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Tag Archives: discussion
So, who are you?
What a fun Blog Hop last week! I’m happy to meet you all, and you’ve made me glad I broke down and added Google Friend Connect 
. And since some of you are new to the blog, I’d like to get to know you, and to know what you’d like to see here! I’d love to hear from you, whether you’re an old or new reader, so I can make my blog worth your while.
Sooo . . .
Aaand
If you have anything else to add, please feel free to make a comment!
Oh, and lest I forget . . . WINNERS! Chosen totally at random, with the aid of Random.org, we have our winners!
The eBook of Monarch by Michelle Davidson Argyle goes to:
The $30 Amazon Gift Card goes to:
Lynn Parsons!
Congratulations, and thanks to everyone who entered this month’s giveaways!
Should fiction be moral?
In case you missed it (and you probably didn’t), recently there was a bit of a debate in the blogosphere over a certain article which decried the darkness prevalent in YA fiction. I can’t remember if I actually read the article, but I did read the responses of many who took issue with the premise, claiming that YA fiction reflects the dark reality teenagers today know.
I’m not going to argue with that point—but I am going to say that I don’t think that a bleak, hopeless vision of reality is a good way to help someone cope with a future that feels tenuous and perilous at best. Even if a book ends in tragedy, it can still reaffirm readers’ hope.
A YA dystopian I read recently is set in a world without love. It’s illegal to even use the word. Already that sounds pretty bad, eh? Naturally, the MC falls in love, and *SPOILER ALERT* the novel ends tragically. And yet we’re left with hope for the MC to have a better life because of the sacrifice made for her.
I think I tend to side with author John Gardner, at least as his On Moral Fiction is summarized by Wikipedia (emphasis mine):
[F]iction should be moral. Gardner meant "moral" not in the sense of narrow religious or cultural "morality," but rather that fiction should aspire to discover those human values that are universally sustaining. [I assume this means things like hope, character, etc.] Gardner felt that few contemporary authors were "moral" in this sense, but instead indulged in "winking, mugging despair" (to quote his assessment of Thomas Pynchon) or trendy nihilism in which Gardner felt they did not honestly believe.
What do you think? Should fiction be “moral”—by this definition or another?
Photo by Tahmid Munaz
Posted in Publishing, Technique
Tagged darkness, discussion, moral fiction, morality, tone
3 Comments
What series would you like to see next?
V is for Voice
Agents Suzie Townsend and Joanna Volpe are doing “First Page Shooter” on their blog—participants submitted their first page and the agents are giving feedback on them. And FPS#3 (by Josin McQuein) hits it out of the park with voice. The first line:
Killing someone’s easier than you think.
It’s amazing how different that is from:
It’s easier than you think to kill someone.
Or
It’s easier to kill someone thank you think.
Okay, so maybe people in the publishing industry are the only ones who’d notice the difference, but each line seems to say something different about the speaker.
What do you think? What kind of person writes each of those?
Photo by Douglas Walker
P is for plotting (and pantsing)
Personally, I think there’s a wide spectrum when it comes to whether or not you outline before you write. Yes, okay, having an outline or not having an outline is pretty cut-and-dried, but there are a lot of in betweens:
- An idea for an opening
- An idea for a beginning and a middle
- An idea for a beginning, a middle and an end (a mental outline, perhaps?)
- Ideas for several major guideposts in the story (written down?), with room to figure out how to move between them
- A written outline of the major guideposts and all the transitions between them.
- A chapter-by-chapter synopsis of the story.
- A scene-by-scene spreadsheet, possibly including dialogue, setting, exposition.
Once upon a time, I was at the pantser (as in “by the seat of your pants”) end of the spectrum. And my stories were often a mess. (Winchester Mystery Story, anyone?) Whether or not they’d turn out all right was hit-or-miss.
Then I got into a larger project: parallel novels written simultaneously with a friend. We had to work to coordinate our timelines. There was no way to pants this without ruining one another’s books. I broke down and plotted. And to my surprise, it was even better than pantsing!
