The Fairytale of Writing

Once Upon a Time… no, this isn’t about writing fairytales. As a child I loved fairytales, so by natural extension when Once Upon a Time aired, I was right in front of my TV, popcorn in hand.

In a recent episode (The Miller’s Daughter) one of the main characters, Mary Margaret, aka Snow White, was handed a life-altering decision. That got me to wondering whether, my black moments are truly as dark as they should be. Am I putting enough at stake? Maybe not.

All her life, Snow has battled against dark magic by doing the right thing. She holds tight to goodness. That’s what her mother taught her. That’s her core.

Her defeats teach her that good doesn’t always triumph. As a child, she had the opportunity to save her mother’s life, but to do so she’d have to choose someone else to die in her mother’s place. She couldn’t do it and her mother died.

Now the black moment. Snow is forced to make a decision that goes completely against her being. In “The Miller’s Daughter,” Snow’s choices are to either give Regina and Cora (the truly bad guys) Rumplestiltskin’s dagger, thus giving them complete magic power and saving her childhood nurse, Johanna. Or she can retain the dagger, let Rumplestiltskin die (who has turned into sort of a good guy, and she’s just found out he’s the other grandfather of Snow’s grandson), which will keep the people of Storybrook safe.

Snow ends up giving Regina and Cora the dagger in exchange for Johanna. Their reunion is short-lived when Regina murders Johanna anyway.

Each time Snow has done the right and good thing, it has cost her dearly. With the death of her childhood nurse, she tells Prince Charming she doesn’t care about justice anymore. Wow! This is our hero, Snow White.

If you don’t watch “Once Upon a Time,” it’s well worth the hour. It is so valuable that I’m thinking of counting that time as a writing class and taking my cable bill off my taxes. Um, maybe not.

Here’s the trick (and it sounds easier than it is):

• Root the current crisis in with the hero’s past.

Thus making the crisis more personal and more rooted in their core.

• Give the character two choices, neither of which is good.

The consequences of the two choices need to be really bad and worse.

• Then force your character to pick one.

They have to make the choice or something even worse will happen.

In stories, as in life it’s all in the choices. You have to make your characters—all of them—the products of their choices. It’s more work, but your stories will shine for it and be memorable. The Miller’s Daughter is one I’m going to use as a template. If you’d like to read the whole synopsis, go to http://beta.abc.go.com/shows/once-upon-a-time/episode-guide/once-upon-a-time-episode-216-the-millers-daughter

How do you make your characters memorable?

How do you make your black moments dark enough?

 

Create Writing Connections

One of the best investments you can make in your own writing career to to attend conferences. Sure, they cost money, and I’m often the first to use no money as an excuse. But it’s money well spent. What business can prosper and survive without investing in it? If you are ready to take your writing seriously enough to invest in yourself, congratulations.

The conference I want to tell you about is our regional SCBWI (that stands for the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators) conference in Boise, Idaho, April 27. You can register for it here. And even if you don’t write or illustrate for children, that’s okay. It will be an awesome conference. Here are a few highlights.

Sara Megibow, an agent with Nelson Literary in Denver, will be speaking on a number of topics, including Connecting with Ourselves as well as Choices in Publishing. These will cover flip sides of the coin: turning inward to connect with yourself as a writer, and turning outward to seek out the best route to publish your book.

Karl Jones, an assistant editor and jack of all trades with Grosset and Dunlap (a division of Penguin), will wow us with his techniques in how to pitch your story. Karl tells me he does this on a web channel, and it’s very popular, so I asked him to recreate the experience with us. He’s also got some other magic under wraps for the day.

In addition, we have Miriam Forster, whose debut novel, City of a Thousand Dolls, came out this past May. I’ve been in critique groups with Miriam, and she is a talented author and delightfully fun person. She will share two of her favorite topics. First, she’s going to wow us with the wonder of How to Connect to Your Reader with Social Media. Miriam is well acquainted with all kinds of social media, and you should be too. Her other talk will be about World Building. In Miriam’s book, she creates an amazing and realistic fantasy world with such subtle skill you hardly even realize it. Learn how to do this in your own writing.

Author Anne Osterland will be on hand to help us focus on creating awesome characters, plus she will be talking about the small stuff, the details that bring a story to life.

