Do you have any sacred cows? No, I don’t actually mean holy cattle—you know the cliché: something you absolutely cannot sacrifice.

We may be flexible about a lot of things in our writing—or not. During the various stages of development, we may be attached to certain characters or events or even words that we just refuse to part with in later drafts.

Until we take our perfect (or pretty good) little baby out into the bright light of scrutiny and let our critique partners and beta readers tear into her. Sometimes an innocent little comment (“this doesn’t feel like the right word”) can feel like a full-fledged attack when we’re so attached to that word.

But eventually, we often find that after a little time and thought, it’s not really as important as we thought—maybe it’s not the right word, or maybe the connotations aren’t what we’re going for. Maybe this character really is redundant. Maybe this event isn’t quite as critical as we thought—after all, they only accomplish X and couldn’t we put that in this scene . . . ?

And sometimes, no matter how much we think about it, there’s nothing we can do to “fix” it—or nothing we’re willing to do. This might be because our CP hasn’t seen our whole or latest draft, so they don’t know the full significance, or it might be a theme they didn’t notice. Or it might be an irrational attachment.

Sometimes we’re advised that there are no sacred cows—we should be prepared to change any- and everything in the quest to create the best book (and/or get published). But I wonder if being willing to lose everything is really the best route to create a better book.

What do you think? Are there really NO sacred cows? Are there things you absolutely could not change, even if it meant the difference between a million-dollar advance and bubkis?

Picture by Gamerscore Blog

I have a guest post up at LDS Publisher today on setting up an author website—you might recognize it if you’ve been around here for a while .

By parallels, I mean scenes that repeat something from the previous ones, or very recent scenes—the same character goal, level of tension, or even setting. Now, parallels can, of course, be used for good—but they can also be ignored for evil to our detriment.

Parallels for good

Within reason, parallels can show off recurring themes, symbols, and the importance of characters or settings. Well-chosen repetition draws attention to itself unobtrusively—it makes readers sit up and take notice without (“Hey, this is the third scene on the dock; what might that mean?”) without stopping the story.

Parallels to our detriment

On the other hand, parallels can be over done, or completely unintentional.

Scenes in the same setting can be repetitive, and may also be a sign that not enough is moving in the story. Maybe not, of course—you could have the whole thing take place inside a single room, but this may be one area to look at. As with the tension chart, we can look at whether there’s another possible setting that might enhance the conflict or add a new layer of meaning.

Scenes with the same character goal are often a sign that the character isn’t making enough progress. While we definitely don’t want to make things easy for our characters, watching a character fail repeatedly at the same thing wears down the suspense. We may begin not to care whether they’re going to succeed or not, unless each scene has high tension—or the character goal can be refined to relate to the specific events, conflict and disaster for that scene.

But probably most important are the sections where the tension level doesn’t change or varies only slightly for several scenes in a row. In Writing Mysteries, one writer shared some advice from an editor: “I must not try to keep everything at high pitch all the way through a story. Excitement, if too steady, can be as boring as having nothing at all happening” (109).

One way to look at this visually is to use the tension rating from your scene chart. In most spreadsheet software, you can create a line graph from that column of data—Kaye Dacus calls this an “EKG” for your story (you know, an electrocardiogram? Like a heartbeat chart?).

Naturally, at the climax of a book, the tension will be quite high, probably for several scenes. But is the tension flat in there? Are there other “plateaus” or “plains”? Does the tension start (or the promises from yesterday) out much higher than it ends?

If the end isn’t satisfying because it doesn’t match the tension of the rest of the book, don’t lower the suspense! Fix the end!! Change things up in plains and plateaus—if you can, add what looks like a reprieve, or a rest for a little bit before plunging them back into danger.

What do you think? How else can parallels point out problems with suspense?

Photo credit: Redvers

If assessing your own tension is hard, critiquing your own suspense level is even harder. But there are a few things we can try to look at objectively to help us find the places where our suspense gets weak. Examining the pacing, the promises and the parallels can point us to places where we need to punch up the suspense.

Pacing

The first place we can look is at the pacing. At Edittorrent, Alicia Rasley once defined pacing as “a measure of how frequently important plot events happen in your story, how closely occurring they are.”

To examine this, make a list of the 10-20 most important events in your story (things like Plot Point 1, the Climax, the Dark Moment, the Resolution, the Inciting Incident). Then go back to your scene chart and highlight those scenes (note that some of them may take more than one scene). Literally—select the whole row in the spreadsheet or draw a big, fat star on the card with a marker.

