This week’s prompt on YA Highway‘s Road Trip Wednesday is What images inspire/ represent your WIP or favorite book? This one is pretty easy because my publisher, Lee and Low, hired an artist to draw some of the creatures and flora that appear in the Tankborn series. So while I’ve been working on Awakening, book 2 of the Tankborn series, I’ve had these images swirling around in my head (bhimkay, seycat, rat-snake, and sewer toad):
There’s a concept I’ve mainly seen in screenwriting called “on the nose” dialogue. That’s dialogue in which there is no subtext, in which a character baldly says exactly what they’re feeling inside.
What’s the problem with this? First, in the real world people almost never say what they’re really feeling. Emotions make us feel vulnerable. If we admit we like someone, we risk hearing back that the someone doesn’t feel the same way. If we tell a friend a secret, like how terrified we are of tiny little dogs, we risk being ridiculed.
Second, in fiction, if the dialogue is “on the nose,” it deflates the tension between our characters and in the story. We expect to be told all sorts of lies in the course of a story. Or maybe not so much lies, but we expect that the realization that a character has early in the book, or half-way through or three-quarters of the way through might not actually be true. People and characters don’t even tell themselves the truth most of the time.
So, like real people, our characters should hide what they really feel. They should nibble around the edges of expressing their true emotions. Maybe they invite the special someone over for dinner, but make sure he knows he’s just one of several guests. Or he admires her new smart phone and asks all about it because he’s been thinking about buying one like it.
Here’s a hastily written example of dialogue that is thoroughly on-the-nose. Boyfriend and Girlfriend are talking on the phone:
Boyfriend: Okay if I bring Spot tonight?
(Girlfriend smiles happily)
Girlfriend: You know I love your dog.
Boyfriend: And we’ll need to stop by Mom’s on the way to the restaurant.
(Still smiling, Girlfriend nods)
Girlfriend: Your mom is great. I’m always glad to see her.
So here, “You know I love your dog” means “You know I love your dog.” And “Your mom is great” means “Your mom is great.” Girlfriend is saying exactly what she means. It’s pretty boring and doesn’t say much about the characters.
Here’s an example where the action gives the dialogue a little bit of subtext:
Boyfriend: Okay if I bring Spot tonight?
(Girlfriend sticks a finger down her throat & mimes gagging)
Girlfriend: You know I love your dog.
Boyfriend: And we’ll need to stop by Mom’s on the way to the restaurant.
(Girlfriend screams silently while pulling at her hair and kicking her feet)
Girlfriend: Your mom is great. I’m always glad to see her.
Now “You know I love your dog” means “Your dog disgusts me.” And “Your mom is great” means “I hate her, she drives me crazy.”
So think about what you say to your spouse, girlfriend, boyfriend, parents, particularly if there are emotions at stake. Are you speaking on the nose, saying exactly what you feel? Or is there subtext?
And as you write your characters, make sure there’s a message under the dialogue that doesn’t necessarily match what’s being said. That’s subtext. And subtext will amp up your writing.
Back around October 2009, I finished work on a manuscript titled GENeration, a young adult science fiction book. I knew it wasn’t finished finished. I didn’t yet have an agent or editor for the book, but I knew that when I did, they would have their say in further re-writes. But I thought the book was ready enough to start querying agents. It turned out I was deluding myself, but I nevertheless e-mailed out my first query on October 13, 2009.
I’d been sending out queries for about a month and a half when it occurred to me that having a beta reader look it over would be a really great idea (gee, ya think?). Luckily, I could keep the read in the family via my younger son. He wasn’t exactly swimming in spare time (he was in the third year of his PhD in economics), but he’s a fast reader and brutally honest. He got back to me at the end of November 2009 with suggestions for some pretty extensive changes.
Of course, I’d already sent the complete manuscript out to a few agents, including the agent who eventually took me on. Hindsight being what it is, this was when I realized I really hadn’t been ready to start querying. Yes, I wish I’d thought to send the book to my son before that first query. But water under the bridge and all that.
In any case, those agents who had the manuscript were happy to replace it with the new and improved version. I eventually got offers from two agents. The agent I signed with asked for another major re-write before he sent it out. Then the book sold to Lee and Low/Tu Books, and required even more changes including a title morph from GENeration to Tankborn. Tankborn was released in Sept. 2011.
Along the way, what with all this re-writing and editing, by necessity a lot of material got deleted from the manuscript. As part of the various and sundry editing, there were four quite sizeable chunks that ended up on the cutting room floor. Each of them was at least a few pages long and the content in them was fairly significant. They offered some pretty cool perspectives of life on the planet Loka, where Tankborn is set. Unfortunately, these scenes didn’t do anything to move the story forward. They didn’t “earn their keep” and had to go.
