A sad day for grammar purists: The Washington Post will allow “singular they”!
Category Archives: self editing for fiction writers
Which is Most Important: Character, Conflict, or Crisis?
As I’ve been reading around in the Indie-verse, I’ve found a couple of books I’ve decided not to finish. As both a writer and a reader, I’ve thought about what triggers me to abandon a book.
One feature that has stuck as a cause for my reaction can be summed up in advice Brian Klems of Writer’s Digest provided at the Writing Day Workshop I attended in Indianapolis in October:
Begin with conflict, not crisis.
In other words, writers I’m deciding sadly to give up on often begin with their characters in crisis. But Klems’s advice reminds me of a cruel but vital truth:
If I don’t know your character, I don’t care about her. If I don’t care about her, I honestly don’t care if she gets her brains blown out.
Sorry, but there it is.
When these writers begin their books, they have three Cs to deal with: Crisis, Character, and Conflict. It may sound counter-intuitive to state that, of the three, Crisis is the least important!
I know, I know: begin in medias res. But not when the folks in medias are just names on a page.
Can you pile on character, conflict, and crisis in opening scenes? I thought I’d try an experiment to find out.
Consider:
Sally found herself staring down the barrel of a gun. She stumbled backwards. He fired. The shot narrowly missed.
Crisis, big time. And a couple of what Paula Munier calls “micro-story questions,” the elements that help to deliver what she calls “narrative thrust.” Who’s shooting at her? Why? Will she escape the next shot?
Okay, I’d read on to the next bit. But if the following three pages consisted of her efforts to flee his escape, I’d be flipping ahead to see whether things got more interesting than an abstract flight-and-pursue.
What if, instead, you read:
Of course Mark was going to pull the trigger. When he threatened, he always delivered. Sally flung her hands up, stupidly, since they wouldn’t stop a bullet, and sprawled on her butt on the wedding dress jumbled on the tack room floor behind her. The gun went off in a brain-numbing explosion, the bullet slamming into the row of bridles hanging just above her head.
Take that, Mark, you scum!
We still get to the crisis pretty fast, but now we have many more micro-story questions. First, we’ve got conflict: these people have a history. It’s not just a question of why he’s shooting at her, but what between them has happened before to trigger her recognition that this isn’t a joke. “Why and who?” becomes “How does she know this about him? What has he done to make her think this now?” There’s a whole history of people in those queries.
More importantly, that wedding dress. Wedding dress? How in the world did a wedding dress get in the floor of that tackroom? And why a tackroom? We now know that these people somehow connect with horses, and that someone (Mark? Sally?) has just been through (or approached) a wedding. And he’s the determined sort who shoots first and asks questions later, while she’s (at present) a bit reactive and self-derogatory (calling herself “stupid”). Conflict and character as well as crisis—leading to a cornucopia of story questions! And all in the same number of sentences, four.
Some of my writing group colleagues are absolute minimalists and would opt for the first austere and abstract version. But to me, pure action is not nearly as engaging as action involving people I know or people I’ve been made deeply curious about.
An experiment like this leads to me be suggest that if you must demote one of the three Cs, let it be crisis! What? Start flat, with just characters in conflict? Well, yes.
As Stephen King argues, narrative tension arises not from wild, boisterous action but from people in “situations,” where they must react to each other and to the problems their situation presents.
True, you can’t spend pages on this development. It has to happen in that medias res moment, through careful pacing and selection of details.
As an illustration of how little we need a doomsday crisis, consider these opening lines from Suzanne Rindell’s The Other Typist:
They said the typewriter would unsex us.
One look at the device itself and you might understand how they—the self-appointed keepers of female virtue and morality, that is—might have reached such a conclusion. Your average typewriter, be it Underwood, Royal, Remington, or Corona, is a stern thing, full of gravity, its boxy angles coming straight to the point, with no trace of curvaceous tomfoolery or feminine whimsy. Add to that the sheer violence of its iron arms, thwacking away at the page with unforgiving force. Unforgiving. Yes; forgiving is not the typewriter’s duty.
We’ve got character, even though we haven’t met the speaker. We’ve got conflict: That nameless “they” is already on trial! I haven’t yet read this book Will I? If it lives up to this crisis-deprived opening, you bet.
Quick Tip: Build Character with Stage Business
In my recent exploration of indie novels about horses, I’ve noticed a way that some of these authors could enliven their stories considerably: by making smarter use of stage business.
By stage business, I mean the interactions between characters and their environments, usually involving elements of setting and, in particular, props—the things they handle as they respond to each other.
