FMHS Write a Book in a Year Club

So You Want to Write a Novel

Yesterday was the beginning of NaNoWriMo, National Novel Writing Month.  The NaNoWriMoNauts are on their month-long expedition to discover a novel within themselves.  Good luck, you heroes of the imagination!

I like the image of thousands of participants going to their notebooks or computers today with an ambitious goal of at least 1,666 (.66666. . .) words each day this month.

Like any marathon, almost all of these writers are going to have ups and downs.  Some of the days the writing will come easily and seem a joy.  Then there will be the other days.

For the month, at least, the NaNoWriMo participants will experience what it is like to be a pro writer on a tight deadline.  What I find interesting is that a pro writer who is finishing a couple of novels a year works at NaNoWriMo pace quite a bit of the time on the production side, and polishes, edits and markets the manuscripts too, which aren’t a part of the NaNoWriMo goal.

So, while I want to celebrate all the one-month novelists out there, I don’t want to forget the folks who do this kind of effort continuously.

I’m working on my short-short story for our Write-a-Book-In-A-Year Club Halloween/Autumn anthology.  The guidelines state that short stories can be no more that 800 words.  That’s a tiny canvas, but writing short-shorts is fun, and I look forward to them.

The issue I’m working with in the story now is its last line.  My piece is a horror story, and the last line right now is this:

As I ran, before the screams, she said in a voice full of graves and old injuries, “This is going to hurt.”

My current problem, besides the rhythmic misstep at the beginning is that I used the word “grave” just a couple of sentences earlier.  I don’t want to repeat it.  So I want to play around with the metaphorical description.  What I like about rewriting at this level is I get to evaluate the impact of a single word change.

This, for example, gives a completely different feeling:

As I ran, before the screams, she said in a voice full of corpses and old injuries, “This is going to hurt.”

It’s a creepy metaphor, but I don’t like it because you can’t really fill your mouth with “corpses”  (gross!  I’m sorry).  Of course, you can’t really fill your mouth with “graves,” but I don’t picture the first line like I can the second.

How about this?

As I ran, before the screams, she said in a voice full of decay and old injuries, “This is going to hurt.”

“Decay,” though, is even less visual than “graves.”  The taste of decay in the mouth is visceral, but, still, too abstract for what I’m going for.

As I ran, before the screams, she said in a voice full of maggots and old injuries, “This is going to hurt.”

This works better for me.  It has the grossness of “corpses,” but I can picture a mouthful of maggots better (once again, sorry–I hope you’re not reading this post right before a meal).

The point of this is that revision often gets down to the single, right word.  I might end up with the maggot sentence as a last line, or I might wrestle with what sounds awkward to me in “As I ran, before the screams, . . .” or I might toss the sentence and go with an entirely different approach.

I have choices.

One of the reasons people read is because they like to go to new places.  They don’t want to just hear the name of the new place, though; they want to feel like they are there, and for writers to give them that experience, they have to make strong, evocative appeals to the readers’ senses.

A good way to practice the skill of convincing, involving, realistic description, writers can take experiences from real life; and nothing is better in real life than a setting where the senses are overloaded.

A great example of sensory overload was this weekend’s Homecoming dance.  To make the description exercise work, you can’t write a description that doesn’t drag the readers into it.  You have to give the readers a lot to experience.

Try writing long, poetic sentences that focus on multiple senses, like this one:

• “The music pounded, pounded, pounded and the flashing strobe showed my date’s face and then hid it, and then showed it, and then hid it; and she grabbed my hand for a second and squeezed, and then we swayed and bounced and danced and danced.”

It’s not enough to say where you were and what you saw, heard, felt, smelled and tasted.  The example above is trying to make the readers be in the dance.  The repetitions of words and the linking of what the narrator felt with the “and” conjunctions gives the sense of what being there was like.  If the description is a good one, then the readers will feel like they were there too.

Remember, your readers don’t want to know if your character was chased by a vampire, or worried that someone was cheating from their test, or had fallen in love; the readers want to be the character who ducks beneath the branches and dodges around trees because the vampire’s claws are only an inch behind; and they want to move their paper to the side of their desk and cover their answers so the cheater won’t steal from them; and they want to stand in a busy store filled with strangers until they glimpse the person who makes their heart quiver in joy standing at the other end of the produce aisle.

