t go there! This activity is at the low end of the internet market, highly exploitative, and needn’t concern you. Mass-produced content is increasingly filtered out by search engines, in any case.

Be aware, however, that you may be asked to write “SEO content,” as SEO specialists widely use this terminology. If you work with an SEO specialist, they’ll usually provide the URL, some keywords, and the target audience, and you then write to that brief. The trick is writing within these tight parameters in an engaging way that hides any clunky SEO techniques.

If you can write creatively to order, you may find SEO specialists knocking at your door. Or, even better, acquire those skills yourself. SEO specialists are often paid a monthly retainer, so it can be lucrative and regular work. SEO is the Wild West of marketing. The territory is constantly shifting, and you need to be prepared to keep up with training, algorithms and future developments such as the “semantic web.” If this sounds exciting rather than terrifying, it may be for you. 

Business blogging

Blogging is another area where copywriters can help businesses. Often, people don’t have the time to write their own blogs on a regular basis. Many new sites start off with great enthusiasm with two or three posts, then peter out. You can help here, by providing business owners with a straightforward solution. If you do this well, it can become a regular source of income.

Some copywriters offer to “content manage” client sites. This means offering an end-to-end service, including posting at the blog and sometimes images on the client’s websites. To make this more economical for clients, offer to batch up items and do several at once, saving time on both sides. Short-form blog content isn’t a lucrative source of income, but a blogging specialist could develop a nice work pipeline with a large enough number of clients.

Resources

SEO introduction. Get the basics in five minutes from Moz.
Start local. Get your first job close to home.


Copyblogger is long-time resource for copywriters on the web.
For US-based writers, consider scanning Freelance Writing Jobs for copywriting gigs.

If you found this post helpful and are interested in starting your own copywriting business, take a look at Jules Horne’s How to Launch a Freelance Copywriting Business.

Asked and Answered: Framing Story Questions Effectively

Today’s post is by regular contributor Peter Selgin, the award-winning author of Your First Page. He offers first-page critiques to show just how much useful critical commentary and helpful feedback can be extracted from a single page—the first page—of a work-in-progress. Learn more about getting a first-page critique.

First Page

I left the island of Jumana under a cloud, deported for an undisclosed crime. As my daughter and I boarded the plane, I turned for a last glimpse of palm trees backlit by the setting sun and a pale horizon of sand framed by a turquoise sea. My hand trembled as I gripped the railing to steady myself.

“Go ahead, Sunny,” I said with a gentle nudge. She stepped into the plane.

I followed, bumping my wheelie suitcase up the last metal tread. Arab and Asian families and businessmen with attaché cases blocked the aisle, but moved ahead all at once. I put our bags in the overhead compartment. We took our seats, and Sunny huddled against me.

As we buckled our seatbelts, a voice in my head kept repeating why? why? I shifted in my cramped economy class seat that was ill-suited for a six-foot-tall woman with long legs.

At least the flight to Dubai would be brief, since Jumana was only thirty kilometers off the south coast of the Arabian Gulf. It was a flight we had taken many times on excursions to Dubai, but this trip was different. My thoughts kept circling around the same obsessive orbit. Caught in the whirl of my mind, details and fragments of things churned like a sand devil spinning across the desert. I leaned over to squeeze Sunny’s hand. “Don’t worry. It’s going to work out.”

“I know, Mom.” She peered at the photo she was clutching of our dog. A friend was taking care of him. Her face clenched up, but she didn’t cry. “When can he come to Dubai?”

“Once we find a place to live, someone will bring him here on the ferry. I promise.”

Sunny nodded, but anguish flickered in her eyes. She was being brave for my sake. What could I say to my ten-year-old daughter, who’d had to pull up stakes abruptly, leaving her friends, her school, and her beloved dog?

I had been given forty-eight hours’ notice to leave the country. No reason why. No explanation why the Women’s College of Jumana University fired me after seven years of teaching. It was a mistake. It had to be. What could I have done to warrant being branded persona non grata and thrown out of the country like a piece of trash?

First-Page Critique

“The writer’s task isn’t to answer the  question, but to frame it correctly.”   —Chekhov

Sometimes everything we need for our openings is there, more than we need, in fact. It’s just a matter of cutting and rearranging.

This opening is of a novel about the experiences of an expatriate professor at a fictional woman’s college located on the island of “Jumana” (a feminine Arabian name meaning “silver pearl”) in the Persian Gulf thirty kilometers from the city of Dubai.

The first page finds the narrator/protagonist boarding a passenger plane with her ten-year-old daughter, having been fired from her job and deported without explanation, raising in readers the same questions the protagonist asks herself, namely, Why are we being deported? What did I do? From here the novel is bound to go back in time to tell us this woman’s story.

The strategy being used here is called a framing device or a framed narrative. What it “frames” or sets up is a long flashback—in this case presumably the length of a novel—one that will answer, or at least partly answer, the question[s] it raises.

The author launches her first page not with an experience, but with information: “I left the island of Jumana under a cloud, deported for an undisclosed crime.” The drawback to this approach is that the information provided answers a question that hasn’t yet been raised in the reader. We read this first sentence with no awareness that the protagonist is boarding a plane, let alone where she’s going, or that she’s been forced to leave against her will. Only halfway down the first page, when the narrator tells her daughter, “Don’t worry. It’s going to work out,” are we given cause to wonder what circumstances have prompted this involuntary voyage.

By answering up front the very question that the scene exists to arouse in us, the author subverts her own purpose. This is not the same as withholding information or creating what I call false suspense. It’s simply a matter of giving readers the experiences before supplying information that explains or categorizes them, rather than afterward.

Otherwise the scene makes too much ado of boarding the plane, of rolling and stowing luggage—mundane actions with which most readers are familiar and that don’t require dramatization. The sooner we get to “Don’t worry, it’s going to work out,” the better.

Here’s my edit, with the crucial dialogue engaged within a few lines. What’s been cut is implied or can wait (we needn’t know, yet, that the narrator has lost her job at “The Women’s College of Jumana”). In the original opening, the beloved dog’s name is withheld, why I don’t know. I have included it, since withholding it from us seems artificial and adds a note of false suspense.

Revised Opening

“Go ahead, Sunny,” I said, nudging my daughter past Arab and Asian families and businessmen with briefcases. We took our economy-class seats (mine ill-suited for a six-foot-tall woman) and fastened our seatbelts. Sonny huddled close. I squeezed her hand.

“Don’t worry,” I said. “It’s going to work out.”

“What about [name of dog]?” she asked.

We had left under a cloud, deported for reasons undisclosed. Through the puddle jumper’s window I caught a glimpse of palm trees backlit by the setting sun and a horizon of pale sand framed by a turquoise sea. My hand trembled. At least the flight would be brief, Jumana being only about thirty kilometers from the coast. It was a flight we’d taken many times.