Most of the authors I’m reading quite rightly use stage business to give readers a sense of setting, to give us a sense of “being there” in the scene, and to punctuate dialogue—for example, to break up a long speech. But this element can work a lot harder than it often does.
Make that cup of coffee talk!
For example, let’s look at the possibilities offered by a fairly common scene: people sitting around a table drinking coffee. To frame the dialogue, we’re told, “He took a sip of his coffee.”
I guess he would, if he’s got a cup and it’s likely to get cold. So there’s really no information here.
But what if:
He waved the nearly full cup around so violently she was afraid he’d sling the contents onto the spotless white table cloth.
Or
In his huge, clumsy hands, the mug looked as fragile as bone china.
Or
He lifted the cup with both hands clutched around it, as if grateful for its feeble warmth.
Suddenly, “taking a sip” tells us something about the character and the situation he finds himself in.
Here’s another example.
She put on her cowboy hat. “Let’s go see what’s up in the corral.”
There’s a big difference between that bit of info and:
She snatched up a dusty cowboy hat stained and dinged with long use and smashed it onto her short black curls. “Let’s go see what’s up in the corral.”
Lady 2 promises a lot more action once we reach the corral than Lady 1. Now that hat talks!
True, it’s important to practice this strategy in moderation. Pacing a scene requires an author to balance forward momentum with information, no matter how exquisitely revealing that information seems to be. I once got slapped down pretty good over a character fidgeting with a paper clip through a long scene. As I recall it, my reader’s marginal comment was, “That paper clip is really getting on my nerves.”
In drafting, as is usually the best move, over-generate. Come up with stacks of double-duty stage-business gems. Then glean for the one best one, the one that really delivers the “telling detail.”
What are some of your best “stage business” lines? I’d love to hear!
Indie Writers: Do you WANT two-star reviews?
Recently, as part of my education in self-publishing, I’ve expanded my reading to include indie books about horses, as my own republished novels feature racing backdrops. My selections have mostly been prompted by mentions in Goodreads groups and the “customers also bought” list at Amazon.
In the past, I’ve tended to stick with books off “year’s best” lists, like those at NPR or the New York Times, so this new reading has taken me into new territory. It has also led me to do a lot of thinking about what works for me and what doesn’t—and whether I’m managing to purge my own writing of a pile of sins.
And it has created a dilemma I’ve read that others face: whether or not to review a book when I can’t give it at least a three-star rating.
As a teacher, I’ve seen enough students’ faces fall to know what a strong critique can do to the kind of relationships I’ve been enjoying through social media, even when the comments are intended in the most constructive of spirits and embedded in the most voluminous praise I can conjure. Do I really want to hurt people whose conversations I’ve enjoyed? And as the recipient of more than one one-star review (in places that, sadly, mattered to a budding career), I know how it feels.
But as I read this new-to-me category of book, I found myself thinking about what’s potentially lost when readers hold back from honest, thoughtful reviews because they’re negative. And I began to wonder:
Do authors of indie books WANT to know what turns readers off?
Should they?
I’ve increasingly subscribed to the view that we don’t know what we’ve written until a reader tells us. We’re too close to our work. Even if we know what to do, what not to do, it’s often only when a sharp reader points out the pitfalls we’ve stumbled into that we realize that we’re in them up to our necks.
Of course, we all know that some one- or two-star reviews offer nothing constructive. The reader didn’t like sci-fi, but reviewed a sci-fi novel and gave it one star because of the sci-fi conventions the reviewer hates! I admit that I am less likely to give even well-done category romances more than three stars, because of the predictability of the plots and conventions I find problematic.
But I’ve given five stars to a very good romance, one in which the circumstances of the predictable elements are so unique and intriguing that I forgot I was technically reading a romance.
So would an aspiring indie romance writer want to know what kept her book from rising in my ranks?
True, she’d have to come in knowing that accepting potential one-star reviews does lay the task of sorting the gold from the pique at the author’s door. Personally, I learned from my negative reviews (although I couldn’t help wishing that my editor and I had been a little more in sync so that we could have headed them off). While I didn’t completely rewrite the book in question, when the chance came to revise for self-publication, I did spot things that had flown completely under my radar the first time around. And I got put on notice about my most persistent pitfall as a writer: the tendency to complicate my plots way too much.
The author of a book I’m reading now commits so many of those writerly sins we all hear about so often that I wonder whether I actually might have something useful to say to him/her. Far too many characters; characters whose relationships with each other and the plot, let alone their goals, are unclear; way too much classic “telling”: in short, can a review serve as a mini-beta reading? Or is it better to hold off on that kind of reading until the author asks?
