brian's blog: Diary of a Writer

forget the formula

2012-01-22T08:44:00.000-08:00

Bad Writing Advice #9: Write using a formula.

There are a lot of people out there who have story formulas they're trying to sell. And maybe they do work for some though I don't personally know any writer they work for. In most cases, I don't believe they work because writing is an organic act. You make a story come to life. Having to do X by page 49 and Y by page 61 and so on strangles the life out of your writing. This is not to say a writer shouldn't outline. Some do very well with an outline. It's not to say a writer can't plot and plan, but adherence to any formula throughout a manuscript robs it of the kind of spontaneity it needs to come to life.

You need, as a writer, to come upon surprises while you write and engage in those surprises in a way that they lead you to interesting shifts in story and character. You have to get down deep in yourself when you're writing and make connections between all the elements in your story. This requires intuitive leaps. Forget the formula.

Or so I think today.

Plot

2012-01-11T04:20:00.001-08:00

Einstein said something like make things as simple as possible but not simpler. Plot is rudimentary. It's what happens in a story. That's the simple version.

Jack and Jill go up the hill. Jack fetches a pail of water. On his way back to Jill he comes upon Sleeping Beauty and can't help kissing her. Jill catches them in the act. All the king's horses and all the king's men can't put Jack back together again.

I think you could complicate plot by adding that beyond what happens in the story there is what happens inside a character. The development of the character, her reaction to what happens in the story, is also a kind of internal plot, but if you want to keep it simple when trying to get into writing a story go back to the simple stories and ask what happens.

writing

2012-01-05T05:23:00.000-08:00

Recently I was reading Laura Ruby’s blog. Her novel, LILY’S GHOST, did very well when it came out six or seven years ago. But, as happens, it is now out of print. So she got her rights back and self-published the book (an e-book version) herself so the book lives on. That’s an example, I think, of how the new world of publishing can be a good thing for writers. I know there are other writers who are having success self-publishing after being traditionally published, too. They have an audience. I think this has happened in music. Many well-known musicians who aren’t “hot” enough for the big labels anymore do very well putting out their own songs or having a small recording company put them out.

Another example that I’ve seen discussed on-line in a few places is this situation: a first novel of a trilogy or series does pretty well but the publisher decides not to publish the second or third book because it didn’t do well enough for them. It may have less to do with the quality of the new manuscript than sales and perception of the potential sales at the publisher. Why shouldn’t the author publish the book if they still believe in it? The series probably already has some readers waiting for the next novel and it will be easier to publicize for this reason. Let the readers decide if it’s as good as the first book or other books in the series. So in this case, self e-publishing makes sense.

And I should add I’m for anything that gives writers more power and choices. E books definitely give writers more options. However, I think a lot of writers will self-publish and find disappointment. It’s hard, even with the backing of a publisher, for a book to get attention, get reviewed, and find readers. It will be even harder for new writers without any help.

And though we writers all complain about the lack of publisher support, publishers DO help every book. And they take care of all those little details and a lot of difficult non-writing work for the writer. I, for one, don’t want to devote my time to the whole publishing business. I want to devote my time to writing new stories.

I don’t really have any big insights. I just think it’s an interesting time. Though I’m aware of the Chinese curse, “May you be born in interesting times” I think all this change is kind of exciting. Will there be more good books out there? Hard to say. For example, someone who is good at sales and publicity has a great advantage in self-publishing over someone who isn’t. Their writing might not be very good but they get attention because they’re good salespeople while better work goes unnoticed. So someone skilled at selling sells their book well and gets noticed and someone who isn’t won’t. Fair? I suppose in a business sense yes but not an artistic one. A lot of good books will still go unnoticed.

At any rate, good or bad, changes are coming. There will be some opportunities in those changes, and some disappointments. We,as writers, just have to stay most focused on writing, on the thing we love.
Or so I think today.

story ideas

2011-12-14T05:11:00.000-08:00

Ideas might come directly from character. A lot of writers start with a character and make that character move forward. What that character wants and what gets in the way of that want is what powers the story.

So let’s say you have a little girl, a tomboy, and she’s got a very distinct Southern voice. She lives in a little town. She has a strange neighbor next door.

Now what? Seems a little generic. If the voice of the girl is strong, though, maybe this will help the writer find her way. Let’s say she has a brother and maybe a friend. They have some adventures.

Things begin to happen but if this story is just about the little girl and her friends, it might be good but it won’t be great. A Southern town during the time of segregation and the Depression and a social structure that creates inequality and promotes prejudice though adds another dimension. The setting is another idea of the author and the development of that setting broadens the story. But now we need some kind of inciting event. A black man is accused of raping a white woman. The girl’s father defends the black man.

I don’t really know how Harper Lee began her story, but somehow many, many ideas bloomed in what could have been the simple story of a girl growing up in a small town. Harper Lee found her way to this larger story situation and then was able to write it so vividly she created a great novel.

narrative current

2011-12-04T09:43:00.000-08:00

Narrative current helps hold a story together. So many stories do a lot of things well and struggle with just one or two major things and these make the manuscript lose its power.

One of those things that is often the culprit is narrative current. Say a writer writes well and has interesting characters andmany wonderful scenes BUT somehow they don’t fit together. There aren’t connections between these scenes. There isn’t a sense of story arc. The writer feels that it isn't quite right but doesn't know how to fix it. The story needs a coherent narrative, a current that will carry it to the right conclusion.

Usually when a writer says something like my story is about love or my story is about loss, they’re talking about theme. These are big, often general or abstract ideas and while the story may very well be about these larger issues they don’t, by themselves, hold the novel together. Theme or the big ideas behind your work are necessary and important but they aren’t what is pulling the story along—at least not by themselves.

Narrative current demands a sense that the whole narrative is taking the reader someplace. The scenes in the story have to be constructed in such a way that the reader feels compelled to find out where this current is carrying them and not just what the scene is about. Connections are essential. The writer chooses the right details because he or she finds this current and so it puts them in the right place.

This might all sound like plot and it certainly is plot but plot is too narrow. It’s not just about what happens in each scene but how these scenes fit together and the interior life of characters and their development etc… Without a narrative current the story strays off or it feels stagnant in places even if it does eventually move to a conclusion.

Or so I think today

scene and summary/ show and tell

2011-11-26T12:20:00.000-08:00

BAD WRITING ADVICE #9--always show and never tell.
Shouldn't be listened to. Really, can't be listened to. Every novel has some showing and some telling. First, there's the summary that comes between scenes, the telling that gets characters from scene to scene and summarizes events that would be tedious for the reader to experience. Sometimes this might be moving from place to place or having a person get ready for school or work or any number of things that don't need to be shown. Then there is description. Then there is backstory. I'm sure there are others, but the point is clear. Things have to be told. Here's the important part: THE WRITER HAS TO SELECT WHAT SHOULD BE SUMMARIZED and TOLD and WHAT SHOULD BE SHOWN IN SCENES. Pick right and the novel will feel balanced and will move without feeling thin. Pick wrong and--well, not good.

But there is also showing and telling within scenes. Here you should mostly show because you're trying to make the reader experience what the characters are experiencing. However, there will be times where some kind of analysis or explanation will enhance a scene. So even within a scene, there will be moments where telling can be a good thing if it isn't overdone. Here's an example from Pamela Painter's book on writing WHAT IF? This is a scene from Hempel's story "In The Cemetery Where Al Jolson Is Buried."

"I have to go home," I said when she woke up.

She thought I meant home to her house in the Canyon, and I had to say No, home, home. I twisted my hands in the time honored fashion of people in pain. I was supposed to offer something. The Best Friend. I could not even offer to come back.

I felt weak and small and failed.

Also exhilarated.

The bold is telling and it makes clear to the reader the conflicted feeling of the narrator. It's effective.

It's the balance of telling and showing that needs to be looked at closely in everything you write.

Or so I think today.

bad writing advice

2011-11-19T05:03:00.000-08:00

BAD WRITING ADVICE #8
WRITE WHAT YOU KNOW: How many times has this been written and rewritten, told and retold? The problem with the advice is inexperienced writers will think it means they have to write about their childhoods and what they had for dinner last week or their husband’s or wife’s new job. A writer who only writes about his or her life not only will most likely not have much to write about (sorry but most lives just aren’t that interesting) but more importantly he or she will make all the wrong decisions. They’ll be trying to stick to the truth of what happened and they will not allow the story to be told the way it needs to be told to be interesting and vivid.

I was in a graduate workshop once, and there was a retired policeman in the class. He wrote a story about policemen. Everyone in that workshop said the story didn’t ring true. The policeman said, “But it’s a true story.” He was arguing that it must ring true because it was true. But it doesn’t matter if something “happened” to a reader. A reader needs to be convinced on the page. The cop author picked the wrong details and didn’t show what he needed to show because he was wed to what actually happened.

Of course writers use their past to show emotional truths. They use events sometimes or things that happened to them. They definitely use ways they have felt in certain situations to create vivid emotions in scenes. BUT few writers (always exceptions) stick to a literal retelling in their fiction. It’s too confining.

A better way to think about what you should write about is “don’t write about what you cannot know”. But here’s the thing: you can know most things with research, which is pretty much just an Internet connection away. So that opens up what you can write about. More importantly, you can imagine most things so that really opens up what you can write about. You need to open up to allow yourself to imagine an original story and fresh situations.

revision: mad scientist...

2011-11-13T07:43:00.000-08:00

MAD SCIENCE 24
I had three readers, my wife and my agent and an assistant at the agency where my agent is an agent, read the manuscript while I let it set. I lasted nine days before I went back to it. I would have liked to let it set longer, but I’m getting revisions back from my editor soon on my other novel, the one coming out next, and I wanted to try to get another draft of Mad Science done before I get those.

My agent is very excited by the manuscript, which makes me excited. She and the agency assistant had some suggestions for revision though and I’ve written these out and thought about them. I like to write them. It helps me see comments a little more clearly. My wife had pretty much the same reaction as agent and assistant but one of her concerns wasn’t brought up by the other two. What I’ll do is go through the manuscript with an awareness of potential problems suggested by the critiques and see what happens.

I have to stay true to the manuscript and my vision of it, of course, but every writer benefits from outside advice and criticism and so it’s important to try to figure out what problems may have made your readers feel something was off in a certain place or a certain way.

At any rate, I’m excited to get back to the manuscript and see how I feel about it. Also, for me, this is one of the best parts of writing. I’m reworking sentences to try to get the “lightening” and not the “lightening bug” effect. So much fun.
MAD SCIENTIST 25

I’ve got through about fifty pages and though I am having a good time, I’m worried about the ending. The ending is where there are still problems and most of the questions of my readers came from the last thirty pages. There are things that aren’t clear. SO I could keep going and get there when I get there, maybe a week or two at most, but I decide to do something I do sometimes—I’m going to skip up there and drop into those last thirty pages and work on them.

This lets me focus on the problem area without having worked through the whole novel which makes me fresher toward it. And I know I’ll go back to p. 50 and work forward again after I’ve gone over these last 30 pages so I’ll get the continuity I need when I do that.

Sometimes it’s helpful to work on one section or one problem or character etc… when you revise rather than doing the more general revision.

To a Character's heart

2011-11-04T04:50:00.000-07:00

You’ve probably heard this before but I’ll say it again:

The way to a character’s heart (and isn’t that where we, as writers, are trying to get?) is through the things he or she wants/needs/desires and the things he or she fears. The acts that the character does in order to get what he or she wants and to avoid what he or she fears create character. These acts in the main characters also often drive the story.

Kind of a big deal, really.

Thinking about this in early drafts might help you decide what happens next or how a scene should work. Thinking about this in later drafts might help you select what should stay and what should go.

finishing a draft

2011-10-28T04:36:00.000-07:00

Nearing the end of MAD SCIENCE...Since this post is behind me a little in time, the manuscript is out in the world. We'll see what happens.

Also, I've joined the MAD MAD WORLD of twitter. I'm there: BrianYansky@...I kind of like it. Seems more interesting that fb or maybe it's just new.

Also, just finished a round of edits on my second alien novel, tentatively called FIGHTING ALIEN NATION. I made some good changes, I think, I hope.

Brian

MAD SCIENCE 23
Now it does feel like the right time to let the manuscript set for a while. So I was right to wait. I just have to accept that I’ll know when I’ve taken the manuscript as far as I can without taking a rest from it. Sure, there are always things I can do. I could go through it right now and find language things to change. BUT that’s not the best use of my time. I know there are bigger problems than my using the almost right word (a big problem, yes, but for a later draft) and I need a little distance to see those bigger problems.

Right now I really love this manuscript. Why pretend otherwise? It’s good. I can’t see its faults. It’s a great feeling. But, alas, it’s not true. I need to see the faults so I can make my next revision push the manuscript forward.

Honestly, I love that I love writing. I love the moments when the manuscript feels right to me and I don’t want to lose those. Delusion is an important part of writing. But it’s also important to get beyond it to make the manuscript better.

JG rules

2011-10-22T06:52:00.001-07:00

The Rule of John
John Gardner is one of the kings of writing about writing. He had a lot to say. He also wrote several very good novels. Two of my favorites are told by monsters, one is Freddy’s Book and the other is Grendal. You’ve got to love a story from a monster’s POV. They are certainly underrepresented in fiction.

“Good writers may ‘tell’ almost anything in fiction except the characters’ feelings. One may tell the reader that the character went to a private school…or one may tell the reader that the character hates spaghetti; but with rare exceptions the characters’ feelings must be demonstrated: fear, love, excitement, doubt, embarrassment, despair become real only when they take the form of events—action (or gesture), dialogue, or physical reaction to setting. Detail is the lifeblood of fiction” John Gardner.
Thank you Mr. Gardner.

Notice he says “good writers may tell”—you still have to find a way to make your telling interesting.
Notice “rare exceptions” because sometimes you will break even John Gardner’s rules. This may happen more frequently when writing humorous scenes and you describe feelings for a laugh.
But these and other exceptions only prove the Rule of John.

more mad science

2011-10-14T06:24:00.000-07:00

Mad Science 21
So I’ve now been through the whole manuscript again. It’s getting closer. I’ve added more to it and clarified the narrative somewhat. Most importantly, I think I’ve given the characters more depth. Getting into each character a little more has caused me to see the relationships between some of the characters more clearly: Ash and Frank and Frank and his father, in particular.

When I’m in the draft I’m engaged by it and I’m always walking around thinking about it—at this stage I mean. It’s the nature of this place in the manuscript that there are many things that need to be worked out and worked through and, like most writers, I mull over ways to work through them.

BUT , also, there’s the struggle to make it more—more believable, more compelling, more interesting, more emotional etc… at this point. I’m looking for places where the interaction between characters in a scene isn’t quite right—that can be for a number of reasons. Wrong motivations maybe or I lose the momentum of a scene or I give into abstractions rather than finding the specific words that will reveal what the scene is about or a failure of language in some way.
This is why most writers rewrite so much. There are many, many things to be done in revision.
Mad Science 22
I think I might be at the place where I’ll print the manuscript up and take a look at it that way. It helps me look at it differently when I see it on the page so I think that’s the next step. Depending on how this goes, I might then go into my set-the-manuscript-aside for a few weeks mode. For the last few novels this has been the point where I try to get a few readers—my agent who is kind enough to read and give back comments and my wife for sure and maybe another person. Depending on the timing, I might try to get my critique group to look at part of it or all of it.

Just to be clear—I’ve had my agent for five or six years and I’m not trying to get an agent or I wouldn’t show it to one until I had the book in the best shape I could make it. But since I have a working relationship with my agent I find it’s helpful to get her feedback when I feel like I have a manuscript that’s in good shape but not ready to submit shape. She can give me some perspective and she’s willing to do it and it can be very helpful to have at a certain point when I’m heading into the homestretch with the manuscript.