“When can he come to Dubai with us?”

We’d been given forty-eight hours to leave. No explanation. After seven years. It was a mistake. It had to be. What could I have done? And what could I tell my ten-year-old daughter, who’d had to pull up stakes abruptly, leaving her friends, her school, even her beloved dog?

“Once we find a place to live, [name of person taking care of dog] will bring him to us. I promise.”

Sunny’s face clenched. Anguish flickered in her eyes, but she didn’t cry.

This version raises and answers the same pertinent questions, in that order.

Your turn: How would you assess this opening? (Be constructive.)

How to Become a Bestseller with Money, Luck, or Work (Mostly Work)

Today’s guest post is by Cyndy Etler (@cdetler), author of We Can’t Be Friends and The Dead Inside. She’s written a range of popular posts for this site, including this great exercise on writing memoir.

“If you build it, they will come” is the biggest crock of sh*t ever foisted. The second biggest is my own mental script: “If I write it, The New York Times bestseller list will come.”

*EHNT* Wrong answer.

How do I know? Because if that mess was true, my first title, Dead Inside, would have been topping that list. Seriously. It ticks all the boxes:

It’s a near statistical impossibility for a self-published book to get picked up by a New York publisher. Dead Inside was originally self-pubbed. It’s now with a New York publisher.
An unknown writer snagging a blurb from a famous author is a utopian dream. Mega-bestseller Ellen Hopkins blurbed my book when it was a Word document.

Kirkus Reviews, the grand dame of book review bodies, is notoriously crabby. Kirkus gave Dead Inside a killer review.
It was singled out for recognition by the big, taste-making library publications: Junior Library Guild, School Library Journal and Children’s Book Council, among others.
Big media has been all up in its grill. The cover reveal was on Bustle. It was covered in VICE. I appeared on CBS’s The Doctors.

But more vital than all of this is what readers are saying: “I’m calling in sick because I can’t put your book down.” Or “I started reading it on my phone. Now it’s four hours later, I haven’t moved, and my hand is a claw from holding my phone up.”

And still, with all that, The Times hasn’t come calling. Why not? Because I didn’t know then what I’m telling you now. Because instead, I bought that old rag about “If you build it.” It took a long time, and a lot of research, for the truth to finally hit me: “They” don’t just “come.” It doesn’t work like that.

How it does work, I’ve learned, is with work, luck, or money. Let’s break that down in reverse, starting with money.

How to Become a Bestseller with Money

If you’ve got beaucoup bucks for a publicist, there’s a chance of getting your traditionally published book on the list … but it will costs you tens of thousands of dollars and you’ll get a zero-percent promise of success.

How to Become a Bestseller with Luck

Now, luck don’t cost a dime, but a million factors have to line up like German factory widgets for luck to land you on the list:

That idea you germinated four years ago, then wrote about for two years, then queried for another year, then edited for a final year, has to be the hot topic on the date your book launches.
The biggest news headlines have to dovetail—*click!*—with your topic or your platform.
You have to be the first on the scene with that haystack needle book topic.
Your book has to be your publisher’s top priority, the one they’re focused on marketing.
There can’t be any natural disasters or political brouhahas or Kardashian births to sweep your story into irrelevance.
If all of these stars align plus you’re an eloquent speaker, look good on camera, and have the flexibility to drop everything and dash to hither, tither or yon, tip your hat to Lady Luck. You win.

I’m not the only one smoking these fantasies. I get emails from writers on the daily: “I’m working on this book. It’s gonna be a Times bestseller. I know it.” I have to stuff a sock in my mouth, because I’m not here to kill anyone’s baby. But I am maybe here to drop some knowledge, so you don’t waste time fantasizing, like I did, and instead, you get to work.

How to Become a Bestseller with Work

Ah, I’m so glad you’re still here. You with the headlamp on, gearing up to truck into the salt mines? You’ll be the one who gets somewhere in the publishing game. If you need a snack, grab it now before we start the long slog.

You’re not here for regurgitation, so I’ll spare you the grit-level specifics on how to market and publicize your writing. There’s an avalanche of that info online; you’ve slogged through it for years already, no doubt. What I am here for is to coach you up on the mindset you want, and the interpersonal strategies you need, to make your book go nuclear. This is the stuff I learned the hard way (okay, the embarrassing way) in my own publishing trajectory.

Expect the grind to be 100% you.

If you have others who are gonna support that grind (if you’re with a traditional publisher) or if you have a budget and you hired  help—fantastic. But set your expectations now, and set them realistic: you’re gonna be the one carrying the boulder, and they’re gonna be the ones carting pebbles.

Here’s the plain truth: they don’t care if your book blows up. Not like you do. Not even a tenth of like you do. So they’ve got no reason to hyper-hustle.

Here’s another plain truth: if you expect them to hyper-hustle, you’ll be a pain. And if you’re a pain, they’ll be less motivated to help you. So here’s your job: work so hard, you don’t have time to be a pain.

Try to meet your own needs, and answer your own questions, before asking the pros for help.

This one’s do or die. There’s a lot that goes into getting a book to blow up. And there’s a lot—a lot—of writers who are dying to have their books blow up. You know what there’s not a lot of? People with the knowledge and skill to make that dream a reality. The few people who have that skill are constantly being hit up by the trillions who want to crib their expertise.

If you’re lucky, talented or connected enough to be in touch with these experts, don’t waste your time or theirs with insipid questions. First, try Google. Then, spend the time. Do the digging. Read the how-to books. Save your precious few questions for the info you simply can’t find on your own. Or risk banishment.

Be genuinely grateful to everyone who supports your work, and make sure they know it.

You know how you feel when some celebrity likes your response to their social media post? You feel rocket-thrill love and loyalty. You know how you feel when you’ve commented three, four, five times on some celebrity’s social, and they don’t say sh*t? You feel bitter, cranky resentment. How do you want readers, influencers, the folks helping you with marketing and publicity to feel about you? Probably not “bitter, cranky and resentful.” So tweet a thank you. Send a card. Write a review. Stalk their timeline, find out what they love, and send a gift. Humble gratitude is a rare commodity. Be the one who shares it.

Be constantly on the lookout for opportunities.

Can you do a guest post? Can you be an expert speaker on a TV show? Is there an influencer your mission aligns with? Is there an event you can speak at? Reach out and do the pitch. Doesn’t matter if you’re nobody. Doesn’t matter if you’re scared. Doesn’t matter if you get ignored. Think of anybody whose name people know. How do you think that anybody became somebody? By tuning in to opportunities.

Here’s this crazy thing I’ve learned about getting media coverage: the more you pitch, the more likely they’ll say yes.

