What I'm Listening To: Cinema Bizarre - Escape to the Stars
What I'm Doing: Reading Nightmare by Piers Anthony, and trying to decide between actual food, or more coffee.
Because I can't (or don't know how to) reply to comments, and some of you have left meaningful, interesting, and insightful comments on some of the things I've got to say about writing, and I just can't not start a discussion about them. (Mostly because, if you've been reading my blog for any length of time, you know this already: I like to talk.)
Point of View
tokidoki-muse: I was mostly ranting because I'd just seen thirty plus badly written, first person excerpts. First person isn't as horrible as I seemed to have made it out to be, in my own opinion. Mami said something similar, that once she starts working on a book, it'll tell her what it's going to be written in, and some of them refuse to be written in anything BUT first person, so I'm not going to rag on your book, simply because it's in first person, which would make me a hipocrite in any case, because the vampire-novel idea that I've got kicking around around in my brain is in first person, itself. Also, a bit of a nightmare is a bit of an understatement. XDD Instead of rewriting the whole MS, just try rewriting certain scenes in third person limited, see how they work, and if you could possibly do the whole thing that way, or if it would be better off as is, in first person.
marynoel: That felt weird. I'm so used to calling you Mami... XD Any way, I've already told you about the spine-creasing and whatnot. And I've always thought that I wouldn't be able to write in first person, and obviously, after thirty-fourty first-person, badly written excerpts, I was ready to tear first-person out of the book altogether, but then I found myself building the possible-vampire novel in my head, and the main character immediately started narrating in first person. I was actually tempted to post the first words that came out of his mouth in my own 'are you hooked' post, and find out if it would be decently eye-catching. AND PERHAPS I SHALL SUGGEST THAT TO THE ANONYMOUS AUTHORESS, AND YOU WILL GET ANOTHER CHANCE. ^3^
farfums: I don't think it limits possible dialogue, because I see it as instead of sitting on the shoulder of the main character, you are instead sitting inside the head of the main character; you'd still be hearing the same things that your MC hears, so it doesn't matter if you're outside or inside, if there's two people too far away from the MC to hear what they're saying, you're still getting no dialogue. And I HEARTILY suggest you find The Shadowy Horses and Sunshine, as they are, to me, the pinnacle of first-person, as well as altogether amazing novels.
Story Creation
Valerie Wangnet: Thank you for commenting! I love hearing about how other people write, because it's such a personal process. I've heard fiction described as 'pouring your soul out to complete strangers' but I consider it more like... making a pretty picture. With words, naturally. But I often compare writing to drawing. You're doing the same thing, in my opinion, only instead of presenting people with ready-made images, you're creating the images with words, and then giving people the option of creating their own pictures from those words. No matter how a character is described to me in a book, I form my own image of their appearance based on how they act, and on other characters that I've seen. Prince Josua, from The Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn Trilogy by Tad Williams, is described as having close-cropped hair (which I initially imagine to look like the stereotyped 'Roman' look) but after that first mention of his hair, when I picture him in my mind, he's got somewhat shaggy, ear-length hair.
And I suppose I lied slightly about creating a story, and then stuffing characters into it. Mostly, my ideas come to me as single-shot images, or ideas - a world where dragons, elves, and unicorns are the norm, a forest ravaged by a nuclear explosion, a 'vampire story' unlike most of the popular vampire novels out there. The stories come to me (I'd be fooling myself and everyone else if I tried to say I create these ideas) based on those initial images or wants, and then the characters to fill those stories arrive.
tokidoki-muse: Gladly taken. They own mine, too, but I refuse to allow myself to fall into the 'vampire romanticism' that has swept the nation with Twilight; if you get right down to the bare bones of it, there's nothing romantic about vampires. Someone said (and I forget who) that vampires are walking corpses who eat people.
No one romanticises zombies.
Inspiration (in the weirdest places)
moonrat: My friend told me about you commenting on my blog, and for a moment, I was terrified. Thank you for taking the time to drop by, though! I'm glad you think so. I'm excited, too.
Some Good Advice and a little more
jessjordan: I read this at nearly three in the morning last night, and it was your comment that sparked the need to create this post, because you raised some interesting points, and I couldn't let it rest without talking to you about it. First of all, thank you so much for taking the time to leave such a comment. It was incredibly heartening to know that I'm not just blowing smoke, and actually say things worth thinking about occasionally, and your comment gave me quite a lot to think about, myself.
I'd originally imagined Eversong to be three, self-contained books in which the conflict of each book is resolved at the end of the book, not the end of the trilogy, but what makes it a trilogy, a set, and not just three books in the same 'world' is that they follow Vicky as a person, going from a slightly-lost twenty-something with no aim in life, and few friends, to finding - and losing - her first love, to finding good friends, and growing as a person, to eventually become a powerful, important person with great inner-strength.
I believe what I'm trying to say is character-driven stories, not plot-driven. I use the same example as from my post here, in the LotR trilogy; characters drive the story anyway, I'm aware of that. Someone (my memory feels like a collander at the moment, and all the important bits slipped out through the holes and left me with vague ideas and memories of what people have said, but not who said it in the first place) said that if in LotR, Aragorn had been the one to take the One Ring to the volcano, then the story would have been much different, nigh unrecognisable. It's Frodo's journey to destroy the ring that makes it what it is, but there is no resolution of major conflicts at the end of each book. You've got to read all three, in order, in order to reach a satisfying conclusion, and as I said, the first book is interesting and attention grabbing because it's the introduction; you get to know your characters, get to see them starting out on their massive journey, and become friends with them. The last book is interesting, because you see how their travels have changed these new friends of yours, and you get to see them triumph in the end, but the middle book sags just a bit, because there's nothing really... happening. They're traveling a lot, and having mini-adventures, and fighting battles, but it just put me in mind of a rope-bridge - on either side of the chasm you're crossing, the bridge is tight and balanced, but in the middle, it droops because of gravity. And that's just my own opinion, and what I, personally, took away from them, and it coloured my desire to NOT fall into the same rope-bridge story, to instead make it a suspension bridge - it's solid and bends enough in the wind so as to not break, but without the suspension cables - the characters, in this case - the whole thing would collapse under it's own weight.
Also; longwindedness is a word if you say it is. x3 The stars and spirits know that I've made up enough words in my day (publishment, I think was the one I said in a previous post)
I value people's opinions, because in my own, Eversong can do no wrong, and I wouldn't see it from enough distance to know why people were calling it contrived, and not good enough, or whatever else you can think of to say about it. It's like being on a mountain, versus looking at it from afar. When you're on a mountain, the only thing that matters is what's right in front of you, but if you're standing at a proper distance, you can get a proper look at the whole thing, and make observations about it as a complete unit.
I hadn't thought of it that way, as in your examples of option 1 and option 2, but you made an extremely good point, and I'm going to try to work that in somehow in order to keep it flowing, introducing the conflict of the next book at the end of the one that precedes it. That would also negate the need for a prologue in book two, explaining how the Dragon problem got started in the first place, I can make an epilogue at the end of the first one, showing that despite the defeat of the Mir'naam (what I referred to as 'dark elves' up until the point that I actually started writing) all is not well in the land of Eversong, that someone is climbing a forbidden mountain, and no good will come of it.
That sets up the next book neatly, and gets people's attention, "OMG, what's going to happen next? I can't wait for the next book!"
I just realised that I'm talking my way through this to you, and somewhat apologise. It's just easier for me to talk my way through problems, rather than sit and think about it myself.
As for the characters, I could also begin set-up for the emotional conflict between Jesse and Vicky somehow; I'm glad you pointed that out. You've helped immensely. <3
And I couldn't get that out of my head all last night; "If you make me love Vicky, I'll follow her anywhere." It's reinforced my desire to make Vicky a likable, relatable person, and not just a 'hollow placeholder for fans' in the way Bella Swan of Twilight was described; someone you wouldn't want to BE, but someone you can sympathise with, and become friends with as you read.
Thank you SO SO SO MUCH for your huge comment. <333 You may find yourself mentioned somewhere when I FINALLY get myself to the point of publication, because you've contributed immensely to the way Eversong is going to work.
Pseudonyms
ReNu: Oh thank god. XDD Thank you for commenting! I am absolute pants at naming things (or rather, titling things, as names come to me as easily as breathing.) I was slightly worried that Eversong, despite it's aesthetically pleasing sound (to me), wouldn't grab people's attention, and that's the base of all books. It doesn't matter how well it's written, or how good it is overall, if it's got a bad title, no one's going to pick it up to find out if it's good.