Importance of situation and teen book festival

2011-10-06T17:26:00.000-07:00

"http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/childrens/childrens-industry-news/article/48968-readers-flock-to-austin-teen-book-festival.html"

I was at the Austin Teen Book Festival last weekend (see above). That was a great place to be. Over two-thousand excited teen readers. Yes, they are out there. It was amazing to see them and I was honored to be part of it. One of the many questions asked to the panel I was on was how do you get started writing? I think, for me, writing often starts with a situation. I began my novel ALIEN INVASION & OTHER INCONVENIENCES thinking about the topic of alien invasion but narrowing it to the situation of an invasion that only takes ten seconds. That pretty much forced me to write about what happened after the invasion, which was what interested me most. Writers start in all kinds of ways, but for me the ideas and characters begin in some kind of situation.

great expectations/mad science

2011-09-30T14:18:00.000-07:00

So what did I do? I read, or actually am reading GREAT EXPECTATIONS. As so often happens when I’m reading or watch something, it inspires something in my work. Coincidence? Kismet? Or more likely I just am looking for ways to fit my experiences into my manuscript because I’m at that point when it’s on my mind a lot when I’m not writing.

Dickens makes you care about his characters. He draws them so compellingly that you are emotionally engaged with them. True, some characters, mostly minor, are caricature or almost caricature. Often they are funny in some way but not always. But the main characters are flesh and blood and you want to know what will happen to them.

I was inspired to go back and work on my characters, particularly Ash, the girl my main character cares about. Each draft, for me, gets longer. I’m an adder, I guess. I’m like a painter who keeps adding layers of paint. Some people are cutters. They start off with the big piece of stone and do the Michelangelo thing of cutting away the excess stone. But me, I’m an adder, and that’s what I’m back to doing. I can’t seem to keep away from the manuscript so I don’t try. There will come a point when I need to give it a break but I’m not going to force myself to do that now. I’ll know when the time comes and the manuscript seems worked enough that I NEED the distance to work it more.

mad scientist-character

2011-09-23T04:26:00.000-07:00

Mad Scientist 18
I need him to be more. I need to go deeper into the character. He doesn’t fit in his world. He wants to know why. That’s the key. He thinks he wants to fit in but that’s not what he wants. He wants to know why he doesn’t. ( I do constantly, in revision, try to sort out this what he “wants” question and find it has many layers and this helps me give him layers). This means he needs to feel something isn’t right. He thinks it’s in him that it’s not right. So this needs to be more present in the novel right from the very start.

This kind of mulling over the character goes on all the time at this stage in a draft. It causes many close calls when you’re driving and your loved ones often find themselves talking to themselves while you are sitting next to them. HEY, they’ll say, WERE YOU LISTENING TO ME? You weren’t. OF COURSE, you say. But if you’ve been writing a while they’ve seen this look before and they know.

Mad Scientist 19
I’m at the end of this draft that is draft 2 and draft 3 in some parts of it. I’ve done a lot in this draft and that’s the best way to think of it. I know there’s a lot more to do but I’ve done a lot.

Do I go back and start over or do I let it sit a while. At this point I might do either. It doesn’t feel done enough to go for the “take a break,” get DISTANCE draft. No, it doesn’t seem quite right enough for that so I think I’ll rework certain parts. I guess I’m uncertain what to do. I know the end needs work so I might focus on that. I’ll see where that leads me. Writing is full of choices. In revision I’m making those decisions in a less intuitive way than in the first discover draft and the second first draft.

Keep Trying

2011-09-16T05:00:00.000-07:00

Here's a little Ray Bradbury. All a writer can do is keep trying. You try to find ways to get better when you aren't writing and when you are. Ray Bradbury talks here about his early struggles and the turning point in his writing when he wrote a story that mattered, that he felt was beautiful. It came out of an experience he had as a child. It was a terrible and haunting experience. He was a little boy playing on a beach at a lake. A girl was playing there, too. Then she went into the lake and she didn't come out. That's what he said. It's such a haunting line. The death of the little girl is one of those memories he carries and it is the one that inspires this first story that he calls beautiful. Her going into the lake and not coming out becomes a metaphor for death in the story. Stories come from everywhere. But I think a lot of our best writing begins in memories that won't go away.

Persuading The Character to Arc

2011-09-09T08:26:00.000-07:00

Mad Scientist 16
Connections are important whenever you’re working on a manuscript. As I’m going through The Mad Scientist what I’m realizing is the connections I make seem to be different than the ones I made in the first draft.

It’s coming together more now. Like I just realized a message my main character got earlier in the novel wasn’t right. It needed to be more specific because it didn’t really add anything to the later action.

So I went back and changed it and that changed the later section. It made it more real. These connections are so important. Everything has to come out of everything else in an organic way. Everything has to fit together, add to narrative and character.

Mad Scientist 17
I think I’m writing something into my character that is unearned. Not to say I’m stealing, you understand. No theft involved. Just that he hasn’t earned the thing I’m saying he has.

We talk about character arc. Well, I don’t, but I’ve had editors who have—as in, “Brian, this character doesn’t have enough arc.” BUT the character can’t just arc because I want him to. I think it’s right that he should change in the way I have him change in the manuscript, but now what I have to do is go back and, beginning at the beginning, change him so that later changes seem true to his character.

Writing is rewriting and rewriting and rewriting—at least for me. I need all the chances I can get.

To Outline or Not to Outline?

2011-09-02T13:21:00.000-07:00

A break in my diary concerning the way I’m writing A Mad Scientist’s Son to ask:
To Outline or Not to Outline?
Whether it is nobler in the mind’s eyes to scratch out an outline of short or long length or suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune without even a written hint of how you’ll transcribe them onto the page before you begin? Yep, that’s the question.

It seems to me that if you do not outline at all, if you’re one who stumbles along through a first draft, then that’s all there is to say about that. Just do it. Most writers are like this. I am like this about my first draft which is really just a discovery draft. I’ve been thinking about the story for some time but I haven’t written anything down. I just start writing. However, there many places in the manuscript when I just write a few lines for a scene and write something like MORE LATER. This is sort of the Swiss-cheese method. There will be big gaps or holes in this draft. So it will be on the short side, but (VERY IMPORTANT) it will go from beginning to end. I know my end by the end. Next draft I write toward that end.

So in a sense my discovery draft sort of works like an outline except it’s not. Some writers do outline. Some outline a lot and some a little before they begin. I once interviewed Sherman Alexie and he said he always knew the last line of his novel before he started and wrote toward that. Check out how much John Irving outlines here—amazing to me:.

As with all elements of process, you have to do what works for you.

More Mad Scientist's Son

2011-08-25T14:45:00.001-07:00

Mad Scientist 14
Doing this blog is making me aware of how much I’m changing in this version of Mad Scientist (version number 3 if you count the discovery draft). It’s not down to just language yet by any means. My changes that attempt to clarify theme earlier in the manuscript are making me think I need to cut characters and completely redo the next few chapters. It feels like I went off the path here. By theme here I’m talking about what is lurking beneath the surface story—what ideas and issues are being worked out in this story.

Mad Scientist 15
I realized some things about the main characters that I didn’t understand earlier. I just kept working on adding to manuscript and finally it seemed clear.
Why oh why couldn’t I see this before? I don’t want to seem ungrateful to the writer Gods. After all, it was a glorious morning, seeing the way to go. I praise them effusively. But this process is so damn messy.
You know what I’m grateful for though is the ability of self-delusion. It is so helpful that I’m able to think I’m writing better than I am at each stage of the writing. Okay, I know there are problems, but I still manage to find pleasure in a good sentence, an insight into character, etc…
So today I see the motivation of an important secondary character which will effect Frank, too, and more especially another important secondary character, and it’s so much better than last draft, so much more believable within the context of the draft.
But here’s another thought, back to the last paragraph. Maybe it doesn’t matter when I come to my insights in writing as long as I come to them. And that ability to be happy within the context of a draft, that self-delusion, is a kind of gift.

mad scientist 13

2011-08-18T06:14:00.000-07:00

Mad Sceintist 13
What I’m struggling with today is something that I thought yesterday and that I’ve been mulling over since. Mulling is the writer way. Mull while you eat your Frosted Flakes (an admission that I eat kid’s cereal for breakfast), take your shower, walk your dog, exercise or avoid exercise, and so on. Mull, mull, mull. Most writers are mullers.

But back to the point. My main character changes but I don’t really have my secondary character changing. She is supporting my main character but that’s not good enough.

This is definitely analysis here but I am in revision stage so I need to stand back in places.
1. I need to look for places to make my main character’s CHANGING more dramatic.
2. I need to look at secondary characters and make them change more.

There are two concerns here. One is with narrative structure, that arc of character that people are always going on about and how it influences the arc of the story. The other is about characters, the heart of fiction. Really. If people don’t care about your characters, then, in the words of movie Mafiosos, “Forget about it.”

That was why, earlier, it worried me so much when I felt my characters didn’t have heart, another way of saying they didn’t feel flesh and blood yet.

So for the sake of story and character I need to clarify the changes that they go through in this story. I figured out one change that wasn’t there before yesterday and today I’m going to go back through the first hundred pages I’ve revised and see if I can make that change work.

Also, if it does then it needs to be “in” the manuscript from the beginning. Any change made on p. 80 needs to connect to p.1.

more mad scientist

2011-08-11T07:38:00.000-07:00

Still working on my mad science novel. I've been writing some blog entries as a kind of diary of the work and to show how I worked through problems in a specific novel I was writing. The blog entries are a little behind real time now. It's a strange, strange novel, so I do worry that I'm writing one that won't find a publisher. You never know, especially if you take chances in your work, if it will find a home. Even if it does work (and you're not certain of that either until you finish and sometimes not even then), your publisher--even if you've published a few books--might say no for a number of reasons. Still, you have to write what you have to write and the real enjoyment and pleasure in writing comes from that. But I can say that my agent has read a version of the novel and loved it. That's encouraging. Still more work to do, but I feel good that she didn't just say, "Now what is this again? Tell me again what you've written?" More later...back to the journal.....

***
I have to keep working on the language because one of the things I discover in revision is that I put a filter between the story and the reader too often. Yes, you have to summarize sometimes but when you’re trying to involve the reader in a scene the filter not only distances the reader it makes me unable to see the deeper aspects of some interaction. I have to make the connections to deepen the writing.
***
Specificity of language helps me find my way and I keep working on that. You can write your way into deepening a character sometimes.
***
This is my third rewrite of the whole manuscript though some places have been rewritten more than that. Thinking about character today. Fiction is ultimately about getting readers to feel and experience what your characters experience so they care about them. Ideas behind all that are interesting if they’re interesting ideas, but they aren’t the reason the reader will read and care about your story/novel.

Okay, so one thing I’m doing today to try to deepen the characters is strengthening the relationship between the father and son. And what I just did was have a flashback and not long after that a flash-forward.

Flashback helped. It helped me see more of dad and son and I have to keep working that. I need to feel more what’s at stake between them.

Flash-forward is me trying to say indirectly what the consequences of what’s happening in a scene might be. This has to come out of character though. It can’t be thought up. It has to flow organically from the scene. What it adds, besides character development, is a hint at the possible future of the story.

bang your head against the wall school of writing

2011-08-05T06:12:00.000-07:00

I interrupt my regularly scheduled MAD SCIENTIST posts for an important message. As I was banging my head against the wall this morning trying to create a coherent sentence, I suddenly realized that this was my method of writing. I am of the bang-your-head-against- the-wall school of writing. True, it does lead to a slightly misshapen head and if you get carried away there is the danger of concussion, but it’s my school just the same, my alma mater. Go bang-your-head-against- the- wall writers.

If you write and write and write WITH a constant eye toward what you’re doing wrong and right in each piece you work on while, when perplexed, banging your head against the wall for guidance, you will eventually find your way. I am a believer.

Or so I think today.

Mad Scientist's Son #8.9

2011-08-03T07:13:00.000-07:00

MAD SCIENTIST 8
Okay, reading through the beginning of The Mad Scientist’s Son and I think that the emphasis in wrong. I do think about structure more than I used to in revision because I know it’s a weakness of mine. There’s a lengthy flashback near the beginning and I’m going to have to cut. It takes the reader away from the main current of the story too soon. So not only is it a distraction but it may actually take the reader in the wrong direction. You don’t want to take the reader in the wrong direction.

This relationship begins with unrequited love. Frank keeps saying, “My friend, not my girlfriend” because he has to keep reminding himself. I need to connect this to his NEED TO FIT IN—which is important to where he starts this novel.

MAD SCIENTIST 9
So one thing I see is Frank’s POV is a little distant. I didn’t see that before. Why can’t I just see these things in draft 1? I don’t know but I can’t. And I’m not alone. Stephen King in his book on writing talks about how he finds big glaring train wreck problems in his manuscripts in revision. It’s part of the process, I guess. And it sucks because you think once you finish a few novels you could avoid the glaring train wrecks but, like life, afraid not.
Maybe sometimes. Maybe.

But now, with Frank, focusing on POV and getting closer and making him see out of his POV instead of forcing an external POV , the language is changing and I’m writing myself closer to his character.

OLD VERSION: It was then that a hologram carrier pigeon fluttered above us and landed on my shoulder. Old bird eyes stared into mine in that flat, declarative way of, well, old birds. The technology for holograms was so good now that it was easy to forget the bird wasn’t real.

NEW VERSION: The fluttering above me made me look up and there was a hologram carrier pigeon asking permission to land. I gave it and it landed on my shoulder, claws pinching my skin. Old bird eyes stared into mine in that flat, declarative way of, well, old birds. He seemed real and even intelligent, as if he had something to say. I mean more than a message.
This was a wrong thought. If I spoke it to others, they would frown.

There’s something about seeing from the inside out, working from that place inside and coming out instead of trying to force the description in-- that adds more to a scene and also helps making connections inside a character. The things I start seeing because of a closer relationship to my character allow me to deepen that character.
I’ve just got to keep on. Of course they’ll be tightening at the sentence and word level but this gives me a way into my character and story.
Or so I think today.

Mad Scientist's Son #7

2011-07-27T05:07:00.000-07:00

I’m still playing around with the heart metaphor. Heart can be used in another way, as in center. And maybe that’s part of my struggle right now as I end this second draft of the novel and go to the third.

I imagine different hearts of the novel, different centers, and I try to organically get to one, but I don’t think I have yet. I mean I have several ideas about what might be at the heart of this novel, but they’re not entirely clear to me.

This could be a novel about someone who doesn’t fit into his world and is trying to fit in-- but it isn’t that novel now. It needs a lot of change to get there, change that must begin in the beginning. A novel has to be connected, has to have a current, from the start. And that means I’d be changing a lot in this next draft to make that identity problem THE HEART of the novel though could be this: he wants to fit but he doesn't.

Structure is always a struggle for me. If a novel becomes fragmented by an unclear center then it’s hard for it to keep that narrative momentum it needs. A novel needs to advance—characters have to change and narrative deepen-- or the reader gets bored.

Or so I think today.

MAD SCIENTIST'S SON # 6

2011-07-20T10:08:00.000-07:00

There’s a point in every novel where it becomes all wobbly at the knees. It seems about to take a big tumble. You doubt everything. That’s now. I’m struggling because I’m uncertain it holds together and some of the problems I’ve already talked about seem Mt. Everest in size.

I have thoughts of starting a new book. Wouldn’t that be fun? A new book will give me some distance, some perspective. Maybe if I just set this one aside and move on to a new story then I’ll have the new story going and I can come back and climb Mt. Everest. In fact it won’t even be Mt. Everest anymore maybe. It will be Mt. Nothing Too Hard To Get Up and Over.

But, of course, that’s not true. And, also, even if I did write a new manuscript I’d still come to the same kind of problems eventually. I’d be right back here looking at Mt. Everest.

I do, at least, know that I can only finish a novel by finishing a novel. I have to push on in my imperfect, stumbling, bumbling way. Whatever happens with this novel, I have to see it through.