Try it!  If you were at Homecoming or at some other event that overwhelmed you, write a description so that the readers will feel like they were there too.  Don’t tell them what you saw, heard, felt, smelled and tasted.  Make them see and hear, feel and smell, and, if needed, taste.

Overload their senses.

When I started writing, I hated getting to dialogue sections.  My characters sounded wooden and inhuman:

“Lunch is a good idea,” opined Reginald.

“Yes, we should get lunch,” grinned Amelia coquettishly.

Reginald said with a frown, “Thank you for agreeing with me.”

“Well, I found that I was hungry,” Amelia growled.

You can see why I didn’t like getting to the point where my characters spoke.  It was embarrassing.  Later, though, I grew better, and now I love dialogue.  When characters speak, the scene is moving.  The people are revealing who they are.  The story is appealing to a sense other than sight.  Good things come from dialogue.

Here are come quick tips on dialogue:

• Use the word “said” most of the time instead of synonyms (they call attention to themselves like they do in my example).
• You don’t need to identify the speaker at all if it is clear who is speaking, like in this example about the babysitter:  The babysitter moved to the window and opened it wide.  “Whew, it is hot.”
• Only report the important dialogue.  Most of the time you don’t need all the “hello,” “how is your family?” “good to see you” politeness we use in ordinary conversation if it doesn’t advance the story.
• Make your characters talk like real people, who use speech mannerisms: slang, interruptions, changes of direction, fragments, pauses, etc.
• Try to make your characters sound like themselves, not just like each other.
• The best dialogue is when either the people talking don’t agree with each other, one of the characters has an urgent agenda, one of them is hiding something (that the readers know about), or one character knows much more than than the other.  If the characters know each other, want the same things, like and agree with each other, and know what each other knows, the dialogue will probably be boring.
• Remember that the standard way to format dialogue is to start a new paragraph when you change speakers, even if that means very short paragraphs.

How do you feel about your own dialogue writing skills?  Do you have advice for someone who is trying to improve their dialogue?

The image comes from Jessie Morrison’s informative article on dialogue from The Writer’s Digest blog.

A bad habit some (mostly unpublishable) writers get into is to write sentences that begin with “I see . . .” or “Roger saw . . .” They’ll do the same thing with the other senses too: “I heard . . .” or “Roger smelled . . .”

When they are really bad, the poor writers will follow the sensory lead in with just a noun, like “I saw a tree,” or “Roger heard the car.” The problem with these sentences are two-fold. First, the act of your character sensing something doesn’t mean your reader will, and secondly, if the sentence is really short, like my examples, the only action in the sentence is that the character sensed something.

One way to revise this is to make the noun do something in the sentence, like “I saw the tree waving wildly in the wind,” or “Roger heard the car roaring down the street.” An even better revision, though, is to eliminate the sensory lead in altogether. If the reader knows that the “I” is in the scene, then all the writer has to write is “The tree waved wildly in the wind.”  The readers know that the “I” person was doing the seeing already.  You can do that with the Roger sentences too, once the reader knows that Roger is the character who is seeing, hearing, touching, tasting and smelling in the scene, you can quit putting him in the beginning of every sentence.

If you are aware of your sensory lead ins, you can also eliminate really silly sentences that can creep into writing like, “Roger felt the rough bark with his fingers.”  First, unless we say otherwise, the reader will assume that the feeling is being done with fingers (at least the reader won’t assume he’s feeling it with other body parts, like his ear or the back of his knee), and if we rewrite, we’ll create a much more active sentence so the story can move on, like “Roger braced himself against the rough bark, letting the tree’s bulk hide him from the soldiers.”

Here are three real sentences I pulled from students’ stories in the last year.  Unless you have a really, really good reason to write one like them, revise them so they aren’t silly and they help to advance the story.

• Aunt Jessica dreamed in her mind that her daughter would come home.  (Where else would she dream?)
• Disregarding his adviser’s fear, the general used his mouth to taste the potentially poisonous soup.  (Thank goodness.  I thought he might taste the soup with his forehead.)
• My little brother ignored my advice, turned his back to me, and sat on his rear end.  (He couldn’t find a chair?)

Give it a try.  Go through your story to see if you’ve made the mistake of writing unnecessary sensory lead ins.  You will, of course, leave in the necessary ones!

The new school year at Fruita Monument High School has begun, and this is our first entry in the Write-A-Book-In-A-Year Club blog.

