Jane Friedman's Blog: Jane Friedman, page 225

6 Common Plot Fixes

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The following post is an excerpt from "The Ultimate Revision Checklist" by James Scott
Bell, featured in the Writer's Digest special issue, Write Your Novel in 30 Days.
If you enjoy this post, check out Bell's upcoming seminar in June on how
to sell your novel.




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Key Questions to Ask About Your Plot




Is there any point where a reader might feel like putting the book down?

Does the novel feel like it's about people doing things?

Does the plot feel forced or unnatural?

Is the story out of balance? Too much action? Too much reaction?



1. Keep Nabbing Ideas


All through the revision process, your mind will be working on your plot. When you
sleep, eat, shower, drive. The boys in the basement never stop.



So be able to nab any ideas that occur to you at odd moments. Have pens and paper
handy in your home, car, office, backpack. Don't hesitate to jot down what occurs
to you, without judgment. Later, you can sift through your notes and decide what to
incorporate.



2. Create Two Trajectories


Create two trajectories for your main character: a personal problem and a plot problem.



He's in his personal problem as the story begins, or it develops soon thereafter.

The plot problem arises when the main conflict is engaged.

The two don't necessarily intersect as the story moves along, though they can. But
the personal complicates how he deals with the plot.



3. Add Another Level of Complication


In Robert Crais's thriller Hostage, burned-out hostage negotiator Jeff Talley
is suddenly faced with a tense stand-off in an otherwise placid bedroom community.
Fine and dandy on its own, but Crais then adds another level: The hostage inside the
house has in his possession incriminating financial evidence against the mob, because
he's the mob's accountant! The mob needs to get that evidence before the cops. To
put pressure on Talley, the mob kidnaps his ex-wife and daughter and holds them hostage.
This added level of complication supercharges the entire book.



Don't hold back on making trouble. Have you been resistant to making things as bad
as possible for your lead? Did you pull your punches when creating obstacles, challenges,
points of conflict? Were you too nice to your characters?



Go through your manuscript, and for each scene define what the point of conflict is.



4. Add a Character


Too few characters can result in a thin plot. Too many can render it overweight. But
just the right character added at just the right time presents a whole universe of
plot possibilities. If your plot is plodding, consider adding a new, dynamic character
to the proceedings. Give this character a stake in the plot. Give him plenty of reasons
to be for or against the other characters. Search out possible backstory relationships
between the new character and the existing cast.



5. Beware of Unmotivated Actions


Do you have characters doing things that aren't justified in the story? A character
can't just show up. You need to give your characters a reason why they act the way
they do. Look to:



desires

yearnings

duties

psychological wounds

passion

6. Change a Setting


Usually the main setting of your plot is going to remain as is, because you have so
much invested in it. You've done research, set up locations for scenes, and so on.
But if it's possible to change, give it some consideration. Will it add levels to
your plot? More exciting possibilities? Even if you can't change the main location,
many of your scenes can be enlivened in this way. Look especially to these locations:



restaurants

kitchens

living rooms

offices

cars

These are the places most of us are in most of the time. For that reason, they're
overly familiar. Look at each instance of a location like the above and see if you
can't find a fresher venue. For example, instead of a restaurant scene, what if the
characters were outside eating hot dogs on a pier? Or at a carnival where there's
too much noise? You don't have to move every scene, of course, but this is one way
to sharpen a plot.



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[image error]Looking
for more? Need character fixes? Dialogue fixes? Scene fixes? Buy the best book available
on revision, Write
Great Fiction: Revision & Self-Editing by James Scott Bell.

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A Wonderful Prompt to Help You Gather Material

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Writers are often asked how they find their ideas.



Author Stefanie Freele says "the world gushes prompts," and in the latest Glimmer
Train bulletin, she gives us a thought-provoking prompt to help us explore the ideas
surrounding us:

Pretend you have been gifted the day off from life
tomorrow. Someone else is going to step in and be you. Your substitute has already
been briefed on the basics: your routine, where you work, your schedule, your general
lifestyle and responsibilities. He or she will take care of it all. However, your
stand-in doesn't know your idiosyncrasies, your quirks, your foibles, your eccentricities.
You need to fill the substitute in on the peculiar details: Since you're going
to be me tomorrow, you'll need to know the following …

Go read the Freele's full article, "On
Gathering Material."




Or click here
for the newest Glimmer Train bulletin, with wonderful advice for working writers.



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Bid on a Consultation With Me (for Charity)

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As part of a Red Cross fundraiser, I've donated a 30-minute writer/author consultation. Click
here to read more and to bid.




This online fundraiser event celebrates Red Cross Month (March). It is intended to
raise funds and awareness for the Red Cross and its work in communities across the
country. Check out daily guest posts
from authors in March.