Something about name recognition, or media-booking types favoring a harasser, or some other mystery of the universe we’ll never understand. But publicity experts say that the name of the game is relentless, relevant, high-quality pitches. Note the emphasis on “relevant” and “high quality.” Remember, we’re in the salt mines here. If you want to be a bestseller, you’ve got to put in the work. Keep your eye on the news, and be ready to pitch when your topic matches the headlines. Do the research on how to craft a pitch, and chisel that thing down to tight, spare, bullet points. If you’re sending out flabby missives, you’re wasting your time.

Accept the opportunities when they start rolling in.

Don’t be too busy. Don’t be too stressed. If you’re not trucking with luck or riches, your way to the top is with a million tiny steps. That small blog with only a hundred readers, the one asking you for a guest post? No, it’s not The Daily Show, but it is a hundred readers. You don’t want those hundred readers to know your name? Yeah, that’s what I thought. Do the guest post, and send the blogger a thank you.

But don’t not have a life.

I’m in love with Los Angeles, but never get to be there. When I was flown to Hollywood to appear on The Doctors, I had a precious half day to just … be in L.A. I wanted to rollerblade on Venice Beach. I wanted to look at art in Los Feliz. I wanted to drink in the fizz and freak of my beloved West Coast city.

So what did I do? I sat in my hotel room and worked on three small blog guest posts. Because I’m OCD. And because “the way to the top is with a million tiny steps.” But damn. Now I’m riddled with regret. Don’t be like me. Work hard, but do life, too.

Get with the 2018 zeitgeist and share other people’s work.

Like at a rate of 20:1, other people’s to your own. Not because this is how you notch up on the scale, but because we need to all be kind. To balance out the crap vibes. So the world doesn’t end in nuclear war. And also, because nothing makes people unfollow faster than a string of “Buy my book!” posts. And also, because people like people who make them feel good, and people feel good when you show their work some love. Maybe they’ll show you love back, maybe they won’t. But trust me one more time: you don’t want to be the author who nobody feels good about.

Expect one out of every hundred marketing and publicity efforts to net results.

Seriously. Expect that, so you keep on going when the going is slow. Expect heartbreak, expect thrill, and maybe don’t expect to hit The New York Times list. Because if you expect the near-impossible, all the wonderful possibles you earn will feel like second-place ribbons.

I’ve hit bestseller status. When each of my books came out, they were Amazon New Release bestsellers; both books sold out and were on back order. I’ve won high-zoot awards. I’ve watched my “as seen on” creds stack up. In other words, this salt-mine stuff? It works. But does it work for the Times list? I dunno yet. Let me keep slogging and find out. I’ll keep you posted.

How to Use Adjectives Wisely and Judiciously

Photo credit: raymondclarkeimages on Visual Hunt / CC BY-NC

Today’s post is by regular contributor Peter Selgin, the award-winning author of Your First Page. He offers first-page critiques to show just how much useful critical commentary and helpful feedback can be extracted from a single page—the first page—of a work-in-progress. Learn more about getting a first-page critique.

First Page

The relentless, screaming siren split the muggy Gulf coast night like bolt lightning rips a summer storm, hot and hard. A boxy fire-red ambulance zig-zagged through dark, foggy streets where other mothers stirred hamburger meat while their thirteen-year-old sons watched reruns of The Simpsons or whined for a new video game. Inside the ambulance a youngish woman in a marker-stained blue sweater dripped tears on her son’s torn black tee shirt. A tired medic with a twenty-four hour beard held up a fluid bag with one hand and checked pulse with his other. Cotton-candy fog from the bay moved in and circled scattered light posts in wisps outside the scratched windows. Bile tasting like guilt rose in her throat, and she felt she might add vomit to her tears.

The sympathetic medic tried to help. “Ma’am, he’s probably gonna make it. His blood pressure and heart rate ain’t real bad. Them pills just knocked him out a little with that beer. But don’t think he got all that much from looking at his vitals. On an empty stomach, it’d hit him fast. Good thing that woman called 911 in time.”

Crystal’s racing pulse didn’t slow. “Yes, thank God,” she whispered. What woman? She forgot at whose house Will was supposed to be, and the woman who called her just said Will was being taken to the hospital. Thank God it was a little town, and she had been close by the kid’s address. She swallowed the sour taste of panic in her throat. The medic’s kind words didn’t make guilt taste any sweeter.

Will is all I have left, she thought. I made a vow when Adam died to take up the slack, and once again I failed. I have to be stronger. Whatever it takes.

She should have monitored Will closer. Was it true he was taking drugs? By thirteen Will should be planning high school courses, not following a pack of losers trying drugs and drinking beer. Her temples pounded like the Presbyterian gong in Shell Beach every Sunday. A familiar migraine was returning with its aura of dancing lights.

Up front the baby-faced ambulance driver complained, “This fog gets any worse, a putty knife would be more useful than them worn-out wipers.”

First-Page Critique

The relentless, screaming siren split the muggy Gulf coast night like bolt lightning rips a summer storm, hot and hard.

Modifiers—adjectives and adverbs—get a bad rap. English and creative writing teachers are known to despise them, and writers themselves haven’t always embraced them with fierce devotion.

Voltaire: “The adjective is the enemy of the noun.”

Twain: “When you catch an adjective, kill it.”

Clifton Fadiman: “The adjective is the banana peel of parts of speech.”

King: “The road to hell is paved with adjectives.”

Ben Yagoda: “Kicking things off with adjectives is a little like starting a kids’ birthday party with the broccoli course.”

My feelings about adjectives are mixed. As those same English teachers will tell you, they tend to be lazy or perfunctory. That someone is “gorgeous” tells us nothing about how they look; it merely casts an overarching judgment with respect their physical appearance. Adjectives aren’t descriptions; they’re opinions.

With modifiers, you want to choose your battles. Just because every noun offers itself up for modification(s) doesn’t mean you should modify it. By serving some nouns plain, you give more distinction to those you embellish. Think of adjectives as ketchup or hot sauce; put it on everything and it quickly wears out its welcome.

The opening paragraph of this first page, which finds us with a mother attending her son in the back of an ambulance, batters us with modifiers. [R]elentless screaming, muggy Gulf coast, hot and hard, boxy fire-red … Taken individually, each of these modifiers may add something. Collectively they lose power and become monotonous.

Which doesn’t mean adjectives can’t be piled on to good effect. Do we really want to take a red pencil to Thomas Hobbes’ description of life in the absence of society as “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short”? And what would Thomas Wolfe have done without his modifiers (“The nostalgic thrill of dew-wet mornings in Spring, the cherry scent, the cool clarion earth, the wet loaminess of the garden, the pungent breakfast smells and the floating snow of blossoms…”)?

