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Writer-Person Digs Deep

October 3, 2008 by in category Archives tagged as , ,

by Cait London

We all have life-lint, memories/incidents/visual scenes that attach to us while we travel through our lives. Bits of our lives remain quietly attached to the writer, waiting to be tapped and used in a unique story.

Question: Are there really unique stories?
Answer: While certain underlying elements can be common, each writer’s style and life experiences create a unique story. Repeat: We are each unique with our own stories.

IMHO, the best stories are built from scratch, from digging around within our collection of life experiences. To start from a pre-made story line (i.e. Secret Baby) is not digging deep, not exploring the who/what/why layers, though the final story may fall within that pre-made category. For instance, in developing my psychic triplet trilogy, (FOR HER EYES ONLY* is an Oct 2008 release) I basically understood how a mother relates to her daughters, and how those daughters relate to each other (well, not in the psychic sense J). Or as Kathleen Eagle says, “I’m selling them off in pieces.”

Sponge-like, the writer absorbs everything around him. My best story lines came while sitting in waiting rooms. Or traveling. The feel of the story locations came from actually visiting Montana, Lake Michigan, and Lexington, KY, the psychic triplets’ homes. Since I am basically artistic (a trait common to many writers), the handbags, sculptures, and jewelry designs were fun to fictionally create. I love Celtic jewelry and an ancient brooch is spotlighted in the psychic triplets’ story arc. Runes and Vikings have long intrigued me, as have psychic-seer elements. In short, much of Me is chocked within my novels.

Our own life experiences can be fictionalized. Just for fun, let’s bump them up, taking them to another dimension. Here’s mine (these can make a fun bio):
Landscape Designer (I’ve planted a few roses in my day.)
Interior Decorator (I’ve painted walls, shoved furniture around.)
CEO (I run my household.)
Technical Engineer (I can use a television remote.)
Chef (Pots and pans manager.)
Lighting Engineer (I change light bulbs.)
Director of Security (I lock the house doors.)
Director of Finances (I pay bills and budget.)

While that’s fun, it’s also a serious examination. When you actually make a list of what you do throughout the day, it’s quite long and filled with great story-fodder. Tap into yourself. Use You.


Cait London’s OCC writer series began last month. Visit CaitLondon.com for more on craft. FOR HER EYES ONLY, the conclusion of her psychic trilogy is an October 2008 release.
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NOELLE GREENE: What Did Tolstoy Know About Women?

December 1, 2006 by in category Archives tagged as

“If you want a writer who understood his characters, look at Tolstoy,” my Dad said. “You’ve read War and Peace, haven’t you?”

I choked.

“Anna Karenina?”

Um, saw the movie. Downer ending, right?

The following week, a heavy box arrived from Amazon, a lovely new edition of Anna Karenina nestled inside.

It’s 817 pages, okay? Before the footnotes. But it’s brand-new and sits on my nightstand reproachfully. And I am curious. How did Leo Tolstoy understand characters?

I suspect this is where the term “tough sledding” originated. If slogging through the landscape of nineteenth century Russian literature isn’t tough sledding, what is?

I’m quite happy to leave literary analysis to the English majors. But now that I’m all of 10% into the book (did I mention the small type?), a couple of things are apparent about Tolstoy. And I’m starting to get it.

He writes from at least seven points of view (so far) in Anna Karenina and head-hops within scenes like crazy. But it works. His empathy for both men and women is all the more striking when you see that he holds someone in contempt or dislike. While deep in a point of view, he subtly gives the person plenty of rope. By then you understand the character so well that you don’t want him to hang himself.

Tolstoy wrote dialogue and introspection almost tenderly. Not necessarily nicely, but genuinely from that character’s point of view. Shades of gray are all over the place, figuratively speaking.

He had a genius for describing ordinary people’s emotions. The following passage describes how a heartbroken girl witnesses dashing Vronsky falling for older, married Anna:

She saw that they felt themselves alone in this crowded ballroom. And on Vronsky’s face, always so firm and independent, she saw that expression of lostness and obedience that had so struck her, like the expression of an intelligent dog when it feels guilty.

Can’t you just see Vronsky? It’s that uncanny ability to capture the essence of a moment that will keep me reading. I already know how it ends.

By Noelle Greene

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Is That Clear?

March 3, 2006 by in category Archives tagged as

By Louise Knott Ahern

As a young reporter, I used to whine that my editors “dumbed down” my writing when they traded big words for simple ones, broke up long sentences or otherwise made my writing clearer.

I’ve learned an important lesson since then.

