Interruptions

When I heard our cat making a racket last night at around 10:30, I assumed she’d seen the opossum that sometimes comes into our back yard after dark. The cat always yowls at it through the bedroom window, hissing and scratching at the glass in an attempt to get out there and show the opossum just whose yard it is. Opossums really creep me out, with their mouthfuls of pointed teeth, their almost-human blue eyes and their long naked rat tails. They hiss like snakes and are just as likely to bite you as they are to roll over and play dead when cornered. The opossum is a horrible little animal and just a bad idea, if you ask me.

“Leave the nasty big rat alone,” I called out from my writing desk. A moment later I felt more than heard something hitting the side of the house, and then I heard the cat again, this time howling in the basement. The weather has turned cold and I thought that the opossum was trying to get into our house through the window well by the washer and dryer, or maybe trying to crawl through the gap below the ancient wooden garage doors.

This was annoying, because I was in the middle of a scene I’d been trying to write all evening and wanted nothing more than another hour of quiet in the house. Intruding animals being in my half of the division of domestic labor, I had however no choice but to get up from my desk and go down the basement stairs to see what was going on. There was nothing at the window above the wash sink. The cat was scratching at the heavy fire door that opened into the garage. She was growling low in her throat like a dog. She’s a strange cat.

“Something in the garage?” I asked her. She looked up briefly and then returned to scratching at the door. I undid the lock and just as I put my fingers on the door handle, I heard something falling or being knocked over within the garage. There was definitely something in there.

“Emma?” I called up the stairs, using Mighty Reader’s pseudonym because she’s diffident and this is a public blog post. “There’s something in the garage. I think it’s that damned ‘possum.”

A moment later Emma joined me at the garage door. The cat had fled upstairs, coward that she is.

“How’s the writing going?” Emma asked.

“Fine until now,” I said. We decided that Emma would open the door and stand behind it while I would go into the garage. I had armed myself with a shovel in case the opossum was not in a mood to play dead. We have an old house and there remain a great many repairs to be made to it, one of which is to rewire the lights in the garage. It was going to be dark in there, even with all the basement lights on. The stairwell between basement and main floor blocked most of the light from the fixture closest by the door to the garage. Like most Americans, we own a flashlight but it's loaded with dead batteries. I gripped my shovel and nodded to Emma, who gave the heavy door a yank and pulled it open.

Like I say, the garage was dark. From behind me, a rectangle of light fell just inside the doorway, illuminating the floor at my feet but beyond that, it was black as pitch.

“See anything?” Emma asked.

“Shh!”

From ahead and to the right I heard a noise, the sound of something being dragged across the rough concrete. At the same time I heard what sounded like gnawing. I thought of the opossum’s mouth full of sharp teeth, like a shark’s mouth, and I shivered and held the shovel like a baseball bat or an axe. I could feel a cold breeze. That meant either Emma or I had not fully closed the garage doors, letting into our basement whatever now hid in the darkness. It was probably me who'd left the doors open, and my absent-mindedness annoyed me as I stood there in the dark holding a shovel. None of this fussing about with opossums or whatever was getting my chapter written. It was cold in the garage and I wasn’t wearing shoes and I’d drunk too many cups of tea and needed to use the bathroom and I was getting pissed off, if you must know.

The thing in the dark corner hissed and my eyes were beginning to adjust so when it moved toward me I saw that whatever it was, it was a lot bigger than an opossum. I swung the shovel at it as hard as I could and the steel blade made contact with bone. The impact made a lot less noise than I thought it would, but the thing stopped moving when I hit it.

“What is that?” Emma asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. “It’s big. I hope I didn’t just kill someone’s dog.”

“Half a mo’,” Emma said, and she disappeared long enough to fetch an emergency candle. When she lit it and held it up we both saw that I hadn’t killed a dog. What I had done was hit our next door neighbor, Monica, in the forehead with a shovel. She wasn’t moving. She wasn’t breathing.

“Jesus,” Emma said. “You killed Monica.” Monica had a husband and two teenaged sons.

“Why is she in our garage?”

“Look at this,” Emma said, moving the candle to light up the corner of the garage Monica had been hiding in. I saw the bloody remains of an opossum. Its head was missing.

“What the hell?” I said, and then Monica sat up and gave an unearthly howl. It was not the howl of a woman in pain from a shovel blow to the forehead, but the howl of a beast, a thing from another dimension. It was not a human noise at all. To Emma’s credit, she did not drop the candle, although the light caught Monica’s attention. She looked at Emma and hissed, a thread of saliva pouring from her mouth. Emma took a step back and Monica followed on hands and knees. I swung the shovel again, the blade making a much louder sound against Monica’s skull this time. Just to be sure, I hit her a dozen more times and then used the shovel to cut her head from her body.

“Jesus,” Emma said. “Now what?”

“Monica’s got a family,” I said. “We need to go next door.”

Within an hour Emma and I had rounded up most of the neighbors on our block and we broke down the front door of Monica’s house and dealt with her husband and sons. We built a bonfire in the empty lot down the street and burned all four bodies. I threw the headless opossum onto the flames for good measure. I still need to finish that chapter of my work-in-progress. This is a story I wrote to entertain you all for Halloween.

Grab Your Lab Coat! (Experiment #1 by Glam)

Since this blog is called The Literary Lab, and we claim in the sidebar that we do experiments, let's have at it today! Pull on your lab coat and glasses and show me how you critique! There are no right or wrong answers.

(1) Read the paragraph below.

(2) Tell me in the comments if - you like it or not, why it works or doesn't, and if you think it needs some revision, what would you suggest (or even more interesting, how would you rewrite it?) Some questions to ask yourself if you're stuck as to what to look for: is it too passive? too telling? is it active? do the descriptions work? what do you know of the character so far, the story, the action?

Feel free to discuss and/or argue in the comments section. If you've seen this paragraph before please don't say so in the comments. Thanks. (No, I didn't write this paragraph so feel free to shred or praise as much as you like)

(3) Come back here after 7:00 EST. I will have posted below my thoughts on our experiment - or results, so to say.

It was a large, beautiful room, rich and picturesque in the soft, dim light which the maid had turned low. She went and stood at an open window and looked out upon the deep tangle of the garden below. All the mystery and witchery of the night seemed to have gathered there amid the perfumes and the dusky and tortuous outlines of flowers and foliage. She was seeking herself and finding herself in just such sweet, half-darkness which met her moods. But the voices were not soothing that came to her from the darkness and the sky above and the stars. They jeered and sounded mournful notes without promise, devoid even of hope. She turned back into the room and began to walk to and fro down its whole length, without stopping, without resting. She carried in her hands a thin handkerchief, which she tore into ribbons, rolled into a ball, and flung from her. Once she stopped, and taking off her wedding ring, flung it upon the carpet. When she saw it lying there, she stamped her heel upon it, striving to crush it. But her small boot heel did not make an indenture, not a mark upon the little glittering circlet.

