Early Tuesday morning the power went out here for about an hour. My computer never regained consciousness. My miracle-working husband took it apart and reconnected it to his computer and recovered most of my files, but none of the children’s. Like my son’s iMovie History Fair project that was ready to be burned to a DVD for his presentation on Thursday. Did I mention I was due to go out of town to a conference with my husband on Wednesday morning?
It was a little crazy around here Tuesday night as my son and husband worked to reconsruct a project in a few hours that took two weeks to build. It helped that my son had scanned all his pictures onto my husband’s laptop and done the original voice recording of his narrative paper on the laptop as well. So he only had to search the web for all the remaining photos.
I had even had my son type his process paper on my account because I was too lazy to log out one night and told him just to hurry and type it. Sometimes my laziness pays off. Rarely, but sometimes.
So that, coupled with accompanying my husband to his conference, is why I’ve ignored my blog this week. I promise to do better next week.
But here’s the really great news! I started work on a new book while I was away. Talk about exciting. And I made a discovery. I am a romance writer who likes a dash of suspense to keep things interesting. There. I’ve said it. I was trying so hard to write a different genre this time around and I was frozen at the keyboard. I’ve brainstormed lists of story ideas that I couldn’t flesh out for a whole book until now. It came to me one day while hauling laundry downstairs. My favorite story idea needed some romance to get me going. And now I’m going. Yea!
Oh what a week! Yea for romance, though!! Happy you are happily writing.
there’s that picture of the ms again– it gives me chills! You’re doing what everyone recommends, while your submission is being reviewed you start on the next one!!
yeah! I love romance!
so sorry for DS–man, to lose that whole project!!! I’ve had things like that happen before. With like, 20 page research papers. I can feel the blood draining from my face, just in the memory of it.
Good luck with your writing!!!!
Thanks for the support Krista and Karen.
Tamara, 20 page research papers?–That’s awful. So sorry.
So, are you going to post your first chapter so we can all have a look. And so that I can dig into it, or are you just going to tell us about your laundry inspired romance thematic experience and leave it at that? Hmmm?
And, what novel did you already submit? And to whom?
So when do I get to read this new one?
Kim, You’re back! I’d love to get your feedback on an entire chapter, but I’ve read conflicting opinions about whether that’s a good idea before you’re published. Most sources I’ve read discourage writers from posting that much. So what to do?
I submitted my novel Falling Awake to DB and Covenant. Just got a rejection today from DB. So one down. Surprisingly, I didn’t even feel that badly about it. What does that say about my mental state?
Shandrae, Whew, it’s really rough right now. You’ll have to wait awhile. There are still so many unknowns I have to nail down–characters, setting, plot–basically all of it. I’ve got a lot of work to do before it can come into the light of day.
That depends on what you want from having someone look at your chapter. If you want an opinion, don’t post it. If you want someone to go over it and show you how you can improve your writing, then show it to an editor or FELLOW AUTHOR who you trust can do you the biggest favor. We’re not talking about getting this ready for publication. That’s already done. We’re talking about giving you some insights to help you with your next novel.
If I were you, I’d let ME have a look. Just for the fun of it.’
Scardy cat!
If it will make you feel any better, I’ll post the opening chapter(or as much as this dialogue box will allow) of the novel I’m working on right now and you can:
1. Critique my writing and
2. Decide if I’m a writer you can trust enough (based on my expertise) to allow me to give you some feedback.
I don’t EVER do this, but for some reason I bumped into you online and you seem so genuinely sincere and SO NOT LIKE ALL THE OTHER COOKIE CUTTER authors out there, I’m taking a chance and spending a few moments making a business offer. And its free. Hey, isn’t that bad for business?
Kimber, Elizabethean, Daveo: You are having way too much fun with the names and email addresses. I think you have strong tendencies in the Productive Thinking area. (Sorry, that’s the teacher in me coming out.)
First you make me laugh out loud, and then you flatter me and offer an outrageously fantastic opportunity–one I’d have to be pitifully stupid to refuse. So I’m in.
