Uncle Jim, undiluted

[MacAllister]

"Learn Writing With Uncle Jim" started in September of 2003. Well over a year old, the thread shows no signs of losing momentum or popularity.

This poses a challenge for the new reader. There are a lot of pages to read, before jumping in to try and participate in an ongoing conversation.

This is the collected Wisdom of Uncle Jim, from the beginning of the thread--to save new readers from having to wade through all the pages of chit-chat.
HOWEVER--there IS a wealth of information in all that chit chat, to read when you have the time.

I've attempted to put quotation markers around questions Jim quoted, then answered, since I don't think the formatting is going to survive. Some of the archive transfer apparently deleted quoted information on the old board that was formatted in a specific manner. I've attempted to pull that information from the old board, whenever possible.

Any formatting errors are most likely mine. I'll be fixing links along the way, when I get a chance. The spelling mistakes are probably his--but I won't guarantee it.

Thanks.
Mac

[MacAllister]

James D. Macdonald
Learn Writing with Uncle Jim
Absolute Write
Novel-Writing Forum
13Sep03

It strikes me that there's a need for a thread on the art and craft of writing commercial novels.

To that end, I'd like to start that discussion. I plan to put down my thoughts on the elements of professional-quality fiction. I'll answer questions, and go where ever the discussion leads. I'll do some notes on the business of writing too.

Here are my qualifications for starting this topic:

My bibliography

A workshop I help teach every year.

My mutant talent is to make my opinions sound like facts.

________________

I have two basic rules: everything that's said should be true, and everything should be helpful.

_______________

There's one other thing that needs to be said, McIntyre's First Law: Under the right circumstances anything I tell you can be wrong.

Okay, and after that pompous lead off, let me say that I'm not going to be talking about novels at all. I'm going to be talking about romances.

Not romances in the Fabio-on-the-cover paperbacks, not the Romance section at Borders, not Harlequin (though there'll be things useful in that genre). Not category romance, or genre romance.

I'm talking about romance in literary theory.

A novel is: A book length work of realistic prose fiction.

A romance is: A book length prose narrative treating imaginary characters involved in events remote in time or place and usually heroic, adventurous, or mysterious.

The thing that the two have in common are that they're book length (call it 50,000 words and up), prose (that is, not poetry or drama), and fiction (some people have said that fiction is when the author tells his own lies; non-fiction is when he tells someone else's lies).

The realism issue, then, is the core of the difference between a novel and a romance. The "realistic" books are the mainest of mainstream; they are the literary works.

The vast majority of the things you find in bookstores labeled "novels" are actually romances. That means:


1) imaginary characters

2) events remote in time or place

3) usually heroic, adventurous, or mysterious

More on all of this later.

I'll try to drop by to talk more after I finish my work every day (except when I'm out of town).


So what do I mean by "finish my work"?

I'm a full-time writer. My sole source of income for the last fifteen years or so has been writing or writing-related. By "my work" I mean ten pages of original prose fiction every day.

That isn't so bad, really. It's only about 2,500 words. It's only two hours or so.

I know, as I write it, that most of it will be changed, moved, or deleted in the revision process. That doesn't bother me. The revision and rewriting and such takes place in another part of my day.

Back before I went full time, I used to hear from people "I've always wanted to be a writer, but I never had the time."

In those days I used to set my alarm clock for two hours early, to make the time. I'd get up at four in the morning to write. If you're a writer, writing is what you do.

So, here's the next bit of advice. This is what my friend Rosemary Edghill calls the "KISS method." (Others call it the "BIC method," for Butt In Chair.)

Pick two hours a day. It doesn't matter which two hours, but make them two hours that you can do every day.

For that two hours, you will sit in front of your typewriter or computer. You will have no distractions. You will write, or you will stare at the blank screen. There will be no other options.

Writing letters does not count. Reading does not count. Doing research does not count. Revising does not count. You will write new stuff, or you will stare at the screen.

No TV in the room. No radio going. No internet. Fill the page or go mad.

Two hours. Every day.

Your body will rebel. You'll get headaches. You'll get colds. You aren't allowed a choice. You will sit in front of that screen even if your head is throbbing.

Some days you will begin writing in a white-hot passion. You'll look up at the clock and discover that three hours have gone by.

You don't get to only do one hour the next day. You still have to do two hours.

Your mind will rebel. You'll want to clean the toilet, change the cat box, mow the lawn. But you won't, because there are no excuses. No, you don't get to reschedule for "later." Two hours, on schedule.

So let me ask you this, when in the revision stage of a ms do you write something new for 2 hrs or just spend days and hrs revising?

Well, it varies. I usually have three projects going at any time, in various stages of finished.

For revisions I take the manuscript (printout) and red pencils and go somewhere entirely different than my normal workspace (sometimes the kitchen, but my favorite is a nice little French coffeeshop down the road a bit) and scribble. After I've done two hours of writing, there's a solid 22 more hours in the day for revising other material.

One trick to revision -- is to read the work aloud. Where you stumble, the reader will stumble. You'll notice different things, too, when you're reading aloud. You're using a different part of your brain than you are when reading silently.

We're not at revision yet, though. First we need the text.

Did I mention that you need to make multiple backups of all your material if you're working on a computer?

I'll give you a minute to make a backup of whatever you wrote today.

See you when you've done.

BTW, I didn't say "no music," I said "no radio." Radios have announcers, disk jockeys, the news, weather ... things that will break your concentration, take you out of that place where the creative things happen.

I like music myself for writing ... I prefer requiems, but maybe I'm just strange.

Whatever helps you get into the state you need to be in....

But there's a warning coming.

Don't couple destructive things with you writing. If you light up a cigarette when you start writing, if you quit smoking you'll find you can't write any more.

Same with drinking booze. Same with eating bon-bons. Coupling bad habits with writing will mean that you'll never be able to shed the bad habits.

One of the popular images of writers is of the guy with a bottle of whisky beside the typewriter.

It probably won't make you a better writer, or even make you a writer at all. It will rot your liver and empty your bank account.

There are twenty-five simple steps to becoming a published author.

Here are the steps:

1. Black ink on white paper.
2. Place your name and address in the top left-hand corner of the first page.
3. Place the title and byline, centered, half-way down the first page.
4. Put a running head (your name, the title, and a page number) in the top right hand corner of every page.
5. Your pages should have one-inch margins.
6. Doublespace your text.
7. Use Courier 10 or Courier 12 only.
8. Type on one side of the paper only.
9. Continue until you reach "The End."
10. Rewrite.
11. Rewrite.
12.....21. Revise
22. Obtain the guidelines for a market that accepts material similar to what you have finished.
23. Follow the guidelines scrupulously when you submit your material.
24. While you are waiting for your rejection slip, start again back at step 1 for your next work.
25. When the rejection slip arrives, send the manuscript to the next market on your list, that same day.

=============

Watt-Evans' Law: There is no idea so brilliant that a sufficiently ham-handed writer can't make an unreadable story out of it.

Feist's Corollary to Watt-Evans' Law: There is no idea so stupid that a sufficiently talented writer can't make a readable story out of it.

=============

Yog's Law: Money flows toward the writer.

Q. Why was the little drop of ink crying?

A. His daddy was in the pen and he didn't know how long the sentence was....

______________________


I write under several different names, including my own.

One reason is to differentiate the genres you're working in. If you write manly action and sweet romance, you might pick a Manly Action name for one, and a Sweet Romance name for the other, just so your fans won't get confused when they pick up a book by their favorite author and discover that it's far different from what they expected.

If you're prolific, you might write under various names to avoid competing with yourself.

I do share a name with some other writers. That's one reason I use my middle initial -- to differentiate me from them.

When you're picking a name, don't pick anything that's difficult to spell or embarassing to say. Anything else is pretty much okay.

How many pages in a chapter?

This is as close to a meaningless question as you can get. It's like "How many letters in a word?" or "How many words in a sentence?"

I've seen novels with chapters ranging from a fraction of a page to the entire book being one long chapter.

Listen: Words are symbols for ideas or concepts. Sentences are made of words. Sentences convey thoughts through the relationships among the words. (A fraction of a word may be a sentence.)

Paragraphs are made of sentences. The paragraph is the smallest unit of meaning in a novel. The meaning comes from the relationships among the sentences. (A fraction of a sentence may be a paragraph.)

Scenes are made out of paragraphs. There are no fractional paragraphs. The meaning of the scene comes from the relationships among the paragraphs that make up the scene.

Chapters are made out of scenes. There are no fractional scenes. The meaning of the chapter comes from the relationships among the scenes.

How many pages in a chapter? How many scenes do you have, how long are they, and how do they relate to one another? At the point where one scene doesn't relate to the one that follows, put a chapter break.

The reader's mind can hold only a limited number of things at once. The reader's interest keeps moving. You should strive to make the source of information be the same as the source of interest.

And that's how long a chapter is.

Pace is a function of detail. To slow down a scene, make it more detailed. To speed it up, remove detail.

We're beginning to get into the place where "art" lives, knowing where where and to what extent you'll need to vary your pace.

You will need to vary your pace, for several reasons: one is to give your readers breathing space, to give them time to assimilate what just happened, and to anticipate what will come.

A second reason to vary the pace is so that the audience will know when they've come to a fast part -- they'll have something to compare it to.

A third reason to vary pace is so that the audience doesn't get bored. Poor things, they're easily bored. A bored reader lays your book aside, meaning to pick it up again later, and never does. (Note: the readers can always, always tell if you're bored.)

Okay ... you're doing a set up ups-and-downs, like walking a trail through the foothills toward the mountain. (I kinda like that description -- many small climaxes, rewarding the reader along the road, but the main climax frequently in sight, first at a distance, then closer.)

To answer your specific question, I've not read Bickham's book.


___________________________





Well, James, if working with a radio on works for you, it works for you. It's not exactly what I'd recommend to new writers; first they should figure out what level of distraction they can handle. I could probably write in the middle of a construction zone -- but I wouldn't suggest that as an ideal place to set up one's desk. I'd say start with mimimum distractions. Folks can always add some distractions if they find that they either can handle them or need them to be productive. (I still wouldn't recommend adding cigarettes and booze, even if they can handle them and they make 'em more productive.)

As far as two hours staring at a blank screen, few if any writers are going to be doing that. We'll fill the screen. Those who find themselves staring at a blank screen hour after hour might rethink the question of whether a career in commercial fiction is for them at that point in their lives.

As far as revision goes, I can produce publishable first draft. By the time I'd been doing this for a while, I'd learned to avoid unprofitable plot threads, I'd learned what works and what doesn't down at the noun-and-verb level -- I've learned to discard thousands of word choices without thinking about them.

Still, revision is vital. Revision means, literally, "looking again." Even if what you say, on looking again, is "Hey, pretty good."

On occasion I've submitted those publishable first drafts. More than once, after the story's come out, I found myself wishing that I had revised a couple of times.

Later on today I'm going to be reading some slush manuscripts for a major publisher. I promise you, whole heaps of 'em will go on the left-hand pile due to insufficient revision. Few if any will go there due to too much revision.

Before closing today's episode: Another advantage of blocking out a regular time for writing is that it becomes your time when no one will ask you to drive the kids to soccer practice or go shopping "because you aren't doing anything."


____________

I'm not talking about academic work, or about screenplays, poetry, or anything other than commercial fiction. What you use on-screen when you're composing is up to you; if you like 8-point PostCrypt, go for it.

However, when you print out your book to submit to a traditional publisher, you shall print it out in 10 or 12 point Courier.

But ... for the revision process, printing the work in some format and typeface that you haven't used before can be useful for seeing the words rather than your memory of the words. There's a place to print out a reading copy in double column Times New Roman single spaced and justified if you want.

Just don't submit it that way.

There are all kinds of ways to come up with wordcount. One of them is to take five pages at random from your manuscript, count all the words on them, divide by five, then multiply by the total number of pages in your work.

===

Next time ... how to tell where your story starts.



A complex question, Navigator: Income does go up year by year, but you do top out in the mid-to-high five figures for advances (at least I do, in mid-list SF). There's a constant churn below that, as the backlist ebbs and flows, some things go out of print, some are reprinted.

On a tangent off that ... how to keep your books in print. I know there's a lot of talk about how books go out of print after varying alarmingly-short periods. To keep your book in print, write another book. When it comes out, your backlist will get reprinted alongside it.

As to what it costs to submit: the price of paper plus postage. Follow the publishers' guidelines. Some want three-and-an-outline, some want a full manuscript. Follow the guidelines explicitly.

So, where does your story begin?

One way to find your beginning is this: first, write your book. Now go through it to find its start.

Here's how to recognize the start: it's the point where you can no longer summarize everything that went before in a single sentence:

Nothing that Ceclia had seen at the Academy could have prepared her for the first sight of Crymble Manor.

"The appropriations bill is dead on arrival," Senator O'Connor said.

The day after the world ended, Bill got into his pickup truck and drove into town.

Another way to say this is: it's the point where the characters can't decide, To heck with this and order out for pizza. The one-way door has blown shut and they can't get back into the theatre.

Later on, as you gain experience, you can get better at avoiding false starts ("Hesitation marks," we call 'em).

Here's how I figure out where to start my story: I figure out the climax -- something that's really big, cinematic, satisfying, full of action and movement. I take the characters who are there, and back 'em off to some point before that climax, then try to get them to it.

Sometimes -- a lot of the time -- those characters never get to the climax I started with. (There's one climax I've been using for years as a starting point. One day I will get there.)

So here's another way to figure out where to start your story: Put interesting characters in an interesting place, then let them do interesting things. (What's interesting? That's the art, isn't it. Your readers will tell you what's interesting by the sound of rapidly turning pages.)

If the first two chapters of your book are backstory and exposition, and the movement of the plot starts in chapter three, the opening of your book is chapter three. Delete the first two chapters.

====

Plots start when movement starts. This movement can be physical, or it can be psychological, but it is movement. The human eye instinctivly follows a moving object. It will follow the fastest moving object if several are present. So ... make your plot move, and eyes will follow it.

A chess game doesn't start until the first piece or pawn moves.








My outlines aren't submission-quality prose (though some bits do make it all the way through without change).

They most closely resemble a guy telling his buddy about a neat movie he saw the night before -- bits of memorable dialog, descriptions, but most important the order of the scenes.

Often at this stage I have nonce-names for characters (sometimes they're named for their function in the story: "Bestpal" or "Cannonfodder"). Sometimes the author is a character: The author looked up from couch where he sat taking notes. "Just keep talking, guys," he said. "I'll fix it in the rewrite."

I see novels as having shape. There has to be a pleasing, balanced shape, with all the parts connected, the corners neat, and overall easy to look at.

Try drawing a picture of your book, showing the flow of scenes and chapters. In a bit I might go into my theory of the novel as architecture.

Typing a hundred fifty page outline runs me about two or three weeks.

After that, bashing it around to make it into something worth playing with, then writing from the outline into a finished novel -- that can take some time.

Right you are, Keith. When you're writing, don't slow down.

Yes, you will do research ... you'll need to know exactly what kind of car your guy is driving, but during the outline/first draft stage isn't when I do it.

I'll research a bunch before, and after during rewrite and revision. The rule in the middle is "don't slow down."

Now ...

On movement, and on art.

The way to tell the difference between the real world and art is that art has borders. Pictures have frames, stages have curtains, books have covers. You have to provide the illusion that your created world extends beyond its covers, but you aren't going to need to create that outside world. We'll talk about tricks for doing that later.

I'm going to talk about chess games instead. Chess games are like novels.


I'm going to recommend a book, too: Logical Chess: Move by Move. I'm quite serious about saying y'all should get a copy, read it, play the sample games, understand it. First off, even if nothing else happens, your chess game will improve.


The other thing is this: chess games happen on a board. The board has an edge, a limit. Therefore, it is art.

Now as it happens, there are only three things that can possibly happen in a chess game. White may win, Black may win, or there could be a stalemate. Exactly how those things happen is where the interest comes -- everyone knows before the game starts what the range of possible outcomes is. The good guys win, the bad guys win, or we're returned to status quo antes.

The game doesn't start until the first move is made. In the same way, the story doesn't start until the first character acts.

Your pieces are your major characters. Your pawns are your minor characters.

The way you win the game -- no one can foresee how the game is going to go. Not even the greatest chessmaster can see twenty moves in advance. What the chessmaster does is put pieces in useful places. The chessmaster knows that a knight is most useful on QB3 and KB3. So that's where the chessmaster puts them. (This is called "Playing Positional Chess," and that's sometimes what I call my style of plotting a book. As in, "Why did you have Fred slip a gun into his pocket before he left the house?" "I'm playing positional chess.")

If you have put the pieces in their strongest positions, surprising combinations will appear as if by magic later on. The game will play itself; the book will write itself.

If you get a chess set where one side is Army and one side is Navy, you have a technothriller. If you get a chess set where one side is Spacemen and the other is Alien Monsters, you have a space opera. If you have a chess set where one side is modern college professors and the other is faculty wives, you have mainstream.

The moves are the same.

Really, trust me, get the Logical Chess. Look at it at an angle; it's a writing book.
==========

Well, now, what to put in the opening?

We're going to stick with the chess game metaphor for a while here. In the opening you're trying to put yourself into a strong position for going into the midgame (where the exciting action and the exciting combinations occur), and you do this mostly by getting your pieces off the back rank as quickly as possible. The pieces are your major characters. Get them out there, and get them doing things.

Don't neglect your pawns -- your minor characters. You should cherish your minor characters. They'll save your life. If you have a selection of minor characters you can pull them out to solve problems later in the book.

Now, what to put in that first chapter? (Recall that if your readers don't finish the first chapter they'll never get to chapter two.)

To answer the question of what goes into chapter one, I'm going to grab the first stanzas from a bunch of Anglo-Scots folk ballads. These were the popular songs of earlier times, cooked by the folk process so that only the important and memorable parts remain, they're entertaining, and they tell stories.

Okay:

Young Johnny rode out on a May morning
With his buckles and his bridles ringing,
And as he rode by the castle walls
He heard a fair maid singing.

====

The king sits in Dumferlin town
Drinking the blood-red wine.
"Oh where will I get a good skipper
To sail this ship of mine?"

====

There were three brothers in merry Scotland
In merry Scotland there were three
And they cast lots which of them should go
Should go, should go,
For to turn pirate all on the salt sea.

====

Okay, what do those have in common?

A person, a place, and a problem. Action and movement. Often a time of year or a time of day.

These are not bad things to get into the first chapter. If you can get 'em onto the first page, even better.

I didn't say one sentence, let alone the first one ... the first chapter is good enough. (You see young, inexperienced writers trying to get everything into the first sentence. This more often than not gives you an opening sentence that looks like a runner-up in the Bulwer-Lytton contest.

But ... do give your readers a reward for reading the first page, a reason to turn the page, then ... you have chance.

There's a reason publishers ask for three-and-an-outline. That small sample will give them an idea of whether you can give readers a reason to start your book, and an idea of whether you know where you're going.

Think with your reader's mind for a moment. When you go to a bookstore, how do you act when you're trying to decide if you want to buy a book by someone you've never heard of?

Go to a bookstore. Hang around. Watch the readers. They are your readers. How do they approach unfamiliar books? Look at the cover... flip a few pages...

Yeah, a few pages. Sometimes just the first page. Grim, right?

You hear lots of folks condemning editors who make decisions based on the first page. Remember what position editors have in the grand scheme of publishing: They are the readers' advocates.

Over a decade ago, I was doing feature articles for a weekly newspaper. A novelist's techniques work equally well for non-fiction -- if you don't create interest and reward the reader for going along, you don't have readers. In both fiction and non-fiction part of the art is in finding and revealing the telling details. The biggest difference is where those details come from, the imagination or research.

Recall also that fiction should be true (for certain values of "true"). The best lies contain the most truth.

We're still talking about first chapters here.

Before I start, how many of y'all went and got a copy of Logical Chess Move by Move? I reccoed that back on page two of this discussion. Go order a copy now. I'll wait.

I'm serious, guys. I'm going to be recommending other books as I go. I'm doing this because I think it'll help you. I know these are the books that helped me.

My next suggestion is also going to be work: Take your favorite novel.

Now, retype the first chapter. Do this with your writer's eye, not your reader's eye. Think about the lengths of the sentences, the lengths of the paragraphs, the sounds of the words. Think about the order of the scenes. Notice the dialog. How are the dialog tags rendered? Where is the point of view?

The point of this exercise is this: Have you ever gone to an art museum and seen the art students sitting there with their easels and oils, copying the great masters? The point isn't to turn them into plagairists, or to make them expert forgers. The point is to get the feeling into their hands and arms of how to make the brush strokes that create a particular illusion on canvas. Writing is no less a physical skill than painting. The words are your paints, the sentences your brush strokes. Following a master, asking yourself, always, why. Why did he or she choose this word rather than another? Why was this scene from this particular point of view? Why did the scene end there?

Writing is an art. Everything is there because the artist (that's you!) chose to put it there. The surface meaning, the deeper themes, those are your choice.

I can hear you saying, "Yeah, right, Uncle Jim. You say 'Retype a chapter,' but I bet you never did that."

Wrong-o, my friends. I did just that (I did more -- I retyped entire books). You can find some of them here, the ones that I still had on disk to convert to HTML and which were in public domain.

At the very worst your typing skills will improve, and that's nothing to sneeze at.

Assignments: Get a copy of Logical Chess Move By Move, and work through the problems. Get a novel that you personally really admire, and retype the first chapter.

More discussion on openings later.



=========




From Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses by Samuel Clemens:

There are nineteen rules governing literary art in domain of romantic fiction -- some say twenty-two. In "Deerslayer," Cooper violated eighteen of them. These eighteen require:


1. That a tale shall accomplish something and arrive somewhere. But the "Deerslayer" tale accomplishes nothing and arrives in air.

2. They require that the episodes in a tale shall be necessary parts of the tale, and shall help to develop it. But as the "Deerslayer" tale is not a tale, and accomplishes nothing and arrives nowhere, the episodes have no rightful place in the work, since there was nothing for them to develop.

3. They require that the personages in a tale shall be alive, except in the case of corpses, and that always the reader shall be able to tell the corpses from the others. But this detail has often been overlooked in the "Deerslayer" tale.

4. They require that the personages in a tale, both dead and alive, shall exhibit a sufficient excuse for being there. But this detail also has been overlooked in the "Deerslayer" tale.

5. The require that when the personages of a tale deal in conversation, the talk shall sound like human talk, and be talk such as human beings would be likely to talk in the given circumstances, and have a discoverable meaning, also a discoverable purpose, and a show of relevancy, and remain in the neighborhood of the subject at hand, and be interesting to the reader, and help out the tale, and stop when the people cannot think of anything more to say. But this requirement has been ignored from the beginning of the "Deerslayer" tale to the end of it.

6. They require that when the author describes the character of a personage in the tale, the conduct and conversation of that personage shall justify said description. But this law gets little or no attention in the "Deerslayer" tale, as Natty Bumppo's case will amply prove.



7. They require that when a personage talks like an illustrated, gilt-edged, tree-calf, hand-tooled, seven- dollar Friendship's Offering in the beginning of a paragraph, he shall not talk like a negro minstrel in the end of it. But this rule is flung down and danced upon in the "Deerslayer" tale.

8. They require that crass stupidities shall not be played upon the reader as "the craft of the woodsman, the delicate art of the forest," by either the author or the people in the tale. But this rule is persistently violated in the "Deerslayer" tale.

9. They require that the personages of a tale shall confine themselves to possibilities and let miracles alone; or, if they venture a miracle, the author must so plausibly set it forth as to make it look possible and reasonable. But these rules are not respected in the "Deerslayer" tale.

10. They require that the author shall make the reader feel a deep interest in the personages of his tale and in their fate; and that he shall make the reader love the good people in the tale and hate the bad ones. But the reader of the "Deerslayer" tale dislikes the good people in it, is indifferent to the others, and wishes they would all get drowned together.

11. They require that the characters in a tale shall be so clearly defined that the reader can tell beforehand what each will do in a given emergency. But in the "Deerslayer" tale, this rule is vacated.

In addition to these large rules, there are some little ones. These require that the author shall:


12. Say what he is proposing to say, not merely come near it.

13. Use the right word, not its second cousin.

14. Eschew surplusage.

15. Not omit necessary details.

16. Avoid slovenliness of form.

17. Use good grammar.

18. Employ a simple and straightforward style.

Even these seven are coldly and persistently violated in the "Deerslayer" tale.

The entire essay is worth reading.

To balance it, remember that Fenimore Cooper is still in print, and recently had (yet another) major motion picture made from one of his works.

[BTW, and apropos of nothing, Sam "Mark Twain" Clemens is frequently cited by the vanity presses and PoD publishers as a well-known author who self-published. It's true, he did. What they fail to mention is that he went bankrupt doing it, and had to go on the lecture circuit to pay off his debts.]


===========


A part of standard English since the 15th century, "surplusage" is excessive or nonessential matter; or material introduced into a legal pleading which is not necessary or relevant to the case.

What Twain is trying to get across with this rule, "eschew surplusage," is illustrated by your reaction. More plainly speaking, eschew surplusage means speak plainly.


You're quite right, PDR. You will never be wrong if you use Courier.



Paper is cheap.

Recall the reasons for the double-spaced lines, the one-inch margins, and the large mono-spaced font. A human being with a sharp blue pencil will go through and make all kinds of hand notes on the pages. Another human being with a sharp red pencil will go through and make other marks. The process of editing is messy handwork, and requires room.



So, how's everyone coming? Did you do your two hours yesterday? Ready for today?

One thing about being a professional writer: it means you have homework every day for the rest of your life.

You'll also need to read, in addition to writing. You'll read things in two ways: First, for information. Second, for technique.

You will stop reading like ordinary folks do, when you start reading like a writer. You'll be looking at what worked, what didn't, and how the effects were carried out.

=============

Shall we talk about Plot and Story?

I'll just give some aphorisms here. First, from a friend of mine who's one of the most perceptive and talented editors I know:

"Plot is a literary convention. Story is a force of nature."

Plot is the sequential arrangement of consequential actions. This happened, then that happened because of this.

These arrangements are not random. They are a result of the artist's choices. "But it really happened that way!" is no excuse in fiction. As an artist you are not only required to make things happen, you are obliged to have them make sense. Nor can you throw in just anything at any point. You have to avoid digressions. Every word must support the theme, reveal character, or advance the plot. Better words do two of those things. The best words do all three.

Recall that sailing ship a bit upthread, ready to get underway? Think of the elements that advance your plot as sails. Each one properly rigged on its mast and yard adds to the speed of your voyage and the beauty of the overall design of the ship.

Elements that don't belong in the plot -- however diverting they may be on their own -- are like taking those same sails and trailing them over the side in the water. They slow the ship, make it look slovenly, and perhaps put it in danger of capsizing.

Story, now, is the wind that drives those sails. Story is simple. "Who are those guys?" "How do I get home?" "Who am I?" "I saw something neat." "What makes us human?" "Am I normal?"

With story we're back around the campfires thousands of years ago, telling each other who's sleeping with who, what the king's up to, what's up in the next camp over. The fire casts shadows out in the dark, the shadows of monsters and demons and gods. We tell stories about them too. Those shadows are, however, the shadows of humans.

All stories are about people.

"You can get farther with beautiful prose and a plot than you can with beautiful prose alone."

"Plot will get you through times with no prose better than prose will get you thorugh times with no plot."

"I am a professional writer. I tell lies to strangers for money."

"One Damn Thing After Another is a perfectly good plot."

"Anything that doesn't add to the story takes away from it."

It might seem like I'm slagging off prose. I'm not. Beautiful prose is a wonderful thing. It is a necessary thing.

"The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and the lightning bug," as Mark Twain said.

Words are your tools. You must make them your friends. If you aren't the sort of person who can regularly ace the It Pays to Increase Your Word Power feature in Readers Digest every month -- become that sort of person.

At the very minimum I expect you to have the following books in your office:

Miriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary

The Chicago Manual of Style

Roget's International Thesaurus

and

The Elements of Style

There are other useful references, which I may mention later. These you must have, and must use.

The words themselves, the nouns and verbs ... they're the polish with 000 steel wool. They're the hand-rubbed oil stain. They're the carnuba wax buffed with chamois. But if you don't have a solid piece of woodwork to start with, all the finish in the world won't make a piece of furniture.

Yes, I'll be talking about prose, including some of my idiosyncratic pet peeves. There, their, and they're are three different words, with three different meanings. Similarly, two, too, and to. Its and it's mean different things, as do farther and further. You are expected to be expert.

If what exactly I mean by "noun" and "verb" (not to mention "adverb," "adjective," and "conjunction") is obscure to you ... go right now to your local bookstore and pick up some of the test-preparation study books for high school students, and work through the sections on English. It's okay, no shame, but you've got to be good with words.

If you can put together two consecutive pages of grammatical English with standard spelling, you'll be ahead of 90% of the people in the slush pile.

==========

Another note: Yes, William Strunk did self-publish the first edition of his Elements of Style, as the PoD and vanity presses are fond of pointing out. You have to remember that it happened in the days before the invention of the Xerox machine -- Strunk printed up copies of his class notes to hand out to his students, so that they wouldn't have to copy it all down by hand as he lectured.

Which leads very nicely into the next topic: Characters.

Plot isn't the whole of your novel. Plot is more like the ropes and poles that hold up the big top where the circus is going to be held. Plot provides structure, but it isn't the novel.

Nor is story the novel: story is the space inside that big top where the show is going to happen.

No, your novel is in the characters: the bareback riders, the ringmaster, the trapeze artists, the lion tamers. A novel is about people, without the people it's an empty tent.

(And you were wondering where I was going to come down on the plot-generated vice character-generated novels.)

When you are coming up with characters, I beg you make them interesting. Interesting people doing interesting things in interesting places make your novel interesting.

You need to develop characters so that they serve a purpose other than Keeping The Front Cover and Back Cover Apart. Two rules for that: Every character thinks that he's the main character in the story, and Every character thinks that he's the good guy. While you are writing the character (from the main character, to the most minor of minor characters) you're in his head, and those two things are true while you're writing from his point of view (POV).

We beat up our characters. We make them miserable. Writing is about a lot of things; being kind to your characters isn't one of them.

Generally speaking, you need at least two characters in a story; otherwise dialog is very hard to do. How many characters you can handle is a measure of your skill level and the needs of your book. Characters all serve a function in the book. If two characters are serving the same function, make them into one character.

Now, I'm going to add two more characters to your story. These have to be characters, though y'all might not have thought of them so.

First is the author. You are a character in your story. Cast yourself. Then stay in character. Are you a lecturer? Are you a genial host? Are you a salesman? Are you a stranger here yourself?

Second is the reader. You have to cast the reader. Picture the reader. Is she a teenage girl living in suburbia? Is she a sophisticated urban professional? Is he a business traveler looking for something to read in the airport? The reader is why you're doing this. He's a character. See him. Make him consistent.

If you want to imagine you and your reader sitting in your living room (or some other location) while you tell the story, that can work. Just be consistent! We are building a dream, here, creating an illusion. Inconsistencies are illusion killers. Don't let your reader see you palming a card.

23Nov03

[MacAllister]

James D. Macdonald
From "Learn Writing With Uncle Jim"
Absolute Write Water Cooler
Novel Writing forum
23Nove03


More on Characters, and a little reward for having borne with me so far.

