Some Third-Hand Advice from the Pros

If you take a few minutes and look here, you'll find some excellent advice about queries and first pages gleaned from the Agent/Author Day at the Backspace Writers' Conference. It's recommended reading.

What I couldn't help noticing is that a lot of writers who are querying agents don't have a firm grasp of basics. Do not be one of those writers. Do your homework. Learn about your genre, learn to write well, and stretch your imagination when you write your book.

And, yes, this post is mostly filler. It's Friday, and nobody reads blogs on Fridays, as I pointed out last week. I was going to write about how some people I know are upset that I don't take to heart their advice the way I do that of publishing industry professionals (like my agent), and how it's likely a good idea to be a bit secretive about the publishing process once it's underway. My best friend Mighty Reader works in publishing, and last week she received a snarky note from one of her author's mothers, sent along by the author. The author is an adult, and the author's mother (even if she is, as she claims, a retired editor) needs to step off. Publishing is a business. Act in a businesslike manner if you want to make this your career. If you're getting paid by a publisher, then being a writer is your job, even if it's not your full-time job. Do you bring your friends and family to the office to argue with the people who sign your paychecks? No? I didn't think so. Anyway, I was going to write about this but as it's Friday and nobody reads blogs on Fridays, I'll just skip it. Have a swell weekend, all.

His or Her Story? Using Multiple Main Characters and Story Lines

illustration by Conny Jude

The Literary Lab is here for you! We know you have questions, and we'd like to help where we can. So ask away by clicking over in the Just Ask section in the right hand column. Thanks to Christopher Goodwine who recently asked:

The more I research and explore the blogosphere, the more I notice an implicit sense that there is one sole main character in stories: "My MC," "the MC," "your MC's emotional development," "the crisis your MC must face," etc..

What if a story incorporates several characters' stories interwoven to achieve its ends? I mean beyond minor and supporting characters. Would a novel be acceptable if it gives equal importance and wordage to two characters or more? Or is it essential for today's readership that there is one particular character for whom the story is ultimately about?

This is a great question, Christopher! First of all, I don't think it's essential for today's readership that there is one particular character for whom a story is ultimately about. This is the conventional way to tell a story, and seems to be the most popular. I personally prefer it, but perhaps that is because I have not read or seen many stories that effectively use multiple main characters, and because I tried to do this in both the novels I have written - and failed.

I asked Davin if he had any good examples of novels that effectively use multiple main characters and story lines. He brought up Everything Is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer and The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan. I'll take Davin's word and state that both novels use three to four main characters to tell the story. Now why does this work? And how? I'll try and shed some light using my own experience.


How Are You Holding Your Story Together?
Bear with me here as I talk about my first novel. I rarely do this publicly, so consider it a rare treat.

My first novel failed. It has failed even in the sixth draft. I had this "brilliant" idea to write two story lines - the story of a girl who is reluctantly kidnapped, and the story of her selfish mother, Karen, who doesn't care that her only daughter is missing. Both story lines, completely separate for most of the book, bore the same weight for me. Both characters were The Main Character. And both had their own chapters in the book.

Chapter One - Naomi
Chapter Two - Karen
Chapter Three - Naomi
Chapter Four - Karen

You get the idea. That should work, right? Both characters are well written and compelling. Both story lines have tension and growth. Both tie together at the end. It should work. Right? Well, I thought so until I put the book aside for 10 months. I had plenty of feedback from earlier on, but decided to let two friends read it a few weeks ago. Why is Karen in here? they asked. I get to her chapters and I groan. I want Naomi's story! This is HER story! And there's plenty of it to go around without her mother interfering.

Since I wasn't as close to the novel anymore, I took a good hard look at the characters. I love them both, but I've ultimately decided that my friends are right. I could go both ways with this book - get rid of Karen's point of view and only tell Naomi's story (which I'm most likely to do) or tell both stories, but shift the themes of my novel to something bigger than character-related subjects. Let me explain. (Thanks to Davin, I can begin to wrap my head around this)

The Way It Is Now - A Character Framework
The themes in my book revolve around creating your own happiness, not relying on others to hand it to you. Great theme. It works. There's more to it than that, but that's the gist. Both Karen and Naomi take this journey, and they help each other reach the same conclusions. But in the end, nothing would have happened without Naomi's story, without her character. She is the framework that holds the story together, the one my readers root for and genuinely care about.

The Way It Could Be - An Overarching Framework
If I made the point of the novel something bigger that held the story together, I could get away with more than one story line. For instance, when I asked Davin what the point of The Joy Luck Club is, he said: "Ancestry. It was about the generational gap, between people born and raised in China and their daughters, born and raised in the U.S."

That's a pretty big idea, and if that's the point of the story, I can see how four separate story lines could easily work. So for my book I might use a larger framework to hold everything together - how partner abuse affects relationships, or how Stockholm Syndrome works. Already I can see that if I made this the framework of my story, Karen's point of view would add more depth and meaning to what I'm trying to get across. So unless Karen enters Naomi's world and fights the same antagonists as Naomi (which she never does), her story is simply getting in the way of Naomi's voice and journey.

It's up to me which way I want to go. Going with the overarching framework would mean I'd probably have to rewrite the book. Not sure I want to do that!


Multiple Points Of View Doesn't Mean Multiple Main Characters
I think there might be a misconception out there that if a story (not told omnisciently) has multiple points of view that each point of view character bears the same weight. That's rarely true, that I have seen. In my second novel I have three Point of View Characters. At first I thought I'd try what I had done in my first novel (since I thought it worked at the time), but as I neared the middle I quickly saw that the story obviously belongs to one character. The other Point Of View Characters are secondary; they add depth and texture to the Main Character that I couldn't do any other way. I'm still in the beginning drafts of this novel. Who knows what I'll decide later down the road. I'm still new to all of this!

So how do you figure out who your story is really about? How do you know if you've got an overarching framework or a character framework? It's oftentimes very hard to pinpoint these things in a first draft, especially if you don't plan everything out and begin with what framework you want to use. Many new writers sit down and say, "I want to write this idea, but I'll use this character and this character and this character to tell it all. Yeah, that'll be cool." Sometimes we do begin with things planned out, and the story takes us in a different direction! But no matter what happens, when you finish that first draft you can sit down and figure out whose story you're telling. I have different methods of doing this. One method is to ask:

Which character is struggling the most against the antagonist?

If your story doesn't have what you like to call the "antagonist" then which character is struggling most against the set of rules governing the story? Fighting against a storm, or a group of terrorists or zombies, a generational gap like in Joy Luck Club, an evil government, or whatever. That's usually your Main Character. There are exceptions, but I won't get into those in this post.

If there's more than one character struggling against the antagonist, and they seem to all be equal in their fight, you might have a problem with identifying your Main Character. If you have a problem with that, you can bet your reader will too. It's absolutely essential to know your focus. If you're using an overarching framework, you'd better know what it is and make it clear what you're doing.

As for me, I'm still trying to figure all this novel-writing stuff out. These are just my thoughts, so if you agree or have more to add, or even if you disagree, voice your thoughts in the comments. I'd love to learn from you!


~MDA (aka Glam)

A Case for the Eels: Showing Off In Your Fiction

First off, I just wanted to let everyone know that PEN Center USA is accepting applications for their Emerging Voices Fellowship program. This program nurtures budding writers by providing free classes, one-on-one mentors, and weekly meetings with professional writers, agents, and publishers. While the description on the PEN website mentions that they focus on applicants from "underserved" communities, I know from personal experience that this term is broad and applies to more than economic need or minority status.

