Chris Baty's Blog, page 209
July 26, 2013
Ask a Published Author: "How do I stop obsessively editing while writing my first draft?"
James R. Strickland has been telling stories since before he could read. After making his career in high tech, he took part in National Novel Writing Month, and in 2004, wrote the first draft of Looking Glass , which was published in 2007. He lives in Denver, Colorado.
What is the best tip for shutting out the inner editor? — Anonymous
Do NaNoWriMo. :)
Seriously, when you can’t edit at all, and you’re hell-bent for leather just to make your word quota for the day, ignoring the inner editor gets a lot easier. Give yourself permission to write crap, as the saying goes. Sometimes you will, permission or not, and sometimes you’ll look into the crap and realize there actually is a pony in there that really really needs a bath.
I’ve never, ever gotten a publication-ready novel out of NaNo. They’re inevitably too short (most novels are around 100,000 words) and there are great heaps of crap all over. The most recent one I finished gave me only the characters and flesh of the world of the novel. Worth it? Yes.
I also suggest having, if not an outline, a roadmap, or storyboards; something to keep you from getting rat-holed. I think it’s perfectly legitimate to prepare these ahead of time. I should note that I’ve never actually done this for NaNo, which probably says a lot to why my most recent novel took me two years and involved cutting a hundred thousand words. Don’t do as I have done. Do as I’m doing now.
Late nights help. When you’re tired, the inner editor tends to go to sleep before you do. I wrote a great deal of Looking Glass in the wee hours of the morning, to the point where I’d often get up the following day and have to re-read what I’d written, and wonder what dusty corner of my brain this strange, creepy, weird stuff was coming from. A warning: late nights help, but they’re not a sustainable tool. Eventually you want to be awake when the day-star is up.
Next week’s head counselor will be Susan Dennard, whose book, A Darkness Strange and Lovely, hits shelves today! It’s the second in a trilogy blending historical fiction, horror, romance, and mystery .
July 25, 2013
Ask a Published Author: "How do I make exposition exciting?"
James R. Strickland has been telling stories since before he could read. After making his career in high tech, he took part in National Novel Writing Month, and in 2004, wrote the first draft of Looking Glass, which was published in 2007. He lives in Denver, Colorado.
I am just reaching the beginning of my plot now, but the first part of my novel seems old and boring, even repetitive. How do you keep the first few chapters of your novel exciting, while also explaining the characters, their lifestyles, and all the other important beginning stuff?
I very much suspect that if it’s taking that long to get to the beginning of the plot, you’ve started the story too soon, and you’re spending those chapters on exposition you don’t need. When editing time comes, I’d say chop those chapters off and throw the readers into the plot and let us swim. Readers are smart. We’re good at picking stuff up from context. Trust us. Trust your writing.
If you really must introduce what the norm is for your characters and/or the world before you start, you can use an action scene that throws us into the middle of a climactic incident in their life (which you then never bother to set in context.) If you saw Raiders of the Lost Ark, you’ve seen this. I used it in Looking Glass and Irreconcilable Differences both, and it works very well. Whereas Raiders used it only for character introduction, I tend to stick important details of the story I intend to tell later in these prequel scenes.
I’m oversimplifying and showing my bias here. Some novels do start with a dump-truck full of exposition parked in front of (or on top of) the plot. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo leaps to mind here. We find out an awful lot about the Vanger family before we cut back to Salander and the story gets moving. It’s important to note, however, that Stieg Larsson was Swedish, and the expectations of how a novel unfolds in other cultures can be quite different. American novels tend to start with the action, just as our movies do.
Next week’s head counselor will be Susan Dennard, whose book, A Darkness Strange and Lovely, hits shelves today! It’s the second in a trilogy blending historical fiction, horror, romance, and mystery .
July 24, 2013
Ask a Published Author: "How do I 'un-blandify' my writing?"
James R. Strickland has been telling stories since before he could read. After making his career in high tech, he took part in National Novel Writing Month, and in 2004, wrote the first draft of Looking Glass, which was published in 2007. He lives in Denver, Colorado.
How do you beef up a very simplistic style of writing? My style feels a tad bland and even boring in places. Most of my friends who read my novel tell me it’s fine, but I think it needs to be un-blandified. How do I remedy this?