A story.

Good morning, everyone! Coffee all brewed? Ready for another day in the word mines?

Let's talk very briefly about those characters. We have to put them into conflict, else nothing much is going to happen.

In the chess games, it's white vs. black, because if you didn't have that conflict, you wouldn't have a game.

There're all kinds of conflicts we can use. Man vs. nature, man vs. fate, good vs. evil. Revenge may be a lousy motive out here in reality, but it's powered many novels.

Let me mention one of my favorites.

Anyone can do good vs. evil. The audience knows who to cheer for. The author knows who's going to win. This can get boring, for everyone. (Important safety tip: Your readers can always tell when you're bored.)

If you want to make your characters sweat, and keep your readers guessing, make the conflict good vs. good. Love of family vs. love of country. Search for truth vs. charity and forgiveness. Faith vs. reason. You get the idea.

All that's visible on the surface in your novel is the plot and the characters. The themes, the stories, the conflicts -- those are hidden. You know them; you're the author. You make them consistent throughout, and the reader will believe the plot and believe in the characters, at least until the book is finished. That's the art and the skill. And that's where lots and lots of unpublished/unpublishable writers fall down.

Another thing about the characters: they don't know they're in a novel.

(Generally speaking, the characters in art don't know they're in art. That's why the lights are turned down and the audience is quiet in theatres: so the characters won't realize they're on a stage. That's why characters in the movies don't look at the camera. (Have you noticed how distracting it is, in amateur film, when an actor's eyes focus on the camera?)

Well ... you can have the characters notice they're in a book or on film or on stage (it's called "Breaking the Fourth Wall"), but this is generally done for comic effect. "Bromosel looked at the huge wad of pages in the reader's right hand. It was going to be a long epic." (Bored of the Rings) or pretty much any of the Police Squad shows.

One thing you don't want to do is have a character say something that'll remind the reader that he's just a reader: don't have one character say to another, "You're talking like the villain in a sleazy detective novel," lest the reader say "Wait a minute! He is the villain in a sleazy detective novel!" This can break the illusion. Illusions are fragile things. The chapters you've spent building the illusion will be wasted; it's not entirely certain that you'll be able to get that willing-suspension-of-disbelief back.

The number one lesson to learn about commercial fiction is: We are part of the entertainment industry!

Hi, Jerry --

I've recommended some books and some exercises already ... I'm quite serious about those. Get the books, do the exercises. Develop the habits.

I'll be recommending more books and more exercises as time goes on. Please trust me enough to play along. I can't give you a publishing contract, but I can take you where they grow.

More advice, just for you? Sure:

You've put down timeframes and dollar amounts in your goals. I've seen people do this before; I've even seen 'em figure which year they were going to win what major award. That's counterproductive. Just concentrate on the day, and on the current project. Let the future take care of itself.

Have a life. Go to interesting places, do interesting things. Observe people. You have to be the best observer around. No matter what you're doing, part of your brain should be turning the scene into descriptive prose.

Read widely. Take classes just for the heck of it. You can't know too much.

Consider joining a writers' workshop. Look for one that has at least one or two people with legitimate publishing credits in it. If workshops aren't for you, they aren't for you, but give 'em a try. You'll need a set of trusted friends who'll read your work and give you their honest opinions. No matter how much those opinions may hurt, thank your friends cheerfully and sincerely.

Make every story you write be the best one it can be. Submit them to places likely to buy them (paying markets only). Send 'em out 'til Hell won't have 'em.

There are no right or wrong answers. The only thing you'll know if you listen carefully to what I tell you here is how I work, and what works for me.

Still, there's that professional attitude. If you're a professional writer, writing is your job. Treat it that way. Sure, it's a job you love, one that you'd do even if they weren't paying you for it, but it's a job.

You can get the sweatshirt and wear it proudly.

Now, some other fun things before we start today's nattering.

Here's the Turkey City Lexicon. We can't talk about -- some would say we can't think about -- things for which we don't have the words. These are some words that you might find helpful in thinking about your writing.

Here's something even more fun: The Sobering Saga of Myrtle the Manuscript. If you ever wanted to know the truth of what happens in a publisher's office, this story tells the truth. It's about short stories, rather than novels, but it's still Pretty Darn True.

Myrtle tells the story from the editor's point of view. If you want to Really True Truth about writing a novel from the novelist's point of view, I recommend you get a copy of The Unstrung Harp; or, Mr. Earbrass Writes a Novel by Edward Gorey. Here it is as a single volume, or as part of a collection.

The Unstrung Harp is very funny, and devastatingly accurate.

==========

Now, today's discussion. Let's say that you have a full novel all done. Three hundred some-odd pages of typescript in standard manuscript format. What do you do now?

Now is the time to put it into pleasing shape. This is what I call Agricultural Work. This is where you prune and transplant, and fertilize the book. Look at the end. Is everything that happens at the end properly foreshadowed in the beginning? Look at the beginning. Does everything that you planted there have a payoff at the end?

You remember Chekov's saying that a gun that's hanging on the wall in the first act must be fired in the last act. Here's where you hang the gun on the wall. Here too is where you make sure the gun goes off.

I see my novels as having form, like a building. They are a space. The walls go all the way to the ceilings, the walls meet at corners, the roof is in place and pitched to shed the rain, the doors swing easily, the floors are level, and there are plants to mask the ugly place where the foundation meets the lawn (in addition to the pure aesthetic pleasure that those pretty flowers give.

You're looking for balance here. You may need to move scenes, shed scenes, write new scenes. Characters may appear or vanish in this part of the rewriting.

To make a statue of an elephant, take a block of marble and carve away everything that doesn't look like an elephant. The first draft, the thing you vomited out at the rate of ten pages a day, is the block of marble. Now you are cutting away everything that doesn't look like a novel.

As you gain skill and experience, the marble will arrive at this later stage more closely rough-cut than it did the first few times you try. Still you will get to know revision. Revision means, literally, "looking again." Look again at all the parts of your book, from basic plot through character, action, theme, story, text, subtext. You are the master of this world you are creating.

The readers are counting on you for one thing: they are trusting you to find the one perfect ending for this novel. (That's why the Choose Your Own Adventure books flopped -- they were a novelty, not a novel. Not all endings are as good as others. You, the artist, choose one.)

The readers expect to be surprised by the inevitable. This sounds like a tall order. It is. There are a couple of cheap tricks I can teach you, but try for the real thing.

(Cheap trick number one: Start a story arc. Before it reaches its climax, start a second story arc. When that second story arc reaches its climax, substitute the climax for the first story arc. This sounds silly, but it really works. For an example, see Chaucer's The Miller's Tale.)

Okay, before I end today, one more rule of thumb: Unless you're writing War and Peace or the Bible, try to have all your characters on stage and moving by page one hundred.

================

Kinda a gallimaufry today:

Plots. Please try to avoid the Idiot Plot. An Idiot Plot is one that only works because all the characters involved are idiots. If the only reason something happens or doesn't happen is because otherwise it would be a very short book, come up with some other explanation.

Let me give you an example of an idiot plot, this time from the movies. How many of y'all have seen Tears of the Sun with Bruce Willis? Our boy Bruce plays Lt. Waters, a Navy SEAL who is sent into Nigeria to rescue an American doctor during a civil war. The doctor refuses to leave without taking her patients with her. What stops Lt. Waters from calling his boss on the aircraft carrier on his satelite phone and saying "Give me three CH-46s at the LZ"? Nothing other than that if he did it, the movie would have been only about twenty minutes long. That's an idiot plot.

What stops the characters in your novel, on seeing mysterious lights in the house next door, from calling 9-1-1? Motivate them. Eliminate "because I'm the author and I say so" as a reason things happen.

Sometimes, though, you'll have to have characters behave in basically stupid ways. You have two choices there: either build their characters to show that they're stupid people (reading stories about stupid people isn't terribly enjoyable, at least for me, but maybe there's a market), or get the action going so fast that the readers don't have a moment to say, "Hey, wait a minute! Why don't they just go to the bus station and buy a ticket?"

Next thought: On plots. Plots are simple things, like a piece of string is simple, but they are complex, like a three-strand four lay Turk's Head made with that same piece of string is complex. When you're thinking about plot, and about the shape of your book, consider the classical unities.

These come from Greek drama, and are unity of time, unity of place, and unity of action. In a Greek play (formal as sonnet, those things were), all the action takes place in twenty-four hours (that's unity of time), it all takes place in one location (e.g. the square in front of the temple -- that's unity of place), and everything that happens deals directly with the climax (that's unity of action, and it's a darn good idea, chums).

Your novel probably won't take place in just one location in twenty-four hours. Still, it's probably a good idea to use the minumum number of locations, and the minimum time. If your character flies off to Miami to learn something he could have just as conveniently learned in New York, leave him in New York. If a whole chunk of your novel can be replaced with the words "What with this and that some five years passed," you may have to refine the focus of your book or replace that part of the novel with a chapter break or a line break.

Let us take for an example The Lord of the Rings. The time covered is almost exactly one year, and an action-packed year it is. Yet it starts in the Shire and it ends in the Shire. The hobbits are center stage on the first page, and they're center stage on the last page. You could do worse than to follow this template.


Let me give you another aphorism: The oldest engines pull the heaviest freight. If you were going to write a modern literary novel, you might consider taking The Trojan Women, and setting it among the Mormons of Mesa, Arizona, one afternoon in August, 1965. Vietnam is just ramping up. It's hot.

You've done your research on time and place and modes of speech ... and off you go.

By the time you've done the book won't resemble the original at all; you'll have something totally your own. Yet it will have a structure, and the structure will be sound, and your readers will appreciate it.

[MacAllister]

James D. Macdonald
From "Learn Writing With Uncle Jim"
Absolute Write Water Cooler
Novel Writing forum

Other random thoughts: On words.

Beware the word "Somehow." You can use it in dialog when the character doesn't know, but you should avoid it in narrative. "Somehow" means the author doesn't know either. This is bad. The reader is trusting you to know what's going on and to guide him to the climax of the book. "Somehow" makes the reader look at you askance and ask "What's the matter with this guy?" It's as if he were following a guide through trackless wilderness, when the guide suddenly gets a puzzled expression on his face and says "Beats the heck out of me."

Example: Our hero is trying to sneak into a warehouse. The door is sliding shut. Then the narrative: Somehow the door failed to close all the way. What? Why didn't it close? Figure this out, author, and come back when you know. Did a mouse get jammed in the gears? Either come up with something reasonable, or give the guy a different way into the warehouse. If you do nothing else, delete the word "somehow." You still have the same action, but without the moment of doubt.

Next: Choose only necessary detail. You aren't constructing a full world. You're giving your reader a blueprint with which he'll construct his own world, which will be consistent with his own needs and experiences. If the room the reader imagines and the room you imagine differ, what of it? Give the reader three points and he'll do the rest. Just be consistent, and choose the important things. If it's necessary that there be a clock in the room, mention it. If it doesn't matter whether there's a clock, don't mention it. The reader may put one there, or not put one there, and it won't matter to the story. The room will be the right room for him.



Readers assume that everything you mention is important. They'll hold those things in their heads. Give them a payoff for everything you mention, a reward for their effort. You can't keep writing checks against your literary account without adding literary capital.

On sentences: There were and It was are weak openings. Not all sentences need to be strong: contrast and rhythm demand that sentence strength vary. Nevertheless, be aware of this fact, and use it as a tool. You are the author. All the words are yours. Be conscious of what you're doing.

Anything that doesn't add to your story subtracts from it. You know what you're doing with your tale; later on students and critics may come by and try to guess, but you know.

Take charge. This is your world, you are the master. Bwah-ha-ha-ha-ha!


Hiya, Jerry --

When's your contest deadline? Deadlines are good things. They concentrate the mind wonderfully.

By "Have a life," I mean don't spend all your time in your room writing. Writers need to get out of the house, talk to people, observe the world. No one can create new worlds until he masters this one.

By "classes," I don't mean writing classes. Those can be good or bad experiences. I don't necessarily think they're required. By classes, I mean things like going to a local college and taking a course in Classical Mechanics, or Origami, or First Aid. Everything, everywhere, fits into your mind, ready to come out when a story needs it. Writers are generalists.

Did I ever mention my Quick Slick Research Method?

When you're getting set to write a story set in a particular time or place, you need to become an Instant Expert on the subject. Here's what you do. Go to the Children's Room in your local library and read a couple of recent kids' books on the subject. That'll get you up to speed, give you an idea of the shape of the material you'll need, and an introduction to the terms and people.

Now go to the adult section, and start reading the adult books on the subject. Start with the big survey books. The Oxford Book of _____ for example. Read only the chapters you need. It's easy to get distracted. Take notes.

Then go to the specialty books. Read the parts that you need (and you will know which parts those are from your previous reading), paying attention to the footnotes (the footnotes are where learned professors float their crackpot theories, or ***** about other learned professors -- footnotes are great fun). Take more notes.

You are now sufficiently an expert on your subject to write your novel. When you've got a decent draft of your novel, take it to someone who genuinely is an expert on the subject to read it and comment on it. Many academics are lonely folks, only too eager to talk with you. Cops and firefighters and emergency nurses love to talk with writers. Coroners will make time in their day to read your book and comment on it. Honest. You'll mention them in the acknowledgements in the front of the book and that's all the reward they want.

On Writer's Digest: this is the Brides Magazine of writing. It's a great mag when you're getting started and planning the wedding. It isn't so good on telling you what to do after the wedding when you wake up the next morning beside some fat guy who snores, smells of sweat, and has stubble all over his chin.

Everyone has a subscription to Writer's Digest once. It's time to reevaluate your career if you renew your subscription. Think about the old maid with the lifetime subscription to Brides Magazine. Yeah, it's like that.

One other thing about Writer's Digest: If an agent advertises there, cross that agent off your list.

[MacAllister]

James D. Macdonald
From "Learn Writing With Uncle Jim"
Absolute Write Water Cooler
Novel Writing forum

A very short post today. Holidays, kids home from school, you know....

First, a Trick for Analyzing your Writing:

Take ten or twenty consecutive pages, and tape them, side by side, to the wall of your livingroom.

Go stand on the other side of the room.

Are all the pages big grey blocks of text? If so, perhaps you need to break things up with dialog, with paragraphs of varying length, with line breaks. All short paragraphs and dialog? Your reader won't have a chance to catch his breath and assimilate what you've just said. Your text should be varied, just as your story varies. The rhythm of your story will be apparent across the room. Big grey blocks = boring. All jagged = tiring.

============

Next thing: Two books for you to read, over the weekend. They're novels, but you'll find lessons on writing in them if you care to dig those lessons out.

First, The Sun, the Moon, and the Stars by Steven Brust.

Second, Misery by Stephen King.



Of the two I recommend the Brust more highly. You can buy copies, get 'em from your library, interlibrary loan, whatever.

(Please note, too, that Brust's book is still in print, even though it was first published in 1987.)

Is everyone so stunned that they don't have anything to say?


Why did I recco Misery?

This is all In My Opinion, of course, but books are about something other than the surface plot. What I think this one is about is the relationship between the author and the reader.

The author is the reader's slave, the reader's captive. The reader has control of what we write. The reader also takes away parts of us.

Observe the long descriptions of how the author has to play fair with the reader, and provide beliveable explanations for the events in the novel. The reader will withdraw her approval if we fail to satisfy her, if we fail to make her believe. The discussion, with examples, of how the fictional author makes the fictional "biggest fan" believe that Misery didn't really die at the end of the previous book is brilliant. And it works through the choices the author has to make, why some lines are right, and why some lines are wrong.

I enjoy looking at the why of a thing. If I know why, I can often figure out what needs to happen in some other specific case by looking behind the surface.

The descriptions of what it feels like to be writing (the "hole in the page") resemble what writing seems like to me.


The clues that this is meant to be a writing manual include the long digression on why Corrasible Bond (do they even still make that stuff?) is dreadfully wrong for writing a novel.

So, aside from the action/adventure/thriller surface of this novel, read it as a parable of the creative process as it pertains to writers and their readers (who are we without our readers?) and I think you'll find lessons that can improve your own writing.

All I can really say is that I found it useful.

-----

Reph, not a day goes by when I don't think "Gee, if only I got serious about this I could be really productive." But yeah, we are prolific. That's what it takes to average two novels and two short stories a year, and that's what it takes (at least, that's what it takes me) to make a living doing this.


Reprinted from elsewhere on this board:

Your readers can always tell when you're bored.

Writing is a lousy make-money-fast scheme. If you aren't doing it at least a little bit for love, I can point to a lot of things that will bring you more money for less work.

Next: Observe this diagram.

The area labeled "A" is what fascinates you; what you might write about. The area labeled "B" is what fascinates everyone else, that they want to read about. The area labeled "C" is what's marketable.

You can't guess this in advance.

Take, for example, Maureen F. McHugh. She was fascinated by Chinese people, gay guys, and subways. She wrote China Mountain Zhang. This was her first novel, and it was picked out of the slush pile. It was published, remains in print, and led her to a career in mainstream literary novels.

The books you're seeing now as the Hot New Releases were bought two years ago. The trend as to who's buying what has already moved on. Write what's going to be on the shelf two years from now, not what's on the shelf today.

King is an interesting writer. He's one of the full-blown Calvinist writers; Calvinism tends toward horror. (Once, when asked why he wrote horror, King replied "What makes you think I have a choice?")

(An example of ur-horror, that passionately American genre, is Johnathan Edwards' "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God." People traveled for miles to hear Edwards preach. When he spoke people would weep, or fall to the floor senseless. That's more than a good sermon: that's entertainment.)

King is also, if memory serves, one of the few writers who has taught English at every level in the American educational system. That's more than a need for money -- that's a love of teaching. I expect that on some level everything he's written is meant to be didactic.

IMHO, however, when he's remembered, King will be remembered for his short works.

Oh, yes, his On Writing is highly recommended.


[/font]

[MacAllister]

James D. Macdonald
From "Learn Writing With Uncle Jim"
Absolute Write Water Cooler
Novel Writing forum

Elsewhere at the Water Cooler, I find a reference to this essay: How Lucky Can You Get? by whiney Usenet troll M. J. Rose. (See? I can be snarky.)

Okay, guys, go read the article, all the way down to What’s the Problem?

M. J. lacks the publishing experience to figure out the answer to her own question. Y'see, I know exactly what happened to "Carl P." He had Golden Word Syndrome.

His first book was publishable, or would be, with editing. Perhaps a lot of editing. The editor liked the voice, or the story, or some aspect of what was a deeply-flawed but correctable work.

"Carl P" got the contract. The editing process started. Then Carl decided that his words were golden. He refused to participate in the editing process, he vetoed the editor's suggestions, he wouldn't make the changes that would turn his manuscript into a commercial novel, his ego was too big to allow him to listen to a mere editorial assistant. He bought a "STET Dammit!" rubber stamp.

Read the little tale that M. J. tells with that in mind. Makes sense now, doesn't it? The editor's actions aren't inexplicable and unmotivated any more, eh?

Carl P's book was printed as unedited slush, with predictable results.

I recently had a chat with a New York editor who had bought a first novel out of the slush pile. The book was interesting, the story moved right along, the voice was unique -- and it fell apart in the last quarter. The author had no clue how to end a novel for all that he'd started brilliantly.

Where most editors write revision letters, this editor wrote a revision novella.

"What will you do," I asked, "if the author won't make the changes?"

"Put a cheap cover on it," the editor replied.

Here endeth the lesson.

[MacAllister]

James D. Macdonald
From "Learn Writing With Uncle Jim"
Absolute Write Water Cooler
Novel Writing forum

Hi, Karen --

Just wanted to say that you've been saying good, true, and useful things on this board. And I'm honored that you're posting here ... I love a good romance, but darned if I can write one.


First, the formatting thing:

The only blank lines in your story will be where you expect linebreaks, and those will have a centered # in them, thusly:


"But why are you telling me all this?" Jane asked. She

passed a trembling hand across her brow.

#

Next morning, Paul awoke to find his refrigerator had gone

off in the middle of the night. Again.



As you can see, you indent the beginning of each paragraph (and each time a new character speaks, it's a new paragraph).

Let's try your example:


"Blah blah blah," he said.

"Blah blah blah," she replied. She then went on to do

something else that was interesting here.


Notice that you end the quoted words with punctuation, either a comma, an explanation point, a question mark, or something else. The comma stands for a period.

I will comment here that "said" is a totally invisible word, and far preferable to all the "said-bookism" synonyms you'll find out there: he bellowed, he shouted, he rasped, he gritted, he snarled, he yelled, he demurred, he apologized, he extemporized, he welded, he [some verb that is not said].

==============

Now on the subject of plots and such:

Many years ago I studied magic. Back when I was six years old, one Halloween night, the firefighters had a Halloween party at the firehouse. I went with my parents. They had a magician! I decided rigth then that I was going to be a magician when I grew up.

I got pretty good at it, if I say so myself. I made money in high school putting on magic shows, doing kids parties and such. It was fun. (It's all the entertainment business!)



Along the way I ran into a book called Magic As A Hobby by Bruce Elliott. In there, I found a line that's stuck with me, that I've found to be absolutely true: "If you know a thousand ways of finding a selected card and only one way of revealing it, to the audience you only know one trick. If you know one way of finding a selected card and a thousand ways of revealing it, to the audience you know a thousand tricks."

I've shifted my focus over the years from magic to writing (a kind of magic all its own -- genuine thought transference!) but that lesson stuck with me.

Up above, I suggested using the plot of The Trojan Women, transported to Mesa, Arizona, in 1965. Suppose you wrote that book. Then suppose you put the plot of The Trojan Women into a novel set in feudal Japan. Then you did another novel with the plot of The Trojan Women, this one set in upper-class Westchester in 2003. Then you used The Trojan Women for a novel set among in the biker bars of Long Beach, California, in 1990.

To the readers those would be very different novels.

A bit upstream Karen commented that all novels are about relationships. I'll generalize that a bit: All novels are about people. Write about people, folks. The rest all follows.

From this you can further derive: You must become an expert on people. You have to learn to see through the eyes of others. You have to understand yourself very well, then you have to understand them.

Now, to reward you: A magic trick.


That's part of casting the author as a character. It doesn't really matter, provided you are consistent throughout the work.

After that, the test is does it work for you?


Hiya, Kim --

No, I've never been on scribendi's bb (and I go by my real name wherever I go -- I'm me, I stand behind my opinions).

Hi, Hapi. Good to see you here. Chime in any time you like.

===========

What shall we talk about tonight?

How about endings?

Books have beginnings, middles, and ends.




If your book doesn't have an end, your readers will be left unsatisfied, as if the chocolate cake they were promised for desert was snatched away from them at the last minute.

I've talked about chess games as a metaphor for the novel. All chess games end. Either with a checkmate, a stalemate, a draw, or a resignation.

Of these, only the checkmate is of interest. We want that checkmate ending to our books. When the reader puts our book down, he should say "I didn't see that coming, but by golly that was the absolutely right ending."

("What do we do if we're planning a sequel? What if this is one book in a series? What then, Uncle Jim?" I can hear you asking.

"My children," I reply, "the book must have an end anyway. You can leave room for more stories in the same world, with the same characters, but this story is finished. Suppose your reader is a sailor, a thousand miles away from shore, six months before he'll get home, and this is the only book on board his ship. Do you want to frustrate that poor swabbie, leave him hanging? No! Give him a conclusion, a satisfying conclusion.")

How to tell you've reached the end of your story:

The characters suddenly don't know what to do next. They wander around. One of them orders out for pizza.

A novel is not life: In life there are always loose ends; the story never really finishes. This is art: Here all the plot threads are gathered together. Sure, you can leave little things lying around ready to pick up in another book, but you can't leave major plot-arcs unresolved. The reader won't stand for it; he will throw your book against the wall; he won't buy your next book. Here's the game: You win if the reader buys your next book.

Do not leave your reader in any doubt that you've come to the end of the story! Imagine a play ... where the audience didn't know to start applauding, when to rise to their feet, when to throw bouquets on the stage. The playwright gives the audience clues that This Is It. If nothing else, when the lights come up, and the whole cast walks on stage and takes their bows, the audience knows This Play is Over, and it's time to go home.

So ... signal that it's the end. Coming to the last page isn't enough. I've run into books where I've been frustrated because the last page wasn't the end of the story. Do not do likewise.

Bad endings: There are three classic errors. One is getting into a land war in Asia. But the other two, almost as deadly are ending your book thusly:

1) It was only a dream.
2) ...and they were all run over by a truck.

Yes, yes, I know. Alice in Wonderland ends with "Oh, I've had such a curious dream!" That book has many other virtues, and the ending is in fact perfect for that book. The danger with using the "it was only a dream" ending with your book is that the reader has been worried about these characters all the way along, he's been hoping for them, fearing for them, and now, suddenly, you've told him that it didn't matter. Yes, it's all a fiction, yet our readers have laughed genuine laughs, shed genuine tears, actually checked to makes sure the windows were all locked, all over our creations. Don't remind him that you just made it up. One of the little fictions of our fictions is that we don't tell them that it's fiction.


The "...and they were all run over by a truck" ending has the element of arbitrariness to it; the author has gotten tired of these toys so he throws them away. Possibly the author didn't know how to end the story, and this presented a convenient way to do it after about three hundred pages. Again, the reader has gotten to care about the characters (at least we hope so, and if the reader is still following along at this point we know he does), and will be upset, perhaps angered, that someone he likes dies for no good reason other than the author said so.

Okay, okay, you're trying to make a point that life is random, brutish, and short, that we all die, and that existence is meaningless. Make your point some other way; this one has already been done.

What both of these endings have in common: The characters' actions didn't matter. That's disrespectful to your readers. Readers can tell when they're being dissed.

[MacAllister]

James D. Macdonald
From "Learn Writing With Uncle Jim"
Absolute Write Water Cooler
Novel Writing forum

Since HConn brought up the Evil Overlord Plot Generator, here's a lot more about it.


I'm going to recycle a bit right now, from another thread here. [This thread no longer exists]

In that thread, HConn mentioned <A href="a href="http://www.scriptsecrets.net/articles/magnify.htm" target="_new">this site.

The following was my reply there.

(I'm thinking that after this I might blather on a bit about Point of View (POV), but that's for another post.)


Quote:

Well, books aren't movies (for all that they're both part of the entertainment industry). They're different art forms, both of which need to appeal to a mass audience. Yet, you can learn from them. I'm a big believer in finding lessons about writing in all sorts of non-writing or peripherally-writing places.

From where I sit, ideas are vastly overrated. One of the things you'll get sick of when y'all become Famous Big Name Writers (or obscure, small time writers like me) is the guy who comes up to you and says, "I"ve got a great idea for a book! You write it and we'll split the money!"

Ideas. I've got lots of my own, thanks. Aphorisms: Watt-Evans' Law: "There is no idea so stupid that a sufficiently talented writer can't make it into an entertaining story." Feist's Collorary to Watt-Evans' Law: "There is no idea so brilliant that a sufficiently ham-handed writer can't make an unreadable story out of it."

The Pump Up The Volume method (what this fellow calls "Magnification") can work, if you're the sort of person it works for. It won't give you sex, lies, and videotape but it might give you Armageddon.

Films play games with higher stakes than novels, at least in the terms of cash outlay. For a movie maker, the special effects budget may constrain the storyline. For me as a novelist, it costs exactly the same for me to type "Fred lit a cigarette" as it costs me to type "The world ended with an earth-shattering Kaboom."

Study the story-telling caracteristics of allied artforms, yes. Remember that what you personally are doing is writing a novel.

You want an example of plot, pure plot, driving a work? Try Sweeney Todd In Concert. This performance has no sets, minimal costuming, minimal props, minimal movement. Yet the plot itself, expressed through the characters, pushes us right along. Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street, has lots of narrative juice. This particular story has been consistently finding an audience for the last 160 years. When you analyse the themes, you'll find classical roots. I really recommend this particular performance of this particular work. Look at is as an example of Plot At Work.

(Oh, incidentally, John Q sucked.)
===========

Sing it, sister!

I personally want to enlighten, teach, amuse, and touch the hearts and souls of those people who read my books.

So do I. So does everyone. But you know what? If they've thrown your book across the room you aren't going to enlighten, teach, amuse or anything else those readers.

Same as if they put down your book after the first chapter, meaning to pick it up again later, and never do.

You've made a deal with your reader: Give me a couple bucks and a couple hours, and I'll show you a good time. The reader wants you to succeed. The reader is willing to help you out. Just don't give the reader the idea that he's put more thought into the story than you did.

Who was it, Sam Goldwyn, who said "If you want to send a message, call Western Union"? Same with your book. Sure, you can put a message in it. That isn't the reason someone will read your book. Put your message on a different level. On the main level, put this: A story, fully satisfying.

Good point about the detective story. The reader wants you to play fair with him, including putting all the clues on the page, so the reader can solve it right along with the detective. Imagine if you read a mystery where it turned out the killer was some guy you'd never heard of, who'd played no part in the book. It wasn't the jealous boyfriend, the butler, the old school chum, or the dishonest stock broker ... it was some random guy, and the cops find him because he confessed after being arrested for some unrelated crime somewhere around page 300.

Or suppose, on the last page, the police inspector says, "Well, beats heck out of me who did it ... put this one in the Cold Cases file. I've got enough other crimes to work on." That's not going to be too satisfying either.

You made a deal with your reader. You have to carry out your part.

Soon ... POV!

Before we start POV, let's look at yet another list of rules for writing, this time from Elmore Leonard.

Mr. Leonard is a noted stylist; widely published, well respected, best-selling. Pray notice when he says that the word for "said" is "said." He also comments on the author intruding in the book. He has other things of great interest.

What we're going to look at today is this bit: "If I write in scenes and always from the point of view of a particular character -- the one whose view best brings the scene to life -- I'm able to concentrate on the voices of the characters telling you who they are and how they feel about what they see and what's going on, and I'm nowhere in sight."


So.

The Point of View is the pair of eyes that is observing the scene. Those eyes, belonging to a character, are your camera. Those ears, belonging to a character, are the microphones that pick up the dialog in the scene.

You may or may not tell your readers what the chacter is thinking. You must tell your readers what one particular character is seeing and hearing.

If the character is not in the room for part of the scene, the readers will not see that part of the scene. Therefore you must either:


a) use a different viewpoint character for that scene, or
b) break the scene into two scenes, with a different viewpoint character in each.

Who should be your viewpoint character? Answer: the character who can best see or describe the scene; the most interesting view of the scene, "the one whose view best brings the scene to life."

How can you tell which one's view best brings the scene to life?

Experience. Reading other authors and asking yourself "Why that character? Why that scene?" Writing your own works, and experimenting with the characters and the scenes. You will eventually get the experience to choose a viewpoint and stick with it in each scene.

Your viewpoint character does not need to be your main character, or even a major character. Remember when I told you to cherish your minor characters? This is one of the places where they can come in handy: they're great viewpoints.

You can go through an entire novel without ever seeing even one scene from the point of view of the protagonist.

If a scene isn't working for you, before your try the other two general-purpose scene-fixes (to wit: shortening the scene or cutting it entirely), try this: rewrite the scene from the point of view of a different character.

What the character sees (that is, what he notices) will depend on the character. You remember Holmes saying to Watson, "You see, but you do not observe"? The same thing is true for your viewpoint characters. Each one of them will filter what they hear, what they see, and consequently what they convey to the reader.