More Mad Scientist's Son

2011-07-14T11:27:00.000-07:00

MAD SCIENTIST 4

I’ve already expressed my diagnosis for this manuscript. Needs more heart. I think it feels thin. Sometimes you get mostly through a draft and you have the sneaking suspicion that something is wrong. You aren’t sure what. You have to listen to that obnoxious and unwanted voice though.

I need to push through to the end even though my inclination is to go back to the beginning. But I’ll have a nice, short, beginning to end draft if I push through. Then I can go back and do heart surgery. I’m sure it will need lots of other work, too. This whole making something out of nothing, breathing life into characters, isn’t easy.

MAD SCIENTIST 5

There’s a big difference between wanting to fit in and wanting to know why you don’t fit in. Frank wants to know why he doesn’t fit in. So in a sense he wants to know the truth of his situation. This has to be clearer from the start. It has to be in there from the start. Part of this must be that he feels something beyond him, something withheld.

So I need all of this PRESSURE in his situation. There is the echo of life in it if it’s done right. There is something going on that is withheld and beyond us all. Why are we here—and then there’s that bitter and inescapable truth: no one gets out of here alive.

Mad Scientists Son #3-rule breaking

2011-07-08T05:25:00.000-07:00

Today I pushed ahead into a section that may or may not work. I’m adding a new POV in the last third of my novel. You aren’t supposed to do that. I can remember an instructor I worked with at Vermont College telling me that it was a bad idea when I did it in a manuscript I wrote over ten years ago. She was right then. The ghost of her voice comes back to me now.
“Don’t do it. Bad idea,” her ghost voice says.
“But it feels like it might be a good one.”
“Same thing Napoleon probably said right before he invaded Russia and we know how that turned out.”

She’s right. I know it goes against a very sensible fiction writing rule. Do not bring a narrator in so late. The reader doesn’t have time to warm to them. It’s jarring also to have the sudden switch. It may undermine established rhythms you’ve worked for.

There are many good reasons not to do what I seem to be doing anyway.

Sometimes you just have to go with what feels right though. However, I am aware that I might be fooling myself so I’m going to keep this POV for now, but I’m going to be suspicious of it. In later drafts when I’m thinking about structure and I’m forcing myself to get some distance from the work, I’ll try to be sure this actually fits and works. If not, I will be merciless. It will be gone faster than a bad piece of fruit.

The Mad Scientist's Son#2-TWPTWD

2011-07-02T08:00:00.000-07:00

There are some cool ideas in this novel.

I’m not sure these ideas in my novel work, but there are some interesting ones. I’m trying to get one figured out right now because it’s a turning point in the manuscript. I thought about it last night, which was not a good idea. You want to toss and turn, just go to bed thinking about your novel.

“You’re like a fish flopping out of water,” my wife said.

I could say I am a fish flopping out of water BUT I’m not that ridiculous. Instead I grunt something about being sorry and go back to thinking and flopping.

It could be worse. I could be out driving. It’s always kind of a small miracle when I’m thinking some writer problem through and driving and I realize I’m at my destination. How did I get there? No clue. Really, the cops should be looking out for writers as much as drunk drivers.

I can hear the cop now. I get pulled over. “Are you a writer, Sir?”
Me, hesitantly, “Yes.”
“Thought so. You have the look. I’ll need to see your license and registration.”
“Was I doing something wrong?”
“I think you know you were.”
“Not really.”
“You haven’t been thinking your writer thoughts?”
He says “writer thoughts” with an uncalled for distain.
“Maybe a few.”
“More than a few I’d say. And then you thought you’d take a little drive?”
“I was just thinking. I can still drive when I think about writing.”
“They all say that. Should have taken a taxi.”
“Sorry.”
“Sorry is not good enough. Step out of the vehicle, Sir.”
“You’re taking me in?”
“This is going to cost you a lot more than a taxi. I’m going to have to charge you with TWPTWD, Thinking Writing Problem Through While Driving.”

“QUIT FLOPPING,” my wife said.

The Mad Scientist's Son #1--No heart

2011-06-27T09:27:00.000-07:00

I'M GOING TO TRY GETTING AT THE WRITING PROCESS IN A NEW WAY, NEW TO THIS BLOG ANYWAY. I'm writing a diary as I work though a manuscript. I hope I can talk about different aspects of the writing process and it will be fresh. I enjoy writing about writing, but I've done it for a while now and it's all getting a bit stale. New is good.

Here's where I am in the novel--I've written a first draft. My first drafts are neatly crafted works of art. HA. We're talking a hurl of words. We're talking a writing GPS that has schizophrenia. We're talking wandering all over the place. We're talking get-those-words-on- the-page-and-worry-later-if-it-makes-sense mentality because that's the only way I know how to do it. So my first draft is as rough as a Charlie Sheen breakup or breakdown or something like that. So, yeah, we're talking rough.

But it's done and I'm about halfway through my revision. So that's where this diary picks up.

So here's a place to start. My first thought this morning.

Crap. It's got no heart.

The manuscript has some things going for it, but there’s no heart. It’s the freaking TIN MAN of novels.

Maybe it was my focus on other things, especially the central idea of the novel that led me to my heartless manuscript. How do I get heart?

Go back to the beginning. Think about what the character wants/needs/ desires/ wants. I need to regroup and try to think this through.

On the surface he wants to find his father. He needs to find his father. That does help drive the plot. Okay so maybe I get more heart if I develop the relationship between the father and son more. Cause it’s there but it’s not there there. Needs to be there there.
But that’s not enough. It’s a good surface need, but it’s not really something that can give it HEART. I mean I want HEART. I need HEART.
Maybe identity is the heart. Maybe I need to make Frank more the outsider. I mean he is (he’s the son of a Mad Scientist but in this world Mad Scientists are sort of accepted and tolerated in the way that writers and other artists are in our world--sort of) but not enough maybe.

Make him someone who doesn’t fit and what he needs to know is why? Then he can move on. So he yearns to know why he doesn’t fit or to fit? Why he doesn’t fit, I think.

And it’s something I can do. I felt that way when I was sixteen. Maybe partly because I was adopted but mostly because I am who I am (Did Popeye the sailor man say that? Am I quoting Popeye the salior man now?). Anyway, I still feel that way sometimes. I can do this.

connections

2011-06-21T05:36:00.000-07:00

As I work through my first drafts now, while I keep pushing forward and resist the urge to start all over (always there in the early draft), I’ m constantly thinking about how my story fits together. How what happens in chapter one fits with what happens in chapter twenty, for example. My first drafts are rough, rough, rough, more like discovery drafts, but I still keep this idea of connection in my mind because I don’t want to wander too far off. I don’t want to end up lost like some authorial Columbus asking, “Say, can anyone tell me the way to China? It’s supposed to be around here somewhere.”

So there’s that.

Then my revision, at least the part that doesn’t focus strictly on language, is about making these connections clearer and filling in my story.

And that’s what I’m getting at in this post. Novels are all about connections. Story arc, character development, all that comes out of connections that the writer makes during the process and then manages to convey dramatically in the work. Everything has to fit together. I think that keeping this in mind helps me with structure.

first drafts

2011-06-10T06:12:00.000-07:00

Everyone works differently. I’ve said before I can’t outline and I can’t. But I think my first drafts are becoming more and more discovery drafts. I don’t even pretend anymore that I’m writing something close to finished.

I think part of this is because I realize that for me, in terms of structure, something I find out about a character on page 57 is going to change that character and maybe the story on page 3. Because a first draft is so much about discovering character and story and trying to integrate all the elements of fiction, I think it needs to be fluid.

You’ve got to be open to changes, big changes, at a structural level, not just changing words in sentences or moving sentences around in a paragraph.

So these days my first drafts are filled with places where I just mark what is going to happen.

My first draft is also filled with notes to myself. But it is a draft—not an outline. I have to try to muddle my way through the world I’m creating to feel like that world, however sketchy, exists.

But I know that my first draft is like an out- of- focus photograph. It’s impossible to see how it will be when it sharpens. There will be many choices ahead and there will be many chances to make connections. It’s kind of exciting and frightening. Finishing a first draft means both less and more than it once did when I believed my first drafts closer to a final version. One great thing about knowing my first draft is kind of a discovery draft is I don’t have high expectations, and I think that makes it easier for me to keep working when I face difficult moments in that draft.

OR SO I THINK TODAY.

voice

2011-06-01T10:30:00.000-07:00

I can’t get very far in a manuscript until I have a voice. I struggle with getting that voice sometimes, as in I rewrite and rewrite the first paragraph and page, but I need that voice, whether it comes in a flash or has to be worked for, before I can go very far in a manuscript.

Generally, I believe you should push forward in a first draft, letting your subconscious mind do most of the work. Of course you’re going to mull things over while you’re in the shower or driving to work (pedestrians and other drivers beware), but when you’re writing you’re mostly trying to get to that quiet place where you can create and experience it all at once--that, as Robert Olen Butler calls it, moment-to-moment experience of your story. However, I can’t do this without a true voice for my narrator. I can’t get there.

I’ll write ten or twenty pages sometimes just to see what happens but I’ll keep going back to that first page and toying with where the story starts and what the narrator’s voice is. For me voice is extremely important. That tone of the story helps me feel truly at home in my world. It’s essential for me that I get that early in the process, however imperfectly, to open up my story.

after the acceptance

2011-05-24T07:16:00.000-07:00

What happens after a writer gets an acceptance from the publisher? A whole lot of things. There’s the contract to sign, which is fun. The publisher promises to publish your book and even pay you a little money in advance for the right to do so. Yahoo to that. Then comes the editorial letter. Not as much fun as the contract I must admit.

Editorial letter?

It comes as a surprise to some new writers that their book will require further rewriting beyond all the rewriting they’ve already done. It will-- in most cases. I haven’t heard of many authors not doing at least one revision. Several revisions are more common.

What begins this process is a letter from the editor making suggestions. I’ve received a few of these now from several editors. They’re all different, but they all have some similar qualities. They begin with praise (anyone who is in a critique group knows the importance of this—the fragile writer ego needs a little love). Then the editor mentions some problems he or she thinks the manuscript has. Then he/she says that, of course, the writer should decide which suggestions are helpful to the writer’s vision of the book and which are not. After this though, the approach of the editors I’ve had varies. Some like to mention a problem and then spend some space explaining why they think it’s a problem and then move on. Some like to spin out possible ways to fix a problem. Usually, the first revision letter focuses on big issues of narrative or character. I say first because, again, you will most likely go through several revisions after the acceptance.

This sounds like it might be hard and I know some writers struggle with these revision letters, but provided you have a good editor (most are, I think, and all of mine have been) these letters are another chance at the manuscript. And who doesn’t want another chance to make the manuscript better? Really. Later, when the book goes out into the world and is reviewed and read by readers, you’ll be grateful for every single improvement made by every single revision. It’s hard to write a book. A good editor can really improve a novel and a writer should be grateful for all the help he or she can get.

So, after the thrill of acceptance, the first big step is going back to the manuscript and trying to make it better by going through the revision letter carefully. I try to be open to every possible change, but I know pretty quickly that some suggestions don’t work with my vision of the book. Others I think are definitely good points I need to work on. A lot I have to think over and work through because I’m just not sure about. So, my advice is not to blindly accept or reject any advice in an editorial letter but to read it through several times, make some notes, then get rewriting. Some suggestions I can’t decide about until I’m in the process of revision and see how certain changes affect the rest of the novel. It’s all part of the process.

sheepdog writing advice

2011-05-17T05:02:00.000-07:00

My sheepdog gave me some advice the other day, “Never take a bath. How will others know who you are if you don’t smell like you?”

Opps. Wrong advice. I meant some writing advice. He said, “Sheep like to wander. Sheep will wander at the first opportunity. You must be vigilant when you are herding sheep.”

That got me thinking about story and the way I struggle to figure out what really belongs. I think that it is easy, easy, easy to be distracted by all kinds of interests: language, interesting thoughts, diversions of all kinds. They make us take our eyes off our sheep and some of them wander off. The novel looses narrative momentum. A novel needs narrative momentum. It has to have it. You have to get all of your sheep from point A to point B. Don’t let your sheep wander.

Kurt Vonnegut on the Shapes of Stories

2011-05-10T05:14:00.000-07:00

I don’t know if any part of writing confuses me more than structure. I struggle with it all the time. What’s the shape of my story? How do I get all that STUFF to fit together? There are so many freaking concerns in writing even a simple story. We writers are juggling character, plot, theme, language and a dozen other things with two inadequate hands and a bit of delusional grandeur. And then, on top of this, we have to somehow create a structure that houses all of our intentions and connivances and deviations, that provides just the right architecture for all that we want to put into our story. It’s hard. Really hard. Or so I thought until I saw this explanation sent to me by my good friend Varian who knows that Kurt Vonnegut is one of my favorite writer people. Thanks, Kurt, for putting it all in perspective.

writing news

2011-05-04T08:41:00.000-07:00

Sold a novel, which is a big thrill. It's the second one I've sold to Candlewick. I'm honored to be published by such a great publisher. Here's the Publisher's Lunch notice.

Brian Yansky's FIGHTING ALIEN NATION, the sequel to ALIEN INVASION AND OTHER INCONVENIENCES, which continues the story of the survivors of an alien invasion, again to Candlewick, with Kaylan Adair to edit, by Sara Crowe at Harvey Klinger (world English).
sara@harveyklinger.com

So it's another alien book for me. I guess I'm going through my alien period. Thank you little green men.

Brian

the right word

2011-05-01T04:58:00.000-07:00

Okay, so I've used this quote before but I've never really tried to explain it on the sentence level, so I thought I'd give it a shot.VIA Mr. Mark Twain, "The difference between the almost right word and the right word is the difference between the lightening bug and the lightening."

So let's say you have a story and your character, late at night, hears the sound of a baby crying outside his house. He's falling asleep but it startles him awake. The crying continues and he jumps up and swings open the door and steps out into amoonless night.He finds a cat sitting on his front walk.

So we want a sentence about this.

The sound of a baby crying and a cat screeching were similar.

SIMILAR as used here is definitely lightening bug for me. Oh, it does the job, sure. But it drags the whole comparison down. Maybe, too, the writer is making some deeper observation about how easy it is to think one thing is another, so the weakness of the word "similar" weakens the whole comparison. So much on just one word? Well, yeah. Let me try again.

A baby crying and a cat screeching are strikingly alike.

STRIKINGLY as used here is still lightening bug to me. Again, does the job. Not bad. Better than the first. Almost?

A baby crying and a cat screeching are erily alike? ERILY? Lightening bug. I'm not sure why exactly. Maybe too predictable?

A baby crying and a cat screeching are unforgivably alike. UNFORGIVABLY? For me that's lightening. Of course that kind of sentence makes a point and so the scene should be following this sense of two things that shouldn't be alike being alike and this situation should somehow be an echo of what's happening in the story. But, for me anyway, this is the right word for this sentence.

So much on the right word? I think so. Certain words in certain sentences need to be right and not almost right.

Decisions

2011-04-24T16:03:00.000-07:00

Decisions, decisions, decisions. That’s what writing is all about. Many of those decisions should be intuitive in the first draft or drafts. How do you make decisions intuitively? You put yourself in the right place.

Easy to say. Hard to do.

I've put myself in the wrong place a whole lot I often realize as I revise my manuscript. What was I thinking? How did I go right when I should have turned left? Why couldn’t I see the opportunity for the relationship between my three main characters and the central conflict in that relationship? I didn’t exploit that. Missed opportunity. Missed. Missed. Missed.

But—doesn’t matter. To get a first draft on paper I just have to feel like I’m going in the right direction, making the right decisions, and make them well enough that I don’t end up in Anchorage when I’m trying to get to San Diego. So, I won’t get to San Diego in my first draft, but I will go in the general direction of San Diego. I will get close enough that maybe with work in revision I’ll know how to get there.