_________________________

THE RESULTS:

Well, aside from talk of cookies and alcohol, you all stayed close on topic for the experiment. Thanks to everybody for your participation. It wouldn't have worked without you.

First of all, the paragraph came from one of my favorite novels (novella, really), The Awakening by Kate Chopin. This lovely lady here:



Taken from a wonderful site, here is a little bit about Kate:

American author Kate Chopin (1850–1904) wrote two novels and about a hundred short stories in the 1890s. Most of her fiction is set in Louisiana and most of her best-known work focuses on the lives of sensitive, intelligent women.

After 1969 [65 years after her death], when a biography sympathetic to The Awakening was published, along with an edition of her complete works, Kate Chopin became known throughout the world. She has attracted great attention from scholars and students, and her work has been translated into other languages, including French, Portuguese, Dutch, Polish, Korean, and Czech. She is today understood as a classic writer who speaks eloquently to contemporary concerns. The Awakening, "The Storm," "The Story of an Hour," "Désirée's Baby," and other stories appear in countless editions and are embraced by people for their sensitive, graceful, poetic depictions of women's lives.

I graduated college thinking everyone knew who Kate Chopin is. I was wrong. Not many people that I have met - even literary snobs like me, have read her. Which is a shame, but she's not up to everybody's liking. Still, I think she has left a great mark on American classical literature.

Anyway, onward to what I thought of all your comments!

First of all, the results were pretty much what I expected. In fact, they were exactly what I expected - heated! Many of you didn't like the style shown in the paragraph (which is take from the first third of the novel, I think), and thought it was passive and too descriptive. Many of you actually loved the paragraph and the voice. Several of you saw the paragraph for what it is - a piece of writing that hints at something written quite awhile ago. 1890 to be exact.

Critics hated the novel when it was first published (it gained popularity later). Willa Cather called it "trite and sordid." I don't think, however, that any of the criticism was for the writing, but the content. Read the novel to find out what makes it so controversial!

Today's experiment has taught me several things I think we can all take home today:

(1) If a piece of writing can excite this much discussion and emotion, there's obviously something there. My friend has always told me it doesn't matter that she hates Kafka. She knows he's a great writer because she loathes him. He's ignited that much passion in her that there's something going on there.

This isn't to say that emotions are always a great way to gauge good writing, but it's a start. I think if 60+ comments had all been unanimous that the writing was awful and boring, then we might start to believe the writing really needs help.

(2) The same old same old: Writing Is Subjective. Critiquing Is Subjective. Reading Is Subjective. Oh, Everything Is Subjective. That's why, when we ask someone to look at our work, we must keep this in mind. Read Davin's excellent post yesterday about knowing your reviewer's language.

(3) Many of you thought this paragraph was a first paragraph. All I have to say about this is please please please understand that your first paragraph is no more important than any other paragraph in a book. Seriously, I've never been one to open a book in a store and read the first paragraph. I usually open up to the middle and judge from there if it sounds like something I'd like to read.

(4) Most importantly, and the one thing I've noticed lately, is that many of us seem to get sucked into RULES. Rules drive me crazy. A lot of the "fixes" that writers made here today reminded me of rules we've all learned about writing. Purple prose is bad. Adverbs are bad. Passive voice is bad. A huge long paragraph is bad. Too many adjectives, subject confusion, vague details, and on and on and on.

If it works, it works. Don't be afraid to bend rules, break them, see if they work. I really liked some of the rewrites in the comments section. Some great writing going on! Several of you changed the voice to your own, and quite well. I think that's great! I think it's wonderful that you can take a piece of writing and know your own voice well enough to rewrite something like that - and make it work.

(Not that we should be rewriting classic pieces of literature! But this was an experiment, after all.)

I guess what I want to say is when you read, critique, and write, keep an open mind. I read a great post on Scott's blog (A Writer's Blog) awhile ago about a famous violinist who went totally overlooked in a metro station in Washington D.C. "Joshua Bell playing incognito in the metro station was organized by the Washington Post as part of a social experiment about perception, taste and priorities of people." It's a great post. Go read it.

In conclusion, thank you once again for participating! I hope you learned something here today. I know I did!

Learning The Language of Your Book Reviewers

I've had the luxury of taking several writing classes in the last few years. Mostly, critique sessions within those classes take on a standard structure: Writer hands out the story. Reviewers read it and give comments on what they think is working and what isn't.

But, occasionally, I've found myself in groups that like to mix it up a little. Some alternative critique styles include:

A) Only saying positive things

B) Only asking questions

C) Letting the reading start off another conversation, any type of conversation.

The first two methods probably seem at least sensible, even if they aren't your preferred method. You may think that it isn't helpful to not get direct comments on what isn't working, but I'd argue that sometimes these alternatives let us see our work in a different way. The third method, at first, seemed completely pointless to me. I wrote a story, and the group started talking about Thai food! Then, I stepped back and remembered that the people leading the discussions were writers that had been working for decades. Like, four decades. Maybe they knew something I didn't know.

When we let someone read our work and they give us feedback on it, this isn't a one-way road. Remember that who the person is affects their response as much as your actual writing does. Rather than take a comment at face value--"I didn't like your protagonist"--figure out why your reviewer didn't like the protagonist. It may because the reader doesn't like anyone who isn't a vegetarian, or anyone who isn't from Jupiter. As objective as a reviewer tries to be, they come to your work with expectations, and you should try to know what those expectations are. Learn the language of your book reviewer.

Getting back to my third example of critique styles, what I realized was that these digressions my teachers allowed to happen were pretty good reflections of what non-writing readers would do after reading a story. Rather than thinking about how it could be better--which also happens, I'm sure--many readers will simply let the piece sink in and affect their thoughts and their moods. That's good to know, and if I didn't want the conversation to stray a certain way, I had to think about what I was putting into the story that triggered those thoughts. To this day, this reviewing style helps me when I write. Almost any review, as cryptic as it may seem at first, has the potential to be helpful.

What's the most mysterious comment you've ever gotten on your writing? What did you do to make sense of it? In the end, was it helpful?

The Past and the Pending

No, this isn't about verb tense. You can all breathe a sigh of relief. Today I want to talk about what a reader can reasonably expect in the way of historical accuracy from a writer.

I know there is a genre called "historical fiction" where real-life figures play roles in fictional stories, or where fictional characters play roles in actual historical events. In this genre, I am led to believe, readers expect a pretty well fleshed-out historical world, with loads of period detail and all of the story events must align properly with real-world events. Have I got that right? I don't actually read historical fiction; I merely report what I've been told.

