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On Editing: What Editors Are For

By Aaron Pogue on Friday, February 11, 2011

This week has been a lot of talk about surprises, whether it’s the unexpected catastrophes that derailed both of my meticulously-planned covershoots so far, or the sudden and unfortunate realization a week before a book is supposed to go to press that it has a gaping flaw in one of the most important scenes.

It’s good timing, the week before releasing a novel titled Expectation, to be talking about the unexpected in the life of a writer. Really, though, the flaws in a manuscript shouldn’t be unexpected at all. They’re perfectly predictable, and the solution is one we’ve known about for a very long time: editors.

Finding Another Pair of Eyes

I know a thing or two about editing. I’ve been playing that role for a while. As an English major in college, I got the opportunity to look over all my friends’ papers before they got turned in (joy). And as a technical writer, it’s an everyday part of my job.

We’ve got a rule of thumb in this industry that for every thousand words in a document, you need another pair of eyes to review it if you want to catch all the critical errors. It’s an idea we take pretty seriously.

I came up with the idea for this blog post, though, when I was doing some hobby editing. See, I recently convinced my writer friend Joshua Unruh to start a blog. He actually started out by agreeing to do monthly comic book reviews for the Consortium website, and then decided to go ahead and maintain a blog of his own in between those offerings.

Knowing Where You’re Going

After I provided him a pretty detailed markup of his first submission to the Consortium site (where I’m the Chief Editor), he felt like he would really benefit from getting that sort of markup on all his posts (at least for a little while), and I saw the opportunity to train him to make reliably good material for his monthly reviews, so I agreed.

It worked, too. Every week he’d send me something to review, and every week I had less and less to say. He picked up the “internet voice,” learned to break his paragraphs up into bulleted lists, and started adding headings to guide the reader through his articles.

Still, every week there was at least one paragraph that I had to go in and gut, sometimes reworking it completely. A couple weeks ago he expressed regret at that — that he still managed to put such broken sentences into his blog posts, even after a month of detailed feedback from me.

The problem, I explained to him, wasn’t in his writing. It was in his knowing. See, when he started that paragraph, he knew exactly where he was going to end up. The reader, though, didn’t have a clue. That was precisely why the reader was reading it in the first place — to figure out what Joshua was going to say.

In that particular case, he had independent clauses spilled all over the page that made excellent supporting evidence once you’d gotten to the thesis, but the thesis came three lines farther down the paragraph and in the meantime this was nothing but gibberish.

Honestly, that’s the same problem I had with Gods Tomorrow and Expectation. That’s precisely why I found myself having to rewrite endings so close to my publication date — because I’d written the story with an understanding where it was going, without fully understanding how much of that my readers didn’t know.

Editing Well

And that is why it takes so many extra pairs of eyes to spot all the problems. An editor’s job is to read like a reader — to read each word as it comes to them, building only on the information that has come before, instead of giving it credit for the information that’s going to come later.

It’s easy to forget about that (whether you’re the editor or the editee). It’s easy to think the editor’s job is to perfect the message, to spot every possible problem, but that’s either unrealistically demanding or aggravatingly meddlesome. The editor’s job isn’t to find the right way to say what you want to say.

The editor’s job is just to find what you’re actually saying. If they can read like a reader, if they can look at your message and tell you how it’s going to sound to an uninitiated reader, then they can tell you exactly what you need to fix.

How is up to you. But the when and where and what…that’s what editors are for. And if your editor tells you the ending doesn’t quite make sense, that you need to add something somewhere to bring it all together, my advice is that you listen.

Early. And often. Because the alternative is no fun at all.

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On Editing: Expect the Unexpected

By Aaron Pogue on Thursday, February 10, 2011

I started the week with the story of my two novels: Gods Tomorrow and Ghost Targets: Expectation (in stores February 15th!). Specifically, I talked about the covershoots for both books, and the surprises they held for us.

Those little surprises are pretty troubling, especially when the book is so close to being published, but they’re not by any means the worst situations I’ve faced. I could tell you horror stories about my homemade publishing software, about the websites for my digital distributors, about problems with the digital standards themselves.

Still, at the end of the day, the biggest problem I’ve run into every time has been me.