The intuitive decisions of a first draft, along with the conscious ones, only need to be roughly successful. That’s all. Most of the real work, in the heavy lifting sense, happens in revision.

Or so I think today.

voice

2011-04-17T04:35:00.001-07:00

The way your character tells his story, the kind of language he uses and how he uses it to tell his particular story, is one way to think of voice. A lot of editors and agents say that the very first thing they look for in a manuscript is a strong voice.

I can see that. I love a strong voice as a reader. I start to believe in the story right away if I’m pulled in by the voice. Voice has to do with diction, of course; it has to do with our choice of words. But the way those words are arranged, the tone that emerges from those constructions, reveals character. I think that’s one of the reasons people react to novels with strong narrative voices. They feel an immediate connection to the character telling the story. They want to hear him say more, tell them more.

Reading

2011-04-08T06:02:00.000-07:00

Published on IndieReader Houston's blog, too.

I will be at the TeenBookCon in Houston on Saturday, April 9. I’m on a panel called Guys Write Great Stuff. Well, they do. So do gals. Right now, in YA, there is so much great stuff being written it’s impossible to read it all.

So guys and gals write great stuff but do guys read it? That’s a question a lot of people have been asking in publishing and beyond lately because they’re worried they don’t. They’re worried that guys not reading will cause them to be poor readers later in life. Also, they’re worried they may not read for pleasure at all.

I worry about this, too, because I was one of those guys who did almost miss out on reading. I didn’t read much when I was a kid. I was well into my sixteenth year before I started opening books without being forced to by teachers.

What changed? I read a novel that did things that I never thought a novel could do. It was strange and funny and frightening and smart and wise and it spoke to me. It did. It was a novel called SLAGHTERHOUSE FIVE. But for every boy, and for that matter girl, it will be a different book. The important thing, particularly for boys, since girls seem to find their way to books and reading easier, is that they find THE BOOK. By this, I mean they find a book that they can’t put down, one that overcomes the resistance to books that comes from not reading them. They have to fall in love. One book is all it takes, in most cases, to decide to open another and another.

For me, reading Slaughterhouse Five made me realize I’d been missing out on things. I’d thought until then that reading novels was another task that had to be done for school. At best I thought of it as a distant and formal entertainment, not accessible like TV or movies. When I found out how wrong this was, how novels could speak more intimately and more directly and how I could participate more fully in the story, something changed for me. I saw the world differently. Great books will do that. They will change the way you see the world (maybe a little, maybe a lot) every time you read one.

So books became my entry into new worlds. They became my friends, too, and over the years I still return to many of those friends. Every book that moves you in some way will be a little different, but all will transport you to another world within this one we live in each day. That’s pretty amazing. That’s a little bit of magic in and of itself. You don’t have to become a writer to get great things from books. You just have to become a reader.

Leave In, Take Out

2011-04-02T13:55:00.000-07:00

Writing is a constant rearrangement, like changing the way a room looks: moving the sofa here and the chair there and the bookcase to the other side of the room. And what should you keep and what should you throw away? Aye, that’s the question. It is a lot of work. You need a strong back and sometimes a hard heart. You can’t keep everything. Sometimes the very things you love most, like Uncle Harry’s velvet picture of tropical fish swimming down Fifth Avenue or Aunt Lulu’s diary descriptions of the twelve times she was abducted by aliens, may have to go.

There are many rooms in a novel, but there is no room for anything that doesn’t truly belong.

Kind of sucks sometimes.

publishing

2011-03-26T05:20:00.000-07:00

I attended an SCBWI conference recently and heard lots of talk about writing and editing and agenting and the future of publishing. What’s that future? According to one speaker it is a decentralization of publishing, way fewer brick and mortar bookstores, and way, way fewer libraries. Printed books? They’ll limp along for a while and then fade a way. It will be a brave new world of e-books.

And out there in blogland, from a multitude of sources, I hear again and again talk of the end of bookstores and of printed books. A lot of people compare books to music and say that it will be just like what happened to CD’s and music stores.

Maybe.

Maybe not.

Nobody knows, of course, but I do think of Mark Twain who read about his death in newspapers when he was sitting at home and quipped, later, to those same newspapers, “Rumors of my death are greatly exaggerated.”

Is there an e-book revolution happening? Of course. Will it change things? Of course. But people do like the “new” and a lot of people who love their new readers might not want to use them exclusively once the newness has worn off. Also, it’s in the interest of reader sellers to make this “revolution” seem as overwhelming as possible. So you hear things like—there won’t be any bookstores in five or ten years and certainly no libraries etc…

But are books like CD’s? I don’t think so. People like the feel of a book in their hands. They have a loyalty to it, a relationship with it. No one had that kind of loyalty to CD’s. It just isn’t the same kind of experience. Some people say that the generation that is coming to reading now will not have that loyalty and this is probably true. UNLESS it isn’t. We’ve had several generations now growing up with videos. And now we can get movies not just with videos/DVD's but in many, many other ways without leaving our house. And the quality is excellent. So why do people? Leave their houses, I mean. Why do so many people still go to movie-theaters? They watch movies at home AND they go to movie theaters because the experience of seeing a movie in a theater still appeals to them.

I think there are plenty of people who will just read e-books in the future, but I also think there will be people who will read e-books and will still want to read printed books (I’ve read teens saying that so much of their life is spent starring at screens they enjoy looking at a page of print) and like going to bookstores and libraries. It will certainly be fewer than yesterday and today, but they’ll be around for some time yet.

Or so I think today.

Uninvited Characters

2011-03-19T06:43:00.000-07:00

I was minding my own business, writing along, when a character I didn’t invite into my novel showed up. He just started talking and I knew that he had something interesting to say. Did I let him stay? YEP.

Here’s what I think about early drafts and sometimes even later drafts; if a strong character appears, I should hear him out, try to see how he might fit into the story, what he can add. I think these characters don’t really appear out of nowhere. If you’re connected to your manuscript and you’re in the story, they show up out of a need.

And sometimes they’re some of the most interesting characters you write.

Okay, it's not brain surgery

2011-03-12T08:22:00.000-08:00

Writing is juggling many things at once and not thinking about any of them while you’re in the act of writing. There are just so many areas of concern: voice, character, plot, setting, language, and on and on. If we think about them while we’re writing, there’s a good chance we’ll freeze up or go into a kind of stiff, forced writing, or maybe make the wrong choices. And the wrong choices can be deadly in a novel. The wrong choices can lead you to other wrong choices and then you’re halfway through the novel and you’re thinking, HOW THE HE** DID I GET HERE? WHAT AM I DOING HERE? THIS ISN’T MY BEAUTIFUL NOVEL. THESE AREN’T MY BEAUTIFUL CHARACTERS (and before you know it you’re in a Talking Heads song—sorry, off topic). It’s not enough to write well. I’ve said that before, but it’s something worth saying again and again. A lot of people write well. A lot of people turn out good sentences. We have to do a lot of things at once to make the right choices or be able to go back in revision and evaluate your manuscript and figure out how to make the wrong choices right.

Writing a novel is a very complex act. Okay, it’s not brain surgery, but it’s difficult. I do think being aware of the many aspects can help a writer focus on a manuscript’s weaknesses in revision and avoid getting stuck on focusing too much on just one aspect. For example, and I have to admit I’m guilty of this myself sometimes, if your novel has serious structural problems rewriting and rewriting the first sentence 2000 times isn’t going to help. You have to look beyond the sentence and try to figure out the structural problem. Anyway, being open to changes in revision is a big step toward improvement of a manuscript.

Serious Nature of Comic Fiction

2011-03-05T05:02:00.000-08:00

I believe a novel can be funny and serious. My work usually is (to the best of my ability) funny and serious. My latest novel, ALIEN INVASION & OTHER INCONVENIENCES, begins with this line “It takes less time for them to conquer the world than it takes me to brush my teeth.” It’s about what happens after the aliens take over and kill most of the inhabitants of our world. It’s about slavery and imperialism and ecology. There’s a lot of death in it. And, yet, if I’ve been successful at all, there’s also a lot of humor in it. You can write funny & serious and they can both even exist on the same page. It’s not easy. It’s walking a tightrope of tone. But it can be done.

Why is it so surprising to people that the comic and the serious can exist in a novel? Aren’t we humans this way in life? Don’t we cry at weddings and laugh at funerals? Sometimes in the saddest moments, even when we've lost someone, we’re reminded of some quirk of that person or something they did and we laugh even as tears fall from our eyes. Sometimes, as at weddings or intensely joyful moments, we’re so happy we cry.

Great comedians make us laugh at tragic things sometimes. Through their vision of a situation or verbal constructions they can make something sad funny. And it is a sad observation that many of the funniest people have a deep melancholy in them that allows them to be funny. Mark Twain said something like the secret source of humor is not joy, but sorrow. He should know.

Most of us are some mix of funny and sad and funny and serious and comic and tragic. I love fiction that mixes the two. Some examples of variations of these qualities are the following: STONER & SPAZ, THE WORLD ACCORDING TO GARP, A GOOD MAN IS HARD TO FIND, HUCK FINN, FEED, ELSEWHERE, GODLESS, SLAUGHTERHOUSE FIVE, and THE TRUE STORY OF A PART-TIME INDIAN to name only a few.

In my opinion there are many, many stories, both realistic and speculative, that mix comedy and serious intent. They’re the ones I’m most likely to fall in love with.

selling out or not

2011-02-27T06:12:00.000-08:00

Let me say first off, forgive the rant. But I am tired of hearing people say this writer or that writer sold out. I heard someone say it about Stephanie Meyer of Twilight fame the other day. Look, in order to sell out you have to be writing something far below what you could write and doing it for fame and fortune. Isn’t that what “selling out” means? But many writers who people say are selling-out aren’t selling-out at all. They’re writing what they can write. A lot of them feel passionate about what they write. How is that selling out?

You and I might not think what they write is very good. Or it might not appeal to you or me for other reasons. Of course, all of that is subjective. You might love something that I don’t and I might love something that you don’t, but the only writers that I consider sell-outs are those who are only writing what they write for money, career etc… That’s it. They have no real love for their writing, or the craft and art, no desire to write the best they can, and so on. Those are sell-outs. Someone who sells a lot of books writing in a popular genre usually isn’t a sell-out. They’re just writing what they can write--like the rest of us.

Or so I think today.

be there out there

2011-02-20T05:20:00.000-08:00

One big advancement for me as a writer was being able to BE THERE (wherever that might be) with my characters, so that my reader could be THERE with my characters experiencing the story in what Robert Olen Butler calls a "moment-to-moment" way. But there was something else I had to do to get to this place. I had to let go and allow myself to make my stories as weird as they could be. I had to go with the WEIRD TALES. That’s just who I am as a writer. I write strange comic stories about ridiculous and serious things. Every time I tried to tell my stories in a conventional way or pull back from the absurdist path my story was taking,it died or became the walking dead. And not in any interesting zombie way either. What I had to do was to go “out there” and just let my stories be what they had to be. So, in my case, I had to BE THERE OUT THERE to BE THERE.

Details

2011-02-13T07:38:00.000-08:00

Nothing wrong with the general. We spend a lot of time living in a general world. But it’s the specific that makes writing come alive. There will be summary in novels of course, telling that will often be general in nature. We need it. It moves the reader from one place to another in the novel, keeping the focus on what’s important instead of loading the reader down with pointless detail. We need the general, but what makes a novel come alive is specifics. If you have details, the right ones, the work will seem real.

From the writers POV, I think you arrive at the right choices in fiction, at the right details, by getting in the zone. That is, you get yourself to that subconscious place where you are living the world of your characters. Then in revision you look for those places where you’ve given way to the general—used the wrong word or failed to make a scene seem specific. It’s a constant battle to make every sentence and scene significant. I think this struggle is where a lot of our success or failure as writers occur. Genuine writing comes out of the specific.

Ideas 2

2011-02-05T05:18:00.000-08:00

This is a continuation of my earlier post about ideas. It's also posted over at my agent's, Sara Crowe's, blog.

Where do your ideas come from?

When asked this question, I sometimes like to appropriate and regionalize a line from Kurt Vonnegut and say I get them in a little store out in West Texas near Marfa.

I wish.

So where do they come from?

Don’t have a clue, but I do know every writer has many, many ideas. They come when you’re in the shower, walking the dog, on the drive to work. They fall out of the sky when you least expect them. Sometimes you see a hint of one disappear around a corner and you have to chase it down. Regardless of whether they come easy or hard, the little buggers are everywhere. So when someone says they have A GREAT IDEA FOR ME, A SURE MILLION SELLER IDEA FOR ME, and all they want for their brilliant idea is 50% of the profits when I write the book, I get a little dismissive. Ideas are the easy part.

Easy. Getting them, that is. Actually making them work? Not so easy. Most ideas aren’t enough to carry a novel. The novelist Patrick Ness says he waits to write a novel until he has an idea that is strong enough to attract other ideas. I like this notion that you start with one idea and others are attracted to it. Another way to think of it is you begin with an idea and other ideas grow out of that one. If they don’t, then the novel will wither and die. Usually this happens around page thirty-three for me.

There are lots of different kinds of ideas. There are the big ideas behind a novel that create theme and there are the more focused ideas that drive scenes and characters. Sometimes the ideas will change as the writer moves through his story. For example, you think you want to write a novel about loss. Your main character’s girlfriend dies and it’s a novel about how he copes with this terrible and difficult situation, but halfway through the novel, he meets another girl and he starts to fall for her (Where did she come from? One day she just appeared on the page, but that’s another post) and his grief begins to fade and he feels amazement and gratitude and guilt, so then the novel becomes about this experience. Maybe the novel then becomes about this whole journey to a new life.

I read this article in a writer’s magazine not long ago about the subject of ideas. One writer said that he started his novel based on a single word. I don’t remember the word but I remember it wasn’t one of the big ones. Not one like freedom or liberty or sex or greed. It could have been kumquat for all I remember. I could never write a novel starting with one word. How could anyone start a novel with the word kumquat?

“One morning Henry woke to find he was a kumquat.”

“One morning a kumquat in a fruit salad began to talk to Henry.”

It’s obvious I can’t write a novel starting with the word kumquat. I’m not responsible enough.

All I can think is that the word, whatever it was, had an association with something important in the author’s life. I imagine that it happened like the evolution of most ideas in a novel. The word made him think of something else, and something else, and something else. Maybe he thought of his father one afternoon when he came home from the store carrying a bag of kumquats and the news that the family had to move and the boy would have to leave all his friends, his high school, his everything. Obviously not going to be a lover of kumquats. Or maybe he is and that’s the story. Why does he love kumquats?

I do think it’s helpful to consider that this gathering or growing of ideas, whether it begins with character or setting or theme or some point of action, is a process that can be worked through. It makes the whole act of starting a new novel a little less daunting to me if I think of it as a process of attracting and growing ideas. Of course once I get going I’m mostly thinking about characters and the moment-to-moment experience of those characters, but the ideas are woven into this if I’ve begun with one that’s strong enough to grow others.

The truth is even if there was an Idea store out in Marfa and even if they had a 70% off sale, I wouldn’t be buying. It’s too much fun coming up with my own.

story

2011-01-30T05:33:00.000-08:00

It's hard, at some point in a manuscript, to see its weaknesses. As a writer it's hard sometimes to see your own weaknesses. I'm lucky to have an editor who has a strength that is my weakness. One of her strengths is story structure which is always a struggle for me, though I think I'm getting better at it. She has been part of that improvement. Of course I don’t agree with everything she thinks needs work. She wouldn’t expect that. But I’m struck by how many times she’s right. She asks the kind of analytical questions that lead me to plot answers that improve the work.