Now, onto showing off! Yesterday, Scott described the evolution of his opening chapter and detailed some of his reasons for making the changes he made. To summarize briefly, he decided to start the story in the middle of the action and spread the backstory throughout the book or not use it at all. This decision included cutting out a section of prose that described the seasonal harvesting of eels.

In reading Scott's sections, many of our readers commented on how much they liked that eel section. It truly is beautiful, but I can understand why Scott would choose to delete it. He wanted a focused, driving story, and that approach works.

But, another aspect of art that I think doesn't get mentioned as much as it should is the idea that showing off in your work, flaunting your stuff, putting an astronaut on the moon, is an acceptable choice too. So often, we writers are told to be humble, to hide our gifts under the table until that rare occasion when someone honors us by offering to read our work. I think this approach is okay, but it's not the only approach out there. Plenty of art exists for the sake of showing off. Think of grand palaces, or statues so large that they become emblems of a country. True, these things might be overdone, but I think they also manage to serve another function: They celebrate life.

One of the reasons I love Tolstoy is because he wrote epic stories. Anna Karenina is no attempt to be humble. Tolstoy delves into the mind of young and old women, young and old men, lovers, the dying, the rich, the poor, even the clever hunting dogs. For me, seeing a man attempting to capture so much of nature and humanity in a single work is absolutely inspiring...so inspiring, in fact, that most of the time I don't care about writing anything original. I want only to be as good as Tolstoy.

Seeing artists attempt to do great things, simply for the sake of doing great things, reconnects us to living sensation. It brings out our sense of adventure and discovery. It reminds us to be passionate and unreasonable, even when so many other forces are trying to get us to be just the opposite. Although I fought it for a long time, I now believe that the essence of engaging art is beauty. And, beauty isn't really something that can be contained or focused. I think beauty overflows; it impresses us by its unwillingness to compromise. A beautiful passage of prose is beautiful on its own whether or not is contributes to the main line of the story. Because of that, a reader may really appreciate it simply because it is beautiful.

Scott, I'm not trying to get you to change your mind. I admire you for the decision you made. But, should you (or anyone else) decide to keep in a piece of prose simply because it is breathtaking, I personally think that is a valid decision.

Evolution of an Opening Chapter

This post is a sort of continuation of Davin's post from yesterday, about First Chapter Blues. I don't know if I have any sort of advice or wisdom to impart with what I'm going to say today, but it might be interesting to other writers. Might not; time will tell.

When I first began my book, I thought I would ease my way into the story the way a good 19th-century author would, starting at some distance from my protagonist and his tale, and gradually bringing the reader closer. This, then, is the way the first draft of the book began:

The Elbe River rises in the Giant Mountains, east of Prague in the land of the Czechs, on the frontiers of the Holy Roman Empire. The Czech realm is a barbarous place of infidels, pagans and mislaid Christians forever at war, battling to the death over land of little value to any. Here the Elbe rushes down mountain-sides and through steep valleys, past savage villages of straw and mud, under the eyes of savage villagers who cannot imagine the seven hundred miles this river courses, arcing across Europe through lands of civilized men, running beneath bridges of ancient stone, her waters reflecting here and there the spires of great palaces and cathedrals, her currents washing everything lost in her out to the cold North Sea on Germany’s coast.

The Elbe is fed at first by the lesser waters of the Labe and the Sazaba, then by the Ohre between Prague and Dresden; the Mulde joins her at Desau, the Saale near Schoenebeck, the Havel a hundred miles north of Magdeburg, and the Elde a hunded miles further on, before the great river forces her way through the canals of Hamburg and rushes home to the ocean.

Midway along her journey, between the savage Czech headwaters and the chaos of the North Sea, the river runs for a time directly westward through Saxony, a land of civilized men; there the course of the Elbe cuts the Duchy in half, north and south. On the north bank of the river, in a region of low forested hills which rise to a plateau further north near Berlin, sits Wittenberg. Named for the white sand found in the soil of those hills, this is the city where I would have remained forever had not I become involved in the history I will unfold.

I like the writing here and I like the image of the river cutting across time and geography, but this doesn't work as an opening to the story. There is too much emphasis on the river, and the river does not return as a setting of any importance in the novel. Gunter Grass could make the river into a character, a personality of its own that interacts with the story, but that's not what I did with my book. So I decided that the river as focal point was out, and I wanted instead to begin with the protagonist himself, his social and historical situation, and some conflict. Here is how the second, third and fourth drafts all began (notice that I still begin at the river):

When I was a lad, I would sometimes steal away from my father's house and follow the sandy banks of the Elbe to a small backwater a mile east of town, there to settle among mounds of wildflowers in the shade under the many trees growing along the water’s edge, and watch a man fish for eels in the shallows. I do not know the man's name, nor did I ever; all I did know was that he was one of the royal fishers in the employ of the Duke. The Duke had an insatiable taste for the shimmering green eels: boiled into soups, soused in brine and served with lemons, breaded and fried, smoked, jellied, grilled over open flames, or diced and baked inside game birds; there were few ways to prepare them that did not please the Duke's palate.

During the cold months, the eels would burrow into the mud and the fisher would use a long, barbed spear to bring them up, knocking them off the tines into a wooden box where they wriggled and fought in sawdust and salt. In the spring a net was used, thrown out into the water near the strong river current, then hauled back to check the catch. On hot summer days, when the fisher was too lazy to work for the eels, he would open a filthy oilskin sack he'd brought from town and pull out the head of a horse which he'd gotten from a stableman or butcher, knot a rope through the horse's mouth and throat, then weight the head down with an iron bar. This he'd throw out into the river, tying the other end of the rope to a tree on the bank. The fisher settled down to wait then, eating his breakfast, drinking the wine he'd brought along, often sleeping for an hour or so. When he'd grown impatient enough, or if the day was too hot for him, the horse’s head would be dragged back to shore, filled with dozens of voracious eels, writhing in the air, their sinuous bodies glistening green. The fisher pulled the eels from the head on which they'd been feeding, dropped them into his wooden box, and after untying his rope and setting aside the iron weight, cast the bit of horse back into the river for the other eels.

The eel man and I did not speak much. He didn't mind my company, and sometimes when he drank more than he was used to, he would tell me stories of taking his eels back to the ducal residence, rubbing their bodies with salt to clean off the slime, cutting long slits in their backs to pull out guts and spines. He did never once give me any eels to take home, as all the eels coming from that particular spot along the Elbe belonged to the Duke, who was a powerful man, jealous of his property. Nor did afternoons spent in his company fill me with any desire to fish for eels myself. Though they have beautiful skins, fine shirts crafted of a million flecks of emerald, eels have wicked faces and eyes like snakes, and I did not like to touch them.

“Wherefrom have you taken the horse?” I asked him once.

“This fellow,” he answered, looping his rope through the mouth and throat of the immense brown head, “Were the proud mount of a noble. Broke his leg two days past; the gentleman shot a pistol ball in its brain--see this hole, right here by the eye? Sold the horse to a butcher, an' he sold me the head. A fine head, too. Marry, I'll have twoscore eels eating his brains in an hour or two, lad.”

I must have looked greatly sad, as the fisher eyed me with some kindness. “Mourn not for this dead horse,” he said. “He served his master well enough, I warrant, and now his head does service for the Duke and the great ones the Duke will feast with the eels I'll bring home. We all serve our masters, lad. This horse yet does honorable duty.”