I’ll post it in the same spot as before, but not until late tonight. I have four scheduled dentist appointments (not all for me, my children) this afternoon. Plus last week’s computer catastrophe isn’t completely cleaned up yet. My files are being stored on a computer without internet access so it’ll take a little time to transfer everything. After FHE of course.
btw-my sister is reading Chi Running and says it holds the cure for IT Band Syndrome.
Oh … and free isn’t bad for business according to Chris Anderson author of Free: The Future of a Radical Price
Couldn’t resist. My mom used to joke that she and my dad had so many children because she washed their clothes together.
Now that’s romantic!
(But not nearly as intriguing as this secret word mincer.)
Like I can remember how to tie my shoes. You’re putting your chapter where? The same place as before? Did I ever go anywhere before? Ever? You’re going to have to read the instructions to me and type them in bold.
And another thing. Since when are tacos health food? Come on. Really?
I went looking on your site for any POST of a chapter. No luck. I’m not good at clicking about. If it doesn’t hit me in the mouse, I usually don’t bother. You’re really going to have to read the instruction loudly.
Also notice that I used the Q trick in these re-writings. Instead of explaining that your character is WONDERING something. Just turn it into a question. Its a technique that professional writers use as often as breathing air.
Instead of:
“You went without me?” I glanced at my finace and wondered why he went shopping for China without me.
You use the Q trick and write something like:
“You went without me?” I glanced at my finace. Why would he go shopping for China on his own?
The tacos sound terrific. I really should have eaten breakfast. Oh bother.
That’s all for today. I’ve got to get to other things.
Please NOTE. That once you begin paying attention to ALL THESE DETAILS, you will notice them quickly, fix them, and they will become part of your writing. They may seem overwhelming to you right now, but you’ll learn quickly and you’ll simply DO IT without thinking. Using all these wonderful tricks that will turn your writing into the work of a pro. Its definitely worth it. Trust me. This is what the pros do. And they don’t tell you. Because, they don’t have the time to spend with you. They’ve got their own work to do.
The authors you listen to at the conventions? They’re at a convention. The ones you really want to listen to are home, hammering on their manuscripts. They’re NOT AT THE CONVENTIONS, selling their sort of, okay work. Know what I mean?
Don’t get me wrong. Conventions are wonderful. So is writing like a pro.
Good luck. I’ll stop in for line four later.
What is the purpose of this opening chapter? What is the dramitic high point of this chapter? And finally, did you foreshadow the end of your novel in this opening chapter?
Okay, that was three quesitons. But you have to answer all three of them if you want this chapter to be stellar. So answer them. Right now. What are they. Tell me what you can…
I have to add a quick note of appreciation here. I’ve been looking for this kind of feedback and didn’t know where or how to get it. Thanks so much for taking the time to teach me. You point out what’s wrong, why, and how to fix it. Invaluable. Thank you. More later.
You’re opening needs to start the story right in the middle of the story (or the action). You can’t write a good opening unless you know the ending. And if you foreshadow the ending, it will guide you to the best choice for a drammatic high point in your scene. Kill a lot of birds with one stone my dear. A lot of birds.
I don’t know enough about your first chapter yet tel give you any feedback about this, but I will when I get a chance to look all the way through your first chapter.
How are we doing so far? Is this helpful? Or a waste of your time?
@Kim: You say:
All that stomach wrenching, chest heaviness, all of that…its something you want your reader to feel. You DO NOT WANT TO EXPLAIN THOSE REACTIONS. You want to create an exchange between these two actors so that when it is finished your reader is repulsed, your reader has a heavy chest, your reader has a stomach in knots.
So I have a question for you. I’ve read and studied Dwight V. Swain’s book Techniques of the Selling Writer. He outlines motivation reaction units. First set up the outside stimulus to which your focal character reacts. Then give your character’s reaction in this order: feeling, action, speech. He says you don’t have to include all three, but they must appear in that order.
Here is my question: Do you disagree with this technique or am I doing it completely wrong?