Still, there are adjectives and adjectives. While “cool clarion” adds something essential to the “earth” that it modifies, what “screaming” adds to a siren is both perfunctory and predictable. As for “cotton candy,” it adds nothing to the fog that helps us see the fog more clearly. In fact it fogs it up, adding connotations of innocent frivolity and sweetness where nothing of the sort pertains.

In the same way metaphors work best when forced on us by our need to make something clearer, the best adjectives are those imposed by necessity rather than those we indulge in or that arise automatically (“blind faith”; abject poverty”; “raving beauty”). In Catch-22, in giving General Dreedle a “ruddy, monolithic” face, Joseph Heller adds something to that face that wouldn’t be there otherwise. Likewise when Jorge Luis Borges writes, “No one saw him disembark in the unanimous night,” only a dunce of an editor would strike that adjective. When Ezra Pound said, “Go in fear of abstractions,” he didn’t mean don’t use them. He meant use them boldly, bravely—and sparingly.

Our opening paragraph with modifiers applied more judiciously:

The siren split the muggy Gulf coast night like lightning. Through dark, foggy streets where other mothers stirred hamburger meat and kids watched reruns of The Simpsons, the ambulance zig-zagged. Inside it a woman dripped tears on her son’s torn tee shirt. A medic with a twenty-four hour beard held a bag of plasma with one hand and checked the boy’s pulse with his other. Beyond the scratched rear window bay fog circled light posts in wisps. Bile rose in the mother’s throat.

What’s sacrificed here by way of specificity of detail is more than made up for in rhythm and pacing, with some details left to the reader’s imagination—which, given the chance and enough to go on—fills them in as well or better than the author in her version.

The rest of this sensational and potentially gripping opening is likewise overwritten, with the “sympathetic” medic’s dialogue turning into a speech—as dialogue tends to do when in excess of two or three lines. Of the six lines spoken by the medic, any one would do to make his point. Given the circumstances, his prolixity seems especially out of place.

The next paragraph (“Crystal’s racing pulse didn’t slow…”) is confusing, with the mother who was “a woman” in the first paragraph referred to now by her first name, while a different “woman”—the one who phoned Woman #1 to inform her that her son was being taken to the hospital—is introduced. The author’s failure to use the past perfect tense (“She had forgotten at whose house Will had been…”) confuses us further.

The next paragraph dips us into the mother’s stream-of-consciousness for some forced exposition (“I made a vow when Adam died…”). Forced exposition is information forced into a character’s dialogue. Though in this case the information is forced into interior rather than spoken dialogue, the result is just as artificial. The second-to-last paragraph compounds this (“She should have monitored Will closer”) while stating things that, if not completely obvious, might be better learned elsewhere and not in the midst of such a dramatic scene.

The last paragraph of this page serves up its finest moment, with the ambulance driver’s dialogue (“This fog gets any worse, a putty knife would be more useful than them worn-out wipers.”) evoking his character while also describing the fog. If only it had come sooner.

Your turn: How would you assess this opening? (Be constructive.)

True and False: Two Kinds of Narrative Suspense

Today’s post is by regular contributor Peter Selgin, the award-winning author of Your First Page. He offers first-page critiques to show just how much useful critical commentary and helpful feedback can be extracted from a single page—the first page—of a work-in-progress. Learn more about getting a first-page critique.

First Page

Prologue

The report read:

August 20, mid-afternoon. River Road. Medium pony attacked, now deceased. Two goats gored and gutted, deceased. Owner reported sighting of a large black mammal, possibly feline.

August 20, 11 p.m.

The clouds rolled across the moon, making it intermittently dark and light. Douglas Travis waited, hidden by the trees. He looked around, listening to the eerie silence, and shuffled his feet on the ground.

Leaves rustled and he heard the snap of dry branches. Footsteps fell from behind him approaching fast. As the clouds cleared and the moon shined bright, he caught a flicker of a shadow and turned.

No one there. He squirmed and looked at his phone for messages for the ninth time. Shaking his head in frustration he turned on his heels to leave only to face the figure in the black slicker.

“What took you so long? I’ve been waiting. Did you bring it?” Douglas said, nervous. “Never mind, this ain’t right. I change my mind,” he continued, looking down at the ground.

When he looked up, the figure was holding a syringe.

“Whoa, that’s not what I…,” Douglas said taking a step back. “Wait — I’m going to call my mom.” He held up his phone.

The assailant plunged the needle into the boy’s neck. Douglas Travis jerked backward, and slammed against a tree, fighting against the branches that seemed to try and catch him in a web of their grasp.

The boy was beginning to turn a bluish color, snorting sounds exploded from his mouth. The figure in the black slicker fled through the woods while the boy made a desperate clutch for his cell phone.

Ashen and weak with barely a pulse, he had meant to push the keypad to dial for help, but pushed the button for the camera instead, and began filming his last breath while catching a distant fleeing shadow. Other eyes then glowed in the dark night.

First-Page Critique

We read fiction largely to learn two things: (1) what has happened, and (2) what’s going to happen next. Question #2 is the one raised by the condition called suspense, the state of anxiety produced by uncertainty. In real life, suspense is often unpleasant. In a work of fiction, however, it’s both desirable and pleasurable. It causes a mental itch that can only be scratched by turning the page.

In my years of reading works-in-progress, I’ve identified two main kinds of suspense, the good kind and the not-so-good kind. The good kind is what I call “true suspense.” It’s the kind of suspense that raises the question, “What’s going to happen next?” and that arises organically and authentically from characters and their actions as conveyed to us through a firmly established, consistent viewpoint.

The other kind of suspense I call “false suspense”: suspense generated by an author who, intentionally or otherwise, withholds information. It’s the sort of suspense created by not knowing that seven year-old Sally’s kidnapping by Martian pirates is really only a dream.

On this first page of a mystery novel the author generates both kinds of suspense.

Putting the police report paragraph aside, on a quick first read the rest of this page goes down well. The writing is sensuous, engaging our eyes first (those clouds rolling across the moon, painting the scene in noir shadows and light), then our ears (rustling leaves, snaps of dry branches). True, the author might have appealed to other senses as well (the musty forest smell, its chilled dankness), but two out of five isn’t bad. And no one can argue that the scene lacks mystery, surprise, or suspense. Indeed, this first page packs plenty of all three into a very small space.

But with my second closer reading a nagging suspicion is confirmed: namely, that this skillful author has subverted her narrator and imposed her own cherry-picked view of things, one that disengages me from her protagonist’s perceptions and, as a result, from the fictional world that I had inhabited through his perceptions.