Gods Tomorrow

I wrote Gods Tomorrow in November of 2008, and scheduled it for publication in October 2010. In the intervening years, I shared it with over a dozen beta readers (all of whom provided me extensive feedback), and dedicated myself to at least four major rewrites (not to mention the little changes I’d make every time someone pointed out a problem to me).

By the time I started prepping it for publication last summer, I really felt like the book was done. I hadn’t done a rewrite in eight or nine months, and I hadn’t heard any manner of critical feedback in at least as long. For my part, I was happy with it.

I enlisted the aid of our phenomenal Chief Editor, Jessie Sanders, because I knew better that to assume “ready for publication” was the same thing as “perfect.” I expected her to find some typos for me and help me fit a more consistent style, but I didn’t really plan to make any major changes.

When Jessie brought me her feedback sometime in September (with the book scheduled for publication at the first of October), she had indeed found tons of those little problems (for which I was grateful). She also brought me a couple paragraphs of feedback on the story: character development issues, pacing, and plot questions that the story had left unanswered for her.

She also mentioned that this book wasn’t really the type she usually reads (an issue I’ve been discussing for the last few weeks), and while I understood her complaints I didn’t really feel like they were critical problems, so with the publication date so close, I decided to leave the book as-is. If anything, I could save those changes for a second edition.

I spent the next couple weeks buried in the hard work of figuring out on-the-fly how to publish a novel, but Jessie’s feedback kept nagging at me. I was pretty sure I’d made the right choice, but at the same time…she had a point. And I did want my book to be the best book it could be.

On top of that…well, I kept trying to ignore it, but the things she’d said lined up really well with some quiet objections Becca had made when she read it. And Kris, too. And I realized I knew exactly what I needed to do, to resolve all of their objections and make my story work.

So I did. The week before the book was supposed to go to press, I opened it back up and did a complete rewrite. I made major character and plot changes in five chapters (out of sixteen), and significantly rewrote the story’s ending (for a fourth or fifth time). Then I frantically read through the whole thing one last time, and uploaded it to four major distributors.

Ghost Targets: Expectation

Of course I learned my lesson, right? Recognizing how hectic my fall schedule was going to be, I gave myself five months between the publication of Gods Tomorrow and its sequel, Ghost Targets: Expectation. I decided I’d do a complete rewrite on my own (even though this book was also already two years old, and much commented-upon), then hand it off to my editor with sufficient time to make plenty of changes.

I didn’t. I lost track of time, so when January rolled around I sent a copy of the story off to Jessie and then dove right in myself, trying to do a rewrite while she was working on it. I cleaned up a couple things that I’d felt were unclear, then after Jessie finished her review (a couple weeks ago now), I followed her advice and wrote a whole new ending for the story — not just reworking what was there, but tacking on a whole scene to serve as a badly-needed denouement. I went back through the whole book and made the changes she’d suggested.

Well…most of them. There was one little part she thought was under-explained — a bit of a deus ex machina right at the climax of the story — but I’d added some hints during my first rewrite, and I thought it was good enough. I certainly had enough on my plate. This was really no time to go making big changes to the story.

And then yesterday I finally broke down and did it. Yesterday. Less than a week to press, and I went in and muddled with major plot elements again, messing with three different chapters (out of fifteen), and significantly shifting around some of the suspicion related to the book’s mystery.

Honestly, I suspect that’s part of storytelling. It’s part of art. No expression is ever perfect, and there’s always something more that can be done. It doesn’t do any good to pretend otherwise — whether that means that you expect yourself to get it perfectly right before you share it with the world (you never will), or that you really believe you’ve spotted everything you need to do to make it “good enough.”

You haven’t. You can’t. And it’s not for any mysterious, magical reason, but for one that’s really easy to understand. In the end, it’s exactly what editors are for. Come back tomorrow, and we’ll talk all about it.

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What I Learned about Writing this Week…from Stephenie Meyer, Redux

By Courtney Cantrell on Wednesday, February 9, 2011

If you riffle through the archives of this blog, you’ll find that Aaron and I both have mentioned Stephenie Meyer at least in passing.  If you peruse the articles in which we make said references, you might pick up on the fact that neither of us are necessarily favorably disposed toward her writing. Today, for my part, I’m going to expound upon my opinion a little bit.