“I'd sooner be the Duke than the horse,” I said.

The fisher cuffed me hard, on the ear. “Watch your tongue, that I don't use it for bait,” he said. “Your lot is to obey your masters. Learn a trade, and mind your place in the world. Remember you this: you are the horse, not the rider. If the Duke cuts off your head and feed it to the fishes, that's his godly right.”

I was quite pleased with this opening gambit, and the beginning of the book stayed this way for some time. This is how the narrative began when I found an agent; these are the first pages he read. But my agent asked me if I could do anything to deepen the protagonist's character, to sharpen the conflict. He didn't specifically ask that I do anything with the opening, but I wanted to somehow have conflict in every scene so I took the passages I had above and forced some conflict into it:

On the day that my wife Astrid gave birth to our daughter, I carried our son Justus, who was but a year old, down to the banks of the Elbe. We followed the river to a small backwater a mile east of town and I found the very spot where, when I was a lad, I had often settled among mounds of wildflowers under the trees along the water’s edge. Many a day had I spent there, watching a man fish for eels in the shallows. I do not know the man’s name, nor did I ever. All I did know was that he was one of the royal fishers in the employ of the Duke, who had an insatiable taste for eels.
[...]
As the eel fisher so wisely noted, I was of no importance; the poor never are. I sat on the river’s north bank and held my young boy to my breast, promising him that I would not let our little family live and die in poverty. Justus smiled to hear me speak but understood nothing of my promise. He knew nothing yet of poverty, neither of despair nor fear. I had long since passed such innocence, and I knew that after I carried Justus home and fed him his gruel, after I kissed his mother and newborn sister as they slept, I would commit an act that would change the fortunes of many men, for both good and ill. My name is Horatio Johannes Andersmann, and I was born on December 27 in the year of our Lord 1571 in the city of Wittenberg, in Saxony. I would have remained in Wittenberg forever had I not done terrible things to protect my Astrid and our children. I shall reveal everything.

This does not work. It's a cheat, announcing to the reader that there is drama to come if you'll just bear with me. It's the same sort of cheap trick a lot of prologues play, and I never did like it. It says, "I don't so much have compelling characters or a great premise to draw you in, so here's a bit of a mystery that will remain unresolved for a couple hundred pages." Like I say, that's just cheating the reader. Which is why it's been cut, all of it. My current rewrite begins with the action of the story itself, my character in the situation lamely hinted at above, in real conflict in the "story present." I am opening, this time around, in medias res, with the action already underway. My plan is to take all the backstory I have cut and, if I think I really need it (and likely I don't need most of it), work it back in around page 100 or 150 or so.

My agent, by the way, likes the eels. But he's wrong, and I'm no longer starting with them.

While I feel confident that I am right in changing the way my book begins, I make no claims that a book shouldn't begin with back-story. I have read (and continue to read) a lot of classic literature which does not obey the currently popular ideas of structure and story-telling, and these classics have aged well. This is just the choice I have made, and I thought it might be fun to share the evolution of my book's opening.

My First Chapter Blues

I haven't spoken much about my own writing progress lately. Well, this last week, I finished the latest draft of my novel, ROOSTER, where I have revamped the ending to flesh out some of the scenes and to try to stay true to the psychology of the characters.

When I was done, I reread the opening chapter of my book and realized that I'm still not 100% confident about it. So, I've been trying to understand what my problem is. Why am I having so much trouble writing my first chapter?

So far, I've come up with two reasons why I'm making the first chapter harder to write than other sections of the book.

A. I feel like readers, agents, and publishers will use the first few pages to determine whether or not they are going to like the rest of the book. I'm telling myself that if they don't like the very first page, they're not going to consider the rest of it. I think there's some truth to this. After all, when I go book shopping, I often (but not always) open up to that first page and see if I can get into a story. If not, I'll move on. (Things like the back cover, opening the book at random pages and reading a scene, and other people's recommendations also play a role.)

B. I'm trying to make my first chapter accomplish too many things at once. Whether I agree with the need for this or not, I'm trying to introduce my protagonist and antagonist, their personalities and relationship to one another, an explanation for the title of my book, the time and place all within the first 8 pages. This really doesn't seem like an incredibly tall order to me, but it does go against my normal method of writing, of letting things unfold more organically. I feel like I have to hit all of my markers, and I think that's making the chapter feel more fast-paced than I actually want it to be.

Do you all have similar issues with your first chapter? Or, can you think of other issues we may be dealing with when we are trying to write our first chapters? What do you recommend for writing that strong first chapter?

Just then, the protagonist tripped...

I had a fascinating but lengthy prologue to this article which I've just cut because, you know, it was just me prolixing on about how cool I am. So let's just get to the goods instead.

Sometimes writers get stuck in the middle of their narratives. The story develops too quickly, for example, and your protagonist's journey from inciting incident to climax is over before you know it and your book is only 50,000 words long. Or, you simply don't know what to do with your characters on the way through Act Two (if you think in terms of a three-act structure). Anyway, there are three basic things you can do to make your plot more interesting during the middle of the story (and, incidentally, up your word count).*

The basic idea is to interrupt your protagonist's journey toward the climax. I will, alas, use examples from "Star Wars" because I doubt most of us share the same reading habits and references. Also, I get to be a geeky SW fan. Live with it.

Complications: These are things, people, or events that slow the protagonist's movement toward their goal. Luke being told by his uncle that he has to wait another year before applying to the Academy and leaving Tatooine is a complication.

Roadblocks: These are things, people, or events that stop the protagonist in his tracks. The Millenium Falcon being snagged by the Death Star is a roadblock.

Reversals: These are things, people, or events that turn the story on its head; the protagonist changes his worldview, his direction and often his goal. Luke's family being killed by the Imperial forces is a reversal.

All of these things are essentially problems the protagonist must solve. You can simply make them things that have happened to the protagonist, but that would be wrong. Why? Because a passive character to whom things happen but who does not himself act is boring. Rule Number One is that you do not bore your reader.

So, if your story is lagging, you give your protagonist problems to solve. Beginning writers tend to just throw these things at their characters in a long episodic middle stretch, and none of the problems are connected to the story as a whole. That's bad. All of your plot complications, roadblocks and reversals should grow out of things, persons or events that have appeared earlier in the story. Minor conflicts from Act One can loop back around and reappear as major conflicts in Act Two. This will give your story balance and shape and internal consistency.

Also, you might consider giving complications to your antagonist. How your villain (to sort of continue Michelle's post of yesterday about complex antagonists) deals with adversity might give us clues about his motivations and weaknesses, possibly foreshadowing the climax. Foreshadowing is teh roxor. Don't forget to use it. See above comments about events/items/people looping back around into the story.

So that's my advice today: if you find your story lagging or rambling in the middle, try to focus on the protagonist's goals. Point him at his goals and them have him trip, fall into a hole, come against a wall, or realize his basic assumptions are all wrong. Even if none of these ideas make it into your story, they could be useful brainstorming prompts that end up giving you ideas better than anything I could possibly offer.

*Does that all sound too formulaic and calculating and anti-art? I try to give pragmatic, nuts-and-bolts technical advice here. I don't know about art.

Know the Complexity of Your Villain

I'll admit it. For me, creating villains is one of the most rewarding things about writing. I noticed yesterday as I wrote a scene that all my great villains are complex. This is one of the reasons I'm rewriting my book instead of revising it. The first version had all simple villains. And too many of them. This new version has one main complex villain - and he's the kind of guy I'm starting to root for. Why? Because he used to be a good guy, and I feel bad for him.