I have, at this point in time, about five books pretty well planned out for future writing. All of them take place in the past. My last book was in the late 16th Century, my current book is in 1749 (in and around Maryland, USA), my next book will likely be set in England and then Antarctica around 1915, the book after that will be around Baltimore in 1910, and the one after that will be set in 1790. Possibly at some point I'll finish a book abandoned a decade ago called The Metaphysics of the Rat, which is set in 1612. So I'll be spending my writing life in the past.

While I do a ton of research when I'm writing about historical periods and places, I've come to realize that for me at least, when the needs of the story conflict with the realities of space and time (which is to say, real history), the story trumps actual fact. Although I don't write in the historical fiction genre, people have sometimes told me that this attitude, that a work of fiction--if it's not overtly some sort of alternative history--should be accurate in historical fact. That a writer should just make sure his research is deep enough to represent the places and times he choses for setting in a way that informed persons won't have cause to point to the work and say, "Wow, look at how dead wrong this is."

On the one hand, I do believe that you should know enough about your period and place that you don't put a cell phone in Magellan's hand or locate Madrid in Italy. On the other hand, if there was a massive earthquake in South America in 1950 and you want to incorporate that into your story set in 1948, I say go for it. The average reader just wants a compelling story, I think, and will let you gloss over facts if the truth of the characters is there.

So what's your opinion on this? Should a writer be sure of every one of his facts when writing about historical periods? Should someone like me have historians vet my stories against their professional knowledge? And when the story and the history are in conflict, is it incumbent upon writers to change their story to fit actual history?

I made this myself

Today, a simple question:

What would it take for you to buy and read a self-published book?

Stories and Not-Stories

As most of you hopefully know, the Literary Lab is conducting a short story contest. We've been getting submissions and hope to get a lot more by the cut-off date. Some of you can write very well, and it's been interesting and satisfying to read the entries.

One thing I have noticed, though, is that some of the "stories" which have come to us are not storylike. They might have good writing, but they are more non-stories. I don't mean that they are experimental and do creative things with form and narrative structure, I mean that these pieces are not stories at all. So I'd like to talk about the very basic idea of a story.

In my opinion, a story has to tell about an event. Something has to happen in the story. Some of the contest entries have been essentially responses to events: journal entries about how the writer feels about something which happened. But nothing actually happens in what we're reading. There is, as Davin likes to say, no movement. Nothing is different at the end of the story than it was at the start.

Something has to change in a story. You don't need to supply all the formal elements of exposition, rising conflict, inciting incident and reaction, climax and the like, but something has to change or happen or you don't have a story. If there is no event in your story, you likely have a non-story. At least that's my take on it.

My minimum standards for a story are that you must have the following elements:

1. An actor
2. An action

One thing I don't consider a story is this:

1. A narrator
2. An emotional state

at least, not if that's all there is to the piece.

But I'm open to suggestion and correction of my stodgy old views. So I ask you, a gang of writers, What Is A Story? How do you know when you have one, and what are the minimum requirements for a story?

This Roller Coaster's Going To Kill Me

photo by Jo Jakeman

Yesterday I made a comment in Davin's post about a wake-up call I got the night before. And like I said in the comment, this wake-up call is something I'll remember for a lifetime.

It was bad. My breath stopped. Tears came. I was horrified. I thought about deleting my blog, all my manuscripts, all my writing, and just crawl in a corner and hide for a solid week.

So I'm obviously overly dramatic. I drive my husband crazy most days. Still, this was a big deal for me. I had opened the document for a novel I haven't touched in a year. Somewhere along the line I'd built up this book as something magical, wonderful, a masterpiece that didn't need much work. I've let a lot of people read it. I always talk about it like it's going to be my debut novel. You know, it's something special.

Wow, was I wrong. I knew it needed cleaned up, but the further I got in the worse it got. It was so bad. Like purple-prose-clunky-flashback-gimmick bad. And all I could do was stare at the screen and remember how many people had read the book a year ago - and how good I thought it was. This book. My baby. All wrong. Talk about embarrassing.

Needless to say, I've had several friends talk me off the ledge. Thanks, you guys. I think we all go through this as writers. My experience is nothing unique, but this particular one opened my eyes.

Writing is such a roller coaster. We're blisfully happy with our work one second, and we're shredding ourselves to pieces over it the next. I think we reach a threshold, though- a place where we can see our work clearly, a place where we can make sure the writing doesn't interfere with the story. I think that's the point we can stop the roller coaster and look out across the possibility of a magnificent landscape (or maybe it's magnificent already). I must be getting to that point if I've been able to see all these problems in the manuscript.

As circumstances have it, though, I'll be putting this book aside once again. Although I've already cut it down from 92k to 68k, I don't think it's ready for more intensive surgery quite yet. Who knows, six months from now I'll probably see even more things wrong with it. How on earth are we ever happy with what we write? How do you deal with that?


~MDA (aka Glam)

Something Borrowed Something Blue

Okay, so the post title doesn't exactly fit, but I wanted to build off of Scott's "Old and New" post yesterday. Shoot me.

I AM going to talk about something blue, however, and surely these thoughts are borrowed, mostly from Harold Bloom. Maybe "Something Harold Something Blue" would have been a better title.

I'm a slight depressive. I like to be depressed. I used to fight it--being surrounded by people who are happy made me think that I was supposed to be happy too. Then, a few years ago, I had a shift in my world view. I decided that I liked experiencing a fuller range of emotions. I didn't mind feeling sadness as long as I wasn't sad all the time. (Strangely, this made feeling sad a happy experience, which perhaps messes up my logic.)

It's probably not surprising, then, that some of my stories are about depressing topics. I used to think this was amateurish--don't we seem to dwell on the depressing dramas when we first pour our hearts out? But, as I was recently reading some criticism by Harold Bloom, I saw how he was celebrating many dark writers. Bloom doesn't admire Faulkner because Faulkner knows how to show and not tell. No, Bloom admires Faulkner because Faulkner has explored and beautifully rendered the dark side of his characters. So, while a trickling steam of rejections has been depressing me lately, I feel hopeful after reading about the classics discussing depression.

Same thing with sympathetic characters. I can get caught up in rooting for a protagonist as much as the next reader. But, I'm still fascinated by the Momoi Gimpeis and the Joe Christmases and the Brods and the Mahlkes--the characters that seem to maneuver despite their hopelessness and nihilism.

But, I wonder: has the range of literary acceptability gotten smaller over the decades? Do people--even a small subset of people--still want to read about darkness? Or, more generally, do people still want to explore books about a variety of emotions, or have we centered more on reading for joy? Or, am I alone?

Everything Old Is New Again

I play the violin. Not brilliantly, but not so badly, either. I have taken lessons, what we in the business call “classical training,” which means that I am in my own small way part of a tradition that goes back to about 1700. I’ve also studied music history, theory and composition, which means that I have an awareness of the way classical music has evolved over the last 300 years, each successive generation of players and composers building on the developments of the previous generation. Even the avant garde composers, the serialists, the atonalists and the minimalists have written music that is directly connected to this tradition, no matter how weird the music seems on the surface. Excuse all the backstory.

