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Monthly Archives: June 2011

Scary Scenes

My friend Rayne Hall is an excellent writing teacher, and she has another class coming up on Scary Scenes. Even if you’re not writing Horror, if you want to learn to add suspense to your novel, this is a great class. (I speak from personal experience!)

Are your frightening scenes scary enough? Learn practical tricks to turn up the suspense. Make your reader’s hearts hammer with excitement and their skins tingle with goosebumps of delicious fright. Whether you’re working on a ghost story, a thriller, a paranormal romance, an urban fantasy or a romantic suspense, this workshop is perfect for planning or revising your scary scenes. If you wish, you may submit a scene for critique at the end of the course.

Teaser and Revisions

Sorry, my blog is boring right now because I’m working hard on the edits for The Unfinished Song: Sacrifice. It will be a few more iterations, I fear. Since I don’t have the energy for a real post, I’ll give you an excerpt from the book. Here’s a rare scene with no spoilers, unless you haven’t read The Unfinished Song: Taboo yet, in which case go do so at once before you read this. (Just kidding.)

Vessia

“You can’t be rid of me that easily.”
The voice was unexpected. Vessia whirled around to see Nangi watching her.
Vessia felt a frisson of resentment shudder through her. It had been so long since she had run through the meadows alone, as she’d used to when she lived with Old Man and Old Woman. She missed the smell of heather under open sky. She needed wind to lift her hair off her neck, she needed to swing her arms without anyone touching her shoulder to calm her. The land they were passing through now was hot, dry and dead, closed up into canyons of striated rock. Trekking through the stone passages, where sometimes the overhang was so high it blocked the sun, was like traversing caves, or tombs. When she’d told Vio she wanted to leave and be on her own for a while, he had only laughed and told her that being a prisoner meant not being free. She had retorted, “But am I not your wife?” and either because of that or because he noticed the mad itch in her, he relented. He let her go alone to a cool gathering of water in the rock, a place where aspen grew around the water’s edge and swans paused on their migration to swim. And now, just when she thought she was alone, she discovered Nangi had followed her.
“I can eat your thoughts, you know.” Nangi smiled a nasty smile.
Vessia had seen her do this with others; she would sidle up to them, hiss at them that she could eat their thoughts, and then grin while they broke into a sweat and began to stammer. Vessia didn’t understand why they feared having their thoughts eaten.
“Do they taste good?” Vessia asked. This was something she had always wondered.
Nangi’s eyes narrowed like a cat’s. “How do you do that?”
“Do what?”
“Shield your thoughts! How do you do it? Stop it at once! It only proves you have something to hide! Let your thoughts out at once or I shall report you to my father!”

Oh, and there’s this too, if you somehow missed it: J.K. Rowling is now an indie author.

Suffering for your art

“Suffering for your art is noble; making your family suffer for it is bullshit.”


http://www.apexbookcompany.com/2011/06/how-to-not-quit-your-day-job/

Should You Start At the End to Reach the Middle?

Beginnings are difficult. Endings are difficult. But connecting them is the most difficult of all.

As usual, a few plot holes have opened up during revisions, a few broken bridges between the Beginning and the Ending. To fix them, to tie up the loose strings, I am writing from the outside in…from the beginning toward the middle, but also from the ending toward the middle, until the two meet.

To to this, I take each character’s story arc and ask myself, Where does this person need to end up? Then I ask, where does this person need to begin? Then…in theory…it’s just a matter of figuring out the steps in between. Generally I try to have each major character show up once a chapter, and supporting characters at least three times in the book. I have a lot of characters, so this in itself can be tricky. My main characters have one to three scenes per chapter.

Designing each individual story arc is not too hard, in and of itself; the tricky part comes when I juggle them. I have to make certain the logistics are feasible. Scene X logically must come before Scene Y. But I also try to coordinate the themes of each scene, which should contribute to the mini-story arc and theme of each chapter. (Each chapter has its own chapter theme, which contributes to the larger theme of the book.)

For instance, the chapter theme in the first book of The Unfinished Song: Sacrifice, is “Recrudescence,” or the resurgence of a disease which had been dormant or cured. For a few characters, their recrudescence is literal, and they suffer a relapse of the disfiguring skin disorder they had when they were Shunned. For most of the others, however, the recrudesce plays out more symbolically. Kavio discovers an old enemy is back, in an unexpected position of strength. Brena meets the bear again and realizes her injury is getting worse. Gremo… well, I could go on, but I won’t spoil anything by saying that Dindi also finds something won’t stay down, so to speak.

Each scene focuses on a different character dealing with a relapse or reoccurrence of a problem or person who was supposed to be gone. The chapter as a whole contributes to the book’s overall theme of sacrifice because the each person will realize in their own way that to truly conquer their problems, they have to do more. They have to give up more than they thought to gain what they want… possibly much more than they are willing to give.

7 Ways To Beat Writer’s Block

1. Read a novel in your genre.
In the grossest metaphor ever, writing is like poop. (Yes, I have small male children. How could you tell?) What comes out reflects what goes in. If nothing is coming in, consider your diet. Your writing diet is fed by reading. Some writers stop reading fiction when they begin to write. This is understandable, maybe inevitable in small doses. But take it too far and you will starve your muse.

Read inside your genre. That will help inspire you again with the kind of story you are working on.

2. Read a novel outside your genre.
If you try reading inside your genre and everything feels hopelessly stale, read outside your genre. Read in a genre you’ve never read before, even one you swore you’ve always hated. Westerns, romance, literary. Try it. You might be amazed that stories feel fresh and unpredictable again. You might find yourself inspired to bring that strangeness into your work, bringing it back to life. Or you might even try writing in a different genre. It doesn’t mean you have to switch permanently. Just let your brain play with variety.