Thank you again to everyone who's taken the time to read and comment so far, and a thank you in advance to anyone who feels the need to comment in the future. I absolutely adore your comments, and every little bit of good advice helps.
Saturday, May 16, 2009
Wednesday, May 13, 2009
Point Of View
What I'm Listening To: BT - Circles
What I'm Doing: Recovering.
I just spent the majority of the day reading over Miss Snark's First Victim's Secret Agent Contest entries, and I now feel as though my brain is leaking out of my ears. The entries I saw this time around weren't as bad as the entries I saw for the last Secret Agent contest, which was a mild improvement, but I've got to know:
When did the memo get around that all YA novels have to be in the first person? That detracts so much from a book, more-so if it's not all that interesting in the first place. I can name two first-person based novels off the top of my head that I willing read over and over: Sunshine by Robin McKinley, and The Shadowy Horses by Susanna Kearsley. Ally Carter's I'd Tell You I Love You but Then I'd Have to Kill You is also in first person, but I've not read more than the first page, when I found it in Walmart. And although I loved the first page, and I'm partial to Ally as a person, that's no guarantee that the book is going to be one that I'm going to love, and reread so many times it begins falling apart.
(I know there are people who take meticulous care of their books, and don't bend or crack the spine at all, but I'm not one of them. If a book is worth reading a hundred times, then it's going to show the signs of those hundred reads, and I do have more than one book that's in two pieces because I've read it so many times that the binding simply gave out.)
But for the most part, first-person is a no-no for me. And after thirty of them, my patience started to give out, and it showed in the comments I left. I read them backwards, from 50 down to 1, simply because it was easier to keep up with that way, and my comments on the first thirty (by which I mean from fifty down to about number twenty) have good, written out, well-thought comments on what worked, why I didn't like it, why I did, what I would have changed, and the like. Down towards the bottom, the comments started to say things like, "First person point-of-view would have been better as third person, limited. Not hooked."
Think about it. My example would be this:
I stepped out of my shadowed doorway, and gazed across the open courtyard before my house. God, what a mess this is, I thought, and carefully picked my way across the open spaces between piles of junk.
(When I'm reading first person, I feel as though the story is being told to me by someone. Normal people don't say "I carefully picked my way through the labyrinth of trash" they're going to say something like "I had to watch my feet so I didn't step in a pile of shit."
So I like to feel like I'm sitting on the main character's shoulder as they're making their way through the story.)
Katreen inched the door open slowly, and stuck her head outside, surveying the mess that was the open courtyard in front of her house. She shook her head at it, thinking of all the work that would have to be done. What a mess this is. Stepping out into it, she made her way carefully among the piles of trash that littered the ground.
--
There are two reasons I prefer third person (generally limited) to first person. The first is that I read a story for the characters. It doesn't matter that the setting is in a beautiful palace filled with jewels and rare treasures if the main character is a shallow, empty-headed thing. But if you've got a rich, dynamic character set within a dirty shack, well, I'm still interested in it, because I'm not reading for the setting. I'm reading for the character.
That said, third person introduces the character to you immediately. It has to. Even if it's something as simple as "She opened the door." You know something already; the main character is a girl. With first person, this is utterly lost, until someone says "Katreen! Girl, get over here!" which could be anywhere from the first sentence on into the third page, and that whole time, you don't know who your character is.
The second is the reason I gave above; I don't want to be told the story, I want to be right there in the thick of it, feeling what my main character is feeling, and going where they go.
What I'm Doing: Recovering.
I just spent the majority of the day reading over Miss Snark's First Victim's Secret Agent Contest entries, and I now feel as though my brain is leaking out of my ears. The entries I saw this time around weren't as bad as the entries I saw for the last Secret Agent contest, which was a mild improvement, but I've got to know:
When did the memo get around that all YA novels have to be in the first person? That detracts so much from a book, more-so if it's not all that interesting in the first place. I can name two first-person based novels off the top of my head that I willing read over and over: Sunshine by Robin McKinley, and The Shadowy Horses by Susanna Kearsley. Ally Carter's I'd Tell You I Love You but Then I'd Have to Kill You is also in first person, but I've not read more than the first page, when I found it in Walmart. And although I loved the first page, and I'm partial to Ally as a person, that's no guarantee that the book is going to be one that I'm going to love, and reread so many times it begins falling apart.
(I know there are people who take meticulous care of their books, and don't bend or crack the spine at all, but I'm not one of them. If a book is worth reading a hundred times, then it's going to show the signs of those hundred reads, and I do have more than one book that's in two pieces because I've read it so many times that the binding simply gave out.)
But for the most part, first-person is a no-no for me. And after thirty of them, my patience started to give out, and it showed in the comments I left. I read them backwards, from 50 down to 1, simply because it was easier to keep up with that way, and my comments on the first thirty (by which I mean from fifty down to about number twenty) have good, written out, well-thought comments on what worked, why I didn't like it, why I did, what I would have changed, and the like. Down towards the bottom, the comments started to say things like, "First person point-of-view would have been better as third person, limited. Not hooked."
Think about it. My example would be this:
I stepped out of my shadowed doorway, and gazed across the open courtyard before my house. God, what a mess this is, I thought, and carefully picked my way across the open spaces between piles of junk.
(When I'm reading first person, I feel as though the story is being told to me by someone. Normal people don't say "I carefully picked my way through the labyrinth of trash" they're going to say something like "I had to watch my feet so I didn't step in a pile of shit."
So I like to feel like I'm sitting on the main character's shoulder as they're making their way through the story.)
Katreen inched the door open slowly, and stuck her head outside, surveying the mess that was the open courtyard in front of her house. She shook her head at it, thinking of all the work that would have to be done. What a mess this is. Stepping out into it, she made her way carefully among the piles of trash that littered the ground.
--
There are two reasons I prefer third person (generally limited) to first person. The first is that I read a story for the characters. It doesn't matter that the setting is in a beautiful palace filled with jewels and rare treasures if the main character is a shallow, empty-headed thing. But if you've got a rich, dynamic character set within a dirty shack, well, I'm still interested in it, because I'm not reading for the setting. I'm reading for the character.
That said, third person introduces the character to you immediately. It has to. Even if it's something as simple as "She opened the door." You know something already; the main character is a girl. With first person, this is utterly lost, until someone says "Katreen! Girl, get over here!" which could be anywhere from the first sentence on into the third page, and that whole time, you don't know who your character is.
The second is the reason I gave above; I don't want to be told the story, I want to be right there in the thick of it, feeling what my main character is feeling, and going where they go.
Story Creation
What I'm Listening To: Poe - Haunted
What I'm Doing: Writing down this blog so that I can finally get some sleep.
The brilliant and famous J. K. Rowling (that's ROLLING, not RAOW-ling, for the record) said that Harry Potter was born the day he strolled into her head, fully formed. For some reason, (I don't know if this was ever mentioned anywhere, or if it's a figment of my own imagination) I always picture him walking into her head in his Quidditch gear. No explanations for that.
And recently, another author I've been speaking to (there are about a dozen, all told, so I couldn't say with exact certainty which one it was) said that her main character, Alex, also appeared in her mind, fully formed, and then pestered her until she wrote the story out.
I don't write this way.
For me, the stories themselves come to me, and then later, they tell me what kind of characters they'll feature. Vicky was born after Eversong created itself in my mind, and cried out for a hero from the human world. Mischief and Murder was brought to life in my mind as a forest ravaged by humanities atrocities, and then ravens and rats were brought in as the main characters because of the idea that sparked it's birth in the first place. (See "Inspiration In the Weirdest Places" for more details.)
After a two hour chat with a lovely group of Sarahs (Sarah Maclean, Sarah Ockler, Sarah Cross, and Sarah Rees Brennan) and some other fantastic people, I told myself I would go to bed at a decent hour. (IE, 11:30 ish, right after the chat ended.) But I found myself gripped by a powerful need to read fanfiction, so I went to my favoured fanfiction site, and dug around a bit until I found something to read. It wasn't enough, so I read another, somewhat longer fanfic. Which had a sequel. Which I then read.
It has sparked a third.
I am overwhelmed with a burning need to write a vampire story. It's lodged inside my chest like a column of flames. It will not rest until it has characters and a plot.
This is the last thing I need.
Oh, what sweet torture we create for ourselves. I am more excited than I could possibly say about this. I don't want it to be a rehash of Sunshine (one of the most amazing Vampire novels I've ever read; go read it now, even if you've already read it before. It bears rereading.) and neither do I want it to be as pithy and insulting as Twilight, which is a black smear across the good name of Vampire fiction.