These kinds of plot questions need to be asked. Not in my first draft since my first drafts are mostly a way for me to enter the story, but in later drafts. Here’s a big plot question (when you’re focusing on that aspect of story): What does this scene accomplish? Just that simple and just that difficult. It’s easy to fool yourself. Well, you might say, the scene reveals my character’s love of meatloaf. But is that really important to the story? If not, even though there’s some good writing in that scene about metaloaf, maybe some very funny and entertaining sentences, you have to consider cutting it. That is very hard, especially when it’s a scene you like and enjoy.

Because we’re writing novels we don’t have to be quite as merciless as the story writer. We have a little room, now and then, in my opinion, to wander slightly, perhaps for humor or to make a general statement about life, but I think my editor’s very smart questions about what is accomplished, scene by scene, to advance the story need to be asked at some point. It’s easy for a story to lose its momentum.

You Got to be You

2011-01-23T05:58:00.000-08:00

The way you see the world and the way you communicate the way you see the world is very closely connected to the voice of any particular manuscript. Even the particular voice of the narrator of your novel sees that particular world in a specific way and communicates it in the novel, BUT this voice is informed by your sensibilities as a writer, too, what might be called the voice behind the voice.

The way you see the world is what is most unique about you as a writer and it is something to be cultivated. Sometimes I think writers suppress this out of fear that their way of seeing the world isn’t what’s selling or fashionable, that it won’t have any interest to readers. How can you know? I don’t think readers really know themselves what they want until they see it. If you persuade them that your particular way of seeing is interesting and unique, they’ll keep reading. Maybe building an audience will take several books if your way isn’t assessable to an audience or is very different, but you have to trust that you’ll eventually reach readers that respond to your vision.

Ideas 2

2011-01-16T05:59:00.000-08:00

I think novels come from imagination, experience, and memory. Any of these might contribute to the work: start it, push it forward, add layers to it. For me, ideas come from these, but I think I need to define ideas a little before trying to write about them more.

When we talk about ideas, we might be talking about any aspect of writing. What first comes to people’s minds when people talk about their idea for a novel isn’t always the same. Some people might be thinking about a situation and others might be thinking about a theme or setting. Very different. So there are these big ideas that are at the core of a novel, that drive it, and that can come from all kinds of places.

In addition to these big ideas, there are more focused ideas such as those, for instance, about character. You’re thinking about your character and you have ideas about what he does, what he wants, what he fears, and how he fits into the novel. Some people start with character when they start their novel and the character helps ideas grow and develop and helps the author find his story and his way through that story.

Things can, of course, change and this will change your ideas. For example, you think you want to write a novel about loss. Your character’s wife dies and it’s a novel about how he copes with this terrible and difficult situation, but halfway through the novel he meets another woman and he starts to fall for her (Where did she come from? Ah, the mystery of fiction and life.) And his grief begins to fade and he feels amazement and gratitude and guilt, so then the novel becomes about this experience. Maybe the novel then becomes about this whole journey to a new life. (And so the beauty of revision because you’ll have to revise the first part with this revelation in mind because ideas lead to other ideas in a plot. They have to be connected.)

Ideas work on many different levels in a novel. I think it’s helpful to consider this and to think of ways to connect them.

Or so I think today.

Where do ideas come from?

2011-01-10T12:08:00.000-08:00

Where do ideas come from?

I like to say I get them in a little store out in West Texas somewhere near Marfa.

I wish.

So where do they come from?

No writer knows. Every writer though has many, many ideas. They come when you’re in the shower, when walking the dog, on the drive to work. Ideas are everywhere. So when someone—and they will if they haven’t already—upon learning you’re a writer says they have A GREAT IDEA FOR YOU, A SURE MILLION SELLER IDEA FOR YOU, and all they want is 50% of the profits when you write the book based on their idea, you can either:
a. laugh in their face
b. explain to them that ideas are the EASY part
c. call all your friends over and laugh in their face
d. laugh silently to youself but try to explain to them that ideas are the EASY part.
e. Pretend you suddenly notice how late it is and run away.

Ideas are the easy part but an idea that actually works for a novel is not so easy. Most ideas aren’t enough. I would say no idea by itself is enough. The novelist Patrick Ness says he waits to write a novel until he has an idea that is strong enough to attract other ideas. I like this notion that you start with one idea and others are attracted to it. Another way of looking at it is that ideas grow off of it, and together they help you fill out the first idea.

One idea isn’t enough. You’ll get to page two or ten or twenty with one idea and then the story will die. You need to be able to attract more ideas, or add other ideas to that idea to develop your story into something substantial enough to become a novel.

language

2011-01-04T04:58:00.000-08:00

Since at the end of last year I was making a plea for including “story” or plot in the family of fictional elements, and to that end maybe exaggerating slightly the emphasis put on language, let me say this year how important language is. Here’s a quote I’ve used before but is, for me, one of the best. Mr. Mark Twain, “The difference between the almost right word and the right word is the difference between the lightening bug and the lightening.” That kind of says it all, but here’s a simple example:

I’m walking up a wide path.

I’m walking up a big path.

I’m walking up a huge path.

I’m walking up a large path.

Each of these sentences is the same except for the adjective. To me, though, the first is much stronger than the second, third, and fourth. It gives a specific image of the path while big, huge, and large do not. How a writer says what he or she says, how he or she rewrites to say it with as much clarity and precision as possible, is the foundation of any good story.

Or so I think today.

Do What You Do Well

2010-12-17T05:26:00.000-08:00

On the other hand, continuing with my last post about story being the poor cousin to other elements of fiction and beautiful prose being sort of the prince or princess among them, if I could write beautiful prose, I would. I think I can write clever prose. There are many excellent writers who write great and powerful books whose language is not extraordinary. It’s always good, mind you, but not the main way they get their power. I would say that’s true of most writers really.

I think what you have to do is figure out what you do well and make that work for you. I think what bothered me in graduate school was how many of my classmates focused on language to the neglect of story and other elements of fiction. The truth was maybe one or two could write beautiful prose (and this was in a large group of talented writers). Most just didn’t have that gift. But instead of struggling to develop what gifts they did have they got caught up on language because that was what all the teachers praised most.

I was lucky. I got more than my share of praise and attention in my MFA program. But I think sometimes teachers and others might actually slow down development. Yes, we always have to try new things as writers. Yes we have to push ourselves. But we are what we are, too. Whatever talents or skills we can use to make our writing powerful and entertaining should be used.

And with that I wish you good writing and a happy holiday. I’m taking a little blog break until after New Years.

If you’re bored and looking for some writer talk, here’s a new page on my website with blog interviews I’ve done recently on Aliens and Writing. http://www.brianyansky.comblog-tour2010.html

Finally, I thought I’d try asking if any of you have questions or topics you’d like me to write about. I’d be happy to give my two cents on any topic I’ve got two cents worth of comments to make. Leave a comment here or at any future post or email me at brian@brianyansky.com if any topics or questions come to mind.

Thanks for reading,

Brian

Story

2010-12-11T05:50:00.000-08:00

In Austin, Texas, it gets hot in the summer. You can fry an egg on the pavement. You can cook a whole five-course meal. If you stand in one place too long, you start smoking. Hot.

How do you get that heat in writing? Everything has to be working in your writing and that includes the oft maligned element, story.

Story isn’t easy. People realize it’s hard to write well, to use language well. It’s hard to develop character, create an interesting setting, etc.. But story doesn’t really get its due. It lives in the worst fictional neighborhood and isn’t invited to the fictional elements’ parties. Its job is undesirable. It’s the garbage collector of fiction.

Story is, in fact, seriously undervalued, particularly in MFA programs (at least that was my experience and seems to be the experience of many others). A lot of writers who write beautifully fail miserably because they have no story to tell or what faint story they do have to tell isn’t told well. They expect us to read their work because they write pretty sentences.

I’m here to tell you—pretty sentences aren’t enough( even though I love beautiful writing). You need all the elements of fiction, including story, to be working. I need them anyway—I need all the help I can get.

intuititon

2010-12-04T15:19:00.000-08:00

Technique is important. Learning craft is important. But it isn’t enough. Of course you have to learn what you can, and then you have to bury it in your subconscious and find a way to get to that place when you’re writing. But there are times when you should ignore technique, ignore your hard won techniques of craft, in favor of intuition.

Intuition is highly undervalued in our culture. We want to know the steps to accomplishing a goal. We want to reason our way to success. It just doesn’t work that way in writing. Prescriptions for success in writing are published all the time, so why don’t we have more great books? Successful people in many other fields, very smart people sometimes, who read these prescriptions for success, try writing fiction and are surprised and disappointed they don’t work. Why aren’t more of these people who are accomplished in other fields published? Why aren’t more of them writing spectacular fiction?

Because there is no formula for writing a good novel.

Nope.

Writing is intuitive in many ways. You find what works for you through trial and error, study of craft, hard work, luck, but there is always an aspect of writing that remains mysterious. Sometimes you have to take chances. Sometimes you just have to trust your intuition.

Or so I think today.

So You Want to Write a Novel

2010-11-28T14:47:00.000-08:00

Got this from David Kazzie's blog. I think it's pretty funny. Take a look.

writing advice

2010-11-27T05:14:00.000-08:00

Here’s my best advice about writing. Don’t take anyone’s advice about writing.

Not without the proverbial grain of salt or maybe a hundred grains anyway.

I love Robert Olen Butler’s book about writing FROM WHERE WE DREAM. I think it is one of the best books about writing I’ve read (there are a lot of bad ones out there it has to be said) but there are many things in that book I don’t agree with and can’t use.

Why? All writers are unique. Writing is one of the most personal, idiosyncratic activities around. What works for one writer might take the life out of another writer’s writing or at least lead them to do things that weaken some aspect of their writing.

Each writer has to find his or her way and take what he or she can from every source and leave the rest. It’s hard but finding your own way requires going the wrong way a lot.

So should you take my advice about writing to not take anyone’s advice about writing?

publishing

2010-11-20T06:27:00.000-08:00

Forgive me. I’m in a ranting mood today.

I’ve been out and about more lately because my book just came out. I’ve heard various versions of this a lot lately, “I’ve written an awesome novel. I’ve been writing for six months or a year or two. No one will publish it because I don’t know anyone. You know, it’s the gatekeepers. It’s a great book that would be a bestseller but I can’t get past those gatekeepers.” They go on to say everyone else is getting a big deal (but if you ask them who they know that got a big deal they will say they don’t actually know anyone but they’ve heard, they’ve read someplace—big deals, everywhere). Why not them? Why not them? I think we all do the “why not me?” thing sometimes, so I sympathize, but I also think that media attention to a few big deals skews new writers notions about publishing.

I’ve got a few things to add to that.

The first is that I read an article not that long ago that said the average published writer wrote a little over ten years before he/she published his/her novel. Now, of course that’s the average. You might do much better than that. I hope you do, but I didn’t. And it says something, doesn’t it, that it takes most writers that much time working on their craft before they publish. So, that’s one thing. Learning to write well is a slow process. If you’ve written for a year or two, even if you’ve written some good work, maybe your work isn’t quite ready to be published. Some writers do get to writing well very quickly but if you're not one of those writers, and obviously most of us aren't, you will get there if you keep writing with passion and a desire to improve.

Another thing: these deals people keep reading about are few and far between. People think there are deals being made all over the place and they’re missing out. They read about the big deals online every week or two so it seems like they’re the tip of iceberg, like there are many of these deals being made, but they’re, um, actually the whole iceberg. Those few big deals every month are in the news because they are so few. The much, much more common small deasl aren’t made a big deal about (ha) and the thousands of manuscripts that are rejected every week—you already know this—are not mentioned at all. I heard an agent speak recently. He said he got 5000-6000 queries a year. Last year he took on two new clients. I think that’s about the number of queries my agent got last year, too. Now, to put things in perspective that agent said about 90% of the manuscripts he got, he could dismiss right away for various reasons, but still. Lots of rejection out there and very few acceptances. That’s the norm. The big deal happens to someone, of course, and maybe you’ll be that person but it’s always a matter of luck and skill and the luck part, I’m afraid, is out of your control. Working hard to improve your skills though—that you can do.

Finally—are the best books always published and the others rejected? No. You may look at a published novel and think your manuscript is better than that. Maybe you’re right. (Of course, it has to be said that writers are not always the best judges of their own work). However, a number of other factors are always involved in publication besides quality. And also we all view “quality” subjectively so it’s a little hard to measure. For example, a person who hates all romance novels isn’t going to be able to judge a good one from a bad one. BUT all of that aside, I think some bad books or so-so books get published and I’m sure a lot of very good manuscripts get rejected. It’s the nature of publishing that manuscripts get overlooked and that some very good works that would only appeal to a small audience might not be published for that reason. That sucks.

BUT here’s the thing. If you let yourself get too distracted by dreams of being published to acclaim and big checks, you’ll miss out on what is most fun, most satisfying, most rewarding about writing-- the writing itself. And I believe that every writer with just a bit of talent can eventually, through hard work, through fighting to grow as a writer and writing a lot of words and reading, become a writer that agents and editors can’t ignore.

Or so I think today.

The End

2010-11-13T12:23:00.000-08:00

I think that writers sometimes go on too long after the denouement of a story. They want to explain things and tie things up and there’s a temptation to have this go on for a few chapters beyond the point where the story has reached its true conclusion. If it’s over, it’s over. I know I’ve done this before in early drafts and had to figure out where the true ending should be. I think it’s worth being aware of this temptation to go beyond the true ending and wrap things up more neatly than they maybe should be wrapped up. Your true THE END probably comes pretty quickly after the resolution of the story.

OR so I think today.

dream analysis

2010-11-07T04:23:00.000-08:00

One of the things I always say about writing and remind myself when I write is not to think, not to force it, to try to find the place in myself and in the story where it unfolds as it would if I were in the story. I want to get in the zone or what Robert Olen Butler says is the “place we dream”, a kind of dream state. I go there every day when I write and I try to live moment to moment in my story. I do all that. Yes.

BUT there comes a time in revision when thinking is required, when you must puzzle over every aspect of a scene, a chapter, a section, the whole. You have to use your mind in a different way to analyze whether something is working or not working or how you might make it work better. How is what’s happening significant? How does it fit with the rest of the story? Why is it necessary? These are some questions that come to mind but there are many more and there are always those that are idiosyncratic to the manuscript I’m working on. Main point: you need that analytical and evaluative side to step in at some point and chide, advise, and order the more dreamy side that has, with luck, made the story and characters vivid and alive.

Or so I think today.

selection

2010-11-01T05:22:00.000-07:00

Can you select the right things to be in the foreground and the right things to be in the background? Can you focus on the important parts of the story? Can you make the less important parts but necessary parts pass at an appropriate pace, one that will make them present but not distracting?

Novels work and don’t work for many reasons. But this seeing what’s important and giving it dramatic focus and expression in scenes, and summarizing the less important, and leaving out the unimportant, is a critical aspect of structure.

Or so I think today.

Also, in case you live in Austin, I'm doing a book celebration/signing with these two lovely ladies:

Mark your calendars to Holler Loudly about Alien Invasions and Truth with a Capital T!

Authors Bethany Hegedus, Brian Yansky and Cynthia Leitich Smith will celebrate their latest books at 2 p.m. Nov. 14 at BookPeople in Austin, Texas.

beginnings

2010-10-27T04:50:00.000-07:00

Beware the false beginning. It’s easy to start in the wrong place. A lot of times we authors even need to start in the wrong place. We need to get out some ideas or ground ourselves in the story or think to the tap tap tap of our fingers hitting the keyboard. We need to find out who are characters are and what they’re doing. So we write a lot of back-story in our beginnings.

What we need to do later is look to see if we really began the story where it should begin or are the first few or ten or twenty pages really just a dump of information or a stumble in the dark? Always be a little suspicious of your beginning. Not necessarily the first line or two which might be perfect, but the first ten pages where your story is trying to get started. You want to jump into your real story as quickly as you can. You want to start your story as close to the heart of the story as possible.