I’ve heard many definitions of point of view, most of them wrong. “First person” and “third person” are not points of view: they are merely the handles by which a point of view may be grasped. No, point of view is something much deeper than pronouns; it’s that crucial lens or filter through which fictional experiences are conveyed to us by a narrator, who, unlike the author (who typically inhabits a desk), inhabits the fictional world. Simply put: point of view is the difference between the author and the narrator. For this reason point of view is sometimes referred to confusingly as “voice.” But it’s the voice—the awareness, insights, and diction—of the narrator, not the author.

This opening page has no consistent narrator, no clear point of view. How can that be?

Let’s read it closely, starting with the sentence “The clouds rolled across the moon, making it intermittently dark and light.” So far the ostensible point of view is neutral or objective, with the experience belonging to no one (or to the clouds). Presented as the character’s experience, the sentence might be combined with the next to read, “Hidden behind trees, Douglas Travis watched as clouds rolled over the moon, casting the forest into alternating shadow and light.” As for “Douglas Travis waited, hidden by the trees,” it, too, is neutral: it could be from Douglas’ perspective, or not. However the sentence after that (“He looked around, listening to the eerie silence, and shuffled his feet on the ground.”) plants us firmly in Douglas’ sensibilities, as do both sentences of the next paragraph, through Douglas’ ears (the snap of branches) and his eyes (the flicker of a shadow).

Our engagement with Douglas’ perspective continues with the next paragraph, up to the point where Douglas “face[s] the figure in the black slicker.” Though it seems as if we’re still sharing Douglas’ perspective, we aren’t, really. As we will soon discover, Douglas knows the identity of “the figure in the black slicker”; he may even know the man’s name. Anyway it’s clear that Douglas and the man are familiar with each other and have arranged this meeting in the woods (“Did you bring it?”). Though these things obviously inform Douglas’ perspective, they don’t suit the author’s wish to withhold said knowledge from us. Hence “the figure in the black slicker,” and not “Joe” or “the man Douglas had spoken with two days earlier.”

With the last two paragraphs, increasingly jarring shifts in perspective occur, with (in the third-to-last paragraph) Douglas referred to as “the boy”—a designation that fits an outsider’s perspective, but not his, and then, in the penultimate paragraph, us watching “the boy” turn “a bluish color” (that he cannot see) and hearing the “snorting sounds [that] explode from his mouth.” The last paragraph drops the boy’s perspective entirely, with the scene’s final moments relayed from a neutral, objective distance per the clouds in the first sentence. We’ve gone from Douglas’ subjective experience to the objective experience of “the boy” to camera-like objectivity. At the moment when my investment in Douglas’ subjective personal experience is greatest, I’m no longer in Douglas’ shoes, but in the equivalent of a movie theater, watching him. Not only does this void my investment, it suggests that it wasn’t sound to begin with: that there never was a clear POV strategy to this scene, that what I’ve been getting all along isn’t a genuine narrator with a firm perspective, but the author’s POV, omniscience by default. Point of view is the difference between the author and the narrator.

The last paragraph (“Ashen and weak with barely a pulse…”) tries to reclaim Douglas’ perspective, but it does so too little and too late. By then we’ve already lost faith in that investment and sold our shares. In case we haven’t, the last sentence (“Other eyes then glowed in the dark night”)—which, given that Douglas is presumably dead or unconscious, conveys an experience well beyond his grasp—puts the final nail in this narrator’s coffin. Though it resembles a fictional experience, that last sentence is pure information doled out by an astute but obtrusive author.

Does point of view need to be consistent? Yes, which isn’t to say it can’t move around; it can—consistently, through the authority of a narrator who, for whatever reason, is able to move from one perspective to another, and does so in ways that don’t disorient and are never arbitrary. In any scene the perspective may change; the narrator doesn’t.

When point of view problems arise, it’s usually either a case of the author not having fully engaged a narrator, or not having surrendered to their authority. Writing teachers are known to say, “Trust the reader.” I say, “Trust your narrator.”

For comparison:

He ran in the early morning, floating like a specter amid the tall, wet pines of the Wisconsin forest. His thick hair curled from the mist. His lungs burned. His breath stank of beer and cigarettes. At the road, he stopped and swiped his glasses on his baggy sweatshirt. Late June, and the damp, cold spring had yet to give way to summer.

Three months earlier, Dave Cubiak had left Chicago, steering a small rental car north along the Lake Michigan shore, across the Illinois state line, and up two hundred miles to the Door County peninsula. He was forty-two, a former cop undone by the deaths of his wife and daughter, who had been killed in an accident he believed he could have prevented.

The move was supposed to be a fresh start.

Instead, it was a mistake.

Grief stricken, guilt ridden, and often drunk, Cubiak felt like a blot on the tourist landscape, a reclusive misfit among the friendly locals, people who waved even to strangers. He had committed to staying one year and had nine months to go. The time it took to grow a baby, to figure out what next.

Cubiak adjusted his glasses and bent over, his hands on his knees. For a moment, he thought of his mother and felt ashamed. He had failed her; he had failed everyone.

A sharp wail shattered the stillness, and through old habit Cubiak straightened, trying to pinpoint the source. A seagull wheeling over the bay? In his new job as park ranger, he’d sometimes watch the plump birds dive-bombing the water, full of avian bravado. Perhaps the sound had been made by a red fox on the prowl. Or the wind. Silence again. The forest gave away nothing.

The opening of Patricia Skalka’s Death Stalks Door County has much in common with our first page, but with a crucial difference: It invests us swiftly by way of its narrator in a character’s perspective. Having done so, it honors that investment. I’ll leave it to you to discover what fate has in store for Mr. Cubiak, but damned if this opening creates no suspense. Were the first page in question written as deeply from Douglas’ perspective, it would shed some false suspense but gain more of the genuine article and intensify our sensory immersion in the scene.

Other notes: Prologues are quaint and can be cheesy. The police report topping this one is effectively the prologue of a prologue, and makes for a stammered opening. I’d cut it and call the rest Chapter One, or make the report the prologue without calling it such.

Your turn: How would you assess this opening? (Be constructive.)

Building Your Business Model as a Writer

In my newest book, The Business of Being a Writer, I devote an entire section to various ways you can earn money as a writer that don’t involve selling books. (If you didn’t know, most of my income is not related to book sales!)

Over the last month, I’ve been talking (and writing) about how to build a business model for your career that suits your particular strengths as well as the unique quality of your work. Here are my latest appearances.

How to Turn Attention Into Sales

Over at Goodreads, there’s an excerpt from my book about basic marketing principles. While you may tune out market concerns during the creative process, once that process is over and it comes to the business of writing and publishing, there’s no way around the discussion of audience.

Funding Your Career Through Grants, Crowdfunding, and Patronage

As part of the Self-Publishing Advice Conference, I offer a 30-minute talk on how to apply for grants, run successful crowdfunding campaigns, and secure donations and sponsors to support your work.