Let us imagine a wedding reception. How would it be described by: a) the grooms' father (a military man), b) the groom's ex-girlfriend (an interior decorator), c) the bride, d) a criminal who is there on business, e) a cop who is there as a guest, f) one of the musicians, or g) the preacher?

Each one of them will see different details as important. Each one of them will hear the conversations differently even if they report them word-for-word. Each of them is more likely to stand in one place than another.

How can you keep close point of view? Try this: Write the scene in first-person as told by your viewpoint character. Then recast the scene in the revision stage to third person.

Readers will notice if you change point of view in the middle of a scene! They will be either annoyed, confused, or lost. Writers have a hard time noticing POV shifts -- this is because they are always looking through their own eyes, and know where they are. This leads to the "head story." A head story is one that's in the author's head, not on the page.

Alas, the only story the reader gets is the one on the page.

[MacAllister]

James D. Macdonald
From "Learn Writing With Uncle Jim"
Absolute Write Water Cooler
Novel Writing forum

In slush I have seen writers change viewpoints as often as three times in one paragraph. This is the sort of thing that gets manuscripts slipped back into return envelopes with one of those little one-page photocopied notes that writers hate to get.

Another viewpoint is the one I call "John Ford's Camera." This is the viewpoint that just sort-of hangs there. It's the Eye of God.

The viewpoint character then is the Author. You. In this case you must be very aware that you, the writer, are a character and maintain scrupulous consistency throughout. (True, you can turn to your audience and address them as "Gentle Reader," though this is seldom seen these days outside of humor, but be ready for the heavy downside too: you are never allowed to use another viewpoint if you're already using your own, and the reader may come to dislike your character.)

-----------

Now comes that point of today's ramblings where I throw out little pearls of wisdom.

Here's one: Say one of your characters is the world's greatest political orator. Do not, under penalty of having your book flung across the room by your readers, attempt to reproduce that orator's speeches. Unless you personally are the world's greatest orator, anything you write will fall short of the reader's expectation. (Same rule applies if your character is the world's greatest poet, greatest preacher, greatest writer, greatest anything. Don't try to provide samples.)

What you do is this: Show people's reactions to the character when he's doing his thing. Don't reproduce the sermon, show the congregation falling to the floor weeping.


A better reply in a bit, Debra, but here's a principle:

In writing, you can do absolutely anything if it works.

The "if it works" part is the tough bit. Try, read it carefully, be honest with yourself. Get the reactions from your first readers.

Think of your novel as a video game. Every time you try something, if it works, you get some number of points. If it doesn't work, you lose that same number of points. The fancier and more difficult the thing you try, the more points associated with it.

You'll start the game with a certain number of points. How many depends on the reader -- if he's read and enjoyed a previous work by you, you'll get more points than if he's never heard of you before. If you're writing in a genre he likes, you'll get more points than if you aren't exactly what he was looking for, but he was bored and there you were.

You've got some points, though, or the cover never gets opened.

Now you start adding and subtracting points for "things that work."

If your score ever goes down to zero, it's Bzzzzt! Game over! and the reader throws the book across the room (or, more demurely, puts it down and doesn't pick it back up).

If you want to use omniscent narrator, find an author you like who uses it, read his book critically to see the technique, then go and do likewise.

A sufficiently vigorous story will overcome many rough patches.



=======

Aphorism: Style is what you can't help doing.


I'll try to make it to the library tomorrow to find a Mary Higgins Clark book. Then we'll see if we can find a scene to discuss.

Meanwhile, this bit from an article by Rob Killheffer seems pertinent:


Quote:

It’s television’s fault. Television and movies. Visual media. In so many of these indie publications the narrative point of view slides around like a hot rock on ice, and observations intrude without any clear viewpoint at all. Consider this, from Thoughtmaster: “a skeletal face…whose shifting features left the viewer confused.” What viewer? Or this: “The voice was surprisingly strong from such a diaphanous figure.” Surprising to whom? Surely not to the only other person in the scene, who knows the speaker well.

These writers’ imaginations have been shaped by visual storytelling, in which there’s always an implied viewpoint — that of the audience, the camera, the peeping lens. They conceive their scenes as if they’re presented on a screen, and when they commit their prose, the camera remains, lurking outside the frame.

There’s no other explanation for scene shifts like those in Exile. As Jeff Friedrick and his pal Carl leave the bar where they’ve met, we’re told: “At the bar, a man turned his head and watched them go. He was tall, and a brief flare of light revealed reddish hair. Before the spotlight moved on, odd points of light deep in green eyes gave the impression of motion.…” Gave the impression to whom? The viewing protocols of film and television help us make sense of it: The two men who have been the focus of the scene get up and head for the door, and the camera pans aside to settle on this watcher. His reddish hair is “revealed” to us, the audience. We’re the ones who receive the “impression of motion.” It’s as if, in these moments, the authors are not crafting prose but working out a screenplay. I recall the oldest and most basic advice offered to the aspiring writer: Read! Read! And read some more! If you want to write a novel, don’t draw your skills from the big — or the small — screen.

The whole article is worth reading.

One of the points about point of view is that you don't need to tell the readers who your point of view character is, so long as you know who he is, and you remain consistent. Your readers are subconsciously constructing a world under your direction. If your blueprint doesn't make the unseen parts line up, the reader will disbelieve.


Alas, my library didn't have a copy of Swan Song. Instead, I got a copy of Moonlight Becomes You by Mary Higgins Clark.

Here's the last scene from Chapter 34:

At six-thirty, dressed for dinner, they sat on the back porch, sipping cocktails and looking out at Narragansett Bay.

"You look great, Mom," Neil said with affection.

"Your mother's always been a pretty woman, and all the tender loving care she's received from me over the last forty-three years has only enhanced her beauty," his father said. Noticing the bemused expression on their faces, he added, "What are you two smiling at?"

"You know full well I've also waited on you hand and foot, dear," Dolores Stephens replied.

"Neil, are you still seeing that girl you brought up here in August?" his father asked.

"Who was that?" Neil wondered momentarily. "Oh, Gina. No, as a matter of fact, I'm not." It seemed the right time to ask about Maggie. "There is someone I've been seeing who's visiting her stepmother in Newport for a couple of weeks. Her name is Maggie Holloway; unfortunately she left New York before I got her phone number here."

"What's the stepmother's name?" his mother asked.

"I don't know her last name, but her first name is unusual. Finnuala. It's Celtic, I believe."

"That sounds familiar," Dolores Stephens said slowly, searching her memory. "Does it to you, Robert?"

"I don't think so. No, that's a new one on me," he told her.

"Isn't it funny. I feel as though I've heard that name recently," Dolores mused. "Oh, well, maybe it will come to me."

The phone rang. Dolores got up to answer it.

"Now no long conversations," Robert Stephens warned his wife. "We've got to leave in ten minutes."

The call, however, was for him. "It's Laura Arlington," Dolores Stephens said as she handed the portable phone to her husband. "She sounds terribly upset."

Robert Stephens listened for a minute before speaking, his voice consoling. "Laura, you're going to get yourself sick over this. My son, Neil, is in town. I've spoken to him about you, and he will go over everything with you in the morning. Now promise me you'll calm yourself down.

It seems to me that the POV is 3rd person omniscient. We'll talk more about it in a bit, perhaps look at the whole chapter.

In each case, we know exactly whose eyes we are looking through, to whom things "seemed" or who "noticed" what.


I will comment that the last line is a great chapter close.

More anon; right now I'm off to have Movie Night at my house.

[MacAllister]

James D. Macdonald
From "Learn Writing With Uncle Jim"
Absolute Write Water Cooler
Novel Writing forum

Is this all sounding too much like high school English class?

Regardless ... onward!


Black = narrator, or undefined POV.
<FONT COLOR="red">Red = Robert Stephens' POV</font>
<FONT COLOR="green">Green = Neil Stephens' POV</FONT>
<FONT COLOR="blue">Blue = Dolores Stephens' POV</FONT>


<BLOCKQUOTE>
<HR>

At six-thirty, dressed for dinner, they sat on the back porch, sipping cocktails and looking out at Narragansett Bay.

<FONT COLOR="green">"You look great, Mom," Neil said with affection.</FONT>

<FONT COLOR="red">"Your mother's always been a pretty woman, and all the tender loving care she's received from me over the last forty-three years has only enhanced her beauty," his father said. Noticing the bemused expression on their faces, he added, "What are you two smiling at?"</FONT>

"You know full well I've also waited on you hand and foot, dear," Dolores Stephens replied.

<FONT COLOR="green"> "Neil, are you still seeing that girl you brought up here in August?" his father asked.</FONT>

<FONT COLOR="green">"Who was that?" Neil wondered momentarily. "Oh, Gina. No, as a matter of fact, I'm not." It seemed the right time to ask about Maggie. "There is someone I've been seeing who's visiting her stepmother in Newport for a couple of weeks. Her name is Maggie Holloway; unfortunately she left New York before I got her phone number here."</FONT>


<FONT COLOR="green">"What's the stepmother's name?" his mother asked.</FONT>

"I don't know her last name, but her first name is unusual. Finnuala. It's Celtic, I believe."

<FONT COLOR="blue">"That sounds familiar," Dolores Stephens said slowly, searching her memory. "Does it to you, Robert?"</FONT>

"I don't think so. No, that's a new one on me," he told her.

"Isn't it funny. I feel as though I've heard that name recently," Dolores mused. "Oh, well, maybe it will come to me."

The phone rang. Dolores got up to answer it.

"Now no long conversations," Robert Stephens warned his wife. "We've got to leave in ten minutes."

<FONT COLOR="red">The call, however, was for him. "It's Laura Arlington," Dolores Stephens said as she handed the portable phone to her husband. "She sounds terribly upset."</FONT>

Robert Stephens listened for a minute before speaking, his voice consoling. "Laura, you're going to get yourself sick over this. My son, Neil, is in town. I've spoken to him about you, and he will go over everything with you in the morning. Now promise me you'll calm yourself down.

<HR>
</BLOCKQUOTE>

Most of the undefined/narrator paragraphs are probably from Neil's POV.


The 3rd Omniscient POV is a very easy POV to write. Since the author knows everything it's a natural viewpoint. It is gratifying to the author's ego to stand in center stage.

This section, however, points up some of the difficulties of 3rd Omniscient: the author can come between the reader and the story (not a big problem in this book; it has lots of story), and the shifting POV can destroy unity thus confusing the reader.

A couple of minor infelicities:

You look great, Mom," Neil said with affection, verges on a Tom Swiftie: "I love hotdogs," Mandy said with relish, or "My headache is gone," Tom said absentmindedly.

Dolores mused is a said-bookism.

Neither of those things are wrong; they have to be watched lest unintentional humor be added to the stew.

Next post, I'm going to try to rewrite this scene from Neil's POV. (Neil is a major character.) Then I'll try again, from Dolores' POV (Dolores is a minor character.)


From Neil's POV:

<BLOCKQUOTE>
<HR>
At six-thirty, dressed for dinner, they sat on the back porch, sipping cocktails and looking out at Narragansett Bay.

"You look great, Mom," Neil said.

"Your mother's always been a pretty woman, and all the tender loving care she's received from me over the last forty-three years has only enhanced her beauty," his father said. H
e paused. "What are you two smiling at?"

"You know full well I've also waited on you hand and foot, dear," Dolores Stephens replied.

"Neil, are you still seeing that girl you brought up here in August?" his father asked.

"Who was that?" Neil wondered momentarily. "Oh, Gina. No, as a matter of fact, I'm not." It seemed the right time to ask about Maggie. "There is someone I've been seeing who's visiting her stepmother in Newport for a couple of weeks. Her name is Maggie Holloway; unfortunately she left New York before I got her phone number here."

"What's the stepmother's name?" his mother asked.

"I don't know her last name, but her first name is unusual. Finnuala. It's Celtic, I believe."

"That sounds familiar," Dolores Stephens said. "Does it to you, Robert?"

"I don't think so. No, that's a new one on me," he told her.

"Isn't it funny. I feel as though I've heard that name recently," Dolores said. "Oh, well, maybe it will come to me."

The phone rang. Dolores got up to answer it.

"Now no long conversations," Robert Stephens warned his wife. "We've got to leave in ten minutes."

The call, however, was for Robert. "It's Laura Arlington," Dolores Stephens said as she handed the portable phone to her husband. "She sounds terribly upset."

Robert Stephens listened for a minute before speaking, his voice consoling. "Laura, you're going to get yourself sick over this. My son, Neil, is in town. I've spoken to him about you, and he will go over everything with you in the morning. Now promise me you'll calm yourself down.

<HR>
</BLOCKQUOTE>


Before plunging back into Point of View, let me natter on a bit about Positional Chess Plotting.

What this means, to me, is that when I start a book I have a general idea of what I'd like to do with it (checkmate the other guy!), but I'm vague on the exact path that'll take me to that goal.

I know how I want the book to end, yet all the steps in between the start of chapter one and "The End" are as much a mystery to me as they are to my characters. The major characters are the pieces. The minor characters are the pawns.

I do know some things -- the size of the area I'm working in (be it a single room in a single night, or half a galaxy over a span of a millennium) -- and the characters I'll be playing with.

From experience, I know that it's best to get the characters out, early, moving. That they need to control the whole of the game board.

I know, from experience, where each kind of character is strongest. I try to put him there. It may not be obvious at the time why I'm moving a character to some location, but I know if he's there he can be active, and control part of the story.

I know to place my characters so that they guard and support each other. Then, later, when plot starts to twist, my characters are where they need to be. It's almost magical. This is how I arrive at the state where the book writes itself.

Then, as the story drives forward, suddenly the exact way in which I'll arrive at the conclusion becomes apparent, and it will be both surprising (because it's only now been revealed to the characters as it was only now revealed to the author) and at the same time inevitable, the "right" conclusion, since the characters had been heading to the places they needed to be since they were introduced.

This is a rather sloppy description of what I hope will become clear as you play through some chess games, noticing how the master moves, what he knows, what he doesn't know, and what he does because he knows it's the right move even though _why_ it's the right move isn't obvious to anyone at that time.

Let me give you the first three moves, with Chernev's commentary, from one of the games in Logical Chess Move By Move. This one is an example of King's Gambit Declined. White is Blackburne, Black is Blanchard, the game was played in London, 1891. Please follow this with a chessboard in front of you.

<blockquote>

1. P-K4

Values were constant in many fields of endeavor, at the time this game was played.

Stories began, "Once upon a time."

Tic-tac-toe players put a cross in the center square.

Checker masters started with 11-15.

Chess masters opened with 1. P-K4.

Despite the researches of the scientists, these remain good beginnings.

1. . . . P-K4

Black opens lines for two of his pieces and establishes equilibrium in the center.

2. P-KB4

An offer of a Pawn to induce Black to surrender the center.

Accepting the gift enables White to continue with 3. P-Q4, and dominate the center with his Pawns. In addition, the opening of the Bishop file will offer White the opportunity of directing his attack at the vulnerable point KB7. This is a tender spot whether Black's King stays at home or castles.

2. . . . B-B4

Probably the safest way to decline the gambit:
a) The Bishop bears down on the center and controls an excellent diagonal.
b) The Bishop supplements the Pawn's attack on Q5 and prevents White from moving his Pawn to Q4.
c) The Bishop's presence at B4, overlooking KKt8, forbids White from castling in a hurry.

3. Kt-QB3

White avoids 3. PxP, as the reply (coming like a shot, probably) Q-R5ch 4. P-Kt3 (even worse is 4. K-K2, QxKP mate), QxKPch wins a Rook for Black.

White's actual move is not as energetic as 3. Kt-KB3, but Blackburne was trying to lure his opponent into playing 3. . . . BxKt 4. RxB, Q-R5ch 5. P-Kt3, QxRP when 6. R-Kt2 followed by 7. PxP gives White a fine game.

3. . . . Kt-QB3

A simple retort to the dubious invitation.

Black continues mustering his forces out on the field of action. In the fight for control of the center, his Knight does its share by exerting pressure on the squares K4 and Q5.

</blockquote>

This is a short game, just 18 moves. Please play it out to its astounding conclusion. It perfectly illustrates my theory about positional play in plotting.

Sometimes I'll do things in my first drafts for no other reason than to have stuff to play with later on. I might put the hero, Dick Steeljaw, on the same train as the villain, Rotten Robert, and both of them carrying identical carpetbags.

If nothing comes of it by the end of the story, the carpetbags (and indeed the train trip) can be deleted in the next draft. But if some interaction follows, with surprising results, the effect can seem magical.

(A note on names. In first drafts I often name my characters for their functions in the plot. The hero's buddy may be named "Buddy," while a minor viewpoint character may be named "Walkon" or "Cannon Fodder." Global Search-and-Destroy with a wordprocessor makes giving them all reasonable names easy in a subsequent draft, and makes keeping them straight easy in an early draft.)

Back to POV.

Here's that scene from Moonlight Becomes You, this time from Dolores' POV:

<BLOCKQUOTE>
<HR>

At six-thirty, dressed for dinner, they sat on the back porch, sipping cocktails and looking out at Narragansett Bay.

"You look great, Mom," Neil said as he air-kissed her cheek.

"Your mother's always been a pretty woman, and all the tender loving care she's received from me over the last forty-three years has only enhanced her beauty," her husband said. "What are you two smiling at?" he added a moment later.

"You know full well I've also waited on you hand and foot, dear," Dolores Stephens replied.

"Neil, are you still seeing that girl you brought up here in August?" Robert asked.

"Who? Oh, Gina. No, as a matter of fact, I'm not. There is someone I've been seeing," he continued, "who's visiting her stepmother in Newport for a couple of weeks. The girl's name is Maggie Holloway; unfortunately she left New York before I got her phone number here."

"What's the stepmother's name?" Dolores asked.

"I don't know her last name, but her first name is unusual. Finnuala. It's Celtic, I believe."

"That sounds familiar," Dolores Stephens said slowly, searching her memory. Something she'd read in the paper a week or two ago niggled at her. "Does it to you, Robert?"

"I don't think so. No, that's a new one on me," he told her.

"Isn't it funny. I feel as though I've heard that name recently," Dolores continued. "Oh, well, maybe it will come to me."

The phone rang. Dolores picked up the portable.

"Now no long conversations," Robert Stephens said. "We've got to leave in ten minutes."

The call, however, wasn't for Dolores. She nearly didn't recognized Laura Arlinton. The woman was talking too fast, repeating, "Robert, please? Is Robert there?"

"It's Laura," Dolores Stephens said as she got up to hand the phone to her husband. "She sounds terribly upset."

Robert Stephens took the phone, "This is Mr. Stephens," he said. A long pause followed. Then: "Laura, you're going to get yourself sick over this. My son, Neil, is in town. I've spoken to him about you, and he will go over everything with you in the morning. Now promise me you'll calm yourself down.

<HR>
</BLOCKQUOTE>

The main emphasis has gone from the new girlfriend, Maggie, (in the Neil's POV version) to Laura and the phone call (in the Dolores POV version.)

In the original Omniscient 3rd POV, the reader is left off-balance. This might be a deliberate choice -- we're about half-way through the book, where the reader is meant to be off-balance. This is a thriller, a mystery, and a romance, all at once. We're transitioning from the opening to the middle. In the opening, the writer opens up possibilities. In the middle the themes are balanced, strengthened, and simplified. We're going to start radically cutting down on possible directions the plot could go.

To sound like a high school English class there would have to be lots and lots of nattering on about gerunds and past participles and such.

English is a frightfully difficult language. The grammar consists of exceptions papered over with idioms, the pronunciation makes you wish we'd just stuck to ideograms instead of pretending that we're in a phonetic system (The tough coughed as he ploughed the dough ... I ask you!), and depending on how you look at it English either has just two tenses, or thirty-three. The line between nouns and verbs is porous. English is graced with a vocabularly larger than that of the next two languages combined: As James Nichols put it, "We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and riffle their pockets for new vocabulary."

Speaking English badly is easy. Speaking it well ... brother, you have a lifetime's work cut out for you.

If you slept through high school English, now's the time to make up those classes. Get a study book, work through the exercises. At the same time, read lots of novels by acknowledged master stylists. Some of it will rub off.

Oh, yes, and Fowler's Modern English Usage Dictionary (get the 2nd edition -- do not get any of the abominable recent editions) is a wonder and a delight. Read it, learn it, love it, live it.

Any thoughts? (other than "that guy is just weird?")

You're just weird. Sorry about that.

Otherwise: Third Person Omniscient is easy to do badly. I think we've already mentioned that it can come between the reader and the story; an additional layer of filtering. It can also become the author showing off, and no one likes a show-off.

Third Person Omniscient is a POV that's often attempted by new writers, since it maps easily to the way they look at their own story. An author can look into anyone's head at any time he pleases. He can go anywhere, do anything.

This is why he shouldn't. Because if something is too easy, the reader can cease to care.

Suppose we're in Third Person Omniscient, and we're in a murder mystery. The reader can become annoyed with the author, because the author knows whodunnit, and isn't telling. Remember above when we said, "Don't annoy the reader, and particularly don't get him annoyed with the author"?

That is where the skill comes in. Using Third Omniscent means you're facing a curveball. Even the best batters can miss curveballs.

Didn't mean to sound like I was putting down HS English classes, they just always annoyed me because we went over the exact same things every year.

I'm not responding to you directly, EJ -- I'm just sayin'.

If you're capable of writing two consecutive pages of grammatical English prose with standard spelling, you're already in the top ten percent of the slush heap.

Writing isn't a lottery -- the talk about the "odds" is misleading -- it's a game of skill. If you write total trash, no matter how many manuscripts you send in you won't get picked. If you write Really Good Stuff, the only thing that'll keep it from being published is if you don't submit it.

The cop that is suspected of a crime and pursued by his own department.

He may not be in his "comfort zone," but he's been moved to where he is active, has choices, and can have others act upon him.

He's been moved off the back row.

It's not what's best for the piece, but is what is best for the game as a whole.

Sure, those sacrifices and combinations that get people to gasp when they see 'em, and have the little (!) annotation when the game is written down.

But the characters don't care about the game as a whole.

Nor do the characters care about the book as a whole. The author, on the other hand, does. Just as a chessmaster will move and perhaps sacrifice his pieces, an author will move and perhaps sacrifice his characters.

Rather than their strongest positions, how about putting the characters into their most interesting situations? This is "interesting" as in the curse, "May you live in interesting times."

It's entirely possible to change POV in the course of revision. If a story doesn't work as third person omniscient, rewrite it as first person and see if it's better. You can do versions in third person limited, then rewrite it as third person dramatic. You can rewrite scenes from one character's point of view, and if that doesn't work, rewrite from a different character's point of view.

For example, our first published short story, "Bad Blood," was written in first draft in third person omniscient, then rewritten in first person. That's the form it sold in. (To the very first market we sent it to, thankyouverymuch.)

If you change POV with every scene change, you can still be in third-person limited.

Right then, points of view:

First person. "I"

The narrator can be the main character, a major character who also observes the main character, or a minor character who serves only as a reporter.

The narrator may or may not be reliable. (The Murder of Roger Akroyd is a classic unreliable narrator.)

The narrator is limited to what that one person knows.

Can you have more than one first-person narrator? Sure. Frankenstein has three first-person narrators, in a nested story.

One thing you can do with first person is create dramatic irony -- the reader knows something that the character doesn't. (An excellent example of this: there's a military museum in Danbury, CT. They have a diorama there, showing off the M3 halftrack. The diorama shows a couple of soldiers, one on a halftrack, the other on foot, having a conversation. The caption on the base of this model is "Relax, buddy, the war's nearly over." The irony is this: they're next to a roadsign that reads Bastogne 25 Km.)

First person can create immediacy and realism. It can also fail by falling into a love-fest for the author.

====

Second person: You did this, then you do that. Seldom seen outside of "choose your own adventures." If you happen to be a master stylist with a genius for this sort of thing, go for it. Elsewise, try to stay out of second person.

====

Third person:

You have your choice here: you can do with third person omniscient (the narrator knows everything, can drop into anyone's thoughts), third person limited (the narrator can only listen in to one person's thoughts), or third person dramatic (the narrator is an audience at a play, and can't hear anyone's thoughts).

Third person dramatic is the fastest moving POV, and is really good for action scenes.

There's nothing that says you can't mix 'n match between scenes or between chapters.

I personally dislike the third person omniscent -- since it's easy to do badly. If you are using third omniscient, make sure that the smallest unit in any given person's head is the paragraph. Treat thoughts like dialog that way. And put up markers so the reader will know whose head you're in. Confusing the reader is a bad plan.

Stephen King's Christine goes from first to third then back to first. How successful that is, I don't know, but it's there.

Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamazov bounces all over the POV map. That may be an artifact of a particular translation, or maybe not.

<a href="http://www.literature.org/authors/dickens-charles/christmas-carol/chapter-01.html" target="_new">A Christmas Carol</a> (and it's seasonal, too!) is in third person omniscient, except when it's in third person limited (it's in Scrooge's POV during the visits of the ghosts).

Here we go from the narrator, into Scrooge's mind, then into Cratchett's mind, then back to the narrator:

<blockquote>
<hr>


He had so heated himself with rapid walking in the fog and frost, this nephew of Scrooge's, that he was all in a glow; his face was ruddy and handsome; his eyes sparkled, and his breath smoked again.

``Christmas a humbug, uncle!'' said Scrooge's nephew. ``You don't mean that, I am sure.''

``I do,'' said Scrooge. ``Merry Christmas! What right have you to be merry? what reason have you to be merry? You're poor enough.''

``Come, then,'' returned the nephew gaily. ``What right have you to be dismal? what reason have you to be morose? You're rich enough.''

Scrooge having no better answer ready on the spur of the moment, said, ``Bah!'' again; and followed it up with ``Humbug.''

``Don't be cross, uncle,'' said the nephew.

``What else can I be,'' returned the uncle, ``when I live in such a world of fools as this Merry Christmas! Out upon merry Christmas. What's Christmas time to you but a time for paying bills without money; a time for finding yourself a year older, but not an hour richer; a time for balancing your books and having every item in 'em through a round dozen of months presented dead against you? If I could work my will,'' said Scrooge indignantly, ``every idiot who goes about with ``Merry Christmas'' on his lips, should be boiled with his own pudding, and buried with a stake of holly through his heart. He should!''

``Uncle!'' pleaded the nephew.

``Nephew!'' returned the uncle, sternly, ``keep Christmas in your own way, and let me keep it in mine.''

``Keep it!'' repeated Scrooge's nephew. ``But you don't keep it.''

``Let me leave it alone, then,'' said Scrooge. ``Much good may it do you! Much good it has ever done you!''

``There are many things from which I might have derived good, by which I have not profited, I dare say,'' returned the nephew: ``Christmas among the rest. But I am sure I have always thought of Christmas time, when it has come round -- apart from the veneration due to its sacred name and origin, if anything belonging to it can be apart from that -- as a good time: a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time: the only time I know of, in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of people below them as if they really were fellow-passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys. And therefore, uncle, though it has never put a scrap of gold or silver in my pocket, I believe that it has done me good, and will do me good; and I say, God bless it!''

The clerk in the tank involuntarily applauded. Becoming immediately sensible of the impropriety, he poked the fire, and extinguished the last frail spark for ever.

``Let me hear another sound from you,'' said Scrooge, `` and you'll keep your Christmas by losing your situation. You're quite a powerful speaker, sir,'' he added, turning to his nephew. ``I wonder you don't go into Parliament.''

``Don't be angry, uncle. Come! Dine with us to-morrow.''

Scrooge said that he would see him -- yes, indeed he did. He went the whole length of the expression, and said that he would see him in that extremity first.


<hr>
</blockquote>

Having beaten POV into the ground (short, take-home lesson: chose the one that's best for your story) shall we turn to Slick Quick Tricks for Outlining?

Oh, and show of hands: how many of y'all did your two hours of writing today? How many of you have retyped the first chapter from your favorite novel?

I may be away for a few days, so I'll leave you with an aphorism:

Never explain anything to your readers before they care about it.

If your work is going to be published, the editor needs to work on it without distraction, and needs to be able to estimate the finished length of the piece as it'll be printed.

That's why courier ten is the preferred typeface (along with all the double-spaced lines and the one-inch margins).

Editors live by their eyes -- that's why sans-serif fonts are right out.

A <a href="http://scrivenerserror.blogspot.com/2003_12_01_scrivenerserror_archive.html#1070992140 06983999" target="_new">fine article</a> (and not merely because he quotes me).

Most of the examples usually given of sucessful self-publishing date from before WWII (when the whole face of publishing was very different), in the nineteenth century, or before.

Even then, most of the self-publishing apologists don't mention that Mark Twain went bankrupt self publishing, that Dickens lost money on A Christmas Carol, and that for every famous success there are thousands of others who sank without a trace.

Self-publishing these days works for: a) when the book will be sold face-to-face anyway (e.g. poetry anthologies sold by the poet at readings), or b) specialized non-fiction (town or regional histories; how-to books).

Yes, lightning may strike. No, it probably won't. Remember that in addition to writing a brilliant book, you need to be art director, designer, printer, salesforce, and warehouse. Those last things are non-trivial; professionals make money doing them all, and you'll be going head-to-head against professionals. Do you have the time and money? Will you break even? How big a gambler are you?

There' nothing wrong with self-publishing. I've done it myself. Sunset Creator, in other threads here, is doing it right now, and all I can do is cheer.

There is something wrong with vanity publishing. It's like self-publishing, only with an anchor tied to your leg.

More on other items as we go along. Lots of things have been brought up; I'll try to get to them all.

No, taxinomically, Dracula isn't a novel. It's a romance. A novel is a book-length work of realistic prose fiction. Dracula flunks the Realistic test.

(Other than that -- it was an epistolary romance. That is, it was presented as a set of letters, diary entries, and so on. It was also high-tech and up-to-the minute, set it its own present day -- parts of it were transcripts of that cutting edge technology, the dictaphone.)

Courier 10 and Courier 12 are equally acceptable.

(I thought I was going to be away -- turned out I wasn't.)

"a classmate who (i thought) wrote in a pedestrian way about boring topics. he really worked hard on his writing. kept at it. scott turow. the difference between inspiration and perspiration."

Way, way, way upstream I said something to the effect of "revise, revise, revise."

And rewrite.

Once you have the first draft, or a strong outline, anyway, you have the equivalent of a potter's ball of wet clay. Sure, there's a vase in there somewhere, but all you have at first is the clay.

I'll get practical about how to outline, and how to revise (at least a scheme that works for me), but first, before anything else, you have to have the raw material.

A story in your head doesn't count. What counts is what's on paper. Yeah, it's going to be dreadful. That's okay, I give you permission to be dreadful. The revision process will take care of the dread.

I'll write more on outlining and the shape of a plot in a bit (have to shovel the $#&^@ driveway first).

The quick answer on outline/plot generation/novel-writing software is that every kind I've tried has gotten between me and the story. The only "writing software" I use is a wordprocessor.

Two things that do prove useful (which I've used, at least) are a deck of file cards (sixty-nine cents for a hundred at the grocery store) and flowcharts (written on the back of a Chinese restaurant placemat is a good place to do 'em: about the right size, and hot-and-sour soup helps clarify the mind).

More anon.


Right, then.

The first thing about plotting is this: the reader's interest is always either rising or falling. It never stays at a constant level.