For example, you don’t want to tell all about Bubba’s troubling childhood and fights he had and the wins and losses and his fascination with Sumo Wrestling (a sport he has always loved even though no one in Cowtown, West Texas, knew anything about it) for the first fifty pages if your real story is about Bubba opening a flower shop and meeting Wild Wanda, the woman of his dreams, when he turned fifty. Maybe you want to work in the Sumo Wrestling (who wouldn’t?) but the reader should feel momentum in the beginning and confidence that the writer is taking them someplace. Most of the time this means starting the novel as close to the heart of story as possible.

Or so I think today.

Showing Up

2010-10-22T04:03:00.000-07:00

I was at the Texas Book Festival this past weekend. I was lucky enough to be on two panels. One of them, in the picture above, was a panel with fantasy writers called Portals to Imagined Worlds. It had Ingrid Law, Cinda Williams Chima, Carolyn Cohagan, myself, and was moderated by another accomplished writer, Greg Leitich Smith.

It was a fun panel. One of the questions was about where we got our inspiration. The others on the panel gave thoughtful, wise answers and I said I bought my inspiration out in a small town in West Texas. I didn't mention that it came in small tins and looked a lot like Altoids but I'll tell you. Very tasty.

I wish.

No, the truth is, in my humble opinion, that while inspiration is very real it seldom just appears out of nowhere. It usually comes to someone who is working every day. That is, you have to be engaged in writing your novel, struggling with each problem, trying to work it out, get the story out, get it right, even on those days you can't actually get to your computer. That's when inspiration comes. It comes because you're in a place where it can come to you. And I believe the way you put yourself in that place is by showing up.

Writing Alien

2010-10-16T05:10:00.000-07:00

This is a reprint of a post I wrote for Cynsations yesterday. If you've somehow missed this blog, you should check it out. It is full of writerly information and insight.

I’ve written elsewhere that my first short-story, “Santa Claus and the Twenty-seven Bad Boys,” which was written in the first grade, neatly outlined my material for a lifetime of fiction writing: it had a stubborn fascination in the mythological and supernatural creatures that haunt and enliven our culture, an affection for odd and strange characters, and a desire to be both comic and serious. While this is surely true, I don’t think I found the complete expression of it until I wrote ALIEN INVASION & OTHER INCONVENINCES.

What I mean is this: though writing quirky novels was nothing new to me, the fantastical elements in those novels were never central to them. The novels were rooted in realism and the fantastical events were appendages added to them in various ways for various purposes. I’d published two of these novels. Both of them had received mostly good reviews and one had won a prestigious award, but neither had sold particularly well.

After those, I’d written my next novel and that novel had been rejected by my editor and several other editors. After those rejections I have to admit, rightly or wrongly, to a feeling that I was doing something wrong. And I have to admit I had no reason to believe there would be a line of publishers interested in my next manuscript if it were like the others. So what I thought at that point was I needed to try writing a more conventional novel. I needed to reel in my quirky characters and mute the fantasy element. I needed to try something different.

With this in mind, I started a novel. It died after twenty or thirty pages. I started another and same thing happened. This went on for a while. I did what writers in a bad place must do, I kept writing. Eventually I started one that began, “It takes less time for them to conquer the world than it takes me to brush my teeth.” Okay, I thought. Kind of funny. Kind of weird.

But not more conventional.

Not following the plan.

I was about to erase the line when another came. “That’s pretty disappointing.”

I had a voice. I couldn’t deny it. Every writer loves when they feel they have a voice, a narrator who speaks distinctly. BUT this was still not the novel I had planned. This was definitely not that novel. My finger hovered over the DELETE key.

But, come on, I had a voice.

I remember thinking to myself, “Really? You’re really going to write this novel? This totally unsellable even-weirder-than-usual novel? Really?”

Be reasonable, I thought. A novel takes a year. Maybe more. No on gets that many of those.

But I had a voice. I had a character. What could I do? (Let me interject here that there are many wonderful conventional novels but that for me writing a conventional novel is like trying to write in a strait jacket. I couldn’t do it if I tried. I did try. I couldn’t.)

This novel that I wrote thinking no one would buy is the novel that sold to one of the best publisher’s around, Candlewick. If I’d listened to the voice of reason, I wouldn’t have written it. Sometimes we writers have to be unreasonable. Sometimes, even though there are many good reasons not to, we have to write what we have to write. And, for me, the writing of ALIEN INVASION & OTHER INCONVENIENCES taught me a lot about what I want to write and how to write it. So that leap in the dark, that to “hell with it,” that unreasonable act, made, as Mr. Frost once said about a certain less-traveled road, all the difference.

beginnings

2010-10-11T06:26:00.000-07:00

So this past weekend I was invited to The Southern Festival of Books In Nashville. Thank you SFB. Nashville’s a wonderful town. I was on a panel with Palo Bacigalupi and I got to have dinner with Louis Sachar (okay, it wasn’t just he and I; there were a few hundred other people there, but we sat at the same table) and it was interesting and fun.

He had a lot to say about writing and bridge. Maybe more about bridge to be honest. The guy is a total bridge fanatic. I am blissfully ignorant when it comes to bridge but he made it interesting. He actually has a new YA novel out that is just about bridge called THE CARDTURNER.

Anyway, he said he always just writes out a rough, rough first draft of his novels and never outlines. That is interesting to me because HOLES is one of those novels whose structure seems perfect. If you’re looking for a novel to study structure, that’s one I would look at.

Not outlined. He found the shape of the novel in rewrites.

I know everyone works differently, but I’m a big believer in writing a quick first draft because so much will change in the novel anyway. As long as I have my first few sentences and feel like I know where I’m going, I’m ready to write fast and just try to get black on white. The “knowing where I’m going” part is an illusion of course. I don’t have a clue. And in the end I will have one big mess, but it will be my mess. It will be my beginning. For a lot of people just getting that first draft down is the hardest part of the process.

Another thing he said was that he always came, in all of his novels, to a point where he thought the whole piece of work sucked (not his words exactly but…) and he felt like throwing it out. I come to that point too and don’t be surprised if you do. You just have to keep going and work through it.

Or so I think today.

In ALIEN news:
I was interviewed here today:

http://childrenspublishing.blogspot.com/2010/10/in-stores-this-week-part-1-with.html

What's it mean?

2010-10-04T04:50:00.000-07:00

What does my sheepdog mean when he puts his head in my lap and stares up at me? He might mean he loves me—really, really, really. He might mean he wants me to pet him. Please. Please. Please. He might mean that he’s feeling a little low and he would like to be told how good he is, preferably for the rest of his waking life. Good dog. Good dog. Good dog. Maybe he means something else I haven’t thought about. He could, for all I know, be telling me that he’s sorry for eating my tennis shoe, which by the way wasn’t nearly as good as he thought it would be. Do I always have to buy Converse?

SHOW DON’T TELL. Yes, but. Some gestures aren’t clear. They need context to make showing them add to the story. And sometimes they need more than that. Sometimes it’s more important to tell and violate the rule (this one is definitely made to be broken on numerous occasions) and be more specific. Expressing with precision the experience of the character—how they’re affected by what’s happening or how they affect another and the way it fits with the rest of the story—is vital. The reader has to be in on what’s going on in order to share the character’s experience. Show. Tell. It doesn’t matter how you do that. It just matters that you do.

Or so I think today.

See It From Their POV

2010-09-29T05:56:00.000-07:00

See it from their point-of-view.

It’s easy, as a writer, to let our own POV direct our characters in a scene. Maybe some of this is inevitable. But I think good writing demands that we see from our character’s points-of-view as they’re living the story. What I mean is that sometimes I find myself being overbearing and forcing my characters to do or say things. It’s easy, when struggling, to fall into this and it almost always, at least for me, leads to inauthentic moments. Things will happen more organically and more right choices will be made if the writer can get inside his character and see the world/story from his/her POV.

Or so I think today.

grammar moment:sv agreement

2010-09-24T06:01:00.000-07:00

Forgive me for using the G. word. Just the mention of it can clear a room but I’m here to tell you, brothers and sisters on the long and twisty road of the writing life, it’s just another part of writing. It’s helpful to know it well enough so you don’t have to think about it. So here’s a little grammar moment.

I am not myself a grammarian and I do not worship at the altar of the Grammar God. Fortunately, I have a friend who I will call the Grammar Guru (to protect the guilty) who does. He lives nearby. He is very tall. He has green hair. He knows grammar.

The first time I visited him to ask a question about grammar I was naïve and impressionable. Along the way the spirit of an undiscovered—during and after his lifetime-- writer genius ( self-proclaimed, of course) named Hal stopped me to ask why I would waste my time on grammar when I wanted to be a Writer—that’s with a capital W in case you missed it.

Good question, I thought.

Spirit Hal made me think about writers I’d known who were crappy at grammar but had something more important—voice and soul and power in their words. Hal also made me think of people who were excellent with grammar and crappy writers anyway. They were stiff and had no heart to their writing and not much to say. Grammar wasn’t going to help that.

And yet. And yet. Wasn’t grammar just one more part of writing? Wasn’t it worth knowing well enough you weren’t bothered by not knowing it? I thought so.

“Get thee behind me, Hal,” I said and continued on the road to the Grammar Guru’s house.

Hal did get behind me but he kept talking. He kept saying things like, “A real Writer needs grammar like a fish needs a boat.”

I had to admit that was pretty good, but I stayed my course.

I knocked on the Grammar Guru’s door. He opened it. He was taller than the doorway. I told you he was tall.

“Ah,” he said. “Greetings fellow traveler.”

He always greeted me this way. He always greeted everyone this way. Probably it had something to do with his being a guru.

“I can see you’ve come with a question. Tea first.”

He always gave me tea first. He drank a lot of tea. He also commented on the state of the world like it was the stock market.

“The world is up today,” he said. “Good news in the trenches.”

I had no idea what he was talking about.

“I have a question about subjects and verbs,” I said when we’d finished our tea. “What do people mean when they say subjects and verbs have to agree? I mean do they sometimes disagree? How do they disagree? Is it like, the verb says, ‘ hey subject, I don’t think you understand why I think dogs are better pets than cats.’ And subject says to verb, ‘I understand, but I know cats are better. More personality. Less care.’ What does disagree mean oh grammar guru?”

“I’m glad you asked me that,” he said. He always said that. He was glad about most things. I guess that was part of being a guru.

Here was his answer:

Subjects and verbs have to agree in sentences. This usually isn’t a problem in future and past tense. There are a few exceptions (like was/were, the past tense of is/are) but mostly there won’t be a verb choice between a singular subject and a plural subject in the past. For example:
Jack walked up the hill.
Jack and Jill walked up the hill.
Walked is the same whether the subject is singular (Jack) or plural (Jack and Jill).
The problem with agreement comes with singular and plural subjects in the present tense and in the third person. For example,
Jack walks up the hill
Jack and Jill walk up the hill.
A regular verb will have an “s” on it when the subject is singular. No “s” when the subject is plural.
(To be continued)

Characters

2010-09-20T05:40:00.001-07:00

Characters need to be put at risk and they need to risk things to keep the reader involved. I’ve said before that you have to be cruel to your characters, make bad things happen to them, which will delight your reader or at least fascinate them (who can’t help looking at a train wreck?). But I would add that these bad things often come out of the characters’ acts. The characters’ mistakes are part of what keep us involved in her story.

Pushing on and BookTrailer

2010-09-14T17:24:00.001-07:00

There comes a point in almost everything I work on when I want to give up. I want to quit. I think to myself, this will never work. I think to myself, what is wrong with you? I think to myself, start over you fool. Quit wasting time.

Actually, this isn’t something I just think about writing. I’ve thought it at other times, too. We all do. But with writing—it happens with nearly every novel I try to write. I’ll be writing a first draft in all of its unwieldy and maddeningly imprecise glory and I’ll feel I’m on the wrong road. I came to a split in the road somewhere earlier in the draft and I took the less traveled road and look what happened? I’m hopelessly lost.

Most of the time I struggle through. Most of the time I push on and it’s the right decision. Writing a novel is a messy business. Sometimes you just have to get messy.
Or so I think today.
In Alien News: Here’s my book trailer--

Seeing Your Fiction

2010-09-09T05:04:00.000-07:00

I think this has to do with the author’s vision. Whatever your skills with the various aspects of writing a novel, whatever your talents, you have a unique way of looking at the world. Everyone does. If you can imbue your work with the unique vision, find the voice for it, then you’ve done something. Something for you. Something for the person reading.

I know when I start reading certain books I feel an immediate rapport with the voice of the novel, an immediate interest, because it feels authentic. I get really excited if it also feels different. Your way of seeing the world is what makes your writing yours.

So all the talk about craft and all the various aspects of writing fiction and yadda yadda yadda—all important and all not worth much if the writer doesn’t have something to say, a unique—in the sense that every person is unique—way of seeing, and can’t put that something into words.

Or so I think today.

Also, in ALIEN INVASION news: I'm giving away my last two unspoken for ARCs on Goodreads for anyone who is interested.

blocked writers

2010-09-04T06:01:00.000-07:00

Writers do get blocked. It happens all the time. Some people call that writer’s block. But unless you have some physical problem or some serious mental problem, the way around it, I believe, is to keep writing. Anyone able to put their fingers on a keyboard or pick up a pen can write. The blocked writer can write. They just can’t write well. I think this is what happens to writers who get stuck. They’re disappointed in the writing so they think/feel they can’t go on. They stop writing. This leads to longer and longer stretches of not writing. Not writing begets not writing.

Sometimes you have to write badly in order to find your way back to writing well. During those times you’re like someone walking through a desert. It will be hot, dry, and you’ll be thirsty and all alone. You have to just keep moving. A lot of other writers have gone through that same desert before if that helps any. Eventually, step by step, you’ll make it to the other side.

Writers write. They don’t always write well. That’s an important point, I think. People who get writer’s block can still write; they just think they can’t write anything well. If you should find yourself in that place you just have to force yourself to write on—even if it’s bad.

Or so I think today.

physical gestures

2010-08-30T04:57:00.000-07:00

Along the same lines as the last entry—thinking about being specific. Avoid generic physical gestures. We need physical description to make a scene real but having someone drink a glass of wine or light a smoke, say, during dialogue just to get some physical gestures into the manuscript won’t do much to improve it. It might even work against the scene’s momentum and undercut the reader’s confidence in the writer.

Just as the description needs to communicate something more than generic, paint-by-number scenery, physical gestures need to communicate more. Everything has to be loaded with the expression of the moment-by-moment life of a scene.

This is hard to do and, if you’re like me, it will take many revisions to get past the generic to the particular.

Or so I think today.

Description

2010-08-25T04:32:00.000-07:00

I was working through a revision of my new manuscript and I realized that sometimes my language wasn’t as precise as it could be because I wasn’t showing or telling the reader what was going on in my character’s mind. Also in description, I wasn’t always putting the reader there by being there with my character. What did the way he saw his surroundings mean to how he was experiencing what was happening? This is at a language level; it’s so important to making a connection with the reader.

Here’s an example of what I’m thinking.

"The trees were green. "

(Very generic. Okay, they’re green. It tells the reader just that much).

"The thick green of the trees closed around him."

Okay, not great but that gives a sense of how the character feels. You have the adjective "thick" which gives a certain feeling to the green. You have the “closed around him” to give a sense of claustrophobia. It charges the sentence with something troubling, even vaguely threatening. OR

"The sun slipped through the thick, leafy trees and warmed his face as he made his way up the path."

VERY different feel. Leafy gives an entirely different feeling than the “thick” in green but objectively the thing being described, a dense woods, is similar. The “sun slipped through “makes the reader imagine patches of light which is a good feeling. Then “warmed his face” is pleasant and comforting.

Same place but different choices make the reader experience it differently.

Onward Through the Fog

2010-08-20T05:00:00.000-07:00

You can quit.