All donors who give over $25 can select one free book from a range of books donated
and shipped by publishers for the event. Click
here to find out more.


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My Latest Thoughts on Writers & Social Media

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While at AWP, I had the pleasure of sitting down with Caleb J. Ross and Nik Korpon
to talk about writers, social media, and the digital era.




You can listen to the 20-minute conversation here.




Some topics we discuss:



How is it writers are so attached to the physical book?

Is aversion to electronic media generational?

Does spreading content through multiple platforms make your platform weaker?

What's the benefit to tracking reader habits?

What are some tools authors can use to evaluate return on their investment of time
and energy?

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Best Tweets on Break

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Best Tweets is on break due to illness. Assuming all goes well, we'll be back next
week. (Still announcing secret project tomorrow.)




You can still find out about the best stuff I read each week: Click
here.




And: Check out these live, online classes from Writer's Digest:



Crafting
Fiction & Memoir That Sells, presented by agent Andrea Hurst, on March 3.
Includes critique of your first page.



How
to Write a Dynamite Mystery or Thriller That Sells, presented by Elizabeth Sims,
on April 14. Includes critique of your first page.

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Glimmer Train Monthly News

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Glimmer Train has just chosen the winning
stories for their December Fiction Open competition. This competition is held quarterly
and is open to all writers for stories with a word count range between 2,000–20,000.
The next Fiction Open will take place in March.  Glimmer
Train's monthly submission calendar may be viewed here.

First place: Stefanie Freele (pictured above), of Geyserville,
CA, wins $2000 for "While Surrounded by Water." Her story will be published in the
Spring 2012 issue of Glimmer Train Stories.




Second place: Dana Kroos, of Las Cruces, NM, wins $1000 for "Sleepwalkers." Her
story will also be published in an upcoming issue of Glimmer Train Stories.




Third place: Joseph Johns, of Decatur, GA, wins $600 for "Reckoning Day with High
Cirrus."  




A
PDF of the Top 25 winners can be found here.

Deadline soon approaching!


Short Story Award for New
Writers: February 28

This competition is held quarterly and is open to all writers whose fiction has not
appeared in a print publication with a circulation over 5000. No theme restrictions.
Most submissions to this category run 3000-6000 words, but can go up to 12,000. Click
here for complete guidelines.




--



If you didn't know, Writer's Digest partnered with Glimmer Train to publish two compilation
volumes of the best stuff from their Writers
Ask newsletter.




Check them out: Volume
1 and Volume
2.



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Is It Time to Call It Quits?

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One of my friends recently told me he was finally writing again. He commented,

We'll see if I end up hating it, as I have every
single thing I've ever written before. I do hope to get over this at some point.

Go
read my advice for people who hate their writing, and usually end up calling it
quits.

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What Does the Borders Bankruptcy Mean for Writers?

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Tomorrow (Feb. 25), Writer's Digest is hosting a free
online event on how the Borders bankruptcy affects writers.




As you probably have heard by now, Borders filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy on February
16. Though the ramifications of this move have already been discussed in great detail,
many questions still remain.




What changes are happening at Borders and how will they impact writers?


If you've never been published, how will this change affect your chances of getting
into print?


If you're already published, how will it affect sales of your current books?


What questions should you be asking your publisher?


What can writers do to help overcome these challenges?


This free 60-minute webinar will tell you everything you need to know about the new
state of the industry and how it will affect your career. The presenters will also
take questions.




Presenters include:



Jon Ackerman, sales director of Adams Media. Previously, he was the Vice President
of Sales for Candlewick Press; National Accounts Director for Simon & Schuster;
and National Accounts Manager for Random House, MBI, Klutz and DK Publishing.



Phil Sexton, Publisher and Community Leader of Writer's Digest. Previously,
he was Vice President of Sales for F+W Media and Sales Director for Adams Media.



The live event is limited to the first 1,000 who register, but any one signing up
after the first 1,000 will still receive a recording.



Click here to sign up!




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Cliches for Aspiring Writers

Today's guest post is from Rafael Yglesias. Rafael Yglesias is a master American storyteller
whose career began with the publication of his first novel, Hide
Fox, and All After, at seventeen. His fiction is distinguished by its clear-eyed
realism and keen insight into human behavior. Follow
him on Twitter, and see his books and more videos at Open
Road Media.




--



"Always try the cliché first," Roman Polanski said to me when I confessed I didn't
know how to approach a particular scene. "It usually works. That's why it's a cliché." 




As is true of most aphorisms, especially the wittier ones, his advice is helpful in
almost all situations, but when wrong it's disastrous. That's why Polanski included
the clever exception, "It usually works."