Simple Villains
They are just that: simple. If you had to sit down and write their backstory, it would probably be boring, if not completely nonexistent. They were pretty much born evil. They want evil to rule for the sake of evil. They might even have that mwhahahaha laugh in some scenes. These characters exist in melodramatic works, and are oftentimes comical. But if handled well, a simple villain can work in genres other than comedy.

I have one simple main villain in my novel. I never show him. He's just there in the background running things with his evil, malicious hand. He might have a backstory. He might be sympathetic, but I don't explore that. His right hand man, however - the one my hero interacts with - is where all the fun lies. Because his motivations are complex.

An interesting blog post, A True Hero Makes The Movie, speaks about a story's strength building directly from the strength of the villain. The more evil a villain, the stronger the hero must be to conquer him. Thus a stronger story. I'm not sure I agree with that completely, but it's an interesting concept. This would mean that it doesn't matter much if your villain is simple or complex. Maybe it doesn't, but we can leave that for another post.


Complex Villains
I like complexity. Some of the most exciting moments in fiction for me are when the story dives into the reasons why a villain is evil. Sometimes this is the story. Sometimes that complexity exists simply to deepen a character. There are, of course, varying degrees of complexity. My friend Natalie let me read one of her novels, and it blew me away that her villain almost made me cry. She tells part of the story from his point of view, and by the end of the book I realized he was never evil to begin with - at least now that I understood him. The misunderstood villain is perhaps the most tragic character of all.

I stole my picture today from an excellent post, How To Write A Complex Villain. Melissa Donovan gives a writing exercise on where to get ideas for your villain's complexity. Seeing the villain in everyone around you is quite fun! Although maybe a little dangerous.

But one of my favorite exercises to discover the complexity of my villains is to write from their point of view, as in a journal entry, a letter, etc. Like my friend's book, some novels use the villain's point of view in the actual story. I have yet to do that, so it's important for me to completely understand my villain before writing too far in. Melissa Donovan has another exercise for this in her post, Become Your Nemesis.


Ask Yourself
Maybe all of this is old hat to most of you, but the reason I've decided to touch on this today is because at one point I though my villains in my current novel were complex. But when I sat down to write out their story I realized I didn't know what really made them tick. It was weakening my plot, my hero, and my writing. Like I said before, I do have one simple main villain. If I made him complex, the story would get too messy.

So lay out your villains and ask yourself what you really need to know about them in order to strengthen your story. Do they need to be more simple or more complex? Does your reader need to know all the backstory? Remember that sometimes you do, even if your reader doesn't.


~MDA (aka Glam)

Make your other brain do the work

On Monday's post comments here, there was a consensus that characters--and in many cases authors--needed to show some sort of change from where they are in the beginning of a story to where they are at the end. (Or, as is the exception, no change, when the point is that no change was made.)

In thinking about a character's journey, we can all come up with "standard" types of change. Our protagonist can face her fear and hopefully conquer it. Or, someone can complete the journey he has needed to complete. But, often, the change within a real person is far more complex. Sometimes, in our own experiences, we can't even fully express why something was meaningful to us, we just know that it was.

That's where our other brain comes along. While I was taking my memoir writing class this weekend, the teacher, Samantha Dunn, claimed that the most powerful literary writing occurs when our subconscious is doing all of the work. Our conscious thoughts are often clear, simple. We understand them. But, our subconscious is the reservoir for all of our contradictions, those messy ideas we have that don't really make any sense. She had us complete this sentence about ourselves:

I'm the kind of person who (fill in the blank) , but (fill in the blank).

One of mine, for example, was "I'm the kind of person who makes an absolute mess in my home, but I project myself so well to others that they never suspect it." It says a lot about me, huh?

Making your subconscious do the writing increases that messiness factor in our characters' journey, the components that often make a reader much more interested in a person. It allows us, as readers, to become a voyeur.

So, how do we get our other brain to do the work? Michelle has a post on Daydreaming that is the important first step in accessing our subconscious for our writing. We have to allow ourselves to get lost in thought.

After that, the main tool we have is freewriting. Usually this involves a time limit. Tell yourself that for 20 minutes, your pen will not stop moving or your fingers will not stop tapping on the keyboard. Even when you can't think of anything, continue to write words down. Start it with a topic: a memory or a prompt.

Then, just go.

What you'll find is that when your conscious brain runs out of ideas, your body is still able to proceed with the exercise. And, in those times, you'll start writing some pretty strange things. Take a look at those things. Find the elements in what you wrote that spark some interest in you or elements that you feel guilty or embarrassed about writing. Those are the messages that have come from your subconscious. If you do this sort of exercise with a particular character in mind, you may find that you can tap into his or her subconscious, allowing you to depict a much more interesting evolution than you could have come up with before. You can also do this with an idea, coupled to what Scott wrote about yesterday, to find out if your planned story has enough interesting material for you to discuss for a couple hundred pages.

A Good Idea Is Hard To Find

How do you know when you've got a good idea? Some of my writer friends tell me that they know they're onto something good when it inspires them to write, when the words flow almost by magic, the story "writing itself." One of my friends tells me a good idea is "the weirdest thing I never imagined I could imagine" that he's never read anywhere else. Me, I think I've got a good idea when I'm excited about the story and think I'm writing a book I'd like to read.

But...in my conversations with these very same writers, it turns out that some of these ideas that look amazingly fantastically great and brilliant for a week or a month don't actually lead anywhere. Or, we don't know where they lead and spend years trying to find out. Michael Chabon, in his book Maps and Legends, talks about wasting five years on a second novel that never panned out, because the idea wasn't enough to sustain a novel and there wasn't actually a story there, just an idea about a city. My own first novel had what I thought was a compelling protagonist and series of events, but the ideas behind the plot were pretty trite and, really, just plain dumb.

I've begun short stories with a clear image in my head of a main character, and never managed to find an actual story for that character. I've also had utterly brilliant first lines that generated prose which petered out after a paragraph or two. Sometimes, what seems like an amazing idea turns out to be very slight, and I find that I've been chasing a mirage across the desert while my story dies of thirst. Or some other, better, metaphor of your choice.

I'm sure I'm not alone in this, and that many of you have also begun writing and felt initially that you had a good, strong idea only to find that the muse was only mumbling to herself, not giving you anything you could really work with. So the question becomes how do we know when we've got a good idea for a novel?

There probably isn't a universally reliable test for this, but over the years I have developed a short list of questions I ask myself about ideas before I sit down and write. Admittedly, some of these questions are best answered by actually trying to write out the story, but one must begin somewhere in forming a methodology (for those of you who reject/are repulsed by any sort of methodology in your art, you can stop reading now).

1. Does this idea generate other ideas? Can I keep brainstorming off the initial vision and spin out more--and more interesting--ideas? If the idea doesn't give me additional ideas right away, I don't bother. Sometimes, you know, they grow into better ideas if left alone for a year or so.

2. Does this idea generate a lot of questions? The more questions the idea raises, the better for me, because I like to solve problems in my writing. If an idea leads to a dozen "what would happen if..." questions, then I've got something I can probably use.

3. Does this idea seem to go anywhere, like to a climax or other ending? If I can't work through from beginning to middle to end of a simple story using this idea, I let it lie until it grows into something more story-shaped. I used to just write out as many ideas as I could, but I don't do that anymore.

