Tag Archives: craft

You are an Evil Mastermind

Author's Perspective Character Conflict Craft & Skills Leigh Galbreath Rewriting The Writing Life 8 Comments

Do you know the thing I love the most about being a writer? It’s not the creation of beautiful prose (though, that is a lovely outcome). It’s not the fact that, when I’m finally published and I gain super-author status I will be able to finally stay at home in my PJ’s for a living (hey, it could totally happen).

No, the reason I love writing is because I, with all my inadequacies and failures and social ineptitudes, get to be a villain.

Let’s face it people. From the moment we sit down to craft a story, we become devious creatures. We build human beings of our own devising just to put them through hell for the enjoyment of others. And we do it with a smile on our faces (inherently villainous). We spend days, weeks, and months picking the right words to manipulate the reader into thinking what we want them to (true super-villainy).

My fine friend, the craft of writing is a master class in being an evil mastermind.

Now, you might say that a character isn’t technically a person, so that doesn’t count.

My reply would be that you’ve obviously never been in a room full of Sherrilyn Kenyon fans. To the reader experiencing your story, the characters should always be people. Complex and issue-riddled, they have faults just like the frail flesh and blood variety. The reader has to see them as real people, or they won’t care what happens to them.

So, once the character is complete and real and human, it’s our job to knock them flat, destroy their lives, kill their friends and loved ones, maim them, torture them, and do pretty much whatever we can to make what’s left of their lives as difficult as possible. Then, we become really cruel. We make them figure a way out all by themselves. This paper person must be active, so no shortcuts, no divine providence. Providence, after all, is the realm of gods, and for your story, you are god-a villainous god. And don’t forget, like the arena of old, this is all for entertainment’s sake.

My, my. We are evil, aren’t we?

But the most dastardly part is what we do to the reader. Our entire craft is completely based on manipulation, obfuscation, and downright lying. From the reliance on descriptive word choice and using the active voice, to how characters walk and what’s in their refrigerators, we work to guide the reader’s subconscious perceptions. It’s kinda like when movie theaters used to splice subliminal advertising into their previews to get the audience to go buy things from the concession stand. Done right, the reader never knows they’re being manipulated. But make no mistake. What we’re doing is convincing the reader what to think, how to feel, and when to do both.

I’m feeling a little like Big Brother in an Orwellian kinda way, aren’t you?

Being able to manipulate the reader like this is, of course, a very difficult and delicate kind of manipulation that takes much hard work, years of on the job study, many maligning critiques (yet more proof of my point), and plotting (See? I just made a pun. I must be evil.). It’s not easy, but highly enjoyable when you see all the minions you create who will love you for being the black-hearted creature of darkness you really are.

 

Pacing and Scene Selection

Craft & Skills Frank Morin 4 Comments

Today I want to talk about story pacing.

I’m currently reading one of those books that’s really gotten into my head and I’ve been thinking about why.  The book is Princeps Fury, book 5 of the Jim Butcher’s Codex Alera epic fantasy series.  I’m really enjoying the book and the series, although I need to finish it soon so I can get it out of my head and focus on my own writing.

Two things in particular have jumped out at me while reading this book.  First, it is a big fat epic fantasy, and yet it is paced more like a military thriller:  fast, unrelenting, with constant twists and escalations.  Second, every scene drives the plot forward, escalating the conflict or twisting the plot.  There’s no downtime, no reprieves.

For me it works, even though it’s hard to maintain such a pace for such a long book.  For my wife, it doesn’t.  She prefers stories where there are breaks in the tension, where the action comes more in cycles than in one long, continuous sprint toward the end.  She needs the periodic emotional rest or she finds a story overwhelming.

Different readers have different preferences.  As authors we need to discover what pacing our story requires.  Then we need to deliver it.  Some readers will like it.  Some won’t.  But if the story isn’t paced properly, no one will.

In a thriller or a fast-action story a hard-hitting, constantly escalating pace is required or there’s not enough emotional tension for the author to achieve the sought after experience for the readers.  On the other hand, some stories have different objectives.  Some epic fantasies explore the milieu (the environment, culture, history, and customs of the worlds they’ve created).  That’s fine too.  Many readers love this type of story as long as it doesn’t get too bogged down by all the side-tracks.

The pacing needs to be appropriate or the story dies.  A common mistake that can derail the correct pacing is including the wrong scenes.  Imagine a story like the movie “Die Hard” where, in the middle of the action, the hero John McLane decides to take a hot bath and drink some tea.

Wouldn’t work.

That example’s a bit extreme, but new authors often fall into the trap of including scenes just because they’re the next sequential step in the character’s journey, even if they’re just filler material between the scenes that really matter.  Experienced authors have learned to recognize those filler scenes that do nothing in and of themselves to drive the plot forward in any meaningful way.  They learn to cut those scenes and move on to the next important action.

