Category Archives: Writing Tools

A discussion of the various software that authors employ to write, plot, backup, and ultimately use to write a novel.

Relationship Rumba

Character Craft & Skills Nancy Greene The Writing Life Writing Tools 3 Comments

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Okay, before you can go to the conventions and use your elevator pitch like we talked about last month, you have to write the story. This month we’re going to focus on the craft aspect of writing. Because it’s February, and for some reason this month bring about images of mostly naked babies holding bows. we’re going to focus on relationships. Don’t groan – we aren’t going to spend the entire month talking romance, although it will be a topic this month.

Think about the stories you love. What made you love it? Not the plot. Not even the special effects. It’s the characters and their journey that takes a story from like to love.  Some of the all time most loved stories include Gone With The Wind, The Wizard of Oz, Charlotte’s Web, and To Kill a Mockingbird. Action adventure movies can be loved, but it seems to me that only happens when there’s something extraordinary about the character dynamics.  Well loved stories, regardless of genre, all have one thing in common – characters that stay with us long after we close the book.

I’m going to use one of my favorite books – The Last Unicorn by Peter S. Beagle – as an example of what I mean. Each of the characters, even the unicorn, is flawed. Schmendrick the Magician (and I didn’t have to look up how to spell his name even though my spelling is atrocious) can’t actually work magic. He’s the incompetent fool, the disappointment and the failure. He can’t touch the unicorn. He joins her quest to benefit himself, not because it’s the right thing to do. Yet, he still finds the strength to get up each morning and try to be a true magician. Molly Grue lives with bandits. She’s brash and a bit crude. Yet, her heart is pure enough to see a unicorn. King Haggard has everything, but can’t feel joy or love. The unicorn is immortal, but she doesn’t know love or regret. A misfired (or not) spell robs her of her immortality. Over the course of the story all four of these character (and Prince Lir) confront who they are.  All are searching for something more than themselves. All but one changes.

Why is this one of my favorite books? Because of the depth and beauty of the characters and their interactions. Peter S. Beagle’s A Fine and Private Place is also on my most favored books list for the same reason. I wanted the good guys to win. I wanted the bad guy to get his comeuppance.

How did Peter Beagle and all those other writers create such memorable characters?

Well, that’s what we’re talking about this month.

This month we’ll look at creating a complete characters, the “good” bad guy, and believable character interactions. We’ll spend some time on Romance in deference to St. Valentine’s holiday. But also platonic relationships between the characters and conflict in general. Please check out posts over the month, and remember it’s not too late to get that box of chocolates.

Revise Unto Death or Quit?

Character Clancy Metzger Craft & Skills Rewriting The Writing Life Writing Tools 5 Comments

The last post of 2012. Oh, the pressure!

This makes me think of endings… and beginnings. These ideas fortuitously play into the topic at hand – when should a writer abandon a scene/plot/character/work that just isn’t working rather than rewriting for the fiftieth time?

My story, A Guardian’s Destiny, was a work in process for sixteen months, give or take.  I wrote, rewrote, edited, revised, rewrote and on and on for what was longer than was good for me or it. I was halfway through rewrites that added a major character when I couldn’t take it any more.  I knew it needed fixed, but  I couldn’t figure out what the fix might be.  Frustration didn’t begin to cover how I felt.  When I stepped back and looked at it with some small measure of objectivity, I could see it had “Edit Face.”  Not pretty. So, I put it in a virtual drawer and began something else.

When do you make that call?  End one thing, begin another?

That is a personal decision, but here are some things to consider.

  • Time – How long have you worked on your scene/plot/character/work?  Think about Return on Investment or Lost Opportunity Costs.  Yes, we want our writing to be its best, but it will never be perfect and we need to recognize the tipping point where we have gone beyond productive effort.  If you could have written a multitude of other scenes/plots/characters/works in the time you’ve spent on this particular one, then maybe it’s time to let it go and move on.
  • Sanity – Is it making you crazy?  My story was.  That’s not constructive and it’s stressful.
  • Distance – Sometimes, it isn’t that you need to completely abandon your scene/plot/character/work, it’s that you need some distance from it.  Your muse may need time to gel. Time to work out exactly what the problem is and how to fix it.  It may be weeks, months, years or never.  You just never know.
  • Perspective – It’s just a story.  We’re not curing cancer. Don’t marry your scene/plot/character/work.  You need to have some perspective.  Sometimes, things just aren’t working and you need to stop.  If it helps, save all the drafts or put any deleted text into a different document.  Then it isn’t really gone, just not where it isn’t working.

A Guardian’s Destiny has been tucked away for six to ten months.  My critique partner asked to read it anyway despite my protestations that it seemed hopeless.  After all this time and with her help, I think it may be time to take it back out and finish it. With a second set of eyes and ideas, it may yet be salvageable, but I know now that if it isn’t complete in a reasonable amount of time (not months on end), then back in the drawer it goes.