4. Does anything about the idea really surprise/shock/anger/frighten me? The stronger my emotional response to the idea, the better. If I'm not emotionally involved in some deep way, the story will end up being boring, even to me. I think it's a great idea to write about things that make us uncomfortable.

I also make notes, draw pictures and otherwise push ideas around before I commit myself to the splendid misery of writing prose. These days, a lot of "writing" takes place in my head before anything gets on paper. I've grown much more cautious as I've aged. So how about you? How do you know you've got a good idea? How do you know you've got an idea that will generate a whole book? How do you know when you don't?

Stop or Evolve

This weekend I spent 14 hours in a beginning memoir writing class and about 5 hours doing the homework assignment for it. The memoir form was very new to me, and surprisingly different from fiction writing, at least in my opinion.

One of the ideas that came up again and again throughout the class was the idea of reflection. We, as writers of our own stories, were asked to reflect on things that happened, rather than simply reporting on them. We were asked to describe the insight we gained through the experience. That's the supposed difference between memoir and autobiography, though often those two words are used to mean the same thing.

A woman mentioned that she had been working on her memoir for about 8 years prior to joining this class. She had written a couple hundred pages before she came to a stumbling block. She didn't know what to write next. Then, she said something that resonated, not only with the memoirist teaching the class, but also very much with me, a self-declared fiction writer. She said that as she was approaching the later part of her story, she realized that she either needed to stop writing, or she needed to evolve to make any sense of why her story was meaningful for her.

Stop or evolve.

What exactly does this mean?

Well, for the memoirist, it comes back to reflection. You know that the story you are writing is significant to you because of something. But, you might not know what that something is. To bring your story to a close, you either have to figure out that thing, or you have to admit that your story isn't ready to be completed yet. (That admission, might be totally okay, depending on where you are in your life.)

The same principle applied to me and my novel. Scott, Literary Lab co-author, read it awhile back, and he liked it...for the most part. Regarding the end, he said "it doesn't feel finished so much as sort of abandoned. I get the impression, actually, that there is something you are trying to imply but you aren't just coming out and saying, something important you won't tell me."

First off, I truly appreciate that Scott would be so honest with me. He is so honest a man. I'd had a dozen people read my book before him, and though I had sensed that something wasn't quite working for them, no one else had actually voiced the problem of the ending despite my annoying prodding. (Well, one person tried to, but he was being a bit too nice about it to break through my thick skull.) Scott, I hope you don't mind me quoting you and showing you for the critical monster you truly are.

But, the problem he saw, and the problem that this memoir class helped me to understand was that I had hit that point of having to stop or evolve. I had explored the life of my protagonist, a fictional representation of my father, and at the end that character needed to evolve if his story was going to reach closure. He could have evolved. The clues were there for him to get or not get--that's what I think Scott was experiencing when he sensed that I was trying to imply something. But, I hadn't actually taken my protagonist to that point of change. He was right up against it, and then he miraculously transported to the other side by the helpful hand of this tired author.

I had been fixing that as I was revising my book. (Thank you, Scott.) And, the classmate's simple phrase was the best way I have heard of that articulates this problem. I feel closer to an end of my book now. I've made some changes that required a tougher examination of my story and the people in it...and of myself.

So, stop or evolve. This is, for me, the first formalization of how to end a story that I've found to be useful.

Questions: Given that so many of you are genre writers, does this idea of investigating insight and having your characters evolve come into play? Does this evolution come up in every story? Should it?

Harriet Potter

I am writing this particular post today for three reasons: First, it's Friday and that's the day when the fewest people seem to read/respond to blogs (I don't take it personally, really I don't) so I can just pad out the week with something light; Second, tonight Mighty Reader and I are going to go see the new "Harry Potter" film (which is nearly three hours long, for gosh sakes, meaning MR and I will get home around 2:00 AM and we are therefore very brave HP fans); Third, I've noticed something in my trolling of query letter sites and I must ask about it.

A lot of people seem to be writing the same book. Or, I should say, the same couple of books. I get around, you know, and read a lot of writers' blogs and see a lot of queries for books people have written, and there seem to be two premises that crop up a lot:

1. Sort of downtrodden youngster discovers he/she has magical powers, enters world where he/she learns to use said powers, and must then battle Ultimate Evil.

2. Sort of shoe-gazey young girl, feeling isolated, meets handsome mysterious male who turns out to be paranormal evil person, who tempts girl to dark side (usually because she has paranormal powers she doesn't know about, and handsome evil boy wants to steal her paranormal energy).

3. There's also a third premise I see a lot that I just remembered, where young protagonist (usually female) discovers she has magical or otherwise unearthly powers and either a) must choose between the life of a close relative (sister or mother in most cases) and her own life as a superhuman powergrrl, or b) must use her superhuman powergrrl powers to save her close relative.

So we have, essentially, Harry Potter and Twilight and Superman (or maybe Wolverine in a Hello Kitty t-shirt) as premises that are being used A Lot Around Here.

So what's the deal? Are people deliberately trying to be the next Rowling or Meyers or whomever (I don't know, maybe Neil Gaiman on the last one), or are these just the sorts of stories that YA and MG readers like, and we write what we read and it's all just that "Harry Potter" and "Twilight" are the sorts of stories we want to read more of?

I'm not complaining or saying any of this is bad. Personally, I think premise is the least part of storytelling, as long as the premise and the story are solid and compelling; it's how you tell it that matters most to me. But I am asking. Why are these the stories a great lot of writers are choosing to tell now? If this is you, dear reader, what's up? Spill it.

The Art of Repetition

I mentioned in a recent blog post that repetition is bad. I'd like to clarify here that there are different types of repetition: Repeating Redundancy and Repeating Beauty.

Redundancy refers to the types of repetition I speak of in the Trust blog post - pounding unnecessary information into your reader's head. For example, repeating dialogue tags when the dialogue said it clear enough, repeating a symbol or metaphor over and over just in case your reader "missed it", repeating specific key plot points in case your reader "missed it", etc.

Beauty refers to something I keep coming back to ever since I read a post by David King on Fractals. It clicked. I thought, repetition isn't always bad. In fact, I've been using the "fractal" idea in my work for a long time. Fractals are naturally beautiful and pleasing. What is a fractal? You can find information on fractals in this Wikipedia post. But to sum it up in David King's words:

A fractal is an irregular or fragmented shape, like a cloud or a coastline, into which you can zoom, almost without limit, dividing and subdividing it into smaller and smaller parts, each of which is a clone of the original whole.

I don't know about you, but this idea is completely fascinating to me. I mean, look at these pictures:







Repetition is everywhere. And I think it can take place in our writing, as well. In fact, I almost gave up on the first book I wrote. It was a complete mess. Irreparable in my opinion. Then a friend told me about the Snowflake Method. This popular outline method, although shunned by a lot of people who simply hate outlines, saved me. It's based on the idea of a fractal. A snowflake is fractal. You start out with a triangle and build and build and build until you get this beautiful, complicated looking snowflake.



It may look complicated, but in reality it's quite simple. Think of it as layers, as building over and over until all the smaller pieces resemble the whole. The idea behind the Snowflake Method shouldn't be shunned by anybody. Because I think it's the basis of any great work, whether or not you like outlining.

In essence, every sentence, chapter, and section of your book should contribute to the entire work in a similar way. For instance, I just picked a random quote from The Great Gatsby. I believe it clearly sums up the novel. Amazing.