Clarity is never dumb.

Clogged, jargon-filled writing is one of the biggest mistakes I find in professional communications today. The point of all writing is to convey a message. Yet the writing that comes out of businesses, schools and other institutions too often lacks a point, the messages weighed down under awkward phrases.

Take a look at the following sentence: The university seeks an increase in funds for the acquisition of periodicals in the library.

Now look at it this way: The university library needs more money to buy books.

Which one is better?

If you picked the first sentence, I’m not surprised. You have been trained to think that big words and long sentences sound professional.

In college, professors gave you minimum word and page requirements for your assignments, convincing you that good writing is long writing. That lesson is reinforced on the job, where you face reports and presentations full of acronyms, clauses and paragraphs that never end.

Hear me on this: Long writing does not make you sound smart. Nor does it make you sound professional.

It makes you sound scared.

Jargon and “bureaucratese” force readers to focus on your words, not your message. And when your message is cloudy, you fail as a writer.

Are you guilty of the heavy writing I’ve just described? No fear. Whether you realize it or not, you already know that simple is better.

Think back to those college days. When studying, did you highlight passages in your text books? You likely do the same thing today when you’re reading annual reports or memos from co-workers. That’s your mind telling you that not every single word you’re reading is crucial.

So, why waste time with words and sentences that aren’t necessary? It is better to make sure that every word you write is clear, precise and essential to your message.

Here are some tips to clarify your writing:

What’s the message?

Before you start writing, ask yourself a few questions. Who cares about this topic? Why should they care? What is the impact of this issue? What do you want people to do/think/feel after they read your words?

Questions like these will focus your writing on the most important points, which always adds clarity. They will also define your message and help you choose the perfect words.

Write like you talk.

You run into a colleague at the water cooler. She asks what’s new, and you say, “Due to a lack of funding, my plan to acquire an enhanced transportation method will have to be put on hold.”

Translation: I don’t have enough money for a new car right now.

For some reason, people think that when they put a message in writing, they have to dress it up and bog it down. They’re wrong. Writing should sound like you. This is how you establish your voice – your unique view of an issue translated into the written word. It’s OK to have a voice, even in professional settings.

The key to writing like you talk is to actually talk while writing. Before you put fingers to keyboard, pretend you’re explaining the issue to your mother. Write it that way.

And, yes, the level of formality in your writing should reflect the audience. I would expect you to speak differently to the President of the United States than your mom. But don’t confuse formality with stiffness. You must still be clear, and your writing should still sound like you.

Presume ignorance.

Assume that your audience has little or no idea what you’re talking about; that your memo or report will be the first time they’ve ever heard of your topic. This is true even if you know that your audience are your colleagues, who are as well-versed and as well-educated as you are on your subject.

When writing, pretend you’re trying to explain this to a group of middle-schoolers. This ensures that you keep it simple, stick to the basics, and avoid the pitfalls of jargon. Define acronyms. Cite studies. Explain procedures and use short words.

I know, I know. The inner Ph.D in you is gasping in pain. How can she possibly show off all those years of college if she can’t use the jargon of her field? Tell her to shut it. She’ll be fine once she realizes that her message makes her sound smart; not her words.

Speaking of words… Shorter is better.

Look again at the two sentences above. We replaced “acquisition of periodicals” with “buy books.” We cut ten syllables to two.

You might argue that “periodicals” does not exactly mean “books.” You’re right. The point is that you can always find a simpler way to say things. As an added bonus, finding the simple way forces you to be as specific as possible. That’s always a good thing.

Get rid of jargon.

I’ve said a lot about the evils of jargon, which should have been a clue that it would eventually get its own section. Nothing grates my nerves as much as jargon. Amateur communicators think that jargon and overly technical writing makes them sound like an expert. Look how much I know about this! I can spew all these fancy words!

I argue the opposite. Jargon is a camoflauge for a lack of confidence in the message. How do you know if something is jargon? Ask yourself this: Does a reader need a degree in the subject matter to recognize the phrase? Could a reader with no background in this issue understand the word? If the answer is no, find another way to say it. (Again, think about how you would explain it to your mother.)

People especially rely on jargon when delivering bad news, as if the message is easier to take when couched under “tech speak.” Bad news is bad no matter how you say it. Readers (a broad term for your customers, co-workers, superiors, etc.) will know when you’re trying to pull one over on them, and they won’t appreciate it. Sales are down? Then just say it.

Take a cue from Winston Churchill. The news from France is bad.

Cut.

Mark Twain once mused, “I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one.”