You can always quit.

Writing is tough and you’ll have some days when you want to give up either because of rejection or some other disappointment or maybe because the words won’t come at all or maybe because only the wrong words or the almost right ones will come. A disappointment as thick as a London fog will set in around you.

You can always quit.

But what if Humphrey Bogart and Katherine Hepburn had said to hell with it in the African Queen (I’m a fan of old movies) and given up pulling that wreck of a boat through the swampy jungle? How many times could either or both of them have given up on that difficult journey? Once Bogart comes out of the water where he’s been pulling the boat and leaches cover his body. Perhaps metaphorically you feel like leaches are covering your body some days when you write but…It would have been easy for Humphrey and Kate to give up then. Oh yeah. They would have died ( well, their characters) in the middle of no-where which is certainly no place to die. But Kate forced them on. Humphrey forced them on. You have to do the same. So, push on campers. Plenty before us have faced much worse than a little literary disappointment. Finish your manuscripts. Suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. Write on.

Getting Help

2010-08-15T05:10:00.006-07:00

When I let others read my work-- my wife, my critique group, my agent, my editor-- I am always as open as I can be. I always listen to their thoughts and criticisms. I reread comments several times. People can help you make a better manuscript and I try not to let my ego get in the way of that. I want the best manuscript I can create and I’ll take help wherever I can get it. Readers help. Good readers can really help.

That said, some people will try to make specific suggestions for changes. They will try to tell you HOW to revise. What I mean is they might say that X in a certain scene bothers them. They might suggest that you do Y instead and give you a detailed explanation of Y, of what you should do to fix a scene. It is very, very helpful to know where people feel something is wrong in a manuscript. What I listen to less (very little, in truth) are the specific suggestions about how I should fix a scene. Usually they just won’t work. Usually, these need to come from me. My advice is to listen carefully to X and be grateful but be suspicious of Y.

IS YOUR STORY REAL &ARE YOU YOUR CHARACTERS?

2010-08-10T05:28:00.000-07:00

(Double posting: also on my agent, Sara Crowe's, blog)

My answer

I have a book coming out in about two months, ALIEN INVASION & OTHER INCONVENIENCES. My first two novels were somewhat realistic and I got the usual questions about whether I was my character and if my story was real. I gave the usual answer. Some of the story and characters, in a very changed form, have elements of autobiography but most is made up. In this new novel, aliens invade the world and conquer it in ten seconds and enslave the survivors. This time I have to admit it’s all real. Every word of the story is true. Also, I’m all the characters.

I’m the aliens who come to earth to colonize. Back in our solar system the sun burned out so we had to hit the road, ride the solar winds, find new worlds. Yadda. Yadda. Fortunately for us there are a lot of worlds out there. Unfortunately, for the inhabitants of those worlds we are quite advanced and think that primitive beings really don’t matter so we put most of them “to sleep” in a humane manner and enslave the rest to help our civilization, which is really, really great, move forward.

I’m also, as it turns out, the enslaved who are mostly young (*author’s note—I killed off most of the older people because, hey, most of them don’t read young adult fiction.) and who must find a way to adapt in order to survive. We’re not happy about this. Each one of us is unhappy in his or her own way. It’s never been all that easy to be a human but being enslaved by aliens (basically little green men whose power comes from their mind and telepathic abilities and not brawn and technology which is very confusing and certainly un-civilized by civilized Earthling standards) really sucks. We’ve lost our parents, our brothers and sisters and friends and dogs and cats. We’ve had a very bad time.

My main character is named Jesse and he is me. He’s only seventeen and I am, well, not. He’s a slave and I am, well, not. His father was in the military for twenty years and mine was in for three. Okay, some similarity there. He has a black belt in TaeKwonDo and so do I, but he’s much more advanced in martial arts than I will ever be. His mother was a teacher and mine was not. He grew up in Houston and I did not. But other than these differences we’re alike. Except in the ways we aren’t.

I guess, in the end, my answer to “is your story real and are you your characters?” , whether writing speculative fiction or somewhat realistic fiction, remains the same. I write what I know and what I know is that any story I write will have parts that are taken from real life and put into the Crazy Imagination Blender™ and used in the construction of character and story along with totally made up parts. In the end, they’ll be blended together in such a way that I won’t always be sure where something came from and what % of it happened and what % of it is made up. It’s all real though—to me—in a purely fictitious way. And thanks for giving me the chance to clear that up.

Manipulation

2010-08-03T04:21:00.000-07:00

I think one thing to consider when you get to rewriting is that nearly everyone has big holes in their manuscript. No use getting depressed about this unfortunate aspect of writing. No matter how long you’ve been writing, no matter how much you think things out, there will be problems that you didn’t see, couldn’t see, until you’ve finished the whole manuscript and gone over it a couple of times. Usually, along with a lot of small problems, they’ll be at least one big thing that feels wrong. Pay attention to that. It probably feels wrong for a reason.

I love Robert Olen Butler’s great book about the writing process FROM WHERE I DREAM. I love his idea of entering a dream state and trying to experience the manuscript moment by moment. Great stuff. One of the areas I disagree with him is revision. He thinks you can and should enter the dream state to revise. I don’t. I think you have to be more analytical in revision (once you have a real draft down which will probably take several runs at the manuscript).

In revision, you need to keep getting to that place in you, the dream zone place, to revise at the scene level…but you also need to step back and analyze how the various aspects of story are working in your manuscript. For big picture, especially, you need to be analytical. You are creating a story. You have characters doing things for certain reasons. You didn’t know that when you were writing. You had glimpses here and there but you didn’t know in the same way you do once you can see the WHOLE story. Now, you need to revise in a way that manipulates your characters and what happens so that it all enhances your story. Also, stories are bigger than just what happens—they’re about something—and that may become clear in this revision in such a way you can enhance that, too.

Revision is the time to be brutal. You need to cut/add and do whatever is necessary to make everything fit.

Or so I think today.

MY Book News: a signed ARC of ALIEN INVASION & OTHER INCONVENIENCES is available in a giveaway over at Goodreads. If anyone is interested go to goodreads.com to enter. http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7655554-alien-invasion-and-other-inconviences

Doors&Windows

2010-07-29T05:25:00.000-07:00

Another thing I work on in revision, maybe after the first couple passes, is adding physical details. I’m a writer who underwrites in the early stages of my work, so what I do at some point in the revision process is look for windows or doors, places where the manuscript needs or can benefit from more details, places I can enter to add these details. I want to slow things down and I want to make the reader more involved in the scenes.

Overwriters should go through the manuscript looking for places to cut. They’ll be trying to recognize the excesses of writing in scenes, the repetition.

I think it’s worth going through a revision focusing on one or two things. I’m never entirely successful at this. I always get sidetracked by other problems, but even just the effort of focusing will make a writer more aware of a weakness.
Anyone else have a weakness in their writing they’re aware of?

It's not enough to write well

2010-07-24T05:08:00.000-07:00

I was reading this interview with several editors and they were talking about how they pick books for their list. We’ve all heard the “I just don’t feel like I would be the best editor for this book” and “I just wasn’t excited enough to take this one” etc. etc… But what the he#* does that mean? Basically it means that, for whatever reason, the editor can’t see himself or herself married to this book for a year or more. The commitment is huge. They have to be able to read the book a dozen times without pulling out their hair, and they have to be able to convince others in the house to agree it’s a good buy and they have to be so excited about it that they’ll stay excited for over the year it will take to publish. They have to, in short, love the book.

Almost all the editors said most of the manuscripts submitted to them were fairly well written. Editors, unlike agents, have, in most cases, someone between them and the writers who submit to them. Agents. (Only a few houses will take submissions directly from writers). So I guess it makes sense that most of what editors read is mostly well written. But it got me thinking; it’s not enough just to write well.

I know there are other factors besides the writing. There’s the fashion of publishing—what’s hot, what’s not, for example. Luck. Connections. Also simply the personal taste of the editor, and also whether they had to wait too long in line that morning for their Double Soy Latte, are having bad hair day, had their foot stomped on in the subway, but I think it’s worth noting that a lot of people WRITE WELL.

I’m talking, as I think these editors were, not only about being able to use language well, but also understanding the basics of fiction: characterization, plot, setting etc…How to move characters around and tell a story. I think these editors were saying most of the manuscripts they read could do these things. (That’s quite an accomplishment in and of itself. That puts a writer in the top few percentile maybe. Let me give you some totally unreliable numbers. I’ve heard two agents say they get around 4000-5000 queries in a year. One agent who said this said he took on two clients out of that 4000-5000. It makes sense that agents have to be picky. How many clients can they represent? But those numbers amazed me. Jennifer Jackson, an agent that blogs, gives a tally of queries she receives and each week and how many partial or whole manuscripts she asks to read. OF COURSE THIS DOES NOT MEAN SHE AGREES TO REPRESENT THE WRITERS, but they make it to level two where she’ll read the full manuscript. Here’s the last two weeks:
92 read queries, 0 requests for manuscripts
153 read queries, 1 request for manuscript.
My point is that with all this rejection going on it does make sense that what editors see will be more polished than most writers are able to do. )

So what does it take then to get a novel published? Love. An editor can’t just think to themselves, “This person writes a pretty sentence” or “Interesting characters in this chapter” or “I love the description of the world these characters are in. Not bad at all on the characters either. Not bad. ” EVERYTHING has to work in such a way that an editor can’t stop themselves from loving it.

For me, a unique way of looking at the world and a unique voice (and just about every editor mentioned the need for a unique voice to attract their attention) will go a long way toward my buying and loving a book.

It may not be enough to write well, but you have to do that first. It’s just that you have to do everything else well too. Writing and reading will certainly help you get there. But consider your weaknesses in writing when you’re doing all this writing. Just writing a lot of words will improve your writing but if you keep making the same mistakes over and over again the improvement will be slow. I know some of my weaknesses in writing and I struggle to make them stronger every time I write. You should, too. And find your voice and your particular way of looking at the world and don't let yourself be persuaded to make your writing more like what's popular or more mainstream. What's most unique about your writing is what's most unique about you: the way you look at the world.

Or so I think today.

What's a writer?

2010-07-19T05:19:00.000-07:00

When people ask me why I write I have to say it’s because I can’t help myself. That’s the way it is now. I love it. I’m addicted to it. I need to do it. But, of course, that wasn’t always my answer. I started out writing because it was fun and I secretly hoped it would make me rich and famous and able to work in my pajamas all day. Unless I was traveling the world, of course, in which case I would gladly wear clothes.

I did love to read.

I did love stories.

But, like many people, I had crazy ideas about what writers did. I thought they worked a few hours a day and the rest of the time they did whatever they wanted. Hung out by the pool, discussed writerly things over drinks, etc... Now, that’s an absurd notion, but as I’ve grown older it’s also one that I would hate to be true. One of the joys of life is doing work you love, whatever that work is. Being passionate about it, struggling with it, these are the things that bring real satisfactions. People who love their work are the lucky ones.

What I’m getting at is unrealistic expectations aren’t always bad. Sometimes you start in that place and as you begin to make your way your ideas about what you want change. You end up in a different place.

Or so I think today.

Process

2010-07-14T06:28:00.000-07:00

The old “to outline or not to outline” question came up at a recent writerly social event I was at. I’ve heard many writers on this subject. Sometimes writers get very adamant about their position. They point their pens menacingly and say, OF COURSE YOU SHOULD OUTLINE. OR--OF COUSE YOU SHOULDN’T OUTLINE.

There are various degrees of outliners. Some say they just put down some vague notions about plot and character knowing they will change as they write. Just having them down somehow makes them more confident though. Some writers write long outlines, ten or twenty pages, and make them very detailed.

Other writers, the majority I believe, take a more iintuitivel approach to writing. They try to get in the flow of their story and push it forward in what they feel is a more organic way. While the outliners may get confidence from a sense of where they’re going, the writer who doesn’t outline feels he or she will be more likely to breathe life into his or her characters by allowing them to lead—in the sense that the story flows out of what they do and don’t do, want and are forced to face to get what they want etc…

Like most writers, my methods vary somewhat from manuscript to manuscript. I’ve never been successful at outlining a novel though and always begin first drafts in the stumbling way of the intuitive writer, living in uncertainty from day to day as I create a story, characters, world. But lately, though I can’t outline when I’m doing initial drafts, I have come to outlining after those initial drafts and one revision.

I think the intuitive approach and outlining aren’t mutually exclusive. I do feel that the intuitive approach in early drafts gives the writer a better chance at breathing life into his characters and stories. But I also think that sticking to this intuitive approach through revision may not serve the story, particularly structurally. So I think a more analytical approach, one that might include outlining and definitely includes chapter summaries, can make writers see weaknesses that they might be blind to. It is also possible that the intuitive writer might use outlining earlier in the evolution of a manuscript to analyze certain sections that are giving him or her trouble.

Or so I think today.

WI

2010-07-09T05:28:00.000-07:00

POSTED (Albert Einstein was definitely a big brain kind of guy but as a young man he responded so slowly to questions that his parents and teachers suspected he was mentally disabled. Also, he did poorly in school and failed his college entrance exams the first time. Go figure.)
Most writers are smart. Yes. But how smart? Are they, for instance, the smartest person in a room of people? Depends on the room, I suppose. If the room is The Poodle Dog Lounge on an all-you-can-drink-for-ten-dollars night, the writer’s chances are pretty good. On the other hand, if it’s a room full of, say, astrophysicists, rocket scientists, and brain surgeons, I’d have to say probably not.

Most writers, in a crowded room of intelligent people, probably won’t be the smartest (in an IQ kind of way) person. Writers are smart, but there are other qualities that count for as much or more than IQ. Creativity, of course, is the big one. This isn’t measured in IQ tests. The whole intimate relationship with language etc…etc… And, of course, there’s the desire and determination thing, which can take a person a long way no matter where they begin. Here’s my point: you don’t have to be brilliant to be a writer. Oh, don’t worry, big brains, you can still be a writer. But if you look at the tribe of successful writers you’ll find a lot of smart, very creative, very determined people. You probably won’t find any more brilliant people than you’d find working at the post-office.

I feel the need to say this because I’ve had people say to me before that they worried if they were smart enough to be a writer. That’s the wrong worry, I think. Worrying about finding a particular voice and style, the right rhythm for the language of a WIP, these are good things to focus on. Maybe there is such a thing as Writers' Intelligence, but luckily for most us only a small fraction of it is innate talent; the rest can be learned.

Wolves and Sheep

2010-07-04T06:11:00.000-07:00

My sheepdog is 105 pounds but looks even larger because of all the hair. In the winter, we let it grow long, let him get back to his primitive self. That hair was supposed to help protect sheepdogs from the inevitable wolf bites when they protected sheep. Naturally, when you’re protecting sheep, you have to expect to meet some wolves.

This makes me think about the wolves and sheep we contend with in our fiction. What I notice some writers doing and what I’ve done myself is sometimes allow a character’s negative qualities to be smoothed over because—no good reason. Maybe it’s because our job as writers is to know all our characters, and so we begin to identify with all of them, and we have an urge to make them stronger and wiser and kinder than they are. This has several negative effects on a manuscript. One major negative is that it weakens conflict in any number of ways.

I think this problem is something a writer can watch out for, particularly in revision, and try to correct. Let your characters be as bad as they need to be, as whatever they need to be, and allow this to lead them to conflict with other characters. It’s conflict that forces the writer into situations that build story, character, etc… as well as tension.

Or so I think today.

conversation

2010-06-29T05:12:00.000-07:00

Sometimes it’s helpful to listen to other people’s conversations. Of course, you’re not going to try to transcribe them. You’re going to listen and mark interesting phrases or turns of phrase or parts of conversation and use them sometime down the writing road when you’re in a scene. Most likely you’ll use a reasonable facsimile of them. I heard two teenage boys talking at the pool the other day. Not that I was purposely listening, but there I hanging onto the edge of the pool and they were talking loudly and what could I do? My ears were open. (I should mention I live in Austin, Texas.)