For authors who do a lot of exploratory writing to “find’ the story, this can be a greater challenge because the very nature of that exploratory writing will result in scenes that are useful to the author but not to the finished work.  In subsequent drafts as the author is paring the story down to its core plot line, those scenes must be removed or they will drag a story down and ruin it.

I’ve learned this the hard way.  In the early drafts of one novel I wrote I included several entire chapters that, although interesting and well written, did next to nothing to drive the plot forward.  It was hard to recognize that they had to go because in a slightly different story they would have been perfectly appropriate.

Just not in the story they happened to be in.

I had to learn to ask the question:  “If I remove this entire scene, will the reader even notice?”  The answer was “No”.  I cut the scenes and no one blinked an eye.

On the other hand, in the same novel, I got a little carried away with trimming the fat and cut an entire POV and all of its related scenes.  Beta readers didn’t know what was missing but they sensed that something was lacking in the story.  I put the scenes back and readers confirmed it filled the gap.

It can be a tricky process, but it is vital.  We as authors need to make sure we understand what emotional journey our readers will be taking as they follow our characters through the torturous adventures we throw them into.  Extraneous scenes need to go.  Scenes that do not deliver the correct tension, pacing, or emotional beat have to go or have to be corrected.

What techniques have you developed for identifying scenes to chop?

How To Write Now

The Writing Life 2 Comments

Character: Myself
Goal: To finish my damned book
Motivation: The story needs to be told
Present circumstances: Mundane life
Back story: Wrote some nonfiction. Thought I’d try my hand at fiction.

Questions:
Will gangsters kill me if I don’t finish my first draft? No.
Will the balance of political power be affected if I don’t finish my book? No.
Will the world as we know it be forever changed if I don’t finish the book? Probably not.

I keep falling off the wagon.

This is because of an insidious form of procrastination – reading how-to-write books.

When I first took up fiction a few years ago it seemed like the thing to do. “What can you recommend on how-to-write books?”

But now it’s become a full blown vice.

More than one how-to-write book has told me I need to write at least a page a day. They say I’ll have a book at the end of a year.

Some of these same books have said I need to read a hundred books in my genre before I’m qualified to write in it. I don’t know how many I’ve read, and that nagging insecurity I feel must mean I should read some more.

But maybe I can make up the difference by reading “how-to” books.

Sometimes the only down time I have is commuting. So I try to tell myself that learning a bit more about craft and structure is a productive use of time, and my Kindle tells me how to develop deep, sympathetic characters that we care about – in its endearing robotic female text-to-speech voice.

I want to write! I’ve tried all the advice about carrying a mini-recorder and putting my notes in it! But I never get around to transcribing them, they are full of hems and haws and I only really get work done when I sit down at the keyboard.

I created a separate account on my computer so I can log out of my “work” self and have an an e-mail free environment where I only write. Kind of like how you have to move the boa from one aquarium to another before you feed it, so it doesn’t think the main cage is for food.

But there’s still a web browser. No writing gets done. I bite my hand anyway.

By now, what do I need to learn? I know I need a strong narrative drive! I know that my characters need a back story but that I shouldn’t include it! I know that the three act structure is both outdated and irrelevant yet critical for a book!

I know too well that I have to create strong sympathetic characters, and if they’re morally ambiguous, a great way to do this is to give them a dog or a wife or something that makes us care.

Heck, by now doesn’t everyone know that events in the story should flow organically from the motivations our characters have? Isn’t it obvious that characters become two dimensional when they are slaves to plot?

Of course dialogue is supposed to be a compressed form of high-quality speech, what that character’s best self could say. I wish I actually had enough dialog written so that I could read it out loud to myself and see if it flows!

I have many examples of the genre beats that my story might want to hit.

Don’t even get me started on the 10-plus hours of lectures that I have been listening to and re-listening to from a recent writing conference. I’m thankful I didn’t get all three days of lectures and only took home what I could capture with my two mini recorders.

I don’t want to hear another word about 1st 2nd and 3rd person, and the different ways writers try to explain the intimate and remote 3rd person. I am fed up with admonitions not to try 1st person contrasted with encouragements to do it. I don’t care if I don’t have a good reason to use 1st person! How about “I’m writing a book” – is that good enough?

I even know that all the rules don’t matter if you’re skilled enough, and that rules were meant to be broken.

(That said, I swear by all that is holy that the choice for me is adverb-free.)

What they’re all saying, the only advice I can’t seem to take, is to finish that first draft!

I guess better writers than I can revise yesterday’s notes to get in the groove for today. But for me, that’s two steps back with no steps forward.

I know how my story ends in great detail. I’ve already started it and written most of the first act. Really, the only thing sagging about my middle act is my persistence in writing it!

It’s pretty easy, really, right? Scenes are just vignettes of conflict. And my characters have goals they’d practically die for. They have such deep motivations! I mean, how else could it be? And all I have to do is write out a bunch of scenes and I have a book, right?

I’m going to try today, to turn over a new leaf, get back on the wagon, and get through this book.