In my first WILAWriTWe with Meyer in the title, I mention getting “sucked into” (Oy vey — the puns! The puns I could sink my teeth into in this post!) the Twilight universe when I saw the preview for the movie. I didn’t even know until a few months later that the film was based on a book and that this book had three sequels. So I started reading; devoured the whole series; and then turned right around and read it all over again.

As I indicated in that previous WILAWriTWe, I had the following reactions to Meyer’s novels:

  1. I wanted to take a red pen to the manuscripts, because they contained more grammatical errors and stylistic problems than I could stomach.
  2. Meyer’s writing clearly improved from one book to the next, which is exactly what should happen when a writer is doing her job.
  3. The adventure of the stories hooked me completely and would not let me go.

After 16 months of pondering the Twilight novels, I would now add this thought to my list: I think the relationship between Bella and Edward is dangerously unhealthy for the self-esteem of any teenage female reader. And of some adult female readers. But that’s another story; if you want to know how I came to this conclusion, ask me in the comments; I’ll gladly discuss.

Now, fellow Twilight fans — and yes, I do say “fellow,” because I still count myself among you — I want you to sit back, take a few deep breaths, and bear with me. I’m about to say a few more things that you aren’t going to appreciate. Just keep in mind that I do believe Meyer has a fantastic imagination; I do respect her creativity and her drive; and I do acknowledge that she has made something unique that has brought a lot of joy to a great many people.

I’m noticing that I’m quite given to the use of semi-colons in this post; I don’t know why.

Anyway, let’s move on to my latest Meyer read, upon which I shall expound posthaste. The book in question is The Short Second Life of Bree Tanner (affiliate link).  This novella tells the story of a minor character in Breaking Dawn (fourth in the original series), a teenage vamp girl named Bree. Not to spoil anything for you, but Bree dies in Breaking Dawn. And she dies for good, not just for undead. That’s just what happens when the ruling class of vampires gets ticked off at you and you’re nothing but a redshirt.

But when Meyer was writing Breaking Dawn, she apparently did a pretty detailed character sketch of Bree, because Bree was a “newborn” — a newly-created vampire — and this was a class of vamps that hadn’t come up in the stories before. So Meyer decided to explore the character a bit, so as to get a better feel for how newborns in her universe act and react to their environment.

This, by the way, is an excellent thing to learn from Meyer: Take a side character and give her a detailed backstory. It’s a terrific exercise in character development, and it can’t help but improve your relationship to your characters. It can’t help but make you a better writer. No matter what we might think of Meyer’s writing, this is a valuable lesson to take away.

But that’s not the only lesson. Meyer didn’t just leave it at a character sketch. She wrote pages upon pages of detail and backstory until she had not just a collection of notes but a collection with potential to become more. And now, her readers get the pleasure of revisiting the Twilight universe they love so much, as well as a glimpse into a part of that universe they haven’t seen before.

Inklings, take note: If they really fall in love with your universe, your fans will never get tired of relevant tidbits, references, and tangents. They’ll drink whatever you give them to drink of your universe. They’ll glut themselves on its lifeblood, if you’ll pardon my French.

So, where do I go from here in presenting to you The Short Second Life of Bree Tanner? I could tell you about some of the characters — who had some great backstories and some fascinating traits. (I’m a sucker for Meyer’s vampiric superpowers, I’ll admit it.) I could tell you about my empathy for Bree and my reader’s-wish that she could’ve survived as a character. (It’s odd to start reading a story with the knowledge that the main character is going to be dead at the end.)

But what I really want to tell you is this: I had less of an urge to take a red pen to Bree Tanner than to the Twilight novels. Meyer has made some changes in her writing style — and it’s encouraging to see a writer gaining in craft skill. That’s what we’re all supposed to be doing.

I found fewer grammatical errors in Bree Tanner. Instead of dialogue tags like “murmured,” “hissed,” or “exclaimed,” which are so very distracting to the reader, there were more “said”s (which don’t break the flow of dialogue). Although I do still think Meyer overused sentence fragments, I saw fewer of them in this manuscript.

(It’s also worth noting that Bree, the female lead, has a far healthier self-esteem and sense of self-preservation than Bella Swan.)