I have the feeling it will be both of these and more. Not better, perhaps, but different. And until it is born, I am consumed in its flames. Being the creator of worlds is an immense, heady feeling.
What I'm Doing: Writing down this blog so that I can finally get some sleep.
The brilliant and famous J. K. Rowling (that's ROLLING, not RAOW-ling, for the record) said that Harry Potter was born the day he strolled into her head, fully formed. For some reason, (I don't know if this was ever mentioned anywhere, or if it's a figment of my own imagination) I always picture him walking into her head in his Quidditch gear. No explanations for that.
And recently, another author I've been speaking to (there are about a dozen, all told, so I couldn't say with exact certainty which one it was) said that her main character, Alex, also appeared in her mind, fully formed, and then pestered her until she wrote the story out.
I don't write this way.
For me, the stories themselves come to me, and then later, they tell me what kind of characters they'll feature. Vicky was born after Eversong created itself in my mind, and cried out for a hero from the human world. Mischief and Murder was brought to life in my mind as a forest ravaged by humanities atrocities, and then ravens and rats were brought in as the main characters because of the idea that sparked it's birth in the first place. (See "Inspiration In the Weirdest Places" for more details.)
After a two hour chat with a lovely group of Sarahs (Sarah Maclean, Sarah Ockler, Sarah Cross, and Sarah Rees Brennan) and some other fantastic people, I told myself I would go to bed at a decent hour. (IE, 11:30 ish, right after the chat ended.) But I found myself gripped by a powerful need to read fanfiction, so I went to my favoured fanfiction site, and dug around a bit until I found something to read. It wasn't enough, so I read another, somewhat longer fanfic. Which had a sequel. Which I then read.
It has sparked a third.
I am overwhelmed with a burning need to write a vampire story. It's lodged inside my chest like a column of flames. It will not rest until it has characters and a plot.
This is the last thing I need.
Oh, what sweet torture we create for ourselves. I am more excited than I could possibly say about this. I don't want it to be a rehash of Sunshine (one of the most amazing Vampire novels I've ever read; go read it now, even if you've already read it before. It bears rereading.) and neither do I want it to be as pithy and insulting as Twilight, which is a black smear across the good name of Vampire fiction.
I have the feeling it will be both of these and more. Not better, perhaps, but different. And until it is born, I am consumed in its flames. Being the creator of worlds is an immense, heady feeling.
Tuesday, May 12, 2009
Links and a bit of Rambling
What I'm Listening To: Aimee Mann - Pavlov's Bell
What I'm Doing: Reading To Green Angel Tower Pt 1 by Tad Williams, and preparing to start working on M&M.
Yesterday I found something I'd saved to my computer called 'writing hacks', and thought it was immensely helpful, so I decided to go through my favourites and share all of the writing tools and websites I've discovered over the last few months.
How to Write a Good Fiction Book. - exactly what it says. The barest of the bare bones on writing, but a good outline of what to expect when you're writing.
(It was suggested that that article be merged with one called 'how to write a fiction book' so I hopped on over and took a look at that one. EGADS. DON'T READ THAT ONE. Or if you do, remember that number 8 is the bane of all authors. "When your book is finished, send it to a publisher." NO. NO NO NO. GODS NO. When your book is finished, you edit. And then you revise. And then you read it again. And then you find your happy little butt an AGENT, who will then find you a publisher. BUT FOR THE LOVE OF ALL THAT'S GOOD DON'T SEND YOUR UNEDITED MS TO ANYONE.)
How to write a book - the short honest truth. - Found this blog a while back, and it's got some useful information in it. It's not as encouraging as some things, but it's true, and it's something to remember when your spirits are flagging.
Warm Up Activities - This is more of a teachers-for-little-kids thing, but it's just as useful for burgeoning authors. I'll dig up another set of warm-ups in the next link.
Warming up: Ten Exercises for Fiction Writers - The opening paragraphs to these are almost as helpful as the warmups themselves.
Writing Hacks (hacks for writing) - Extremely useful. And entertaining. For those of you who are wondering, somewhere on his blog (can't find it now) he wrote that writing hacks are like computer hacks - a way in.
How to survive creative burnout - Mostly aimed at officeworkers or webdesigers and other people who have an actual job, but can be just as useful when applied to writing.
How to write a novel: the snowflake method - This wasn't particularly helpful to me, but it did put some good ideas in my head. Maybe you'll find better use of it.
Ally Carter's Tips and Hints for Writers - Probably the single most helpful collection of writing links I've found to date. Ally Carter is the author of a most interesting series of YA books, I'd Tell You I Love You But Then I'd Have To Kill You, Cross My Heart and Hope to Spy, and her newest, Don't Judge a Girl by Her Cover about a girl who goes to a school for spies, and falls in love with a 'normal boy' and has to deal with the intricacies of leading what amounts to a double life. As she's gone through the process so many aspiring authors are hoping for already, she's just shy of expert when it comes to giving good advice on the writing process. Even if you've ignored the rest of these links up until this point, go check out her tips for writers. You won't be disappointed.
---
And if you want to know the importance of editing and revision; I just reread my opening paragraph before the links, and discovered something I'd done by accident, but hadn't caught the first time: I'd written "Yesterday I found something I'd saved to my computer called 'writing hacks' and found it again,
Department of redundancy department, much? And while reading Ally Carter's tips for writers (which is the last link, and is something you ought to be reading/have read at this point) she was talking about 'show don't tell' - something I've heard a great deal about since I started my foray into writing with the end goal of publication, and not just for myself or faceless internet fans.
It made no sense to me. (I believe I may have covered this already, but I'm feeling particularly lazy about my blog, and don't care to reread the whole thing just to see if I've talked about one little thing before. ... Maybe I haven't written about it in the blog yet, and have just spoken to people on it. At any rate, here it is again.) "Show, Don't Tell" they say. It just puzzles me. If you're writing words down, you're telling people a story. Movies show things; books tell them. And so I realised it was very good advice, but I could see no way to make it in any way useful to myself.
That was when I found Ally Carter's 'For Writers' section while wandering about her website.
I won't rehash that here (because you should have already read it.) but I'll say that it helped immensely with understanding that little phrase.
If I were to write, "'Bethany, your mother is dead.' She couldn't believe the words. 'What?' she said, horrified. 'Dead?' But she was alive yesterday! She began crying sadly, and turned her face away from her father."
and then
"The words dropped with leaden certainty into Bethany's stomach. They arched through her mind, ripping open old wounds that had just started to heal, and threw themselves in front of her as though they'd been written on a banner. The sudden and unexpected loss of her mother, someone she'd always expected to be there for her, left her with nothing but a hollow feeling. Her eyes shimmered with unshed tears, and her hands closed into fists. Unable to take the pity shining in her father's eyes, she turned away."
I realised just how difficult it is to actively write badly while thinking this exercise up. I automatically go for the most descriptive way of writing (and that second paragraph could probably be whittled down a bit, but it's not intended to be a perfect specimen.) But the point of it was, the first paragraph tells us exactly what's going on, exactly what she's been told, with no guesswork involved. It just hands us the information. The second paragraph starts off in such a way that you're left wondering what Bethany was just told, that they're hurting her so much? And then you find out; she's just been told her mother has died.
Now, granted, I am not the greatest at my craft. Even as I was writing this followup to those two paragraphs, I was going back and rewriting them, and rearranging the words. The paragraphs you see are not the paragraphs that were originally written down, which is as it should be in your writing.
So there are two points to be made: You don't need to spoonfeed your reader by saying "Bethany's mother is dead," instead you want to skirt over it, hint at it, make your reader figure out that Bethany's lost someone important to her before you reveal the facts.
And editing is your friend. Your first draft will never be your final draft (and woe to those I discover attempting to make it so.)
What I'm Doing: Reading To Green Angel Tower Pt 1 by Tad Williams, and preparing to start working on M&M.
Yesterday I found something I'd saved to my computer called 'writing hacks', and thought it was immensely helpful, so I decided to go through my favourites and share all of the writing tools and websites I've discovered over the last few months.
How to Write a Good Fiction Book. - exactly what it says. The barest of the bare bones on writing, but a good outline of what to expect when you're writing.
(It was suggested that that article be merged with one called 'how to write a fiction book' so I hopped on over and took a look at that one. EGADS. DON'T READ THAT ONE. Or if you do, remember that number 8 is the bane of all authors. "When your book is finished, send it to a publisher." NO. NO NO NO. GODS NO. When your book is finished, you edit. And then you revise. And then you read it again. And then you find your happy little butt an AGENT, who will then find you a publisher. BUT FOR THE LOVE OF ALL THAT'S GOOD DON'T SEND YOUR UNEDITED MS TO ANYONE.)
