Wordplay

Today I’m excited to offer a special prize drawing featuring a free e-version of Victoria Mixon’s new book The Art & Craft of Fiction.


Based on Mixon’s work as a successful independent fiction editor, The Art & Craft of Fiction: A Practitioner’s Manual brings together in one place everything you need to know about writing a novel, an in-depth exploration of the myriad aspects of creating fiction in a warm, entertaining voice that welcomes you into the greater fellowship of all writers.


According to Lucia Orth, “Victoria Mixon’s The Art & Craft of Fiction should be on your writer’s shelf between Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird and John Gardner’s On Becoming a Novelist. Read it all the way through first, then pick it up again and again—whenever you’re stuck and need encouragement, advice, and witty examples on the process—to get on with the hard work. You are not alone, not with this book to set you on your way each writing day.”


All you gotta do is leave a comment that includes your email address. I’ll draw a name at random and announce the lucky winner next Wednesday.

This week’s video simplifies the trick of hooking a reader at the beginning of a story by showing how Elizabeth Gaskell piqued curiosity in “Lizzie Leigh.”




Video Transcription: Creating an opening that hooks readers into being unable to put your story down (and, as a result, hopefully plunking down their hard-earned money to purchase it) is the trick you have to master in every one of your stories. But once you know the secret of a good opener, it’s really not so tricky at all. The single most important element in convincing a reader to continue reading past your first page is an unanswered question.

This question might be explicit: perhaps you open with the character wondering something, which will hopefully make readers wonder the same thing. But, more often, the question is implicit, as it was, for example, in Elizabeth Gaskell’s short story “Lizzie Leigh,” which opens with a dying man’s last words to his wife. All he says is, “I forgive her, Anne! May God forgive me.” Readers have no idea whom the man is forgiving, or why he might need to beg God’s forgiveness in turn. The very fact that we don’t know what he’s talking about makes us want to read on to find the answers.

The important thing to remember about presenting this opening question is that it cannot be vague. Readers have to understand enough about the situation to mentally form a specific question. What the heck is going on here? does not qualify as a good opening question. It’s not absolutely necessary that the question remain unanswered for the entire story. It’s perfectly all right to answer the question in the very next paragraph, so long as you introduce another question, and another and another, to give your reader a reason to keep turning those pages in search of answers.

Tell me your opinion: What's the unanswered question in your opening page?

Related Posts: 9 Ways to Strengthen Your Beginning

Utilize Character in Your Opening Scene

3 Integral Components of a Story's Beginning

Whether or not you edit as you go really isn’t the bazillion-dollar question. The real questions you should be asking yourself are “What’s the 50-page edit?” and “Why am I not taking advantage of it?”


Okay, so it wouldn’t take IBM’s Watson computer to answer that the first question. The 50-page edit is pretty obviously an edit that takes place around the 50-page mark. Why 50 pages—and not 40 or 60 or 38.5? Well, honestly, no good reason except that the big five-oh is a memorable milestone, one that should find you approximately a quarter of the way into your story. That’s far enough for you to have some serious mileage in your rearview mirror, but not so far that your destination is anywhere in sight. In other words: It’s the perfect place to stop and remember where you’ve been, so you have a better idea of where you’re going. In his book Revision and Self-Editing, legal thriller author James Scott Bell refers to the 50-page edit as the “20,000-Word Step Back”:

After 20,000 words you stop, take a day off, then read what you have. By this time your story engine should be running. You’ve done enough of the novel to know pretty much what it’s about. You then take some time to make sure you like the characters and the direction…. You can also make a decision about the tone and feel of your novel. It may want to take on a different emphasis than what you had planned. A better novel may be asking to be released.

Bell only recommends one 50-page edit, but I take it one step further by printing off my manuscript every 50 pages. So maybe you’re now asking yourself a third question: “Why should I go to the time and trouble of editing my novel every 50 pages?” Take a look at some of the benefits:

• Grounds you in your story.

• Helps you spot inconsistencies.

• Helps you fix plot holes.

• Reminds you of details.

• Helps you identify potential foreshadowing and symbolism.

• Allows you to recognize when you’re on the wrong track.

• Polishes your first draft.

• Helps you build the next 50 pages.

