Category: Writing Craft

Give Your Story Its Head? Or Keep it on a Tight Rein?

I am a horse person. Maybe better to say I am horse-obsessed. If I’m fast-forwarding past the commercials in a DVRed TV show, I’ll hit pause if I see a horse (gotta love those Budweiser Clydesdales). When I’m out driving in our semi-rural area, my gaze will rove over the surrounding pastures, admiring the bays and appys and chestnuts and grays (those are horse colors for the uninformed) ambling about. I’ll walk up to total strangers in the supermarket and strike up a conversation if they’re wearing chaps and boots.

I ride my Andalusian/Morgan mare 3-4 days a week, mainly in the arena. Although she’s a nice horse on the trail, mostly I do dressage with her. That’s one of those equestrian disciplines that’s fascinating for its participants and dead boring for everyone else. A horsie friend’s hubby has a T-shirt that says, “Whoever said life is too short has never watched dressage.”

When riding dressage, the movements are pretty controlled on the part of rider and horse. The horse has to be very attentive to the rider, to pay attention to each request made of her and be ready to segue into the next.

On the trail, on the other hand, I ride my horse on a loose rein, let her take a gander at the countryside, admire the view, maybe snatch a little mouthful of grass. She should still pay attention to me (I’m not letting her march me through the poison oak, no way no how), but it’s supposed to be more relaxing for horse and rider. Plus, if she smells a mountain lion and takes off running, I’m gonna let her take the lead.

So, what about your writing? How do you approach it? Do you keep it on a tight rein? Do you pin down every little detail about your characters, the plot, every turning point, dark moment, what and where the climax will be?

Or do you just sit and start writing, pages and pages of stuff in some sort of free form way? Characters popping up as you go, the story revealed to you just as it will be revealed to the reader (mega-bestselling author Lee Child said he does it that way).

Which way should it be? To some extent, I think it depends on the writer. I personally like some of that dressage-like preparation. It also depends on what you’re writing–a first draft? Go ahead and gallop down that trail if that works for you. A final draft? Mmm, maybe you need to get a better grip on the reins. Do you know who all your important characters are? Do you know what their goals and motivations are? Do all those great scenes that spilled out have a place in your story? Do you have a lot of repeated word usage, or overused imagery that you need to change or cut out?

If so, it’s time to tighten those reins a bit. All that freedom to do what you want has to be traded in for the discipline of the rewrite. You’re doing arena work now, keeping focused on what the manuscript needs you to do, improving each paragraph the way a dressage horse improves the beauty of each move it makes.

Some people don’t want the restraint on their freedom. They want to just keep running headlong through their manuscript. They chafe at feedback that suggests change. Well, if you never want to publish a book that someone will want to buy, write it anyway you like. But just like me letting my mare trot sloppily into the show ring, you’ll never get the blue ribbon, or a book sale, that way.

So use the beauty of your creativity along with the discipline of your craft. And go and create something wonderful.

Meanwhile, I’m gonna go ride my horse.

March 11, 2013
Avoid the “Empty Calories” of Extraneous Scenes

I am an absolute nut for Junior Mints. I admittedly eat far too many of them in the course of the day, and then have to compensate for the indulgence with daily exercise.

My passion for the sweet, minty, chocolate-coated candies started in childhood. At the movies, a box of Junior Mints would be my treat of choice. I would have to discipline myself not to open the box and start eating until the movie started, or I’d finish them off too soon. Now I buy the mondo 12-ounce packages when I can find them at Walmart or Target and force myself to only eat five at a time.

As tasty as these yummy morsels are, they are regrettably empty calories. There is no nutrition whatsoever in Junior Mints. They’re nothing but sugar (okay, and some modified food starch plus a few other ingredients). They add nothing to my diet.

What do Junior Mints have to do with writing? Well, let’s say you’re writing a romantic thriller. You have this marvelous idea for a scene in your novel. There’s going to be a summer carnival in town and your hero and heroine will be attending together. He’s going to show off his skills at dime tossing, she’ll demonstrate her stomach-stretching prowess in the pie-eating contest. They’ll go on the Ferris wheel and it will get stuck for a few minutes, then the operator will fix it and they’ll get off again. They’ll have a final cotton candy, then he’ll take her home.