How to write a book - the short honest truth. - Found this blog a while back, and it's got some useful information in it. It's not as encouraging as some things, but it's true, and it's something to remember when your spirits are flagging.
Warm Up Activities - This is more of a teachers-for-little-kids thing, but it's just as useful for burgeoning authors. I'll dig up another set of warm-ups in the next link.
Warming up: Ten Exercises for Fiction Writers - The opening paragraphs to these are almost as helpful as the warmups themselves.
Writing Hacks (hacks for writing) - Extremely useful. And entertaining. For those of you who are wondering, somewhere on his blog (can't find it now) he wrote that writing hacks are like computer hacks - a way in.
How to survive creative burnout - Mostly aimed at officeworkers or webdesigers and other people who have an actual job, but can be just as useful when applied to writing.
How to write a novel: the snowflake method - This wasn't particularly helpful to me, but it did put some good ideas in my head. Maybe you'll find better use of it.
Ally Carter's Tips and Hints for Writers - Probably the single most helpful collection of writing links I've found to date. Ally Carter is the author of a most interesting series of YA books, I'd Tell You I Love You But Then I'd Have To Kill You, Cross My Heart and Hope to Spy, and her newest, Don't Judge a Girl by Her Cover about a girl who goes to a school for spies, and falls in love with a 'normal boy' and has to deal with the intricacies of leading what amounts to a double life. As she's gone through the process so many aspiring authors are hoping for already, she's just shy of expert when it comes to giving good advice on the writing process. Even if you've ignored the rest of these links up until this point, go check out her tips for writers. You won't be disappointed.
---
And if you want to know the importance of editing and revision; I just reread my opening paragraph before the links, and discovered something I'd done by accident, but hadn't caught the first time: I'd written "Yesterday I found something I'd saved to my computer called 'writing hacks' and found it again,
Department of redundancy department, much? And while reading Ally Carter's tips for writers (which is the last link, and is something you ought to be reading/have read at this point) she was talking about 'show don't tell' - something I've heard a great deal about since I started my foray into writing with the end goal of publication, and not just for myself or faceless internet fans.
It made no sense to me. (I believe I may have covered this already, but I'm feeling particularly lazy about my blog, and don't care to reread the whole thing just to see if I've talked about one little thing before. ... Maybe I haven't written about it in the blog yet, and have just spoken to people on it. At any rate, here it is again.) "Show, Don't Tell" they say. It just puzzles me. If you're writing words down, you're telling people a story. Movies show things; books tell them. And so I realised it was very good advice, but I could see no way to make it in any way useful to myself.
That was when I found Ally Carter's 'For Writers' section while wandering about her website.
I won't rehash that here (because you should have already read it.) but I'll say that it helped immensely with understanding that little phrase.
If I were to write, "'Bethany, your mother is dead.' She couldn't believe the words. 'What?' she said, horrified. 'Dead?' But she was alive yesterday! She began crying sadly, and turned her face away from her father."
and then
"The words dropped with leaden certainty into Bethany's stomach. They arched through her mind, ripping open old wounds that had just started to heal, and threw themselves in front of her as though they'd been written on a banner. The sudden and unexpected loss of her mother, someone she'd always expected to be there for her, left her with nothing but a hollow feeling. Her eyes shimmered with unshed tears, and her hands closed into fists. Unable to take the pity shining in her father's eyes, she turned away."
I realised just how difficult it is to actively write badly while thinking this exercise up. I automatically go for the most descriptive way of writing (and that second paragraph could probably be whittled down a bit, but it's not intended to be a perfect specimen.) But the point of it was, the first paragraph tells us exactly what's going on, exactly what she's been told, with no guesswork involved. It just hands us the information. The second paragraph starts off in such a way that you're left wondering what Bethany was just told, that they're hurting her so much? And then you find out; she's just been told her mother has died.
Now, granted, I am not the greatest at my craft. Even as I was writing this followup to those two paragraphs, I was going back and rewriting them, and rearranging the words. The paragraphs you see are not the paragraphs that were originally written down, which is as it should be in your writing.
So there are two points to be made: You don't need to spoonfeed your reader by saying "Bethany's mother is dead," instead you want to skirt over it, hint at it, make your reader figure out that Bethany's lost someone important to her before you reveal the facts.
And editing is your friend. Your first draft will never be your final draft (and woe to those I discover attempting to make it so.)
Monday, May 11, 2009
Lingo, Dialogue, and Slang
What I'm Listening To: Emilie Autumn - Swamped
What I'm Doing: Reading Tad Williams' To Green Angel Tower and brainstorming M&M.
I was talking to Mami last night, and I sprang a rather odd and unexpected question on her in the middle of the conversation.
Do I talk funny?
I possibly could have phrased it: "Do I speak strangely?" and it would have made more sense, because the question in it's first incarnation garnered me an odd look and an 'Er?' in lieu of an actual answer.
The reason I asked was because I realised that I ... for lack of a better way of saying it, talk funny. Speak strangely. Most people don't actually say things like "Currently, I am attempting to muster the energy to get out of my chair," and the like. But I do. Constantly. Added to the fact that I'm about ten years behind on slang (my sister had to explain the nuances of 'camel toe' to me once) I came to the conclusion that most of you have already reached: I'm weird.
Mami said (very kindly) that writers tend to use their vocabulary. There's a difference between showing off your knowledge of a somnambulist and actually using that word in a sentence without thinking about it. "I find myself somnambulating at night; I think I need to go see a doctor," is well within the span of something I would say.
Normal people would say, "I need a doctor. I'm sleepwalking at night."
See what I mean?
At the same time (and another thing Mami pointed out to me) this is useful in writing, and showing people who's talking by what they say.
I could tell you that Maria is a dark, gothic, depressed type, and Roger is something of a geek, and then show you a conversation between the two of them.
"The world is a dark and empty place, and I just don't fit into it any more. It's time for me to move on."
"Well, don't say things like that. You should just try moving to another city, or actually reaching out to people - hey, I've got a D&D game in need of a mage, you could try joining us."
You know that Maria is depressed, and that Roger is a geek, so I don't need to tell you who's speaking in order for you to figure it out. Their mannerisms and phrases give them away.
I wish to god I'd saved the conversation with Mami in which we were talking about nicknames for Vicky (from Eversong) and I told her I was considering 'Vic' for short, and she told me that it reminded her of 'victim' and launched into a brief dialogue between two cops.
It was brilliant. I immediately heard the gruffness, the cold, the dispassion with which the cops spoke of the murder victim. It wasn't just Mami 'speaking' for two cops, it was two cops speaking. I pray fervently that I can match that talent for voice in writing one day. It's one of the things that makes her so fantastic a writer, and one of the things holding me back. I'm aware that I have difficulty with voice. It's because the characters aren't yet real. When I'm writing fanfiction, the characters are already real to me, and I have no trouble distinguishing them by their spoken words, or getting into their heads and discovering what they'd say in any given situation.
It's one of the things I'm struggling with at the moment in my own writing, distinguishing between voices, and keeping the people from becoming cookie-cut-characters.
I already know that Vicky, from Eversong, is something of a drifter, like myself. She has a tendency to daydream, and get lost in her own thoughts, and when she's tense she gets snappy. Riley, on the other hand, from Mischief and Murder, is totally different. I don't want to say opposite, because that's not true. Riley's not snappy under pressure, he completely flakes out and becomes useless. Kind of an 'OMG OMG OMG WHAT ARE WE GONNA DO WHAT ARE WE GONNA DO WE'RE ALL GONNA DIE OMG!" guy. Vicky, under the same circumstances, would say something like, "Shut the hell up and let's just keep moving!"
But Jonas (from Eversong) and Mara (from M&M) are both somewhat similar, (they fight horrendously with their main characters) and I've got to find some sort of distinction between the two of them, possibly, Jonas is an ass because he's got an asshole father, and he doesn't know any other way. Mara's kind of a jerk because she's under pressure, and her parents are dead, and she's usually quite sweet, or at least, has sweet moments, and also because she has no patience with Riley's freak-outs.
I wish blogger were more like LJ, with 'cuts' that let you hide parts of the text so that if people didn't want to read them, they didn't have to. That being said, consider this my 'cut' - I'm just going to write down something for myself, and don't feel obligated to read it just because it's here.
----
Situation: a landslide while walking on a narrow pathway.