When we pulled out into the winter night and the real snow, our snow, began to stretch out beside us and twinkle against the windows, and the dim lights of small Wisconsin stations moved by, a sharp wild brace came suddenly into the air. We drew in deep breaths of it as we walked back from dinner through the cold vestibules, unutterably aware of our identity with this country for one strange hour, before we melted indistinguishably into it again.

I hope this isn't intimidating. It's not meant to be. My point is that repetition doesn't have to be bad. One of the greatest things I believe a writer can do is sum up their book in one short sentence. Reveal the "whole" of your book - the whole tree so to speak. Then break it down and show the branches, the leaves, the veins on the leaves that astoundingly enough resemble the whole tree.

If you can't do this, do you really know what your book is about?

To me, it comes down to focus. Without it your story is weak, weak, weak! This idea is absolutely essential to me. And although I know many readers might skip over this post because it looks freakishly complicated and in-depth, the idea is simple. My first book is still a mess, but it makes sense in my head now. I know what I want it to be, and the basic "whole" is there. My second novel has been easier to write once I grasped this concept, and I know that the more books I write, the more this idea will make sense. Like creating any beautiful piece of art, it takes a lot of time and practice.

Do keep in mind, though, that this process often happens naturally if you have your focus in place. It's not something that you have to consciously think of every time you write a sentence. Thank goodness! Finding that focus is often the tricky part. Perhaps I can save that for a 15-part blog post...


~MDA (aka Glam)

Show Me Where We're Going

This post is about beginnings, a sort of follow up to my post about starting stories in the middle of the action. Whether you jump directly into the central conflict or not, you still need to create drama for the reader. This means that you have to show things in action.

Character=action
Conflict=action
Drama=action

Put things into motion and keep them in motion. This does not mean that your characters must be running from aliens or leaping volcanoes constantly. It means that the story must move forward, that there must be momentum towards a fixed point (the climax). It means that your characters must be doing things.

What are your characters doing, then? Simply put: they are making decisions and then acting upon them, and then dealing with the consequences of those actions. Your characters want something, and your story is the movement through time of your characters toward that goal, whether they achieve it or not. If your characters don't want anything, then they are not dramatic characters and you should write a different story where people have desires. But I digress.

Put things into motion and keep them in motion. How does the reader know who your characters are? By watching them act. So show them acting. In Homer's Iliad, we know that Achilles is broody and prideful. Do we find this out by reading pages of Achilles brooding, alone in his tent? No; we find this out when he argues publically with Agamemnon or refuses Odysseus' plea to join the battle (both of which are dramatic scenes filled with conflict: a warrior versus his king, and a man versus his friends). In The Lord of the Rings, we don't read pages of Frodo's inner struggle against the evil influence of the One Ring; we see Frodo as he stops heeding Sam and places his trust in Gollum instead, eventually abandoning Sam in Mordor after verbally abusing him. These two examples are both fairly subtle and you might not consider them action at first, but they are: the characters are shown making decisions and acting upon those decisions.

To tie the title of this post into my ramblings, I'll say that in the beginning of a story, you need to let the reader know what the central conflict is, what the story is about: where the characters are going. And you need to show that through action. "Okay, Scott," you say. "We know that. Can you go beyond the basics of 'show don't tell?'" Well, maybe.

Conflict is character. Conflict, for our purposes, means people (or, yes, elves if you must) attempting to achieve specific goals and having to struggle for those achievements. In order for the reader to care about the outcome of this conflict, the reader has to care about the characters. In order to care about the characters, the reader has to know the characters. In order to know the characters, the reader has to see the characters in action. Yes, you can go on for sixty pages about your protagonist's inner thoughts and tell us the whole sad story of his estrangement from his father and his subsequent hatred of all men of a certain age and how that might effect his view of himself as your protagonist becomes the same age as his father when he was disinherited. You might even write it in gorgeous, moving prose. I'd read that. But if that isn't your story--if it's your back-story--you can get the same point across (that your protagonist has "issues" with men of his father's generation) by writing a dramatic scene where your protagonist is cruel or indifferent to an older man. Drama is vivid, memorable and engaging. And, frankly, makes the point better and faster than ruminations.

Can't I stop and think ever? Certainly. Please do. I like thoughtful books, but that's not the way to begin one. Before you have your characters consider the state of their lives, show us your characters within their lives, in action. Even a book like "Pride and Prejudice," which is alleged to be pretty tame and undramatic, begins with 1) a statement of theme (a man with money needs a wife), and 2) the event which kicks off the action of the book (the mansion up the road has been rented by a man with money; we simply must meet him!). That's not as dramatic as jumping a volcano or battling Poseidon, but it's still a dramatized scene that immediately introduces us to Mr. and Mrs. Bennet and immediately introduces conflict. Which is exactly what we want as readers, and one reason why Austen's book is still in print after all these years.

This post is a bit of a hash, stucturally. It all seemed brilliant on the way to the office, but it might be less focused than I might like. I'll try to clarify things later.

How To Give A Public Reading

Yesterday Tricia J. O'Brien over at Talespinning mentioned an article on reading out loud. I also learned that some of our blog friends here are about to go on a writing retreat that includes a public reading. So, I wanted to give a few tips on the subject.

I've had the opportunity to study the art of public reading with voiceover artist David Thomas. I've also had the amazing opportunity to have one of my stories read out loud by actor Joshua Harto in WordTheatre in Los Angeles. Seeing how the pros interpret words on a page and perform them was extremely educational.

Before the reading

Practice a lot. Read your piece over and over several times so that you have it nearly memorized. Understand the landscape of the piece: slow down and speed up according to the story's dramatic points. Practice using highs and lows in your voice to emphasize key points, multiple characters, and so that you don't sound like a robot. You don't need to do anything fancy like using accents--in fact, a lot of people are annoyed by that.

Two tricks: a) practice reading with a wine cork clenched between your teeth. You'll sound horrible while you are doing it, but it works the weakest muscles of your mouth, and if you read immediately afterwards without the cork, you'll notice that you pronounce everything much more clearly. b) practice speed reading through your piece. Get through it as fast as you can, but make sure that you hit every word and every sound.

At the reading

1. Make sure you have the attention of the audience. You made need to wait a few seconds. You can even have a drink of water in front of them so that people know that you are preparing. Often, the opening of a passage contains key details that let the audience orient themselves, so it's important that everyone gets that information.

2. Go slowly. Go slower than you think you should, especially in the beginning. Every word in the first sentence should take plenty of time--it will seem too slow to you, but not to the audience. You can speed up later to fit the mood of your piece if you need to.

3. Use the landscape that you created during practice. Don't be afraid to emote. An audience will be more engaged if they realize that you are engaged yourself. And, keep in ming that audiences are on your side. They want to see you do well because they want to be entertained. No one wants to see a bad show.

4. Don't forget to make eye contact with the audience. Or, at the very least look out toward the audience. I usually pick out three places--one on the right side, one in the center, and one on the left--that I try to look out at regularly.

5. If you're given a time limit, stick to it. Better yet, stay under the limit by a few seconds or minutes. No one likes to be thrown off schedule.

Note: If you are using a microphone, try to practice on it ahead of time. Test to see where your mouth has to be relative to the microphone. Some require you to be close while others sound better if you are further away. Figure out where you are going to put your pages, or how you're going to hold them before you start reading. Don't let the pages cover your face or block the path of air from your mouth to the microphone/audience.

I've had the opportunity to do public readings at some book fairs, and I'm happy to say they have all gone well thanks to the advanced preparation I've done. A strong reading will get people interested in your book and make them want to read more.