Sadly, for those who are busy sawing off their feet to escape the trap of clichés,
every story is chock full of them and sometimes depends on an especially hoary one.
The solution, to borrow another aphorism, is to aim without aiming. What really makes
a work original is you. It is the writer's particular experience and sensibility that
infuses a cliché with the oxygen rich blood of its original life.



The same caveat applies to the famous advice given to all
neophyte writers, "Write what you know." The implication is autobiography
in some form: memoir, fiction in which you are the main character, stories about your
family, your background, someone you know well. But the advice is too banal to be
useful to a young writer without an obviously compelling story to tell. 




What if you are unlucky enough not to have endured the Holocaust, witnessed Apartheid,
or been sexually abused by your father? What if you feel that the world you know,
although thoroughly unpleasant, is also very dull?  Or has been written about
so well by another that you have nothing to add?  




It's hard to conceive of someone who could work for at least a few hours each day
for months and years on the same story without it being close enough to their life
experience to fuel their commitment. When a writer chooses characters that seem far
away from what he or she has direct experience of—say Updike's first novel, The
Poorhouse Fair, about the elderly residents of the Diamond Home for the Aged written
when he was twenty-six—it's rarely their first writing. Updike had been publishing
in The New Yorker for years and before that in the Harvard Lampoon.
Besides, the setting of Poorhouse, its social milieu, the old folks themselves,
were people and a place Updike did know well.   




And who knows the world of The Hobbit better than Tolkien? One can argue that
fantasy and science fiction novelists write more out of what they know than any autobiographical
writer. They are the creators of everything in their work and can't be disputed as
inaccurate by a reader, except when they internally contradict themselves, whereas
readers of realistic fiction may compare their world to the book's and quibble about
whether authors really do know what they claim to. 




"Write what you know."




But what do you know? Is it compelling? I don't mean to your readers. To you. You
will keep company with your writing longer than anyone else. (Unless you're Tolstoy
and your wife copies all your manuscripts by hand seven times over.)




If your subject doesn't involve emotions, ideas, truths and lies that delight, frighten,
soothe and enrage you, how can you expect it to fascinate a stranger? Whether you
want to entertain or to provoke, to break hearts or reassure them, what you bring
to your writing must consist of your longings and disappointments. 




Arthur Conan Doyle was entranced by the notion of a brilliant detective who can deduce
everything a stranger has been up to from the merest clue, and yet can't have a trusting
relationship with his closest friend. Sherlock Holmes thrilled readers. Doyle came
to feel claustrophobic about the success of his popular creation and killed him off.
His addicted audience was so outraged he dutifully brought Sherlock back. But Conan
Doyle didn't start with that boredom or cynicism.  He invented Holmes because
he longed for Holmes to live and so he knew him.




Another cliché: "Know your audience." Of course
you must know your audience, especially if you're writing about them. Once you know
them inside and out you must forget them. The paradox of writing as a form of communication
is that the receiver stretches into the distance of an infinite and unknowable future,
too unpredictable to worry about. 




My father, Jose Yglesias, was born in 1919 to a desperately poor family in Ybor City,
a Latino community of emigrant cigar-makers in Tampa, Florida.  He struggled
for years to become a published novelist, an ambition from adolescence that he worked
at in between being a busboy, assembling radios on a factory line, fighting in World
War II and working at Merck as a sales executive while supporting a family in the
1950s. His first published novel, actually the third that he had written, came out
when he was forty-three. Its setting was his home town, its characters the emigrant
cigar-makers and their Americanized children. Ybor City is a fascinating community
that was dying out by the 1960s.




I am confident that my father's fourteen books, most of them about the world of Ybor
City and its people, would have been bestsellers if, when they were published in the
60's, 70's and 80's there had been hundreds of thousands of book buyers in the United
States whose ancestors had emigrated from Spain and Cuba in the late nineteenth century.
There weren't. They were hardly any. One of my father's books was serialized in its
entirety in The New Yorker in 1967. It didn't sell many copies in hardcover
and was never a paperback, despite rave reviews and the magazine's prominent pre-publication.




When my father was dying in 1995 all of his books were out of print and he had been
unable to find a publisher for his previous two manuscripts. He was lying in a hospice
bed, three days before the end, when I brought him the news that Arte Publico Press
would be reissuing his old novels and bringing out two new ones, including one of
his very best, The Old Gents. Those posthumous publications have brought him
new readers. Not enough, but the story isn't over. Although many Latinos in the United
States come from different countries than Cuba or Spain, one day they may discover
as a group that they have their very own version of Isaac Bashevis Singer, that Jose
Yglesias was a pioneer chronicler of the Latino emigrant experience, and then I suspect
Dad will be read by hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions.