Vicky: *flattens herself against the back of the path, with the hopes that the rocks and dirt will pass over her*
Jonas: *tries to outrun the landslide and get away from the danger*
Riley: *stares at it in horror*
Mara: *flies out of the way of the falling debris*
This tells me a lot about my characters. Vicky uses logic, even if it's not the greatest idea, Jonas uses brute force to rescue himself, Riley freaks out, and Mara actually takes herself to guaranteed safety. If this were to actually happen to Mara and Riley, she'd probably take him with her, for the simple reason that he'd probably stand there freaking out until it was too late. XD
Something I read about characters, and 'not making them mary sues/gary lous' was making sure they have character flaws. It's easy to make someone perfectly unlikeable. It's not as easy to make someone likeable, but not perfect.
What I'm Doing: Reading Tad Williams' To Green Angel Tower and brainstorming M&M.
I was talking to Mami last night, and I sprang a rather odd and unexpected question on her in the middle of the conversation.
Do I talk funny?
I possibly could have phrased it: "Do I speak strangely?" and it would have made more sense, because the question in it's first incarnation garnered me an odd look and an 'Er?' in lieu of an actual answer.
The reason I asked was because I realised that I ... for lack of a better way of saying it, talk funny. Speak strangely. Most people don't actually say things like "Currently, I am attempting to muster the energy to get out of my chair," and the like. But I do. Constantly. Added to the fact that I'm about ten years behind on slang (my sister had to explain the nuances of 'camel toe' to me once) I came to the conclusion that most of you have already reached: I'm weird.
Mami said (very kindly) that writers tend to use their vocabulary. There's a difference between showing off your knowledge of a somnambulist and actually using that word in a sentence without thinking about it. "I find myself somnambulating at night; I think I need to go see a doctor," is well within the span of something I would say.
Normal people would say, "I need a doctor. I'm sleepwalking at night."
See what I mean?
At the same time (and another thing Mami pointed out to me) this is useful in writing, and showing people who's talking by what they say.
I could tell you that Maria is a dark, gothic, depressed type, and Roger is something of a geek, and then show you a conversation between the two of them.
"The world is a dark and empty place, and I just don't fit into it any more. It's time for me to move on."
"Well, don't say things like that. You should just try moving to another city, or actually reaching out to people - hey, I've got a D&D game in need of a mage, you could try joining us."
You know that Maria is depressed, and that Roger is a geek, so I don't need to tell you who's speaking in order for you to figure it out. Their mannerisms and phrases give them away.
I wish to god I'd saved the conversation with Mami in which we were talking about nicknames for Vicky (from Eversong) and I told her I was considering 'Vic' for short, and she told me that it reminded her of 'victim' and launched into a brief dialogue between two cops.
It was brilliant. I immediately heard the gruffness, the cold, the dispassion with which the cops spoke of the murder victim. It wasn't just Mami 'speaking' for two cops, it was two cops speaking. I pray fervently that I can match that talent for voice in writing one day. It's one of the things that makes her so fantastic a writer, and one of the things holding me back. I'm aware that I have difficulty with voice. It's because the characters aren't yet real. When I'm writing fanfiction, the characters are already real to me, and I have no trouble distinguishing them by their spoken words, or getting into their heads and discovering what they'd say in any given situation.
It's one of the things I'm struggling with at the moment in my own writing, distinguishing between voices, and keeping the people from becoming cookie-cut-characters.
I already know that Vicky, from Eversong, is something of a drifter, like myself. She has a tendency to daydream, and get lost in her own thoughts, and when she's tense she gets snappy. Riley, on the other hand, from Mischief and Murder, is totally different. I don't want to say opposite, because that's not true. Riley's not snappy under pressure, he completely flakes out and becomes useless. Kind of an 'OMG OMG OMG WHAT ARE WE GONNA DO WHAT ARE WE GONNA DO WE'RE ALL GONNA DIE OMG!" guy. Vicky, under the same circumstances, would say something like, "Shut the hell up and let's just keep moving!"
But Jonas (from Eversong) and Mara (from M&M) are both somewhat similar, (they fight horrendously with their main characters) and I've got to find some sort of distinction between the two of them, possibly, Jonas is an ass because he's got an asshole father, and he doesn't know any other way. Mara's kind of a jerk because she's under pressure, and her parents are dead, and she's usually quite sweet, or at least, has sweet moments, and also because she has no patience with Riley's freak-outs.
I wish blogger were more like LJ, with 'cuts' that let you hide parts of the text so that if people didn't want to read them, they didn't have to. That being said, consider this my 'cut' - I'm just going to write down something for myself, and don't feel obligated to read it just because it's here.
----
Situation: a landslide while walking on a narrow pathway.
Vicky: *flattens herself against the back of the path, with the hopes that the rocks and dirt will pass over her*
Jonas: *tries to outrun the landslide and get away from the danger*
Riley: *stares at it in horror*
Mara: *flies out of the way of the falling debris*
This tells me a lot about my characters. Vicky uses logic, even if it's not the greatest idea, Jonas uses brute force to rescue himself, Riley freaks out, and Mara actually takes herself to guaranteed safety. If this were to actually happen to Mara and Riley, she'd probably take him with her, for the simple reason that he'd probably stand there freaking out until it was too late. XD
Something I read about characters, and 'not making them mary sues/gary lous' was making sure they have character flaws. It's easy to make someone perfectly unlikeable. It's not as easy to make someone likeable, but not perfect.
Saturday, May 9, 2009
Inspiration (in the Weirdest Places)
I was reading Moonrat's blog, and I happened to be looking over the links that go down the right-hand side, and she mentioned that a group of rats is a 'mischief.' I was thinking about how strange this was, and what other words don't really make any sense - a 'murder' of ravens, for example.
This immediately launched my mind onto a book entitled 'Mischief and Murder' and is about rats and ravens, possibly as little anthros in waist coats and top hats. Or possibly something new-age and/or post-apocalyptic, as the waist-coats and top hats has, I believe, been done to death already.
But it made me start thinking. I've always been able to find inspiration for ideas in just about everything under the sun (and quite a few things above it, too). It's generally the motivation for writing that I lack, and I'm working on that. I do this as an exercise sometimes; look around at the things in my room, or in my back yard, and build stories about them.
I'd thought, vaguely, that I would write a childrens/YA short story, for the simple fact that there's a growing market for those genres. I also think that a short story would be easier. Not because there's less work involved - I intend to work just as hard on my short stories/short novels for YA as I do on Eversong. No, the easier part comes in with the time involved. It's going to take me several months; possibly up to a year to complete Eversong, whereas I'm fully confident in my ability to produce a well-written short story/novella/novellette (note to self; study the lingo and find out what exactly it is you're writing.) within a month or two, with a few weeks between the writing and editing, rather than the full three or four months I intend to wait between Eversong's completion and revising. The reason for the immense time differences is because Eversong is my baby. I'm writing short stories/novellas/what have you for fun, and in order to establish myself as an author. I'm writing Eversong the same way people actively try to get pregnant in order to carry on their family lines. I want Eversong to be the absolute best thing I could possibly write, to date. It's going to be a serious expedition into the world of writing; my novellas/etc are more of a lark.
Which now gives off a bad impression. I'm going to take my novellas/etc just as seriously as Eversong, but I think what I'm aiming to say is that I'm not going to have as much invested in them as I do Eversong. It's not going to be a huge personal failure if they get rejected fifty times before getting published. If Eversong gets rejected fifty times, it will slay me. And then I will scrap it, and forget about it for years and years, and then go back to it and rewrite the whole thing, and I don't want that. I want Eversong within the next few years. Eversong's continual rejection will be like constant miscarriages when all you want is to carry a healthy child to full term. Depressing, but you keep trying because it means so much.
That said, I'm off to write some for Eversong, and then brainstorm my latest writingchild idea.
This immediately launched my mind onto a book entitled 'Mischief and Murder' and is about rats and ravens, possibly as little anthros in waist coats and top hats. Or possibly something new-age and/or post-apocalyptic, as the waist-coats and top hats has, I believe, been done to death already.
But it made me start thinking. I've always been able to find inspiration for ideas in just about everything under the sun (and quite a few things above it, too). It's generally the motivation for writing that I lack, and I'm working on that. I do this as an exercise sometimes; look around at the things in my room, or in my back yard, and build stories about them.