Here are some sayings that I keep in mind to help me.

A certain amount of opposition is a great help to man.  Kites rise against, not with, the wind……  John Neal

It’s only a book.  If nothing is happening – hit delete and start over. …..  I don’t remember where I heard this, sorry.

When your moment of truth comes, remind yourself: They told me it would be hard. This is what hard feels like. I can do this. …..  Rachelle Gardner, Literary Agent

What do y’all think?  I’d love more great quotes and/or tales of death, birth and maybe rebirth of your scene/plot/character/work.

 

 

 

Why Revising is a good thing.

Craft & Skills Guest Posts Writing Tools 4 Comments

Guest Post by Dan Wells

Congratulations! You finished NaNoWriMo this year–a 50,000-word novel in just one month. Maybe it’s a full story, or maybe it’s just a beginning; maybe you printed out the little diploma and hung it on your wall, or maybe you didn’t even finish. Maybe you didn’t even do NaNoWriMo this year, but you have a book left over from last year, or a book that you wrote without any connection to NaNoWriMo at all. The point is, you wrote a book. Hooray! That’s a step most people never even make it to, and you’ve done it. Good for you.

Now it’s time to go back and make it better.

“Revision” is, for a lot of writers, a scary word. You may think I’m trying to give you a bunch of extra work. You may think I’m telling you that the book you wrote doesn’t count, and that you have to write the whole thing again. You may even think that the book you wrote is brilliant and doesn’t need to be revised at all. Rest assured that your book IS brilliant, and it DOES count, but that you need to revise it anyway. Revision is something that a lot of aspiring writers balk at, but experienced, professional writers never question. It is our very best friend, and, quite frankly, one of the primary reasons we are professional writers. Revision is a magical process that will turn your finished book into an excellent book; it will take your brilliant story and refine it in a way that will help everyone recognize its brilliance. Think of the recipe for your favorite food: even if you have all the right ingredients, the dish won’t turn out like you want it unless you combine them in exactly the right way–and even if the flavor is perfect, the best chefs will spend just as much time on presentation and serving, making sure that every aspect of the meal is perfect.

Or, to make things easier, I can sum up that entire paragraph in one sentence: your first draft is for what you want to say, and your final draft is for how you want to say it.

The revision process starts with distance. Remove yourself from your writing for a while–a few days, a few weeks, a few months, whatever it takes to give yourself a fresh perspective when you come back to it later. Work on other projects, read other books, and cleanse your mental palate. If you have someone willing to read your work, give them the manuscript so you can get some outside feedback. The purpose of this step is to help yourself see the book for what it is, not for what you think it is. Inside your mind you have an idealized view of the story you wanted to tell–you know what emotions you wanted to create, what reactions you wanted to elicit in the reader, and which parts of the story would be exciting or romantic or scary or sad. While you were writing it, you saw it the way you wanted it to be. Other people–and yourself, with enough distance–don’t have that idealized view, and they’ll see your story for what it really is. When you give yourself distance and come back with fresh eyes, you can compare the story on the page to the story in your head and figure out which parts worked and which parts missed the mark. WARNING: most of it missed the mark. I can tell you that without even reading it, because that happens every time, and it happens with every author. The more you write, and the more you develop your skills, the better your first drafts will be, but even your very favorite writers write bad first drafts. They do it all the time. I do it myself. The trick is to not let it get you down–don’t get depressed, don’t give up, just use this as an opportunity to fix what’s wrong. Again, think of a chef: when she tastes her latest creation and realizes there’s not enough salt, she doesn’t close her restaurant and move away and never cook again, she adds more salt. You’re not here to agonize over your problems, you’re here to solve them.

Step two, of course, is to look really closely at the problems you found in step one, and figuring out exactly what’s causing them. To continue the metaphor, step one is where you taste the food and realize something’s wrong; step two is where you figure out that it’s wrong because it doesn’t have enough salt. Like all things, this comes with practice, but you can start that practice by asking the right questions. It’s not enough to say “this book is bad,” you have to ask yourself why it’s bad. Is it boring? Are the characters unlikable? Is it hard to understand? Maybe your helpful friend who read the book told you he couldn’t figure out why the characters were doing what they were doing. Your job, as the author, is to look at those characters and their actions with a discerning eye: do they have good reasons for what they’re doing? Do those reasons connect as logically to their actions as you thought they did when you wrote it? Are those reasons clear in your mind but never really presented well on the page? Say the book is boring: does the reader have good reasons to care about what’s happening? Does the reader like the characters enough to be invested in their problems? Does the reader have all the information they need to be ready for the climaxes and the cliffhangers and the big emotional payoffs? No matter what the larger problems might be, you can dig underneath and find the specific issues that are causing them.