There are a couple things that can cause this. First is lack of specificity. At Taos Toolbox, a very good workshop I attended in 2011, Nancy Kress called this White Room Syndrome.
Consider:
"It was night time. He drove his old car, listening to talk radio." It doesn’t give you much to work with as a reader. You could put this guy anywhere in the United States, on any road, in any old car, thinking anything and not change those two sentences.
Consider, instead,
"He was making about 50 on the interstate between Pueblo and Colorado Springs. His Pinto wouldn’t go much faster, wasn’t safe if it did. The Sparkomatic radio in the dash dragged Rush Limbaugh in off the AM airways, noisy and full of static, but the man’s message could be heard."
I’ve given no actual description, but because I’m trading on cultural memes I expect my audience knows, I don’t have to. Sparkomatic spent millions of dollars in the 80s making their name indelibly associated with “Owner of a Lonely Heart". The Pinto’s been a running joke at Ford’s expense for decades, and Rush Limbaugh’s radio show helps set the scene in the nineties to aughties.
Those three elements also set some expectations about the driver, as does the pacing of the sentences, which put emphasis on Rush and his message. Depending on what you want to do with these expectations, you can either use the character as you’ve painted him, or you can contradict those expectations in the following sentences and give the character complexity. Evoking these cultural memes costs research, but it lends flavor and tone. Is this a funny story? Are you making fun of the main character? Is it a violent story? Is something about to happen? All these things are the nerd-knobs you can adjust in that simple paragraph to make your story go. The details tell you important parts of the story and they give you feel, description, and so on.
The other common way stories wind up bland is that the writer gave themselves too much distance from the story and the characters. Stories are about emotions and (usually) bad things happening. If the emotions aren’t there, it’s boring.
In Looking Glass, this was a particular problem for me. There is one scene where the narrator’s entire world has come apart; she’s wrecked her whole life and her quest is at an end. It took me six tries before I got a level of emotion appropriate to the task. (My wife let me know in no uncertain terms that the previous five versions weren’t there yet.)
It’s scary to give characters heart. You have to listen to them scream for what you’ve done to them. My rule of thumb is that if I don’t worry that someone’s going to read the book and say that I really needed medicating, I’m not digging deep enough.
Next week’s head counselor will be Susan Dennard, whose book, A Darkness Strange and Lovely, hits shelves today! It’s the second in a trilogy blending historical fiction, horror, romance, and mystery .
July 23, 2013
Ask a Published Author: "How do I balance dialogue, action and description?"
James R. Strickland has been telling stories since before he could read. After making his career in high tech, he took part in National Novel Writing Month, and in 2004, wrote the first draft of Looking Glass, which was published in 2007. He lives in Denver, Colorado.
Help! My characters do nothing but talk! What’s your advice on scene balancing (dialogue, action, description…)? — bravenewlady
The underlying questions here are what you want the scene to do, and how you want it to effect the plot and the pacing.
Some scenes are almost all talk, and if they’re done right, they can be the most dramatic. Characters can and should do interesting things, but the reasons they do them, along with a ton of characterization, are usually exposed in dialogue.
If the dialogue seems too heavy or the plot seems to die in conversation, that’s a great indication that the conversation has wandered and needs clipping back. Raymond Chandler once said, “When in doubt, have a man come through the door with a gun in his hand." Dialogue interrupted with sudden violence or action is a plot accelerator I use frequently, and it makes subsequent conversations tense because the reader wonders if it’ll happen again.
Dialogue does impact pacing. Typically the more dialogue-heavy scenes are going to be closer to the beginning, as once the action starts, dialogue tends to suffer.
As for description, this is how you, the author, control pacing, tone and feel, because it determines how the reader sees your world. When you’re setting the stage at the beginning of your novel, you can afford to have your sentences read slower and be more broadly descriptive. As the plot accelerates, your description can get tighter and tighter, or they can loosen again if you want to slow down and add complications, and so on.
There are no boxes to check, only whether the scene works in and of itself, and does what it needs to do at this point in the story.
Next week’s head counselor will be Susan Dennard, whose book, A Darkness Strange and Lovely, hits shelves today! It’s the second in a trilogy blending historical fiction, horror, romance, and mystery .
July 22, 2013
"Self-discipline is necessary, but so is playfulness, flexibility, joy. When you stop demanding..."