Today we’re talking about revision, not editing. Editing is checking spelling, punctuation and grammar, mostly. What I’m talking about today is revision, the act of seeing again, re-vision.

The revision process for me with fiction is mostly about four processes, taking out, rewording, reorganizing and putting in. Of the four, although they’re equally important, the last one almost always requires the least time. Mostly “putting in” means inserting a line more of description here and there (often touch and/or smell sentences), a line here and there of introspection (how the character is reacting to what’s going on), and, occasionally, more action, which might be as little as a line of dialogue to give a conversation an extra beat, or as much as a new scene. Still, the putting in is almost always more a matter of tweaking the story rather than remaking it.

So, what are your steps in revision? What do you do when you start working with your rough draft?

The always thoughtful lmarley is teaching a writing workshops for teens next week, and she posted her thoughts about National Novel Writing Month.  She asked, “How does this exercise teach you how to ‘learn and master’ style and craft and pacing? If you don’t revise, rewrite, edit, and examine, what improves?” 

Her questions got me thinking about the value of sprinting through a 50,000 word month:

I don’t think the NaNoWriMo helps much at all with craft and pacing, but I do think there is some value in discovering voice. One of the big problems I see with wannabe writers is that they just haven’t produced much, and what they do produce is overthought. Where I see this most clearly is in my creative writing classes where I have them keep 1,000-word-a-week journals. The stories they turn in can be tortured, stilted and mechanical, but their journals often have passages (sometimes very long passages) of smooth, readable, interesting and even compelling language.

I think the difference comes from their mindset and the process. When they are writing for me, they are thinking about all they know about writing and about me as a critical reader. They seize up, write slowly, and kill their voice. But when they write in their journals (especially after we’ve been doing them for a couple of weeks), they are writing quickly and for themselves.

NaNoWriMo puts writers more into that journal writing mindset. It’s okay if it’s bad. It just has to be done, and in the midst of trying to get it done, passages with real voice emerge. What they learn from the process is not only to get words on the page, but also to write from a more direct place in themselves–not the heavily filtered place where they normally wring their sentences.

The editing that comes later will be about picking out the good, adjusting the not so good, and tossing away the bad, but they can’t do the editing if they don’t produce something to edit first.

The cartoon is from the very funny writer and artist, Debbie Ridpath Ohi.  She has lots of other insightful writing illustrations at her site.

The writer Louise Marley, who is also an accomplished singer, wrote about the five lessons she learned from music that apply directly to being a better writer.  It turns out that the practices necessary to improve in music are the same for a writer:

• Practice
• Study
• Be professional
• Sing with your own voice
• Persevere

Marley also stresses the importance of discipline for a writer.  As she says, “Discipline always works. An artist without it is doomed to fail. Great talent can draw attention right away; but the application of talent, the training and practice and organization, the honing and development of it, are what make it last. Talent without discipline is like a lightning storm; you never know when, or where, it might strike, and it’s a darned unreliable source of power.”

Read Louise’s entire essay.

Post your thoughts about her advice here.

October 20 is the National Day on Writing.  This is an event that was created by the National Council of Teachers of English, NCTE,  “to help make writers from all walks of life aware of their craft.”  (Wouldn’t you think that a bunch of composition teachers would choose a more efficient way to name their organization, like calling it the English Teacher National Council and save the use of two “of”s?).  The U.S. Senate passed a resolution on Oct. 8, declaring Oct. 20 the National Day on Writing!

Colorado organizations are celebrating the day in a variety of ways.  The Denver Writing Project has linked to the NCTE who has created a gallery for writers to post their work at http://galleryofwriting.org/galleries/366137.  Anyone can post their poems, stories, etc. for the world to see.  It will go public on Oct. 20, but you’ll be able to post work until June of 2010.  Colorado has its own gallery at http://www.galleryofwriting.org/galleries/55020.

Douglas Hesse, the director of writing at the University of Denver and Colorado curator in the digital National Gallery of Writing, has written an interesting article about the future of writing in today’s Denver Post, entitled “Put Forth Our Best Writing Selves.” In it he discusses what he sees as the future of writing in a twitter, instant-message, chat board, text messaging, blog dominated reading environment.

We’re all writers.  What can we do personally to celebrate?  Remember, your deadline for contributions to our Halloween anthology is Oct. 21, so maybe the 20th would be a good day to do your final polishing for your piece.