I'd thought, vaguely, that I would write a childrens/YA short story, for the simple fact that there's a growing market for those genres. I also think that a short story would be easier. Not because there's less work involved - I intend to work just as hard on my short stories/short novels for YA as I do on Eversong. No, the easier part comes in with the time involved. It's going to take me several months; possibly up to a year to complete Eversong, whereas I'm fully confident in my ability to produce a well-written short story/novella/novellette (note to self; study the lingo and find out what exactly it is you're writing.) within a month or two, with a few weeks between the writing and editing, rather than the full three or four months I intend to wait between Eversong's completion and revising. The reason for the immense time differences is because Eversong is my baby. I'm writing short stories/novellas/what have you for fun, and in order to establish myself as an author. I'm writing Eversong the same way people actively try to get pregnant in order to carry on their family lines. I want Eversong to be the absolute best thing I could possibly write, to date. It's going to be a serious expedition into the world of writing; my novellas/etc are more of a lark.
Which now gives off a bad impression. I'm going to take my novellas/etc just as seriously as Eversong, but I think what I'm aiming to say is that I'm not going to have as much invested in them as I do Eversong. It's not going to be a huge personal failure if they get rejected fifty times before getting published. If Eversong gets rejected fifty times, it will slay me. And then I will scrap it, and forget about it for years and years, and then go back to it and rewrite the whole thing, and I don't want that. I want Eversong within the next few years. Eversong's continual rejection will be like constant miscarriages when all you want is to carry a healthy child to full term. Depressing, but you keep trying because it means so much.
That said, I'm off to write some for Eversong, and then brainstorm my latest writingchild idea.
Friday, May 8, 2009
Query Letters
What I'm listening to: Anberlin - A Whisper and a Clamor
What I'm doing: Reading blogs and articles.
I'm still reading through Robert Gregory Browne's articles, and one in particular seemed extraordinarily relevant.
He claims to be talking about how to get an agent, but what he's really aiming at is writing a good query letter.
But Amy, I hear you saying plaintively. You're only on chapter two. Why are you worrying about a query letter right now?
That's because I'm a slacker and a wanderer, and I'm not able to focus JUST on writing if I don't have something else to shift the focus to every so often. And by shifting the focus to something that will eventually help me in my quest to publish my books, I'm both slacking off on the writing process itself while still doing something useful and book-related. I am, at the very least, aware of my faults, even if I'm unwilling/unable to do anything about them, which is more than I can say for quite a few people of my acquaintance.
Back to query letters. I know the importance of them. I read Query Shark, and I've gone over the query letter sections of several agent's blogs to find out what works for them, and what doesn't, and I've read some of the Secret Agent entries. I'm fully aware of how much rests on your query letter, but that doesn't make them any easier to write. To date, my query letter for Eversong is in it's third incarnation, and is about to move into it's fourth, because of this very simple formula Mr. Browne was so kind as to supply us with.
Who, What, and How. Who is it? What are their circumstances. How do they resolve them? This is for creating the 'logline' (his words, not mine) of your query, the 'hook' that will reel in your readers. Following this for Eversong, I came up with the following:
Who: An average girl.
What: Gets thrown into a world full of magic.
How: She goes on a quest to save the world, the conclusion of which will allow her to return home.
And end up with my baited hook line:
When Vicky Crawford is thrown into a world full of magic and mythology, she's got to find a way to save everything before she can get back home.
This sums it up perfectly. Vicky's in a strange world (I keep going to write 'magical world' but the world itself isn't magic, just the creatures who inhabit it.) and it's in danger. She wants to get home, but before she can do so, she's got to save the world.
It's got everything; it's short and to the point, it covers the basics, and it tells you a great deal about the story without telling you everything. Using this as the basis, I'll be able to write a much better query letter.
And now as an exercise, I'm going to write it for the next book, too.
Who: A girl who's already saved the world once.
What: Her friends are in danger from a deranged king who wants to destroy the world.
How: She uses the love and help of her friends in order to send him back where he came from.
And from it is born the premise of Return to Eversong:
Vicky's already saved the world once, and brought home the tee shirt to prove it, but when the Dragon-Lord Draevn unleashes his thousand-year wrath on the world that rejected him, she returns to fight beside her friends and win back everything she loves from the clutches of a madman.
It does the same thing; sums up the story, the conflict, and the strength of character that Vicky has in order to protect the people and places she loves. Now, granted, I don't know as much about Return to Eversong as I do about the first novel, because I haven't done more than the preliminaries on it, and the hook for the second one could probably be better, but it's a start, and it's a way to interest people in the next novel.
What I'm doing: Reading blogs and articles.
I'm still reading through Robert Gregory Browne's articles, and one in particular seemed extraordinarily relevant.
He claims to be talking about how to get an agent, but what he's really aiming at is writing a good query letter.
But Amy, I hear you saying plaintively. You're only on chapter two. Why are you worrying about a query letter right now?
That's because I'm a slacker and a wanderer, and I'm not able to focus JUST on writing if I don't have something else to shift the focus to every so often. And by shifting the focus to something that will eventually help me in my quest to publish my books, I'm both slacking off on the writing process itself while still doing something useful and book-related. I am, at the very least, aware of my faults, even if I'm unwilling/unable to do anything about them, which is more than I can say for quite a few people of my acquaintance.
Back to query letters. I know the importance of them. I read Query Shark, and I've gone over the query letter sections of several agent's blogs to find out what works for them, and what doesn't, and I've read some of the Secret Agent entries. I'm fully aware of how much rests on your query letter, but that doesn't make them any easier to write. To date, my query letter for Eversong is in it's third incarnation, and is about to move into it's fourth, because of this very simple formula Mr. Browne was so kind as to supply us with.
Who, What, and How. Who is it? What are their circumstances. How do they resolve them? This is for creating the 'logline' (his words, not mine) of your query, the 'hook' that will reel in your readers. Following this for Eversong, I came up with the following:
Who: An average girl.
What: Gets thrown into a world full of magic.
How: She goes on a quest to save the world, the conclusion of which will allow her to return home.
And end up with my baited hook line:
When Vicky Crawford is thrown into a world full of magic and mythology, she's got to find a way to save everything before she can get back home.
This sums it up perfectly. Vicky's in a strange world (I keep going to write 'magical world' but the world itself isn't magic, just the creatures who inhabit it.) and it's in danger. She wants to get home, but before she can do so, she's got to save the world.
It's got everything; it's short and to the point, it covers the basics, and it tells you a great deal about the story without telling you everything. Using this as the basis, I'll be able to write a much better query letter.
And now as an exercise, I'm going to write it for the next book, too.
Who: A girl who's already saved the world once.
What: Her friends are in danger from a deranged king who wants to destroy the world.
How: She uses the love and help of her friends in order to send him back where he came from.
And from it is born the premise of Return to Eversong:
Vicky's already saved the world once, and brought home the tee shirt to prove it, but when the Dragon-Lord Draevn unleashes his thousand-year wrath on the world that rejected him, she returns to fight beside her friends and win back everything she loves from the clutches of a madman.
It does the same thing; sums up the story, the conflict, and the strength of character that Vicky has in order to protect the people and places she loves. Now, granted, I don't know as much about Return to Eversong as I do about the first novel, because I haven't done more than the preliminaries on it, and the hook for the second one could probably be better, but it's a start, and it's a way to interest people in the next novel.
Some Good Advice and a little more.
I've been reading Robert Gregory Browne's blog of sorts, and it's filled to the brim with interesting articles and anecdotes about writing and publishing. He's a little confused on the subject of agents, but that's because he's never (by his own admission) written a good query letter in his life.
But he raised some interesting questions for me, and I have no idea how to answer them myself. He's discussing structure and conflict, and the three acts of a story; act one - the beginning, the set up, the lead in, what-have-you. Act two - the middle, the meat of the story, the bridge. Act three - the conclusion, the climax, wrapping it all up and finishing with a bang.
And it made me start thinking about my book, versus the other fantasy trilogies I've read, and another sci-fi trilogy that just popped into my mind.
I'll clarify.
Tad Williams' Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn Trilogy is one mega-quest that spans three novels in order to complete, the quest to save the world from The One Great Evil, and it's stuffed full of mini-quests, and tangents, and the stories and set up of other characters that don't show up until later, at which point they serve a great deal of good towards the completion of the Mega-Quest.
In contrast, Eversong is one book with two sequels
rather than a comprehensive story that spans three novels. Does this make sense?
I'll rephrase, because it's not really making sense to me, so I can't expect it to make sense to other people.
Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn is one story that spans three novels. Eversong is three completely separate stories, and over the course of those stories, Vicky grows as a person. The same thing happens in MST, granted; Simon starts off as a care-free lad more interested in daydreaming than anything serious, and by the end of the trilogy, he's a mature young man who becomes king. I'm still making no sense to myself.
