Tag: TANKBORN

A Literary Schlep–4…er…5 Tips on Finishing Your Novel
I flew from DC to Northern California today. I bring this up because I was contemplating how odd it is that at 6am this morning (3am PST), I was heading off in my rental car to Dulles Airport, and at 2:10pm PST, I was pulling into my own driveway. Door-to-door, about 11 hours.

Which might seem like an excruciatingly long time. But truly, if you think about it, my plane ride was barely a blink of the eye compared to crossing the country in a wagon train. A quick Google search tells me that a wagon train trip (which generally left from Missouri, not DC), took 4-6 months. Tack on the extra 40% farther DC would be and you’re talking 6-8 months.

What does this have to do with writing a novel? That plane ride I took is a lot like, say, writing a short story. The cross-country wagon train trip is like penning a novel. It’s a long-term commitment with pitfalls and setbacks around every corner, and if you’re not fully prepared, you just might not make it.

So how can you improve your odds? Here are a few tips I’ve learned along the way:
1. Write at least a rough synopsis. Yeah, I know, some of you are thinking, But that’s just not how I work. I just have to let it flow. My answer to that is, if it really, truly works for you, if you find yourself able to finish that book, then another, then another, and they’re all reasonably coherent stories even before you start your re-writes, then okay, I’ll give you a pass. But if on the other hand, you start one book after another, get a few chapters in, or even half-way through, but can’t seem to close the deal–write a synopsis. Even if it’s so ugly you won’t dare show it to anyone else, get your story structure mapped out.
2. Flesh out your characters. I have a variety of character sketch formats that I’ve used over the years. Twenty-plus books later, they’ve gotten a little abbreviated, but I still like to know a) physical characteristics (don’t want to change eye color in mid-stream) and b) conflicts and goals. This helps me get to know the character well enough that when I plunk them down into a scene, I know how they’re going to behave. I know what they’ll say, how they’ll say it, and what they’ll reveal and won’t reveal about themselves. They’re not just blobs moving through my invented universe, they’re real, three-dimensional people.
3. Turn off that infernal internal editor. Shoosh her away. Put duct tape on his mouth. Lock that hyper-critical, opinionated loud-mouth in a dark closet in the corner of your mind. Because she will freeze your hands on the keyboard. He will convince you to turn your back on that story that you could see like a movie in your head. That cantankerous soul will make you doubt every word you put on the page. Your internal editor has his place in the process, but it isn’t now. Give her a margarita and tell her to wait her turn.
4. Just keep going until you get to the end. Well, that’s pretty stupid advice, isn’t it? If you could get to the end, you wouldn’t need this blog post. But this goes along with tip #3. Just keep going. Without worrying too much about how it’s all going to hang together. Without stopping every paragraph to polish the prose. Without going back to chapter 4 and adding that crucial information you didn’t figure out you needed until chapter 18. Just make a note to yourself about what needs adding and keep going. The time for worrying about those changes, for letting the editor out of the closet and taking away her margarita is at the end. Because after you’ve written right to the end, you have a book you can re-write and fix and polish. As author Nora Roberts said (my all-time fave writing quote), “I can fix a bad page. I can’t fix a blank page.”
So, there you go. With these four fabulous tips, finishing your novel will be easy-peasy. A do-it-with-your-eyes-closed cake-walk. Heh. Yeah, right.

It isn’t easy. It’s cholera-just-broke-out, the-wagon-wheel-broke, early-winter-has-us-snowbound hard. So here’s one more tip to keep you going.

5. Don’t beat yourself up over the bad days. If all hell breaks loose at home, or you’re exhausted after work, or you have a stack of student essays to correct and you can’t get even one word written, let alone one page, cut yourself some slack. You’ll get back to it tomorrow. And you’ll be one more paragraph, or page, or chapter closer to The End.

Anything to add? Tips you’ve discovered that keep you going? Please share.
March 26, 2013
5 Proven Ways to Wake Up the Draggy Bits in Your Novel
We’ve all been there. You’re at point A in your story. You can clearly visualize your destination: point B, when that next Wow moment happens. Point B is one of those scenes you’ve been looking forward to writing since you first thought up the story, and you know it’s going to be fantastic.

But somehow, you’ve lost your road map between A and B. Your character seems to be slogging along with shackles on his feet, and every word out of his mouth sounds kind of lame. You know the story will pick up when you get to that gonzo scene on the horizon, but how do you get from here to there without putting your reader to sleep?

