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February Thinky Links!
Over the month of January, I collected the stories I found on Twitter and in my feeds that were just too good to miss and put them together for you! Welcome to “Thinky Links“!
Author Janice Hardy offers some good advice on how to cut a scene without hurting your story
Kristen Lamb gives a really good example of how to start in medias res.
The Editors’ Blog looks at the use of coincidence in fiction, why it’s bad—and how to fix it.
I’ve been working hard on revising my Nano novel, so I’m really far behind on my feeds, but I did happen to see two good posts on EditTorrent recently, the kind that make me want to run around telling people “I’ve been vindicated” in an imaginary battle I was having with no one. The first covers showing versus telling in an interesting way (i.e. not writing 101), including that was is not always bad and is not the same thing as passive voice, and the role of telling in exposition.
The second is how to avoid that obnoxious “As you know, Bob” (or Alphonse) dialogue by slipping in backstory, characterization and other information through subtle cues. I LOVE working on this, and Alicia gives great examples!
Although I’m now with a traditional, regional publisher, I still find self-publishing very interesting. So for two different perspectives on that this month, Daniel J. Friedman takes a hard look at the numbers behind self publishing: what they make, what they’re worth, and what they’re selling. On the other hand, Joanna Penn interviewed Adam Croft on How To Sell 130,000 Books Without A Publisher. And for some perspective on both sides, Future Book looks at Why Amanda Hocking Switched, with some interesting notes on how her publishers are working for her.
And to close, here are a few of my favorite posts on this blog from Januaries past:
- A perennial favorite of mine, how to spot and avoid the most common (empty) gestures in writing
- Another one I still use extensively, creating and editing with a scene chart
- And a few from the series on tension, suspense and surprise:
- Choosing whether plot elements should be set up strongly to create suspense, or should remain a surprise
- One I should probably study a little more: creating suspense in Act I
- What creates tension and suspense?
What’s the best writing/marketing/publishing advice you‘ve read lately?
Photo by Karola Riegler
J is for Jumping in
Here’s a complete shocker: J is one of my favorite letters 
. But I had a really hard time thinking of something for the letter J. I was going to do an acrostic—but I still couldn’t think of anything for J, and then I’d have to think up even more letters? Blech.
So instead, I’m jumping in. This works on two levels in writing. The first is that we need to jump into 
our stories. In medias res is the common phrase: in the middle of things. Don’t spend five or fifteen or fifty pages warming up, giving us your characters’ life stories, waiting for something to happen. Readers don’t like to be kept waiting!
But we have to balance between opening too early and too late. We don’t have to have the central conflict on page one, line one. We need to have some sort of conflict in the first section of the book, but sometimes the biggest conflict of the book takes some time to set up. I’ve been more guilty of starting too late: at a point where the conflict is obvious, but the reader doesn’t know the character well enough to sympathize, or at a point where the conflict itself takes a lot of explanation instead of playing out in front of us.
The other way we need to jump into our writing is to do it now. So many people wish they “had time” to write. But having time to write doesn’t mean you have hours of down time (I certainly don’t, with three kids five and under). It means making time by making choices—and making sacrifices. Time you spend writing is time you can’t spend watching TV, playing piano, painting, knitting, practicing the piano, with your children, sleeping, etc.
On the other hand, sometimes it’s not that we’re not ready and willing to make the sacrifice—we’re scared. Guess what: you don’t need a degree or a certificate to write. Heck, I know people who write without a basic grasp of grammar and punctuation. There are no requirements to be a writer: just pen and paper. (Or a laptop. Oh wait, are those requirements? Crap.)
What do you think? Do you jump in?
Photo credits: plunge—Konrad Mostert
Jump into the action
Once you’ve settled on the who and the what, the when might still need a little fine tuning. In Revision And Self-Editing, James Scott Bell gives a great rule of thumb: “act first, explain later” (132). Start with action—a character doing something—and explain only what’s absolutely necessary, and even then, wait as long as possible.
There are other advantages to this approach, too. The primary advantage is that it piques the reader’s curiosity. This hearkens back to our series on tension and suspense, where one technique to increase tension within a scene is to start the scene with a bang.
One great way to create tension is not to explain these actions—at first. The reader is taken aback by this interesting or inexplicable action—and they’re eager to not only find out what happens next, but to learn why this is happening now.
As James Scott Bell says in Revision And Self-Editing, you can “marble in” this sequel information through the beginning of the scene.
This works on a story-level as well as the scene-level when used in the opening.