Whether your preferred writing method is planning or pantsing, by the time you actually start crafting your first draft, it’s amazingly easy to get lost in the minutiae. The fact that crafting a single scene sometimes takes days can put us in a mental time warp and fog our memories about scenes we wrote even just a few pages back. The 50-page edit centers us in our story, reminds us of what we’ve already written, and keeps us on track for the next 50 pages. In a novel-writing journey that can span months and even years, the 50-page edit is an important tool for ensuring our stories maintain cohesion and consistency over the entire story arc.

Tell me your opinion: Have you ever utilized the 50-page edit? What were the results?


Related Posts: Should You Edit as You Go?


How I Edit


Embrace Your Inner Editor


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This week’s video explains how, in North and South, Elizabeth Gaskell uses a single “telling detail” to effectively take the place of a lengthy description.






Video Transcription: In fiction, we’re unable to sketch every detail of our character’s actions, feelings, appearance, and surroundings. Particularly in the current trend of minimalistic descriptions, we’re lucky to get away with two solid paragraphs of description. This can present quite a problem for authors who want to paint a vivid picture in their readers’ imagination, but don’t want to risk boring them with excess information. The solution is a deft use of the “telling detail.”


Take, for example, this line from North and South, Elizabeth Gaskell’s classic tale of social revolution, in which a character fills up an awkward silence by occupying “himself in smoothing the nap of his hat with his coat-sleeve.” This is such a simple statement, but it not only perfectly conveys the mood of the character, it also provides a vivid image of the bygone beaver-skin hat this Victorian-era gentleman would have been wearing. In half a sentence, Gaskell’s telling detail accomplishes what she never would have been able to in a full description of the character’s appearance and clothing.


The telling detail is a single nuance that takes the place of entire pages of description. We might spend hundreds of words trying to portray the shift of sunlight on water, but if we’re able to hit upon just the right telling detail, that’s all we’ll need to cause our image to explode into our reader’s mind with more force and color than we could ever hope to share through mere explanation. Discovering the telling detail is largely a matter of serendipity, trial and error, and a keen observatory eye. Don’t allow yourself to settle for the obvious details; dig beneath the surface until you find one that transforms your scene.

Tell me your opinion: What's the last telling detail you used in your work-in-progress?


Related Posts: Details: Bringing Fiction to Life


How to Use Details to Suspend Disbelief


Description: Friend or Foe?

Today, I’m honored to be part of Write to Done's special compilation post "10 Ways to Writing Excellence From Top Writing Bloggers," which features tips contributed from all 10 of the Top 10 Blogs for Writers winners.  Below is a sneak peek:

This is the fifth post in the Most Common Mistakes Series, inspired by the prevalent slip-ups I run across in editing other people’s work. Don’t worry: I don’t use any names or specific examples from my clients’ stories. I hope the series will prove helpful to you in nabbing these mistakes in your own work—before an agent or editor nabs them for you.

Don’t jeopardize your characters’ witty dialogue with punctuation and stylistic mistakes. Let’s a take a look at two means for indicating speakers and varying the rhythm of speech and narrative: the speaker tag and the action beat.

The speaker tag, which in its most basic form consists of the speaker’s name and a speech-related verb (said, shouted, asked, etc.), is often the simplest way of indicating which character is speaking.

Example: “I told you not to throw that cat at me,” Mike said.

How Not to Use It:

• Don’t overuse it. It’s unnecessary to say “he said/she said” at the end of every line of dialogue. If you have only two speakers, you only need to indicate the speaker every few lines. If you have more than two speakers, vary your speaker tags with action beats.
• Don’t vary the verb too often. “Said” is your most utilitarian speech verb. Its near invisibility allows your dialogue to stand on its own two feet without telling the reader how to read the dialogue. Use other verbs (shouted, sniffled, whined) and modifiers (briskly, quietly, nervously) with caution.
• Don’t underuse it. Whenever it’s possible readers might not understand which speaker is talking (such as after a lengthy paragraph of narrative), indicate the speaker at the first opportunity.
• Don’t punctuate the preceding dialogue with a period. Unless the dialogue ends with an exclamation point or a question mark, finish it off with a comma inside the quote marks, followed by the speaker tag (see example above).

The action beat is a description of the actions (gestures, facial expressions, or even thoughts) that accompany the speaker’s words. It is included in the same paragraph as the dialogue as an indication that the person performing the action is also the person speaking.