Yesterday Davin Malasarn (who elsewhere curiously implies that I have the brain of a starfish, which calls for an explanation, DM) posted about writing something that does not try to be experimental, that tries to conform to traditional storytelling. Which got me thinking. I pause to reflect on how so many of my posts these days are responses to things Davin and Michelle have posted. Excuse the digression.

Anyway, Davin’s plan to write something in a traditional manner with a traditional structure made me realize something about my own journey as a writer. In brief, my writerly evolution has gone something like this:

1. Lots of reading as a kid, sparking a desire to see my own name on a book cover.

2. Trying to write like the authors I admired.

3. Failing to write like the authors I admired.

4. Trying to write nothing like the authors I admired, trying to be “original” and “experimental” to “find my own voice.”

5. Failing to come up with any Earth-shattering new way of writing.

6. Trying to write like the authors I admired.

What I think happened at steps 2 and 3 is that I didn’t know enough about the craft of storytelling to be able to write the way I really wanted to write. The authors I admired all knew how to tell stories. These writers were part of the literary traditions that stretched back from present day all the way to Aristotle’s Poetics. Even if the writers I admired didn’t know Aristotle, they were writing in ways that reflected his ideas about narrative, character, dramatic tension and conflict, et cetera.

In the end, I think we all return to some kind of traditional storytelling (even the current experimental writers like J.M. Coetzee and Italo Calvino), because we tend to understand stories in a certain way, and writing to that understanding makes our stories meaningful to our readers. I also think that the step of striking out on our own and trying things we’ve never seen attempted is important, so that we have unique and individual writerly experiences that we can bring back to the traditional forms when we do return. Sort of like the prodigal son returning with war stories and battle scars and knowledge gained of the outside world. Or something. My starfish brain struggles with similes this morning.

What I’m getting at is this: to try new things and experiment is important and, likely, necessary to growth as a writer. But in the end, basic storytelling and prose skills are what will find us a readership and make our work valuable. I know too many talented writers who, when their experimental phase didn’t get them published, gave up writing entirely. I think of myself as a traditional sort of writer, but even so, I try new things in every piece I write. But I don’t concentrate so much on the experimental side of things these days; my first priority is writing a coherent narrative and telling an interesting story. Do I know, really, where I’m going with this rambling post? Not so much. Mostly, I am sharing my amusement that I have come full-circle on my writerly journey, and am back to trying to write like the authors I admire.

Wallowing in Conformity

As some of you know, I've stopped working on my novel, Rooster, for a couple of months now. I can still think of ways to make it better, but I also think the project deserves a rest. It captures a time, and that time is over...for now. I've started a couple of other projects, but both of them are still in the highly experimental phase. Because of that, I've felt trapped in a sort of writing limbo.

Along comes NaNoWriMo, a month dedicated to the completion of a new novel. I figure what better opportunity to try something new. So, I've decided to go out on a limb, scribble outside the lines, step out of my comfort zone and...conform.

Yes, yes, as artists, we often challenge ourselves to be original. And, truly, I think this is an important (though not strictly essential) concept that all artists must confront. But, I think there's also something to be said for being able to imitate the classics.

The downside to conformity, even temporary conformity, is that we may never be able to scrub that unoriginality out of our brain cavity once we squish it in there. But, I subscribe to the idea that knowledge is power. I'm up for the challenge of breaking out of tradition rather than never knowing what tradition is to begin with.

Thus, for the next few weeks, I'm working on a novel structured traditionally, with traditionally sympathetic characters, and traditional primal conflicts. In homage to Scott G. F. Bailey, I'm spending the rest of October in the outlining and researching phase. I've been reading Fairy Tales from the Brothers Grimm. And, tonight, I'm arranging colored index cards into a three act structure after having spent the first part of the weekend reading Save The Cat. November will be devoted to writing this new book, currently titled The Collectors. And, if I hate it, I figure I've only lost a month.

I'm hoping, through this experiment on non-experimentation, to pick up some good story-telling habits. I'm also hoping to direct my creativity into other areas of the storytelling process. By fixing certain elements, like structure, my creative energy will flow into other avenues, like scene building and character traits, that will force me to think in a different way. As Icelandic superstar Bjork says, "The less room you give me, the more space I've got."

What do you think? Is it worthwhile to be traditional? Should we master the old ways before we step out in new directions? Is conforming on some elements a good way to force creativity on other elements?

Let's Watch the Paint Dry

In case you missed it, Rick Daley is holding a short fiction (300-500 words) contest over on The Public Query Slushpile. It looks like fun. As much fun as watching paint dry, even! Go check it out!

A Man's Got To Know His Limitations

Earlier this week, Davin posted about the idea of experts versus novices, and how they view processes and fields of learning in different ways. It got me thinking about how one indicator that we are learning our craft is when we can recognize things we don't do well. If we can see our own limits, that means we have a big enough picture of what writing is to know how well our skills fit within that picture. As we write more and grow as writers, these limits get farther out and the things we need to work on become more subtle and personal. Thinking about showing and not telling, for example, maybe becomes thinking about how summarizing a scene will impact the imagery we're using and how that will affect the long-term shape of the narrative. The concept of dialogue will evolve from ideas about breaking it up with beats and tags into ideas about, maybe, the weight of individual words and the rhythm of the exchanges and how that works with the rhythm of the book's voice.

Anyway, I am sure that every established writer, no matter how many books she has published, is aware of things she'd like to do better. Even the ones who tell you otherwise and repeat a mantra of "don't get it right; get it written." I'm not talking about perfectionism here (though it's one of my many annoying traits as a writer) so much as I'm talking about awareness of not quite getting what we want down onto the page and seeing that we ought to work harder at what we can't quite do satisfactorily.

For example, I have a tendency to sort of hedge my bets when writing. I will sometimes refuse to commit to a specific meaning in a story, by which I mean that I can't decide exactly how someone feels about a situation, so that character will talk about it in vague terms. You know they feel something but I won't tell you what it is because I don't want to decide. Decisions are hard work, and have implications for the remainder of the story, so I'll write passages that could have more than one meaning--not to be clever, but because I just don't know. I wish I'd knock that off.

I also think that I don't pay as much attention to setting and detail as I should. Mostly that's because I am more interested in character than in details, or maybe I'm just telling myself that because writing setting and detail is a weak spot. In my current book, I am forcing myself to slow down and focus more on the physical details of the fictional world, and I don't like it because I don't do it well, but my hope is that when I've finished the first draft of the WIP, I'll have trained myself to do this kind of writing better. That which does not kill me makes me stronger, and all of that.