Sherry Meidell, a picture book book illustrator, will offer her insights about what makes a good picture book. Beginners in the children’s lit world often set their sights on picture books, so we have asked Sherry to help answer all the usual questions about how picture books are made and how you write one. Since she’s an illustrator, she’ll have loads of slides to show. I love going to illustrator talks, because I am not a visual artist, and it always amazes me how they think of story in pictures.

So you have the opportunity, in one day, to learn about:

• creating intriguing characters
• building a fantasy world
• how to use details to bring your writing alive
• using social media to your advantage to connect with your readers
• connecting with yourself
• pitching your ideas
• making picture books
• multiple platforms for publishing

And, you’ll meet people with whom you might bounce around ideas or become critique partners. You might talk with Sara at lunch and realize she’s the agent for you. Or you might find out from Karl Jones that his company has work for hire gigs you might like.

For me, one of the best things I get out of conferences, and I’ve been going to them for more than 12 years, is the inspiration. Always, I come away with new ideas, new perspectives, and even new friends. Whether you are a beginning author or and old pro, you never stop needing inspiration and growth. I hope you’ll join us in April.

 

Discoveries

I love finding things that make writing easier. It’s all about the details. And if you don’t get them right, you throw off the story. Readers do check. I’m in the middle of a story set in the fall. My problem? Sunrise and sunset. I can’t have my characters strolling around in the sun at 7:30 when the sun set at 6:53. Bad form. I found a great website that takes care of all those nasty sun details. It’s especially great because you can set it for any place in the world. Not only that but it goes back in time. I got tired of clicking the back button to 1940.

It also tells you what phase the moon is in. It might be very picky to know what phase the moon is in, but it’s one more thing you don’t have to worry about. If your day is October 16, 1940 (no I’m not going to click forward to 2013), we find out that the sun rose at 6:51, set at 17:53 (or 5:53 civilian time), but that the moon rose at 6:17 and set at 7:06, and it was full. If you like you can use UTC (Coordinated Universal Time) or GMT (Greenwich Mean Time.)

Where can you find all this wonderful information? At http://sunrisesunsetmap.com. And to make things even better, you can print off your year of choice. Having a hard copy right in front of me is so handy. I can mark it up or change the day so it works for what I need.

Another great resource is to search the native plants for the area you’re writing about. It will give you pictures of the plants and that, in turn, will give you all you need to put the right plants in the right area.

I know none of this is new information, but it is something we need to remember to use. It’s so tempting just to rely on memory and keep writing, but don’t give in. The more realism you can sift into your work, the more the reader will subconsciously buy the premise. And, after all, isn’t that the goal? Keep the reader grounded in the story.

Keep the research close at hand and use it.

I love nothing more than to have a bunch of relevant websites bookmarked.

What are your go-to websites?

 

The Unexpected Outline

I’ve blogged here before about how my first crack at a novel was pounded out on a pilfered typewriter.  There was no stopping to edit, and certainly no outline.

This week, I’ve been working on a short story where I’ve meticulously outlined every scene.  I’m estimating the outline will be almost a fifth as long as the final manuscript.

What changed?  I don’t think outlining is inherently better or worse than winging it (I do something in between when drafting novels, now).  But for years, I thought I was simply not an outliner.  I’d written something freestyle, so surely everything I wrote should be done in that manner.

Little by little, I tried outlining.  I learned something: outlining is useful for me.  More useful than fretting at the keyboard without a road map.  It’s become an invaluable tool for my writing — one I wished I’d tried earlier.

One of the keys to writing well is figuring out what, in the sea of writing advice, works for you.  Writing is largely solitary.  There are, it seems, as many ways to write as there are writers.

I’ve tried suggestions, of course, that didn’t work.  I used to make police-style dossiers for characters per the advice of a writing book, but these always felt like middle school worksheets — and they never added the promised depth to my characters.  So I stopped.

I’ve heard authors rave about how writing is best done in multi-hour blocks.  Accordingly, I used to strive to write in such stretches, in a calm room, with a serene mind fully ready for writing.  I didn’t get much writing done.  Then I had kids and let go of the idea of calm hours alone all together.  I learned to write in ten-minute bursts, and discovered that I write better and more consistently in small chunks.

I imagine my process will continue to change, shifting little by little as I figure out what tools and techniques work well for me — or for a particular story.  And so today, I’m writing from a tight outline, something I thought I’d never do.  Oddly, it’s working fine.