Another pithy cliché: "Write what you want to read." My
mother, Helen Yglesias, was eager to be a novelist and wrote her first in three notebooks
when she was seventeen during the Depression. When her much older brother Charles,
who at the time was supporting a bankrupt father, an exhausted mother and eight siblings,
discovered that Helen had used her emigrant Jewish family as the basis for her story
he shamed her.  He raged and demanded that she destroy the notebooks. She tore
out the pages in manageable bunches, lit them on the kitchen stove and watched them
burn in an empty soup pot. She didn't write another novel until she was fifty-four. 




How She Died was published to great acclaim and good sales, as was Family
Feeling, a portrait of her family that she fictionalized for her second novel.
By the time of her death she had published six books. Having been forbidden from writing
what she wanted, although that injunction was eventually sustained by her own guilt,
stymied her for decades and barred her from a party that she could rightfully have
hosted. She didn't want to read what she wrote. It made her sick to her stomach to
read her own work, she often said, and she meant it. But that painful exercise, her
writing, was Helen Yglesias' greatest source of satisfaction and a timeless gift to
the world.



Don't write what you know. 




Don't write what you love to read. 




Don't write what publishers are looking for. 




Don't write what critics are hailing. 




Don't write what your creative writing teacher claims is the only form of literature
that is still dynamic. 




Write what horrifies you, write what charms you, write what repels you, write what
you love, write, to be aphoristic, what you cannot stop yourself from writing.




Yes, you will have to find "your voice," and yes, you will have to learn the craft
of writing, which is endlessly demanding and so varied that you will probably never
feel you are more than a clumsy student. And don't limit yourself to study only the
craft necessary to produce your particular kind of writing. Also learn how the writers
you have contempt for do what they do; you may discover something useful for your
work.



But all of those necessary skills are servants to your Lord and Master: write what
you cannot stop yourself from thinking about, even if it disgusts everyone you know.
Readers read to subsume their consciousness, for a profound but limited time, into
another's. Some want reassurance, some want challenge. Some want pleasant lies, some
painful realities. You may be unlucky and be fated to have a small audience. That's
too bad. (By the way, it is the fate of almost every writer.) 




Over time, if you work hard and write what obsesses you, there will be readers who
will want to live in your peculiar universe, and precisely because what you have provided
is rare they will be all the more grateful for your creation.     



--



Go read more about
Rafael Yglesias

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How to Leave Meaningful Blog Comments

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As readership on your site or blog grows, you'll have to figure out a strategy for
dealing with unproductive comments.



There are 3 categories of "unproductive":



Straightforward spam. This is the stuff you automatically delete, or preferably
filter out using a plug-in like Akismet.



Trolls. These are people who say inflammatory or off-topic things, usually
meant to get an emotional rise out of you or your community. It would be akin to walking
into a Billy Joel chat room, and saying Billy Joel is the worst musician on earth.
How do you handle? It's usually preferable to block those people from commenting again,
or to delete such comments.



Self-promoters. These are commenters who don't contribute to the conversation,
but say something like "Great post!" while leaving links back to their own blog or
site. Sometimes this practice can feel like spam if it happens often enough.



Aside from unproductive comments, you'll also have to deal with critical comments.
(I don't advise deleting critical comments unless they cross the line into flame wars.)




Rather than take offense when some disagrees, or always argue why you're right, view
criticisms as an opportunity to learn something, or to have conversation on your site—which
can attract more readers over time, if the conversations are meaningful and respectful.




Leaving meaningful comments


As
I discussed last week, leaving meaningful comments on others' blogs or sites is
a good way to attract attention to your own site, so it's helpful to be consistent
in your approach and tone. Here are a few suggestions:



Don't be a drive-by shooter. This is where you post a quick criticism like,
"I don't agree; this isn't my experience." This doesn't really engage in a conversation
or offer something meaningful to other readers or commenters. It IS helpful to offer
an alternative viewpoint, so take the time to elaborate on it.



Put your comments in context. Most people won't know who you are when you're
commenting. So it's helpful to relate something about your background, experience,
or POV on issues.

To really impress, offer a targeted resource. Some of the best comments I've
ever received pointed me to a very specific blog post or resource that I hadn't seen
before.

Ask questions. If you didn't understand something that was discussed, there's
a good chance someone else didn't understand either. So bring it up in the comments.
Get clarification. Most people love the chance to elaborate, or they can address the
question in a new blog post.

When views differ, look for common ground. To maintain goodwill wherever you
go, it's helpful to look for areas where you agree with a person. While we can all
say (in theory) that we're open to disagreement and criticisms, it still helps immensely
to figure out where thoughts and beliefs align.



So … I welcome your meaningful comments on comments!

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