But I thought it would be fun to put them up on my website, part of some exclusive material that will only be available there. So if you’d like to read what might have been in Tankborn, take a look here. If you haven’t yet read the book, there is some spoilerage, but it is clearly marked. So it’s safe for all to take a peek.
I’ve finally been given my
editor’s blessing to announce my good news. There will be two Tankborn sequels: Awakening, which is scheduled for release in Spring 2013 and Revolution, scheduled for Spring 2014.
I’d been working on Awakening these past several months, even before the offer was in hand, because I wanted so much for Kayla and Devak’s stories to continue. Now the pace for writing book 2 has picked up to a fever-pitch as I work toward a, shall we say, challenging deadline.
What’s in store for our heroine and hero in Awakening? Aw, you don’t really want to know that, do you? No spoilery here. But I can say there will be more adventures, some familiar returning characters, some new characters, and more intriguing questions asked about humanity, race, and class.
One fun thing about writing Awakening is that I already have a “story bible” to rely on to use as a basis for my world. Most of the heavy lifting of world-building was done in Tankborn. I get to reap those benefits, using Tankborn as my reference material. At the same time, I’m giving myself the freedom to invent some new things that (hindsight being what it is), I would have mentioned in the course of writing Tankborn if I’d thought of them. It’s very cool to add some layers to Tankborn‘s world. Also quite nifty to know there will be a third book which I can start to set up in Awakening.
So keep an eye out for updates–cover reveals, blurb teasers, Scribd samples. Spring 2013 will be here before you know it.
I just found out that my favorite physics professor–actually, my favorite college professor, period–passed away last July. Dr. James Imai was instrumental in me changing my minor from English to physics. He was a fantastic lecturer and as astounding as it may sound to non-science folks, he made physics fun.
I entered California State College, Dominguez Hills in 1974 as a junior, planning to major in math and minor in English. Only one or two quarters into my first year there, I took a class with Dr. Imai and fell in love with physics. He had a way of using real world examples to illustrate physics principles and somehow injected humor into every physics lecture.
For instance, in one of my first year physics classes, he escorted the class out to the parking lot to demonstrate how one would hotwire a car. He explained to us how we could wire in a switch that would interrupt the usual pathway a car thief would use to steal the car. You’d turn off the switch to break the circuit so the car couldn’t be hotwired. He also recommended that you dirty up the wires you use for the switch installation so the car thief wouldn’t notice it. I thought it was pretty hysterical at the time that he was teaching all these young, impressionable college students how to steal cars.
He also assigned a very entertaining weekly homework assignment starring the fictional character Joe Whizz. These were page-long word problems in which Joe had some kind of adventure that would illustrate a physics principle. In one I remember, Joe went camping with his good buddy, Neighbor Jones. Near where Joe and his buddy camped, there were some large boulders in which small, natural pools had been carved out. Joe wanted to heat the water in the pools so he could do some hot-tubbing. He decided to put some handy 2-kg stones into the campfire to heat them, then put the stones into the water until the water reached the necessary temperature. We had to figure out how many heated stones it would take to warm the water to the desired temperature.
What was pretty cool about Dr. Imai is that although he kind of talked a macho game, it was me and my friend Peggy that he seemed to take under his wing. When we complained that the wives of Joe Blow and his buddy were always on the sidelines in the Joe Blow stories, Dr. Imai came up with a homework problem in which the wives were the heroines of the story.
My favorite memory is how Dr. Imai taught me and Peggy how to cook hot dogs using a “suicide cord” (kids, I do not recommend you try this at home!). We took an ordinary lamp cord, cut off at one end and with a plug on the other. We split the cord into two for maybe 6-8 inches. We then stripped the cut ends to expose the metal wire within. Those metal wires were each wrapped around a 10-penny nail (near the head of the nail). With the cord unplugged we poked the nails through either end of a hot dog. We then plugged in the cord and voila! the electrical current cooked the hot dog. Peggy and I actually started a modest hot dog concession in the physics lab, selling hot dogs and soda to students and TAs.
Dr. Imai and I kept in touch off and on in the years since I graduated. I still have the wedding gift he gave me thirty years ago (at left). More recently, he requested some of my romance novels both for a friend of his and himself. As best I can tell, we last corresponded in December 2010, when I told him about my new granddaughter. I also mentioned that I would have a science fiction book, Tankborn, coming out. He said in response, “as you may recollect, science fiction is one of my favorite subject areas. I take it that TANKBORN is your chosen title. You can put me down for an order of a copy.”
Now I know he died months before Tankborn came out in September 2011. I wish now that I could have sent him an advance copy. I would have been so proud to know he’d read it.
If you want to know more about Dr. James Imai, do a Google search. He was a remarkable man.
Note: Thanks to Leslie Ogg, Dr. Imai’s longtime companion, for the correction on Joe’s last name and for his buddy’s name.