More bombs good

WARNING: This is a writing update. I'm sorry if it's a little 'me-centric', but I'm hoping by blogging about my writing it might keep me more firmly on track when it comes to writing progress. Also, I might blog more consistently! Onward.

I can happily report that today I rewrote an entire scene and it is at least twice as awesome as it was before. That is not to say that it is now AWESOME, just that the previous iteration needed a lot of improvement.

I once wrote a blog post about dropping plot bombs. The basic premise is: if you feel like a scene is going nowhere, or lacking conflict/tension, there's one sure fire way to sort it out - drop in a plot bomb. Ask yourself, what's the worst that could happen right now to these characters? Be sure to throw in an evil cackle for good measure.

So before the scene went something like this: MC finds enemy soldiers (only three), kills two of them (one in cold blood) even though she's never killed anyone before, rescues girl, goes on her merry way (albeit a little depressed over killing two men).

Now: MC finds a group of around 20 soldiers holding a girl captive, she hides out until night and slips into the tent with the girl, kills two men in self defense and gets a stab wound in the side and almost strangled for her efforts, rescues girl and hightails it outta there with 18 pissed off soldiers on her tail. Will she make it?

Favourite bit today:

My eyes widened as the knife sunk into my side. I fisted his shirt and dragged him closer to me, staring into his snarling face. Victory glinted in his eyes. He thought he’d won. Perhaps he had.

Either way, I was taking him with me.


It's exciting being able to see improvements in your story, isn't it? How's everyone else's writing going?

Intern lessons: Take your finger away from the send button...

I've read a lot of manuscripts and written a lot of assessments since starting my internship with Entangled. I've seen the range, from great to 'did they just finish their first draft and call it done?'. The single most common thing I end up writing in those assessments is: the premise has great potential, but the execution just doesn't live up to it.

So often I see a manuscript that has the potential to be amazing, but the amount of work involved in making it so is just too much for a busy editor with a mountain of work already sitting on their desk. Often the issues with the manuscript are things the author could have fixed themselves, if they'd done a little research or sought the help of a CP or beta reader (or even just moved from draft 1 to draft 2). By not making that little bit more investment in their work those authors have lost a potential opportunity.

So, first intern lesson learnt: make sure you're sure, like really really sure, your MS is in tip top condition (and I don't just mean spelling mistakes) before sending it off to your dream publishing house/agent. Sometimes, when you've been working so damned hard on that story, it's easy to get impatient. If you're feeling impatient then find yourself a beta reader and use the time it takes them to read and assess your MS to take a step back and think about something else for a while. Who knows? Maybe they'll think your MS is ready too!

Mmk, I know that this intern lesson is one all my writer friends who read this already know. We follow the online writer community and educate ourselves on this stuff, right? (Surprisingly, a lot of the MSS I read with easy to fix issues come from authors who do have an online presence.) I've read a lot of agent blogs saying they wished people would make sure they were ready to submit before doing so, so it's not like it came as a surprise to me, but it is very interesting to see the trend in practice.

Have you every submitted or been tempted to submit, even though you know your MS isn't quite ready? What are your experiences with this?

To rewrite or not to rewrite?

That is the question.

I was reading an MS from the slushpile today, and getting very frustrated with the opening paragraphs. My frustration was for many reasons, but one of them was the way the MC was introduced to new concepts.

The MC was starting in a state of ignorance, as are many MCs in YA fantasy, and is found by people who know more than her whose job it is to educate her. And herein lies my problem. It's not interesting to read about an MC being lectured in what they don't know. It's passive. The MC is not actively seeking this information, she didn't even know it was out there. It just fell into her lap. She was even ignorant about her ignorance so there was no reason for her to go actively searching for an answer. And ... I was not terribly entertained. The end result? I stopped reading after about four chapters. (I would have stopped earlier but I'm still nervous as a new intern about not giving MSS enough of a chance.)

My story, to a certain extent, suffers from a similar problem, and it's taken me til now, pinpointing it in this story, to realise it's what's causing me grief with mine. I've rewritten my first 40-60 pages or so about four times now. Each times it's gotten marginally better but I'm never fully happy with it and now I know why: my MC is ignorant, and, rather than not taking no for an answer when her seniors refuse to give information, she accepts her ignorance and waits for it to fall into her lap.

The thing is, her ignorance is so important to the story (but not ignorance of her ignorance - she knows there are things she doesn't know and this is imporatant). So, the solution as I see it is to remove the sources of information that are handed to her and make her go out and get it. And that means ... well ... basically a rewrite, probably from start to finish.