So—one- and two-star reviews:
Should we as readers write them?
Should we as fellow authors risk writing them?
Should we as authors WANT them?
What qualities make a bad review worth the pain?
What do you think?
Great Advice on Building Conflict!
Check out this piece
on strategies for creating conflict from PubCrawl.
How to Build Beats and Style in Your Writing!
Found this terrific piece on cadence and beats at the sentence level on Writers in the Storm. I especially like the rhetorical devices
guest blogger Margie Lawson provides. As a rhetorician, I’ve encountered many of these in my research, and I’ve used many, even if only intuitively, in my writing.
I’ve written about some of these in my Novel First Lines series, and in my post on the effects of commas on cadence. Meter and rhythm are powerful lures in the first lines of a book or story. For a wonderful discussion of rhythm and cadence as persuasive devices, check out Martha Kolln’s textbook (find used copies), Rhetorical Grammar.
See if you use any already—and what you can learn to use.
Visiting Bryan Garner’s “Language Change Index” for Grammar Rules
When in doubt, I ask Bill.
Lurking around on an NCTE forum for English teachers, I learned about Bryan A. Garner’s Language Change Index and thought it nicely complemented some thoughts I’ve posted on this blog about grammar and usage. An interview and a critique discuss his efforts to do more formally what I did informally in ranking usage practices by how widely they’re likely to actually be noticed (see “split infinitive”) by the learned folks aspiring authors need to impress. What emerges for me, based on the examples in these articles, is how idiosyncratic grammar prescriptives can be. BTW, “hopefully” is now a Stage 5, not, in my view, because it ever was an “error,” but because it has been recognized as a perfectly good sentence modifier along the lines of “unfortunately” or Garner’s example of a “correct” sentence modifier, “regrettably.” No identifiable subject has to “hope” any more than an identifiable subject has to “regret.” So there.
3 Lessons, 4 Resolutions from the Indiana Writers’ Workshop, October 24, 2015
It’s unusual to find a conference that changes the way I think about my novel and about myself as a writer. This one-day conference, less than a day’s drive away, did just that.
The Workshop featured presentations by Brian Klems, online editor for WritersDigest.com. The basic fee covered four all-group presentations by Klems and a “first-page” critique by four agents of randomly selected submissions. Participants could pay extra for ten-minute pitch sessions with up to six agents and for a personal query-letter critique by Chuck Sambuchino, author of a number of books and blogs on writing as well as humor books.
Klems’s presentations covered a huge amount of nuts-and-bolts information most valuable to writers who had not attended many conferences or mined the web for information on the business of writing. The pitch sessions were well-coordinated; all three of the agents I queried were generous listeners. The published schedule did not build in meals or receptions for the social networking that many writers find rewarding.
So what made this conference so productive? Two things: Sambuchino’s critique of my query and the “first-page” session, at which some 20 or so of the first pages submitted were thrown down and stomped upon.
First: Query-Letter Critique
I didn’t receive Sambuchino’s comments until the Thursday night before the conference, and Friday was hectic, so it was evening before I could settle into my motel room to digest the veritable armada of comments he had supplied. Everyone reading this can probably empathize with my stomach-twisting lurch when I realized that the back-of-the-book blurb I had workshopped over and over with multiple audiences was No Good. Basic questions—what is Michael’s wound, his need? What is at stake? How does this event lead to this one?—still loomed. Sambuchino wanted A LOT more information than any back-of-the-book was going to accommodate.
The feeling of utter inadequacy that settled over me produced a complete rewrite. Was that the right strategy? All I know is that when I sat across from agents and talked from the notes they were glad to let me use, not one broke in with a confused frown to tell me I wasn’t making any sense. (Believe me, this has happened.) There’s no experiment that could tell me whether my response to Sambuchino’s comments made the difference. But I do know that when I revise my query letter, the pitch itself will look a lot more like the one I wrote Friday night than the one I have now.
Lesson learned? First let me talk about
First Page Armageddon
Note to Self: Four Editing Rules to Follow THIS TIME!
Do you have rules for your own self-editing sessions? Can you suggest some I ought to apply?
Editing a manuscript that I wrote some time ago has actually turned out to be quite a bit of fun. The story’s there, almost solid; now it’s time to make sure nothing in my style, my pacing, my voice, keeps it from getting across. Line-editing this novel is a lot like cleaning out a closet and finding out which of my old treasures really are treasures and which ones are junk.
And the thing that’s great about cleaning up the text of your novel: it’s not quite as likely as a closet to get cluttered again.