My conclusion, my darlingest inklings, is that no matter where you are in your writing, you’re not *there* yet. You haven’t arrived. You cannot rest on your laurels and think to yourself, “I’ve gotten where I want to be, and I need go no further.” Even if you’re famous, getting fabulously rich off your books and off the movies based on them, you still have to put in your time at learning and improving.

I don’t know what Stephenie Meyer is working on right now, and I have no idea what her plans are for the future. But in The Short Second Life of Bree Tanner, she proves that she’s honing her craft. And that’s something we all must needs do.

And that’s WILAWriTWe!

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On Editing: Expectation

By Aaron Pogue on Tuesday, February 8, 2011

Five months ago, with Gods Tomorrow poised on the brink of publication, I brought my awesome photographers (Julie and Carlos of Julie V. Photography) to town to shoot some art for the cover. I made arrangements with our model, scouted locations, and put together a whole covershoot in the space of about a week.

I had some concerns, of course (it’s in my nature), but the night of the shoot everything looked perfect. We chose an office building here in town, and when we got there, Karen was already waiting. She had graciously provided her own costume, and when I saw her standing there — headset on her ear, handheld in her fingers, and revolver on her hip — I saw Katie made real. It was a thrill.

Then Julie stood her up where we thought the shot was going to be, snapped a couple test images, and then checked them on her camera. I was waiting for a breathless exclamation at what perfect cover art this was going to be.

Instead, she frowned and said, “Damn you, McDonalds!”

The dramatic mirrored walls of our background were throwing some handy product placement right in the middle of our shot, with those iconic golden arches perched neatly on Katie’s right shoulder.

So we had to improvise. Julie dragged Karen all over the building’s grounds, trying to find a clean angle that gave us the right amount of sunset light in the right places, without any inconvenient reflections in the walls.

Julie’s good at what she does. She had Carlos’s help, too, and between the two of them they found the position, the angle, everything they needed to get my perfect cover.

Unfortunately, it involved wading out into ankle-high grass freshly soaked by the building’s sprinkler system. And then, for Julie, it involved stretching out on her belly in the grass to get the right angle. By the time everything was said and done Karen’s pants were wet up to the knees, and Julie’s clothes were dripping wet…and yet both of them were in a great mood. We got the shot. That was what mattered.

That was last summer. Last month, I got the opportunity to reconvene our little group to shoot cover art for the sequel. In the meantime, Julie and Carlos have expanded their operation a little bit. They have lights now, which makes all the difference in the world.

We decided to do an indoor shoot (we ended up using the fellowship hall at our church), no longer relying on that perfect sunset glow. When Julie and I were first discussing that I could hear the satisfaction in her voice when she said, “Oh yes. That’s perfect. We’re not at the mercy of sunset or of those stupid sprinklers.”

I laughed about it, and we went on planning. Then a week later I was relaying our plans to Karen, telling her where to meet us and what to expect, and when I mentioned it was going to be an indoor shoot this time, she said, “Oh, excellent! So no sprinklers this time!”

Everyone liked the idea of us being in control of our environment. We were going to have a cover designer at the shoot with us, too, and we had grand plans to build some composite covers (instead of trying to stage dramatic scenes), that had us thinking we could get art for five novels in one night’s shoot.

It was a great idea…right until the moment we tried to put it into practice. Once again, Julie took a couple test shots, checked them on her camera, and knew right away it wasn’t going to work like we’d planned.

We improvised. We stacked tables on top of song books (and, eventually, on top of other tables). We filled a syringe with Gatorade. We hung a shotgun from the ceiling with fishing wire. We were even ready (for a second time) to do unmentionable things with duct tape.

We didn’t get cover art for five books, in the quiet luxury of our perfect control of our studio environment. Instead we worked hard for five hours straight, improvising like mad, and we got the art for one.

And you know what? We left that shoot in a great mood, too. Because we got the shot. That’s what matters. You can see it up above, and see it attached to a real book a week from today. It’s incredible.

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On Inspirational Writing: Writing for Readers

By Aaron Pogue on Friday, February 4, 2011

I’ve spent the last month talking about books I read in a Category Fiction class and everything I learned from reading them. The class was designed perfectly to create that experience, and I knew it from the very first day, when Professor Chester said,

I want you to analyze these books critically. I want you to recognize that, for whatever reasons, these books got published. These books found an audience. These books sold. I don’t want to hear whether or not you liked it. I want to hear a thoughtful analysis of the books. For the next few months, I don’t want you to read like readers. I want you to practice reading like writers.