If I can find time around two internships, full time work and part time uni.

Eep.

Have you ever found yourself in this situation? Have you found ways to make your current set-up work with minimal rewriting, or did you have to do a complete overhaul? If the latter please just lie to me and tell me it was easy peasy! Kidding, I really do want to know about your experiences and your words of wisdom.

PS. Please excuse me if I'm making little to no sense. It's late, and I'm tired, and I've just had an unepiphany that looks like it's going to equal oodles of work.

Clichés and anatomical impossibilities

How many times have you read the line ‘her jaw dropped to the floor’, or ‘my stomach sank’ or ‘her eyes were as blue as the ocean’? A fair few? More?

Yea, me too. It’s gotten to the point where I do an involuntary eye-roll when I read one of those lines. According to a quick Google search only 1 in 6 people (in America) have blue eyes. Even that statistic sounds a bit high to me. I very rarely notice people with blue eyes. Not the Alexis Bledel kind anyway.

Is the character a blonde-haired, blue-eyed Scandinavian? Ok, forgiven. Dark-haired, olive-skinned, blue-eyed beauty? Why? Is it because she lives in a dystopian world where a certain type of blue eyes mean she has a genetic abnormality brought on by genetic experiments? Ok, I can dig that.

Is it … just ‘cause? If you chose option C, cue eye-roll. She’s much more likely to have brown eyes. Or hazel. And what’s wrong with those colours? And for the record, green eyes are even less likely. Only 1-2% of people (according to that same Google search) have ‘eyes the colour of jade’.

If you’re aware of the improbability of your character having blue eyes, green (grey, violet, red) eyes, and you decide they still need to have that eye colour (I hope it’s for a good reason and not just ‘cause) then please, please come up with a way to describe them other than ‘sea green/blue’ or ‘eyes like sparkling sapphires/jade’. The first word to pop into your head is probably there because you’ve the descriptions a million times before. Put it away, and try for another.

Those eyes, so blue I felt as though I were staring into a fathomless pool, so deep and wide that I could swim forever.

So now we’ve got the eyes sorted, I would just like to point out that it is not actually possible for a jaw to drop much further than, well, anywhere past your face. Once upon a time, I’m sure the image of someone’s jaw dropping to the floor was new and fresh (but so were all clichés) and told the reader perfectly how stunned the character was. (Or it was a perfectly gruesome description of a decaying zombie.) Now, not so much.

Is your character’s jaw dropping to the floor because they’re stunned by something they’ve seen or heard? How else would they be affected? Would a jolt run through them from the surprise? Would their breathing speed up? Goosebumps? Eyes widening? Shaking? Muscles tensing?

There are so many different physical and emotional responses to any situation your character might face, and there is never any need to use a clichéd line. The thesaurus is your friend (much like Google). If you’re feeling stuck, maybe try to imagining yourself in your characters shoes. How would you feel?

How ‘bout you? Does clichéd writing grind your gears? What are your tips for avoiding overdone wording?

A recipe for bad dialogue

Bart Simpson: Hey Lisa, how was your day at Springfield Elementary School today? Did you play your saxophone in music lessons with Dewey Largo, Springfield Elementary School's music teacher?
Lisa Simpson: Why yes I did, Bart. Thank you for asking. How did you know?
Bart Simpson: Because that's what you do at the start of every episode, of course.

Ok, it's obvious I'm not going to get a job any time soon as a Simpson's script writer, and I'm not entirely convinced this is the best way to illustrate the point I want to make but it's the best I could come up with on short notice without quoting from a book.

What is wrong with this bit of horrid dialogue (other than the obvious)? Could it possibly be that Bart has included a lot of information that isn't necessary because Lisa is already very familiar with it? In other words, is Bart's dialogue completely unrealistic because really he'd say something more like, 'Hey Lis, how's school today? Did you get kicked out of sax class again?' (We're just pretending for a moment that Bart is a nice brother and he'd actually care how Lisa's day is.)

All the other information, the names, the places - the specifics - is not necessary. At least in the context of those two having a conversation. Lisa already knows what school Bart is talking about because she goes there. She knows who her music teacher is. She knows where her music teacher teaches. The only reason a writer would write a piece of dialogue with so much unnecessary information is because they are trying to inform the reader.

I'm here to say ... don't do that. Seriously. Don't. Unless you're trying to make your reader cringe.