- Karen Russell, on giving yourself room to write with joy.
July 19, 2013
Ask a Published Author: “Should I let my friends read my work-in-progress?"
Ari Marmell wrote his first novel while studying at the University of Houston, one that he now charitably calls a “learning experience." Today, Ari works as a novelist and a freelance writer for roleplaying games. He lives in Austin with his wife, George, and two cats.
Do you let other people like friends read your novels while you’re still working on the first draft or before you’ve edited at all? Is it helpful or unhelpful to do so? — Anonymous
This is one of those things that, like outlining, is going to work very differently for different people. In my case, yes. I usually let a couple of people—chosen from a group consisting of my wife, my sister, and a few close, trusted friends—read each chapter as it’s done. It can be a bit nerve-wracking.
Trusting your beta-readers to be honest isn’t enough. You need to trust them to be able to construct their feedback helpfully, and to recognize that this is a rough draft and judge accordingly. And you can ask different things of them: I get better plot feedback from some readers, better feedback about narrative/descriptive flow from others, and so forth.
I’ve gotten a lot of valuable feedback, been made aware of mistakes and plot holes… I recommend you at least give it a shot. If you decide you just don’t like doing so, you can certainly stop, but the rewards are worth the attempt.
Next week’s head counselor will be James R. Strickland, Wrimo, and author of science-fiction and cyberpunk novels, including Looking Glass .
July 18, 2013
Ask a Published Author: “How do I avoid cheesy dialogue?"
Ari Marmell wrote his first novel while studying at the University of Houston, one that he now charitably calls a “learning experience." Today, Ari works as a novelist and a freelance writer for roleplaying games. He lives in Austin with his wife, George, and two cats.
How do would you go about avoiding stereotypes and cheesy dialogue? — Anonymous
Don’t think of it as dialogue; think of it as people talking. Yes, those mean the same thing, but hear me out.
When writing dialogue, you need to honestly think about people saying it. It’s not enough to look good on the page; it should also work if actually spoken aloud. That sounds almost like a no-brainer, but it’s amazing how big a difference it makes. You might even try actually doing that—read it aloud to yourself and see how it sounds, until you get the hang of it.
Or, if you want another quick and dirty rule (which, like all these rules, is more of a guideline): If you’d roll your eyes if someone actually said this to you, odds are good a lot of readers are going roll their eyes when they read it.
Next week’s head counselor will be James R. Strickland, Wrimo, and author of science-fiction and cyberpunk novels, including Looking Glass .
July 17, 2013
Camp Pep: Writing Like a Monkey In a Box
For this Camp session, we invited some true experts to write pep talks: our participants! Today, Bill Patterson has five tips to keep writing, and proposes a writing marathon this coming Saturday, July 20:
Ack! The month is half over and you’re nowhere near the halfway point of your novel! What to do? Embrace Herman Woulk’s words: “When in danger or in doubt, run in circles, scream and shout!"
Whoo! That was fun. We still have those unwritten words though, you know. Grab a towel and don’t panic. The sudden realization that you’re behind has a kind of liberating effect. You cannot afford to go back and edit! You only have time to sit down and write.
"But I’m stuck!" you say. “My outline is trashed! The characters are off the rails!" Excellent! There are two ways to proceed: continue their newfound journey (maybe your subconscious is telling you something) or draw a big line across the document, type "Everything above this is trash", and rewind your novel back before the characters went haywire. Here are four more tips to keep writing:
Unhappy with the scene you just wrote? Draw a line, label it “Take One", and rewrite it! But do not ever erase a word—they all count!
Can’t think of a character name? Call her ProtagGirl. In August, figure out a name, then do a search and replace. Once I named a character Dwain, it stood for ‘Demon Without An Interesting Name’. I got such a chuckle out of that, I kept it.
Stymied by some bit of research? Drop a line to yourself, and keep writing. You don’t have time for fooling around in Wikipedia! The Reference Desk forum will still be up and running in August. Ask your question then. Here’s how I handle it:
"I’m afraid your husband has contracted SomeDisease," said the doctor.
"What is it?" she asked.
——- Hey Bill—research that cool skin-falling-off disease, data-dump it here. ——
"That’s horrible," she said.