But while I’m definitely a plotting convert, I’m not a hard-core-plan-every-scene-to-the-final-detail kind of writer. Like pantsers (and probably most plotters to some extent), I need at least a little discovery and creativity to make drafting fun for me. I’m still experimenting at how much discovery vs. planning I need—my last draft was a little short on the planning. It wasn’t until I sat down and figured out my path in a little more detail that I could finish the book. (And I’m going to need to add some more structure in some parts—that darn sagging middle!)
So where do you fall? How did you come to be a plotter or pantser?
Photo by fracacta
What makes you put a book down?
So I’m undertaking a major reading project right now, since I don’t want to push myself to write in the midst of some other project. (What was it again? Oh yeah, Operation Make-Rachel-Stop-Crying. It’s a full time job.) I picked probably twenty or so books that have been nominated for various awards in my genre or published by my target presses (and that were available at my library) and have plowed my way through several.
But not all. Maybe I’ve gotten a little burnt out on reading (is that possible?), but in the last week or two, I’ve suddenly had a hard time sticking to a book. This week, I tried two novels where the writing was so bad, I had to skip half the book or more. (I still wanted to know how it ended, though that was at least partially so I’d never be tempted to pick up the book again.) Telling vs. showing was the main problem. I said it was like the author was standing in front of me, holding up a curtain as he dictated the action on the other side.
Although bad writing is always a turn off, it’s not always enough to make me give up on a book, or at least half of it. Some of the books I just couldn’t not put down lost me in character soup. In one case, the story was told from one character’s POV, but by the end of the first chapter, we’d met so many people I couldn’t remember which character that was. And I kept forgetting in subsequent chapters.
I think it all boiled down to a basic factor: I just couldn’t get involved in the characters. Something about the narration style (telling) was too distant or confusing for me to make an emotional connection and sympathize with characters. And I’m realizing that life’s too short for boring books (or boring novels, anyway), so I’m not willing to persevere through a hundred pages to see if I suddenly start liking a character.
(And since life’s too short for boring books, I’d better work twice as hard to make sure mine aren’t boring!)
What do you think? What makes you put down a book?
Photo by Wade Kelly
What are you good at?
To round up our week of inspiration, I thought it’d be nice to have the chance to share what you’re good at. Come on, you 
know there’s some aspect of writing that you’re pretty good at. You can claim that your critique partners say it’s good, or you can say that you’re pretty good at it on the second draft (first drafts don’t count here anyway), if you feel like it’s boasting, or you can qualify it with what you’re not so good at yet.
Personally, I’m pretty good at dialogue—or so I’m told. (I know a couple things I can work on in that area, of course, but “good” doesn’t mean “perfect on the first draft.”)
So what are you good at?
Photo by Joel Telling
Who’s laughing now?
Well, after all that tension, I thought we could all use some stress relief, eh? Every once in a while, after all, you do have to let it out.
The other day I was reading a blog post that mentioned making someone laugh. “Not just guffawing, but outright laughing,” they clarified (okay, that’s not what they said, but that’s basically the idea). But that note left me scratching my head: isn’t guffawing harder than laughing?
So today I bring you a game! From two thesasauruses (those are dinosaurs that know a lot of words), I gathered all the synonyms for laughter:
| amusement be in stitches break up burst cachinnate cackle chortle chuckle convulsed crack up crow die laughing fit fracture gesture giggle glee grin guffaw heehaw |
hilarity howl merriment mirth peal rejoicing roar roll in the aisles scream shout shriek snicker snigger snort sound split one’s sides titter wakka wakka wakka whoop yuck |
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In the comments, let’s rank these from the most hilarity/hardest laughter to lightest. (And feel free to leave out ones you don’t know. “Cachinnate”?!) Note that this list includes both nouns and verbs.
Photo by Jackson Carson