“It’s totally illegal to bury ashes on a mountain in Alaska,” one of the boys said.

“What?”

“Illegal, Dude. I’m just saying.”

“Travis said throw his ashes off the mountain. That’s what he said. He said he wants his parents or someone to throw his ashes off a mountain in Alaska when he dies. ”

“Totally lame.”

“He didn’t say bury.”

“I’m pretty sure you can’t throw them off a mountain either. I'm pretty sure there’s a law against it.”

“Oh, come on.”

“There’s a lot of things you can’t do up there. Like you can’t throw a Moose out of a plane. You’d probably get like a huge fine for it.”

Pause.

“What about Caribou?”

“I think Caribou are okay.”

Happy World UFO Day

2010-06-24T04:41:00.000-07:00

HAPPY WORLD UFO DAY:

According to Wikepedia: June 24th was selected as World UFO Day because the first UFO report that was widely reported took place on June 24, 1947. This UFO sighting was reported by Kenneth Arnold. He spotted nine unusual objects flying in a chain near Mount Rainier on that day.

I begin some novels with characters and some novels with situations and some novels with voice. I began ALIEN INVASION & OTHER INCONVENIENCES with a situation. I decided that I wanted to have a vastly superior race invade earth for labor and settlement. I didn’t want this to be a story of invasion though. I wanted the invasion to take about ten seconds. (the novel begins like this: It took them less time to conquer the world than it takes me to brush my teeth. ) I wanted the story to be about what happened afterward, and I wanted to work on the theme of how power makes people arrogant. Our history is littered with examples of powerful nations treating weaker peoples as if they aren’t human at all. Slavery is just one of the consequences of this way of thinking. These aliens in my novel sure don’t treat humans as if they’re worth anything. They make them slaves. They think of them as product. So this novel began with a situation and the characters and voice and tone of the novel (kind of comic and kind of serious) came out of that.

Every novel, for me, begins differently. I think you have to be flexible because each novel begins in a different place and requires different things from you.

BACK TO UFO DAY and my novel:
In honor of WORLD UFO DAY, Candlewick, my publisher, is giving away ARCs of ALIEN INVASION & OTHER INCONVENIENCES on twitter. If anyone is interested, go to Candlewick on twitter and do this (and I have to admit to being twitter and tweeting illiterate so I’m not sure what this means exactly)--- Follow+RT today, June 24, for chance at 1 of 5 Alien Invasion & Other Inconveniences ARCs.

why write?

2010-06-20T05:02:00.000-07:00

This is from an interview over at Editorial Anonymous http://editorialanoymous.blogspot.com . If you’ve never looked at this blog, you should. This anonymous editor has some interesting things to say about the business of publishing and writing. Sometimes she has interviews. She had one recently with Adam Rex whose new YA novel—coming out this summer—is titled FAT VAMPIRE. I haven’t read it yet, but it sounds great.

Anyway, towards the end of the interview, E.A. asks him if he has any advice for writers or vampires. He responds:

ADAM REX: “There's a joke in there somewhere: What's the difference between a writer and a vampire? One of them leads a pallid, lonely existence, sucking dry both loved ones and strangers alike in his ghoulish quest for immortality, and the other one is a vampire. Ha ha.”

Uncomfortable twinge, right?

Why do we want to be writers at all? What drives us to do what we do? It’s different for everyone, I guess. I love the process, the making of a story, but sometimes I think it’s a ridiculous way to live: sitting around making up stories while life goes on all around me. But, for me, making up stories is one way that I do live. It’s one of the things that makes me feel alive. So, I say, suck away.

verisimilitude

2010-06-16T05:23:00.000-07:00

Sometimes it feels like we walk through life half-asleep much of the time and then something reminds us we’re alive. What wakes us up?

What wakes you up?

For me it’s all kinds of things. Sometimes it’s just a sentence I’ve written or one I've read. Sometimes something someone says. Martial Arts did when I was doing those. Various passions. Issues I care about sometimes will wake me up. People wake me up ETC…

When it comes to fiction, I come back to an idea I’ve heard expressed different ways but one that Robert Olen Butler expressed most succinctly for me: the moment to moment experience of our characters, if expressed with specificity and detail, makes the reader experience that moment. SO we, as authors, must be awake to the moment our characters are living through and express that. Those moments, linked together, will give our reader an experience.

I do think a lot of times that denouement is our characters coming awake in a manuscript, being aware of something in such a way that it brings their story to a natural conclusion.

kill your darlings

2010-06-11T06:12:00.000-07:00

When you’re deep into a manuscript, maybe working through it the first time after the initial draft, there are scenes you love and points of character and plot that must change even though you don’t want them to. A first draft is going to be full of wrong turns.

What I found myself doing as I was reworking a manuscript, or I should say caught myself doing, was trying to keep something that happened to a character and that revealed character because I liked it. I think I knew, deep down, it was wrong but I wanted to keep it so I wrote another scene and another scene to justify its place in the manuscript. BUT all I was doing was taking myself further and further off-course.

So here’s my point: the old Faulkner advice, “Kill your darlings” is sometimes true. I think you have to pay attention to your feeling that a manuscript might be heading in the wrong direction or that a scene you really love might be distorting some aspect of a story and even leading you in the wrong direction. A novel, to get where it’s going, needs to be heading down the right roads. I don’t know that I would agree with Faulkner but I would, at least, say BE AWARE or BEWARE of your darlings.

Or so I think today.

writing and canine criticism--year one

2010-06-06T05:50:00.000-07:00

In honor of my first year of blogging. Here's my first post.

Last week my Old English Sheepdog, Merlin, pulled some of the manuscript pages of my latest WIP from my desk and began to eat them. Merlin, like most dogs, is adept at non-verbal communication. Of course he is also, another noble trait of the canine, notoriously good-natured and non-judgmental. I wondered what could have driven him to such uncharacteristic and extreme criticism.

After I managed to wrench the somewhat chewed but readable manuscript pages out of Merlin’s toothy grip, I started to read them. A growing uneasiness began at the nape of my neck and spread and that uneasiness became queasiness and that queasiness became despair. It was, alas, all wrong. Started in the wrong place. Went on too long here and not long enough there. Most importantly the life, somehow, had been squeezed out of it and the characters moved as if they were clueless stick figures rather than living creatures.

Merlin was right.

So though I am going to write about writing in this blog, and though I’ve written a lot of words and sentences and pages and have learned, maybe, a few things that might be of some small use to beginners, the truth is no writer, on any given day, really knows more than a sheepdog happily chewing away on a manuscript. And what we know on any given day is sort of a stab at the truth. Another day we might feel differently. I should probably end everything I say about writing with—Or so I think today.

That’s a good idea.

Or so I think today.

revision--chapter summaries

2010-06-01T05:04:00.000-07:00

In my last manuscript, Alien Invasion & Other Inconviences, I struggled with several plot points. My editor did something I’d only tried once. That time it hadn’t really worked for me. This time it helped a lot.

She did an outline of each chapter of the novel (there are about fifty so this was no small thing). It wasn’t a detailed outline. She just wrote a few sentences explaining what each chapter was about, the major points. (It really needs to just be about two or three sentences for each chapter, I think, so you can keep it focused.)

The chapter summaries helped me see structural problems in a way I couldn’t see them before. I realized I needed to do some rearranging, which meant being open to moving chapters around. I think this chapter by chapter summary can be very useful for the big picture revision that every writer should face at some point (a good time might be after letting the manuscript sit for a while to get a little distance). Anyway, it was really helpful to me to do a rewrite just focusing on story points and using the summaries as helpful signs to guide me. It became easier to cut whole chapters or move them and I did both. It was hard but I think it made the manuscript better.

wear a helmet & kneepads

2010-05-27T11:41:00.000-07:00

“You’ve got to jump off cliffs and build your wings on the way down.” Annie Dillard.

Sometimes you have to do this in writing. You can plan all you want but if you’re writing from the place I believe you should be writing from-- that place deep within you and below your conscious mind which is all too interfering in the intuitive connections stories require—then you will be jumping off some cliffs and building your wings on the way down.

Good luck.

Wear a helmet and kneepads.

tension

2010-05-23T04:54:00.000-07:00

What makes people tense? Lots of things. But what makes them most tense is when they’re unsure about something. For example, they think they might know that their boyfriend or girlfriend or husband or wife is having an affair, but they aren’t sure. Once they’re sure, one way or another, they might feel a lot of things but the tension is different. I could be wrong about this but I think the peak of the tension is not knowing.

When your goal is to intensify tension one of the best ways to do that is to put your character in this place of not-knowing and carefully describe what he or she goes through when they’re there.

WADD

2010-05-18T13:17:00.000-07:00

Along with this notion of the necessity of writing nearly every day for some length of time should be my confession that, however long I sit at my desk, I am writing during much of the day when I am away from it.

It’s a kind of disease or illness that can certainly lead to trouble for the writer. I’ve got a name for this disease. I call it WADD: Writers' Attention Deficit Disorder. How many of my brother and sister writers out there suffer from it? Very many. Perhaps most.

Here are some signs. You appear to be listening to someone talking to you—friend, spouse, boyfriend, girlfriend, family member. You nod your head and smile (somewhat vaguely it’s true if one were to look closely) when you are actually thinking about what your character did that morning when you wrote or will do tomorrow or should do or shouldn’t do. There eventually comes the moment when the person talking to you says, “What do you think?” Naturally, you will be forced to say something broad and indefinite like “I think you should do what you think best” to avoid hurting the person’s feelings. WADD once again has reared its ugly head.

Here’s another example: let’s say you’re driving. You get in the car. You turn on the radio and start thinking about a plot point in your story. Somehow you arrive at your destination with no clear recollection of having driven there. You’ve been so lost in thinking about your work that you haven’t paid any attention to the road. You’re fairly certain you haven’t hit anyone, but you aren’t entirely sure. You take a guilty look at your car for dents or scratches.

I could go on. There’s no real cure for WADD. Writers simply have to live with the fact that their minds will often wander out of the moment. They have to try to control it so that they don’t agree to things they don’t mean to agree to. For example, you might not be listening and someone might ask you to marry them or move to Portugal and you might say, “Sure, whatever, “ when you really mean, “He** no.” We, sufferers of WADD, must be careful given the sometimes devastating consequences of this disease. Still just admitting we have it will help. Knowledge is power.

writewritewrite

2010-05-14T05:24:00.000-07:00

I read Stephen King's book on writing not too long ago. I admire his work ethic as a writer and his struggle to write the best he can. He says a writer should find three or four hours a day to do some combination of reading and writing. Of course, he doesn’t have a day job, so it may be that your job stops you from finding that much time. Some days mine does.

But you do need to find time to write. In my opinion it needs to be almost every day, even if you only find thirty minutes to write. Even if you only write a few good sentences. Notice, I say write. That has to come first. I write and read most days, but if I don’t have time for both, it’s the reading that I don't get to. You have to read, yes, but you shouldn’t allow reading to take the place of writing.

What I’m getting at it is there’s a trap with reading. Sometimes a writer will read a couple of hours and manage to convince himself that he’s done his writing work for that day by reading. He counts the reading as writing since he knows it makes him a better writer. But reading won’t fill pages. It will raise the quality of your work, but only writing fills pages. It’s great if you read a hundred books in a year, but if you want to be a writer the real goal is that you write one .

My other point about writing is that getting to the “writing place” where you can pour out words is easier if you open that door every day. The door begins to stick for me after only one or two days of not opening it. After a week, it can be a real struggle. Two weeks and I might need a chainsaw to get through it. Write and read fiction. It's simple in a way. Nothing will make you a better writer than to write and read fiction. Ultimately, though a writer is a writer because he or she writes. In my humble opinion, writing nearly every day not only leads to a finished manuscript it makes writing itself, getting to that place where writing comes from, easier.

Sooner is Better

2010-05-08T13:27:00.000-07:00

One thing that my last manuscript taught me is something I had heard Kurt Vonnegut say and something I’m trying to do in my new WIP.

Tell everything you can as soon as you can. Don’t hold back. Don’t try to keep things hidden in the hopes of adding suspense. Okay, there are plot points you may eventually realize can be hidden and their press against the story will help in terms of tension BUT too often we withhold because we think something is cool and needs to be set up with a lot of events that will lead to it. Often though, putting it earlier will force the story to push deeper earlier. You’re building a story. You need to throw everything in as early as possible and then, in revision, make decisions about pacing.

In my new manuscript I was going to withhold an important piece of information one character knew about another. I thought this would add tension. BUT my choice to put it in now, get it out there, makes me see where the story should go. This point is going to allow me to get on to more important things (I hope). If I’d withheld it, I’d still be focusing on building toward it and that would put a drag on my story. I’m sure there are exceptions to this idea of not saving information for later in the story, but it’s at least something to consider as you build story. In a first draft, sooner is better unless you have a very good reason for saving it.

delusion

2010-05-03T06:04:00.000-07:00

Delusion can be a good thing for a writer.

You have to fool yourself into writing. If we didn’t fool ourselves, we would never start in the first place. You have to fool yourself when you’re a novice that you’re writing good fiction when, most likely, you’re struggling to find your way, learn technique, learn what works for you and what doesn’t. And every first draft, whether it’s the writer's first novel or fifth or beyond, requires that the writer fool himself into pushing on. In a first draft you have to feel your sentences are doing the job, you have to imagine that the (if you’re like me) fuzzy mess is actually insightful and has enough right words that it can be made, through revision, into something worth your time.

When you’re working on a new novel, you have to believe it’s the best thing you’ve ever written. Though you know deep down writers don’t usually write from worst to best over a life; some books are just better and sometimes they’re book number three or five or eight. But you can’t think of that. You have to believe what you’re working on is the best, the very best, work you’ve ever done.

So celebrate your delusion. Probably best if you don’t celebrate it too loudly or allow it to press its way into other aspects of your life, but in writing it can allow you to move forward. Let it. We need all the help we can get.

Process 4--revision

2010-04-28T05:24:00.000-07:00

After I’ve gotten through my drafting stage I get to my first revision (which most likely is the third or fourth time I’ve worked through the manuscript). It’s still messy but the main elements of the story are there: the characters are fleshed out, and the structure seems pretty sound. I may still move chapters or sections around a little, but I have a sense at this point that I might actually finish this novel. I have a pretty good idea of what the larger concern or concerns is or are in the story.

So at this point I get to think about other things. One of the things I think about is language. I tighten language every time I work on the manuscript, but once I get to the revision stages I can focus more on that since the larger structural issues aren’t so pressing. I turn to Mr. Mark Twain for inspiration here: “The difference between the almost right word and the right word is the difference between the lightening bug and the lightening.” It’s true. One wrong word can take all the raw force out of a sentence. I never want to take language for granted. I always want to struggle to write better sentences. And it is a struggle.

How many times do I revise? Sometimes three or four and sometimes more. A lot. There are always parts, sections, that I have to rewrite many, many times. The beginning chapter or chapters I might go over fifteen or twenty times. It’s ridiculous. I know it is, but I can’t help myself. I need to do that to get them to be the best I can make them.

Another thing I work on in revision is making sure each scene is important. I don’t want any throwaway scenes. I want each to be important. Passionate interaction between characters, passionate action, passionate language, I want the scene to have a purpose—whether it’s to advance the story or deepen the character—in the larger story.

Dialogue is action. Dialogue is showing. I love dialogue and I work hard to make it carry some scenes. People talking are always interesting to me as long as they don’t talk about the weather. Characters should be talking, however indirectly, about something important.

I try to be there in each scene, experiencing the scene with the characters and with the story. Back to passion. I’ve got to feel what the characters are experiencing. I’ve got to make the reader feel and understand why they feel that way. I also have to feel what’s happening beneath the action and how it’s essential to the story.