I’ve already made some changes based on your comments. THANK YOU. THANK YOU. THANK YOU. Dialouge is some of the most difficult and most important stuff in your writing. It also requires a lot of WORK! And a good ear to hear when its not working. You develop that ear over years of working with Dialogue. No matter what any author says, you don’t develop a good ear by listening to people speak. You develop a good dialogue-writing ear by writing dialgoue and then re-writing it until it works. Really well. By that, I mean, that what your characters say characterizes them, that there is NO uncomfortable tension between who they are and what they say. No what I mean? It also has to be a logical (or in the case of some wacko characters) a well-placed illogial comment.
Here’s what I did (pay attention to the last snippet of DIALOUGE in all caps):
I changed this:
“I be sent to fetch the Ethiopian sea urchin. Capn’s orders. Aims to speak with the keeper of his prize before we make landfall.” The sailor pointed the dripping-wet end of the oar at her. “That be you, Missy.”
“I know nothing of the sea.” Mima folded her arms. “NOR YOUR CAPTAIN.”
TO THIS:
“I be sent to fetch the Ethiopian sea urchin. Capn’s orders. Aims to speak with the keeper of his prize before we make landfall.” The sailor pointed the dripping-wet end of the oar at her. “That be you, Missy.”
“I know nothing of the sea.” Mima folded her arms. “AND I KEEP NONE OF YOUR CAPTAIN’S PRIZES.”
In fact, I changed all of this on account of your comments. Way to go!
Chapter One
Mima huddled near the bow of the tiny dinghy—as far away from her sailor escort as the craft’s leaking timbers permitted. She never should have agreed to let this stranger row her beyond the safety of Sidon’s coral reef harbor.
“What need have you of a handservant aboard a cargo ship?”
“I be sent to fetch the Ethiopian sea urchin. Capn’s orders. Aims to speak with the keeper of his prize before we make landfall.” The sailor pointed the dripping-wet end of the oar at her. “That be you, Missy.”
“I know nothing of the sea.” Mima folded her arms. “And I keep none of the Captain’s prizes.”
“That’s not what the Capn’s prize tells me.” He worked the oars through the cresting waves. “Talks of you like his own flesh and blood, he does. Capn’ had me keep an eye on you all these years, he did. Says his prize wanted it that way.”
This is so much fun. I’m rewriting the first chapter and recharacterizing my dialogue. Thanks for reminding me that I have to do that. If you ever want to see the fixes I’m putting in, let me know, if you think you could learn anything by comparing the two versions, otherwise, I won’t ever bother you with this.
I just noticed I wrote a, what do they call it, a phononym or homonym or whatever. I wrote, in one of my comments:
No what I mean:
Instead of:
Know what I mean?
I write way to fast, and never look back. And it move my lips when I read. Its one of my many, many, many faults/flaws. But hey, I just keep working at it. Right?
You wrote:
I told my husband after I posted my first chapter for you that I would probably cry when I read your critique.
It had the opposite effect. You showed me how to take what I have and make it better. It made me want to try it out and write a better novel. Your examples are not trying to rewrite my novel but make it come alive. You haven’t told me to change my characters or plot, only given examples of how to demonstrate it better depending on what I want the reader to feel and understand. Thank you.
Here’s a little secret. You can actually write about anything. You can have your plot be anything. And you can have any kind of characters you want. Seriously. All that about choosing a story that’s relevant or cool or hip or in the news or in style is all BUNK. That’s right. BUNK. As long as you render the characters extremely well. And you present YOUR story very well, it will be published, it will be read, and it will be loved.
All that bunk about picking the right HIP, IN VOGUE, HOT SELLING story is really a bunch of authors who want to get published but don’t want to spend the time to render things expertly. They just want get published and sell. Good for them. They’re always going to chasing the wind, looking for the WHAT”S NEXT or WHAT’S BIG story to write. But they’ll never write from their heart. Too bad. I pity them. Just a wee bit.
So yeah, all I’ll ever talk about (usually) is how to render what you’ve written with more power or clarity or voice or professionalism, but far be it from me to tell YOUR STORY.
YOu wrote:
Then give your character’s reaction in this order: feeling, action, speech. He says you don’t have to include all three, but they must appear in that order.