Expect the rest of this entry to be likewise as rambling.
The problem I'm seeing with Eversong is that it doesn't quite need to be a trilogy. From where I see it now, each book could probably stand on it's own, with references from the previous novels standing in for having read the novel itself. If you picked up Eversong: Dark Star Rising, you'd see Vicky on the eve of her wedding, when something happens to disrupt it, and then she goes on a quest to defeat the newest threat to Eversong, does so, gets married, and lives happily ever after. You won't have to read Eversong or Return to Eversong in order to understand Dark Star, because each novel is it's own, contained arc, with it's own, contained three acts. The reason there's three of them is to follow Vicky on her quest to find love, friendship, and a place in life, and to see how she matures through the trials she experiences.
The reason I mentioned The Crystal Singer Trilogy above, is because it does the same thing. You don't need to have read Crystal Singer and Killashandra in order to understand Crystal Line. They're each self-contained stories, within the same universe and with the same characters. There are references (in Killashandra, the main character talks about 'The Trundimoux Installation', an event that took place near the end of Crystal Singer.) but from the surrounding paragraphs, it's easy to deduct that the Trundimoux Installation was a complete mess for Killa, and she didn't like it, and she doesn't want a repeat of the event in the newest mission she's been given.
And here's where I feel like I need to go shout my blog from the roof-tops, because I need people to read it, and tell me what they think, as I'm wondering which why is better. After having gone through all this trouble to set up the three novels as self-contained stories that simply follow Vicky on her journey, should I scrap the whole thing and re-write it to be one cohesive story, that the dark-elf menace and the Dragon Wars were the harbingers of the Dark Star problem?
TL;DR: Most trilogies ARE the three acts of novel writing. The first novel is the set up, the second novel is the bridge, and the third novel is the climax.
This way of writing is good, but often the end result is something like The Lord of the Rings, in that the first novel, the set up, is infinitely interesting, because you're just beginning to learn about your main character, and the troubles they're about to face. The third novel is also infinitely interesting, because the story is wrapping up, the threads are coming together, and the Ultimate Evil is about to be vanquished once and for all. The middle book, the bridge, is unquestionably the most boring, and the toughest to get through, because nothing's happening. It's just a path between the set up and the climax.
With Eversong, this isn't the case, and I just want some opinions on what the majority of readers think is a better way of going about it.
But he raised some interesting questions for me, and I have no idea how to answer them myself. He's discussing structure and conflict, and the three acts of a story; act one - the beginning, the set up, the lead in, what-have-you. Act two - the middle, the meat of the story, the bridge. Act three - the conclusion, the climax, wrapping it all up and finishing with a bang.
And it made me start thinking about my book, versus the other fantasy trilogies I've read, and another sci-fi trilogy that just popped into my mind.
I'll clarify.
Tad Williams' Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn Trilogy is one mega-quest that spans three novels in order to complete, the quest to save the world from The One Great Evil, and it's stuffed full of mini-quests, and tangents, and the stories and set up of other characters that don't show up until later, at which point they serve a great deal of good towards the completion of the Mega-Quest.
In contrast, Eversong is one book with two sequels
rather than a comprehensive story that spans three novels. Does this make sense?
I'll rephrase, because it's not really making sense to me, so I can't expect it to make sense to other people.
Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn is one story that spans three novels. Eversong is three completely separate stories, and over the course of those stories, Vicky grows as a person. The same thing happens in MST, granted; Simon starts off as a care-free lad more interested in daydreaming than anything serious, and by the end of the trilogy, he's a mature young man who becomes king. I'm still making no sense to myself.
Expect the rest of this entry to be likewise as rambling.
The problem I'm seeing with Eversong is that it doesn't quite need to be a trilogy. From where I see it now, each book could probably stand on it's own, with references from the previous novels standing in for having read the novel itself. If you picked up Eversong: Dark Star Rising, you'd see Vicky on the eve of her wedding, when something happens to disrupt it, and then she goes on a quest to defeat the newest threat to Eversong, does so, gets married, and lives happily ever after. You won't have to read Eversong or Return to Eversong in order to understand Dark Star, because each novel is it's own, contained arc, with it's own, contained three acts. The reason there's three of them is to follow Vicky on her quest to find love, friendship, and a place in life, and to see how she matures through the trials she experiences.
The reason I mentioned The Crystal Singer Trilogy above, is because it does the same thing. You don't need to have read Crystal Singer and Killashandra in order to understand Crystal Line. They're each self-contained stories, within the same universe and with the same characters. There are references (in Killashandra, the main character talks about 'The Trundimoux Installation', an event that took place near the end of Crystal Singer.) but from the surrounding paragraphs, it's easy to deduct that the Trundimoux Installation was a complete mess for Killa, and she didn't like it, and she doesn't want a repeat of the event in the newest mission she's been given.
And here's where I feel like I need to go shout my blog from the roof-tops, because I need people to read it, and tell me what they think, as I'm wondering which why is better. After having gone through all this trouble to set up the three novels as self-contained stories that simply follow Vicky on her journey, should I scrap the whole thing and re-write it to be one cohesive story, that the dark-elf menace and the Dragon Wars were the harbingers of the Dark Star problem?
TL;DR: Most trilogies ARE the three acts of novel writing. The first novel is the set up, the second novel is the bridge, and the third novel is the climax.
This way of writing is good, but often the end result is something like The Lord of the Rings, in that the first novel, the set up, is infinitely interesting, because you're just beginning to learn about your main character, and the troubles they're about to face. The third novel is also infinitely interesting, because the story is wrapping up, the threads are coming together, and the Ultimate Evil is about to be vanquished once and for all. The middle book, the bridge, is unquestionably the most boring, and the toughest to get through, because nothing's happening. It's just a path between the set up and the climax.
With Eversong, this isn't the case, and I just want some opinions on what the majority of readers think is a better way of going about it.
Reading and Writing
What I'm Listening To: Hey Pretty - Poe
What I'm Doing: Still reading The Dragonbone Chair by Tad Williams, and enjoying my theft of the fan from the living room. Not hot for once!
First of all, I have to share this absolutely mind-wrenching link from Meg Cabot: My Little Pony, Live Action Thriller.
My childhood.
Moving on. I was thinking of popular bloggers, and what they do, and came to the conclusion that they blog. Brilliant, wasn't it? I think so. In that vein, I've decided to actually do so, myself, and as I was casting around for something to talk about that wasn't a rehash of yesterdays blog (a friend on LJ was talking about how bad her first chapter is, and it reminded me of what I was saying yesterday.) my roving eyes fell upon the novel I'm reading.
The Dragonbone Chair, by Tad Williams. It's an absolutely fantastic novel, and a long-time favourite of mine. It seems I'll be rehashing a bit of yesterdays blog, anyway; one of the commenters on said-friends' LJ said something to the effect of 'chuck the first chapter, and start right in on the action if you want readers hooked.'
That's a good idea, I suppose, but I can't really recall any books that started, "My sword cut swathes through the hordes of vampires like a hot knife through butter..."* can you? No. Most books start out something like, "The vampire scourge has walked among us for thousands of years, but it's only been recently that they've come forth from the shadows and made their presence known; recently that they've moved themselves from legends to reality. My childhood was a happy one, and I grew up neither knowing nor caring what happened beyond the walls of my house, so long as my family was safe within... " etc, etc.
They give a little bit of back story, and introduce you to the main character before the action starts. Because even if you've got an action-packed thriller for a novel, if people don't know your main character, they're not going to be interested in the book.
Take Tad Williams' trilogy, Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn, of which The Dragonbone Chair is the first. Quite literally, no action begins until approximately 200 pages in. The first two hundred or so pages are just introducing Simon, the main character, and his home life, and some of his back story, and by the time you get into the action, the meat of the story, you feel like you've grown up next to Simon, and have always been dealing with him, and are maybe a friend of his, and once the action starts, you're on the edge of your seat, wondering what's going to happen to your new friend, and whether he's going to make it or not. This makes it a little bit harder to get into, I suppose, because you've got two hundred pages of Simon catching beetles and bringing home birds' nests, and knocking over suits of armour in hallways, but interspersed with that is the tidbits that make it interesting; the old king is dying, and his two sons don't quite get along, and then suddenly the younger son disappears and some people think he's dead, but what's going on? Mr. Williams achieves two separate things before the action even starts; he lets you into the life of Simon, and he drops hints and sets up for later story points that grab your attention and make you think.
There's another book in a totally different setting that I absolutely worship. It's called Sunshine, by Robin McKinley, and when I first picked it up, I got about two pages in, and then didn't touch it again for about four months. It starts right in on the action, or at least, AN action: "I didn't hear them coming. Of course, you don't, when they're vampires."