Bridging the Divide Between Art and Business

I’m delighted to be a guest on the DIY MFA podcast, discussing how to develop a strategy to make a living as a writer.

Educating Yourself on the Business

Joanna Penn and discuss how to adopt a mindset that’s conducive to earning a living as a writer—The Creative Penn podcast (April 9).

The Myth of Overnight Success

With Julie Duffy at StoryADay, we discuss what writers should do when they want to go pro, the myth of the overnight success, the nature of “work” and networking for introverts. Here’s a link to the podcast.

In Storytelling: Never State What You Can Imply

Photo credit: 2bmolar on VisualHunt.com / CC BY

Today’s post is by regular contributor Peter Selgin, the award-winning author of Your First Page. He offers first-page critiques to show just how much useful critical commentary and helpful feedback can be extracted from a single page—the first page—of a work-in-progress. Learn more about getting a first-page critique.

First Page

The bartender slid the keys across the bar toward Judy with such force they flipped over the edge and onto a barstool. The keys that had been aimed so mindlessly at her would open the doors to what were supposed to become the band’s accommodations for the next two weeks. With a nod of the head pointing toward the rear of the building, the bartender informed us the rooms were located above the bar. Our eyes locked … close friends don’t need to talk sometimes, you just know what each of us is thinking; and we both knew we were surrounded by bad juju, and this was just the beginning. Judy and I turned and walked outside to update the other four girls, who were still waiting in the van. Suspicions already raised, we voted on who would head up our little reconnaissance mission. As leader, we naturally drafted Judy. The first in line is always the first to be sacrificed, right?

Single file, we stayed close to each other for security. All six of us followed the fractured sidewalk that looked like it had lost a bet with a jackhammer to the back of the building. The paint covering the wooden entry door leading to the second floor was blistered and cracked, scars from its colorful life. The feelings of fight or flight were beginning to set in, intensifying our natural instinct to turn around and run away from the decrepit building; but obligation forced us to open the door.

In spite of the creaking groan of the rickety wooden stairs, and against my better judgment, I cautiously continued placing each foot on the next step. My eyes felt the need to scan the tunnel-like surroundings, in case I had to make an emergency escape, when the words fell from my mouth, “I don’t like the looks of this, girls. Rooms above a bar—not a good sign.” I said this with the air of confidence of a nineteen-year old; a confidence that existed only because I was not alone.

First-Page Critique

This opening can be much improved without adding a single word. In fact, I’m going to subtract hundreds. First, though, let me explain why.

Never state what you can imply.

Years ago a dear writer friend gave me this useful bit of advice, which, whether he knew it or not, he got from French avant-garde poet, playwright, filmmaker (painter, photographer, chess player, etc.) Jean Cocteau. For a long time I clung to the injunction so fervently I printed it out in BOLD-CAPS, landscape format, and hung it on the wall over my computer next to that other sacred writers’ commandment: NO POV = NO STORY.

Since then, though I still cling tenaciously to the second injunction, I’ve loosened up a bit on the first. There are times, many in fact, when we writers need to state a thing outright, even when it has been or might be implied, in order to drive a point home or simply to draw more attention to it, or just to make sure certain implications don’t slip under the reader’s radar.

“Never state what you can imply” differs from “show, don’t tell,” that oldest of creative writing chestnuts, in that it allows for times when implication can’t always be achieved through action or “showing.” Sometimes—often in fact—we rely on the narrator’s intervention to interpret or color characters’ experiences and actions for us. There are also times when for pacing purposes an author wants to establish context more quickly than dramatization (“showing”) permits. And while it’s true that a story told purely through authorial summary (“telling”) isn’t likely to satisfy most readers, the same novel told purely through action and dialogue would in all likelihood be equally unsatisfactory. It would be like reading a movie, which is like drinking a steak.

I recall coming upon a “revised edition” of an early John Barth novel, The End of the Road, a black comedy about a character named (with intentional irony) Jacob Horner who suffers from nihilistic paralysis. I’d read the novel back in the seventies and much admired it. Curious as to what changes Barth had made, I did a page-by-page comparison with the original, only to find that the revision affected exactly one sentence. The sentence was “It hit me like a ton of bricks.” For the new edition Barth cut the line. He did so, I’m sure, because it merely stated an emotion obvious to anyone reading the scene, without adding nuance or dimension to it. On the contrary, it flattened the sentiment into a cliché. Still, the sentence did add something: a beat to allow the moment to “sink in.” If only Barth had not done it so tritely.

One of the best known examples of the power of implication is Hemingway’s famous short story “Hills Like White Elephants.” Though the story is about a young woman facing an abortion, that word makes no appearance in it. Nor are we ever told directly how either of the story’s two main characters—the woman and her male companion—feel about the prospect. Instead, all is implied through their terse, oblique, circuitous dialogue as they drink beer and absinthe and await the train that will take the woman to wherever the abortion will be performed. The first overt reference to the procedure doesn’t even appear until halfway through the very short story, where we read:

“It’s really an awfully simple operation, Jig,” the man said. “It’s not really an operation at all.”

The girl looked at the ground the table legs rested on.

“I know you wouldn’t mind it, Jig. It’s really not anything. It’s just to let the air in.”

The girl did not say anything.

Up to here, the characters have discussed (1) the shape of the hills in the distance, and (2) the taste of absinthe, nothing at all to do with the grim procedure awaiting the young woman. It can be argued that the true subject of “Hills Like White Elephants” is not abortion but avoidance. At any rate, nothing is stated; everything is implied. Our involvement in the story is heightened by the trust placed in us by the author, who dares to not describe or even to label emotions for us, who would rather risk our misunderstanding than do so. That trust, that willingness to let us supply and interpret emotions, makes for a truly interactive reading experience. We become Hemingway’s co-authors. We finish his story for him. As a result, it involves us more deeply.

Telling readers what to think or feel is the job of a propagandist. A storyteller’s main purpose, on the other hand, is to create experiences for the reader, to involve us so deeply, so convincingly, so authentically in those experiences that we feel what characters feel.

In this first page of a memoir, the author feels compelled to both show and tell us what her characters are experiencing, so we’re never allowed to draw our own conclusions. That the bartender shoves the keys “mindlessly” is implied by their flipping over the barstool. That the same bartender “informs [the narrator and her friend that] the rooms [are] located above the bar” is likewise implied by his directional nod. That the two protagonists share the same thought (that they’re “surrounded by bad juju”) is implied by their locking eyes with each other, as is the fact that their “suspicions [are] already raised.”