You want the reader's interest to rise over the general length of your book, peaking at the climax. Therefore, your book should start at a fairly low level -- just sufficient for reader to pick it up, and turn the page.

Each individual chapter will rise in interest, to its end. (You may also consider the cliffhanger in this context -- it at once provides closure for the current chapter, and provides a reason for the reader to start the next chapter (to find out what happened next), even though the next chapter starts at a lower level of interest.)

The next chapter will start at a slightly lower level of interest than the preceeding chapter's close, but rise to a higher level at its end than the end of the previous chapter.

You do not want to have your biggest, bestest, most special scene as your opening. The remainder of the book will be an anticlimax. Your strongest scene goes at the end of the book. Your second strongest goes at the half-way point. Your third strongest goes at the 3/4 point.

The source of information in the book and the source of interest should be the same things.

Your readers can only think of one thing at a time (the poor dears). It is vital that you don't confuse them.

Your first scene, your first page, your first paragraph: a) seizes attention, and b) starts with a low level of interest. This seems contradictory, but... remember what you are doing to your readers. You are creating an auto-hypnotic suggestible state in them, in which the page opens up and pictures and sounds show in their heads. This state is fragile, and must be rebuilt constantly.

On confusing the reader: If you have confused the reader, he will stop reading, or will not understand the next thing that happens in your book. Therefore... you must be clear enough so that the slowest reader in your proposed audience (recall that you cast your audience as one of the characters in your book) will be able to follow it, while at the same time having enough going on that the quicker readers won't become bored.

So:

Basic structure of your book:

1. Catch the reader's attention. Do this on page one. There are cheap ways of doing this: Sex and violence come at once to mind. The danger of using cheap tricks is a) you may come to rely on cheap tricks, and thus become a cheap author, and b) the reader may say "That's a cheap trick," and put your book back on the shelf." The game is to a) get the reader to pick up this book from the shelf and take it to the cash register, and b) have the same reader go to the bookstore specifically to buy your next book. Your page one gives you goal (a), the rest of the book gives you goal (b).

2. The introduction. The remainder of chapter one, tells the reader what sort of book he's in ... a cosy mystery, a sex-and-shopping romance, a gothic thriller, a literary exploration of angst ... whatever. This is where you introduce yourself to the readers, and get them to become the audience you want them to be. Are you the detached observer? The helpful lecturer? The comedian? Are they the crowd at a NASCAR track or the crowd at the Pimlico? Interest begins here. Ideally interest starts on page one, near the top, but it's permissible for interest to show up on page one near the bottom. This is chapter one's purpose.

3. You get your theme rolling. The theme will run throughout the book, but you state it here, at the beginning. Recall that I've said that every word must advance the plot, reveal character, or support the theme? Now is the time to state the theme. The Seven Deadly Sins and the Seven Splendid Virtues are great themes, and just about simple enough. Theme is both simple, and necessary. If the plot is the engine pulling the train, theme is the track that the plot runs on. You can't get theme going too soon. You can also be fairly bald in stating your theme.

4. The plot starts. Life continues; it's been going on for a while in all your characters, and will presumably continue (except for the ones who die in the course of your book) for some time afterward. But plot, that great literary convention, starts now. Imagine a firedoor in a theatre. Your main character steps through that firedoor, the wind blows it closed behind him. Now he has to do new and different things. Status quo is no longer available.

<blockquote>
A word on "plot" right now. Plot is merely a set of consequentially related events. Of which the word "consequential" is the important one. "The king died, then the queen died" is not a plot. "The king died, then the queen died of a broken heart" is a plot.
</blockquote>

5. The setup. We're in the early chapters now, and we're giving the readers the preliminary sets of tools and information. The setup may be quite long ... Moby-Dick is around 400 pages of setup, followed by 50 pages of action.

6. Tell your readers what to expect. Readers hate surprises. Bring in the detective, tell the readers that he will solve the crime. Whatever. Just make sure it's clear what's going to happen by the end of the book, and have this out there by the middle of the book at the latest.

7. Now comes the action, the running of your plot. In most books this is the longest, most complicated part of the story.

8. The climax. This is what you've been aiming for; it rewards the readers for staying with you the whole time. You can get quite complex here, with multiple can-you-top-this? climaxes, reverses, twists, and anything that your devious little heart can devise.

9. The bowknot. Tie off all the loose ends. This is the very last chapter, it tells the readers "the story's over, folks!" so they won't turn the last page and wonder why there's no printing on it. This is brief.

That should give you the overall shape of your book, seen from a distance. I see them as actual physical shapes and spaces. How you see them may differ, but the whole of it will be there... though you may not know all the details until the second or third drafts.

[MacAllister]

James D. Macdonald
From "Learn Writing With Uncle Jim"
Absolute Write Water Cooler
Novel Writing forum

Now ... on using filecards.

Take a stack of filecards. Number them (I use upper left-hand corner) 1, 2, 3, ... and so on. These are chapters. They're major divisions. They're scenes. They're whatever you want them to be. You may have only two at first, 1 and 2, the opening scene and the climatic scene, only a sentence on each. It's okay, doesn't matter.

You can ignore dialog at this point. You can ignore setting. Now, between these cards, put other cards, numbered 1.1, 1.2, ... 3.1, 3.2, 3.3 ... 57.1... 62.19. You put intervening scenes on these. Things that must happen after one event but before another.

Between 3.2 and 3.3, if you think of something that has to go there, put 3.2.1, 3.2.2 ... and so on. To any level you want.

You are answering questions here: What happens next, and what does the reader need to know so he won't be confused?

Never tell the reader anything before he cares!

Too much outlining will take the fun out of the writing. After you're happy with the overall shape of your plot, that you've got the characters entering, doing things, and leaving, now's the time to type up a strong outline.

A strong outline will be dozens (if not scores) of pages long, and will resemble you telling a friend about a book that you read. You'll include the major scenes, and sparkling bits of description, you'll start to fill in dialog.

From this, write your novel.

After the writing of the novel, comes the revision. This is the smoothing, the sanding, the staining, the waxing, and the polishing of this thing you've sculpted.

Here you do the Agricultural Work. If you have something in your climax, you need to make sure it was properly planted in the beginning. If you have something in the begining that didn't sprout by the end, you need to root it out.

If, at any point you become stuck on what to do next, remember this motto: "Listen! I'm going to tell you something cool!"

I believe I've heard the bit about "And now, I'm going to tell you something really cool" attributed to Steven Brust, who attributed it to Gene Wolfe.

That's Brust I'm quoting.

(I have a little Emma Frost the White Queen action figure on my desk, with a little comic balloon above her head that says "Write your book... NOW!")

More on "interest level" later. I may be using a personal shorthand here -- "interest" and "attention" are different things. I'll expand on this.

Also, I don't have a Grand Theory of Everything worked out. My writing this series of posts is helping me clarify how I think about these things.

Interest takes many forms.

Tension. Plot development. Conversation. Logic problems.

People's minds wander. You have to substitute in various forms of interest to keep that interest growing.

Recall that this series of posts is on writing, not on analysing or criticizing someone else's book.

Yes, the critics will try to figure out your theme. They may be right, they may be wrong. However, you, the author, will be right whenever you state what the theme of your book is because you are the author. When you are revising, you will know what to strengthen, what to cut, and what to leave alone based on how relevant it is to the theme.

Take, for example, our own book (I can speak authoratively on this, being the author) The Price of the Stars.

The theme, stated explicitly in the <a href="http://www.sff.net/people/doylemacdonald/POTSEXPT.HTM" target="_new">prologue</a>, is "Family Matters," or "Blood is thicker than water," with a strong undercurrent of "Planned Revenge."

(If I were writing the book today, I'd have folded the Prologue into Chapter One, since I've learned that many (most?) readers skip prologues.)

A term y'all may not know is quadrigia. That's a four-horse chariot, with the horses all side by side. If any of the horses is stronger, or faster, or slower, than the others, the chariot won't run straight. It takes a skillful charioteer to drive one.

"Quadrigia" was also a medieval term for a theory of sermon construction. The four horses of this quadrigia were the literal, allegorical, moral and spiritual (or mystical) senses. The sermon had to function on all four of those levels, simultaneously, and equally. If any one were faster, slower, stronger, or weaker, the sermon would run off-course.

I'm a believer in hidden structures. You can do worse than to have your novel function on those four levels, simultaneously. Remember, to stand out from the slush, your novel has to have more, and be better, than 98% of the other manuscripts that are piled on the editor's desk. Adding levels of meaning, layers of discourse, a structure, will make your novel stand out.

Writing is a skill. It is an art. Some people can do it unconsiously, but I can't. I'm the calculating, analytical kind of author. So far it's stood me in good stead.

(The book we're quoting from here was continuosly in print for a decade.)

Here's the first page:

<blockquote>
[i]

On the naming of names, and finding my own meaning.

Nothing happens by accident in a book. The author chooses each word, each image.

Let me explain what the words mean in the brief excerpt above:

First, night. This is the dark night of the soul, the time when the powers of evil are exaulted.

Now... Waycross. On the allegorical level, this book is a refutation of the Manichean heresy. Yes, this is a Christian book. Wanna make something out of it? The name is all the clue you need: Waycross is the Way of the Cross. That's my spiritual level.

Innish-Kyl is taken from an Irish song, the Inniskillen Dragoons:

A handsome young maiden of fame and renown,
A gentleman's daughter of Monihan town,
As she rode by the barracks, this beautiful maid,
She stood in her coach to see dragoons on parade.

<Blockquote>
Fare thee well, Inniskillen, fare thee well for a while
All thy bright borders of Erin's green isle
When the wars they are over we'll return in full bloom
And you'll all welcome home the Inniskillen Dragoons.
</blockquote>

Do I expect the readers to know this? Of course not. It's sufficient that I know it. It'll be a structure for me. (We'll return to this location "when the wars are over," and the main character is a "maiden of fame and renown.")

Beka is Rebecca, a Biblical character. Rosselin is Rosslyn Chapel. Metadi is a contraction of Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin.

These provide meaning for me. If there is meaning for the author, the reader will know that meaning exists.

Claw Hard means to struggle.

Cashel and Raffa sound like cash and raffish, temptation and frivolity that have been left behind.

Thus I define my book, and so start in. The rest of the scene is from the standard furniture of science fiction, subgenre space opera.

"i see your main distinction ... plausibility ... but isn't it just that, if one is willing to suspend disbelief for a second, that makes Drac such a great book?"

Not plausibility, but realism. All fiction needs to be plausible, lest the read say "Oh, come on!" and throw the book against the wall. (That's another reason why you can't use real life straight in fiction. Real life doesn't have to make sense ... fiction does.)

"hey, what's your opinion on character profiles? once again, i can't write without them. what info do you put in yours? and do you use one for minor characters as well as major ones?"

Age, description, eye color, and any details that I learn about the character in the course of writing the book.

Yes, I do them for minor characters as well. This is because the minor character doesn't know he's minor. To the minor character, the story is about him, and he's the good guy.

(Y'all know what a hero is, right? It's someone who's made the "hero's journey." That is, someone who has gone to the realm of the dead and returned. See Odysseus for example. While the term has expanded to mean protagonist, consider making it literally true that your hero has gone on that journey. (You can do this in symbolic terms.) This will resonate with your readers who are, after all, the products of thousands of years of western culture, whether they know it or not.)




When I was in high school, there were times when we had to do essays and we had to turn in an outline. I'd always write the essay first, then the outline.

This can work, too, for your full-length fiction, as a tool for finding plot-arcs that don't go anywhere, loose ends, not-fully-justified actions, and other plot-related bobbles.




"every time I go for the novel, which is what I've always wanted most, I get stuck after a few pages."

I give you permission to write scenes out of order. Later on, you can move 'em around with your wordprocessor. (In the old days, authors would literally cut-and-paste whole chunks of prose. It got messy.)

I also give you permission to write badly. So long as your fingers are moving on the keys, you can write utter tripe. It's okay. You're going to revise it anyway, right?

What I don't give you permission to do is not write. When the Muse comes to your house, she expects to find you sitting in your chair in front of your typewriter. If you aren't there, she'll just go on to the next author on her list, rather than go looking for you.

Make time, every day, and during that time be at your keyboard. There is no substitute for the BIC (Butt In Chair) method.

I work with the current version in hardcopy, and the hardcopy version is the official one.

My wordprocessor allows me to sort files by date, so I know which is the most recent one I've fooled with.

<hr>

Another note on fonts -- for reading copies, sometimes I'll print out the novel in some font and size that I'm not used to -- Times New Roman double column justified singlespace, for example, to get a look at the text with a fresh eye.

Are prologues death to an unpublished writer? No. Bad writing is death to an unpublished writer.

You merely have to remember that many of your readers are going to skip the prologue and go straight to chapter one.

If your prologue, or prelude, is vital to the story, call it Chapter One, and have Chapter Two start fifty years later.

Regardless of your decision, the first page of your prologue, prelude, or first chapter has to reward the reader enough to lead him/her to turn the page with rising interest. Even if they're just following along out of idle curiosity, at least they're following.

<HR>

A note on editors. Editors are not the enemy. What they are is readers' advocates. Think of them as a class of super-readers. Evading the editors is tantamount to evading your readers; a foolish course to take.

The great mass of readers out there in bookstores and libraries are relying on editors to do two things: a) guarantee that someone other than the author's mom liked the book, and b) the book was fully formed and polished before it arrived on the shelves.

Just as no one reader will like every kind of book, editors are not a monolithic block. You have to find the fit between your work and the right editor. This can be frustrating; the frustration level can come down a bit by choosing your markets carefully. (I've seen astounding things in the slush heaps at major publishers, things that made you wonder, "Hmmm.... is this guy going through Writers' Market alphabetically and it was just our turn?" because he should know that a house that publishes adult novels isn't going to be looking for a children's spelling book.) Send your stories to places likely to buy them! (Yes, it does pay you to read books that come out from a publisher you're considering.)

(Another note: a cover letter won't sell your novel, but it can certainly sink your novel. A cover letter that contains the words, "I think you'll find my book far better than the kind of trash you usually print" isn't going to make you any friends.)

(A personal note here: When I read slush, I take the cover letter and put it on the bottom of the stack of paper, unread. I don't want to go in prejudiced in any way. If I'm still reading at the point where I hit the cover letter, then I read it, and pass the story up the line.)

(Later, I'll give you an example of A Perfect Cover Letter.)

<hr>

Take home lesson: Editors are readers. They are your audience. Anything I say about readers, you can substitute the word "editor." Anything I say about editors, you can substitute the word "reader."




If the characters involved in the prologue aren't dealt with until far later in the series, maybe this is the first chapter from a different book. Try this: Drop the prologue, and see if any of your beta readers say "Hmmm... seems like there's something missing."

On the series: write each book as if it were the only book you'll ever write, as if the others don't exist and never will. Sure, they can all be part of a bigger universe, but give each book a beginning, a middle, and an end that's all its own, and is fully satisfying.

These are things I've learned by experience, by getting it wrong and learning better.




I have the early part of the tiger book in very rough draft. It has some literary and perhaps commercial merit. I need an honest beta-reader.

No, qatz, at this point you don't need a beta reader. At this point you need a finished draft.

Don't wear out your beta readers. They are gold. Give them the best, most polished version you can.

I mentioned, briefly, using a flowchart. I didn't go into it in great detail, but I think it might be a direction you might explore. Here's an <a href="http://www.cpuinc.net/~rcjhicks/" target="_new">example</a> of a flowchart on a written source. See also <a href="http://www.technologyevaluation.com/request/main_edge.asp" target="_new">http://www.technologyevaluation.com/request/main_edge.asp</a> for a freebie.

I promised you The Perfect Cover Letter:

<blockquote>
Salvatore Luchese
Cell Block B
2nd Tier, #34
Ft. Leavenworth Federal Prison
Ft. Leavenworth, KS 66027

(913) 123-4567


Dear [NAMEOFEDITORSPELLEDRIGHT],

Enclosed please find the first three chapters and an outline for my 120,000 word mystery novel, Mafia Wedding.

My previous works include "Pushing Up Daisys" (Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, June 2001, nominated for an Edgar, 2002), and "Sleeps with the Fishes," (Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, September, 2002, reprinted in Year's Best Mystery Stories, 2002, Graham, ed., March 2003).

I am currently serving seven-to-ten for racketeering in Ft. Leavenworth Federal Prison.

This is a disposable manuscript.

Sincerely,

Salvatore "Sally the Writer" Luchese

encl: SASE
</blockquote>

<hR>

Notes:

First NAME OF EDITOR SPELLED RIGHT. (If you can't do this, perhaps you need a new hobby.)

Second: Very briefly: length, genre, and title.

Third: Any pertinent credits. Only the most recent and most prestigious. A good sale ten years ago means that you haven't sold anything since. A bunch of 1/4 cent-a-word recently means that you aren't selling. Don't even bother mentioning self-published or e-publications unless you sold enough on your own to hit the Times Bestseller List. If all you have is one or two lower-tier mags, and they're recent, then you might list them. If you've got eight or ten lower-tier mags and they stretch back over three or four years ... better to leave the impression that you're unpublished rather than brand the Scarlet L of Loser on your forehead.

Fourth: Any special qualifications you may have for writing this book.

Fifth: Any other notes (disposable manuscript).

Your name.

INCLUDE AN SASE.

The primary purpose of a cover letter is to give the editor something with your name, address, and phone number on it that will fit in a file cabinet. The secondary purpose is to give the editor somewhere to put her coffee cup without putting a brown ring on your manuscript.

Be brief, be professional, and SPELL THE EDITOR'S NAME RIGHT.




Make sure all the major plot threads you have in this book get tied up in this book (or at least come to a satisfying stopping point).

Other than that, if there's too much plot in your book your editor will tell you.

Too much plot and too many neat things happening are not a problem.




"I have a question. How much is too much?"

It's too much when you've allowed the outline to suck up the joy of writing the novel.

It's too much when you substitute writing the outline for writing the novel.

Outlining does not count against your two hours a day. You must do two hours of writing in addition to any time you spend outlining.

For the query letter (I'm talking about fiction here -- non-fiction is a whole nother area) substitute the words "May I send you" for "Enclosed please find."

If you have no prior publishing credits just omit the paragraph beginning "My previous published works include...." Silence is golden.

Remember that the work stands on its own. The reader in the bookstore won't see your brilliant letter. All that counts is the book.

Do not obsess over cover letters.

Hey, qatz -- best of the season to you, too.

Writing is a performing art. We're part of the entertainment industry. As such -- the audience doesn't give us an "A" for effort. They're out there ready to throw rotten tomatoes, no matter if our heart is in the right place.

This is a demanding art; it's difficult. I won't fib to you. If writing were easy, everyone would be doing it.

<HR>

Now, y'all know that as artists we're parasites, right? If there weren't a real world where would we be? We live in the real world without contributing to it. And what we do, when times are hard, folks can do without better than they can do without food and fuel.

Now, about parasitism: y'all know what a "parasite" is, right? It's a Greek word, meaning "beside the food." Originally parasites were poets who would crash rich guys' parties, and eat all they could, and provide entertainment with their poetry and songs and witty conversation. Until they were thrown out.

So now we all know where we stand in the Great World, right?

<hr>
Merry Christmas, happy holidays, to all.

Another thought on parasitism in art: We feed off reality. Without reality there could be no art. Therefore it behooves us to be experts on reality.

Until we've become masters of this world we won't be able to make worlds of our own.

More on Realism later.

I have ripped out anything that could remotely resemble the run of the mill stock fantasy world.

I recommend you pick up a copy of The Tough Guide to Fantasyland by Dianne Wynne Jones. Travel any distance, pay any price, to get a copy. It's got all the cliches, arranged in alphabetical order. It's also hilarious, especially if you've read entirely too many fantasy novels.

Some day when I make my living writing, I will definitely consider working within guidelines that incorporate some of your rules Jim.

Many years ago, when I was first becoming a professional writer, I had a day job. And people would say to me (word was out that I was writing), "I've always wanted to write a book, but I never had the time." And I'd think "You son of a [bleep!]. I set my alarm clock two hours early to make time to write."

For your plot problems: Put interesting people in interesting places, and things will happen. That's the Positional Chess theory of writing. You may not be the sort of writer for whom an outline is useful/necessary. The first goal is to get words on paper. The second goal is to revise the heck out of 'em.

Your readers have six senses. So should your characters!

"I'm not so sure when I do violence how credible it is ..."

First: become a keen observer of the world.

Second: Ask yourself if the violence advances the plot, reveals character, or supports theme. If it does none of those things then it doesn't belong in your book. If it does any of those things, the barest sketch will allow your readers to fill in the parts that they find necessary for their own reading experience, drawn from their own needs and memories.


You are providing folks with a blueprint for a story that they are building for themselves.




Today I found myself reading a bit of slush. Here's some advice I want to pass along:

* Spelling counts.
* Agreement of number is important.
* Keep the tense consistent.
* You're allowed to have more than one sentence per paragraph. In fact, you're encouraged to do so.
* Dialog is one of your basic tools. Learn how to use quote marks.
* Don't make your readers guess about the antecedents of your pronouns.
* You've heard of Point of View? Pick one. Then use it.
* Not all nouns need adjectives; not all verbs need adverbs.
* Assigning emotions to inanimate objects is called the Pathetic Fallacy. First, because it's a fallacy. Second, because it's pathetic.

* SHOW, DON'T TELL!




"Does anyone really submit stories like those?"

As I keep telling people, "If you can write two consecutive pages of grammatical English with all the words spelled right, you're already in the top ten percent of the slush pile."

Short answer: Yes, they do.

Even shorter answer: Arrrrgh!

Notice: Publishing isn't a lottery. Yes, major publishers get thousands of manuscripts. The way they select their manuscripts for publication isn't by going into the Slush Room and pulling out three at random then sending the rest back. This is a game of skill, not a game of luck. If you send in a good (or at least competent) manuscript, odds are good that you'll get published. If you send in bad manuscripts, you won't get published no matter how many times you submit.

Now ... if in addition to having the bare bones mechanics of English prose down pat you can tell a story ... you're in the top two percent of the slush heap where the sales come from.

Trust me on this: I promise you that publishers do not have rejection slips that say "Sorry! Too well-written and original for us!" no matter how many times you hear unpublished writers say that their manuscripts were rejected for having exactly those two qualities.

The mass of unpublishable slush is:

a) Badly written,
b) Trite,
or
c) Badly written and trite.

<HR>

Addendum: For Shawn. Sure, use the list. If even one writer Takes the F'ing Hint it'll be worth it.

Next bizarre bit of writing advice:

Memorize this speech. Be able to recite it any time, anywhere, no matter what you're doing. (There will be a quiz.) Practice frequently, and aloud.

I promise you that your writing will improve if you have this bit by heart:

<blockquote>
<hr>

For God's sake, let us sit upon the ground
And tell sad stories of the death of kings;
How some have been deposed; some slain in war,
Some haunted by the ghosts they have deposed;
Some poison'd by their wives: some sleeping kill'd;
All murder'd: for within the hollow crown
That rounds the mortal temples of a king
Keeps Death his court and there the antic sits,
Scoffing his state and grinning at his pomp,
Allowing him a breath, a little scene,
To monarchize, be fear'd and kill with looks,
Infusing him with self and vain conceit,
As if this flesh which walls about our life,
Were brass impregnable, and humour'd thus
Comes at the last and with a little pin
Bores through his castle wall, and farewell king!
Cover your heads and mock not flesh and blood
With solemn reverence: throw away respect,
Tradition, form and ceremonious duty,
For you have but mistook me all this while:
I live with bread like you, feel want,
Taste grief, need friends: subjected thus,
How can you say to me, I am a king?

<HR>
</Blockquote>

That's from Richard II, Act 3, scene ii, by William Shakespeare

" For what it's worth, I've never found "advance planning" necessary for scenes that include sex or violence."

Fascinating!

How do you decide where they'll go in your story, and what they'll accomplish in your plot?

"But if I lose my spark and interest, so does the writing."

Oh, absolutely. The readers can always tell when the writer is bored, too.

I never said (or at least, I hope I didn't) that this is the only way to write. All I can promise is that those who are following along will learn how I write, which may or may not be useful to them.

I have lots of little idiosyncracies; for example, I dislike the word cluster "and then." "And" means two events happened at the same time, "then" means they happened sequentially. "And then" means ... what? I'll change that group to "and" or "then."

As those who've been reading along know, I'm a very heavy outliner. My outlines are perhaps 3/4 the length of the finished novel. (They're very rough, they tell rather than show, they sketch out people, places, and dialog, they have things like "An exciting battle scene goes here" or "Time to tie up the Second Girlfriend Plot-thread" -- they're darn-near unreadable by anyone but me and my coauthor.) Bits of business are only suggested, and frequently change many times before the first draft. But that's just me.

Every writer has his or her own way of writing, and the more honestly and accurately he or she presents it the weirder it sounds.

Then is an adverb. In "Joe walked to the door, then turned," then modifies turned.

"She typed 'Chapter One,' then stared out the window," is perfectly grammatical; then modifies stared.


"She brushed her teeth, later took a shower," is ungrammatical since it leaves out the word "she." "She brushed her teeth, later she took a shower," while hardly graceful, is grammatically correct.

Right. Better would be "She brushed her teeth; later she took a shower."

A comma splice is infinitely preferable to "and then."

Not to be unpleasant about it, Reph, but you're wrong.

If I draw a single line through the word "and" every time I see "and then," the sentences work better. Every time.

Unless the actions are happening simultaneously -- then I draw the line through "then." That too improves the sentence.

The word cluster "and then" is meaningless. It's an oxymoron. There's no excuse for using it.

Yes, you'll find "and then" in some of our published works. These were added by copyeditors who were, universally, wrong.

"...of a particular friend when Jim made his dictum about the Pathetic Fallacy... "

If you'd read the piece of slush I'd read just before I typed that, you'd have said the same thing.

In your friend's case, assigning emotions to inanimate objects is part of her character and upbringing. Further, it's happening in dialog, not in narration.

You'll notice that I'm not saying that outlines are everything, Note On. I've also mentioned how a book is like a chess game. Later on I'm going to tell folks how a short story is like a lime pie. And how a novel is like a house. How it's like the bottom of a stream. How it's like a box. How it's like a vase.

Don't get hung up on outlines. I use 'em, sometimes, for the things that outlines are good for. Other times I use positional play. When I think about a novel in progress, I see it as a shape, with volume, angles, corners and edges.

I also have a hole open up in the screen, with pictures behind it that I describe. I guess I'm in an alpha state then.

Sometimes I turn off the monitor and type, because the shapes of the words are a distraction from the writing.

All I can do to teach how to write is use analogies. Writing is the thing itself. That's why I've been stressing the BIC method.

As writers we are are defined by the act of writing. Thinking about writing, planning to write, researching, outlining, revising ... those things are not writing. Only writing is writing.

I recognize that "and then" may be an idiomatic expression, and thus acceptable in dialog.

(Unlike "over and out" in radio comms, which is never acceptable anywhere.)

Reph, early on, back at the beginning of this thread, I quoted McIntyre's Law: "Under the right circumstances, anything I tell you may be wrong." I also said that my mutant talent was making my opinions sound like facts.

If your writer's ear tells you to use "and then," you're perfectly free to do so.




Yeah, BIC is Butt In Chair.




It is not oxymoronic; it is redundant, at least as normally used.

qatz, I'm sorry, but I cannot bring myself to agree.

That particular word group is oxymoronic because it says that two events happened simultaneously, and that they happened in sequence.

This is trivial. I don't want to get sidetracked on it. I offered it as an example of one of my idiosyncracies, and you know what? It is one of my idiosyncracies. Call it religious on my part, if you like, to get an idea of how I feel on this question.

Another of my idiosyncracies is that I believe that grey and gray are two different colors, and that the words are pronounced differently. I once used the sentence "The clouds went from gray to grey as the sun rose behind them," and knew exactly what I meant.

I hope this doesn't get us into a huge debate about spelling and whatnot.

For another example of my mountain-sized ego: I've been known to write corrections into dictionaries.

As to grammar: Correct grammar is what native speakers of a language agree is correct grammar.

Further on grammar: A writer can indicate a great deal about a character by using particular grammatical habits in that character's dialog.

Further on that dialog: This requires that we be observant of the world around us, of the people in it, and the ways in which they talk.

Further further on dialog: Book dialog is to the spoken dialog of humans in their natural habitat as a stage whisper is to an actual whisper. Dialog as it is written in a novel is a literary convention.

Experiment: Tape-record an actual conversation. Transcribe it. Notice how much hesitation there is, how many sentence fragments you find, how wasteful and redundant (or elided and obscure) it is, and what infelicitious phrasing the natural stuff has. As novelists, our job is to write book-dialog that gives the impression of natural dialog.

[END YEAR ONE]

01Jan04--Here's to a happy, healthy, and productive new year.

[MacAllister]

James D. Macdonald
Learn Writing With Uncle Jim
January 2004 posts

"And?" is correct. "And then?" isn't.

Here's the recipe for the best lime pie in the world:

Pie Shell:

Whites of 3 large fresh eggs, at room temperature
1/4 teaspoon cream of tartar
1/8 teaspoon salt
3/4 cup sugar

Heat oven to 300 F. Lightly grease a 9" pie plate.

Beat egg whites in a medium bowl on medium speed until frothy.

Add cream of tartar and salt and beat on high speed until soft peaks form when beaters are lifted.

Beat in 1/4 cup of the sugar, 1 tablespoon at a time, until blended.

With mixer on low speed, sprinkle on remaining sugar and beat until blended.

Spread meringue over bottom and sides of prepared dish.

Bake until lightly browned, about 45 minutes.

Cool in dish on wire rack.

Pie filling:

6 egg yolks, slightly beaten
1/3 cup lime juice
2 and 1/2 Tablespoons grated lime rind
1 cup granulated sugar
1/4 teaspoon salt
2 Tablespoons cold water
6 egg whites
1/8 teaspoon baking powder
1/4 cup granulated sugar

Beat egg yolks until thick and lemon-colored.

Add lime juice, rind, sugar, and salt, then beat mixture until throughly blended.

Cook this mixture in a double-boiler until very thick, stirring constantly.

Now add the cold water to the egg whites and beat until stiff but not dry.

Combine baking powder and remaining 1/4 cup sugar and add to beaten egg white mixture. Beat until stiff.

Fold hot lime mixture into half the egg white meringue; fill pre-baked pieshell.

Cover with remaining meringue.

Sprinkle lightly with sugar and bake 15 minutes in a moderately slow oven (325 F) or until meringue is delicately brown.

Serve cold.

<hr>

This, O dearly beloved, is a short story.

<hr>

You craft it as carefully as you can, using all your experience and skill. You use the finest ingredients, all in just proportion. At the end it looks perfect to your eye. You cool it for a day; you bring it forth to serve to your guests. But you don't know, not until you take the first slice, whether the inside jelled or if you have some runny lime-flavored egg soup.

At that point you can't go back and remake the pie. Either it works or it doesn't.

Your guests may exclaim over how good it tastes, but they won't look forward to pie next time they come to your house.

True, you can guarantee your results a bit by using potato starch or gelatin. Neither of those produces the texture and mouth-feel that you want. Practice will help, as you learn by experience what thick, very thick, soft peaks, and "but not dry" mean. Yet you'll never be sure, until you take that first slice in front of your guests, that it really worked.