This is the story equivalent of Junior Mints. You could write this scene beautifully, have your reader smelling the popcorn, hearing the carny calls, easily visualizing the bright colors of the lights on that Ferris wheel, tasting the bubblegum sweetness of the cotton candy on their tongue, feeling the warmth of the summer night breeze. But there’s a bottom line question you have to ask with every page, paragraph, sentence that you write. Am I moving the story forward? And this scene, although as yummy as a Junior Mint, does not.

Every scene you put into your book, every line of dialogue you put in your characters’ mouths, your reader will take note of, whether consciously or unconsciously. They will wonder, Hmm, something important is going to happen at this carnival. I’d better pay attention. But when it turns out that scene had nothing to do with anything, that it was the empty-calories-equivalent of a Junior Mint, they’re going to be annoyed. Why did you make them read something that doesn’t move the story forward?

So think about every scene you write and if you figure out it’s not advancing the story, cut it out of your “diet.” You can’t afford those empty calories.

But go ahead and have a Junior Mint.

March 9, 2013
Discover-a-whatilbee?

Six authors walk into a hotel room (two of them virtually)…and find themselves in a Facebook/Twitter/Pinterest/Triberr/Goodreads/Shelfari/Hootsuite madhouse. All in the pursuit of discoverability.

Back in October, I attended the annual Novelists, Inc conference in White Plains, NY. We all learned about something dubbed an author “lifeboat,” in which a group of authors support and promote one another through social media. Several authors, including myself, decided to form our own support group. Some of these authors I’ve known for years, some I’ve only met recently.

After much back and forth via e-mail, we coalesced into a group of eight. E-mails and posts via YahooGroups flew through the ether as we got to know each other and each other’s work. In the workshop we’d attended, it was suggested that we schedule a weekend for all of us to get together to share our expertise with each other. We decided on this weekend, and six of us met–four of us physically and two of us virtually (via Skype). The remaining two (who had planned to join us virtually this weekend) couldn’t make it due to (1) illness and (2) family commitments.

What was it like? Imagine deciding to take three days to earn a doctorate. Or maybe allowing three days to learn all of Bach’s sonatas when you don’t know how to play a piano. Or perhaps the most apt analogy would be to take the entire contents of the Internet and forcibly shove it into your ears in hopes you will actually understand what all that social media is for (cue the glazed, deer-in-the-headlights look).

And imagine you’re doing all of this in glamorous, luxurious Manteca, CA. Garden spot of the Central Valley. Kind of the official middle of nowhere, and you really don’t want to what Manteca translates into in English.

Well, not many distractions other than that glorious pool we did not dip so much as a toe into. We didn’t even sniff the chlorine wafting from the hot tub. But to quote what I posted on Facebook, here is what I learned this weekend:

What Triberr is and how to post there, how to use a list in Twitter to categorize tweets, how to grow my Twitter followers, how to tweet to Twitter and post to Facebook from Pinterest, that I need to include links in my indie-pubbed books to my other books, each platform will need a different file for different links, that reader street teams are pretty cool, that I can blog directly on Goodreads (and post a first chapter for readers to sample), that I can run contests through RaffleCopter.com and best of all, authors may be pretty crazy, but they are the best fun to hang around with.

Thanks Deb Salonen, Barbara McMahon, Ginger Chambers, Lisa Mondello, and Rogenna Brewer.

March 2, 2013
Stick to One Genre, Or, Ignoring Perfectly Good Writing Advice

Back when I was starting out as a novelist and I was flitting around from genre to genre, I was told to pick one and stick to it. I was told I shouldn’t write one book that’s romance, another that’s science fiction, or God forbid, a romance science fiction novel (which, sigh, I did write). I found that advice irritating because I wanted to write all over the place. In fact, I wanted to write not only novels, but also screenplays and the occasional article and short story.