So I'm wondering, are you aware of the current limits of your craft? Are you consciously working on them? What's the most recent breakthrough you've had in your writing?

More importantly: It's Friday! This weekend cannot come too soon.

Ummm, you want to read what?

photo by laura604

Last spring I sent out the 2nd draft of one of my novels to over 30 people. THIRTY PEOPLE. Amazingly enough, 18 of those 30 actually read the entire book and gave me a full critique. Some of those readers, bless their hearts, pretty much line edited all 101,000 words. (It's now down to 71,000).

I remember sitting at my desk with all 18 critiques open on my computer. I tried to find a paper bag as my breaths kept coming shorter and shorter, but nothing was in sight. Instead I closed the critiques as fast as I could and ran outside for some fresh air. What was I thinking!? The more feedback I got, the better? Oh, groan groan groan.

No offense to any of the wonderful, smart, and incredibly helpful readers who read my book last spring, but all that great advice kind of sent me into overload. It took me a few months to decide what I should do. Much of the advice bordered on the major revision side. I finally decided to rewrite the whole book - like, open a new document rewrite the whole book. So I did. Now I'm finished again.

I think one of the most flattering things a person can do is tell you they want to read your book - that they're dying to read your book. Really? My book! Wow, of course you can! Let me polish it up and send it right over.

Then I remember the paper bag.

This is difficult for me to admit because I'm always afraid it will keep people from telling me they're interested in my work - but I'm becoming increasingly more careful about who and when I let others read my work. Is this a bad thing? How do you decide who and when will help you with your work? Do you let people read just for fun, or is it always for a beta-reader type critique?


~MDA (aka Glam)

How to become a (writing) expert

Yesterday I went to a seminar on the science of education. The speaker was Nobel Laureate Carl Wieman, and he presented some tips on teaching and learning in the sciences that I realized could also apply to writers.

Dr. Wieman's first point was that novices and experts in a field have different belief systems. Novices believe that the things they learn function as individual pieces to be memorized. They believe this information is handed down to them from authority figures. And, their technique for problem solving is to match a given problem to something they had memorized and learned to solve before.

Experts, on the other hand, believe that the content of a subject matter can be organized and grouped in coherent ways. They believe that information is based on the observations in nature and that problem-solving can be approached by concept-based strategies that are widely applicable.

The problem with this difference is that most classes are taught with novices in mind. Individual pieces of information are presented, and teachers expect them to be memorized. And, what happens, is that novices leave a class feeling more novice-like than they did before they started. They are MORE scared of the subject matter they wanted to master.

How does this apply to us?

Well, think about all the things we are learning from each other, all these so-called rules: no adverbs, no telling, no shifts in tense, and on and on and on. If we try to memorize all of these things as individual rules that we must apply because people tell us to, we will forever be novices. If we approach them as novices, we will stay novices.

But, if we are able to organize these rules, know what their function is, then they become tools for solving a bigger problem. We will be able to USE the rules rather than FOLLOW them.

So, I'd like to suggest that we writers organize all these rules. Instead of memorizing them as individual pieces, let's let them fall into a broader category, dominated by the bigger rule, WRITE AN INTERESTING BOOK.

If you are faced with taking out an adverb or making the book less interesting, keep the adverb. If not telling also makes the book not interesting, then tell. These rules are meant to serve a bigger purpose, and we should all keep this purpose in mind.

So, where are you? Do you consider yourself a novice or an expert? And, if you're calling yourself a novice, what will it take for you to change your mind?

No, Let Me Explain That

One of the biggest issues writers struggle with is clarity of structure, telling a book-length story that makes sense all the way through. Just writing a straightforward narrative from a single POV in a more-or-less unbroken span of time is hard enough. The further your storytelling method gets from that, by shifting points of view, changing timelines and settings, mixing narrative styles and the like, the less clear the narrative becomes to your reader, and the more careful we writers must be to make certain our readers can follow us along. Unless, of course, your intent is to confuse or bemuse your reader, in which case you should ignore the remains of this post. But let's assume you want your narrative to be completely comprehensible to your reader, and talk about some issues that affect clarity.

First issue: The writer is unsure of his intent. I know that in my own writing, there have been passages where even I'm not able to say exactly what is going on. A scene or bit of dialogue is vague and while it seems important, nobody can point out why. This happens when I don't quite know what I want to happen. I know that I need some kind of scene there, but I don't know exactly what that scene should be, so I put in a sort of placeholder and hope it all becomes clear later on. Scenes like this are not only useless, because they add nothing to the story, they in fact do harm by baffling your reader and possibly putting them to sleep as you ask them to tread water or run in place for a while as you think about your story and then move on.

Second issue: The writer forgets that the reader is not a mindreader. This is what happens when the writer makes some sort of shift in the way the story is being told and forgets to tell the reader the shift has taken place. For example, you change POVs with each chapter or several chapters, and you don't bother to show right away that the POV has changed. The reader is suddenly in the land of "Huh? What the hell is going on?" That can be cool if you're going for that effect, but if you're not, then pay attention to the clues you give (or don't) to the reader.

Third issue: The writer puts in vague transitional devices. This is similar to the second issue, but the writer thinks she has warned the reader that the narrative has switched from, say, first-person action in the "story present" to journal entries or letters or something else. Often this is accompanied by a change in POV or voice or verb tense, but sometimes not. It can look, to a reader who hasn't been warned that he's now reading a diary instead of being told a story by a narrator, like nothing more than sloppy writing.

The second and third issues frequently crop up when we're trying to be subtle and not hit our readers over the heads with big signposts saying "POV SHIFT HERE." One thing I've learned is that what we think is subtle is often merely invisible or nonexistant to readers, and what we think is heavy-handed is often not. Because we are so familiar with the story, we sometimes lack the critical distance to know the difference. This is why trusted readers are important.

So, the big lessons here:

1. Know what you mean to say, and say it. If you have to explain it to a reader outside their reading, the words on the page don't work and have to be rewritten.

2. The more clever you are with structure, the greater your chance of losing your reader, so be prepared to do extra work clarifying what's going on. Books that shift POVs often have chapter titles with the POV character's name for this reason.

3. The more literary devices you employ, such as journals, letters, found books and the like, the more work you have to do to set those passages off from the rest of the narrative.

What's the best way to delineate between these changes in structural elements? Contrast. If your POV characters all sound the same, why are you bothering? If your narrator's journal entries sound like her narration, what's the difference or the point? Don't just hijack someone's storytelling methods because they were cool in his book; make sure they have an actual function in your own book, and think in terms of function and not of coolness value. If it doesn't make sense, it is nonsense, right?

The Writer's Writer

Recently, I passed an excerpt of my current WIP, Bread, to Scott and Michelle for their feedback. I was happy to hear that this new story was working for them both, but one thing Scott mentioned in his review was that he appreciated that I was "following ideas for longer stretches" than I did in Rooster, which is composed mostly of short chapters (as usual, I blame Tolstoy for this).