In the same way, a short story either works or it doesn't. Once prepared, using all your skill, you can't go back and revise it into something that isn't lime-flavored runny glop.

Nothing at all will help if your guests don't like lime pie to start with. Some may even be allergic to eggs, or have ethical or moral issues with egg use.

<hr>

A novel is different. A novel is a wooden crate. If the crate doesn't work, you can take the boards, rearrange them, and try again. You can fill the old nail holes with Plastic Wood. You can go get more wood at the lumber yard to replace a board that isn't working out, or to fill an opening that you didn't intend. Once it's all banged into shape, then you can sand it, stain it, varnish it, put on brass handles and corners, and hang a pretty padlock from the hasp.

People who take your crate can put any number of things into it, and if some of them don't use the crate for storage, they might use it as a coffee table or a place to put a nice lamp.

Novels you can revise. First make the shape, then smooth and refine, then show to your friends.

More on this anon.

All that you can do with a failed short story is write a new short story. The new story will be a completely new one, for all that it may resemble the other (both are made of limes and eggs and sugar).

With a failed crate, you can still take it apart and reassemble it into a new crate, and most of the lumber will be the same physical lumber (though the new crate may not resemble the old crate at all, except in its crateness).

----------

If Our Lord Himself couldn't explain the Kingdom of Heaven except by parables, how am I, a mere man, to explain writing?

(Matthew 13 xxiv-xxxiii, if you're interested.)

A short story is a single joke. A novel is a comedy routine.

There was a lumber camp far up in the hills in Vermont. All winter long the lumberjacks would cut trees, then in the spring drive them down the rivers to the sawmills in the towns below the notches.

One day a stranger came to one particular camp, and was invited in to share the men's evening meal. The air was warm inside, filled with the smells of delicious food and strong coffee. And as the evening progressed, one of the men shouted out "Fifty-seven!" and everyone laughed.

Then another man shouted out, "Twenty-two!" to great laughter and applause, another shouted "One hundred sixty-eight!" and everyone laughed even harder.

The stranger turned to the man seated beside him and asked, "What's going on? Why are the men laughing at those numbers?"

"We've all been up here so long," replied the lumberjack, "that we've all heard each others' jokes. So to save time, we gave them all numbers. Instead of telling the joke, we just say the number."

At that moment, someone shouted out "Two hundred eighty-nine!" and everyone laughed harder than ever. Men were slapping their thighs; tears were streaming down their faces.

"What happened?" asked the stranger.

"Oh," said the lumberjack, "That was a new one."

"Gee," said the stranger, "Can I try?"

"Sure."

The stranger stood up and shouted "Ninety-one!"

Silence. Everyone just looked at him.

The stranger's face turned red, he sat back down, and turned to his companion. "What happened?" he asked. "Why didn't anyone laugh?"

"It's okay," said the lumberjack. "Some people just can't tell jokes."

Any analogy can be pressed too far.

Part of learning how to make this pie is learning what "until very thick" means. If it happens you get it wrong, you try again. The pie you have then isn't the same as the one that didn't work ... because this time you stirred until very thick.

A short story is all of one piece.

A novel is many pieces.

Gracious. Of course <a href="http://www.sff.net/people/doylemacdonald/stories.htm" target="_new">my opinion is my opinion</a>. What else could it be?

No one said to rewrite after an editor rejects a story. The only time you rewrite after you've decided that it's finished and it's time to start sending it around is when an editor opens his checkbook and says "I'll buy this if you make the following changes..." Otherwise once a story's done, it's done.

A story that only needed to have 500-600 words removed from its beginning (and that's closer to two or three pages than one) is one that worked pretty well. Starting a story too early is a common fault. One that lacks a conclusion, that's tougher to fix. Finding the proper conclusion is part of the art here; a perfect conclusion is one that is at once surprising and inevitable. (See notes above on what a "surprise" is.)

Yes, stories that don't work are catastrophes. Either the entire thing works or it doesn't.


"...be ready to cut or change anything, but don't throw out a single word carelessly, and only revise what feels wrong to you," is basically sound advice. Once you've done that ... if the story doesn't work put it in your desk drawer and write a different story.

(Here's some practical advice for the Stir Until Thickened part of the process: Don't use the cut-and-paste function of your wordprocessor at all. Retype the entire thing from hardcopy, making changes as you go. You'll find yourself dropping paragraphs that aren't worth the trouble of retyping, and you'll find yourself adding dialog and description that was missing. Better, smoother ways of phrasing things will occur to you.)

"Is that a genuine recipe? Have you made it yourself?"

Yes, it's a genuine recipe. An old family recipe, in fact. (And I have friends who Really Love it.)

I also feel, making that pie, the way I feel when writing a short story. Whether this means I'm nuts in the head I leave to others.

Perhaps it is a koan.

"Writing a short story is like making a lime pie," the Master said.

The Disciple asked, "How is making a lime pie like writing a short story? It makes no sense!"

"You are quite right," the Master replied. "It makes no sense."

Is there a FAQ or a set of guidelines somewhere?

Yes, real early on: Anything you say must be true, and anything you say must be helpful.

Another quick one: is there any problem with using "now" to refer to a past-tense action? "I now sat at the table", for instance? I've been avoiding this one on the assumption that it was an oxymoron, but substituting "then" doesn't always sound as good.

How does ""I now sat at the table" differ from "I sat at the table"?

If' you're using that as dialog, and trying to differentiate how your different characters speak, perhaps show something about their social class, level of education, or native region, I don't see anything wrong with either phrasing.

Perhaps if we could see that sentence used in a paragraph?

Words are given meaning by the words around them.

"'What a day!' I thought. I was right. It had been quite a day. It all started with the Grand Wizard of Schnorkle...

...and there were a great many things I had done that day, yadda yadda shish bam boom.

NOW I sat at the table. A fly was on the wall. It made me hungry."

Two thoughts came instantly to my mind: Did the readers really need the recap; and was it the fly, the wall, or table that made the narrator hungry?

Try this: Read the passage aloud without "now," then with it. Which sounds better to you?

Within that passage we have (a) an "and then", (b) a "superfluous" now (or is it? What do you think, Jim?), and (c) a shift from the future to the present tense with no warning or explanation.

I think this is thought, or interior dialog. Much is allowed in dialog. Is the narrator revealing character? I suspect he may be.

What's with the leading periods?

I also ask, how fast is the plot moving at this point? Plain, or even clumsy writing will be overlooked if the story is strong and the plot is moving.

(I blush to admit that I haven't read this particular book.)

General principle: You can do anything, anything at all, in dialog.

I quit my day job around fifteen years ago.

Here's what I wish someone had told me before I did so:

First, make sure you have a year's supply of writing contracts to work on.

Second, make sure you have a year's supply of money to live on.

Third, pay down all your credit cards to zero then cancel them.

Fourth, be prepared to white-knuckle your way through life.

Yes, I think I would have listened. Quitting your day job isn't some wild, crazy thing to do on a whim, and it isn't something so compelling that you can't do otherwise. It's a decision to make, with full facts available, and with all sorts of opinions from people who've been down the road ahead of you to look at and evaluate for your own situation.

... if the narrator is *also* a character, a lot of the narration can also be "dialogue."

That's your basic First Person POV. [note--code error on this page to fix later 04jan04 10:34am]

... is called an ellipsis. (If you have more than one, they're ellipses.)

An ellipsis means that one or more words has been left out. You see those a lot in blurb quotes from reviews.

You can use an ellipsis to show a pause in dialog.

"What you must understand," George began," is that Frieda ... has not always been truthful."

(What I'm trying to show there is George pausing to think of how best to say that Frieda lies like a rug.)

You can use them at the end of a sentence to show the words trailing off (in that case you have four dots in a row, one of them being the period).

"The old farm," Joe said. "That would mean Bill and Freida...."

(Joe's voice trails off, as the horrid realization blooms in his mind.)

As long as you're consistent, use of ellipses is part of your style. Do try to keep the stage directions to a minimum, though.

Lots of your fonts have ellipsis characters [&hellip;]. Don't use 'em in your manuscript. Use three periods in a row to represent ellipses.

What's with the pulsing "EZ" graphic that suddenly showed up on some (but not all) topics on the board?

It indicates a 'hot topic'.

Oh, okay. Never noticed before. What are the criteria, I wonder?

==========

ObOnTopic: I always spell out "okay" rather than use the letters "OK."

Are you allowed in the "learn writing without uncle Jim" thread?

I suppose technically I am, but I doubt it would be polite for me to post there.

Are you really an uncle?

Yes, and so is my brother.

What was impolite was to say "Reph, you're wrong."

I've gone back to edit that to read "Reph, I am unable to bring myself to agree."

It's been the holidays (kids home from school) and a serious deadline (19 January).

I'll continue with Things About Writing pretty soon.

I need to go back through the back posts to see what things I've promised that I haven't talked about.

Hi, Evan --

I'll be away from on-line for two or three days.

Go ahead, post anything you like. But...

Please include a link to this discussion, and to our homepage.

If the guidelines don't specify what the editor or agent wants, write a letter (self-addressed stamped envelope included) asking if they'd like to see a synopsis, three-and-an-outline, or full text of your 100,000 word mystery/adventure story.

The most important thing is that you spell the editor's name right. The next most important thing is that you include that SASE.

If nothing is specified, I would go with a one-sentence length-and-genre description of the book.

That's a good question, sugarmuffin, and one that doesn't have a simple answer.

But that's not going to stop me from trying to give you a simple answer anyway.

At first, the protagonist only needs enough of a goal to get the reader to follow along. This can be a small goal, easily accomplished. It can, for example, be our hero's attempt to get a ham sandwich.

Later on, the larger goals will appear. The character may not know what they are for dozens or hundreds of pages. Some of the goals may not be apparent until the reader has finished the book and is sitting there thinking about it. Some goals along the way may be false goals.

Nevertheless, the character needs to be doing something other than wandering aimlessly at the beginning, lest the readrer only follow along out of idle curiosity.

This isn't to say that you aren't going to be foreshadowing that big, main goal in that first chapter. Foreshadowing is part of what makes the ending you select seem so very right for your book.

The trick to foreshadowing is to put it in during the second draft, when you know how everything is going to turn out.

Thanks for the response.

The funny thing is, so far in the first couple of pages-- which I'm not sure I'll keep -- he is actually stopping at a deli to get a cheese sandwich!

I think I mentioned this in my first post, but I have been trying to do this for a long time; been to a number of writing workshops over the years in the Boston area where I live, even one in Italy. Have a writer's mind, but I realize that I really need structure. Hearing Uncle Jim say what a first chapter should include was like an aha for me, simple as it sounds. I've written lots of bits and pieces of things, have been a paid writer and written a few technical manuals, managed other folks writing technical stuff, but the novel has eluded me.

So thanks for sharing your brainstuff and experience here, Jim, it has given me some inspiration.

Lisa

And thanks too Eric. Did you really go to that colony?

Hi, AsianJournals.

The funny thing about the Grammar Wars is this:

Grammar isn't really that important.

Once you've gotten up to a workmanlike level, when you're not actively bad, it doesn't matter all that much. If you get one of those PSAT prep books or programs, and you get to the point where you are aceing the grammar section, you're good enough.

You can get farther with excellent grammar and a plot than you can with excellent grammar alone.

Story will get you through times with no style better than style will get you through times with no story.

Your publisher will hire people with excellent grammar to fix yours, provided you've written a compelling story. Your publisher hired you to provide that story.

The Infamous Lime Pie Recipe was back on page 19 of this thread. I promised "More on this anon," but never got to the "anon" part.

Here's more:

The pie tastes just the same, but it looks a lot better, if you make swirls and peaks on the top layer of meringue.

And:

Viewed objectively, all you really have is a very fancy plate of scrambled eggs.


I trust I don't need to explain those two metaphors as they relate to writing your stories?

========

Show of hands: How many have done their two hours today? How many have finished a book and want to revise it?

That flesh is heir to.

Shall we talk, briefly, about some of the horrible things that go wrong in a writer's life? Sure, why not. Many people won't talk about them, but let's be honest: this isn't an easy job.


First off, you can take this as true. It's easier to sell a first book than a third.

With a first book, anything can happen. It could take off and be a wild best seller. It could become a quiet back-list perennial. It could find its niche. It could develop a fan base. Anything.

Another plus for the first-time novelist: the editor doesn't have to offer a big advance. A couple thousand bucks, the book's his.

The book goes out. It sells some number of copies. This is great. Maybe it earns out, maybe it doesn't. That doesn't matter much; publishers can make profits even on books that don't earn out.

Then you turn in your second book. It too hits the stands. Now here's the problem. Your second book must do better than your first book. A rising career is good. A falling career ... isn't.

Lots of readers will give a new author a chance. Fewer readers will give an author a second chance. If someone read your book and didn't like it, the odds are they won't buy your next book, even if it's radically better. (You wanted reasons why you shouldn't publish a book that isn't quite ready? That's reason #1398.) Word of mouth can be negative, too.

So, if you're on a declining curve, that third book is going to be a really tough sell. Especially since, as a third-time author you should expect your advances to be rising.

At that point it'll be time to change publishers, and possibly to go to a pseudonym.

Right, you think that's grim? Try the Death Spiral.

The Death Spiral works like this: The big chains (and if you aren't in the big chains you aren't in the game) have this trick called Ordering To Net. That is, however many copies of a book Author A sold last time, that's how many copies of his next book they're going to order this time.

Say Fred Goodguy writes a novel, a mystery called Up Your Nose With A Rubber Hose. They print 10,000 copies, and he has a sell-through of 80%. (80% sell-through is pretty good.) That is, of those 10,000 copies, 8,000 sold.

Now Fred's new book comes out, Down Your Throat With A Motorboat. The chains saw that 8,000 copies sold last time, so they order 8,000 copies. Again, Fred has an 80% sell-through, and 6,400 sell. Fred's third book, In Your Eye With an Apple Pie gets 6,400 pre-orders, that's how many are printed, and sells 5,120. Now the big chains are only willing to preorder 5,120 copies of Fred's next proposed book, Up Your *** With Broken Glass, so his publisher declines to exercise their option on it, and Fred's left without a career.

What can Fred do? Go to another publisher and start all over again, under the name Joe Nicefella, with The Broken Glass Affair. Fred 's fans will be wondering why Joe isn't writing any more, while others will think that Fred is just a cheap Fred imitator. And, Fred will get a first-time author's advance at his new publisher. But, on the other hand, he'll get a first printing of 10,000, and the bookstores will preorder them, in hopes that this new author will turn out to be a best seller.

[Note: if your publisher likes you, you may get a name-change and stay where you are: and the name change doesn't have to be big, just big enough to fool the major chain stores' computers. Adding a middle initial to your name has been known to work. Or, printing on the cover By Fred Goodguy Writing as Joe Nicefella.]

These thing may not happen to you. But they can, and there are writers that they have happened to. Just be prepared.

What other bad things can happen?

Your editor bought your book because she believes in it. She's presented it to the other editors and the publisher, she's been shepherding it through production... then she gets hired by another company. What happens to your book?

It's an orphan, that's what. No one to speak for it at the publisher's. No one to boost it to the sales force. It goes to the desk of some other editor who already has a full allotment of books on his desk, and who doesn't love your book as much as the original editor did. He loves his own books better. The editing it gets is more of a lick-and-a-promise than the full deal it needs and deserves.

Bad things happen. Everything is done, but it's at the minimum level. No one, particularly not the author, is happy when the book comes out.

Other bad things? Shall we talk about basket accounting?

That's where you sign a contract for a number of books, but the royalties don't start until they all earn out. If one of them is wildly popular, but another doesn't sell for beans, the popular one doesn't start putting money in your pocket until after it's paid off the dead dog's advance too.

There's more, there's worse -- the bad copyedit. Some copyeditors think that what you really wanted was a co-author.

Then there's the way books have the shelf life of yogurt. They go out, they're on the shelves, and if the readers don't pick up on 'em right away, off the shelves they come to make way for next month's books. There's a sad thing.

The natural state of a book is Out of Print.

But I'll end this story with hope, just like Pandora's box had hope in it.

There's an easy cure to the Off The Shelves in a Month problem. You want your books on the shelves for years, and you don't have what it takes to be a bestseller? (And what that takes is both to write a good book and be lucky.)

Here's how to get your book back on the shelf: Write a second book. When it's published, your publisher will rerelease and resolicit your first book at the same time as your second book. They know that having two different books by the same author shelved side by side will make the public more willing to buy either book than they would one title alone. The bookstores know this too. They're more willing to shelve three copies each of Up Your Nose with a Rubber Hose and In Your Eye with an Apple Pie than they would be to shelve six copies of either one.

That's the secret of bookstore placement, increasing sales, and a happy career: write another book.

Since you started writing another book the minute you finished your last one, there you are.


Shall we mention bad contracts?

I think we shall.

Bad contracts aren't limited to the sleazy side of the street; you can find bad contracts and bad contract clauses right in the penthouse suites of publishing.

Two of the clauses most strewn with landmines are the option clause and the indemnity clause, but don't think because I've not mentioned them that other clauses, or even entire contracts, aren't writer-unfriendly.

Here's where having a canny agent is worth your while. I recall one place that sent out a standard contract to everyone -- with all the really horrid clauses on the last page. Savvy agents (and savvy writers) knew to just throw alway the last page and sign the next-to-last page. Newbies would find themselves ... in less happy circumstances.

Beware: The lawyer you pick out of your phonebook to look over a contract, unless he specializes in publishing, doesn't have a clue where the landmines are.

Nor will I attempt to list them here. Too many varients. Just because I don't mention something doesn't mean it isn't out there.

Shall we mention publishers who pay on acceptance, publishers who pay on publication, and publishers who pay on threat of lawsuit? (If you hang out in the bar with other writers, they'll tell you. They might not put it in writing -- sleazy publishers can be vindictive.)

Yeah, and slow payment? Advances are often divided into three parts: One on signing, one on acceptance, and one on publication. (Varients abound.)

That "on signing" payment can stretch out, so you may find that you can write a novel faster than a publisher can write a check, with the other payments ... sometime.


Here's a word of advice. Never start writing a book that you've sold on proposal until after you've signed the contract, and never turn in the manuscript until after the on-signing payment clears.

More later, perhaps on cheerier things.

Self knowledge, anyone?

Writing is a great way to get to know yourself. You've written something. You've come to The End.

Hurrah!

Now, it's time to Read What You Wrote, not what you think you wrote.

Here's something for y'all to read while I think about what direction to go with this.

<a href="http://www.sff.net/people/roger.allen/essays/mistakes.htm" target="_new">http://www.sff.net/people/roger.allen/essays/mistakes.htm</a>

[MacAllister]

James D. Macdonald
Learn Writing With Uncle Jim
February 2004


When someone says something better than I can, I'm not shy about pointing others to those places.

So:

You want to know about slush?

<a href="http://scrivenerserror.blogspot.com/2004_02_01_scrivenerserror_archive.html#1075737301 99787039" target="_new">Scrivener's Error</a>

<a href="http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/004641.html#004641" target="_new">Making Light</a>

<a href="http://www.salon.com/books/feature/2002/02/25/slush/" target="_new">Confessions of a Slush Reader</a>

<a href="http://www.sfwa.org/writing/myrtle2.htm" target="_new">Myrtle the Manuscript</a>

Yeah, yeah, I know; I recommended Myrtle the Manuscript before, but that was a lot of posts ago and not everyone has been reading from day one.

Yes, you did ask about Slick Tricks for Outlining.

I'm trying to figure out if you mean an outline to write a book from, or an outline to send to a publisher.

I'm also re-reading the earlier posts in this thread to see what I've already talked about, and what I promised to talk about later.

I also have a whole 'nother tangent to go off on, about modelwork.

Dialog, yes.

Really quickly, my opinion on accents -- dialect, we call it -- is that less is more.

Once spelling out dialect was common and accepted. Take a look at Kipling's Captains Courageous for example. That's also an example of how the use of dialect can fail. Kipling spoke with a strong British accent himself, and his dialect is based on his own pronunciations. If you happen to know what a Gloucester fisherman's speech sounds like you can derive Kipling's accent from his dialog. (If you try to read his dialog with an American accent, the result is totally weird.)

Nowadays use of dialect has fallen out of favor. You can get by with using a light hand -- having one character say "Sugah," for example, would probably be okay -- but try to get the feel of a dialect with word-choice and sentence rhythm. People from various parts of the country use different words for the same things: frying pan, fry pan, griddle, spider; brook, creek, stream; paper bag, paper sack. A person from one part of the South might habitually say "ink pen" rather than "pen" to mean a writing implement, since to him "pen" and "pin" have the same sound.

Here's where your reading of books being published today will pay off, and here's where having a group of beta readers who are brutally honest with their opinions is worth gold.

As with the rest of commercial writing, the master question is: Does it work? You can get away with anything if it works. Who tells you if it works? Your readers. How do they tell you? With the sound of rapidly turning pages.

Congrats, Tamara!

(Where I've been the last couple of ... days? Yesterday morning I was a guest instructor at the US Coast Guard Academy in the morning, and at two classes at UConn in the afternoon. Before that, I'd spent the weekend in Boston (fans! editors! expense-account dinners! alcohol!) doing professional things.)

Okay, brags and boasts aside....

Shall we talk briefly about the Mid-Book?

That's the dreadful, long, trudgingly weary part of the novel that comes between the opening and the climax.

You have to have this part of the book for several reasons. First, you want to have your novel be novel-length, right? The mid-book keeps the covers from getting too close together. Second, the climax of a novel is bigger and more complex (and operates on more levels) than the climax of a short story. Setting up a climax like that takes time and verbiage. The mid-book is where it happens. Third, the experience of a novel involves getting to know the characters. Your readers can't do that without spending time with those characters.

Still, the mid-book is hard to write, at least for me. The joyful exhilaration of the opening is gone. The slam-bang heady excitement of the climax is yet to come. Here in the mid-book the climax seems far away; all that the mid-book promises is a day of writing, followed by another day, then another... stretching out to the end of time. Crossing an endless plain under the hot sun could hardly be more tedious.

If you're going to give up on your novel now is the time when you'll do it. Joy has leached from the world, all is dust and ashes, the words that formerly had come running gladly to do your command now sit about sullenly pretending you aren't there.

The freedom of the opening is gone. Those choices you made in the first half-dozen chapters are now handcuffs restricting your possible courses of action. You don't see how you're ever going to get to a conclusion, let alone a satisfactory conclusion.

I've used the chessgame analogy before, and I'm going to use it again. The mid-book is the mid-game. You're setting up the checkmate, but it's still anyone's game, and a more confusing time for the player (that's you, author) would be hard to imagine.

Someone else said that a basic plot goes like this:

1) Get the hero up a tree
2) Throw rocks at him
3) Get him out of the tree.

We're at the rock-throwing stage.

Well, this is good to know. If you can't think of anything else, do something nasty to your hero.

How to get out of this quagmire for good? Remember this: A novel isn't just a short story with more words. A novel has layers and levels of meaning, and the mid-book is where they go.

Now you do the variations on your theme. You do counterpoints. You do mirror-images. If your theme is Honor, now you show Disgrace.

Who does these things? Your minor characters! Each with his own story-arc, each with his own climax, all the while you're building toward your main story's main climax.

I wish I could draw you a picture, show the interlacing arcs of story, each moving the plot forward, each developing theme, each revealing character, all coming to minor (yet ever increasing and more-rewarding) conclusions. Perhaps I'll try, later on.

It is a thing of beauty. (Or will be, after revision.)

<hr>

Uh Oh ... a Pitfall.

How many of you have programmed in BASIC? You remember the <a href="http://www.oopic.com/do.htm" target="_new">Do Loop</a>?

90 LET X=1
100 DO WHILE X<=10
110 LPRINT "STUFF HAPPENS!"
120 X=X+1
130 LOOP

Do not make the middle of your book a Literary Do Loop. That just fills pages with prose without getting anything accomplished. Recall that your goal is to write The Very Best Book You Can. That is, Way Better Than Anything Else Now Being Written. (Aim high, guys.) Wheel spinning will only gain you readers who throw your book against the wall.

The mid-book will still be horror compounded to get across, but, day by day, you'll get through it, until one morning your hero will make a bold stroke, everything that your subconscious put in place will aid him, and you'll realize that you're in the Climax. Hurrah!

That, O my friends, is the mid-book.

So i've finished my first attempt at a novel. NOW WHAT!?

Revise the heck out of it.

Or, by "finished" do you mean "I already read it out loud. I already put it in my desk drawer for three months, then re-read it with my red pencil in hand. I've already sent it out to my beta-readers, and took their suggestions to heart. I already reprinted it using a different typeface and margins, so I could read it with a fresh eye. Now what?"

Now... send it out 'til Hell won't have it.

Go to your local bookstore. Find books on the shelf that are similar to yours. Note down their publishers. Write to those publishers to get their guidelines. Follow those guidelines to the letter.

At the same time, make a list of the agents who you would most like to represent you. ("Because he advertised in Writer's Digest is not a reason why you want someone to represent you!)

Proceed on a two-front approach. Try to get an agent, and try to get published, simultaneously.

Yes, it's easier to get an agent if you've sold a book, but it isn't impossible. Yes, it's easier to sell a book if you've got an agent, but it isn't impossible.

Be aware that you're playing in the big leagues now. No one is going to cut you any slack because you're a first-timer. The readers in the bookstores certainly won't. But ... if you've got a fair handle on English Prose, and if you have a strong story that you tell convincingly, you will be published. Maybe not at the first, or the second, or the third place you send the book ... but it'll happen.

And ... maybe not this book.

As soon as you drop the manuscript into the mail, as it goes off to its first publisher and its first prospective agent ... go back home, put your butt in your chair, and Start Your Next Novel.

Manuscripts are never so much finished as escaped. If you're still in the daily polish routine ... if you're making substantial changes, and they're improvements ... it isn't time to lay it by, not just yet.

If you're taking out a comma in the morning and putting it back in the afternoon, it's time to go to your beta readers.

Do try reading it aloud, and do try reading it reformatted.

Starting your next book now wouldn't be a bad idea. Writing one while revising the last is one way that keeps my batteries fresh. It might work for you.

Here's an article about aiming high.

Yes.

I've heard of the cover letter that came with one piece of slush: "I think you'll find the enclosed manuscript a cut above the kind of crap you usually publish."

This impressed the editors no end.

Jeff ...

I have a climax in mind when I start. (The climax is usually in the form of a startling visual.)

More than once I've reached a different climax. Heck, there's one climax I've been using for years, but never getting to it.

So.

What you do with your story: Find the right climax for it. How the heck do I do that, I can hear you ask.

One way: Hold your story in your mind as you're drifting off to sleep tonight. Tomorrow morning, write a whole new ending for your story.

(How long a story is this?)

If your last line is the weakest one in the story, cut it. If the last page is weak, cut it. Maybe you've overshot your conclusion?

Put the story aside. Read it again in a few months.

Ask your beta readers for their opinions.

Write a new story, then come back to this one.

Place this story aside, then rewrite it from memory.

Many are the things you can do to fix this story.

The best fix might be: Consider the writing of it as experience. Write a new story, this time with a strong climax. The climax is where you reward the reader for believing your tissue of lies.

Woo-whee, abdel411!

Those aren't simple, easy questions, and there isn't a simple explanation. Lots of different cases, lots of variables, lots of outcomes.

Here, though, are some very simple ones:
The length is whatever length is the best one for your story (you'll learn this through experience).
Who you send it to is someone who is likely to buy it (you'll learn this through research).
Average pay approaches zero (more experience).


Your local bookstore and library are full of book-length works explaining all these things. Check 'em out. Meanwhile, here's a good collection of articles: <a href="http://www.sfwa.org/writing/" target="_new">Read 'em and digest.</a>

Now some general words of advice: First write your book. Thinking about writing isn't writing. Talking about writing isn't writing. Only writing is writing. Write with all the power and passion and skill that you have. Get to The End. Revise the snot out of your book. Then send it on its way to paying markets.

Submitting your work isn't writing either; now it's time to start writing a new book.

Don't ever pay to get published.

Hapi,

The mid-book is "where the exciting action and the exciting combinations occur" (as I said way upstream and <a href="http://boingboing.net/2004_02_01_archive.html#107716444588285115" target="_new">Boing-Boing</a> blogged).

What I'm trying to say here is that the mid-book is (for me) the toughest part to write -- when the horizon recedes by one step for every step I take forward -- and seems to me to be the part of the book when most writers embarking on a first novel quit.

I've tried very formalist outlines (based on visual designs), and I've tried winging it to get through the mid-book. (The mid-book is lots longer than one-third of the book. It's the part that isn't the opening and isn't the climax.)

What I've found is that the stronger your opening, the better you've put interesting people in interesting places, the more easily you can answer the question "What the heck do I do now?"

For this reason openings are hard.

Mid-books allow you to do themes and counterthemes, and sudden shifts ... but that's because you're trying to set up the climax and illuminate it. Novels aren't just Very Long Short Stories. They are a knot where a short story is a string. They are a comedy routine where a short story is a joke.

I'm going to have to do a picture of a plot. I just know it.

1. What are the steps to get them published?

Type them double-spaced on one side of the page ... and submit them with a self-addressed stamped envelope. Same guidelines for manuscript preparation and submission as for any story. (Getting US stamps might be a problem -- International Reply Coupons is the standard answer, but I'm not certain how to work 'em from Russia.)

2. How much should I expect to get for a short story, say 15 pages? Do they pay for word/page/story?

Most magazines pay by the word. 15 pages * 250 words/page * $0.04/word = $150.00. Therefore ... you should concentrate on the best-paying markets. But that's good advice for everyone. Generally speaking, the number of readers you'll have is directly proportional to the size of your advance.

3. Who publishes SF short stories in the US? SF magazines?

Many anthologies and magazines publish SF short stories. Fantasy & Science Fiction, Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction and Analog are three of the best-known/highest paying magazines.

4. Should I take some specific steps for copyright issues? I don't know how US law works in this respect.

Generally speaking, copyright exists from the moment the work first is fixed in tangible form (that is, when it's reduced to writing from an idea in your mind). Copyright registration is generally done by the publisher who buys your works.

Now some more general advice: If you're doing your own translations, makes sure a native speaker of American English is among your beta-readers.

(Note: A beta-reader is one of your friends who is willing to read a draft of your story and make brutally frank, honest comments on it. When you find such a person, honor him.)

check www.ralan.com for a list of professional and semi-professional SF & Fantasy magazines

Another useful index can be found at <a href="http://www.marketlist.com/proindex.asp" target="_new">Marketlist.com</a>

Hiya, TroutWaxer! Pull up a chair, have a beer. Everyone's welcome.

For a really long gap of time, a chapter break is usually appropriate.

<blockquote>
<HR>

.... "Here's to success!" Margrave said, raising his glass.

"Sucess!" Wulfram echoed. The wine tasted bitter on his lips.


CHAPTER THIRTY TWO

What with this and that some five years had passed before Margrave saw Wulfram again....

<HR>
</BLOCKQUOTE>

Something else to ask is, "Why the long gap in time or jump in location? Wasn't a minor character doing anything in that time? Wasn't a major character having an adventure that would shed illumination on an important point in the approaching climax?"

Only show the important parts, yes. But ... have you explored every meaning of the word "important"?

Hey to Envygreen, too!

