Author: drdoyleeditorial

Tales from the Before Time: Classroom Issues

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For a long time, I was — to put it mildly — skeptical about the value of classroom writing instruction, if by “skeptical” we mean “unconvinced of its utility and halfway convinced that its influence is largely malign.”

I blame early-writing-life trauma.

Picture me, in the eighth grade, bookish and awkward and laboring under the further social burden of being a new kid in the sort of town where everybody has gone to school together since first grade.  I wanted desperately to be — well, not popular, because popularity looked like it came with more strings and preconditions than I felt like dealing with, but ordinary.

At the same time, I was already a beginning writer, turning out lachrymose poetry and lumpy prose and working hard at my efforts to improve both (harder, in fact, than I ever worked at any of the  “draw one line under the subject of this sentence and two lines under the verb” exercises in our English textbook .)  And I was as hungry for outside validation as any writer, beginner or established pro.

Unsurprisingly, there came a day when I had a finished story in hand and wanted somebody else’s opinion on it.  (Needless to say, the story sucked.   I was, after all, only in the eighth grade.)  So I screwed up my courage to the sticking-point and showed the story to my eighth-grade English teacher, hoping to at least get some useful commentary out of the deal.

This was a big mistake, because she liked it.

She liked it so damned much she read it out loud to all her English classes.  Which put paid to any hopes I might have had of appearing ordinary, and got me out of the habit of trusting English teachers about anything.

Three and an Outline

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Or, what goes into a typical query package:  three chapters and an outline of the novel in question.  Plus the cover letter, of course.

It shouldn’t really be necessary to say that when we’re talking about “three chapters” what we mean is “the first three consecutive chapters” and not some random collection of chapter highlights . . . but the conversations I’ve had with slushpile readers have convinced me that yes, it is necessary.  (No, not for you, of course . . . but there’s always somebody who doesn’t yet know the customs of the community.  And we were all of us clueless once.)

Likewise, by “outline” we don’t mean the I-II-III/A-B-C/1-2-3/a-b-c format that our high school teachers sweated so hard to insert into our resistant brains.  What “outline” means, in this context, is a five to ten page synopsis of the novel in question, usually single-spaced, giving the main arc of the plot, the important characters, and something about the setting and general milieu of the story.  If there are important plot twists and revelations, mention them here; your potential agent or editor is not worried about spoilers.  Customarily, in an outline, the plot is narrated in the present tense — rather as though you were telling a good (and non-spoilerphobic) friend the story of this really nifty movie you saw last night.

Writing an outline is not fun, at least not for most writers.  The best way to get through it, I find, is to grit your teeth, tell yourself “It’s not an art form, it’s a sales tool,” and push on through.

As for cover letters — briefer is better, generally.  Include the title and word count and a short description of your book (“a cozy mystery featuring a retired card sharp”), relevant publications if you have them (“three short stories in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine“), and relevant personal information (“I made my living for twenty years as a Mississippi riverboat gambler.”) But the single most important thing you can put into your cover letter is your return address and telephone/email contact info.  There’s nobody quite as sad as an editor who has found a good manuscript . . . and has just discovered that the title page with the author’s address on it has gone missing.

Don’t make an editor cry.  Include a cover letter with your full contact information, even if all that the letter itself says is the prose equivalent of Roses are red/Violets are blue/This is a book/That I’m sending to you.

Everybody Has Their Own Ten Rules

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Writers like making up “My Ten Rules for Writing” lists (heck, I’ve done it, right here), and other writers like reading and arguing with them.  I’ve said before that I suspect the liking has less to do with a desire for advice and more with a desire for company (“See!  Somebody else thinks this is important, too!”), but even the most wrong-headed List of Ten can provide a useful insight or two.

Today’s noteworthy list is over at the Paris Review tumblr:  Geoff Dyer’s Ten Rules for Writing Fiction.  It’s the usual mix of universal and idiosyncratic, helpful and what-was-he-thinking.  The rule that stuck out, for me, was the second one:  “Don’t write in public places.”  I’ve seen other writers’ lists with the same caveat (coffee shops are often singled out); on the other hand, I’ve seen or heard other writers talking about how writing in cafes and coffee shops was their salvation.  J. K. Rowling, famously, wrote her first Harry Potter novel in a cafe in Edinburgh; the humorist and playwright Jean Kerr used to resort to writing in the front seat of the family station wagon.  Of course, what counts as a public or a private place can differ from writer to writer: a naturally gregarious and easily distracted person might need a quiet office with a closed door in order to get stuff done; a writing mom with a house full of noisy children and nonstop demands on her attention might find an hour a day at the neighborhood Starbucks to be an oasis of sweet privacy.