Example: “I didn’t throw the cat at you,” Leigh grabbed a vase of flowers, “but I am going to throw this!”

How Not to Use It:

• Don’t combine it with a speaker tag. Used together, they’re almost always repetitious. When in doubt, cut the speaker tag in favor of the action beat, since the action beat offers you more opportunities for characterization.
• Don’t use it solely for the sake of speaker of identification. If the only reason you’ve inserted an action beat is to identify the speaker, you’re probably better off with a speaker tag. Action beats must serve to move the story forward or advance characterization; they cannot exist only to give the character busy work.
• Don’t allow it to interrupt your dialogue. A lengthy action beat in every line of dialogue will chop up the rhythm of the characters’ speech and destroy the flow of the conversation.
• Don’t punctuate the preceding dialogue with a comma. Unless the action beat interrupts a dialogue sentence (see example above), always end the dialogue preceding the action beat as you would if it stood alone.

If you can expunge these common mistakes from your dialogue, you’ll not only strengthen your characters’ conversations, you’ll also mark yourself as a professional.

Tell me your opinion: Do you use speaker tags and action beats correctly?

Related Posts: Most Common Mistakes Series #1: Are Your Verbs Showing or Telling?

Most Common Mistakes Series #2: Are You Using "There" as a Crutch?

Most Common Mistakes Series #3: Are You Confusing Readers With Poor Cause and Effect?

Most Common Mistakes Series #4: Why Vague Writing Is Weak Writing

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This week’s video shows how writers can learn from the movie Like Dandelion Dust in keeping extraneous subplots from bogging down their stories.




Video Transcription: Subplots are vital for deepening your story’s plot and themes, providing contrast and resonance for the main plot, and giving your characters and their world a feeling of verisimilitude. However, it’s important that we don’t let our subplots run away with our story in a way that waters down the plot with parenthetical information. Realize that not every moment in your character’s life needs to be explained. Sometimes readers are better off knowing something happened, without the author digressing into the nitty-gritty details.

For example, the movie Like Dandelion Dust (directed by Jon Gunn) is about the custody struggle between a young boy’s biological and adopted parents. A key point in the movie is that the boy’s biological grandmother forged his convict father’s signature on the adoption papers. This step forces the parents to lie to a judge about the signature so they can avoid being prosecuted for it. At first glance, this is such a crucial bit of information that it would seem necessary to explain it to the viewer and show the characters fretting about it, discussing it with their lawyer, and coming up with their alibi.

However, because the criminality of the forged signature was not the crux of the story and because spending too much time on the characters’ worrying about being prosecuted for it would have detracted from the story’s main thrust, the filmmakers decided to bypass all that and cut directly to the chase. When the characters deliver their alibi to the judge, they also deliver to the viewer all the information he needs. The story stays on target with its main focus—the emotional struggles of all the characters involved—without dragging the reader into an unnecessary and dilutive series of scenes.

Tell me your opinion: Have you ever written a subplot that turned out to be unnecessary?

Related Posts: Resist the Urge to Explain

Top 7 Reasons Readers Stop Reading

Skip the Boring Parts

When we think of good guys and bad guys, we think of people are diametrically opposed to one another. But what if I told you that the best stories are those that feature protagonists and antagonists who share more in common than not? The more similar your hero and villain, the stronger your story, the more realistic your characters, and the deeper your exploration of theme. Consider what screenplay consultant John Truby writes in The Anatomy of Story:

The contrast between hero and opponent is powerful only when both characters have strong similarities. Each then presents a slightly different approach to the same dilemma. And it is in the similarities that crucial and instructive differences become most clear.

Following are three areas in which you can and should strive to create common ground between your protagonist and antagonist:

Personality
When your protagonist and antagonist share common personality traits, you open all kinds of interesting scope for exploring both characters. In your antagonist, you’re highlighting all the worst traits of your hero and illustrating what your hero could become if he makes the wrong choices.

Examples: In the original Star Wars trilogy, Luke Skywalker was one bad choice away from becoming Darth Vader. Jane Austen’s classic Pride and Prejudice works because Lizzie’s and Darcy’s mutual pride and prejudice spark against one another. Jon Turteltaub’s movie The Kid, in which a successful but unhappy “jerk” is magically visited by his eight-year-old self, sets up the protagonist’s younger self as his own antagonist and a perfect illustration of the bad choices he’s made throughout his life.

