Wordplay: Helping Writers Become Authors: January 2009

Let’s just admit it. We all get the urge to throttle someone from time to time. Annoying coworkers, overbearing family members, and just plain nasty members of civilization—they all bear the brunt of our frustrations and our mumbled threats. When it comes to our fiction, however, we tend to be a little more lenient.

When I look at that big fat pile of manuscript on my desk, I’m much more likely to lean back in my chair, fold my hands over my stomach, and smile complacently, than I am to pull out the old X-Acto knife and start slashing. My words are like children, and no one in his right mind goes around axing his kids. That first glimpse at a finished manuscript is magical. You hold it in your arms for the first time, and those thousands of words marching across the pages, those words over which you labored for months, suddenly appear imbued with some mystical essence. It’s an essence that writers and mothers alike are familiar with: perfection.

So, really, it’s little surprise that we find it difficult to even see our mistakes, much less draw our razor-sharp red pens and cover the page in bloody excisions. It’s an unfortunate fact, however, that a little bloodletting is about the only way to prevent the inevitable rambling, bloating, and general hubris that find their way into most all of our first (and second and third) drafts.

Years ago, when I was introduced to the writerspeak term “killing your darlings,” my response was to cock a disbelieving eyebrow. The article I was reading made a statement about “taking a look at your manuscript and deleting all your favorite lines.” Understandably, I said no way and chalked the author up as a minimalist kook. It took me years and several less-than-memorable novels to understand that the point of this statement was not that I should be hacking out all my best work, but rather that I should be taking a good, long look at my “darlings” and analyzing whether their presence in the story was the result of necessity or just my smug enjoyment of my own supposed brilliance.

If this is arguably the most painful lesson an author has to learn, it’s also arguably the most valuable. Self-editing is the keenest blade in a writer’s armory. Too often, we fall so much in love with passages, characters, settings, plot twists, ad nauseum, that we miss the bigger picture. We fail to see that our darlings are actually stumbling blocks, both to our writing of the story and certainly to the reading of it.

Scriptwriter Joss Whedon reminds us to “cut what you love”:

Here’s one trick that I learned early on. If something isn’t working, if you have a story that you’ve built and it’s blocked and you can’t figure it out, take your favourite scene, or your very best idea or set-piece, and cut it. It’s brutal, but sometimes inevitable. That thing may find its way back in, but cutting it is usually an enormously freeing exercise.

I’ve been doing quite a bit of darling killing this past week, in the latest draft of my recently completed fantasy story Dreamlander. Two of my favorite scenes—scenes that I’d written with much joy and oohed and ahhed over in the second and third drafts—became increasingly obstructive to the realism of the story. Suspension of disbelief was in danger. So I chopped them. In all honesty, I knew they were scenes that should never have made it past the first draft. And as soon as that first flash of pain was over, the relief and the assurance that the story was much the better were overwhelming.

So, here’s to arming ourselves with the reddest of our red pens and setting forth to do some slaughtering of the darlings.

January 25, 2009
14 Comments
K.M. Weiland
Posted in dreamlander , Editing

Generally speaking, writers fall into two different categories: outliners and non-outliners (or, as my friend Linda has dubbed them, “seat-of-the-pantsters”). I’m an outliner. Mostly, I outline because I’m lazy. I hate rewriting; I hate watching my burst of pride and relief at the end of a novel dissipate in a realization of a hole-riddled plot. I’d much rather know where I’m going from the beginning, rather than trying to force my foreshadowing and plot twists into the text somewhere in my second draft. It’s much easier to spend a few weeks rewriting an outline than it is to spend a few months to a year rewriting an entire draft.

Because I’m already familiar with each pit stop along the road of my novel—thanks to my road map—it’s much easier for me to visualize the big picture and to realize what each scene must do to play its part. It’s also a sure-fire antidote for writer’s block. When all I have to do to know where I’m going is look at my map, I rarely have to waste valuable time and brain cells staring slack-jawed at the blinking cursor.

Admittedly, as perfect as outlining is for me, it’s not perfect for everyone. Many writers feel that outlining stifles their creativity. They feel that if they already know what happens in the story, why should they bother writing that first draft? In a way, however, an extensive outline is a first draft. It’s the “mistake” draft, the dry-eraser board where we all throw out our ideas and see how they line up on the page. Outliners and seat-of-the-pantsters alike go through this process. The only difference is that the outliner’s process takes maybe a quarter of the time.
Outlines take many forms—some of them a few sentences scrawled on a Post-It Note, some of them notebooks full of ramblings. I’m probably one of the more in-depth outliners. I fill up at least a notebook or two up with my scrawlings, and over the years, I’ve developed a handful of steps.

Premise

By the time, I sit down to begin work on a story, it’s usually been chasing around in my head for at least a year or two. I almost always have ideas for several main characters, a handful scenes, a general conflict, and at least a sense of what the ending will be. My first goal is to hammer all this down into a premise: a single sentence that conveys the plot and the theme. This premise may actually change several times throughout the outlining and first-draft stages, but, to begin with, it helps me focus my thoughts.