3. Read nonfiction.
Did you know most published books are nonfiction? If you don’t normally read nonfiction, try it. There are two variations. Research and Fishing Expeditions. When you read nonfiction for research purposes, you know what you need to learn more about to make your story work, so you find a book and read up on the subject. But if you have writer’s block, that might not be strong enough medicine. You might benefit from a Fishing Expedition. That’s when you read random crap off the internet, or strange books on bizarre topics, things that have no conceivable relationship to your writing or anything else in your life. You just find the topic fascinating. And eventually (trust me on this) you will see connections that you never imagined.

4. Watch TV.
Oh, no, girlfriend, you did not go there! Uh-huh, bitch, I did. Deal with it. Television is just another medium of entertainment. Watch different genres and take notes. (You knew there had to be a catch. Damn.) Analyze the stories as you would novels. If you can get ahold of the screenplays, read the show you watched. Think about how you would write up the novelization of the episode, if you were tasked with the job.

5. Exercise. 
I used to swim. Lots. I wrote stories while I swam and always had to have a notebook by the pool so I could dash down my ideas, often while my bathing suit still dripped all over the cement. Then circumstances changed and I couldn’t swim anymore. My writing suffered. I realized how important it is to the mind to take care of the body. Exercise also helps combat depression, which contributes to writer’s block. (And living block.) So get on a bike, in a pool, on your toes. Jump up and down next to your desk if you have to. Punch the air. Get yourself moving. Let your mind wander.

6. Doodle.
Many writers are also artists. I think the part of the brain responsible for the visual arts is slightly different than for verbal arts. Switching media is another way to keep your brain from getting bored with itself. Even if you can’t paint or draw, doodle. It can be about your book. It can be just for fun. Just don’t do it half-assed. Do the best you can; treat your work as art, no matter what your level of skill.

7. Break it down.
If you’re working on a novel, the sheer length can overwhelm you. Break it down. Don’t worry about the whole thing at once. Just focus on one chapter or one scene. This is probably what you’re doing anyway, but actually pretend for a while that this chapter is the whole story… as if you were writing a short story, not a novel at all. Craft the beginning, middle and end as you would a short story. If it’s a short story you’re writing, focus on just one page or one paragraph, as if it were a bit of flash fiction. As if it were just a character study, a set piece, a beautiful bit. A bonsai tree sized story. Rest. Then, tomorrow, do another beautiful bit. Another bonsai tree. Until you surprise yourself with a forest.

Why Have “Age Appropriate” Books?

In a previous post, I discussed YA literature, and whether it was merely an artificial publishing box. Today, as I sit with my one-year-old and listen to Barney sing about firetrucks, I wanted to ask how far that is true. When I was a tot, there were stories and television for children, but the diversity and volume of children’s media has certainly increased.

The research that goes into children’s television is also astonishing. One show my kids love is Blues Clues. The success of this show was not accidental. The producers did a tremendous amount of research into the cognitive abilities and attention span of three and four years olds to craft every show.
I don’t know if as much research goes into children’s literature. In general, I think the younger the children, the more research there is on how to package uplifting and educational messages for the target age group. Of course, this is because the younger the children, the more the target (buying) audience is actually the parents. Parents want the literary equivalent of health food for their kids. 
By the time the readers reach their teens — Middle Grade and Young Adult — the buyers are frequently the teens themselves. Even if the credit card is still mom’s or dad’s. But parents, teachers and other adults still buy books, and they still do it with the hope of moulding (or at least not corrupting) pliable minds. Notice that the article complaining about the darkness in YA was a mom trying to purchase books for her daughter.
There was an interesting study of Romance heroes done by Daniel J. Kruger, Maryanne Fisher and Ian Jobling, which compared reader’s preferences for certain kind of romantic heroes. The heroes were coded according to whether they were dark and dangerous (anti-heros) or noble and chivalrous (traditional heroes). Female readers were’t told that the descriptions of the men were from fiction, and were asked various questions hinged on imagining themselves in relationships with these men. Most women preferred the anti-hero for a one night stand, but the chivalrous hero for a long term relationship. 
However, even the women who were intrigued by the idea of a fling with the anti-heros overwhelmingly agreed on one thing: when it came to choosing between these two men for their daughters, they almost all wanted the chivalrous man for their daughters.

It is striking that 60 percent of women would prefer to have sex with [the anti-hero], a cad, but only 13 percent would prefer to see him engaged to their twenty-five-year-old-daughter….

You might think this was a generational thing, that of course old fuddy-duddy moms of an older generation would be more conservative, but in fact the participants of the study, as in most human-rat-maze experiments, were college students.

The women in this study were similar in age to their imagined twenty-five daughter, and yet they were able to state a preference that would be appropriate for a potential grandmother.

By the way, this shows that it’s not a matter of age, so much as relationship. It’s not that adults consider teens as other. It’s that people, as parents or even when they just imagine being parents,  look something different in literature for their children than for themselves.

Generations of researchers have debated whether violence in video games and on television causes a rise in criminal violence in society. Fretting over violence or “darkness” in literature has not been nearly as fevered. (Before TV, concern over literature occupied a greater fraction of the global reserve of Worry That Young Minds Are Going To The Dogs.)

These questions are not quite the same as asking what kind of literature is “best suited” to teens. The problem is that it is difficult to untangle what we mean by “best.” Is “best” mean most entertaining, best selling, most educational, most conducive to being a whole, rounded, compassionate and intelligent person? And how would we measure that? We can ask children to sing their ABCs or share toys, but its harder to evacuate the intellectual and emotional growth of teens and adults.

So Young Adult books are judged as effective by the de facto method our society uses for judging the success of most things: number of sales and final dollars earned.

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