Professional writers know what he means. The hardest part of writing is rewriting, and the hardest part of rewriting is cutting. You spend all that time putting the words down, and then you’re supposed to erase a third of them?

Yep. Writing is cruel.

But if you take it in steps, cutting doesn’t have to be so painful.

Start by looking for redundancies. Do you refer to an “advance plan”? Just say “plan.” It means the same thing. How about “unexpected surprise”? Aren’t all surprises unexpected? You’ll be amazed how many of these redundant phrases crop up in your work and weaken your message.

Next, condense or break up sentences. Read your work aloud. If you can’t finish a sentence without taking a breath, it’s too long. Either break it up into two sentences or shorten it. With paragraphs, a good rule of thumb is to not exceed a few sentences.

Finally, change passive to active voice. Not sure of the difference? Let’s look at some sentences again.

Passive: The man was bitten by the dog.

Active: The dog bit the man.

The first sentence is passive; the subject of the sentence (the man) is acted upon. An active sentence is one in which the subject acts upon something else. Turning your passive sentences into active ones will immediately make your writing sharper, warmer and more authoritative.

You can spot passive voice by the word “was” and by the use of “ing” words. She was dancing becomes She danced.

The proposal was approved by the city council becomes The city council approved the proposal.

Proofread beyond the spellchecker.

Township to hold forum on pubic safety.

If you caught the mistake in that sentence, I’m impressed. If you didn’t catch it, read it again. See it now? Didn’t know your local government was so concerned with your pelvic health, did you?

Too bad that real-life headline from my first newspaper job was supposed to say “public safety.”

Few things can kill your message as quickly as typos. Don’t rely solely on the spellchecker to proofread your work. Print it out. Edit it. Then edit again.

Is that clear?

Good.

© 2004 Louise Knott Ahern

OCC member Louise Knott Ahern is a freelance journalist and public relations coach who writes contemporary romances. She’s the author of “Opting Out: A Career Woman’s Guide to Going Home Without Going Crazy,” a blog for mothers at http://www.optoutguide.blogspot.com/. She is also a contributor to The Writer’s Vibe (http://thewritersvibe.typepad.com/the_writers_vibe/), a blog for professional writers.

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Part 2: Things Are Not Fine

January 6, 2006 by in category Archives tagged as



A Slice of Orange Blog is pleased to bring you part-two of Susan Squires Blog! For part-one, please scroll down to the preceding blog.

By Susan Squires

I had a great time during the holidays. I connected with friends and relatives, and I got pretty much just what I wanted for Christmas. Which started me thinking. That would not be a great situation for a novel. We want life to be nice to us, but we can’t be nice to our characters.

Because I’ve been knee-deep in contest entries recently as judging season rolls around, I wanted to talk just a bit about conflict. You may remember recently that I advised taking time to think about what each character wants out of a scene. It’s also important in constructing both your book and your scene to have the reader clear on why that character can’t have what they want.

Yep! Your main character can’t get what they want most, or even whatever they want out of a particular scene, for most of the book. If the scene looks like they do get what they want, there has to be an unforeseen outcome or some kind of a mistake which puts that character right back in conflict. Maybe they got what they thought they wanted, but the reader knows better. If they don’t get what they want, take that opportunity to make not getting it have an even worse consequence. Let’s look at an example. Sally wants to have John ask her to take a ride in his new car. He does. But they get in an accident and are stranded miles from town. Or he does, but the reader knows that he’s secretly a rat who will take advantage of her, and she shouldn’t be going anywhere alone with him. Make it worse—he’s a serial killer! Or he’s a great guy but he doesn’t ask her and worse yet, he asks her arch-rival Ann, instead. And they run over her bicycle which is her only transportation to school. And they laugh at her! You get the idea.

So the question you are asking yourself in each scene is “Does my character get what she wants?” The answer is either, “ Yes, but……” or, “No, and furthermore….” It’s hardly ever just “yes.” Until the last scene! Okay, I only put in “hardly ever” because I’m not a believer in rules. But I do believe that if the main character gets exactly what she wants without her having reservations or without the reader feeling that it was a big mistake, you are letting the story tension seriously lapse. If you do that at the end of the chapter, the reader may close the book and never pick it up again. You leave the reader feeling, “Nice, but so what?” instead of being on pins and needles to see what happens next.