(More thoughts on public/private writing spaces can be found here.  For the curious, I found the link by Googling “Jean Kerr writing station wagon”.)

Everybody’s different.  But it’s telling, I think, that the one rule most lists have in common is “Keep on writing.”

Today’s Nifty Link

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Over at the blog Ex Urbe, there’s a long, chewy post (with pictures) about the historical development of the city of Rome from its first days as a cluster of huts on a hilltop by the Tiber.

Writers dealing with invented worlds (whether past or future), take note:  This is how a real city grows up.  Your invented cities need to have similar layers to them if you want them to feel real.  (This is also, I suspect, why planned cities can have such a flattened feel to them.  They haven’t had enough time in place yet to accumulate additional strata, so when you scratch the surface all you get is more surface.)

Peeve of the Day: Dashes vs. Ellipses

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There are two ways to end a line of dialogue that isn’t meant to stand as a complete sentence.  One is with a dash, the other is with ellipses (those three spaced dots, remember?)

They aren’t interchangeable.

Ellipses are for utterances that trail off in some manner:

“Well,” she said, “if that’s what you really want . . . .” (That’s the ellipses, plus a period.)

“Well . . . if that’s what you really want, I suppose it’ll have to do.”  (That’s just the ellipses, showing how the speaker lets his or her voice trail off into a significant pause before going on to the rest of the sentence.

Dashes are for utterances that are broken off or are interrupted:

“I told you I wanted–”

“I know what you told me, but the store was all out of them.”

Or:

“And the winner is–”

(Drum roll.)

“Anastasia Oddfellow of East Drumstick, New Jersey!”

Got it?  Good.

Public Service Announcement

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We interrupt your irregularly scheduled blog reading with a business-related announcement.  Related, that is, to my editorial and critique services (see the sidebar link for more info.)

After careful consideration, I’ve decided that as of 15 September I’m going to be slightly raising my basic-rate flat fee to $1500 for a line-edit and critique on a standard-weight novel.  Novellas and doorstops will remain separately negotiable.  And as before, I will also line-edit and critique a short story or the first chapter/first 5000 words of a novel for $100.

My reasons for doing this are twofold.  One is that the increased rate should, I hope, enable me to better strike a balance between the need to keep the household exchequer in a healthy-enough state, and the need to have sufficient time to work on my own contractual writing obligations.  The other is that I’ve done enough research into the going rates for editorial work to satisfy myself that even with the projected increase, my rate remains at the relatively inexpensive end of the scale.

I’m giving this one-month heads-up so that anyone who wants to take advantage of the old rate can do so; those pre-contracted jobs will go into the editing queue ahead of those from people who sign up after September 15.

A Recipe in Lieu of Witty Advice

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(Because some days I’m fresh out of wit, and because this recipe is by way of being a traditional welcome-home meal for the daughter whom we picked up at the bus stop yesterday evening after her summer in New York.)

Green Chile Pork Stew

2 to 2 1/2 pounds pork stew meat, or lean pork cut in 1″ cubes
1/3 cup flour
1 teaspoon cumin
1/4 teaspoon black pepper
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon ground sage
3 tablespoons olive oil
3 tablespoons vinegar
2 large onions, coarsely chopped
2 or 3 medium potatoes, cubed
2 or 3 green chiles (such as Anaheim, or whatever you like), diced,
or 1 can (4oz)
2 cups tomatillo salsa (salsa verde) (about 1 jar)
1 can (15 oz) chicken broth
1 teaspoon brown sugar

(Salsa verde comes in varying degrees of hotness, depending upon the other ingredients in it besides tomatillos.   If the locally available brand is milder than you prefer, you can compensate by adding chopped jalapeños.)

Put flour, cumin, pepper, salt, and sage in a plastic ziploc bag; add pork cubes and shake to coat thoroughly.