I don't mind free publicity one little bit. (One note: I'm James D. Macdonald. John D. McDonald is a) A better writer than me, and b) Dead.)

I hope you enjoy The Sun, the Moon, and the Stars.

I didn't mention Writer's Market (and Literary Marketplace)? O dear, I have been remiss! Both excellent sources for markets.

Yes, as soon as your story is done, you send it. But "done" means "fully revised." Don't send out first drafts!

Here's another rule: Never practice in public.
(and yeah, Never let a manuscript sleep over).


To me, Mainstream is a work of realistic fiction set in current times. A Literary work concentrates on prose style above realism.

But that's just me.

Really, what we're talking about are marketing categories. That's a mark on the spine that the publisher puts there to tell the bookstores where to shelve the books, so that people who are looking for a particular kind of book can find it easily.

There are four genres: Prose, Rhetoric, Drama, and Poetry. Everything else is a quibble on how to sell the product for money.


Six weeks between finishing a first draft and starting revisions is entirely reasonable. That gives you time for the book to go through the "How did I write this garbage? If anyone sees this they'll know I'm a fraud" stage without your having to look at it.

[MacAllister]

James D. Macdonald

Writing With Uncle Jim

AbsoluteWrite Water Cooler



March 2004



Hapi, all that fits under the general rubric of "playing positional chess."

That's putting interesting things into the first draft, that may or may not play out. In the second draft, I take out the stuff that was planted that didn't turn out to be useful (provide a fun combination, a surprise, or move things along in general).

So ... two groups wiring the same ship, at different places. One for a good reason, one for a not-so-good reason.

Neither goes off.

Though ... if I'd needed to, I'd be set to blow up the ship as part of the climax.

I don't keep a formal list of Fun Things taped to my desk. I just put Fun Things directly into the manuscript as I think of them.

From the <a href="http://pub43.ezboard.com/fabsolutewritefrm3.showMessageRange?topicID=412.to pic&start=21&stop=32" target="_new">Hello</a> thread.

<hr>

I had was,Is It (always,sometimes,never..) necessary to make sure that the reader is forewarned(per sey),that a certain charter has the propensity to do what he may end up doing?? Say,becoming the bad guy,when not expected too ??

Readers love to be surprised, but they hate surprises. This is contradictory, but it is true.

Recall <a href="http://users.telerama.com/~joseph/cooper/cooper.html" target="_new">Mark Twain's rules</a> for romantic fiction, particularly "They require that the characters in a tale shall be so clearly defined that the reader can tell beforehand what each will do in a given emergency."

So, you play fair with your readers. You foreshadow all the way through (this foreshaddowing can be symbolic). You don't have your characters break character. The goal is to have your readers say "I never saw that coming," and "That's so right!" simultaneously.

This is art. You do this in the second draft, if pointing up the things that need pointing, using what you now know.

May I recommend a couple of films to you, both of which include a character suddenly and unexpectedly shooting another, yet as you look back on 'em, both well foreshadowed? (Film is a different art form from the novel so lessons from one are not universally applicable to the other, yet both share the drive of narrative....)

Minority Report

L.A. Confidential


Oh, and how about directly telling the audience what's to come? As we all know, the end of Carrie has the town of Chamberlain, Maine, engulfed in blood and fire with hundreds dead. That ending is directly mentioned on ... page five (Signet paperback edition, 1975). Carrie's telekinetic power is mentioned on page one.

Discussion question for the group: While Carrie is the title character, the protagonist is Sue Snell. Support or oppose; be specific, support your opinion with quotes.

Foreshadowing can be as subtle as the weather, colors, or the sounds of words.

Right on.

Plunge ahead to "The End." Even if what you're putting on the page at the time is absolute crap. I give you permission to write badly. You're going to revise anyway, right?

I've found some of my best stuff was writing that I thought was crap at the time I put it down. And some of what I thought was my best turned out to be crap when the re-reading and rewriting stage came. It's a wash.

But it ain't nothin' if you don't have three-hundred-odd pages to play with, capisce?

The second mistake that writers make (after Not Writing the Darned Book To Start With) is to only write one book. Look, the first may not be very good. It may be good but not very marketable. So.... the day you send the first one out to the first publisher, that day you start your next book.

Entirely too many people write just one book, then spend the rest of their lives trying to find a publisher for what may be a fatally flawed manuscript.

1) Books are never really done. They escape.

2) Your beta readers may tell you.

3) Even after laying it aside for a month and re-reading it, you can't see anything substantial that needs fixing.

4) You're tired of it. What the heck, send it out.

"Could you detail how you move your own characters or how I could kick-start my outlining process?"

Tell me, Stefpub, have you run through the example games in Logical Chess Move by Move yet?

Paragraphs ....

The easiest ones are in dialog. Every time a new person speaks, a new paragraph starts.

Else ... every time a new thought starts, a new paragraph starts.

Paragraphs are organized units of meaning.

I think I talked about paragraphs in one of the opening pages of this thread....

First ... Fame!

This thread is mentioned here: <a href="http://www.sillybean.net/archives//001460.html" target="_new">Writing and Publishing 101</a> (Excellent list of links.)

We've been <a href="http://boingboing.net/2004_02_01_archive.html#107716444588285115" target="_new">Boing-Boinged</a>!

<hr>

Now, another useful link: Gene Wolfe's <a href="http://subnet.pinder.net/onwriting/index.asp?name=./References/19970101wolfe.htm" target="_new">rules for writers</a>. (Mr. Wolfe, aside from his virtues as a writer, is best known as the inventor of the Pringle potato chip.)

<hr>

To other topics:

A hero, to my mind, is someone in your story who has died and returned from the land of the dead. This may be partly or entirely symbolic.

A protagonist, to my mind, is the person driving the plot, the one whose action or inaction causes the larger action of the book.

<hr>

How to get characters in motion, how to move them to useful positions:

This is easy: Get them moving! Get your pieces off the back rank. You will learn through experience that the best place for a knight is KB3 or QB3. While gaining that experience, just move them. You'll see what works and what doesn't.

Here's another hint: Put your characters through one-way doors. When you've moved a pawn you can't move it back.

And one more hint: If the positions of all the pieces and pawns repeats thrice the game ends. In a stalemate. Do different stuff.

And recall that all the maneuvering, all the knight-forks, all the pins, have one goal: Checkmate the other king. If you don't have the climax, you don't have diddly.

<hr>

Now paragraphing: There can be disagreements between authors on breaking the same text into paragraphs. There frequently are disagreements between authors and copyeditors on paragraphing.

Paragraphing can be for rhythm as well as for pure grammar. You are the artist. You are conveying thoughts. How you convey thoughts is part of your artistry.

<hr>

Last: The best way to learn to write a novel is by writing a novel. Has everyone done their two hours today?

From another thread (http://p197.ezboard.com/fabsolutewri...icID=418.topic):

<blockquote>
<hr>
You want to see a plot with juice? Try Red Harvest by Dashiell Hammett. (I highly recommend this book -- it's got real page-turning power, and Hammett is a major American stylist.)

That plot has since resurfaced in Yojimbo, Last Man Standing, and Miller's Crossing to name just three movies. I'm certain that some or all of that plot has appeared in other novels, in short stories, in movies, and TV dramas.

When you have written the book, you have made the plot your own. The plot is the framework that holds up the tent of your novel, but it is not the novel.
<hr>
</blockquote>

Hi, Beaver --

Best way to establish credibility and get the readers to trust you is to tell them the truth. Don't make up anything you can look up. Do the math.

On your chapter... do you Really Really want me to do a full edit on it?

Right.

Drop on down to <a href="http://p197.ezboard.com/fabsolutewritefrm31.showMessage?topicID=206.topic" target="_new">p197.ezboard.com/fabsolutewritefrm31.showMessage?topicID=206.topic</a>.

I'm going to take this thing one paragraph at a time, which means a series of ... 23 posts. At least.

"Style" is what you can't help doing.

Every word should advance the plot, support the theme, or reveal character. Better words do two of these things. The best do all three.

And more excellent links at Writing Links & Links for Writers (http://www.internet-resources.com/wr...ks-fiction.htm)

Recall that some time back <a href="http://p197.ezboard.com/fabsolutewritefrm3.showMessageRange?topicID=257.to pic&start=285&stop=285" target="_new">I mentioned the Pathetic Fallacy</a>, and the way it keeps turning up in <a href="http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/004641.html#004641" target="_new">slush</a>.

This is true. An awful lot of slush starts out with personification of inanimate objects. If you can make it work this is okay. But be brutally honest with yourself about whether you've made it work.

*[need to insert link to HapiSofi's post about sex scenes, posted at Uncle Jim's request]*

Thanks, Hapi. That was truly useful.

<hr>

MacAlStone, you're moving from opening to mid-book. Keep going!

The six senses are:

Sight
Hearing
Taste
Touch
Smell
Proprioception

<HR>

And welcome, pina la nina! (I'm Jim to my friends, and I hope everyone here is a friend.)

Proprioception is awareness of where your body is in relationship to itelf. How you can tell how close your hand is to your leg, even with your eyes closed.

Yes, I read for pleasure -- all the darned time (Today, Post Mortem by Patricia Cornwell). But I also see books differently than I used to. I might say "Wow, the author sure slipped in some exposition there!"

Part of the trick is now to have both a writer's mind (to see how other writers write their books, as well as how you write yours) and a reader's mind to tell how your book will read to a non-writer.

(Think of a magician doing tricks for a regular audience, and that same magician doing the same routine for an audience of magicians. Each of those audiences will look for different things, and will be impressed by different things.)

Goodness, Dancre -- Beaver used it in his sample first chapter...!

An edited work is still yours.

jeir12 -- nope, I don't edit folks' manuscripts (except for educational reasons, as the spirit moves me). Your best course is to learn to edit your own.

Novella: at least 17,500 words but less than 40,000 words.

But is it more difficult to get published for this type of work?

Nope, easiest thing in the world. But they have to ask you. You don't write the book then submit it, like with normal publishing. Some cheerful editor calls you on the phone and says "Can you write a Spiderman book? Say, by Tuesday?" And you say ... "Sure."

This is getting closer to the slimey underbelly of traditional publishing here, but I have to say, the money's nice. It can keep you going as a writer while you're working on your regular stuff. Those two Spiderman books -- one was written in a week, the other over 72 hours. The dangers are two: you can be seduced by the money so you start doing them to the exclusion of your regular writing, and you can pick up bad habits that carry over to your regular writing.

The Bad stuff is as bad as you'd think (though you're talking pro writers here, who can do How Much for Just the Planet.)

Readers are perverse things.

Some will take your figurative language literally. Others will take your literal language figuratively.

"Her eyes flew around the room before falling to the floor" can provoke ... unusual ... images in some readers' minds.

The test is to try.

Faye, if you want, go to <a href="http://www.sff.net/people/doylemacdonald/" target="_new">my homepage</a> and pick a book.

A general clean-up post, before diving into a weekend that involves a heavy deadline....

ChunkyC:

<blockquote>
Noooo! or NOOOO!

If extra vowels are acceptable, how many is too many? Or is this a purely subjective thing?
</blockquote>

I wouldn't use extra vowels at all. How the character delivers the word should be obvious to the reader from the story-telling and character development to that point. "Nooooo!" is close to dialect and stage directions, both of which should be used lightly if at all.

All things are subjective, and if you make it work for you, you've made it work. Alas, spelling out "Noooooo!" and "Yesssssss!" and "Arrrrrrggghhhh!" look very much like shameless padding.

<hr>

Weren Cole

If a character is important, he/she should be mentioned early, and should be given enough to do while waiting for his Big Moment so that when the Big Moment arrives the readers don't say "Who?" and have to flip back fifty or a hundred pages to refresh their memories.

At the same time, if a character is given a name, the readers will try to hold him in mind, assuming that he'll be important later. (Thus: don't name your characters unless you want them to stay in the readers' heads where they'll take up processing power: it's like naming kittens that follow you home.)

Generally speaking, try to get by with as few characters as you can. And try to have them all on-stage and acting in the first hundred pages.

It's perfectly okay to outline after you've created the first-draft text. The outline will show you where the bumps that need to be filed off and the dips that need to be filled are.

File cards are your friends.

You'll learn how much is too much backstory by writing it, and trying it on your beta readers. But also ... imagine that you are that person. What do you actually say? Realism is also your friend. (This will help you avoid "as-you-know-Bob" dialog, and "Gentle reader" insertions.) Generally speaking, use the absolute minimum backstory necessary to keep the introduction from being completely cryptic.

<hr>

Rigby Eleanor

No, you haven't written a doorstop by accident. 400 manuscript pages is pretty reasonable.

A novel (at least, a YA novel) can start as low as 40,000 words. You won't start being saleable for an adult novel until around 60,000 words (with the standard Genius Exception: If you've written a work of genius, all bets are off).

So don't worry. As long as the words are the Right words, all's well.

<hR>

AnneStJohn

I write for a living.

What you might try is this: If you're too tired of looking at a screen to write fiction after a long day at the office, write your fiction in the morning before you go to work. Set the alarm clock early, and get one of those coffeemakers that will start a pot of coffee based on a timer so it's hot and steaming when you stumble out of bed.

<hr>

qatz:

More on Outlining soon.

MiltonPope:

The chessboard is most clearly visible through the words in The Price of the Stars.

You can pick up a copy here.

You may quote me, with attribution.

For the title and byline being half way down the front - what font size should be used for those

Courier 10 or Courier 12


and is it okay to use something other than Courier for those?

Why would you want to?

And what is a byline?

The line that says "by [authorname]"

The name in the byline can be a pseudonym. The name in your address in the top left corner will be your real name; the name you want on the check.

For the running head - is it okay to just use your last name instead of your full name on every page?

Yes.

And is it really necessary to put the title?

Yes.


What font size and style should this heading be?

Courier 10 or Courier 12

What about chapter titles? What font size should be used for chapter titles

Courier 10 or Courier 12


and is it okay to use something other than Courier for those?

Why would you want to?

For titles, bylines and chapter titles - are bolds, italics or underlines acceptable?

Italics and underlines are the same thing (underlining is how you indicate italics). The title will appear as some kind of display font. Your name will appear as some kind of display font. Chapter titles can be italicized if the word would normally be italicized (e.g. a foriegn word or phrase). Usually all of these matters will depend on the publisher's house style. Don't waste time worrying about it.

And also - when should they be used within the story itself?

When you wish to. Italics are indicated with a single underline, bold is indicated with a double underline.

I'm a little hyphen crazy I think and I'm still not sure on the rule on when to use a hyphen or a semicolon or a colon.

Get a good grammar book. A writer who doesn't know how to punctuate is like a golfer who doesn't know how to swing. Your local bookstore will be full of test-prep books for students taking the SAT and PSAT. Those might be a place to start. And if you don't have a copy of Strunk & White, go out now, today, and get one.

Really, I'm not kidding.

Well, I know to use a colon for lists. And a semicolon for two complete seperate sentences within one sentence. Or something like that. I should know these rules by now.

Grammar is your friend. You want to make your meaning clear to your readers. Grammar helps you do that.

Here's (http://ccc.commnet.edu/grammar/index.htm) one place to start.

I return briefly the the Novel-as-chess-game trope, to give you this:

<A HREF="http://www.ex.ac.uk/~dregis/DR/quotes.html" target="_new">Chess quotes</a>

Go, read them, and see how each could apply to you and your novel.

Now, get your copy of Logical Chess: Move by Move. It's a writing book. Really.

When you're typesetting, it's easy to miss italics that appear as italics in the text.

Underlines and double underlines are universally understood by typesetters, they're obvious on the page, and they're easy to add with a red pencil in the editing stage.

Beats the hey out of me, Jen. Knock on doors and call folks on the phone, I'd say.

Lots of things have changed in printing over the last fifteen years. Heck, fifteen years ago being a Selectric repairman was guaranteed full time employment.

I've said that I wished I could show you a picture of an outline. So I think I will:

Here's an <a href="http://shop.webomator.com/cgi-bin/cpshop.cgi?storecrc=cb&target=prod&page=1&trail=&s t=&p=bws01.4397456" target="_new">outline for a novel</a>.

"What?" I can hear you say. "That's a friggin' box!"

Oh, dearly beloved, let me explain.

Look at that design. Notice that it has limits; thus we know that it is art. (It also has balance, and symmetry.)

See how the threads intertwine, appearing and vanishing? See how they all form a pleasing whole?

Each of those threads is a plot thread. Each of those curves is a story arc. It's okay to write character names right on the thread, and follow that character through the story. It's okay to name each thread for a theme, too.

When I outline, I don't set up one of those "outlines" like you learn in high school: Roman Numerals, capital letters, arabic numerals, small letters. No. (I'm certain that somewhere there's a writer who uses that style of outlining and makes it work: the master rules are "Nine-and-sixty ways" and "Does it work?") Nor yet do I do a Powerpoint series of Plot Points. (Again, somewhere, I'm quite sure, some writer has done it and made it work.)

Instead, I draw pictures of my plots. And the pictures that I draw are Celtic Knotwork. (For example: our <a href="http://www.sff.net/people/doylemacdonald/wiz1head.htm" target="_new">Circle of Magic</a> series was based on a <A HREF="http://www.webomator.com/bws/data/freeart/celtic/circles.html" target="_new">circle</a>, with six nodes, each linked to the point beside it, to the point two away, and to the point three away. Once the knotwork was complete, I labeled the threads for the characters (Randal, Lys, and Walter), for attributes (hand, heart, head), and for themes (honor, loyalty, stability).)

Then I watched how the threads interacted, which ones were on top, which more buried, and wrote the books based on the interlacing of the cords. If you're wondering why certain characters appear and vanish in the various books, why first one then another is the protagonist, there's where and how the decisions were made.

Here, for your own use, are <a href="http://www.entrelacs.net/en.index.php" target="_new">workshop instructions</a> on creating your own Celtic Knotwork.

You can adapt this to single novels (as I have) by saying that each node is a chapter, and again naming characters and themes as they're moved around and through, come in contact, are brought to the fore, and are hidden again.

Listen, for I will tell you a true thing: Your readers expect order, a plan. Even if they don't know explicitly what you're doing, they will sense whether you're in control.

<a href="http://www.entrelacs.net/en.6.php" target="_new">Here</a> are some outlines that could become dandy novels.

This is the book that taught me how to draw Celtic Knotwork: Celtic Art: The Methods of Construction by George Bain.

Celtic knotwork is deeply embedded in Western thought. It dates back thousands of years. It's ingrained in the hindbrains of our readers. When our readers run into it, even though they don't consciously notice it, their imaginations will play along.

And that, my friends, is one of the ways in which I outline.

Here's a good line from that page of <A HREF="http://www.ex.ac.uk/~dregis/DR/quotes.html" target="_new">chess quotes</a> I gave earlier:


<blockquote>
<hr>

"If you have any doubt what to study, study endgames. Openings teach you openings. Endings teach you chess."

-- Stephan GERZADOWICZ, Thinker's Chess.

<hr>
</blockquote>

So.... let's think about that in writing terms. How many times have I heard "XXX started off well, but it fell apart at the end"? Lots of times, and lots of those times were when discussing why books got rejected.

We spend an awful lot of time talking about openings: opening lines, first pages, first chapters. Not to say those aren't important; if the first page doesn't invite the reader to turn the page that reader will never come to your ending. But ... you'll be able to mess with the opening in your second and third drafts. When you start your novel you may not have a clue what the real opening of the book is; even if you think you do, you may be wrong, and may find this out when you've finished your draft and read it through.

The climax is what pays off the reader for going with you. The climax is what entices the reader to buy and read your next book. (The reader will buy and read your next book, even if the opening of that book is slow, because of the promise of a strong ending.)

<Blockquote>
<HR>

"In order to improve your game, you must study the endgame before everything else...."

-- Jose Raul Capablanca, World Champion 1921-1927

<hr>
</blockquote>

The climaxes of novels, however, are difficult to study compared with the openings. The opening exists as a unity, it comes from a blank page, it's creating itself as it goes. The ending, of necessity, grows from the middle and the beginning of the novel. Where we can look at an opening chapter in isolation, it's difficult to look at the final chapter without having the rest of the story in mind. Take, for example, the classic last line from 1984: "He loved Big Brother."

As part of the whole, that's chilling; the epitome of horror. Taken without the rest of the book, it's meaningless.

The last three chapters of Moby-Dick are the novel. All that came before was necessary to allow the reader to understand those three chapters.

<BLOCKQUOTE>
<HR>

"Modern chess is too much concerned with things like pawn structure. Forget it - checkmate ends the game"

-- Nigel SHORT

<HR>
</blockquote>

[MacAllister]

James D. Macdonald
Learn Writing With Uncle Jim

March 2004

But, again, you may ask, what is the climax?

(Homework: Read a bunch of novels in many genres from literary to best-seller. Identify the climax. Go and do, in your own work, what the masters have done in theirs.)

Here is the one big secret of climaxes, from which all others spring: The reader must be in no doubt that this is the climax.

I said, earlier, that there's only one ending to the novel: The good guys win. I quoted, just a bit above, the last line of 1984. Did the good guys win?

I say yes: and I also say this: you must define, in the course of your narrative, who the good guys are, and what "winning" means. You cannot assume common views in today's society; you have to establish those views in terms of your fiction.

The book that does not so much end as stop, that appears to run out of steam, or where the author got to a certain page count and wrote "The End," those are not good climaxes.

For most writers at most times, "It was only a dream" and "Then they were all run over by a truck" are not going to be satisfying climaxes. (Unless you can make it work, of course. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland is an example of the first, All Quiet on the Western Front is an example of the latter.)

I had a beta reader before who criticized me for leaving some things out because she didn't get it -- she wanted the narrator to tell her if the protagonist was indifferent or angry, meanwhile he was "pounding his fists on the window."

If a reader tells you that there's something wrong, he's almost certainly right. If he tells you what's wrong, he's almost certainly wrong.


Which is it?


At which of those points did the audience spontaneously burst into applause?

That is the climax.

Not sure what to think.

What I think is that this is one of the ills of workshopping: The cheapest, easiest crit to give is "I wanted to hear more about XXX." This comes from looking at books piecemeal rather than as organic wholes.

Jim, do you think it would be better for me to just interweave the prologue in the novel's story or leave as is?

I haven't read your book, so my opinion is based on general principles rather than specific cases.

That being said: If you leave it as a prologue, half your readers won't read it.

That being said, I've used prologues in my own works about half the time.

We've been talking about rules? There are no rules. There are only guidelines, some of them stronger than others.

While most people are having great fun skiing down the slope on skis, every once in a while you'll see someone gliding up the slope on an ironing board and making it look easy.

"It works" trumps everything.


"Thanks for your comments Jim."

jerir12

Actually, Jeri, I didn't answer your question.

Knowing only what I know from what you've posted here:

One concern I have is whether the prologue gives away too much of the story.

The prologue (literally "before the word") has been used, mostly in drama, to explain what's coming, and at the same time give people time to get back from the candy counter, find their seats, sit down, and shut up.

You find prologues in movies and TV shows: those segments of action before the opening titles. These can be badly done: the voiceover in Dark City is an example.

They can be well done. The opening narration in The Fellowship of the Ring (material that Tolkien wisely put in the Council of Elrond chapter, nearly half-way through the first volume, after the readers were engaged and cared about the information) is an example of a sucessful prologue.

Let's look at a couple of other prologues:

From Romeo And Juliet by William Shakespeare:

<blockquote>
<hr>

Two households, both alike in dignity,
In fair Verona, where we lay our scene,
From ancient grudge break to new mutiny,
Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean.
From forth the fatal loins of these two foes
A pair of star-cross'd lovers take their life;
Whole misadventured piteous overthrows
Do with their death bury their parents' strife.
The fearful passage of their death-mark'd love,
the continuance of their parents' rage,
Which, but their children's end, nought could remove,
Is now the two hours' traffic of our stage;
The which if you with patient ears attend,
What here shall miss, our toil shall strive to mend.

<hr>
</blockquote>

Now from Dr. Faustus by Christopher Marlowe:

<BLOCKQUOTE>
<HR>

Not marching in the fields of Trasimene
Where Mars did mate the warlike Carthagens,
Nor sporting in the dalliance of love
In Courts of Kings where state is overturned,
Nor in the pomp of proud audacious deeds
Intends our Muse to vaunt his heavenly verse.
Only this, Gentles: we must now perform
The form of Faustus' fortunes, good or bad.
And now to patient judgments we appeal,
And speak for Faustus in his infancy.
Now is he born, of parents base of stock,
In Germany, within a Town called Rhodes.
At riper years to Wittenberg he went,
Whereas his kinsmen chiefly brought him up.
So much he profits in Divinity,
The fruitful plot of Scholarism graced,
That shortly he was graced with Doctor's name,
Excelling all, and sweetly can dispute
In th' heavenly matters of Theology,
Till swoll'n with cunning of a self-conceit,
His waxen wings did mount above his reach,
And melting, heavens conspired his overthrow;
For, falling to a devilish exercise
And glutted now with learning's golden gifts,
He surfeits upon cursed Necromancy.
Nothing so sweet as Magic is to him,
Which he prefers before his chiefest bliss;
And this the man that in his study sits.


<HR>
</blockquote>

Notice several things: First, that they are dispensable, second, that they are brief, and third, that they are self-contained.

So .... Jerir ... tell me about your prologue? Is it dispensable, brief, and self-contained? If it is, then make it a prologue indeed. If not, try it as chapter one, with a particularly long time interval between chapters one and two. See how that reads.

If the rest of the story-telling is strong enough, you'll have an editor who has read your work to comment on the appropriateness of your prologue. If the rest of the writing isn't strong enough, it won't matter.

And... please yourself. Pleasing yourself is a big part of the art of writing.

...the grammar checking function in Microsoft Word... is something that every writer should turn off, disable, and delete from their wordprocessor.


Stronger than love, stronger than hate, stronger than self-perservation, is the desire to mess with someone else's prose.

<HR>

<BLOCKQUOTE>


Prologue

The white and yellow flowers smelled sweet. A quiet psalm sounded among the whispering trees. The boy looked on with curiosity as large men lowered a coffin into the ground. The headstone stood nearby, a name on its face, every line carved hard and deep and cold. His brother's.

The boy tossed a white rose into the grave. Rain fell and chilled his hands.

His mother’s gentle palm brushed across his eyebrows, then his eyes, his nose, and his chin. Her lips were softer than her touch: She kissed him on one cheek, then the other, then on the forehead. Her eyes were red; tears mixed with the rain.

He shivered. She clasped his hands, giving them a warm squeeze.

He looked up and saw his father--so still, so grand, like the statue of a king. Rain fell, but his father never moved.

I'm not sure that "cleaved" is the word that's wanted here. To cleave is an interesting word, one that has two meanings in English: To split apart, and to stick together.

I don't see using it to describe carved letters at all.


We had some discussion, quite a bit ago, about taking college-level classes to learn to write.

Mostly, to me, courses labeled "creative writing" are a waste of time (except in so far as they get your fingers on the keys, which is never a bad thing).

Yet here I've found something that I think is pretty neat. It's a course called "Reception of the Arts," offered at Penn State, available over the Internet via their "World Campus." The course looks at art (all art), not through the making of art, not through the history of art, but by way of how the audience responds to art.

First, here's the site itself: <A HREF="http://art3idea.ce.psu.edu:16080/art3/" target="_new">InArt 3</a>.

To get into the site, click the "the main site" link.

The site itself is an eye-opener, without signing up for the course. Lots and lots of content here. To start -- look at the vertical black bar on the left. Click on the link called "red cubes," second from the bottom. New index on the left: Third from the top is "humors." Click on that.

You'll see a red square to the right of the black index bar. The leftmost link inside that red square is "melancholy." Click there, you'll get a definition, and a link to Lesson One.

Lesson one is wonderful ... to a large extent it mirrors my own opinions about art. So's the rest of the material on this site. I've been chasing down links on it for hours, and saying "Ooohhhh, that's right!"

This is a Grand Unified Theory of Everything as far as Art is concerned. We're artists, we writers. How the Audience Reacts is very important to us as far as being commercial artists (the reaction we want is "Throwing Pots of Money At Us").

So, read. Be astounded. I was.

Recall just a bit ago the novel 1984 came up? Recall one of the central conceits of 1984 was Newspeak, an artificial language designed to keep people from thinking, by destroying words? (The theory being that people can't think about things that they don't have words for.)

Well, here are some vocabularly lists for y'all. If we want to think like artists, words give us the tools to think about our art. Here you go:

<A HREF="http://art3idea.ce.psu.edu/art3/basics/a_to_f.html" target="_new"> Big Words A to F</a>

<A HREF="http://art3idea.ce.psu.edu/art3/basics/g_to_n.html" target="_new"> Big Words G to N</a>

<A HREF="http://art3idea.ce.psu.edu/art3/basics/o_to_z.html" target="_new">Big Words O to Z</a>

Those lists by themselves are mind-expanding (and will give you a big edge while playing Scrabble, too).

Try 'em. See if they don't add the ability to talk about -- to think about -- what we've been trying to do.

Golly. This is a course that I might take myself.

A bit back I was talking about knotwork as a way to think about plot. Here's all kinds of notes about labyrinths, as expressions of art. It works out to the same concept that I'd developed on my own, these many years past.

Here's a site to bookmark.

-------------

Coming soon: Another Way to Consider The Whole Plot.

GHOTI

That was George Bernard Shaw.

(GBS also only ran about two paragraphs of Eliza's dialog in dialect in Pygmalion before he dropped back to normal spelling. Learn from the master, O my child.)

See also, Dr. Seuss's example and illustration: "The Tough Coughs As He Ploughs the Dough."

If you're including lyrics from other people's songs, you have to get permission, and it's you, the author (not the publisher) who has to pay the permissions.

If you need lyrics, write your own.

In any case...

If you're a talented poet, and the poetry enhances the story (reveals character, advances the plot, supports the theme... you know the litany), then do it. Else, don't.

Titles can't be copyrighted.

When in doubt, consult your agent and/or your editor.

Dipping back to page 37 in this thread:

It's funny. She didn't say "something is missing" but "you did not put in such and such." So it seems like she does get it, but she wants some explanations to go with it.

I have to ask ...

Was this story being workshopped at the time, and did the reader have the full manuscript, or only a portion?

Back on page 36 of this thread.... Pthom asked:

<blockquote><strong><em>Quote:</em></strong><hr>So, what's my point? akaEraser asked, "How come we can't just make the italics or bolds or whatever to begin with?" My friend the typesetter is a small outfit; has only a few hundred clients. Uncle Jim, seriously, do the big guys still set type for whole novels by reading 8 1/2" x 11" typed copy? Especially when it's so much easier, quicker, and more error free to do it from a file. I betcha that 95% of us writers prepare our manuscripts using a word processor on a computer.

Surely, modern publishers utilize the most current and efficient technology. Don't they?

<hr></blockquote>

Let's see: Yes and no.

For the past several years I've turned in my manuscripts both as hard copy (standard manuscript format) and on disk.

All the editing is done on the manuscript, and I wouldn't want it any other way. I want to see what's happened. If the editing happened in an electronic file, how would I see what was changed, to either approve or disapprove of it?