That little speech stuck with me. It made sense, and I followed through on that advice with a semester full of incredible learning experiences (often, as I’ve said, buried deep in books I didn’t like at all).

Die Trying

It wasn’t until the end of the semester, until I read Die Trying, that I realized I had, perhaps, taken her advice too far. As I said, I really thought I liked Dragon and Fink and Games and Curse, but when I got to Die Trying, I realized I most liked those others “as a writer.”

When I read How to Train Your Dragon, it reawakened in me the desire to tell the fantasy stories that got me writing in the first place. I got home from our class discussion of it and dusted off the manuscript of my own dragonrider novel, Taming Fire.

When I read Jeremy Fink and the Meaning of Life, I got inspired to finally seriously try my hand at Young Adult fiction. Hunger Games made me want to play around in a post-apocalyptic world of my own, and A Curse Dark as Gold made it seem incredibly fun to try to write a fairy tale with a modern technique.

Writing Books that Readers Want to Read

When I got to the end of Die Trying, for the first time all semester, I thought to myself, “I’ve got to read more books by this guy!” I went straight to Amazon and grabbed the sequel (and the prequel, too).

I can name four other books from the reading list that I liked, and every one of them is by an author with more books on the shelf (and often more books in the series), but all any of those did was make me want to write. Die Trying made me want to read more.

Maybe it’s a matter of market. Maybe I just happen to like Thrillers (although I would’ve self-identified with Fantasy and Science Fiction way before I got to Thriller).

Maybe it has to do with follow-through and hitting hard (Lee Child certainly does go big). But I think, in the end, it all comes down to the same thing: communicating with a real audience — understanding their expectations, responding to their needs, and building story structures that will thrive in their environment.

The good news (as any number of hand-crampingly-long lists of sub-sub-sub-genres illustrated) is that there are as many audiences for an author to choose from as there are categories for readers to stick to. It takes a little bit of education, and a little bit of effort, but every story can find a real audience, and every book needs real readers to survive.

This course challenged us to read like writers, but now that it’s over the ultimate lesson is just audience analysis, all over again. Write for readers, and the rest will take care of itself.

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On Inspirational Writing: Die, Dragon, Fink, Games, and Curse

By Aaron Pogue on Thursday, February 3, 2011

At last, I’m ready to talk about the books I liked. Of course there were books I liked! In fact, I mentioned some of what I’m about to say right here back in October when I first read one of them. Among them, these five books taught me one of the more valuable lessons I learned from the class.

This time, I’ll skip straight to the book review, and save my analysis for after. The books I actually liked were How to Train Your Dragon, Jeremy Fink and the Meaning of Life, The Hunger Games, and A Curse Dark as Gold. The greatest of them all, though, was Die Trying.

Die Trying vs. Dragon, Fink, Games, and Curse

I’ve already said a little bit about three of these, and I can add a fourth below.

How to Train Your Dragon did as much with its lovable caricatures as it did with its delightfully wretched setting to make a fun adventure out of its imaginative storyline.

Jeremy Fink made me cry.

The Hunger Games did amazing things building a deep and inventive character and wrapping her in a plot that dragged the reader (me) through page after page with a burning need to know more.

A Curse Dark as Gold introduced a world that walks an intriguing line between historical fiction and classical fairytale. In fact, it presented a fantasy story through an almost dry, autobiographical conceit.

I enjoyed all four of those books. I defended them in class. I recommended them to friends (and I recommend them to you). After six or seven years of reading almost nothing, and then several weeks of reading books that didn’t appeal to my reader expectations, I really thought these books were great.

And then I read Die Trying by Lee Child.

It’s a thriller with enormous and masterfully-crafted suspense…and in that spirit, I’m going to make you wait until tomorrow to learn what I loved so much about it.

(All five of those links are affiliate links, and every one of them comes with a strong recommendation. Read them. You’ll be a better writer for it.)