Brown the cubes of pork in hot oil in batches; remove when browned and put in your crockpot.

With the heat still on, add the vinegar to the skillet to deglaze the pan, making sure to scrape up all the brown bits.  (The vinegar will reduce).

Ad the chopped onions, the chiles, the potatoes, the salsa, the chicken broth, the brown sugar, and the scraped bits from the skillet to the pork already in the crockpot.  Stir and cook, covered, on low for 8 to 12 hours, or on high for 4 to 6 hours.

This goes well with cornbread.  And if there’s any left over — which is by no means a sure thing — it reheats well in the microwave the next day.

Thought for the Day

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Advice on writing — if it hopes to be at all honest — really needs to have a sign posted over it in flashing letters of bright red neon:

THIS IS STRICTLY MY PERSONAL OPINION.

IT’S WHAT WORKS FOR ME.

And that definitely goes for anything that may be posted here.

(I will admit that I’m vain enough to think that my personal opinions are generally valid, at least for fairly large subsets of the writing population.  But I’m not so vain as to think that they are, or ought to be, universal.  One size definitely doesn’t fit all, in this business.)

Trouble on the Wind

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Or, foreshadowing.  Of which there are two general kinds, which require — of course — different handling.

The first kind of foreshadowing is when you need something bad to happen to your characters unexpectedly — the equivalent of having your protagonist walking down the street without a care in the world, and then dropping a grand piano on his head.  This needs to come as an unforeseen, and probably fatal, surprise to your protagonist; but not to your readers, who have little patience for plummeting pianos.  Either you carefully plant, amid the usual distractions, the fact that the occupant of the fourth-floor-front apartment plays the piano, and hopes to trade in his or her current badly-tuned specimen for a better one someday; or you make it clear from the first pages of the book that your protagonist lives in the sort of film-noir universe where death by random piano is always a possibility.

The second kind of foreshadowing is when something bad is going to happen to one or more of your characters, and you want the reader to be aware that something bad is going to happen, and you want them to be waiting for it — the equivalent, in this case, of putting all your characters under a tornado watch and letting your readers sweat over the question of exactly which one of their fictional friends is going to see the funnel cloud snaking down out of the greenish-grey sky and hear the noise like an enormous freight train going over a bad grade.  For that kind of foreshadowing, you need to start bringing the warning signs into the narrative early, a little bit at a time, and letting the frequency and the intensity build up slowly but steadily until the warning sirens begin to sound.

Because just as a stage whisper isn’t anything like a real whisper, fictional surprise isn’t anything like real surprise; it’s an artificial representation of the real thing.  The real thing, if put unchanged into fiction, is liable to look fake.

It Came from Office Space

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“Home office” sounds so . . . respectable.

Maybe for some professions, it is.  And maybe even for some writers.  I don’t know.  But for a lot of us, the home office, if we’re lucky enough to have one, is more like a cave where the books and papers are organized by geologic strata and topic drift, with the desk and chair and attendant writing machinery (computer, typewriter, quill pen and inkwell, whatever) rising above it all like a lighthouse on a rock.

Plus, often, a cat.

That’s if we’re lucky, and have a room to spare.  Jane Austen, famously, wrote her novels in the family parlor, and shoved the papers underneath the blotter whenever anybody came in.  Louisa May Alcott’s fictional alter ego, Jo March, set up her writing desk in the attic.  I thought a lot about both of them during the years when I had my own writing gear set up in our fortunately-large kitchen — not for lack of a spare room for the office, in my case, but in order to have a commanding view of the front door, the latch of which our pre-school offspring had, unnervingly, proved themselves able to open.

Writers through the ages have managed to ply their craft under the most trying conditions imaginable — in hospitals, in prisons, on ships at sea, in grinding poverty or in the diamond-encrusted straitjacket of social expectation — and have undoubtedly cheered themselves by daydreaming of the perfect office they would make for themselves someday, if only.

Sometimes, if they’re lucky, they get to have that perfect office.  And if they’re even luckier, they don’t then sit down in the perfect chair at the perfect desk and take up the perfect pen (or the perfect typewriter, or the perfect computer) . . . only to have their muse demand to be taken back to that cramped walk-in closet with the typewriter set up on a board across two suitcases and the toddler throwing his alphabet blocks out of his playpen and in through the open door.