This comment thrilled me, but it also got me thinking about the idea of being a writer's writer.

After all, Scott and Michelle can appreciate that I'm following ideas for longer stretches because they know how hard it is to do that themselves. But, would the average non-writing reader feel the same way? Would they care at all?

For me, writing longer chapters was a challenge I gave myself. At the same time, I have no idea if longer chapters makes a better book. Even with Rooster, my last book, one of the things I'm most proud of is that I was able to write from the point of view of multiple characters. But this again could be something readers don't care about...or even get annoyed by! Let's face it, a lot of the things we do as writers get unnoticed by readers.

Okay, okay, we hope that readers still pick up on these skills, even if they aren't aware of them. Perhaps, they can detect that something is better about a book, though they can't quite identify what that something is. But, is it possible that a lot of what makes writing great can only be recognized by people who have done a ton of reading, who have dissected it, who have compared it to other works?

Is there a benefit to being a writer's writer beyond the favorable pat on the back by our colleagues?

Influence and Voice

Yesterday, Lady Glamis posted about voice, which got me thinking. About voice. In my last novel, which is set in 16th-century Europe and plunders Shakespeare's "Hamlet," my narrator and all the characters speak in a sort of modernized Elizabethan speech. It's very distinctive but nothing at all like the way I write or speak in real life. My current work-in-progress is set in 18th-century Colonial America, and while I'm not totally sure how my characters should talk yet (still doing research on that), the narrative voice is more modern than in my last book, but still has a sort of formal, old-fashioned tone. Again, it's not how I talk or write in real life.

As I said in my comment yesterday to Lady Glamis' post, I think that beneath the narrative voices lies my own authorial voice somewhere, which presents in the way the rhythms of the prose work, in word choice, in sentence and paragraph construction. Even though the Hamlet-based book was heavily influenced by the language of Shakespeare, and my current book is heavily influenced by the language of Hemingway and Melville and possibly people like Thomas Hardy and Charles Dickens, I think that not only does each book have its own unique voice, they both also have my own unique voice.

Which gets me thinking about influence upon authorial voice. Davin Malasarn, as anyone who's read his posts for any length of time should know, is a big fan of Count Leo Tolstoy. Yet Davin's writing doesn't sound like Tolstoy, it sounds like Davin. Which is good, because I am a big fan of Mr. Malasarn's writing. His book ROOSTER is written in a clear, shining voice that gives space for the characters to act and the reader to see. My own prose, despite my love of Hemingway, is dense and can become overcrowded with multiple meanings if I don't watch myself. So how much actual influence is there on us from the writers we admire most? What is it that we take from reading their works? What, exactly, is the influence Tolstoy is having on Davin and what is the influence Hemingway is having on me?

I think there might be a large gap between our favorite authors and the stamp those writers make on our writing. Which is curious and strange but I think it's true. I think that when we really admire to the point, maybe, of worshipping some writer, they may have less actual impact on us than writers we don't love as much.

When I wrote my very first novel about 15 years ago, I was trying very hard to write in the style of Flannery O'Connor, a sort of bizarre religion-centered Southern Gothic darkness. That novel is really awful, so bad that I gave up writing for about a decade in fact, but in a lot of ways I got the O'Connor voice on the page. But I'll never try that hard again to imitate another writer, at least not consciously. I have since then learned that I write better when I'm not trying to copy someone else.

Also, I think that when we really admire a writer, as we come into our own as writers and start to find our own authorial voices, we avoid anything that sounds like our writing heroes, even if we don't know we're doing it. I want to write like Hemingway, but I don't want to have written something that's a rip-off of Hemingway or anyone else. I think Davin won't write like Tolstoy because Davin is trying to write like Davin. Possibly, what each of us wants is to have the command of craft that our favorites have, to command the same affect upon readers these guys pulled off. But not so much to sound like them. Maybe.

I know that reading a lot of Shakespeare has given me a new appreciation of the way words sound together, and of the games you can play with double-meanings in dialogue. I know that Hemingway has given me an appreciation of clarity and simply saying what you mean. Flannery O'Connor had a great economical way of describing action that I admire and try to emulate. Melville enjoyed the sound of his own voice and really understood the concept of telling details. Dostoyevski and Gunter Grass and A.S. Byatt know how to show people at their best and their worst, to create deep characters that remain with readers. I've tried to learn from all of these people, but I don't think I sound like any of them. If there was one thing I would like to still learn, it would be maybe Ivan Turgenov's way of relaxing into the prose and making the reader see the broad sweep of the landscape surrounding the action, all with a couple of sentences.

So we come to the questions du jour: Who are your favorite writers? Do you try to write like them or not? What's the one thing you'd like to learn from another writer?

Two Voices...and Penguins

MG Higgins recently did a post that sparked my thoughts about voice. I normally hate the term voice. It annoys me because it's such a slippery term; it can mean so many different things depending on how you look at it and who's defining it.

I propose this today that there are at least two voices in every work. Did you know that the emperor penguin, like most birds, has a two-part organ that produces its "voice?" In most birds, these two parts of the organ are used separately from each other, but in several species of penguins, they're used together. Especially with the emperor penguin. Because there's no possible way for the penguins that mate together to find each other's nests in order to switch off "egg warming" duty, they must use their distinct voice pattern to recognize each other for the rounds.

Hmm, two voices creating a distinct voice that matches no other. Because there're a lot of penguins waddling around on that ice.


Which Two?
First, I've noticed in every novel I've written, there are two voices. The first one?

My voice.

I think this is something extremely hard to lose or avoid unless, like I've done before, you're being dishonest with yourself and trying to write something that's not who you are. Every writer has a voice. It just sort of happens. And it's not something I feel you can consciously alter. Our experiences make it what it is. It shows through in every word choice, every sentence construction. In my opinion, referring to MG Higgins's post, this voice does not change.

The other one?

Your narrator's voice.

This is often the Main Character, but think of it in terms of the essential viewpoint character, the one you cannot tell the story without. They have a voice, just like you do. In my novel, Monarch, I have three POV characters, but only one is the essential viewpoint of the story, and he flavors everything, even the other viewpoints. In my opinion, this voice should change.

Like MG says:

In my novel, my main character makes an important life decision and becomes more self-aware. So she shouldn't sound exactly the same on the last page as she does on the first. She's still spunky (since that's a personality trait), but not as sarcastic. And she's more relaxed because her decision has been made.

Remember the Penguin
So like the penguins, try to remember that you've got dual voices going on, and that they should work together to create a feel for that novel, and that novel alone. This is how we can write completely different novels that feel distinct, but the same. Our voice usually doesn't change (unless over a long period of time as we change) but each essential viewpoint will change for a different book (outside of a series, I suppose).