Now let’s talk a little bit about the beginning of a book (remember, I’ve been reading a lot of contest entries, and they’re always about the beginning.) Here, setting the conflict has to come as early as you can manage it. I’ve seen lots of entries where the first pages set the stage, and things are just fine. Uh, oh. Setting the stage can work, but the character has got to have some problem. Okay, she may not have been transported to another universe where she will have to save earth from certain destruction by aliens yet, but she’s got issues! They can be internal conflicts, relationship problems, character flaws, something…. but “things are just fine” doesn’t capture a reader’s interest. Start things off in the middle of “not fine,” and go from there.

Going back to the example I gave of character motivation, what the hero and heroine want is, ideally, in conflict. I used The Companion as an example in my last blog, where Ian and Beth both want to return to the life they once knew. He can’t because he’s a vampire and a normal life is denied him, and her father died, forcing her to abandon her life as an itinerant archeologist. Okay, that means each has conflict between what they want and what they can have. But when we find he wants to return to England where she has always been wildly unhappy and she wants to return to North Africa where he suffered as a slave and has vowed never to return, their goals are in conflict with each other as well. Of course, we know that they are more the same than different. It’s what draws them together. And we suspect that during the course of the story, what they want will change, but the idea is to start them off with things, “not being fine.”

So, let’s consciously separate ourselves from our characters. I hope the holidays were everything you wanted and expected, and I hope in 2006 you make your characters suffer until the last possible moment!

Susan Squires
THE COMPANION, May, 2005–St. Martin’s Press
THE HUNGER, October, 2005–St. Martin’s Press
THE BURNING, April, 2006–St. Martin’s Press
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Part 1: Connections

January 5, 2006 by in category Archives tagged as
This is the first part of a two-part blog written by Susan Squires. Look for part two tomorrow!

By Susan Squires

This time of year is contest judging time. Many contests for unpublished writers come out in the fall, and I’ve been reading and judging lots of contest entries. I’ve noticed some particular problems that have to do with the connective tissue of a story. So, I thought I’d take a moment to talk about connections as they have to do with telling a good story.

We all know about creating nice, complex characters. We all try for an engaging plot line that pulls our reader through a story. But it’s good to understand that those issues come together at the nexus of character motivation.

Motivation is what engages your character with the incidents of the plot and moves your story along. If you are writing a book about the discovery of a cure for vampirism (just as a random example, since that’s what I’m doing right now), how might your various vampire characters feel about that? Does everybody think it’s a good idea? If not, why not? And what would they do about it? Voila! Motivation drives the action. Your characters can change what they want. They can want more than one thing at once, though not all things in the same degree. But you have to make what the characters want very clear to the reader at all times, and not let the motivation “drift.” Drifting just confuses a reader. They lose interest.

So how can you keep your character’s motivation from drifting? When I’m beginning a tale, I start with a statement: “All character X wants is…..” and I try filling in the blank. Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz wants to go home again. Neo wants to know what The Matrix is. When you do this for your hero and heroine, it’s always nice if they want something wildly conflicting. In The Companion, all Beth wants to do is get back to the life she knows in North Africa and avoid England. All Ian wants to do is get back to the life he knows in England and avoid North Africa. That’s what drives the story, and what I had to keep in mind every time they reacted to something that happened, or when they talked together. Their motivations change during the story, but it required showing that change very clearly, and why they change as well.

That’s okay for the big arc of the story, of course, but these connective motivations occur in each scene as well. Every character comes into a scene carrying an invisible suitcase. That baggage includes who they are, what they believe, what they want to happen in this scene and what just happened to them in the last scene. I see many contest entries where the writer seems to lose the thread of what is in the character’s suitcase. What happens in that case is that the scene lacks direction, or the character’s motivation doesn’t seem real. The dialogue feels “off.” We’ve all read stories (published and unpublished!) where this happens. The heroine’s father has just died and she seems to forget that. Or someone goes into an explanatory discourse in the middle of imminent danger. So take a moment to ask yourself before writing a scene, not “What has to happen in this scene?”, but “What does the character want to happen right now?” “Why?” “How will they feel about what just happened to them in the last scene?” Do this for all the characters, even the minor ones, in your scene. Then write with that in mind. It will help your scene “ring true” both in dialogue and action. By the way, what happened in your scene now gets loaded into the character’s baggage!

When you keep the larger motivational arc in mind, and you pull those characters and their suitcases through each scene, asking what they want and what’s going on in their mind, you are connecting the tissues of your story, and connecting to your reader as well.

Susan Squires
THE COMPANION, May, 2005–St. Martin’s Press
THE HUNGER, October, 2005–St. Martin’s Press
THE BURNING, April, 2006–St. Martin’s Press
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