Eventually I did settle on romance novels, and then narrowed that down even more to category romances. I still wrote the occasional screenplay in between book contracts, but those scripts didn’t go anywhere (the movie business is really, really hard to break into), so I felt I could really only call myself a romance novelist.

After 17 romance novels, I got kind of burnt out. I decided to try my hand at young adult fiction. Since I’m not one to waste good material, I decided to take one of my screenplays (a sci-fi thriller) and adapt the story into a YA novel. This eventually became the Tankborn trilogy (I got a lot of mileage out of that one script).

This is all fine and dandy, you’re probably thinking. I wrote in one genre for a while (romance), then switched to another (YA science fiction).

Well, yes, except…I got the rights back to 7 of my romance novels. And with the brave new world of indie publishing, I started re-releasing my romances as e-books, under the pen name, Kayla Russo.

This all worked fairly well. My sexy romances were published as Kayla Russo books, and the YA as Karen Sandler books. There was a squidge of confusion there, what with my Harlequin books still published under Karen Sandler. But since I’m letting Harlequin do the work of promoting those, I didn’t worry my pretty little writer head about it.

Then I sold Clean Burn to Exhibit A Books. Clean Burn is not a romance and not a YA SF. It’s an adult mystery. It’s–ack!–a third genre. So how was I supposed to market three genres worth of books?

First, I dropped the pen name. That’s the miracle of indie publishing for you. I had my cover artist revamp the covers with Karen Sandler as author, touched up the files and re-published them. I created another Twitter identity, @karensandler, for the adult stuff and continued using @karensandlerYA for my YA stuff. I am now in the process of splitting out my website (which currently only promotes my YA books) into three choices–YA, Romance, Mystery.

So, do I regret ignoring the “Stick to One Genre” advice? No. I really wanted to write all the books I’ve written, genre be damned. I do wish it wasn’t so hard to keep all those balls (books?) in the air at one time. I wish every reader loved reading all three genres I’m published in (side note: I recently found out it’s okay to end a sentence with a preposition).

So, what about you? If you’re a writer, are you doing the genre-flit like me? If you’re a reader, to you love reading a multitude of genres? If you do, thank you from the bottom of my genre-confused heart. You are my kind of reader.

February 24, 2013
Funny Stuff

This week’s Road Trip Wednesday at YA Highway asks, Who is your favorite comedian or funny book and/or movie? I don’t follow comedy much, so I’m not sure I have a fave comedian. If I had to name one, it would be Jon Stewart. Funny movies–I don’t see a lot of them, period, and the ones I see tend not to be comedies. I liked Bridesmaids (which I saw on a flight back from The Netherlands), but I don’t usually like that kind of gross-out humor.

Books, though, I can come up with three right off the top of my head. Two more recent offerings in YA, one from the ’60s that I originally read in high school.

Newest first. Fellow Tu Books author Kimberly Pauley’s Cat Girl’s Day Off was a silly, goofy, fun, funny laugh-out-loud treat. I liked it so much, it was my RTW Best Book in April 2012.

Second, John Green & David Levithan’s Will Grayson, Will Grayson was a gem. Back in the day (when I was an actual teen reading books about teens), a book like Will Grayson, Will Grayson would have been called a “coming of age” book. I love how the two main characters and excellent secondary characters (the two Wills and Tiny) are all so beautifully drawn. I disliked the second Will Grayson character almost immediately, but he had such a fantastic character arc, I loved him at the end.

Third, Richard Bradford’s Red Sky at Morning is an actual “coming of age” story that very much deserves to be read by today’s audience. Published in the mid-sixties, the story takes place during WWII. The main character is Josh Arnold, and his father is going away to war. Josh and his mother have to move from Mobile, Alabama to Corazon Sagrado, New Mexico. Red Sky at Morning is also a “fish out of water” story as Josh, used to city life in the South, has to adjust to a small town in the mountains of New Mexico where he’s in the minority (most of the town is Hispanic). This is one of those books that will have you roaring with laughter, then sobbing within a few pages. A wonderful book.

How about you? Read any good, funny books?

January 23, 2013