MG said she has a hard time separating personality traits that don't change from a situational-based personality trait that's more pliable. Those pliable traits, like MG's character's sarcasm, are what make a story arc exciting. When a character actually changes their worldview because of the action, choices they make, etc., that's when the story gets exciting. They change. They grow. Their voice should change to reflect that!


Question For the Day: Do you feel like you have two voices going on in your work? How does it help you, if you do?


~MDA (aka Glam)

Tense? Just Relax.

Bridget Chicoine asked: "When is it okay to mix past and present tense? Is it ever okay?"

Bridget, the short answer is yes, it's okay to mix tenses, even in the same sentence.

Tense helps to convey time in our stories. There are several different tenses, but the variations can be clumsily lumped into past tense (I walloped), present tense (I wallop), and future tense (I will wallop). (The variations include phrases like "I was walloping", "I might wallop", "I have walloped", and others.)

For those of us who refuse to break grammatical rules, changes in tense are perfectly acceptable in a given passage if different times are described in that passage:

I wallop for a living. I first walloped when I was sixteen, and I will wallop until I retire.

For those of us who happily break the rules, tense can be used to create certain dramatic effects, even if they aren't strictly correct. In Light In August, William Faulkner frequently changes tenses, with the idea--so critics say--that the sudden shift from past to present brings more immediacy to the story:

He drove on, the wagon beginning to fall into its slow and mileconsuming clatter. Neither does he look back. Apparently he is not looking ahead either, because he does not see the woman sitting in the ditch beside the road until the wagon almost reached the top of the hill.

What do you all think of that?

I may be wrong (someone correct me if I am), but I think older stories were usually written in past tense. Only recently, with writers like John Updike, did present tense prose come into vogue. I personally adopted the present tense in my novel Rooster because I thought the story felt more exciting that way, like it was unfolding in the moment. But, be warned, writing in present tense third person POV can bring out an unsettling side effect when you are doing public readings. Most of your verbs will end in S, and those S's sure like to call attention to themselves. Suffering succotash.

Questions: What tense do you prefer to write in and why? Have you used tense shifts for dramatic purposes? Did it work?

Step Into My Office

Lois Moss had a post yesterday about music and the positive effect it has on her while writing. Making off with that idea of hers, I am thinking about the writing process in general, and what things are necessary in order to get the work done.

Over the years, my minimum requirements for the right surroundings have shrunk to almost nothing: a stable writing surface, good paper, a good pen and nobody speaking to me. For years I wrote in restaurants and a decent (or just any) meal with coffee was a requirement before I could write, but I've written on crowded buses, on lawns, on planes, in cars and just about anywhere where I could be ignored and open my notebook. It doesn't matter if there's music playing, or people talking around me as long as they aren't talking to me, or where I am. Good light is important, though, especially as I get older. There's a great pho restaurant nearby that's just too dimly lit for me to write in, which is a pity because I like their pho and they have big tables.

At home, Mighty Reader and I set aside a room that's part library (though it only holds about a third of our books, if that), part sunroom (the cat spends a lot of time on the chaise lounge by the window), part music room (it's where I keep the guitar and the violins) and part writing room. We set up my writing table, a couple of lamps, my printer on a stand and my laptop there, and allegedly it's where I'll write my books. Certainly that's where I type up my revisions and new work, but I haven't actually written anything there. Time at home, alas, is still mostly given over to working on the house or recuperating from long days at the office. So even though I do most of my writing in restaurants and on the bus these days, I still have a dedicated space in the house set aside for writing, and here's what the view looks like from my chair:



There's a rack of CDs behind my chair that you can't see, and I can hook my laptop up to my small-but-powerful speakers so that, on those days when I actually do use the writing room, I can listen to music. There's no pattern to music played while writing, either. It's pretty much whatever comes on the iTunes shuffle or whatever disk I grab blind from behind me off the CD rack.

So what I'm wondering is: what are your minimum requirements for writing? What things make it impossible for you (for me, it's people talking to me but not much else)? Got a photo of your writing space at home? I don't think you can actually post those in comments, but maybe you could email them to me and I'll add them to this post. That might be cool. We'll see. For now, let's just see under what sort of conditions we've all been laboring.

Additions! Rick Daley and Annie Louden have bravely sent me photos of their writing spaces. Here's Rick's:



And here's Annie's:



This is where Davin Malasarn writes. I assume the green book is Tolstoy:



You'll notice that none of them has a stuffed Gir:



Which is why I rule.

Why Stevi Carroll Reads

We thought it would be interesting to ask people the simple question: Why do you read? Here's our first installment, a fascinating article written by my dear friend Stevi Carroll, who recently started her own blog, Geezer Chick:

Davin asked me to write about why I read books. In a spirit of full disclosure (isn’t transparency all the rage these days?), I have to admit that until I was around 12 or 13, all I read were comic books, Archie and Veronica (see Sherman Alexie’s TONTO AND THE LONE RANGER FISTFIGHT IN HEAVEN to see how those characters can be used), Little Dot, and Richie Rich are a few I remember now. Sixth grade brought the Oz books to me, and I ate them up like candy, but they were better for my teeth. I spent seventh grade in Jeffery City, Wyoming, a mining town of 24 houses, around 100 trailers and a bunkhouse. I presently have a library larger and more diverse than the loaning library housed in a small room in the Quonset hut that also served as the movie theater, hair salon, dance studio for ballroom dancing for the teenagers, and church, Catholic Mass on Monday evenings. I was a little light on the reading that year. I lived in a larger town for eighth grade, and I don’t remember if St. Joseph’s School had a library or not. I did not venture into any public library that might have been available, but to help me pass the summer in another new town, my father loaned me his copy of James Michener’s HAWAII, and by the time I stepped into St. Joseph’s in the fall, I’d finished it. HAWAII was my first ‘grown-up’ book, and I still have that copy. Then the big switcheroo happened. My family moved to Redwood City, California, on the San Francisco Peninsula, and there I found a real public library. Whoa! Years after my first pass through those library doors, I wandered in and saw a book called HOW TO CHANGE YOUR OWN LAST NAME. That was my magical ticket to the last name I now have.