Ok I have to generate the motivation myself. Somehow.

I’m imagining the situation. I have to write the book. There’s a loaded shotgun over the mantle. Did I put it there?

My future self is furious that we’re out of money and that I’m going to die penniless and obscure, because I never finished the book.

My future self takes Chekov’s gun and aims it at my head and says,

“Write. Now.”

ThrillerFest, ePublishing, and Getting an Agent

The Writing Life 3 Comments

I recently attended ThrillerFest.

It was a four day event. Last two days are panels of famous authors and lots of awards. I saw Ken Follett speak and met and spoke for a while with Larry Beinhart. The first 1.5 days were called CraftFest, and consisted of three tracks of great panels from highly successful writers in the Thriller genre. At the end of the CraftFest was AgentFest. It was like a speed dating event, but you’re pitching agents. (Forgive my metaphor, as it’s the only one I knew offhand).

The CraftFest portion of the event was very enriching. Lectures covered topics such as “How to develop your voice”, “keeping the reader in suspense” and “point of view, psychic distance, and passive voice”.

Probably my favorite lecture was from Stephen James who had a very fast delivery style (he was covering “nine characteristics of the modern thriller”) and who had an odd technique of literally hurling free books AT the audience, and even his handouts were distributed essentially spraying a cascading fan of paper over the front few rows.

There was tons of advice given, but I heard these basic lessons reiterated and I think they are still the most valuable to give to anyone entering the field:

1) READ READ READ, good and bad, in your genre

2) WRITE WRITE WRITE

Simple no?

ePublishing

Over the last year the volume of press about self-publishing and e-publishing has been deafening. Working and writing about technology in my other life, I was very familiar with the rags-to-riches stories that had been told about application development for mobile phones, and some of these same themes were being explored in eBooks.

During the last year the here’s what I heard through all my sources — all the rumors, discussions, opinions — about e-publishing

  1. There’s no longer a stigma to being self published
  2. Publishing is transforming to digital faster than it did for music or movies
  3. E-publishing is now 20% of the bookbuying market. or 30%. Or something like that.
  4. Amazon sells more e-books than normal books
  5. Not really, Amazon sells more volume because many books are cheaper
  6. Spam eBooks are killing Amazon, and then you’ll need a filter, which will be… traditional publishers
  7. Only Amanda Hocking and Adam Locke did a million and you’re not them
  8. Borders is going bankrupt because eBooks are the future
  9. Barnes and Noble’s new focus is toys, gifts, coffee table books, games, puzzles, DVDs, CDs, and scones
  10. The way to succeed with eBooks is 1) social networking 2) writing half dozen acceptable quality books in rapid succession
  11. Literary agents have been infected with the Hollywood virus and are now out to steal your soul and all your royalties because they no longer work for you they just want to own your back catalog mwah hah ha
  12. E-royalties suck and aren’t fair in traditional deals
  13. Publishers never did anything for midlisters anyway it was all up to them to market themselves
  14. Don’t get an agent you can do it all yourself
  15. Don’t get a publisher you can do it all yourself
  16. You just need to spend a few grand for an editor and somebody to make you a good cover
  17. Oh wait, if you focus on learning social networking and building up your audience you may not have time to write
  18. If you self publish successfully you can get a traditional book deal and sell to people who don’t have e-readers and a few of those still exist
  19. $0.99 to $2.99 ebook pricing is devaluing books
  20. People can’t find your book in a bookstore if it’s e-published
  21. There’s no longer a stigma to publishing traditionally on paper

Getting An Agent

The main reason I had gone to the event was to learn about getting an agent. Here’s what I learned about THAT:

  1. You need an agent because they can submit simultaneously instead of you slowly pitching your manuscript slowly, one publisher at a time, over many years.
  2. You need a “log line” – a punchy one-line hook about your book
  3. Loglines are too Hollywood ; those are for scripts. You need a pitch line and a query letter.
  4. You need to work on your pitch a lot to make your query perfect.
  5. You must address your query letter to the agent and research the agent and address them by name and call to verify their name but you can’t nag and you can’t do anything strange or unusual in your query letter.
  6. Actually you don’t need a query letter they’re too slow. You need to go to conferences and meet an agent and pitch your book. Then they’ll ask you to send the manuscript.
  7. If the agent doesn’t like your pitch, because your one-line description of the book wasn’t short enough and perfect enough.
  8. Wow this is going to be really hard.
  9. Actually you’re interviewing the agents and you need to see if you can vibe with them.
  10. Oh wait, the right agent will like your pitch if your story is good because they’re interested, and will ask for the manuscript.
  11. If the agent doesn’t like your pitch you can simply move on. There are other agents.

Summary

The event was amazing (I’m writing spy thriller and some scifi thriller so it was a good fit for me) and I plan to go next year as well. To recap:

  1. There’s no longer a stigma to having a literary agent
  2. Read in your genre
  3. Write a lot