Here are some methods that I’ve used to kick those pages into higher gear:
1. Change your point of view character. This one is a favorite of mine. Of course, it assumes you’re using more than one POV in your book. If you are, the problem may be that the wrong character is telling that part of the story. It’s one of the other characters who is doing much more exciting things at the moment. Perhaps they’re in the middle of the action instead of on the sidelines. They’re the one who should be front and center.
2. Switch from summary to scene. If you’re like me, you’re sometimes in such a hurry to get to that point B scene that you summarize a bunch of action to get there quicker. Summaries are great when you need a time transition and the action that takes place during that summary isn’t particularly important to the story. If it’s a string of ordinary days, better to summarize. If those are the days during which the main character is in captivity by space aliens and having her internal organs reorganized, I think the reader is gonna want more details. A scene with those details is called for.
3. Get your characters talking. Paragraph after paragraph after paragraph of your characters silently doing things (unless it’s heart-pumping action) can be pretty snoozy after awhile. Often you’re trying to reveal information that moves your story forward. But for a reader, dialogue between two characters is a much more fast-paced way to reveal that information. Note: You don’t want to fall into the expository dialogue trap, e.g., “As you know, Bob, earth has been taken over by space aliens. You and I have had our internal organs reorganized several times now.” Both Bob and the speaker know this already and would never have that conversation.
4. Get your characters moving. Sometimes even fast-paced dialogue can get a little dull if the characters are just standing in a room bouncing words off one another. Let them walk and talk. Or run and shout. Have them leave their room, or if they’re trapped in a prison, have them trying things to escape. Or they’re at least pacing, somehow in motion.
  El Gato ready to fight the Bad Guys.
5. Throw in a fight scene. Well, not necessarily a fight, but go for some action. Don’t worry for the moment how it relates to your story. When I’ve gone ahead and written that scene that wasn’t in thesynopsis, that I hadn’t planned for, nearly every time, it magically ends up being a key moment for what comes later. Until I started writing it, I didn’t know I needed that scene. Sometimes I don’t figure out why I wrote that scene until I’m much farther along in the story. And if it turns out what I wrote never meshes with anything else? Just delete it. You probably got things moving just by writing it. That was its purpose and now it’s time to let it go.
I hope these help. They work for me. Do you have any other methods of juicing up your story when it lags? Let me know in the comments.
March 19, 2013
Get Out that Broom (or a Shop Vac) to Tidy Up Your Writing

This week on YA Highway, Road Trip Wednesday asks, What do you hope to “clean out” from your writing? What habits/tropes/words, etc do you want to eliminate?

Before I even clean anything out of my writing, I’d like to clean up my act regards my Internet obsession. My e-mail checking, tweet reading, Facebook status browsing, YahooGroups message scanning, time-wasting habits. Some of what I do on the Internet is legitimate (I’m really working hard to make my social networking become a better marketing tool), but when it’s a political blog I’m clicking over to, or Google news I’m poring over, or an irresistible cat video I’m watching, my writing train has gone off its tracks.

Assuming I continue to battle that time-wasting impulse, there are a few things I’d like to sweep away in my writing. Sometimes I struggle with pacing. I can write a pretty exciting scene, but then I worry when the one after it maybe drags on a bit more than I’d like it to. I’m lucky to have fab editors to clean that up, but I need to focus more on pacing even before my editor gets to it. So get out the Dust-Buster for those draggy scenes.

Aren’t those a great pair of eyes on the cover of Awakening though?

Next, I’m weird about eyes, and all the things they do. Glance, glimpse, stare, glare, look, and plain old see. I use eye action a little too much sometimes. I’d like to get out the shop vac for that.

I am thoroughly in love with ellipses…and em dashes– Often on the ends of sentences…when it often doesn’t need to be used–when it might work better just to break up the sentences into multiple ones where I’ve inserted the ellipse or em dash. Sweep those little buggers out the door (or, rather, the manuscript).

I still have a bad habit of too much throat clearing at times (taking too long to get to the point). This kind of goes along with pacing, but it’s often at the start of the book, or maybe even the start of a chapter. It’s as if I’m having to hack up all those words to get a sense of where I’m going. It’s later when I realize (or someone points out), Oh, I don’t need all this info dump in here. Get out the blower and whoosh it away.

There’s probably a few more odds and ends of writer’s spring cleaning that I could do, but this is all that comes to mind at the moment. I have to say, I am so grateful for 2nd drafts (and 3rd, 4th, etc), and other pairs of eyes on my manuscripts.

Especially when those eyes are glancing, glimpsing, staring, looking, and plain old seeing what needs to be fixed.

March 13, 2013
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