Next bit: I use WordPerfect as a wordprocessor. Other writers use other programs. I know of one who uses XYWrite. I'm sure there's at least one who uses Peachwrite, another who uses Electric Pencil. There are probably some who use edlin. Heck, if my good old Atari were still working, I'd still be using PaperClip. I liked that wordprocessor. Somewhere there are writers working on original Macs, on Apple IIs, on a Coleco Adam (with the funky tape drive -- remember it?). Even a few holdouts who use typewriters.

I've heard horror stories from my editor chums, too: of the writer who turned in her novel on disk, with each individual page saved as a separate MS Word file. Of the writer whose files came through garbled. Of the writer who had the virus. I recently got done with a project which involved a group of writers each sending me chapter-length files. You wouldn't have believed the hand-fiddly-work it took to turn those individual files into one single coherent file.

All the way through, hard copy is faster, easier, and more efficient.

I bet that the typesetters nowadays take the marked up hardcopy, and at the end transfer the marks from the hardcopy to the text file that the writer supplied.

There's a silly article in Salon today.

<a href="http://www.salon.com/books/feature/2004/03/22/midlist/index.html" target="_new">www.salon.com/books/feature/2004/03/22/midlist/index.html</a>

(You'll have to look at an ad to read it.)

I'm a mid-list writer too, making my living at this game for the past fifteen years. Poor Jane Doe! She's written five books in ten years? What's she been doing with her time?

Most mid-list authors would love to have advances like she got. She's averaging $40K/year. That isn't poverty. She wants to be a writer? She should write. She should write books that people want to read.

A word of advice for her: What do you think pseudonyms were made for? Change your agent, change your name, and get to work.

You want to know my worst advance ? $2,000. You want to know my worst sales? 640 copies in hardcover. (Happy ending there: sold the book to another house, where it came out in paperback and sold over 100,000 copies.) Sales numbers and advances aren't particularly secrets. For heaven's sake! They're printed in the trade mags.

Friggin' cry me a river, lady. On your feet and get moving. Did someone tell you this gig is easy?
<hr>
UPDATE Joe Scalzi on this same article:
<a href="http://www.scalzi.com/whatever/archives/000703.html" target="_new">www.scalzi.com/whatever/archives/000703.html</a>
UPDATE 2 More from
<a href="http://www.livejournal.com/users/nihilistic_kid/405207.html" target="_new">the Nihilistic Kid</a>.

I remember one software upgrade:

"Don't worry," said the tech. "It'll be transparent to the users."

"Yeah," said the system manager. "Kinda like a helicopter's rotors...."

Two more links for y'all:

<a href="http://www.scalzi.com/whatever/archives/000701.html" target="_new">Ten pieces of very good advice</a>

<a href="http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/004925.html#004925" target="_new">Discussion of that silly Salon article</a> (don't forget to follow the sub-links).

One space or two?

That tells folks if you learned how to type on a typewriter or a computer. Typewriter folks use two spaces after punctuation; computer-trained folks use one.

It's meaningless. Concentrate on telling a good story.

Now some practical advice for "Jane Austen Doe" over at Salon.com.

1. Don't quit your day job.

2. Take that first book, the one that you got the $150K advance on. I'm sure it's reverted by now. Resell it to a small press that will bring it out in a prestige trade paperback edition. A $500 or $1,000 advance is not too small for you to accept. Same with your other books as they revert.

3. That celebrity ghostwriter gig is a good one. Ask your agent to line up some more of those.

4. Drop your old name, whatever it is. Find a nice pseudonym and start again as a new writer. Sure, you'll get new-writer advances, maybe in the $5K range. Grow your career the old-fashioned way, by writing. Who knows? Maybe someday those earlier books of yours will be reprinted as "By Pseudonym (writing as Old Name)." Stranger things have happened.

5. When you get a big advance, put it in the bank.

6. Don't quit your day job.

For someone to enter a field notorious for its small financial rewards, unsteady prospects, and lack of recognition, then to complain about small financial rewards, unsteady prospects, and lack of recognition is ... well, many working writers who read that piece had reactions that consisted of laughing uproariously.

To call Ms. Doe's story a "tragedy" is rather overstating her misfortunes.

For that matter, it takes a certain amount of nerve on her part to call herself a "mid-list writer." She was certainly making front-list money.

Nah, when publishing house offers an unheard-of advance, put it into CDs, with the maturity spread out so you can't spend it all at once.

10,000 sold hard and paper combined, after a $150,000 advance? That wasn't just a mess, that was a disaster. That was the point where she should have changed her name.

If you're the sort of author who sells 10,000 copies, you aren't the sort of author who makes six-figure advances. And this isn't new -- publishing didn't become a business just in the last ten years. Let me whisper to you.... publishing has always been a business.

<hr>

No, 10% of Nothing isn't one of mine; I don't even know the author (except by reputation). I just think that he's written an important book.

After the intensity of their meeting with the police, Sylvie and Jayson had both felt drawn to the peaceful isolation of the soporific river running through the centre of Georgetown, and they held hands as they sauntered along the bank. The air was warm, almost motionless, and thick with the buzz of insects--it smelled fresh and clean and alive. Several picayune puffs of cloud floated lazily far above, their edges razor sharp against the deep cyan of the late afternoon sky. Sol beat down virtually unimpeded and Jayson's scalp had begun to tingle as perspiration collected in his hair and slalomed down the sides of his head. He was glad of the sensation, it confirmed they were out of the confines of the police station and away from everything it signified. Sylvie walked beside him with her face turned toward the water as it gurgled past.

“Tell me more about your mother, Jayson.”

<HR>

<blockquote><strong><em>Quote:</em></strong><hr>After the intensity of their meeting with the police, Sylvie and Jayson had both felt drawn to the peaceful isolation of the soporific river running through the centre of Georgetown, and they held hands as they sauntered along the bank.<hr></blockquote>

That's a bit of a run-on sentence. Watch the adjectives: peaceful isolation and soporific river. Is the comparison to Lethe intentional? Is a river running through central Georgetown really isolated? (In the USA, centre is usually spelled center.) Is "sauntered" the exact verb you want?

<blockquote><strong><em>Quote:</em></strong><hr>The air was warm, almost motionless, and thick with the buzz of insects--it smelled fresh and clean and alive.<hr></blockquote>

"Fresh" and "clean" aren't how I imagine thick, motionless air in the center of a southern city.

<blockquote><strong><em>Quote:</em></strong><hr>Several picayune puffs of cloud floated lazily far above, their edges razor sharp against the deep cyan of the late afternoon sky.<hr></blockquote>

Is "picayune" the right word? Is the alliteration intentional? Are the edges of puffs of cloud really razor sharp? Why say "cyan" if "blue" will do? Is either necessary? "Lazily" verges on pathetic fallacy territory.

<blockquote><strong><em>Quote:</em></strong><hr>Sol beat down virtually unimpeded and Jayson's scalp had begun to tingle as perspiration collected in his hair and slalomed down the sides of his head.<hr></blockquote>

"Sol"? Why make the readers pause to figure out the high-falutin' lingo? How is "virtually unimpeded" different from "unimpeded"? Must the reader imagine some unspecified impediment? Does "slalomed" fortify the image of warmth and peace?


<blockquote><strong><em>Quote:</em></strong><hr>He was glad of the sensation, it confirmed they were out of the confines of the police station and away from everything it signified.<hr></blockquote>

Consider using a semicolon between "sensation" and "it." How does having sweat trickle through his hair confirm that he's finished with a police interrogation?

<blockquote><strong><em>Quote:</em></strong><hr> Sylvie walked beside him with her face turned toward the water as it gurgled past.<hr></blockquote>

I'm having a hard time picturing her walking holding hands with him, not watching where she's going. Does the Potomac at Georgetown really gurgle?

<blockquote><strong><em>Quote:</em></strong><hr> “Tell me more about your mother, Jayson.”<hr></blockquote>

I hope we aren't leading up to a coredump of exposition here.

<hr>
The comments we've seen, about POV shift and direction shift, are good ones. Please consider breaking this up into three smaller paragraphs, with the sentence structures a bit simplified. This is an establishing shot; it should go down fast and easy to put a picture in our readers' minds before we get to the important information.

Imported, and slightly cleaned up, from another thread (http://p197.ezboard.com/fabsolutewri...topic&index=17):

<hr>

Don't worry about scam agents pirating your works.

The only possible thing they could do with your manuscript would be sell it to a publisher -- and we know they won't do that, right? If they knew how to sell manuscripts to publishers they wouldn't need to be scammers.

I'm not a lawyer, and I don't play one on TV.

That being said:

Among the elements of proof in a copyright infringement you'll find "access." Independent creation is a defense against the allegation.

So, for someone to win a copyright infringement suit, you'll not only have your original materials, you'll have your correspondence with that individual.

Now it happens that plagiarism does exist (http://www.themorningnews.org/archiv...l_strength.php). For example: Ron Montana's Death in the Spirit House (http://search.barnesandnoble.com/boo...SBN=0385178263) was plagiarized by Craig Strete, who published it as his own. Death in the Spirit House was eventually reprinted under Ron's name as Face in the Snow (http://search.barnesandnoble.com/boo...SBN=0553296337). In this case, however, it was an attempted collaboration gone horribly wrong -- WGA, mailing a copy to yourself, copyright registration, none of that would have helped, hindered, or made a darned bit of difference.

That's the only case that comes to mind in the past twenty years from the world of print fiction of an unpublished work being plagiarised.

Dawn Pauline Dunn and Susan Hartzell (http://www.scifan.com/writers/dd/DunnPauline.asp) plagiarized Phantoms (http://koontz.iwarp.com/phantoms.html) by Dean Koontz for two of their books, Crawling Dark and Demonic Color. In that case, Phantoms was already published, so prior existence wasn't hard to prove, and available for sale, so access wasn't hard to prove either.

One more plagiarism suit (http://www.likesbooks.com/lawsuit.html), this one from 1997: Janet Dailey (http://search.barnesandnoble.com/boo...SBN=0060176970) copied from Nora Roberts (http://www.news-star.com/stories/073097/life1.html); again this involved already-published books.


There have been whacko cases, of course. A lady who claimed (http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight...es/001463.html) that J. K. Rowling copied from her self-published children's books (thrown out of court when it was shown that the plaintiff had manufactured evidence). A lady from New Jersey who claimed that Stephen King had copied her unpublished manuscripts (by reading them through her window while flying by in his airplane) in a case that never made it to court.

Most plagiarism (http://owl.english.purdue.edu/handou...r_plagiar.html) cases involve previously printed books, whose contents are lifted in whole or in part for unpublished works. Don't worry about it; just don't copy from someone else's book in your own.

This is without going into derivative works -- using another writer's characters and settings for your own work. No matter how much I like The Lord of the Rings I can't write my own fourth volume. That isn't, strictly speaking, plagiarism.

So ... until you're published, forget it.

On why you might not want to copyright your works before you start sending them around: Say you copyright your manuscript, and start the dance. It sells a year from now. It's scheduled for two years later. So you have a book coming out in 2007 with a 2004 copyright date on it. People spotting it on the shelves for the first time might think it was an old book. Or -- do you want the first editors who come to your novel to know how long it's been batting around the slushpiles of New York?

(I remember one that I saw in the early nineties that had a 1967 copyright on its title page. (I read that one all the way through, each page lifting my eyebrows a little bit higher, as I realized why it hadn't sold in the intervening 25 years. No, I'm not going to tell you the plot, lest the author be here and be embarassed, but I promise you, if I told you, you too would say "Yeah, I see why that one never sold."))

So -- "Poor Man's Copyright" is an urban legend. WGA registration is worthless in print publishing (for all that it might be useful in the world of screenplays). Real, live copyright is of marginal utility, and might do you more harm than good in the print world.

Put it out of your mind. Having your work stolen isn't the first or second thing that you should be worrying about when you're submitting your book.


ma

[MacAllister]

James D. Macdonald
Learn Writing With Uncle Jim

March 2004--cont.

Over the course of the past several months I've recommended various books and movies. Here's a all-in-one-post roundup:

Logical Chess: Move by Move

Anglo-Scots folk ballads

The Bulwer-Lytton contest

Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses

Miriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary

The Chicago Manual of Style

The Haunted Author

I Am A Professional Writer

Turkey City Lexicon

The Sobering Saga of Myrtle the Manuscript

The Unstrung Harp; or, Mr. Earbrass Writes a Novel

Standard manuscript format

The Miller's Tale

The Trojan Women

Turk's Head

The Sun, the Moon, and the Stars

Misery

China Mountain Zhang

"Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God"

How Lucky Can You Get?

sex, lies, and videotape

Sweeney Todd In Concert

Rules for Writing

Elmore Leonard

My Week as a Pod Person

Moonlight Becomes You

3rd person

omniscient


The Murder of Roger Akroyd

Christine

Captains Courageous

Writing

Boing-Boing

Marketlist.com

Writer's Market

Minority Report

L.A. Confidential

Writing and Publishing 101

Rules for Writers

Red Harvest

Yojimbo

Last Man Standing

Miller's Crossing

Writing Links and Links for Writers

story

How Much for Just the Planet

My homepage

Chess quotes

Celtic Knotwork I

Celtic Knotwork II

Celtic Art: The Methods of Construction

Circle of Magic

1984

Moby-Dick

All Quiet on the Western Front

Dark City

The Fellowship of the Ring

Romeo And Juliet

Dr. Faustus

InArt 3

Big Words A to F

Big Words G to N

Big Words O to Z

Mid-List Writer

Joe Scalzi on Mid-List Writer

Nihilistic Kid on Mid-List Writer

Discussion of that silly Salon article

Ten pieces of very good advice

The Postman Always Rings Twice

Accidental Strength

Death in the Spirit House

Face in the Snow

Stouffer/Rowling

Plagiarism

You can learn whether a market accepts these (and whether they accept reprints, and much else) from their guidelines.

The first thing to know is that publishing is a buyer's market. That this is an unhappy thing for the sellers (we writers) should be obvious.

Next, you need to know that if a work is publishable by one it is publishable by many.

When a publisher buys a book, it isn't just some editor somewhere who reads it, loves it, and buys it all in the same day.

That editor will have to present the book to an editorial review board, pitch it to the publisher, work out a profit and loss statement, and find a hole in the schedule (arrived at with the other editors). Those other things will have to happen before the offer is made. If those things are done for a book that's no longer available (since if it is publishable by one it's publishable by many, the same process may be happening or already have happened across town), that's time and money wasted, alone with the editor's prestige among the other editors at the house.

Thus, publishers do not like simultaneous submissions. If you simsub and you're good enough to be published I guarantee that you'll be caught. (If you aren't good enough to be published, no one will ever know.)

The exception to this is the auction. This is agent territory. If you have a hot book by a hot author, the agent may select a few publishers who are likely to Really Want This Book, call them on the phone, and say "I'm auctioning this work." What that means is that the one who comes up with the best offer is allowed to publish it. Happy you! (Unless the book subsequently tanks, then Unhappy You, and it's time to pick a nice pseudonym.)


Yep, that's a disadvantage for the writer. Life's not fair.

That's part of what "buyer's market" means.

But what's your hurry? Are you in a rush to get as many rejections as possible? You sent your manuscript to a particular market because, out of all the hundreds of publishers out there who haven't yet rejected this manuscript, these are the guys you want to see publish your book. Right?


The Best of HapiSofi:

Lee Shore Literary Agency

Need Advice

Agents Charging Fees

Sex Scenes (...How?) Sex Scenes, version II

Typesetting

1st Books was OK

Prologues

Midbooks

Tone

PA Authors

ST Comments I Love It!

All PublishAmerica Titles are in the Library of Congress

Decent Typesetting
__________________
Dark Courier. A wonderful submission font. (Windows TrueType font.)

Dark Courier

Can't do the chess thing, can't do the Celtic Knotwork thing?

("Right brain" is supposedly Random, Intuitive, Holistic, Synthesizing, Subjective, and Looks at wholes. I'm not sure I believe it.)

I have two other metaphors for writing a novel. Anon, anon.

Turned in a novel a week ago Monday, turned in a proposal to my agent this last Monday, and I'm trying to get a short story finished by Friday. It's been a bit intense.



[END OF MARCH 2004]

[MacAllister]

James D. Macdonald
Learn Writing With Uncle Jim

This is part of the longer series on Metaphors for Plot.

-------------------------------------

My father, W. Douglas Macdonald, was a chemical engineer and an electrical engineer. Most of his life he worked for building materials companies, including Glidden paint, US Plywood, and Eucatex. He died entirely too young, 72, of congestive heart failure secondary to chronic obstructive pulmonary disease; that is to say, smoking killed him. (Note to everyone: If you smoke, quit right now.) I miss him very much.

That was his professional life; his hobby was modelmaking, specifically ships and model railroads. He won contests in the 1920s for his model railroad cars. Back when I was young, he let me help him with his modelmaking (talk about your love: the help of six-year-olds can be a challenge). That was where I learned modelwork, which I still enjoy.

All the arts are related; modelwork and novel-writing. Both center on making a world in miniature, a false seeming that convinces the viewer/reader of its reality.

Herewith some lessons I took away, and use in my own works:

No matter how good your model is, it won't be perfect. No matter how much praise you get, no matter what awards you win, you'll never be able to look at that model and see anything but its imperfections.

No one counts the rivets on a moving car.

If you suggest detail, the viewer will add his own details.

The rivets on model cars are badly out of scale. To have visible rivets, they'd have to have heads the size of softballs.

Painted plastic, painted wood, and painted metal all look the same.

It isn't a model until you add people. Before that, it's a clever machine, perhaps, or a toy. Characters bring their own reality, and bring the person looking at the model into the story. Your models tell stories; if you have a car that's got mud on it, or rust, or scrapes and dents, it has a history. The viewer won't know what the dent came from, but he'll know that the car has been places, done things, and subconsciously won't think of it as something that just came from a modelmaker's workbench.

----------------------------------

Another thing: there were always hidden things, that only the modelmaker knew about. These made the model real to him, and if it was real to him, it would be real to the viewers. For example, once we made a model of the
submarine USS George Washington (http://www.modelshipgallery.com/gall...598-index.html). This was a plastic model with a hinged side that could be opened to show the interior. One of the interior spaces had a door that led to the food storage reefer. My dad built and painted scale model hams, hung them in the walk-in refrigerator area, then continued with the model, sealing that area off where it would never be seen.

Sometimes the best model for a thing is the thing itself: nothing looks so much like a load of coal in a hopper car than crushed coal in a hopper car.

Don't put things square on bases; use diagonal lines. They suggest motion.

A frame makes the model seem more real than it otherwise would appear.

Let the paint dry before you touch it.

If you can't see the world you can't model it.

---------------------------------

I haven't built model railroads, though I love doing model ships and model houses.

Herewith are some exercises for y'all; not too expensive, and again (I promise!) will help your novel writing. (Or, anyway, it's helped mine.)

First off, get yourself a nice HO scale paper model house. Two I've done are Cut and Assemble Victorian Cottage and Cut and Assemble Victorian Shingle-Style House. Of the two, the latter has the greater story possibilities.

Build one of the houses. In the building of it, add one interior room. (If you want, you can open doors and windows with your X-acto knife to give other people a chance to see it, or not.) Note: while the instructions don't say it, paint the insides of the chimneys black! If you leave them white, the illusion is broken. If you blacken them, the illusion is strengthened. Anything that
doesn't add to the illusion detracts from it.

Now place the model on a base. Landscape it. (Landscaping can cover a multitude of sins.) Spring, summer, autumn, winter scenes all have different feels.

Add people. These tell your story. If you put in a group of folks having a garden party, it's a different story from the model that has a police car and an ambulance pulled up out front of the house, with detectives, dogs, uniformed police, and a stretcher with a sheeted form being wheeled out the front.

Don't skimp on the people. In my model of the shingle-side house, one figure (of several) cost more than the rest of the materials combined. I found it in a hobby shop, and knew that this was the figure I needed. The more realistic the little plastic people, the more real the entire model will appear.

That's it. Learn to see the world. Discover that tree trunks aren't brown; they're grey. See how the same basic, off the rack things, when arranged in various ways, with you choosing the arrangment, make different, unique, artistic stories. Discover that when you mix paint for your Pullman cars using paint chips taken from real Pullman cars, that they look too dark -- you have to lighten the paint to make it look right. Looking right is more important than being right.

The models don't look like much until you have them all put together, landscaped, populated, and framed. Then ... they're magic.

-------------------------------

Now an exercise for everyone: As you drive along, you'll meet cars coming the opposite direction. Look at the other drivers. You have from the moment they come into view until the car is abreast of you to give them names, and brief histories. In heavy traffic you'll be doing a lot of naming and history-provision. Make sure the names and histories fit their appearances.

Right on, Karen.

I tell my readers everything they know -- but I don't tell them everything I know. If you know who your heroine's best friend was in fifth grade, and where she went on vacation in the summer between fifth and sixth grade, your character will be consistent in her later actions, in the story that you're telling your readers.

This is another bit of the modelwork question: A viewer can only see three sides of the model house. He assumes, because he knows what houses generally look like, and because you made the angles correctly, that there is a fourth side. This may not be true, you may not have a fourth side on that model house -- but the viewer will supply it.

The viewer also supplies an interior to that house, even though it may quite literally not exist... that's why I suggest that you build at least one interior room in your model house. You will know that it's there, and your knowledge will be transmitted to the people who see your model, through your increased confidence.

Even if you don't want to build a paper model house (though I suggest that you do -- all of the arts are related) you can still play with the Putting A Storebought Thing Into Another Storebought Setting and Creating Something Uniquely Your Own in the Process by using one of those little Collectible Cottages (http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&l...++&btnG=Search) and some model railroad landscaping (http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&l...ng&btnG=Search). Here's where to get workshop instructions (http://www.woodlandscenics.com/collectiblehouses.htm) for doing that.

Remember when I said, long ago, that you had to follow along and work the problems to see what I mean? This is another one of those where I suggest you really try.

How many of y'all have memorized that speech from Richard II? How many have retyped the first chapter from a favorite novel?

He longs for a smoke, but he doesn't dare touch a cigarette.

OR

He longs for a smoke, but he doesn't dare touch a cigarette, not after quitting after five years of struggle.

Not enough information to tell which is "better." What's the chapter it's in look like? What's your usual style? What else is going on?

Is it even necessary to mention him longing for a smoke? Me, I'd just say He longed for a smoke and leave it at that.

If you write fantasy or sci-fi, you tend to have to describe the settings, people, etc. in great details because you're putting the readers in a strange world.

I dunno about that. I've written a series of SF books that includes faster-than-light spaceships.

All we know about the way those spaceships work is this:

They have engines.
The engines have tubes.
They need fuel.
A hyperspacial reference block is a neccesary part.
That reference block can get out of alignment.
When it gets out of alignment, you need a synchmeter to fix it.

That's plenty, don't you think?

Remember this: books are about people, and people are people no matter where or when.

Right on, Karen.

Writing/reading is an act of co-creation. (That's one reason writers want readers....)

We don't give folks an experience, we give them the blueprint with which they build their own experience. We give them two points; they construct the rest of the line.

You don't know how much this lady annoys me. She isn't a mid-list writer. I'm a mid-list writer. She's a wannabe front-list writer who's discovering that she might be a mid-list writer (Sob! Horror! Woe!).

Here are a couple more responses to that thing:

This one has some very good advice for all writers.

Here's a dead-on accurate parody of the original weepy article.

You can indicate these with italics (which are indicated by underlines in your manuscript), or by saying "Bill thought," or by some combination of the two.

Entire paragraphs of italics are hard to read. If your book includes entire paragraphs of thought, consider writing it another way, or indicating thoughts in some other way.

Don't worry about it. House style is going to rule in any case.

Oh, yes, another link:

This piece has many insights on writing and the writing life. It's all true, too.

Why 98% of the slushpile is unpublishable.

Is there a difference between these sentences:

Billy was kind to animals.
Billy was not unkind to animals.

In the first, Billy is kind to animals. In the second, Billy could be kind to animals, or he could be indifferent to them. He could be anything at all in relation to animals except unkind to them. The second sentence is more ambiguous.

I'll overlook the obvious differences in sentence rhythm and complexity, though those might take more importance when you're figuring out which sentence to use in a given paragraph.

International Slushpile Bonfire Day (http://www.revolutionsf.com/article.html?id=950)

Quote:
New York -- One of the most onerous tasks in the magazine and book trade is the sifting of the slush pile. Slush piles, the collection of unsolicited and unagented manuscripts sent to publishers by beginning or would-be authors, are sometimes the source of future literary successes, but more often than not are the source of headaches and indigestion. Many editors privately complain and scream about the uselessness of slush piles, but fearing a backlash from beginning writers who already assume conspiracies keep their work from being printed, very few speak out about the quality and quantity of the material received.

With this in mind, the international literary community announced a special amnesty day for those long-suffering editors forced to sift through manuscripts where everything but the name of the author was misspelled on the title page. April 31, 2002 marks International Slushpile Bonfire Day, where editors and publishers are encouraged to collect all of the unreadable or unusable manuscripts that have built up in their offices, in some cases since 1968, and burn them while drinking wine and singing songs. Since one of the worst offenders is the science fiction / fantasy / horror triumvirate, SF, fantasy, and horror editors are allowed to place the first documents and light the pile when complete.

-------------------------



And while we're at it: Brilliant Sri Lankan Novelists Go Home

Quote:
NEW YORK, May 14 (UPI) -- Did you ever notice that the books in the airport reading rack -- the books that everyone actuallyREADS -- are never the books that are reviewed in the big Sunday book sections?

You're British, writing in Britain, presumably for British markets? I'd say a British dictionary should be your choice.

[font=Verdana]I reiterate:

If a reader tells you that there's a problem in your book at a certain point, he's almost invariably right. If he tells you what the problem is or how to fix it, he's almost invariably wrong.

-----------------------------

And it occurs to me, this advice seems valuable with regard to lots of other information, as well--setting descriptions, character appearances, etc. In short, all those details that we, as writers, spend sooooooooo much time lovingly dreaming up, thinking through, and writing down in our notebook/compendiums to ensure consistency (wait a sec--were Bill's eyes blue, or brown, in chapter two. . .)

This is related to making every word reveal character, advance the plot, or support the theme. Better still is if the words do two or three of those things all at once. Hold a gun to each word's head and make it justify its existence. Every word needs to be the right word, in the right place. (See above, the discussion of that opening paragraph from a chapter, with the fellow who just got finished with a police interrogation who goes walking by a river with his girlfriend.)

Anything that doesn't add to the story subtracts from it.

Consistency helps you avoid illusion-breaking. But just because you know something doesn't mean you have to tell your readers. The readers will assume that anything you tell them is important, and hold it in mind, expecting you to use the inforrmation later in your story. It's possible to overload your readers.

BTW, if you ever do cut-n-paste all my posts together into one document, if you'd send me a copy....

Sure, I don't have a problem with that, provided there's credit given, and a link back here.

Though, I think I'd like a chance to go through and edit the final document .... and it's likely the discussion will continue.

I (believe it or not!) do intend to write a few more multi-screen posts on Writing.

Chicago Manual of Style? Hah! I got yer Chicago Manual of Style hangin'!

Go Fowler!

Here (http://www.bartleby.com/116/index.html) is the ultimate reference for every question you ever had about English usage. And it's free!

Or, get it in hardcopy (http://www.powells.com/cgi-bin/partn...for=0192813897), suitable for smacking other members of your writing group upside the head.

It sure is a balancing act trying to convey what you want while leaving enough room for the reader to create an image of the story and the characters for themselves.

This isn't actually hard: Only include those details that are important to the story, and don't include the details until the reader cares about those details.

You pretty much have three choices ...

Shorten the scene significantly -- only one question.

Show the scene from someone else's point of view.

Delete the scene and let your character's subsequent actions reveal her thoughts.

In my never-ending stream of copying my earlier posts from elsewhere: this is from Making Light.

--------------------------

Let's see if I can clarify a bit more about the difference between vanity publishing and recording your own music to sell after your gig:

There's no quality control in the world of vanity press publishing.

With the self-published musician, there is quality control. If the musician weren't at least half-way competent, he'd never have the gig in the first place to sell the disks after the show. And you've already heard his music, and you've liked it enough to want to have a bit of it to take home.

With the self-published fiction author, most times the manuscript is ... slush. No one would read it willingly.

The exception to this is in non-fiction. If you happen to be the world's foremost expert on some obscure subject, you can write and self-publish a monograph and have people pay you for a copy. If you're delivering lectures from the platform, you can say "Copies of my book are available at the back of the hall," and no one will blink. If you're written a local history, you can sell it in a local bookstore -- no interest anywhere else in the country, lots of interest right in that one location.

Note, though, that in all those cases there is quality control. You first have to have a reputation as the world's expert on something, or you have to have hired and filled the hall, or you have to have convinced the bookstore owner to carry your book. None of those things are easy.

If someone says "It's easy. Just give me your credit card...." that person doesn't have your best interests at heart.

---------------------------

Another factor in quality of product in the vanity fiction area is the availablity of legitimate outlets.

If you were living in the 19th c. and you'd written the very best erotic novel in the world, it couldn't get legitimately published, and so would be privately printed. A fair number of the privately printed 19th c. erotic novels are pretty good.

Here, now, if you've written the very best erotic novel in the world, there are any number of legitimate, advance-and-royalty paying, sales in major bookstores, publishers who will be slavering to hear from you. Thus the only erotic novels that are vanity published are either a) very badly written, or b) of such small niche interest that it wouldn't repay publication (the erotic potential of women's right middle toes, and even then if the book is really the Best in the World, it could be legitimately published as Magic Realism and those who liked that sort of thing would get an extra bonus), or c) actively illegal (pre-teen bestiality incest, frex) (And some of those can be well-written too, if you can get past the squick factor).

Getting down to the main point: if you've written the greatest sword-and-sorcery novel in the world, lots of publishers will be lining up to publish you. If you've written a basically competent sword-and-sorcery novel, lots of publishers will be ready to publish you. If you've written a pretty-much-okay sword-and-sorcery novel and the timing's right, the book will get published, though perhaps after a few rejections.

Which means that the only sword-and-sorcery novels that you'll find from the vanity press are the ones where the author's only writing skill is the ability to write a check, and the very, very, exceedingly rare good book whose author was totally scammed. But no one will ever hear of that very, very rare book because readers and bookstores and everyone else go "avert! avert!" when they see the vanity label.

Very few read slush manuscripts for fun. No one reads a second slush manuscript for fun.

---------------------------

I've been reading The Gangs of New York which has some interesting descriptions of con games and swindles from the 19th c., things like selling gold bricks, the banko game, and a variant on the pigeon drop.

In the variant, the con man approaches a fellow and offers to sell him a bag of counterfeit money for pennies on the dollar (one enterprising grifter sent out advertising flyers through the mail making the offer). The bag of money is shown, and the mark is invited to take a sample to any bank to have the bill checked out -- it's such a perfect counterfeit that no bank clerk can detect the fakery. The mark takes the bill, goes, and wow! It really does work! This is great stuff. He comes back, buys the whole bag of counterfeit money, and -- when he opens it -- finds only cut up newspaper. (Need I mention that the reason the counterfeit bill passes muster is because it isn't really counterfeit?)

(Another scam, not mentioned so far in that book at least, involves going to the racetrack and going around advising people about horses that are sure winners. The trick is that you recommend every single horse that's running in a given race to various people. In the course of talking with the mark, you slap him on the back, putting a chalk mark on his coat. After the race, you hang out at the pay window, and watch for people with your chalk mark on his coat. As they're counting their money you come up and say "Hey, remember me? I gave you that tip. How about a tip for me?")