Anyone else have a story about unexpected changes to the way you write?

 

Grammar Lesson

I edit manuscripts for other authors as part of my freelance business. And while I focus more on the big picture stuff, there are also times when little things like punctuation just annoy me to tears. Grammar, punctuation, and spelling do matter. You should never, ever submit a manuscript with errors of this kind that can be easily fixed.

By now, you’ve probably seen the popular meme that shows two versions of the same sentence:

Let’s eat Grandma!

and

Let’s eat, Grandma!

One little comma changes the meaning of the sentence entirely. In the first, we’re going to actually eat Grandma. Now this might be what you mean if you are writing about the Donner Party or a horror story involving cannibalism. But if you mean to be telling Grandma you are ready to eat, you better have a comma.

There are also very important reason to use commas correctly to separate items in a series. Such as: I ate grapes, mangoes, and bacon. If you leave off the final comma, it connects mangoes and bacon–which might be what you meant. Mangoes wrapped in bacon. Hmmmm. But if you meant each item separately, then you need the comma.

Most people can manage those commas pretty well. It gets tricky when you start using them in dialogue.

Simple dialogue doesn’t seem to trouble most people. Something like: “I want to go to the grocery store,” said Mom. That’s pretty normal.

But what if your dialogue is more obtuse and complicated? I’ve had clients do any of the following:

“I don’t know,” He said, “can you tell me the answer?”

“Please don’t go,” he scratched his lip.

“Whatever,” she asked… “do you mean?”

And much, much worse. I’ll give you a minute to fix the mistakes in the above sentences and see how you do. I’ll wait.

Done? Okay, let’s check our work. The first sentence should read:

“I don’t know,” he said. “Can you tell me the answer?”

If you are using a comma before the dialogue tag, you don’t capitalize “he.” You do put a period after “said.” And you cap the next bit of dialogue.

“Please don’t go.” He scratched his lip.

OR

“Please, don’t go.” He scratched his lip.

I think the comma after “please” is optional, depending on the inflection you want. The first way, without the comma, is more urgent. The second way is more pleading.

The most important part of the fix is to put a period after “go.” Why? Because the comma between what is said and the dialogue tag is meant to allow for the tag to indicate who and how it is being said. But we have an action following this dialogue that is completely a separate thing from what is being said. Therefore, you put a period. “He scratched his lip” is not a dialogue tag. It is an action unto itself.

People have been known to get into screaming matches over this kind of thing. Please don’t do that. But do please remember that a dialogue tag has to do with the statement or question said. Therefore, the dialogue tag must be words like:

said

asked

whispered

hollered

whined

A frequent mistake of beginning writers, and something that will scream to an editor that you are a beginner, is using words that cannot possibly describe how something is being said as if they are dialogue tags.

For example, “I have to kill you now,” he held up his gun. Holding up the gun is an action, but it does not describe how the words are spoken. I don’t even like things like “he threatened” in this case. Mostly because the words are already threatening, so it’s redundant to say that.

Often, writers will have a character laugh their line. Have you ever tried laughing words? It can’t be done. Yes, you can laugh while you’re speaking, but you’re still speaking. The laughter is separate from the words. I’ve seen dialogue where a character is snorting his lines, sneezing them, hiccuping them. None of these is speech.

The easiest way to fix this is to make the dialogue and the action two separate sentences: “I have to kill you now.” He held up the gun.

Our last test sample was this: ”Whatever,” she asked… “do you mean?”

This isn’t wrong, per se, but it is more complicated than necessary. It would flow more smoothly like this:

“Whatever do you mean?” she asked.

Whenever possible, simple is better. The main goal in writing dialogue is for the tags to disappear from consciousness. The less obtrusive they are, they better.

However, perhaps the author is trying to convey a pause, a hesitation on the speaker’s part. Then this would work:

“Whatever. . .” She paused. “Whatever do you mean?”

(Side note: Ellipses are typed with spaces between the periods. Just FYI.)

This is just the tip of the proverbial iceberg of comma usage. There are whole books on this topic. My favorite book with the clearest examples of correct usage is Strunk & White’s The Elements of Style. It’s a classic.

If you can accomplish correct usage in your punctuation, your copyeditor will love you.