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What I Learned About Writing This Week…from Jack L. Chalker

By Courtney Cantrell on Wednesday, February 2, 2011

Greetings, my dear inklings! I come to you today bearing tidings of the sci-fi nature. “Sci-fi nature” — is that an oxymoron? No matter! (Anti, dark, or otherwise.) What’s on my mind today is that I’m reading a terrific book right now, and I’m going to attempt to tell you about it without giving away too much of the fantastically cool plot.

Jack L. Chalker’s novel The Four Lords of the Diamond is a classic sci-fi tale with robots, aliens, utopias, dystopias, genetic engineering (What self-respecting u-/dystopia wouldn’t have that?), genetic mutation, telepathy, and space travel. There’s a main character you can’t help but feel for, what with his getting mind-wiped all the time. And you spend the whole story wondering if the good guys and bad guys are really who the seem to be.

Or, rather, you spend the whole stories wondering. Chalker’s novel is, in fact, four novellas in one:

Lilith: A Snake in the Grass
Cerberus: A Wolf in the Fold
Charon: A Dragon at the Gate
Medusa: A Tiger by the Tail

Lilith, Cerberus, Charon, and Medusa are four planets. All four stories take place more or less at the same time, and all four revolve around the same main character. I’d like to tell you the poor man’s name, but I can’t. He has four. Or maybe it’s five. I’m not sure. And if I tell you much more than what I’ve already said, I’m going to be giving away too much of the plot.

Let’s just say that to write this novel, Chalker had to start four very different stories exactly the same way. And gah! I just told you too much! I know some of you have already guessed what I’m talking about. Ah well, I’ll just have to trust that you’ll still want to read the book for yourselves and, when you do read it, that you’ll have forgotten all the little hints I dropped.

Anyway. I’m currently a few dozens pages into Charon: A Dragon at the Gate and enjoying myself immensely. But not only is this a great romp of a sci-fi story, it’s also making me reevaluate an entire character in my work-in-progress.

Because of how Chalker uses point-of-view in his novel(s), he’s reminding me that knowing a character’s backstory and motivations is essential to giving that character life. Without all of that behind-the-scenes information, a character will be forever flat. I don’t even have to share all of that background information with the reader; the results of it will come out in the story. But even if I don’t share it, I have to know it. If I haven’t worked it out in prewriting, I won’t be able to make that character shine.

The POV of Chalker’s unusual main character also inspires me to think about how sometimes, the character we think will shine the brightest actually ends up taking a backseat to another, lesser character. I’m talking about the sidekick who’s wittier than the hero, or the best friend who’s spunkier than the heroine. Sometimes, the story is just plain better when we view it through the eyes of a supporting character. Sometimes, it’s more interesting. Sometimes, it’s more fun. And it’s definitely more effective at capturing first the reader’s attention and then the reader’s heart.

So the lessons are these:

Know your character,

and know which character your story needs.

My current work-in-progress is the third in a young adult paranormal trilogy. Each novel in the trilogy has had a different main character, and for this third one, the MC is Anne. I have no problem with Anne. I love Anne. She might just be my favorite MC of the series; time will tell. But I do have a problem with Nora.

Nora is mostly a sidekick character, but she thinks she’s a main character. She doesn’t have a lot to say. When she does speak, she’s kind of whiny. When she opens her mouth, the first thought that pops into my head is, Oh, no. Not her again. And I’m starting to wonder if maybe Daniel could do and say everything Nora is doing and saying at this point.

I like Daniel. He’s kind of a jerk, but he knows his stuff. I like him…and so, I’m starting to consider cutting Nora out of the story entirely. It wouldn’t take too much re-writing to give her whole part to Dan the Man. (I promise, I don’t really call him that in the story.) Besides, Owin wouldn’t like it if Daniel played Nora’s role in Anne’s life — and that drama might be too juicy to resist.

I’m writing this story entirely from Anne’s POV — but Nora’s POV still shines through, because Nora is a reference point for Anne. But is she a necessary reference point? Would my storytelling be more efficient without her? Would the story sparkle more?

Thanks to Mr. Chalker, I’m starting to think that the answer to the latter two questions is yes.

And that’s WILAWriTWe!