Here is my question: Do you disagree with this technique or am I doing it completely wrong?
I prefer to write the scene. And then decide which techniques OR dramaitc points need to be added, taken out, modified, or changed into a completely different technique.
For example, you write a couple of paragraphs of narrated dialogue, which I like to do because the character is speaking but it allows you to use a few word choices and thrown in some interior dialouge without actaully having to place the character’s words in quotes. What you lose in immediacy, you gain in narrative power. However, after writing that part of the scene like that, when you go back over it, you may find that it lacks the power of CHARACTER. It just isn’t right. That’s because you begin to lose the character. So you make a decision to drop the narrated dialogue in favor of the actual dialogue and it adds a lot of emotion to the scene. Wow. Just by changing techniques. Who would have thought it possible.
Feeling. Action. Speech. I prefer to put them altogether. Feelings can come out in the action. Sometimes they are the feelings that the reader brings to some action you’re describing which is terrific because then your action has lots of emotional content and you don’t have to write any of it. Its just there because of the shared understanding between reader and character (ops, I almost wrote shared understanding between reader and author and if the reader is sharing some understanding with the author, then you’ve got some serious voice problems).
Or maybe, you’ve got a paragraph or a scene within a scene where its a rather long run of interior dialogue. And you break it up, or even introduce it with some spoken dialogue. Interior dialogue is usally full of emotion. Bad ID tells emotions. Great ID uses the Q trick and a bunch of others I hope we, one day, get to cover, in order to create the emotion in your reader…or let your reader experience frustration, hope, anger, fear, etc. that your character experiences without saying something terrible like:
She felt the fear of his presence in the darkness.
Better to write something like:
The sound of footsteps on the leaves rustled across the cemetary. Was that him? Did she follow him here?
You see the difference. You never have to say the word FEAR. The reader experiences the fear.
So let’s say you’ve got a bunch of ID going along and there is lots of emotion. You don’t have to have some action and then some dialogue. How dumb is that? You can use dialogue to introduce something. You can use it to break up the ID. And you really use the ACTION to remind the reader that you’re in the head of the POV character, so that you can then have them speak. I think that’s what Swain is saying, in a very poor, convoluted way.
Feeling is best presented through Interior dialogue. Interior dialogue is best rendered when you drop in some action in order to get the reader into the head of the POV character. And when you combine ID and Action, it usually leads to some dialougue runs. So yeah, Swain may be given some decent advice, but why the heck is he packaging it up in some scientific analysis of writing. Weird. Better to just lay out all the techniques. Show how they can improve your writing and then let the author find their groove.
You say:
Feeling is best presented through Interior dialogue. Interior dialogue is best rendered when you drop in some action in order to get the reader into the head of the POV character.
My first couple of drafts had quite a bit of interior dialogue. My beta readers liked it for the most part. Then I sent some pages off to an editor and I was told to get rid of most of it which really killed the emotion. The editor wanted me to change my characters all based on his/her personal taste–or so it felt to me. I took out A LOT of ID but refused to rewrite my characters’ personalities.
After the rewrites, my beta readers kept telling me they wanted to beinside the character’s head more, but I resisted because of this editor’s critique.
I think that editor was trying to tell me what you said, but didn’t have the knowledge base for it. He/she knew something wasn’t working and assumed it was my characterization. Instead of deepening my current characterization, he/she wanted to make them into different people.
Last night I dug out my old ID and began reinserting it with my character’s voice. Such fun.
I’m glad my comments could help even a little bit. That is much clearer now. And yes I like to see how you rework scenes. It’s very instructive.
I forgot to mention that if, after trying to ressurect you ID, it just aint workin, then you may want to delete it. I do it all the time, but not until I’ve tried every possible fix, thrown a life preserver, called out the marines, and sent up smoke signals. Sometimes you have to bury the dead, but not until you’ve used life support for the legislated time period.
You don’t want to be accused of murder. Maybe just a little assisted suicide.
In my first sentence of the post above I wrote:
I’m not sure what you want out of the next SCENE WITHIN THE SCENE, but we are NOT about to enter a dialogue scene in your opening.