You already know the plot: he’s stuck in ICU, she’s doing the mission, touch-and-go in the ICU. Write that, and worry about the real-life medical details later.
Bumming about your word count? Need a kick in the pants? Well, I have that covered too. On Saturday, July 20, I’m writing in a public library from 9 to 5. Not impressed? I’ll also be surrounded by camping gear, under a big Camp NaNoWriMo banner, and have everyone reading what I write on a large flatscreen, with an hourly word-count guessing contest for the library patrons.
Here’s some math: I write about 1800 words/hour. I’ll be writing 45 minutes out of every hour, or 1350 words per hour. 8 hours yields 10,800 words. Sounds huge, right? Don’t worry about my goals—come up with your own! Hang with me for one hour or all eight. I’ll be posting my word count in the Campfire Circle forum—just look for the Monkey in a Box Results thread.
Let’s make this interesting. The Wrimo who posts the closest guess of my total word count for the day will win something excellent—rules will also be in the Results thread.
Come on! You can do this! This is why we write. This is why you’re in NaNo. Who says writing has to be in November? Who says you have to stretch your writing out over a month? So join us on the 20th! Write. Just write. And keep writing! Post your results! And eat a banana—they’re full of potassium.
Bill Patterson joined NaNoWriMo in 2007 and became the Municipal Liaison for Central New Jersey in 2011. He has been published in JournalStone’s SF anthology “90 Minutes to Live"(2011), as well as Mutation Press’s SF anthology “Rocket Science" (2011). His 2007 novel is seeking representation, and he is currently finishing his first YA novel. He and his wife of 30 years, Barbara, live with their two sons in Central New Jersey.
Illustration by Kayla Matt.
July 16, 2013
Ask a Published Author: "How much research do I have to do for my novel?"
Ari Marmell wrote his first novel while studying at the University of Houston, one that he now charitably calls a “learning experience." Today, Ari works as a novelist and a freelance writer for roleplaying games. He lives in Austin with his wife, George, and two cats.
Before I start NaNo or Camp NaNo, I think I’ve done all the research I need to do, but then when I start writing I realize that to move the plot forward accurately, I need to do more research. Have I not spent enough time up front? Do I just need to let it go until after the month is over? I just cringe at the thought of some Future Reader writing me hate mail because I got a fact wrong. Advice, please! — garretwriter
This happens to me all the time. I get paranoid about getting a fact wrong. I recently wrote a book set in 1932, and I actually found myself looking up the date of the full moon in March of that year, rather than making it up. But… that’s not necessary. It’s possible to do too little research, but it’s also possible to do too much.
At the end of the day, you’re an author. You’re not a physicist. Or a historian. Or a programmer. Or a military tactician. There are people who have spent lifetimes studying these topics. No amount of research is going to let you get all the details right that they might have. If you try, you’ll drive yourself crazy, or never start writing in the first place.
What I recommend is the Average Reader Rule. If your research is sufficient to convince the average reader, that’s enough; it doesn’t have to convince the expert. You can certainly shoot for higher than that—there’s a wide gray area in-between—but that’s the bar.
As far as up-front… It’s very unlikely you can do all the research in advance. You’ll absolutely come across questions you didn’t think to ask. Don’t be afraid to stop and look something up—if it’s important, and if it’s something you can look up relatively quickly. If one or the other of those is not the case, you might be better served putting it aside and making a note to come back to it.
Thing is, there’s no hard and fast rule. Some things are good to look up immediately, others can wait. There’s really no determining factor, beyond general guidelines, except for practice.
I can tell you that, if you’re interrupting your writing every few minutes, or if you’re taking hours-long breaks, you’re probably better off either holding off until rewrites, or else devoting another day or two to research alone.
It also helps if you have a spouse/partner who enjoys looking things up. ;-)
Next week’s head counselor will be James R. Strickland, Wrimo, and author of science-fiction and cyberpunk novels, including Looking Glass .
July 15, 2013
"Everyone told me I had to think positive when I was writing my first book. If I believed I could do..."
I am here to tell you—what matters is sticking with it. Even if you don’t know if you can make it through to the end of your novel, just get through today. Then get through tomorrow. Don’t worry about the day after that, until it’s today. Then you know what to do.”
- Holly Black, on taking your story one day at a time.
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