Actually, “self-editing” is a little bit of a misnomer. A lot of what I’m doing as I revisit the manuscript of my long-shelved “Sarah” novel is responding to the comments and suggestions of my wonderful Green River Writers critique group (see here, for example, to learn more about how and why they’re wonderful). But at the same time, coming back to my writing after a hiatus changes the way I see and hear it. Distance makes the heart grow smarter? Or am I just hearing myself through other people’s ears now?
Since those of us who want to be read (and published) need more than anything to know what we sound like outside of the wind cave of our own brilliance, I hope I’ve assimilated the collective wisdom of my writing group, in which people just plain tell me when I’ve made them start checking the number of pages to see how much more of my brilliance they have to take.
Here are four editing moves that give me consummate pleasure. Who would have thought that slashing a big X across half a page or a black line through a sentence could be so fun? Continue reading
Grammar Rules I’m on the Fence On. Are You?
I’m curious what people think because I am on the fence. Unlike ending a sentence with a preposition, these are not nonsensical non-rules. And unlike using “who” when “whom” is technically called for, they’re not completely invisible—or are they? That’s my question: If you were advising a beginning indie author wanting to self-edit, would these go on your “must know” list?
In fact, very well-credentialed writers do ignore them. Is that enough to move them to “okay to ignore”?
I’ll start with one that seems to have been ripped up and stomped on:
The dangling modifier.
I recall the first time I heard a dangling construction on an episode of NPR’s Nova. What??!! Since then, I’ve seen so many of these that if I had a penny for every one, I could pave my driveway in copper.
The pattern’s ubiquitous.
“An accomplished author, her books have sold millions.”
“Long known for her steamy romances, her fans number in the millions.”
“His heart broken, the loss of his lover left him devastated.”
“Running across the street, a car almost hit me.”
Does only an ex-English teacher shrivel inside her arid little syntactical shell when the modifier doesn’t modify the noun or noun phrase that immediately follows? When it’s not her books that are an accomplished author? When it’s not her fans that are known for her books? When it’s not the car running across the street?
It’s not that readers can’t make out what goes with what. Is it only an ex-English teacher who shivers in delight when parts of sentences link together so precisely that they’re like the rocks in Inca walls—you couldn’t force a needle between them?
It’s amazing how obviously problematic these seem in isolation. Yet, zoomed over in texts, it can be hard to catch them. (Hah! See?)
But readers know what’s meant perfectly well, don’t they? So what’s the fuss?
Lie and Lay.
I just saw “laying” when it should have been “lying” in a book I deeply respected. Which editor’s job is it to catch this? Am I silly to care?
I’m going to make the radical claim that the English language has decided. “Lie” and “lay” in the progressive tenses (she was lying/laying, he is lying/laying) are interchangeable, as they are in the simple past (he lay/laid down). Let go of it, you hyperventilators! The distinction has deserted you.
Or has it? Is it worth fighting for?
Incomplete comparisons.
If you look this one up online, you’ll be told that you “complete” a comparison by making sure to state what is being compared with what. In other words, it’s “incomplete” if you say that “Painkiller X is better.” You must say better than what. Nor can you say, “Product X has the most nutritious ingredients.” You must designate the category in which nutritious ingredients are being measured. The first hits in an online search tie such “incomplete comparisons” to misleading advertising. These hits are correct: We do hear claims like these all the time. But they’re fairly easy to spot if we’re looking.
However, here’s what seems to be a more subtle form of incomplete comparison, given how often it pops up:
1) Education in Europe is a lot cheaper than the United States.
2) The restaurants in Louisville are better than Cincinnati.
3) My friend’s grammar skills are better than some English teachers.
Here’s a sentence I read this morning in an academic journal (I have changed some relevant nouns lest some enterprising soul try to figure out where it came from):
My years as a low-wage employee have been a lot better than some others at many locations.
Now, one could make the case, given the exceptional level of literacy this writer demonstrates throughout the article, that “some others” here refers to “years,” not other, comparable employees. If the referent is “employee,” however, the sentence would have to read (with the “understood” parts in brackets):
My years as a low-wage employee have been a lot better than [they have been] FOR some others at many locations.
Would you have read this sentence as I did? Would you have revised it, possibly to clarify the referent? What about the others above (1-3)? Would they have jumped out at you if you weren’t looking for them?
And then there are these:
Each of these, in some camps, is wrong. Yet I bet we read over them as often as we catch them. So. . . if you were editing your own work or your critique partner’s, would you flag these?
Neither of us are going to be there.
The data explains why the theory is wrong.
McDonald’s raised their prices again.
None of us like making mistakes.
Verdicts? Let me know what you think!
Just Can't Help Writing 