The tendency to state what’s implied persists through this opening, with us being told that Judy is the “natural” choice to lead her all-girl band in its reconnaissance mission to inspect their quarters, that the band members keep close together “for security,” and, as they make their way down the “fractured sidewalk that [looks] like it lost a bet with a sledgehammer” and through a paint-blistered entryway “scar[red] from its colorful life”, that “feelings of fight or flight were beginning to set in.” In case we missed the point, we’re furthermore informed that said feelings “[intensify their] natural instinct to turn around and run away.” Got it.

The same opening with implications left to the reader:

With a nod toward the building’s rear, the bartender slid the keys across the bar so hard they flipped over it onto a stool. The keys were to the band’s accommodations for the next two weeks. Judy and I locked eyes, then turned and went out to the van where the other three members of Ahead of Our Time waited.

Single-file, we followed Judy down the fractured sidewalk to the back of the building. The blood-red paint covering the door leading to stairs was blistered and cracked. As we made our way up, to the sound of wood creaking under us I said, “I don’t like the looks of this, girls.”

The original runs 341 words; the revision 111. What, if anything, crucial is missed?

In Flannery O’Connor’s most famous story, “A Good Man in Hard to Find,” wherein a southern matriarch watches—or rather listens—as one-by-one the members of her family are executed by one of a pair of escaped serial killers in the woods close behind her, never once are we told how frightened and horrified she must feel. We aren’t told how she feels at all. The horror implicit in the scene is left entirely to our imagination. Which makes it all the more horrific.

Your turn: How would you assess this opening? (Be constructive.)

Make Your Writing Anxiety Disappear By Thinking Small

Today’s guest post is by author Jane Anne Staw (@anne_staw), the author of Small: The Little We Need for Happiness.

In college, I struggled mightily with writer’s block, although I didn’t know it at the time. I thought I was just a lousy writer. All my professors told me so: “Too bad you’re such a poor writer,” one professor wrote on a term paper. “You have a fine mind.”

“Good ideas, poor execution,” another said. “You can think, but you sure can’t write,” yet another professor wrote in red ink at the end of another term paper.

Reading some of those papers recently, I thought: My professors were right—you’d have thought German was my native tongue, not English!

But it turned out, I wasn’t a poor writer at all. I was an anxious writer, a writer who worried so much about every single word, in every single paper, that I wrote and rewrote and rewrote again each and every sentence I managed to wrestle onto the page. In the end, most of my sentences resembled elaborate Faberge eggs.

I grew up with a brilliant and critical father whom I wanted very much to please. Once I arrived at college, I fretted and fumed about every single sentence I wrote because I wanted my professors to think highly of me. I had transferred my strong desire to please my father to the faculty at my university.

By the time I graduated, even thank you notes presented nearly impossible obstacles. And the identity of poor writer was by that time thoroughly affixed to me.

It wasn’t until years later, a long time after I had overcome my block, that I understood that behind all that hand wringing and rewriting, a pretty fine writer waited in the wings to emerge. She simply needed to be given a chance.

Poetry is what gave me that chance. I began writing poetry and found that I was able to create entire poems, with verses and stanzas, metaphors and similes. At the time, I had no idea why I was able to do this, but I remember feeling such great relief. Maybe I could write after all.

Now, with hindsight, I understand that poetry is the universe of small, and it was by thinking small that I was able to begin overcoming my block.

Think about it: Poetry is written word by word by word, the words accumulating, often quite slowly, building force and emotion, scene and psychic space, until the poem is complete. Thinking about only one word at a time lowered the stakes for me, so that I no longer felt so anxious about the final product. And thinking small kept me in the moment, focused on the immediate verse I was writing.

Writing poetry, I no longer worried about what my professors would think of what I was writing, or about what grade I would receive in the class. Instead, I began to take pleasure in single words, or the rhythm of several words in a row.

Poetry began my unblocking process. But to become the writer I am today, I had to continue thinking small. When I moved on to writing personal essays, and then books, I quickly discovered that thinking about the entire book, or even the whole essay, caused a surge of anxiety. So I learned to think small and focus on the current sentence I was composing, or at most, on the current paragraph.

In the beginning, I was still anxious about the quality of my writing. So I made a deal with myself. I had to complete one whole paragraph, before I could return to it and revise. And when I revised, I could go through that paragraph only once.

Later, when I was writing more fluidly, I moved from one paragraph to one whole page before I allowed myself to read over what I had written and revise.

Gradually, my writing became more and more fluid. I was able to sit and write for longer periods of time without feeling antsy and anxious. And I discovered that sometimes, I actually enjoyed what I was doing.

Another way I learned to think small when I wrote was not to allocate too much time for writing. If I left the entire morning open for writing, I was more likely to procrastinate. To clean my refrigerator, answer emails, respond to phone messages. Leaving too much time allowed the anxiety to creep in, and to avoid that feeling, I did anything but write. I learned that for me, at times, a writing window of a half-hour was plenty of time to get a good deal of writing done.

I also learned that worrying about publication and who would read what I was writing was anxiety provoking. So when I wrote, I shrank my writing universe to a population of one. Writing was a relationship I had with myself; when I was writing, nobody else mattered. Once I had finished the piece, I could think about readers and publication.

Many people I know are ambitious about their writing. Ambition is not bad in and of itself. But it definitely interferes with your writing. If even before you begin a writing project, you are thinking about where you want it to be published and who, you hope, will review it, you are opening the door to anxiety.

From struggling with severe writer’s block in college, I am now a teacher and coach of other writers, some of whom see me because they too are struggling with block. One recent client came to me midway through a novel he was writing. “It’s overwhelming, thinking about this novel. I have so much more to write,” he said. “It’s discouraging. It makes me want to forget about this novel.”

Together, we brought this writer’s focus back to the writing itself, to the scene he was inventing at the moment, to the characters in that scene. We did this by talking about the scene, reflecting on the principal character and how she would react to what was taking place. By bringing the current scene or chapter center stage, this writer no longer thought about the future of his novel. He wrote and lived his novel in the present. And was able to complete it much more quickly than he had anticipated.

Another recent client was unable to write a book she had a contract to write because she worried so much about how readers would react to what she had to say. Not writing was a good way to avoid this anxiety.

I helped this writer think small by suggesting she introduce me as the principal reader for what she was writing, and eliminate all these future and potential readers from her writing world. It took a while, but in the end, the writer was able to keep me in mind as she wrote, not all her potential critics, which opened the door for her to complete her book.

I work with each writer as an individual, but at some point in our work together, and to varying degrees, I suggest they think small. To focus on the moment they are writing about—the current word, scene, or paragraph–and not the entire writing project. To have at the most one ideal reader in mind when they write. To concentrate on the process, not the product. To stay with the writing and not the publication of their project. And whenever my clients do this, many of their writing inhibitions disappear.

If you enjoyed this post, be sure to check out Jane Anne Staw’s Small.