Another full disclosure: I’m white. When I was in second grade, my family lived in Grand Junction, Colorado. Uranium was a hot item lighting up defense contracts, and Grand Junction was part of the Southwest USA’s mining business. For some reason, two Negro girls were in my class. One chilly day, we were lined up around the classroom in front of the radiators when one of the girls admitted she had to go to the toilet and asked permission to leave the room. The teacher said no and the girl urinated on herself. My skull crawled with discomfort. Around that same time I think I may have told my father not say ‘nigger’ in our house anymore. I might have made that up because I wanted to say that. Moab, Utah, another uranium town with both a mine some place outside of town and a mill just across the Colorado River, is where I spent third, fourth and fifth grades. One over-90-degree summer afternoon, a cattle truck pulled up the dusty downtown street as my mother and I stood waiting to cross it. When I saw Navajo women disembark from the back of the truck dressed in heavy skirts and thick velvet blouses, looking hot and dusty, I asked my mother why these women, a number of men, and a bunch of kids rode into town in the back of a cattle truck. As I recall, she said, “They like it like that.” To me they looked hot and sticky; she might have been right. Right? The bed of a hot dusty cattle truck for miles across the desert. I really wondered about that. During eighth grade in Rawlins, Wyoming, and St. Joseph’s School, I got to see white superiority and Latino inferiority, except for the kid called Speedy Gonzales who was a really versatile athlete. As I said before, ninth grade took me to the Bay Area so for the first time in school I got to see real Black/White separation with the kids from East Palo Alto hanging together, except for the athletes, pretty much away from the White kids and vice versa, or rarely the twain should meet. One of the first books I remember checking out of the Redwood City Public Library is MAN’S MOST DANGEROUS MYTH: THE FALLACY OF RACE by Ashley Montagu. Books not only entertain me, they also explain what I observe and wonder about.

Topics other than race have interested me over the years. The Holocaust threaded its way through my pleasure reading a long time. The Vietnam War era held some sway with my reading for a while. Nuclear weapons have had their moment to be held close to my heart of reading. Murder mysteries have helped me see the bad guys get theirs, especially helpful when I would like someone or a few people removed for their perceived misdeeds. I’m always happy when I see timely topics lived out in novels.

I think it was November when the school district I taught in celebrated National Education Week. If it’s national, I guess it wasn’t just my school district. I’d bring in a number of books that have helped me become the person I am today. I’d take in different kinds of books from HAWAII to this transactional analysis book I credit with saving my life to BETWEEN PARENT AND CHILD to THE PROPHET. Often, my youngsters would be impressed by the sheer number of books I’d read. When I’d tell them I’d read EVEN more books than those, whoa, big geek points for me.

I love the ways authors craft sentences. Although I do not remember the exact quote, I do remember that in A ROOM OF ONE’S OWN, Virginia Woolf uses a woman’s flowing hair to describe the flowing branches of a weeping willow. Elizabeth George is such a card in CARELESS IN RED. I listen to books as well as read them. CARELESS is a CD book. As I drove in to the gym parking lot, EG via her book was talking about how thin a medical examiner was by saying, “as thin as a spinster’s hopes for marriage.” Thirty years ago I would have wanted to rip her stomach out (nonviolently of course) and feed it to her, but recently? I sat in my car laughing for a minute or two. Maybe BEING PEACE by Thich Nhat Hanh helped with my transformation; I know that book helped me not take teenage snottiness personally.

I usually have a book or magazine with me. I never know when I might have to wait for a few minutes and what better way to pass my time than reading a passage or two or perhaps a poem or part of a news article. Books slow me down. One of my favorite times of day is when I go to bed. I warm up some milk, brush my teeth, put on my jammies, and snuggle in with a book. I might get two pages read or four, but no matter how many I read, I know when my eyelids get droopy, I can close my book, shut off the light, and have a restful sleep.

Conjunction Malfunction

A long time ago, in a galaxy indistinguishable from this one, Davin wrote this post about the word "and." His concern in that post is the bad practice of linking conflicting descriptive words or phrases together when we can't decide exactly what we're saying. It's a good post, well worth reading if you haven't already, but this post is about a different misuse of the word "and."

One less than elegant stylistic habit I have in first drafts (and sometimes shamefully in subsequent drafts) is to write seemingly endless sentences that chain actions together with the word "and." I'm wordy, I'm a fan of the long sentence, and often I'm simply not paying attention. So I'll have an action sequence of some sort that follows the pattern:

I did [action] and then [action] until I [action] and then I [action].

This rarely comes out well, especially if there are prepositional phrases and objects in the sentence, like:

I cut the ropes on the parachutes and then pulled my pistol from its holster while taking hold of Harry's harness and dragging him to safety in the underbrush, dodging the spears flying at us from the trees to the south.

I'm sure that the action is fine, but I think that long sentences like this, when they're essentially just strings of verbs, usually work better if we break them up. Maybe like so:

I cut the ropes on the parachutes and pulled my pistol from its holster. Taking hold of Harry's harness, I dragged him to safety in the underbrush. Spears flew at us from the trees to the south.

Or variations on that theme. There are plenty of ways to divide that passage into separate sentences.

Recently (okay, it was today) I came across the following in my own writing:

“Aye, and so can I,” the bursar answered as I stepped around him and walked out of the building.

I have a bad habit of using the I did [action] as I [another action] construction. Occasional use is fine, but too much of it does weird things to the rhythm of the prose. There's nothing particularly wrong with that sentence of mine, but in the context of the scene it strikes me as clumsy, so I'm getting rid of the "as" and just writing:

“Aye, and so can I,” the bursar answered. I stepped around him and walked out of the building.

That's much more satisfying to me. I like the full stop after "answered."

I think that a lot of times when we look at sentences or passages that strike us as wrong, we immediately start trying to change the word choice ('the bursar answered?' Maybe 'said' instead. Or maybe 'stepped around' is wrong?) when what's really wrong might be as simple as the punctuation. Just a thought.

Also: See the link on the right, where it says "Want a topic discussed?" If you click on that link, you can tell us what sort of things you'd like Davin, Michelle and me to write about here at the Literary Lab. Because we aim to serve.

The. End.

I'm very close to finishing the complete rewrite of my novel, Monarch. This means I'm halfway through the last chapter, which means I'm trying to write as slowly as possible. I want to wrap everything up. I want to create an ending that satisfies both me and my readers.

I recently met with a blogging friend to discuss her novel. She looked at me with a dejected expression, her shoulders falling. Not a lot of people "got" her book, she said. Not a lot of people understood why it ends the way it does. We later figured out why, and I'm convinced that if her book sells, she'll have a lot of controversy over that ending even though it's a perfectly valid and good ending. I haven't read the book, but I know I'll love it if I do.

The truth is, we all like different endings. You can't write an end that will please every single reader. You know that saying you can't please 100% of the people 100% of the time? So true.

Either way, I'm interested to see what most of our readers like! So take a minute to vote on the few questions below. Yes, there is chocolate.

What makes a story ending satisfactory for you?

If you thoroughly enjoyed a book, but the ending is unhappy, are you likely to read it again?

Do you have to eat chocolate to finish a novel?

Are you planning on entering our Genre Wars Contest? Mark "yes" if you have already

Question For The Day: Since I didn't ask enough questions already, let me know where you're at with the end of your current novel. Have you planned it? Are you writing it? Do you just wait until you get there to figure it all out?


~MDA (aka Glam)