Once you’ve identified specific issues, step three is to figure out how to solve them. Let’s look at character motivations again: your readers (and perhaps even yourself, if you’ve created enough distance from the manuscript) are confused about why the main character is doing what he’s doing, and you’ve determined that this is because his motivations are never properly explained. There are many, many, many ways to solve this, and you need to figure out which is the right one. Do you just add a few lines of inner monologue where he explains himself? Maybe several lines, scattered throughout the book, where he reaffirms his personal beliefs? Maybe you need a new scene–the bad guys do something that affects the main character personally, so he has a clear and visible reason for opposing them. Maybe you need to add a new character: a dependent who the bad guys can hurt, or a buddy that the main character can talk to, or a romantic interest that will give the main character something to fight for. Maybe your character’s motivations rely on some key piece of knowledge she didn’t have access to in the first draft: oops! Figure out how to give her that knowledge, maybe with a mentor/traveler/newscaster/whatever who can explain it to her, or a scene of investigation or accidental discovery where she can learn it for herself.

It all boils down to this: when you look at your book critically and identify its weaknesses, you can drill deep down into what’s causing those weaknesses and figure out exactly how to make your book better. Once you’ve cleaned up the storytelling, you can do the same thing with the writing: polishing it and refining it until it’s not just good, but great. Learn how to revise, and your writing will become better than you ever imagined.

Dan Wells has a new book coming out in March called FRAGMENTS, the sequel to PARTIALS; it’s a post-apocalypse SF story about a group of plague survivors trying to rebuild civilization.  Also check out his e-novella called ISOLATION that’s kind of sort of a prequel to the series and takes place several years before the apocalypse.

Bio: Dan Wells lives in Germany with his wife and five kids. Why Germany? Why not? He writes a lot of stories, reads a lot of books, plays a lot of boardgames, and eats a lot of food, which is pretty much the ideal life he imagined for himself as a child.

What if? – Two words to unlock inspiration

Craft & Skills Frank Morin Writing Tools 8 Comments

Have you ever had a great idea for a story that thrilled you with the possibilities, only to struggle to develop it into a fully realized manuscript?  You have that scene that burns so bright in your mind, but just can’t seem to expand it into a full novel, or that character you know as intimately as yourself, but lacks the right scenes to shine? Or, maybe you just finished a work and you’re searching for the next big idea, but aren’t sure where to start?

Whatever stage of your project you happen to find yourself struggling in, there’s a simple yet powerful tool you can always turns to for inspiration.

The “What if?” game.

This game casts you beyond all bounds, out into the realm of pure imagination. There are no limitations, no hesitation. No idea is too crazy, no disaster too terrifying that you cannot consider it. Don’t hold back when playing the “What if?” game. Ask yourself, “what’s the worst possible thing that could happen in this scene, or to this character?” and then explore the possible answers.

The results can be a little scary. We need to torture our heroes, but sometimes we cringe back from the awful reality of just how bad we can make things for them. Or we hesitate because if we follow the newly illuminated road our ideas have revealed, it’ll mean a lot of mental struggle to figure out how to guide the heroes through the new difficulties to their eventual triumph.

Don’t hold back.

These are exactly the moments to take a second look and ask “what if?” again. That new, twisted, crazy idea might just be what our story needs to drive it from mediocrity to excellence. It might require more work on our part, it might torture our characters until we cry out with them, it may challenge assumptions we’ve made.

It may be awesome.

Of course, it may kill our story too by taking it off a cliff. In that case, discard that idea, ask “what if?” again, and explore a different road.

Sometimes we play the “what if?” game in the middle of free-writing a scene, when we’re struck by a sudden burst of inspiration and type a few lines that veer the story off the expected course. Again, we need to explore it, consider it, and decide if it was a false start or an exciting new twist.

In one manuscript, I wrote a scene where one character’s powerful magical weapon, which was critical to the plot, unexpectedly fell into the sea and was lost. I hadn’t planned it, but while writing the scene, I realized this was the worst thing that could happen, and I wrote it. The resulting scene became more powerful by entire magnitudes, although it left me quite literally shaking from the shock. At first I wanted to delete it, to shy away from the disaster I’d revealed, but that would have weakened the story and been the easy way out. Eventually, I figured out how to deal with it, and the story proved the stronger for it.

Recently I played the “What if?” game with a friend to explore the deep back story of a current work in progress, and after traveling far afield, we came up with some wonderful ideas I never would have considered without casting myself out into the world of limitless possibilities opened through “What if?”. Those answers now tie in aspects of the plot that were hanging a bit loose, and the resulting whole is consistent and far more powerful.

What experiences have you had with the “What if?” game? If you’ve never tried it, what are you waiting for?

What if it revitalizes your story?

What if . . . ?