For Your Consideration

One of the most beautiful things I have come to expect from my fellow writers is that almost everyone is considerate. When we disagree, for the most part, we are able to discuss our different views in a reasonable way. We know when to let something go and when to agree to disagree.

There's one considerate message, though, that I think we writers spend too much time on, and I'm wondering if we can get some sort of consensus on it once and for all.

Here's an example of what I'm talking about.

Dear writer,

I read your book and I thought your character, Priscilla Persimmon, was just a wee bit too rude.

Please keep in mind that this is just my opinion, and I could be the stupidest person in the world. Also keep in mind that other people could have a different view of things. Oh, and I hope you don't forget that these opinions of mine are only what I'm feeling on this particular day and time, and they might actually possibly change at some point in my life as I learn more about this craft of writing.

Yours ever so humbly,

Davin

Haven't most of us included this sort of disclaimer at the end of our critiques? We want to make sure that the writer we are reviewing doesn't take our word as law. We want to protect our own reputations in case we accidentally say something stupid. I, for one, spend far too much time making this point when I review someone's work.

Part of this has to do with our trust in the writer...or maybe the lack of it. We personally understand that someone's review is just their opinion, but we don't know if another writer knows that our review is just our opinion. When, in fact, they probably do.

So, here are my questions for you on this lovely Monday morning. Do we really need to include that "this is just my opinion" clause in all of our reviews? Can we, as a group, accept that as a given? Or, maybe, we can come up with some nice acronym that we put at the end of all our reviews that will always and forever represent the idea that our reviews are nothing more than our personal judgments, something we can just include at the bottom of the page.

Dear writer,

Priscilla P. is rude.

IYFAH,

Davin

In Medias Res

In Medias Res is Latin for "in the middle of things," and refers to the story-telling device of starting a narrative not at the beginning but during a dramatic scene, skipping any backstory or setting or characterization and getting directly to the action. You open the book to page one and BANG! you're in the middle of the story already.

Literary agents seem to like this approach, if one judges by their blogs, and one is tempted to say that this is a "modern" writing technique, that the classics of literature could not be published today because writers used to spend the first 10,000 words of their books giving us setting and backstory and introducing characters. But beginning in medias res has a long and illustrious history. I took a quick look at my librarything account and grabbed the following titles, all of which start in the middle of the action:

True History of the Kelly Gang (published 2002)
My Name is Red (published 2001)
The Master and Margarita (published 1966)
Crime and Punishment (published 1866)
Paradise Lost (published 1667)
Hamlet (published 1601)
The Iliad (written c. 800 BCE)
The Odyssey (written c. 800 BCE)

I'm not going to discuss the relative merits of beginning in medias res versus easing into/setting up the story (though feel free to do so in the comments). What I will do is, maybe, give some advice on how to structure the beginning of a novel to start off in medias res. It's going to be oversimplified, cookbook-style advice, because we must deal with generalities in a forum like this. Sorry.

I will assume you have written something like this:

Prologue (ick!)
Hook sentence or paragraph.
Backstory and setting.
Dramatic action leading to inciting incident.
Inciting incident.
et cetera.

Step One: Read your first chapter or two and find the first dramatic action that is part of the story's real conflict. By which I mean, if your book is about a vampire hunter who is haunted (sorry) by his past, skip the story about his past, no matter how dramatic, and get to the story-present's first dramatic scene (likely some vampire hunting by the adult protagonist).

Step Two: Start your book at the scene you found in Step One. It begins there and goes on from there, just as you've written it. What about all that stuff that used to go before it? Well, you're going to cut most of it. Read on.

Step Three: Cut your prologue. You don't need it. I know: you love your prologue, and know in your heart that the story can't begin without it. Your heart, alas, she is wrong. Admit that your prologue is back-story, and You Do Not Begin With Back-story!

Step Four: Read your book, beginning with the new first scene. Do you really need any of the back-story you cut out? Really? Do you? How much of it? Note where there is missing information that must be filled in.

Step Five: Read through all the stuff that you have skipped over by beginning with the new first scene. Highlight or otherwise mark those things that are absolutely necessary for the reader to understand the story; you aim to fill in those areas you flagged in Step Four. Cut everything else. No, I mean it: cut everything else. You don't need it, and your readers don't want it.

Step Six: There is no Step Six. You're done. Move on with your life and enjoy your shiny new actiony story beginning. You should have a structure that now looks like this:

Dramatic action leading to inciting incident.
More dramatic action leading to inciting incident.
Inciting incident.
Possible introduction of back-story.
et cetera.

A note on Step Five: You might want to keep some of the details you don't necessarily need for clarity, and use them to add depth and substance to the book. Just don't let your world-building and gorgeous descriptive passages get in the way of the story itself.

Also: there are other ways to do this, other ways to structure a story, and they are equally valid. I'm just offering up a simple way to turn a slow-starting novel into something that starts more quickly. And again, I'm not saying that this is the Best Way to start a story; it's just one way to do it.

Where You're a Genius

You want to quiet the noise in your head to solidify that fragile germ of an idea ~ Dr. Jung-Beeman

Have you ever wondered where your Aha! moments come from? That's brilliant! you say. That's pure genius! This is going to be the best book ever written because I'm so darned clever! Yeah, I've been there, too.

A recent study in an article titled, A Wandering Mind Heads Straight Toward Insight, shows that our Aha! moments are more method than we think. And they come from the strangest of places - daydreaming. The truth is, most of these thoughts are genius. They're the thoughts that come about from our brain working harder than it normally does - even harder than when we're concentrating on a problem.

"People assumed that when your mind wandered it was empty," says cognitive neuroscientist Kalina Christoff at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. . . As measured by brain activity, however, "mind wandering is a much more active state than we ever imagined, much more active than during reasoning with a complex problem."

She suspects that the flypaper of an unfocused mind may trap new ideas and unexpected associations more effectively than methodical reasoning. That may create the mental framework for new ideas. "You can see regions of these networks becoming active just prior to people arriving at an insight," she says.

Talk about a relief! Because I don't know about you, but I daydream all the time. Especially about my writing and my characters and story.

One of the most important points of this article, however, was that insight comes best when the mind is positive. How you are thinking and feeling when you delve into daydreaming and those "mindless useless thoughts" has a direct correlation on how effective that daydreaming will be. And it can be effective! Think of Descartes, Newton, Archimedes.

I've noticed a lot of negativity around the blogosphere these past few weeks. I'd like to shout out that we need to STOP! It's a vicious cycle. If we're negative, our work will suffer. We will suffer. And it spreads like a disease. It obviously affects us more than we think it does.

Now put a smile on your face, gather your confidence, and head out to a field or a quiet corner today. Let your mind daydream. Get that Aha! moment you've been waiting for.


~MDA (aka Glam)

Exaggerated characters

In part, I'm building on what Scott discussed yesterday regarding writer reliability and on what Michelle wrote regarding trust. I wanted to get your opinions on the effectiveness of exaggeration.

As part of an in-person writer's group, I've often faced a phenomenon that can happen in our writing when the idea we have in our head somehow gets diluted on the page. I'll try to create a character that's annoying, and she'll come out seeming ordinary. Or, I'll try to create a character that is cowardly, and he'll come out seeming ordinary. I often feel like I have to exaggerate the character personality I'm trying to convey before readers can experience it on the page.

The idea of exaggeration isn't new, of course. Hardly anyone would argue that Shakespeare's characters are real or realistic. But, what Shakespeare manages to do is to evoke the reality of the world by representing it with exaggerated characters.