General Sketches

This is probably the single most important stage. This is where I give myself leave to throw my every idea—no matter how ridiculous—onto the page. I write down what I already know about the story, crafting it into a synopsis of sorts and discovering the plot holes. I ask myself lots of “what if’s” and “why’s.” Why is the character behaving this way? Why is she bitter about her past? What is forcing him to make these particular decisions?

In essence, the few scenes already in my brain are like dots on a connect-the-dot puzzle. It’s my job to figure how and why the lines follow this pattern, and that job is much easier when I can concentrate merely on answering the questions, rather than also trying to construct full-blown scenes, with characters, dialogue, and a consistent plot.

Character Sketches

Once I have a pretty good idea of the story arc, and once I’ve filled in all the plot holes I can spot, I go to work on character sketches. I use a lengthy “interview” process that forces me to learn my characters’ backstories (which tend to be vital) and gives me the opportunity to figure out their every little quirk. You can read my list of interview questions in the post “Character Interviews.”
Character interviews are a lengthy process, so I only focus on the POV characters, the antagonist, and maybe one or two important minor characters. This part of the outlining generally gets my brain juices foaming and brings up all kinds of interesting tangents and opportunities for deepening the plot.

Extended Outline

This is where the plotting begins in earnest. Step by step, I plot out in as much detail as possible (though without dialogue or narrative) every road stop along my map. In places, this plotting goes pretty quickly; in other places, I have to stop to work my way through iffy plot points and implausible character motivations. This step, by itself, can take several months, but because of the active, full-throttle creativity demanded, it’s one of the most exciting and rewarding portions of my storytelling.

Abbreviated Outline

Finally, once I have my entire plot mapped out, I condense all the pertinent info into an abbreviated outline—which keeps me from having to read my entire extended outline every time I sit down to write. In the past, I’ve always just typed the abbreviated outline up in Word and printed a copy for easy reference. But during my last novel, I discovered the outlining software yWriter, and I’ve found its superior organizational features invaluable.

In a nutshell, that’s my process. If you ever feel yourself mired in the hazy middle of a novel that doesn’t really seem to know either where it’s coming from or where it’s going, I would recommend giving outlining a shot. Even just the simple tactic of scribbling down a handful of scene ideas can go a long way toward pulling a story into an organized whole. Plus, it’s about the easiest way possible to complete a first draft and ensure a cohesive second draft.

January 17, 2009
13 Comments
K.M. Weiland
Posted in Characters , first draft , outlining , OYN , writer's block , yWriter

January 12, 2009
11 Comments
K.M. Weiland
Posted in behold the dawn , News

Vivid writing demands more than just telling a reader how a character is feeling. As readers, we don’t care what the characters are experiencing so much as we care what we experience through the characters. But that’s easier said than done.

One of the best tricks I’ve run across is the notion of “never naming an emotion.” Love, hate, happiness, sadness, frustration, grief—they all might be easily recognizable emotions, they might even all be emotions that will immediately get a point across to a reader. But by themselves the words lack the ability to make a reader feel what we are trying to convey.

It’s pretty easy to tell the reader that “Sam stood in shock.” The description is short, to the point, and every reader in the world will instantly understand what Sam is feeling. So what’s the problem? The problem is that the reader is being told what Sam is feeling, rather than being shown. Sweeping references to generally held emotions don’t require much effort on the part of the author. But they also don’t paint vivid pictures for the reader. Saying Sam is shocked is one thing; saying “Sam stopped short and stared, his lungs turning inside out, his heart trying to thrash its way out of his chest” is another bowl of chow mein altogether.

Now, granted, my description probably isn’t the best portrayal of shock ever written, but you get the idea. Which description makes you feel Sam’s shock? This is a basic tenant of “show, don’t tell,” but it’s one that’s often overlooked—or at least seldom named. In his thought-provoking book From Where You Dream, a transcription of college classes, Robert Olen Butler discusses what he calls the “anecdote exercise,” in which students are encouraged to stretch themselves beyond summaries and generalizations.

This, of course, applies to so much more than just character feelings. It applies to every tenant of “showing.” But sussing out inevitable instances of telling is much easier if we have something specific—in this case a concrete noun or verb—to search for. Train yourself to recognize concrete words that could be expanded into more vivid descriptions. It’s amazing how this one trick can blast color and energy through what otherwise might have be, at best, a merely serviceable line.

Be aware, of course, that not all summary emotions (or actions) are inappropriate. Occasionally, the story demands that we relay the short version to our readers. And sometimes stating an emotion, on top of a description, only strengthens the overall effect of the showing. Like all of writing, it’s a very instinctual balancing act. But if you can master it, you can give your writing a huge boost toward vivacity.

January 10, 2009
14 Comments
K.M. Weiland
Posted in emotion , Showing , Telling

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