Not too bad a scam.

-------------------------

Back to the literary scams of the current day:

We have some nefarious deeds decribed here:

http://www.writersweekly.com/warnings/helping.html

And more about the Helping Hand Agency here:

http://www.sfwa.org/beware/general.html#titsworth

Find out the name of the detective assigned to the case!

-------------------------

Here's something:

Not to be confused with the well-known http://www.promedia.com/ we find http://www.promediainc.net/.

Promedia Entertainment has apparently been placing newspaper ads all over the place, selling their training materials.

Who knew that there was such a screaming shortage of script readers in Hollywood that folks who had taken a $50 videotaped course could get high-paying jobs working at home reading scripts?

---------------------------
---------------------------

And ... next, a grammar quiz:

Golly.

How Grammatically Sound Are You?

I, of course, am a Grammar God.

Frex = For Example (i.e., e.g.).

Hi, Steve Eley, good to see you here!

Yes, I do have fun, and that's excellent news about your novel.

Now a minor brag of my own, and a digression.

First, the brag: We had two short stories come out last year: one original, one reprint. Both of the anthologies they appear in are listed here: VOYA (Voice of Youth Advocates) Best Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror 2003.

That's a major review venue, and it's nice to be noticed. The specific anthologies are New Skies and Crusade of Fire: Mystical Tales of the Knights Templar.

In further good news, today's mail brought a royalty check for $17.50. Not much, but those checks have been arriving every six months for the past nine years for one short story in one anthology. It does add up over time; no further work required on our part.

This brings us to the digression:

Anthologies.

Here's the way fiction anthologies work:

An editor pitches an anthology idea to a publisher. ("We'll get Stephen King, John Grisham, Tom Clancy, and a few other people to contribute....")

The publisher likes the idea, and writes a contract with the editor, sending the editor an advance. Standard royalties, you know the deal.

The editor then sends letters to King, Clancy, and Grisham, all of whom write back polite notes saying words to the effect of "So sorry, much too busy."

At this point the "a few others" clock in, because one of them can be you. The editor lets it be known that he's reading for an anthology, with the following title, following theme (can be anything from very specific to very broad), that the deadline is this, the lengths requested are that, and off you go.

The editor selects from this vast slush-heap (the size of the slush heap varying by how well known he is, and how widely noised-about the anthology is) the dozen or so stories he wants. Edits them, all that.

If the editor is canny, he will pay on acceptance (you get a better quality of slush that way). If he's stingy, he'll pay on publication. If he's a moron who has spent all the advance money on a flashy website, or a cheap bastard who has decided to keep the money all for himself, there won't be any money at all (don't submit to those anthologies, kids!).

The stories come in, the payments go out (3-5 cents a word, whatever).

The anthology is printed. Most times it sinks without a trace, you take your story and try to resell it to other markets.

Sometimes, though, the anthology earns back its advance. There are royalties! Hurrah!

The editor gets those royalties. You haven't signed a contract with the publisher, you've signed your contract with the editor.

Generally, the editor keeps 50% of each royalty check, and divides the money among all the authors who contributed to the anthology. There are two ways of splitting it up: one is by the page (pro rata, this is called). So if the royalties are $100, the editor keeps $50, and divides the rest among the authors -- your story is ten pages out of a 350-page book, you get $1.43.

The other way is by dividing the money by the number of stories. Same $100 royalty, same $50 to the editor, you your ten-page story is one of a dozen stories in the book, you get $4.16.

The contract you have with the editor will specify how the royalties will be divided; pro rata or per story.

That's the way it's supposed to work.

Now I've had stories where the very first royalty payment was over $800. Selling to a book that sells well is a great way to live. I've had stories that have kept contributing small amounts to the household grocery fund for years -- over a decade in one case. Selling to a constantly-in-print anthology is nice.

What you don't want to do is sell all rights for a one-time-flat-fee (or, even worse, for nothing at all). You want to have profit participation in all of your words, and keep the rights yourself.

End of digression.

Hi, Hannibal --

If you haven't started from the beginning of this thread ... maybe you'd like to?

We'll Always Have Paris

Like I keep saying: Celebrities are in a different ball game from the rest of us.

I've gone into outlining several times upthread.

Basically, the old Roman numeral/letters/numbers outline style is particularly useless for novels, IMHO.

I like things a lot more organic.

The roadtrip/map idea is interesting, and might be useful. As long as you aren't doing it literally.

The way to finish a work is to set aside a time every day during which you do nothing but write. You don't have permission to stop for any reason, or to rewrite, until you've reached THE END. This too is explained in more detail upthread.

While I'm sure details about life in Hungary would be fascinating, I don't think this is the thread to put them in.

Sure, Chris, there are exceptions. Publishing in general is one big exception.

You had a good, valid reason to self-publish. You wanted a limited number of copies by a certain date. That your book sold outside of your immediate family is a plus.

Poetry is one of the genres where self-publication is traditional.

As far as using PoD self-publication or vanity publication as a way to reach the general reading public, though ... I wouldn't recommend it. "The race is not to the swift nor the victory to the strong, but that's the way the smart money bets."

-----------------------

Note on my use of the word "genre" here. There are four genres: Poetry, rhetoric, drama, and fiction.

----------------------

In other depressing news, the Garfield movie novelization is out. Those of you who have been trying to perfect your craft, and finding the frustration of submitting/rejection/submitting again wearing on the nerves will look at that book (or, worse still, try to read it ... a prize to anyone who makes it all the way to the end of chapter one!) and despair.

That book reads like it was written by a pro over the course of a long weekend, fueled by a pot of coffee and a case of beer; either that or it was written by the producer's cousin who always wanted to write a book.

That book was not published because it was an outstanding piece of literature. It was published because a Hollywood movie gets a novel (paid for out of the advertising budget). Pay no attention to this; it's not part of the set of things that are under your control. Rather, think that the money Hollywood paid to have that book published will help pay your advance, and the money Hollywood is paying the bookstores for placement of that book will help pay the salaries of the clerks who will recommend your book to their customers.

And think that if you get a reputation as a writer who's easy to work with, who can reliably hit deadlines and come in on-length, that someday you may be the pro who gets that movie deal; a five figure advance for a long weekend's work, fueled by coffee and beer.

An outline is a planning document. Some people find them useful in constructing a novel.

Uncle J, did you read the companion book to "Terminator 3"?

I darn-near wound up writing it. But ... it didn't look like the fun-to-money ratio was right on that one, and based on what I heard afterward I was right. Dodged the bullet on that one.

My thoughts on fan fiction?

Well, why not ask me to walk through a minefield instead?

It can be useful when you're practicing at home alone, when you're doing exercises creating plots using predefined characters. However ... that's for you, at home.

You'll eventually have to create your own characters, too. Why not now?

As far as submission material to Viable Paradise, I would rather see something of your own, even if it's less polished, rather than a fan piece.

I'm aware of a line of fanfic erotica stories based on Mr. Spock from Star Trek.

A goodly number of them featuring Mr. Spock and Captain Kirk as gay lovers. Let's not get into a big discussion of fanfic, okay?

People write it. It's okay for you to write it, if you're doing it as an exercise in story construction and plot, where you don't have to come up with your own original characters and backgrounds. Just don't publish it.

(Yes, yes, I know all about the parody and fair-use defenses in copyright infringement suits. This isn't the time or place to discuss them. If you want to write and publish fan fiction, what you do is become a professional writer, then let it be known to the people who own the rights that, if they want to have a novel set in some TV or movie world, you're available. There are lines of Star Trek and Star Wars novels. (In earlier times there were Bonanza novels, Man From U.N.C.L.E. novels, and Brady Bunch novels. I kid you not.) I don't think that J. K. Rowling will want anyone to write a line of Harry Potter novels for her, but hey, stranger things have happened.)

First, work on your own stories: your own characters, your own situations.


You aren't asking for much, are you, Chris?

Okay, open with a noble knight riding along the way. He's got a prancing white horse, a noble gleam in his eye, a hawk on his wrist.

There he goes. Whizz! A crossbow bolt comes out of the underbrush. Hits him in the jaw, he's down, he's out.

The gent with the crossbow comes out of the brush, walks up to the noble knight's body, takes the money purse from the knight's belt. Opens it, takes out three silver pence. Says "Next time, pay your gambling debts."

Leaves the rest of the money, all the rich trappings.

Next, the knight's sword gets picked up by a peasant. He has no use for a sword, but he has a need for a new coulter for his plow. Blacksmith puts it on the plow.

The knight isn't dead, but he's hurt bad. He recovers, but never again is able to speak nor eat solid foods.

The three pieces of silver are melted to make nails to hold together a small wooden chest.

The bread made with the grain grown from the field plowed with that sword has mystic properties.

The knight becomes a monk, goes begging. He's got religion. He can hardly talk, but he can preach.

The monk eats some of the bread, and is cured. He cuts out his own heart, and puts it in the wooden box. He carries it with him.

The kingdom which the knight is no longer protecting is under siege by the Powers of Darkness. (That is, it's so dark that wheat won't grow. Bad weather, bad crops. Only the one enchanted field is still producing.)

The monk determines to find the source of the bad weather-luck. He goes into the wilderness. There he finds an old woman who is starving. He offers her his heart which is in the box. She eats it, and becomes a) strong, b) well, and c) the guy with the crossbow back from the first page.

The monk is now healed, has his heart back, and is able to talk. He returns to where he was heading back on page one, where he becomes the rightful king. The bad weather is over. The enchanted field is never seen again. There is much rejoicing.

The end.

-------------------------

That's a short story. That's a lime pie. For a novel, then's the ship and the chessgame and the house and knot.

So, death and rebirth, journey, power of threes, king's health linked to the land's health, and the sacrament of the Eucharist, all rolled together. After this it's just typing.

I want to know what happened to the hawk on his wrist.

Who did you think was telling the story?

Tell ya what, Chris -- now you can go out and buy some of my short stories. And buy some of my novels, too.

(You want to see me write a novel? I'm doin' it every day. Check your bookstores.)

This is quite enough to start baking the pie writing. When you get to The End, revision and rewrite, make it all smooth.

Once it's done as well as you can make it, send it out to markets likely to buy it. For cash.

That idea looks like about a 7,500 word idea.

---------------------

The power of threes:

In Western society, Three (http://web.cn.edu/kwheeler/documents/Numerology.pdf) is a very powerful number. Look at all the things that come in threes. Ready, set, go. Three is the number of perfection. Three rings for the elven kings. The Trinity. The two wicked stepsisters plus Cinderella. Three wishes. Christmas Past, Christmas Present, Christmas Yet-To-Come. The Fates. The Wyrd Sisters.

Pretty much everything that doesn't come in threes comes in sevens. (Or nines, which is three threes. Or forties -- which means A Whole Bunch.)

These things are embedded deeply in our culture. If you use them, your reader won't know why, but your reader will think that this is right.

Hannibal:

Too young to be a writer at 23?

I started when I was twelve.

I sold when I was 35.

Everyone's path is different.

If you are sitting in your chair, making your fingers move on your keyboard, putting words on paper you are a writer.

What defines a writer is writing. Go. Write.

--------------------------

Chris: Your assignment is to take that very bare-bones outline and make it into a 7,500 word story by the end of the week. I grant you all rights.

You must write all the way to THE END. (If it turns out different from that outline that's okay!)

Lay it aside for a week.

Read it aloud.

Rewrite it for a week.

Send it to trusted friends for a week.

Revise it for a week.

Send it out (to paying markets only) until Hell won't have it.

That's your penance for making Bambi-eyes.

I have to go write another chapter in a fantasy novel set in the America Civil War, but before I go....

If you want one in Swedish, Främlingens Önskan. I liked that one best of the entire series, though I liked the series quite a bit. That's the series that was based very formally on a six-pointed Celtic knot.

It's a short -- middle grades -- novel.

Here's another novel y'all might like: Uncle Joshua and the Grooglemen.

Buy one! Better still, buy a dozen! They make excellent gifts!

Here, for free, a complete story: The Last Real New Yorker in the World. It should be pretty obvious to you why it'll never be reprinted.


-----------------------

Want to see our Very First Short Story? It's in this book (Werewolves: A Collection of Original Stories). That was the first story we submitted, and the story sold to the first place we sent it to. (Okay, everyone, you can turn green with envy now.)

Want to see the first story I wrote after the Long Dry Period (between when I was 19 and when I was 30) when I wrote no fiction? It eventually got published here (Between the Darkness & the Fire). The story is "The Little Prune that Couldn't Talk."

It too sold to the first place I sent it ... it's just that I waited nearly twenty years to submit it.

a) Perhaps more appropriate in one of the "Share Your Work" groups.

b) We won't revise until after you've gotten to THE END.

c) Keep going.

It all turns to crap between first writing and reading. That's why you put the work in your desk drawer for a month after you've written it, to let it age and let all the crap drain off.

First posted here. (http://p197.ezboard.com/fabsolutewri...art=41&stop=41)

And recopied here.


----------------------------

From today's news:

She's a bestselling author -- at 15
Flavia Bujor's European hit now in America

Thursday, April 22, 2004 Posted: 11:37 AM EDT (1537 GMT)


NEW YORK (AP) -- After a few years of starting stories that never got finished, Flavia Bujor decided it was time she completed something.

So at the age of 12, she decided to write a novel. She was 14 when the book was published.

CNN


This is relevant in that a) publishing at an early age isn't impossible, but b) it's so rare that it's newsworthy when it happens.

So don't worry.

A couple of aphorisms:

Plot will get you through times with no style better than style will get you through times with no plot.

This comes from one of the smartest editors I know:

Plot is a literary convention. Story is a force of nature.


-------------------------

Literary tastes change.

Here are the best-sellers of the 1860s:

1860 Edward S. Ellis, Seth Jones
1860 Miriam Coles Harris, Rutledge
1860 Ann Stephens, Malaeska
1863 E.D.E.N. Southworth, The Fatal Marriage
1863 A.D.T. Whitney, Faith Gartney's Girlhood
1864 E.D.E.N. Southworth, Ishmael
1864 E.D.E.N. Southworth, Self-Raised
1865 Mary Mapes Dodge, Hans Brinker and His Silver Skates
1867 Horatio Alger, Ragged Dick
1867 Augusta Evans, St. Elmo
1868 Louisa May Alcott, Little Women

Okay, of those you've seen a movie version of Hans Brinker, you've heard of a "Horatio Alger story" (without ever having read one), and you've read Little Women, right?

Look at the list from a hundred years ago:

1900 Mary Johnston, To Have and To Hold
1901 Winston Churchill, The Crisis
1902 Owen Wister, The Virginian
1903 Mrs. Humphry Ward, Lady Rose's Daughter
1904 Winston Churchill, The Crossing
1905 Mrs. Humphry Ward, The Marriage of William Ashe
1906 Winston Churchill, Coniston
1907 Frances Little, The Lady of the Decoration
1908 Winston Churchill, Mr. Crewe's Career
1909 Anonymous [Basil King], The Inner Shrine

Of those, you've seen the movie version of The Virginian and know one line from it ("When you call me that, smile"), and you've never heard of any of the other books or authors, right? (This Winston Churchill wrote historical romances set during the American Civil War and shouldn't be confused with Sir Winston Churchill, the British prime minister during WWII.)

Literary fame is fleeting; times change, tastes change, and the natural state of a book is Out Of Print.

Here ya go, guys: Bestseller lists, 1900-1995.

How many of those books do you recognize? How many have you read? How many are still in print?

You know what might be an interesting exercise? Find and read one book from each year's bestseller list. Shouldn't take you over a year to do it, and it'll prove an education.

Each new chapter starts half-way down a new page.

---------------------------------

There are reasons you want to start half-way down a page.

First, the Official Reason: The big blank area allows the editor lots of room to write notes, instructions to typesetters, and so on.

Second, the Real Reason: If there are fewer words on the first page, it's less likely an editor is going to bog down and stop reading on the first page. Once you've got the poor bugger turning pages, you've got him.

-------------------------------

Next: Quick'n'Dirty Story Injection Technique.

For the next month, watch a movie every night. You can do this by going to your local video rental place and picking out movies you've never seen before (extra points if you've never heard of them, even more points if you pick genres you don't particularly like), or by going to a local multi-screen theatre at a random time and seeing the Very Next Movie Showing that you haven't previously seen. Big box of popcorn is extra. Checking the movie listings in advance looking for something you want to see is not allowed.

The idea here is to fill your head with Images and Story Fragments. These will slop around between your ears and come out in Story of your own.

Yep, story bits for critique should go in Share Your Work with a note and a link here.

See announcement here: b27.ezboard.com/fabsolutewritefrm16.showMessage?topicID=397.topic

Chris's first bit plus commentary is here.

Geeze, qatz, when you did your market research did you look at Windhaven Press, Sherman Editorial Services, or dymk productions?

Fascinating info, Jeff -- and another reason to take great care when setting a story in a culture not your own.

----------------------------

Fun things:

Preamble to the Constitution, Diagrammed! (http://webster.commnet.edu/grammar/d...2/preamble.htm)


The Pledge of Allegiance, Diagrammed! (http://webster.commnet.edu/grammar/diagrams2/pledge.htm)

Those who are playing along at home can try diagramming this stanza from A Visit from St. Nicholas:

As dry leaves that before the wild hurricane fly,
When they meet with an obstacle, mount to the sky,
So up to the house-top the coursers they flew,
With the sleigh full of toys, and St. Nicholas too.

---------------------

Oh, a reflected boast: Sales (http://www.sff.net/people/greg/vppubs.html) by some of our Viable Paradise students.

Though Cultural Information about China and Japan is no more relevant here than details of horsemanship might be.

You need to be aware of as many details as you can, and you need to stay as close to the truth as you can in your fiction, to give your readers the confidence that you, the writer, know what you're doing, and to avoid throwing readers out of the story.

Thus, if you have your character going to room 4 on the fourth floor of a Japanese building, you might have some reader throw your book across the room. You want to avoid book-throwing.

--------------------

The main thing that you need to do is be consistent. You can be consistent with the real world -- as in the examples given of Japanese house numbers. If you're writing fantasy or science fiction, you need to be consistent with your own creation, sufficiently that the readers will be aware that the hidden structures are solid.

It's not enough to be consistent. You have to be consistent with something.

The primary thing to be consistent with (and here is art!) is that you have to be consistent with your theme. Your book is a lie, through and through, but the theme is true. It's that truth the readers seek. The human mind seeks truth.

Knowing and keeping your theme in mind will provide the answers to plot questions as they arrive. The details will appear if you know your theme.

The theme also governs, and is governed by, the treatment. If you're writing a humor piece, and it isn't funny, it's lost. If you're writing horror, and it isn't scary, you're lost.

Here's another secret: Write your book as if every element, the characters, the plot, the story, the events, were literally true. Find a treatment (serious, humorous, detached, intimate) that best suits the presentation of the theme you're using. Make every detail consistent.

Make every plot point so clear that even the stupidest, most distracted reader will be able to follow it. Make every plot point so interesting that even the smartest, most involved reader will find it inherently satisfying. Be clear without being boring.

If you aren't consistent, the readers won't keep their suspension of disbelief. They won't live the illusion. They won't pick your book back up.

When one bearing burns out, the engine stops. Pay attention to the bearings. Your details are the bearings that the engine of your plot turns on.

There's even a term for putting too much of your research on the page: "I suffered for my art, and now it's your turn."

Keeping the rule that only words that reveal character, support the theme, and advance the plot belong in your novel should keep you from the worst excesses.

Research your characters, keep them consistent with your research, but (like the iceberg of cliche) 90% should never be seen.

No, no one came down from Mt. Sinai and said "Only one protagonist!"

At any given spot in your story the readers should have no doubt as to which character they're watching. That isn't to say that you can't have several of equal or nearly-equal importance.

As to parallel plots: Everything comes together at the climax.

Heck, I even did one novel with two separate stories, decades apart, told in alternating chapters, that only come together at the climax.

As to the main theme being obvious: All that matters is that it be there, that you know it, and that you stay consistent with it.

Glad your husband liked the pie.

Remember the master rule: You can do anything at all provided it works.

What "works"? Something that the readers accept. More than accept -- they approve with the sound of rapidly-turning pages.

I take it as a good sign.

That's a very good sign. When your readers keep turning pages because they can't help themselves, when they hand back the manuscript and ask, all on their own, "Do you have anything else?" then you're well up the road.


Up above I said: ...the readers should have no doubt as to which character they're watching..

This is because you, the writer, the artist, are directing their attention. The source of information, the source of interest, those are where you want the readers' attention to lie.

Here's your next assignment, everyone: Go to a professionally produced stage play. Watch to see how the director is directing your interest. Sure, there are other things on stage, other people on stage, at any given moment, but you'll find you're looking at one of them. Why? What are the clues?


Now, go see a top-line, critically praised movie. How does the director direct your interest? Why do you look at one part of the screen rather than another? Where does the information that you need to make sense of the climax come from?

Now, go see a professional magician do his or her act. How does he get you to look where he wants you to look? How does he achieve his effects?

Last, read a novel -- not just any novel, but a recent best selling yet critically acclaimed novel. How does the author direct your attention? How does the author get information across?

In all of these, I'm asking you not to watch these various performaces with your Joe-in-the-street eyes. Watch them with your writer's eyes. Watch to see the how, not merely the what. Yes, this may break the illusion for you. You aren't in the theatre to fall under the illusion, not this time. This time you're in the theatre to learn how to make the illusion.

You want to make illusions. Art is art. Art is illusion. Observe, learn, do.

Pay attention to the story-telling styles and modes. Use the information you learn from how others tell stories to make your own story-telling sharper.

Novels aren't movies, but movies are stories.

The address is now p197.ezboard.com/fabsolutewritefrm3.showMessageRange?topicID=257.to pic&start=1&stop=20

I hope everyone updates their links. (And that includes you, Jenna -- the link to the Water Cooler on the Absolute Write front page is dead....)

Oh ... and if you just type in Learn Writing in Google, this thread comes up at the #1 hit.

I feel humbled by my success. I'd like to thank all the little people who helped me on my way ...

And that means that I have to come up with a nice substansive post Really Soon Now to justify the trust that y'all have demonstrated.

But first ... I have some galleys to do, for a story that will be coming out this coming October. It's a new adventure of a character we introduced in "Ecydsis" in the Otherwere anthology. (As of this morning Amazon only has 14 used copies available. Get one now before they're gone!)

(The story is "A Tremble in the Air" in Murder by Magic, which isn't even listed at Amazon yet. I'll let you know when it's available.)

In The Unstrung Harp: or, Mr. Earbrass Writes A Novel by Edward Gorey (a book that contains more truth about writing than any ten consecutive issues of Writer's Digest -- what do you mean you haven't gotten a copy yet?) we see Mr. Earbrass attend a literary dinner: "The talk deals with disappointing sales, inadequate publicity, worse than inadequate royalties, idiotic or criminal reviews, others' declining talent, and the unspeakable horror of the literary life."

What, then, are these unspeakable horrors?

I shall speak of them.

Elsewhere I've said that readings and signings and book tours rank slightly above oral surgery on the scale of Fun Ways To Spend Time.

Here are a couple of links you might look at:

A cartoon by Posy Simmonds (via the indispensable Making Light).

An article in The New York Times (via the equally indispensable Scrivener's Error).

Yes, readings and signings really are that bad. They take you away from your keyboard, which is where your major money-making takes place. The way to sell books is to a) write a book, and b) write another book. Suppose you have a really successful signing. You sell fifty books. Say these are $8.00 paperbacks, and you're making 10% royalties on them. You've just made $40, minus your agent's 15%, or $34. Which will get to you ... eventually. After the book's earned out, after reserve-against-returns has been met. In the next royalty period after that. A year? Two?

Did that pay for your gas to get to the store? Did that pay for the time you had to take off from writing? How about food and lodging? But really, it's a great Ego thing if you sell 50 books. You want to know what you'll probably get?

Nothing.

Bigger names than you or me have had no one show up to readings/signings. When John Grisham gets no one to show up (as he did in freakin' downtown Boston on one not-so-memorable occasion), where do you think we're going to fit on the food chain?

Want to talk about ego-killers?

So: survival tips.

First, do a joint reading/signing with another author. That way you'll have someone to talk to.

Second, put a bowl of Hershey Kisses on your table. That way people will come over to at least pick up some free candy. (Don't forget to subtract the price of that candy from your profits.)

Third, do your own press releases and publicity. Don't rely on the bookstore/your publisher to do that. (Subtract the price from your profits. Are we below zero yet?)

Next, when someone comes by and asks you about your book (or asks you for directions to another shop in the mall -- I've had that happen to me) don't tell them what your book is about. They'll say "I don't like [science fiction] [romance] [mysteries] [quirky literary masterpieces filled with wonderful insights into the human condition]." Instead, ask them what kind of books they like. Whatever the answer, find a way in which you can tell them that your book contains exactly those elements they mentioned. I'm sure you can do this ... novels have lots of different things in 'em, you're intimately familiar with your book, and you're creative. Go for it.

Okay, two more things for you to do:

Get and watch "Jose Chung's From Outer Space" (X-files) and "Jose Chung's Doomsday Defense" (from Millennium Season Two -- not yet available on tape or DVD). Those, too, tell the Truthiest Truth about being an author.

[MacAllister]

James D Macdonald

Learn Writing With Uncle Jim

May 2004

I've got to go through this thread and correct all my links to other Water Cooler threads.

And ... I'd appreciate a chance to read over and edit the compiled Wit and Wisdom document.

What do y'all think of creating a book over at CafePress, just as an experiment?

(I don't much like PDF, because it's hard to search, and limiting in its presentation. I can convert Word to HTML pretty easily, and have a lot of room on my own web page, if it comes to that.)

This is CafePress.

They offer a Print-on-Demand publishing option.

Let's say that the Uncle Jim book was 100 pages.

It would cost out at $9.50 for Wire-O binding, $8.50 for Saddle-stitch, or $10 for Perfectbound. Add in a tiny bit of profit for your humble narrator, and it's $9.15 retail.

Whether this would be Worth It to anyone, I don't know.


I'm not in favor of going over as a group, or of organizing at one website to go visit a community at another website, to argue with them. Now if someone wanted to issue a polite invitation to come over here?

What's the exact URL?
Now I haven't seen the discussion there -- but in general, you write the way you practice writing, and it's possible for someone to get bad habits, for some definition of "bad," writing in a particular genre or style.

I emphasize care in your writing, in choosing your words and images carefully so that they all lead in one direction and support one theme. But that's just me.

<hr>

Speaking of jealousy, here are some more Writers' Deadly Sins.


Today in the Author's Toolbag, let's look at Dramatic Irony.

In Dramatic Irony, the reader knows something that the characters in the story don't know.

Let us turn, briefly, to the historical novel The Killer Angels by Michael Shaara.

The scene is in the Confederate camp at General James "Old Pete" Longstreet's headquarters, on the night of 30 June/ 01 July, 1863. General George Pickett has come up to Longsteet with something on his mind....



In this quoted section, General Pickett speaks first:

...

"Well, sir, now I don't mean this as a reflection upon you, sir. But well, you know, sir, my Division, my Virginia boys, we weren't at Chancellorsville."

"No."

"Well, you know we were assigned away on some piddling affair, and we weren't at Fredericksburg either; we were off again doing some other piddling thing, and now they've taken off two of my brigades, Corse and Jenkins, and sent them off to guard Richmond--Richmond, for the love of God-- and now, General, do you know where I'm placed in the line of march? Last, sir, that's where. Exactly last. I bring up the damned rear. Beg pardon."

Longstreet sighed.

Pickett said, "Well, I tell you, sir, frankly, my boys are beginning to wonder at the attitude of the high command toward my Division. My boys --"

"George," Longstreet said.

"Sir, I must--" Pickett noted Longstreet's face. "Now, I don't mean to imply this command. Not you, sir. I was just hoping you would talk to somebody."

"George," Longstreet paused, then he said patiently, "Would you like us to move the whole army out of the way and let you go first?"

Pickett brightened. That seemed a good idea. Another look at Longstreet's face.

"I only meant, sir, that we haven't--"

"I know, George. Listen, there's no plot. It's just the way things fell out. I have three divisions, right? There's you, and there's Hood and McLaws. And where I go you go. Right? And my HQ is near the Old Man, and the Old Man chooses to be here, and that's the way it is. We sent your two brigades to Richmond because we figured they were Virginia boys and that was proper. But look at it this way: if the army has to turn and fight its way out of here, you'll be exactly first in line."

Pickett thought on that.

"That's possible?"

"Yup."

"Well," Pickett mused. At that moment Lew Armistead came up. Pickett said wistfully, "Well, I had to speak on it, sir. You understand. No offense?"

"None."

"Well, then. But I mean, the whole war could be damn well over soon, beg pardon, and my boys would have missed it. And these are Virginians, sir, and have a certain pride." It occurred to him Longstreet not being a Virginian, he might have given another insult.

...

We see lots of technique here -- notice the planting of information right, left, and sideways. This might be a deadly expository lump, or an As-You-Know-Bob, but it is saved by the use of dialog, and the chacterization that is being done for both Pickett and Longstreet.

We are in third-person limited in this scene -- we see Pickett's thoughts, not Longstreet's. Pickett is being portrayed as upset, and as not terribly bright. It is quite clear what Longstreet's opinion of Pickett is.

Lots of good stuff in that scene -- yet what I wanted to point up here was the use of irony. We see Pickett thinking that the war might be over without his men seeing action. But the readers of this book will certainly know that within three days most of Pickett's men will be dead, killed in the doomed hopelessness of Pickett's Charge. That is what adds the poignancy to this particular scene, what might otherwise have been a recitation of facts necessary for the reader to know, but which all of the characters would already be perfectly familiar with. Surely Pickett knows how many divisions Longstreet commands, and surely Longstreet knows where in the column Pickett's men are marching.

Without that use of irony, this scene would be out of place.

Pray notice how every word reveals character, advances the plot, or supports the theme.

What Kind of Writer Are You?

To what should be no one 's surprise, I'm a "Plot Writer."

WordPerfect? It should have a "Save As" entry under "File," where you can save as .RTF.

I use WordPerfect myself (ver. 10 -- I don't know if it'll read version 11 files).


On computer safety:

Zone Alarm freeware firewall

AdAware freeware spyware removal

AVG freeware antivirus

Popfile freeware spam filter

Grr! shareware registry protection

Hints for writers:

The spell checker in your word processor doesn't relieve you of the necessity to proofread your flippin' text.

There, they're, and their are different words. Two, too, and to are different words. It's and its mean different things.

Outside the window she heard a redundant owl.

Can someone tell me just what the hey that's supposed to mean? There was one more owl than she needed? Guys, if you don't know what a word means, look it up. If you think you know what a word means, but it isn't a word you use every day, look it up.

========

On plot-driven vs. character-driven stories: I think all stories are both plot and character driven. The difference is in the mix -- some have more of one, some more of the other.

==========

You want characters? I got characters.
He's an ungodly albino cop whom everyone believes is mad. She's an orphaned thirtysomething barmaid from a secret island of warrior women.

Those are the characters.

They fight crime!

That's the plot.

=========

Together those make story.


========

Fresie, have you