Tag: writing

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.

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.

How Long is a Piece of String?

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I finished a short story this evening, just barely making the deadline.

Looked at one way, I started writing it three days ago.

Looked at another way, I’ve been working on it for six months.

It took me most of that time to look at and discard all the possible stories I wasn’t going to write, and to find the right idea and the right angle of approach for the one that I was.  And it took me the better part of a month to find the voice that I wanted to tell it in.

Once I had all of that sorted out, putting the words together was the quick and easy part.

So — how long is a piece of string?

And the answer is:  As long as it needs to be.

Radio Silence from the Northland

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I’ve got a promised short story for an anthology due the day after tomorrow.

So I’m kinda not here for a bit.

(Goes back to staring out into space and muttering.)

Thought for the Day

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Try not to attach your writing to a particular habit or tool — no matter whether it’s alcohol (the classic writer’s trap) or caffeine or chocolate; or one specific fountain pen and color of ink; or absolute silence; or the perfect comfy chair.

Because this world is fickle, and chairs break and pens and ink go out of stock, and silence is easy to get when you live alone but a lot less so once you decide to go through life in tandem or (God help you) reproduce.  And as for self-indulgent habits . . . they have a nasty way of either turning on you or becoming forbidden fruit, just when you think you need them most.

When the day comes that one of your favorite things either goes away or has to be given up, your life is going to be ten times harder if you also have to figure out how to get your writing done without its aid and support.

Avoid attachment . . . that’s the ticket.  Easier said than done, but then, what about this writing thing isn’t?

Getting Acquainted

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So you have the idea for a novel — you’ve got a compelling theme you want to work out, or you’ve got a nifty science-fictional or fantastic conceit that you want to play with, or you’ve got the outline for a marvelously well-fitted and dovetailed plot — and now you need characters to fill it.  Unfortunately, all you’ve got so far is a list, if you’re lucky, of names that you think might work.

It’s time to get acquainted.

There are a lot of ways to get to know your characters.  None of them work for everybody, because writers (and characters) are persnickety like that.  But there’s a chance that one of them may work for you.

Some writers fill out detailed character questionnaires for all their characters.  (There are lots of these available on the internet.  Just google on “character questionnaire” and there you go.)

Some writers have their important characters write letters to them, or to each other, or keep a diary.

Some writers make musical playlists for their characters.  Others scour the internet and other resources for visual references for their characters’ physical appearance, clothing, and home decor.

Some writers draw up astrological charts for their characters, or do tarot readings for them.  (This approach, oddly enough, can work just fine even for writers who think that astrology and the tarot are pure hokum.  It gives the writer a way to think about the characters in symbolic terms.)

As always, there isn’t a right way to do this.  Whatever works, works.

Today’s Link-of-Interest

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An interview with Stephen King, in which he talks about effective opening sentences:

In The Atlantic, here.

(Stephen King on writing is always worth listening to, in my opinion, because — also, of course, in my opinion — he’s pretty much the Charles Dickens of our modern era.)

Making the Rounds

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One of the things I tell myself, when I’ve got a short story out somewhere on submission, is that submitting a story to a market doesn’t mean that you’re asking for an absolute up-or-down verdict on its ultimate worthiness.

When you submit a short story, you’re doing the equivalent of sending it out on a blind date.

And we all know how blind dates work.  A few of them are utter disasters, of the “I’ll never trust So-and-So to set me up with someone ever again” variety; most of them are the sort of forgettable evening that ends with a “let’s not do this another time” handshake and a taxi ride home; and every once in a while, you get fireworks.  (Also, sometimes your best friend has a date with Mr. Forgettable Number 17 and meets the love of her life, because the chemistry between two people is a strange and unpredictable thing.)

So when your story comes back to you with a note saying “We’re sorry, but your submission does not meet our needs at the present time,” for heaven’s sake don’t take it as a polite hint that you should stop writing and take up train-spotting as a hobby instead.  It was just another blind date that turned out to be a dud for reasons that were nobody’s fault.

What to do?  Find another likely market, and send the story out again.  Because — who knows?

Maybe next time, the fireworks.

Still Too Hot.

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There’s a reason why I don’t read romance novels set in exotic tropical climes:  I hate hot weather, and the tropics have almost nothing else.

I spent three years in the Republic of Panamá, back when my husband/co-author was in the Navy, and every year we spent there, I moved my ideal location for permanent settlement another tier farther north.  One more year down there, and right now I’d probably be living in the Yukon.

Some good did come of it, though.  Get hot enough and bored enough, and you’ll start writing fiction to keep yourself occupied, and the next step after that is selling some of it, and after that, you’re doomed hooked.

I really will post about Pacific Rim real soon now, I promise.  Just not tonight.