Tag Archives: discussion

Technique

V is for Voice

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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

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Technique

P is for plotting (and pantsing)

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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?

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Technique, Reading

What makes you put a book down?

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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?

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Technique

What are you good at?

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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

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Mechanics

Who’s laughing now?

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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

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.

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Technique

Any final words (on suspense)?

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Well, we’re winding down the series on suspense, tension and surprise. We’ve looked into assessing our stories, ratcheting up the tension and increasing the suspense. We’ve used lots and lots of resources (the most I have for any series), and I’ve talked a lot about things I’ve found in looking at my own work.

But, man, that still seems a little one-sided. I’d hate to leave you in suspense over your greatest suspense, tension or surprise issues—and I’d hate for all of us to miss out on the things you‘ve found to make your work better in these areas.

So, do you have any other questions or fixes on suspense, tension or surprise? (Comments and questions here may get “promoted” into posts of their own, so ask or share away—and be sure to put your link in the URL box!)

Photo credits: question—Svilen Mushkatov

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Technique

How did you learn to write?

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Most writers, of course, learned to write in school—the teacher stuck a pencil in their hand and showed them how to form the letters. Another teacher later on taught them about words and sentences and parts of speech and punctuation.

Of course, everyone learns those things, and not everyone goes on to want to be a writer. Personally, I learned a lot from writing—a lot. I wrote all through high school. I wrote in my freshman year of college, and then I drifted away from writing for several years while I finished school, got married, and started my family, though somewhere in the back of my mind, I still wanted to be a writer.

And of course, I’ve learned a lot in other ways as well. Writer’s conferences are a lot of fun and extremely useful, but most of the time aren’t designed to hit the techniques very hard (unless you go to a more one-on-one track). Critiques from trusted friends (and strangers!) have been invaluable.

And then there are the books, of course. I hit the public library and read almost every writing technique book they had, my favorites being How to Write a Damn Good Novel and How to Write a Damn Good Novel, II by James N. Frey, and Writing the Breakout Novel by Donald Maass, among others that escape me now.

But honestly, even these things are kind of advanced—they don’t, for example, cover basic things like showing vs. telling. And, um, I’ve kind of forgotten how I learned that.

So how did you learn writing—the basics and the advanced stuff?

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Technique

Share your favorite plotting resources

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I’m getting ready to make our series on plotting into a free PDF. In one of my free writing guides, I included some “bonus features”—resources that weren’t posted on my blog in the original series, but that are pretty darn awesome.

I’ve been collecting bonus features again this time around, and I have a few. But I’d love to see your favorite resources and methods for plotting.

What do you use to plot? Share your favorite resources in the comments and I’ll include an attribution link for you in the free PDF version of the plotting series!

Photo credits: question—Svilen Mushkatov

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