Values
Heroes and villains don’t even need to have different value systems. Stories in which both characters are fighting for a good cause for a good reason present wonderful opportunities for exploring the different facets of truth and morality. How many brother-fighting-brother Civil War stories have been based on this very premise?

Examples: Consider Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World, Peter Weir’s movie adaption of Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey/Maturin series, in which the main character, the captain of a war frigate dueling it out with a French privateer in the southern hemisphere, wonders why the privateer won’t leave him alone and is told by another character that the French captain “fights like you, Jack.” The main character in Roland Emmerich’s film The Patriot seems miles away from the brutal antagonist at first glance, but viewers soon learn that both men fight their wars in the same way: with a cruel efficiency that focuses on results more than morals. Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins gives us a protagonist and an antagonist who are both concerned about cleaning up crime and making the world a better place; only their methods of achieving that objective are different.

Goals
Perhaps the most important similarity you can create between your protagonist and antagonist is their primary goal. Their shared goal is at the heart of your story’s conflict. It gives you a reason to keep bringing these two characters together and a mirror off which to reflect both their similarities and their key differences.

Examples: The titular Maltese falcon, in Dashiell Hammett’s classic noir novel, is sought after by practically every character in the story. In Andy Tennant’s Cinderella retelling Ever After, both the protagonist and her evil stepmother are after the prince. David Twohy’s science fiction flick Pitch Black features a cast of characters, of various levels of antagonism, who all want to escape the eclipsed planet on which they’re marooned before the night monsters can eat them.

If you’ve ever thrown your characters onto the page, only to discover that you don’t know what one or the other of them wants—or if you’ve ever created an antagonist who ended up being a less than worthy opponent for your hero—all you have to do is start looking for (or creating) the similarities between your hero and your villain. The opportunities for strengthening your characters, plot, and theme will start springing up like daffodils after the rain.

Tell me your opinion: What traits do you hero and villain share?

Related Posts: Love Your Characters - or Else!

Why Your Character's Motive Matters

Antagonists Don't Have to Be Evil

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Click the “Play” button to Listen to Audio Version (or subscribe to the Wordplay podcast in iTunes).

This week’s video uses a historical movie to illustrate why and when it’s better to forego prologues and epilogues.




Video Transcription: That age-old question—to write a prologue or not to write a prologue—is one that confronts authors in every story they write. And, unfortunately, in large part because authors don’t always understand the true function of prologues (and epilogues), the answer to that question often results in unnecessary padding. Of course, we know that prologues and epilogues are useful tools of the trade, but how can you tell when they are an appropriate choice for your story?


A historical movie gives us a good illustration of why it’s often better to forego prologues and epilogues. This particular film is framed by a set of scenes, one at the beginning and one at the end, in which a minor character revisits the setting from the main part of the movie. In the opening scene, he wanders about for ten minutes or so, obviously reminiscing, and then the shot fades into the first scene of the story proper. The movie ends by picking up where that original scene left off, with the minor character silently walking back to the road and leaving.


Unnecessary padding like this, especially at the beginning of the book, delays your reader from forming an emotional attachment to your main character and engaging his intellect in the plot. The surest way to discover whether a prologue or epilogue is necessary to frame a story is to ask yourself if the story in between loses any clarity or context without them. If the answer is no—as it was in this particular movie—then you’ll do both yourself and your readers a favor by cutting them.

Tell me your opinion: Can you find any unnecessary padding to trim from your work-in-progress?


Related Posts: Writing Event Story Prologues That Really Work by Johne Cook


When Not to Skip the Prologue


Strengthen Your Story With Proper Framing

Writers either live in solitude or wish to. Many of us who juggle family, friends, and a day job, along with our writing, would often like nothing better than to slam the door against the rest of the world. Ah, solitude! Sometimes the word is a siren song of peace and productivity. But sometimes a writer’s enforced solitude can go from “alone” to flat-out “lonely.”

Often, writers tend toward introvertedness—either by nature or necessity. Our devotion to our craft means our weekends and evenings are spent hunched over a keyboard instead of jet skiing or watching NASCAR. In a “How I Write” interview with Susan Agee (The Writer, March 2010), acclaimed short story author Cary C. Holladay notes:

Writing is something you have to do on your own. You have to take it seriously and be willing to be lonely while you do it.