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On Dramatic Action: Open Season and The Dead Cat Bounce

By Aaron Pogue on Friday, January 28, 2011

Yesterday I talked about one of my shortcomings as a writer: I pull my punches. I claimed that I learned that from two atrocious, miserable books my professor made me read.

So what were the two books I hated so much? Open Season and The Dead Cat Bounce.

Open Season

Open Season by C. J. Box is the story of a disgraced game warden in Wyoming whose livelihood and family are placed in the balance when his retired predecessor invests in a pipeline company that’s going to suffer financial loss because of a den of endangered weasels.

That’s right: endangered weasels. There’s relationship drama, job drama, gun drama, surpassing-the-mentor drama, and even child-molestation drama, but it’s all built on a foundation of weasels.

The story itself is boring and tedious. The hero is a pathetic loser who’s desperately worried he’s going to lose his job even after the writer has established he’d probably get a better standard of living working as a cashier at Wal-Mart. The narrative meanders around in the woods, moseys through a miserable, dirty little town, and introduces us to characters I’d really prefer not to know.

But through it all the narrator is constantly bemoaning the huge tragedy of everything…and in the end, he blows someone’s arm clean off. It’s bigger than reason, and it’s the foundation of an incredibly successful series.

The Dead Cat Bounce

In sharp contrast, Dead Cat Bounce by Sarah Graves pulls its punches. It’s a mystery that starts with the narrator’s discovery of a corpse in her basement, which she sets aside (rhetorically speaking) to introduce a ditsy friend, describe how she came to live in this town, complain about the process of maintaining an old house, and consider how well her teenage son gets along with the local handyman before she returns to the only interesting aspect of the story.

Every page of this book is a sheer torture because you can always see the interesting story you want to read, but the writer keeps it forever out of reach behind a dense, impenetrable barrier of backstory and exposition.

The worst part of that experience, though, was recognizing my own style in it. She has found a story worth telling, a big event worthy of a mightily swooping plot arc, but she wraps it in so many layers of everyday reality that the excitement inherent in the plot events is entirely untouchable.

At the same time, so many of the other stories we’ve read have gone big. They’ve gone huge. Hunger Games and How to Train Your Dragon introduced wild settings — the one adorable and the other devastating — and both entirely unbelievable but, at the same time, entirely engaging. Jeremy Fink and the Meaning of Life had the audacity to announce in the title that it intended to explain the meaning of life, and it followed through with a compelling tale.

I got into storytelling because of the power of story. I enjoy playing games with the written word, I like the feel of well-crafted prose and the special magic in poetic imagery, but I write to reach people. This class reminded me that it’s not enough to extend an invitation. I’ve got to follow through.

(Once again, I really wouldn’t recommend buying either of those books, but just in case you decide to disregard my advice, the links above are all affiliate links. That way at least some good will come of your misguided choices.)

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On Dramatic Action: Pulling My Punches

By Aaron Pogue on Thursday, January 27, 2011

This month I’ve been talking about the books I read and the lessons I learned during a Category Fiction class last fall. One of the things I admire most about the structure of the course is the way the professor managed to turn profoundly bad books into brilliant educational opportunities.

So far I’ve had a lot to say about things I learned from books I really didn’t like, and it only gets worse. The next two books I want to discuss are the books I liked least out of the entire course.

Go Big, Or Go Home

They weren’t just technically flawed, stuttering or stumbling in pursuit of a compelling storyline. These two were awful. They were unpleasant to read. They made me hate the authors.

And yet, even as I was despising these books, they were actively pointing out to me what my own writing is missing. Along with the rest of the books in the course, these books helped teach me one of the most surprising and most valuable lessons I’ve learned this semester.

That lesson is (to borrow terminology popular among sports pundits):

Go big, or go home.

I have a bad habit in my writing of pulling my punches — whether they’re emotional, physical, or just narrative. I know why, too.

Tame Storytelling

I started out writing fantasy when I was ten years old, and then at some point when I was in college I found myself standing in front of a room full of engineers and business majors giving a class presentation about my semester project — a market analysis and submission package for my world of wizards and elves and dragons.

I made it about thirty seconds into my presentation before I began suffering an intense feeling of humiliation, and the following eighteen months of blind submissions and (perfectly merited, I now know) rejection letters only confirmed to me that I was writing about silly things.