"The raven himself is hoarse

That croaks the fatal entrance of Duncan

Under my battlements. Come, you spirits

That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here,

And fill me from crown to the toe topful

Of direst cruelty!"

(Lady Macbeth from Act 1, scene 5 of her play.)

Really, who talks like that???

And, have you noticed that many of our favorite literary and cinematic characters are not the main protagonists, but the exaggerated side characters with the quirkiest of traits? I tend to be a stripped down stylist, but I often find that my readers respond more to my writing when I feel like I'm overstating my point just a little.

While we absolutely should strive to be reliable as writers and to trust our readers, I think it's a difficult balance as we also try to combat the dilution factor of writing to create drama and vitality in our stories.

Have you all faced this sort of thing yourselves? How do you calibrate your writing so that you can get your point across without talking down to your reader?

True or False?

Last Thursday, Michelle posted about establishing trust between writer and reader. I'd like to explore that a little more and talk about trustworthiness of narrators and trustworthiness of authors. This is also known as reliability.

Reliable/unreliable narrators: When a story is told from a first-person point of view, the reader has to discover how truthfully the character is relating the story. Some narrators lie to the reader. Some narrators think they are telling the truth, but they are wrong. Some narrators think they are telling the truth, and they are right. And narrators who are also characters in stories don't always know all of the truth, either. Sometimes they discover it as the story is told, along with the reader.

Narrators who deliberately lie are unreliable narrators. The books of Nabokov are famously populated by unreliable narrators, and a lot of the great Russian authors of the previous generation employed unreliable narrators as well. An unreliable narrator lets you keep secrets from the reader, generally for a major plot twist or 'reveal' at the end of the story. Iain Pears' An Instance of the Fingerpost is the same story told four times in a row by four different first-person narrators, each of whom is unreliable in some way. Some people think this is just gussied-up plot manipulation and is cheating the reader. However, if the reader knows the narrator is unreliable, I would say it just adds a layer of mystery to the story.

Narrators who think they are telling the truth but are wrong are also unreliable narrators. Sometimes, it's just that the narrator is missing information or has made wrong assumptions about other characters in the story. Think of the multiple narrators in Faulkner's As I Lay Dying. None of them quite know what the real situation is; between the six of them, the reader gets the whole story, but individually, the narrators are unreliable. This sort of unreliable narrator lets you incorporate dramatic irony into your story, where the reader knows things that the characters don't.

All first-person narrators will be unreliable to some extent, simply by being characters lacking omniscience. And as a rule, when narrators begin to editorialize, their reliability decreases. Salinger's Holden Caulfield is unreliable in that he doesn't understand the adult world toward which life is inexorably moving him, yet he gives a running commentary on it throughout the book.

Unreliable narrators are perfectly legitimate tools of a writer. They have a long and illustrious history, and can be very cool. What's not cool, however, is an unreliable author.

Unreliable authors: When a writer, as writer outside the story and not as character inside the story, withholds necessary information from a reader, he's unreliable and not to be trusted. For example, I've read mysteries where a new character is introduced in the final act and named as the murderer (this is just like a detective knowing clues that aren't shown to the reader). It cheats the reader and means that the writer isn't good enough to have constructed a mystery story properly.

Unreliable authors are usually not good story tellers, and try to compensate for this by cheating the reader. They throw all sorts of bizarre plot twists, characters and locations at the reader without actually resolving the central conflict of the story. Or, they resolve the central conflict in a way that makes the characters act out-of-character, or is simply unbelievable within the world the writer has established. Other unreliable author tricks include the deus ex machina, where the complications of the plot are resolved by forces outside the story.

In summary, it's okay to lie to your readers via a first-person narrator as long as the reader finds out in good time that the narrator is unreliable, but it's not okay to cheat your readers by manipulating the plot or hiding details or introducing new characters at the last minute or otherwise breaking the basic rules of storytelling.

Originality

July 4th reminded me of independence, or originality, as a writer. Most, and probably all, of my favorite writers are not only masterful aesthetically and intellectually, but they are also unique. William Shakespeare, Leo Tolstoy, Virginia Woolf, William Faulkner--a reader can probably identify any of these writers' work just by reading a single paragraph.

In science, some form of originality is absolutely crucial. I can't publish on a project unless I can convince an editor and the peer reviewers that I've either done something completely new, or that I've done some better than past researchers have done it. But, the writing world is, perhaps, a little more forgiving. Book publishers often chasetrends that allow writers to profit from copying the ideas of previous writers.

Honestly, I don't see anything wrong with that. For me, as long as I enjoy what I produce, I don't particularly care if it's original. At the same time, the thought of presenting the world in a way that no one else has ever seen it before is truly exciting. I'd love to hear that I'm doing something that no one else has done before.

What about you? Do you strive to be original? Do you think originality has to come from a conscious attempt to be so, or can writers stumble upon it? (Feel free to talk about yourselves and let us know how your work is different from what has come before it!)

Trust

I've had the word TRUST on my blog post list for awhile now. But I was never sure what I wanted to say. Natalie's post helped guide me in the right direction. When someone begins reading your story, they may feel like this frog:



Natalie says it better than I can:

What does [not trusting your reader] mean? It boils down to not trusting that your audience will "get" what you're trying to give them. This leads to over explaining and repetition, which is annoying to a smart reader (and guess what, I hear most readers are smart people).

Backstory, Flashbacks, and Extraneous Scenes
Look at all of these closely. I recently did a post on my writing blog about how your reader might not care about most of this stuff. How do you present it? Is it ripping your reader out of the real story? You may care deeply about all of that information, but how much does your reader really need to know?

Scott wrote an excellent post on backstory here.

Fillers
Most of the time, scaffolding is unnecessary. If your reader screams "I know!", you don't have to put a dialogue tag after it that says she screamed loudly.

He was just plain downright annoyed. He stomped his foot and clenched his fists.

When he looked deeply into her eyes, he whispered softly and lowered his voice.

The cool breeze flowed into the small room and rustled the lacy curtains until the stagnant air felt refreshed.

These are obvious examples, but I see this all the time. Adverbs. Extra adjectives, etc. Wordiness!

Repetition
You. Don't. Need. To. Repeat. Things. Except for this phrase: You don't need to repeat things! This is my biggest problem. I like to pound things into my reader's head. Symbolism. Metaphors. Obvious things. A good example is from Natalie's post:

"That's not a good idea," he said. He seemed sure we shouldn't go in the cave.

Yes, and then I would probably repeat again in a later paragraph that he seemed sure we shouldn't go in the cave. The dialogue said it all. Just leave it at that.

Oh, Hate Them!
If one of your characters is a downright mean, ugly person. Let them be. Don't make excuses for them. Don't try and make them likable because you've read somewhere that all characters need to be likable.

In my first novel, one of my main POV characters is a terrible person. The other main POV character hates her. So why would I try and make her likable from the get go? I have no idea. But I did. And the character rings false.
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These are a few things that hinder trust, which can lead to you looking like a poor storyteller, a weak writer, and someone who doesn't trust their own work and abilities. Trust me (haha), I'm barely learning all of this. I know I have a long way to go in strengthening my writing. I think a follow-up post is in order for things that help the reader trust. Scott? Davin? Any volunteers for a guest post?

Question For The Day: How important do you feel it is that your reader trusts you? Do you have any other examples of how a writer can hinder trust?


~MDA (aka Glam)