The word NOT, should NOT have been in there. It should have read:
I’m not sure what you want out of the next SCENE WITHIN THE SCENE, but we are about to enter a dialogue scene in your opening.
Sorry about that NOT…
Hey. All the posts have magically disappeared. I don’t see any of the fifty, except the most recent one. What happened? Am I lost in cyberspace. Ops.
…I found the OLDER COMMENTS button. All is well in panicville.
Perhaps I’m infringing on a private exchange between you two — but as a newbie I find it oh, so fascinating. Thank you for sharing.
Mystery writer, I have a question about this paragraph you wrote:
The only thing I could see was a thirty-something bacelor living in an apartment waiting for Better Homes and Garden’s to find it. He owned a Martha Stewart dining set, Rachael Ray cookware that matched his granite countertops and where did he get the idea for the kitchen color? What does a Ph.D. student in Physics need with Spanish Rose walls, back-lit glass cabinetry, a Roech bread mixer and a special order, double bowl, under mount sink? Buying new China without her was simply over-the-top.
I noticed the paragraph opened in the first person and ended in the third. (The use of “her” instead of “me.”) Was this deliberate? Because, if so, it seemed to subtly cast a much broader, more authoritative judgment against Sean than Eva’s opinion alone — as if all readers were in agreement. And so my question is, can such a shift in POV be an effective tool?
The use of HER is still in first person. Surprise. You’re right. It was done as the ROYAL HER. Its self talk. She giving herself a pep talk, telling herself that she’s up to this confrontation, that Sean is wrong to do what he did and it acts as a springboard into the conflict of this exchange. USING me doesn’t work here. Using her includes the reader in her most intimate interior dialogue. That’s my opinion. What’s yours?
Jennie:
Just a short comment about using HER in the middle of ID in first person. Remember that weirdo guy named Shakespear. He did that all the time. I remember one line in particular in much ado about nothing:
The World must be peopled.
Granted, he wasn’t using the pronoun, but it was a self talk moment, and Shakespear did that all the time. Its loads of fun. And using the ROYAL HER AND HIM in place of the me, is perfectly fine. You’re not changing point of view. You’re talking to yourself, about yourself in a sort of third person way which ends up falling into the Shakesperean self-talk sililoquoy sort of moment. Know what I mean?
I don’t plan my dramatic points. I discover them. While I’m writing. And then I go back and make sure they are written properly, since when I was first writing the scene I wasn’t sure of the dramatic point. I usually stew over WHO SHOULD BE THE POV character. And often I get it wrong. That’s how you discover the dramatic point. By determining the POV character. You try to figure out WHO IS BEST SUITED TO VIEW THE SCENE. And in order to make that determination you have to figure out what is it they are going to be viewing. So you muddle through, you figure out what it is, really, they are vieiwing. In other words you figure out the PURPOSE OF THE SCENE. Then you have them view it. Then you decide if they are the best choice as the POV character. And if not, you go back in a rewrite another character into the POV character.
There are other considerations like who can’t and can know something which will add to the difficulty of selecting your POV character.
If Sean is a major character, then you may need to start earlier in the story-line. If he is a major/minor charcter who will be discarded later in the book, start there, at the discarding.
And finally, if you want to know where to start your story, figure out how it is going to end. Once you know your ending, it will be a simple matter to figure out how it will begin.
So, how does your story end?
So, may I make some suggestions from the brief outline you’ve given me?
Okay. Still thinking. Your suggestions up the intensity. I think I’m afraid to do that. But I want to. I need to. Yeah, I’ve got a lot to think about. I really like the ending scenes I’ve written because of the intensity, but it took six weeks of being frozen at the keyboard because I was afraid to write like that. But it was really fun.
…an isolated event. Something awful happens, but its something aweful that could happen to anyone. Or is it. Let the awful event at the beginning be used to bring the characters together, and the event alone will be all the foreshadowing you may need. Its existence in your beginning will gnaw at the reader until you get to the unraveling of more an suddely the reader says, I knew that was going to be more relevant than just a random event. Sounds like you’re on your way nicely.