When done well, opening with action also helps to anchor us in the POV character’s head far better than, say, starting with their thoughts off in space could. Rather than thinking about the backstory, the character should be acting based on the backstory. Then slipping in that information will be natural.
In Don’t Murder Your Mystery, Chris Roerden distinguishes between “backstory,” the events that take place before a story starts, and “background,” which supplies information that was or still is true. To use yesterday’s example, Hamlet’s father being dead and his mother marrying his uncle are part of the background. By Chris’s definition, then, we want to get the background in so the story makes sense, but not so much we slow the story down—a classic problem of backstory.
Tomorrow we have a guest post from the magnificent Margie Lawson with more about managing backstory!
What do you think? What kind of action do you start with?
Photo by Horia Varlan
Posted in Technique
Tagged action, anchor, Backstory, bad backstory, beginning, beginnings, boring backstory, establishing tension, tension
2 Comments
Where to start
Knowing where to start a story (or even a scene) is a fine art. Too early and we bore the reader. Too late and we confuse the reader (and then have to wedge in that much more backstory later). With backstory, the central issue is usually starting too early—we know these events will influence the story, but we still don’t want to start before the story “really” does. So how can we tell which events are backstory and which are story-story?
Two ways I can think of are focusing on:
- who our story is about (the protagonist) and
- what our story is about (the theme or the central events).
Take Hamlet, for example: when the play starts, the story events are already in motion—his father is already murdered, and his uncle has already married his mother. But Hamlet’s story doesn’t start until his father’s ghost appears to call for vengeance, and that’s where we join him.
Now, we could have started out watching Claudius plot and eventually murder Hamlet Sr., and marry Gertrude to assume the throne. But Shakespeare’s story wasn’t ultimately about the betrayal of family—it was about the consequences of inaction. Hamlet was his protagonist. (And that kinda made Shakespeare’s choice easy, since he needed Hamlet off at school when his dad was killed.)
Author Chris Roerden offers some more advice on where to find the beginning:
It’s where the first sign of trouble appears.It’s where a change threatens to upset the status quo. Mystery author and literary agent Jack Bickham says, “Nothing is more threatening than change. . . . Identify the moment of change, and you know when your story must open” (The 38 Most Common Fiction Writing Mistakes, 11-2; from Don’t Murder Your Mystery, 54).
Naturally, the backstory will set up the opening situation, as it does for Hamlet. Usually, at least some of those circumstances of the story created by the backstory should be quickly explained. We’d be awfully confused if it took a quarter of Hamlet’s story to discover that his dad is dead and his mother has already remarried. Of course, that doesn’t mean we have to explain everything in the opening lines. Backstory is more powerful when we save it as long as possible.
What do you think? How do you choose when to start your story?
Photo by Tom Magliery
Posted in Technique
Tagged Backstory, bad backstory, beginning, beginnings, boring backstory, story start
5 Comments
Editing ambivalence
This month’s series will be on creating sympathetic characters! But that’s for tomorrow.
I love editing. I love eradicating errors (where did all those typos come from?!); I love finding better, 
more vivid ways to say things; I love rewriting scenes on the whim of inspiration for something that is much, much better.
On the other hand, I hate editing. I hate slogging through my book for the third fifth eighth time only to discover that it’s still not perfect; I hate feeling that I don’t know whether this latest change is any better than the last three versions of this sentence; I hate getting directly contradictory opinions over something I’m torn about myself.
This is the definition of ambivalence. (Go ahead, look it up—ambivalence means feeling strongly both ways about something, although the common misusage has naturally bullied its way in to many a dictionary. Ambi in Latin means ‘both’—like ambidextrous—and valence comes from the Latin verb meaning ‘to be strong’—the same root as valiant, for example.)
These days, however, my scale is starting to tip towards hate more and more. I think I’m burning out on my latest round of revisions. This will be my third round in two months, so I suppose fatigue is only understandable. But I haven’t written anything new in almost as long (aside from new/rewritten scenes), and that’s something that I really need to do.
Unfortunately, none of my many ideas is screaming “write me now!!!” at the moment. But rather than run myself ragged on revisions, I think I’m going to try to start on another book—just the first three chapters. The big risk here is that if my idea isn’t really ready, writing is like wringing blood from a stone—it’s just as tiring as another round of revisions.
Do you have a love/hate relationship with editing? How do you avoid editing burn out?
Photo credit—Book heart: Piotr Bizior; screaming: ralaenin