How to Establish Routine While Building Character on the First Page

Today’s post is by regular contributor Peter Selgin, the award-winning author of Your First Page. He offers first-page critiques to show just how much useful critical commentary and helpful feedback can be extracted from a single page—the first page—of a work-in-progress. Learn more about getting a first-page critique.

First Page

Shoulder resting gently against shoulder, they nestled on a supple leather sofa, Barry absorbed in the sixth game of the World Series, Sheena enjoying the only baseball she watched all year. At each highlight, a key pitch, hit or catch, he offered commentary, she smiled and sipped a white wine.

“Play ball!” the umpire signaled the start of the fifth inning and Barry crossed fingers for his Orioles. Facing them on a 75-inch flat panel, the Braves pitcher gripped a ball hidden in his glove, peered out at the couple and nodded.

The view from the centerfield camera jumped onto the screen and now Sheena and Barry were behind the pitcher, looking past his red “37” at the nervous hitter flexing his bat while the umpire crouched and the catcher raised his mitt to the inside of the plate. The pitcher wound up and fired a fastball and flinched at the crack of the bat blasting a blur over his head through the top of the TV. The image reversed again to capture the shortstop’s skyward grimace and bring into focus the ball sailing far above the left fielder before arching down to clip the foul pole and carom fair into the fourth row of dismayed fans.

“Hell yeah, it’s gone,” Barry cheered, “Turner nailed that fastball.”

The picture switched back to the hitter almost to first base, slowing to a trot and thrusting up his fist in joy, then cut to a close up of the pitcher’s face, bent down to study the cloud of dust he had just kicked up on the mound.

“Looks like we’ll be tasting victory champagne, Sheena.” He tilted his face to hers, his styled gray hair grazing honey blonde tresses a generation younger. “We’re going to win this. The Braves are cooling down and the O’s are getting hot.”

“Hope you’re right.”  Sheer pink fingernails brushed a tuft of golden bangs away from an eye.

First-Page Critique

Reading this first page, without the help of a tersely lurid title (Dead Cold, Sweet Death, Blood Secrets, Dark Waters …) and one of those covers, you know the kind, with raised metallic 200-point gothic type superimposed over silhouetted figures casting ponderous shadows, you might never guess that it’s the opening of a legal or crime thriller, but it is. So we can be fairly sure if not absolutely certain that something extremely unpleasant and of a criminal nature will befall this romantic pair of baseball watchers.

Still, this opening generates too little interest in its romantically involved characters, who, though of different ages, with her “honey blonde tresses … a generation younger [than his gray hair]”, are otherwise not developed. As for the baseball game, World Series or not, and however deeply invested these lovers may be in it, in itself the game holds no interest for this reader.

Though he didn’t invent it, for the role played by baseball in this opening scene, director Alfred Hitchcock, the Master of Suspense, popularized the term “MacGuffin” or “McGuffin,” meaning (according to the dictionary) “an object or device in a movie or a book that serves as a trigger for the plot”—or, as Hitchcock put it less charitably, “The thing that the characters … care deeply about … and for which the audience does not give a damn.”

Though rendered in great detail, the baseball game here exists mainly to establish this couple’s interest in the game along with Barry’s betting habit, the routine against which an extraordinary event will soon play itself out with (presumably) deadly results, launching the criminal or legal proceedings that will drive this novel’s plot through several hundred pages.

As I’ve said elsewhere, routine is important. Without routine the extraordinary events that make for a plot have nothing to work against or to set them into relief. I’m reminded of that passage at the opening of the most famous of crime thrillers, Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, in which he establishes the story’s setting: Holcomb, Kansas, the small Midwestern town where Herb Clutter lived with his family, and where their gristly murders would occur:

Until one morning in mid-November of 1959, few Americans—in fact, few Kansans—had ever heard of Holcomb. Like the waters of the river, like the motorists on the highway, and like the yellow trains streaking down the Santa Fe tracks, drama, in the shape of exceptional happenings, had never stopped there.

The trouble with routine is that it can’t be dramatized, nor should we bother trying. When we do, the best we can hope for is dramatized routine—a contradiction in terms, routine and drama having about the same relationship as water and oil. However much action, dialogue, or loving description we pump into the corpse of routine, however heroically we try to resuscitate it with artful similes, breathless adjectives and adverbs, and other linguistic adornments, the result will most likely still be dead on arrival.

Most likely, that is, unless while establishing routine we’re also doing something else: evoking character. As I’ve also said before: if something we write evokes character, we should probably keep it. If it doesn’t, we do well to question it.

In the given opening, though it establishes Barry’s gambling habit (which may or may not play a role in what’s forthcoming), otherwise watching him and Sheena watch a baseball game tells us little if anything about them. But it could if the perspective were altered. Were the scene written from a close third-person subjective viewpoint, one that immersed us—however briefly—into one or both of the characters’ sensibilities, through their individual perceptions of and responses to the game we’d know them as individuals, as people. Do Barry’s big-win dreams feature palm trees and infinity pools? Does Sheena wonder if he’s getting himself in over his head? We would therefore care about them, and therefore care that something (we intuit) bad is going to happen to them, and therefore feel not boredom, but suspense.

Instead, the author uses a point-of-view strategy that curiously puts us and the watching couple into the baseball game—or rather into the television screen in which the baseball game is taking place. It’s a compelling strategy, but one that gives us no access into the characters’ interiors, and that makes the ball game, the McGuffin, the very thing we don’t care about, its subject.

Something else that wouldn’t hurt this opening: a topic sentence that makes clear what we’re getting ourselves into: a story not about baseball or a pair of baseball-loving lovebirds, but of crime and punishment. How differently we’d read the same opening if it started thus:

They died in the third inning with bases loaded.

That’s the opening strategy Stephen Booth uses in his crime thriller, Scared to Live:

Even on the night she died, Rose Shepherd couldn’t sleep. By the early hours of the morning, her bed was like a battleground—hot, violent, chaotic. Beneath her, the sheet was twisted into painful knots, the pillow hard and unyielding. Lack of sleep made her head ache, and her body had grown stiff with discomfort.

In her short story “Home, Sweet Home” Hannah Tinti takes a similar approach:

Pat and Clyde were murdered on pot roast night. The doorbell rang just as Pat was setting the butter and margarine (Clyde was watching his cholesterol) on the table. She was thinking about James Dean. Pat had loved him desperately as a teenager, seen his movies dozens of times, written his name across her notebooks, carefully taped pictures of him to the inside of her locker so that she would have the pleasure of seeing his tortured, sullen face from East of Eden as she exchanged her French and English textbooks for science and math. …

Note how in both cases from the throat-grabbing opening sentence each author goes on—not to establish routine—but to evoke character. The author of our first page has a chance to do both.

Your turn: How would you assess this opening? (Be constructive.)