Dialogue for the sake of imparting information to the reader, and not because it would be a natural conversation for the characters to have, is a great way to create stilted scenes. It doesn't feel real, and for good reason. It's a dialogue info-dump, and it's just as bad as the non-dialogue kind.

Do you notice the dialogue info-dump? Does it make you cringe? What other tips do you have for avoiding stilted dialogue?

Is it easier to see the bad than the good?

I mentioned in my previous post that I've just started an internship (yes, on top of doing my full-time job - I'm a little bit coocoo). I only started on Tuesday, so I can't tell you precisely what this internship involves, but I can tell you I'm doing it extramurally and so far I've been given two manuscripts from the slush pile to read and assess. I've just finished one and started the other, and already I'm learning something from this task.

Why is it so much easier to discuss the bad than it is to discuss the good?

The first manuscript was brilliant. Really, it was. I'm in awe of the writer's abilities and think she truly deserves to be published. But I was reading the MS with my editorial hat on because I knew I needed to be more critical than your average reader, and I definitely found things that could be improved upon. Which is fine. What I find interesting is that, even though I thought the book was great, I found it much harder to discuss the good points than the bad.

I'm not sure if this is just me, or if our brains automatically pay more attention to things we don't think are working, because we want to figure out how to fix them. When things work than perhaps we spend a lot less time analysing them, all we need to know is that it works, right? Do you do this too?

Maybe we (or I, if I am alone in this) should be spending just as much time figuring out what a writer has done right, and how, as we do analysing what has gone wrong. Surely it's just as important to understand what is good, what to aim for, as it is to understand what doesn't work and what to avoid.

What are your thoughts on this? Do you focus on the bad when reading with an editorial eye, or are you able to assess the good just as readily as you assess the parts that need fixing?

One of many ways to drag a reader out of the story

Imagine you're lost in a good story, immersed in the characters and setting and plot, and all of a sudden you trip over something that doesn't belong, or that doesn't feel quite right, and then, unhappily, you're back in the real world. It's like a glitch in the matrix, and it makes you feel a little squeemish inside.

These glitches can come in many shapes and forms: inconsistent characterisation, time lines that don't match up, unrealistic dialogue. Or it could just be a word.

I read a series a few years ago (which I loved for the most part) that actually gave me an uncomfortable squicky feeling every time I read a particular word. The word was 'boyo'. My aversion is not to the word itself, but to the author's use of it. If one particular character, or characters from a similar area, used the word in speech it would be a characterisation tool. Something to mark them as different. But the word wasn't used that way. It sat where every instance of 'man' or 'boy' should have been. And the book wasn't even in first person! I started pausing every time I read 'boyo' and replacing it with 'man' or 'boy' in my head, so annoying was it. I almost stopped reading, even though I enjoyed the rest of the book.

So there you go, one simple way to throw your readers out of the story.

What have you read recently that's made you pause and pull back from the story? Or does this sort of thing not bother you? If you're a writer, do you have a word you like to use that others might find out of place? If so, it could be time to use Word's find and replace tool.

June is over - how did I go with my goals?

... Ahhh ... *crickets chirp into the silence*

Well, let's just say that I didn't fail completely, but I may have been a little ambitious with the goals.

Let's have a look:

Complete at least one round of revisions for Blood Legacy. Nope. Not done. I didn't do it every day either. More like 80% of the days in June. So while the revisions are not complete I did get some good progress on this, although it is going a little slower than I'd like because I'm rewriting a lot of scenes from scratch.

I also had some notes back from a CP about my beginning which got me thinking a lot about that for a couple of days. I now have some good ideas for the beginning rewrite (number three) but that will have to wait till I've finished this round of revisions.

Read and write notes for critique partners. Check. Although I do still have some to do.

Write out plot for Blood Legacy. I wrote BL with absolutely zilch planning and therefore I have no record of my plot. I figure this would be a big help for revisions so I wanted to have it written down. Also, I won a ten page critique from the awesome Sarah Billington and I need to send a synopses along with it. To start the process off for both of these I have been writing a one to two paragraph summary of each chapter as I finish revising it.

Work on consistency of character voice in BL. This kinda comes under revisions, and I am working on it. I think I'll do a post on this some time soon too.

Continue writing and choose a setting for So Far to Fall. These two were bonus goals if I got through the rest, so no - they haven't been touched.


Did you set June goals? If so how did you go with them? Will you set some goals for July?