Then look at the whole—zoom out until you can see all the rows on the spreadsheet or layout the cards in order and stand back. Where are the big gaps between important events? That may be a point where the suspense is starting to wear thin—so take a careful look at those long stretches of unhighlightable scenes. Make sure they’re giving the reader something to look forward to, some reason to move on to the next scene—like a promise.

Promises

Promises are key to creating suspense. Suspense is all about anticipation—and when we promise the reader some event, we put them in suspense. You can add another column to your scene chart of promises made in a scene, and another for promises fulfilled. (In the example below, I used lettering to keep track of the promises, and rated the importance/tension of the promise on a scale of 1-10, to make things easier and keep track of the relative importance of the promise.)

Note that not every promise we make must be fulfilled in the next scene, or the next time we come to it. In fact, delaying promises, while reiterating that they’re coming and how important they are, is a great way to increase the suspense. (Plus, this handy chart makes sure we don’t forget anything .)

Those in-between sections from the highlighting exercise can be a great place to look for these (since the important events are probably already setting up and fulfilling a number of promises). So has it been a long time since we’ve seen any promises made, fulfilled, delayed or denied?

Tomorrow, we’ll look at how parallels can show us places to punch up the suspense.

What do you think? How can we look at our pacing? What else can pacing and promises show us?

Photo credit: John Bounds

When you’re editing yourself, it can be hard to see which of your scenes are low in tension. For tension, a scene-level edit is a definite must. For each scene, ask yourself:

• Character’s goal: Is it clearly stated or irrefutably implied? (That scene goal in the scene chart thing? Yep. Plus, a scene chart and/or spreadsheet is a really convenient here.)
• Bring on the conflict: Can/should I cut to where the conflict for that goal starts? Is that the worst conflict I could use here?
• Bring out the conflict: Have I stated why this is a difficult/delicate situation?
• Length: Is the scene an appropriate length for its significance? (That applies to both word count and the passage of time in the scene.)
• Setting: Could another setting lend more tension to this scene?
• Purpose: Does this move the story forward? Is my reason for having this scene good enough to justify this scene, or any scene at all?
• Ending: Does the scene end with a disaster for my POV character’s goal? Do we cut away at the worst possible moment, something that will induce the reader to find out what happens next?
• Finally, rating: as Noah Lukeman recommends in The Plot Thickens, rate the scene tension on a scale of 1 to 10.

Another method here is to read the story backwards, scene-by-scene. Or, I guess, you could jump around as long as you made sure you covered everything. That way, you know each scene will stand on its own—but if you change anything important, especially near the beginning, you’ll just have to go through and fix all that again. (Which can cut both ways, of course.)

Of course, this whole method requires brutal honesty. No rating a scene higher because your heroine gets off a few zingers, no keeping a scene that doesn’t serve any real purpose because it has that beautiful paragraph that it took you a month to write. Cut and paste your favorite parts (or the whole scene) into another document and you never have to actually “lose” anything.

Finding and fixing low tension scenes is just the beginning of making sure your story keeps your readers hooked. Tomorrow we’ll look at finding problems with the overarching suspense in your story. (Gulp!)

What do you think? What do you look for to find low-tension scenes?

Photo credit: Samuraijohnny

Larry Brooks, “the story fixer,” had a recent post that really got me thinking about this—Story Structure vs. Story Architecture: “Dude… what’s the diff?”

All stories, says Brooks, have structure. And, to employ my own analogy, so do all buildings. But not all buildings are created equal:

You might recognize this place, or the legend behind it. The owner believed that her house must be under construction always, or she would die. But they couldn’t use a master building plan.

Considering that, the Winchester Mystery House is pretty well-built. Yeah, it has stairs that lead to nowhere and doors that open out from the second floor (no stairs on that one—maybe move those first stairs over there?). It’s fun—it’s a blast to explore, and I bet Sarah Winchester had an awesome time throwing in every element she could think of.

It has a decent foundation—instead of leveling it, the 1906 San Francisco earthquake only knocked off the top three stories. After the quake it stood four stories. The remaining structure is a rambling, 160-room, 4.5-acre mansion. It required more than 20,000 gallons of paint—and it constantly needed painting.

I think we’ve all gotten to the end of a story, looked back and seen our own Winchester Mystery Structure. The Winchester Mystery House has structure. In some sense, it has architecture—but not really. There is no plan, and the closest thing they had to a designer (architect) was a crazy woman.

And “rambling” is right. Dead ends, doors and promises that go nowhere, accidental MacGuffins. . . . After round 28,657 of revisions, I got tired of writing stories that looked like they were designed by a crazy woman.

What do you think? Have you ever written a “Winchester Mystery Story”?

Photo credits: exterior shot and stairs to nowhere courtesy of the Winchester Mystery House; rooves—the_photographer; windows to windows—Emily Hoyer