So I abandoned fantasy, and switched to writing mainstream literature. It was grown-up, it was philosophical, and it was intensely believable. Everything that happened on the page made perfect sense. None of it was silly. None of it was melodramatic. None of it was big. (And, incidentally, none of it really got read, even by friends and family.)

I’ve left that series behind and moved on to better narratives, but I still shy away from intense drama. Not so these authors!

I suppose this goes right back to my first point, but just reading again reminded me what stories are supposed to be. They’re supposed to be big. They’re supposed to be filled with remarkable events. They’re supposed to startle and astonish and impress.

Come back tomorrow and I’ll tell you about two books that have the nerve to do just that (even as they make you want to claw your eyeballs out with their miserable storytelling). Should be a fun read.

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What I Learned About Writing This Week…from Christmas Decorations

By Courtney Cantrell on Wednesday, January 26, 2011

Actually, the title should end with “…from Putting Away Christmas Decorations,” but that would be ridiculously long, don’t you think?

Anyway, this past weekend, the husband and I finally got around to taking down all the Christmas stuff. We don’t usually wait this far into January to get this chore out of the way — but I had the flu for ten days after Christmas, and Ed’s parents stayed with us for a week after that. In the meantime, I’ve started a new blog (see Affiliates links in the sidebar), and we’ve had an unusual number of social activities. So boxing up seasonal adornments just had to wait.

But this past weekend, we finally got a hold on one of those round 2 it thingies. Out came the empty boxes, and down came the festive stuff.

When I take down Christmas deco, I call it “Reclaiming My Home From Christmas.” Now, don’t get me wrong. Christmas is my favorite holiday (though, depending on the year and the goings-on, it sometimes has to compete with Halloween). I love the brightly colored doohickeys (lots of red!), the sparkly thingamajigs, and the homemade whatnots. In our Christmas treasure trove, we have lots of traditional German decor, much of it hand-crafted. My mother has given me a new tree ornament every year of my life, and I enjoy reminiscing over the good memories attached to each ornament as I hang it on the tree. Not to mention the cozy romance of Christmas lights and candles!

But.

The Christmas stuff gets everywhere. We didn’t even unpack all of it this year, and it was still everywhere. We couldn’t trust the kitten to be alone with the tree, so the tree went into the office — which meant shifting around half the office furniture to make room. Every time someone wanted to eat at the table (which was at every meal while we had company), I had to clear it of Christmas table runner and other decor. The traditional German “Schwibbögen” (wooden arches with lights) looked fantastic in the windows but were in constant peril from the cats. Santa took over the coffee table.

I love my Christmas stuff. But after awhile — especially after New Year’s — it starts to become just that: stuff. It turns into clutter, and I can’t see my life through it anymore.

Christmas and Writing and Uncluttering Both

Sometimes, dear inklings, our writing is like that. We get into the joy of our craft. We throw ourselves into the beauty of word and phrase and rhythm. We embellish here, we add flourishes there. We touch-up with elaborate metaphor. Heaven forbid, we start using adverbs and too many dialogue tags other than “said.” We prettify every sentence until it’s a sparkly doohickey.

At first, all of this might seem attractive. At first, it might make readers ooh and aah over what we’ve created. At first, it might make us ooh and aah. It’s so very easy to fall in love with our own ornamentation.

But.

What we’re really doing, gentle readers, is cluttering up our writing. We’re adding so much stuff to it, it’s near impossible to hear our real writer’s voice over the visual noise. Our writing has become so frilly, we can’t see the beauty of simple truth anymore.

The solution — as ever and always — is to kill our darlings, as they say. Pack up the frilly dialogue tags. Box up the adverbial embellishments. Cut out the complex sentence structures. Take the darn jingle bells off the door and just let the door be a door already! It doesn’t all have to be over-the-top drama, drama, drama.

My metaphor breaks down when I think about next Christmas. I’ll be unpacking the deco again, putting out the whatnots, and plugging in the electrical sparklies. That’s okay, though. Maybe it’s like writing a first draft: I can do whatever I want until it comes time to edit, revise, and re-write. But by then, I’ll be ready to reclaim my writing and simplify for the second draft. By then, I’ll be ready for the truth of unadorned, uncluttered beauty.

And that’s WILAWriTWe!

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