But what about the moments when that feeling of aloneness becomes overwhelming? When you can’t help feeling that the people in your life don’t have a clue about what drives you as author? When you start wondering if you’re the only person in the world who struggles with this dual identity: normal person by day, super-secret writer by night? Or what about the moments when you start wondering if your writing is causing you miss out on something—when you start wondering if you’re not so much living your life as haunting it?

Take a sigh of relief, because you, in all your magnificent weirdness, are in very good company. Every author encounters feelings like this sooner or later. But you only have to be as alone as you want to be. As important as it is to claim large chunks of uninterrupted writing time, it’s also important that we make time to actually live our lives. In a Facebook conversation a few weeks ago, Rhonda Rae Baker made the beautiful and undeniable statement that “a writer has more to say in meaningful ways when they have lived a broad and deep life.” Following are a few tips on balancing our solitude without letting it become loneliness:

1. Schedule your writing time. Make time to participate in a variety of life experiences, including investing time in important relationships.

2. Reach out to the writing community. Particularly in this digital age of Facebook, Twitter, and the blogosphere, other writers are only a mouse click away. Connect with them, commiserate with them, learn from them, and nurture them. (You can connect with me on my social sites by clicking the icons found in the left column.)

3. Seek out non-writing jobs and hobbies. If you begin to feel you have no life outside of writing, give a try to broadening your horizon. A career or hobby unrelated to writing may be just the ticket for helping you connect with others and glean from new experiences.

4. Connect with readers. If you’re published, you’re connecting with others simply by putting words on paper for them to read. Reach out to them through social media and other venues (libraries, bookstores, book expos, etc.) and encourage them to interact with you. If you aren’t yet published, you can kill two birds with one stone by jumping into the social media pool and getting to know your readers before the book deal. By the time you’re ready to sign that million-dollar contract, you’ll have an established platform and hordes of encouraging fans.

Balancing the advantages and disadvantages of solitude will be a lifelong challenge for most of us, but it’s one that’s definitely worth tackling. As Lori A. May wrote (“Get involved: Play an active part in the writing community,” The Writer, May 2010), “Writing may be a solitary endeavor, but a writer’s life shouldn’t be.”

Tell me your opinion: How do you achieve your need for solitude while avoiding loneliness?

Related Posts: Writing Buddies

Making the Time to Write

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Click the “Play” button to Listen to Audio Version (or subscribe to the Wordplay podcast in iTunes).

I don’t usually run book reviews on Wordplay (incidentally, if you’re interested in my reviews of writing how-to books, you can find them on the blog AuthorCulture), but Larry Brooks’s Story Engineering is a worthy exception. Larry has long been one of the most respected writing instructors on the Web, and I was privileged to share Write to Done’s Top 10 Blogs for Writers Award with his marvelous site Storyfix. Those familiar with his site are already aware of the quality information he churns out week after week and won’t be surprised to learn that his recently released book on “mastering the six core competencies of successful writing” presents more of the same.

I read many how-to writing books every year, and I glean something from almost every one of them. But not many offer truly revolutionary ideas about the craft and how to move forward to the next level as a writer. Story Engineering does just that. Larry frames the book on the idea that every successful story is made up of six necessary “competencies” (four elements and two skills): Concept, Character, Theme, Story Structure, Scene Execution, and Writing Voice. He brings worthy and inspiring ideas and suggestions to all these subjects, but the heart and soul of this book is undeniably the twenty-three chapters on story structure.

Story structure is so often neglected in the teaching of fiction writing. We learn how to create three-dimensional characters, high-concept plots, and powerful themes—but without the ability to frame them in a strong structure, they’re weak-sauce stuff at best. And yet, so many writers are crafting story structure on sheer instinct, instead of a foundational understanding of what makes a solid structure—and what doesn’t. This book takes away the guess work. Larry teaches what constitutes a correct structure, how to recognize and study it in the stories of others, and how to implement it in your own work. If you’re only going to have two books on writing on your bookshelf, make it John Truby’s The Anatomy of Story—and this one.

As a special bonus: If you purchase Larry’s book from Amazon and send him an email (storyfixer [at] gmail [dot] com) letting him know you heard about his book here, he’ll send you a free copy of his e-book 101 Slightly Unpredictable Tips for Novelists and Screenwriters.