This tells us two things. There's vampires, and the main character is involved with them in some way. But then instead of continuing on in this vein, the main character (whose name is Sunshine) immediately launches into a ten-page jaunt of talking about her family, and her youth, and where she works and lives, and it's all very interesting, but it's a bit like talking to someone who can't quite come to the point. The entire book is like that; it's less of a story you're experiencing as you read, and more a story that you're sitting down with Sunshine, and she's telling it to you after it all happened. Sunshine, as a character, tends to go off on rambling tangents for pages and pages, before she finally comes back to the point, but the author, Robin McKinley, doesn't always write like that. If you pick up Beauty: A Retelling of the story of Beauty and the Beast, The Blue Sword, and Sunshine, and read through them all, you'd probably think they were written by three completely different authors. Not one of her books has the same 'voice', but they're each engaging and interest-snagging in their own ways.
On the other hand, Anne Bishop has written several inventive and interesting trilogies, and one 'twosome', but they're all the same. Notably, The Black Jewels Trilogy and what's listed as The World of the Fae on her website, are like reading two different versions of the same novel. Both trilogies are good, but they have exactly the same 'voice', and basically the same characters, rehashed, and the same basic idea, rewritten. It's like she's got cookie-cutters for her books, and when she starts a new one, she just recreates her old worlds and characters and renames them before setting them into a new plot. Even her Ephemera novels are slightly similar to the other two trilogies, but not in exactly the same way (which is something of a relief.) The world of Ephemera is utterly different than the worlds of the other two trilogies, but she undoes her good work with the world building by plopping the same, cookie-cut characters into those worlds. There's the dark, mysterious main male lead, the ditzy/clueless/otherwise innocent female love interest, the dark, mysterious, super-powerful outcast main female lead...
They're good books, don't get me wrong, but I don't like the feeling of rereading the same thing over and over again. If I want to reread the same novel, I'll open it back up and reread it. I don't want to spend money on three different sets of novels, only to find the same underlying themes and people running through them all.
This is a good way to improve your own writing. After you've gone through the bookstore and read the first page and decided why you'd continue reading or not, pick two or three off your list, and buy them, or get them out of the library, and actually read through them.
Did they live up to the expectations of the first page? Would you read them again, or was it a waste of money? Did you learn anything to incorporate into your own writing?
I own dozens of books. Scores of them. If I sat down and counted them all out, I'd probably have well over a hundred. And even for myself, looking over my collection, I think I must be slightly schizophrenic in my tastes, because there's no set genre. They span the range.
An example:
Directly behind me (I have no bookshelf, so the coffee table in my room is crowded over with books) there is approximately thirty books. (probably more; I didn't move any of the stacks, just briefly glanced over them.) Clearly visible are books like The Bride and the Beast, by Teresa Medeiros, Reliquary by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child, Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton, and Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by J.K. Rowling.
I make that one historical romance, two suspense fiction, and a YA fantasy. And that's just a sprinkling. Other favourite books of mine include The Crystal Singer Trilogy by Anne McCaffrey, and The Hot Zone by Richard Preston.
A sci-fi trilogy and one that I have no name for, (it's about ebola and marburg, the effects, origins, and outbreaks.)
My book tastes run the gamut, and it's made me a better writer because of it. I don't limit myself to just one or two authors (though I do admit to seeking some authors out repeatedly. If I see something by Michael Crichton that I haven't read yet, I pick it up. Likewise, Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child. And Teresa Medeiros is my absolute favourite historical romance author ever; I'm well on my way to owning every single book she's put out to date). Because of this wild and eclectic taste in novels, I have no shortage of places to turn if I'm feeling the dreaded Writer's Block. It's amazing how a little reading can turn that around. After staring at a blank word document for an hour and a half, all it takes is for me to sit down somewhere quiet with a book, and about ten pages in, I'm itching to go write for myself.
What amazes me is the amount of people who don't read, who can't read. I inherited my love of reading from my mother, and it's something I've never regretted. But then I look back on people I went to high school with, who struggled to read to themselves, and made me want to snatch the book out of their hands and beat them with it when they tried to read out loud. That these high school seniors - people about to graduate from mandatory school and either go on to further schooling or unleash themselves upon the world at large - can't read...
I suspect that many of these people who never willingly picked up a book in their life are the ones who attempt Nanowrimo and then immediately upon finishing their 50k words send it to publishers and editors and the like. It is, I'm firmly of the belief, utterly impossible to be a writer if you don't read.
*Addendum: I ammend that. Certainly there may be some books that start off that way, but it would be followed with something like this. "My sword cut a swathe through the vampire horde like a hot knife through butter. I'd been fighting them since I was fifteen years old, and my mother sat me down and said, "Michael, daddy's not coming home." and into the shocked silence this statement produced in me, went on to explain that he'd been taken by the vampires on his way home from work." Sure, it starts off right into the action, but then it takes a step back and introduces the main character, and gives you the reason he's currently 'cutting a swathe through a horde of vampires.'
What I'm Doing: Still reading The Dragonbone Chair by Tad Williams, and enjoying my theft of the fan from the living room. Not hot for once!
First of all, I have to share this absolutely mind-wrenching link from Meg Cabot: My Little Pony, Live Action Thriller.
My childhood.
Moving on. I was thinking of popular bloggers, and what they do, and came to the conclusion that they blog. Brilliant, wasn't it? I think so. In that vein, I've decided to actually do so, myself, and as I was casting around for something to talk about that wasn't a rehash of yesterdays blog (a friend on LJ was talking about how bad her first chapter is, and it reminded me of what I was saying yesterday.) my roving eyes fell upon the novel I'm reading.
The Dragonbone Chair, by Tad Williams. It's an absolutely fantastic novel, and a long-time favourite of mine. It seems I'll be rehashing a bit of yesterdays blog, anyway; one of the commenters on said-friends' LJ said something to the effect of 'chuck the first chapter, and start right in on the action if you want readers hooked.'
That's a good idea, I suppose, but I can't really recall any books that started, "My sword cut swathes through the hordes of vampires like a hot knife through butter..."* can you? No. Most books start out something like, "The vampire scourge has walked among us for thousands of years, but it's only been recently that they've come forth from the shadows and made their presence known; recently that they've moved themselves from legends to reality. My childhood was a happy one, and I grew up neither knowing nor caring what happened beyond the walls of my house, so long as my family was safe within... " etc, etc.
They give a little bit of back story, and introduce you to the main character before the action starts. Because even if you've got an action-packed thriller for a novel, if people don't know your main character, they're not going to be interested in the book.
Take Tad Williams' trilogy, Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn, of which The Dragonbone Chair is the first. Quite literally, no action begins until approximately 200 pages in. The first two hundred or so pages are just introducing Simon, the main character, and his home life, and some of his back story, and by the time you get into the action, the meat of the story, you feel like you've grown up next to Simon, and have always been dealing with him, and are maybe a friend of his, and once the action starts, you're on the edge of your seat, wondering what's going to happen to your new friend, and whether he's going to make it or not. This makes it a little bit harder to get into, I suppose, because you've got two hundred pages of Simon catching beetles and bringing home birds' nests, and knocking over suits of armour in hallways, but interspersed with that is the tidbits that make it interesting; the old king is dying, and his two sons don't quite get along, and then suddenly the younger son disappears and some people think he's dead, but what's going on? Mr. Williams achieves two separate things before the action even starts; he lets you into the life of Simon, and he drops hints and sets up for later story points that grab your attention and make you think.
There's another book in a totally different setting that I absolutely worship. It's called Sunshine, by Robin McKinley, and when I first picked it up, I got about two pages in, and then didn't touch it again for about four months. It starts right in on the action, or at least, AN action: "I didn't hear them coming. Of course, you don't, when they're vampires."
This tells us two things. There's vampires, and the main character is involved with them in some way. But then instead of continuing on in this vein, the main character (whose name is Sunshine) immediately launches into a ten-page jaunt of talking about her family, and her youth, and where she works and lives, and it's all very interesting, but it's a bit like talking to someone who can't quite come to the point. The entire book is like that; it's less of a story you're experiencing as you read, and more a story that you're sitting down with Sunshine, and she's telling it to you after it all happened. Sunshine, as a character, tends to go off on rambling tangents for pages and pages, before she finally comes back to the point, but the author, Robin McKinley, doesn't always write like that. If you pick up Beauty: A Retelling of the story of Beauty and the Beast, The Blue Sword, and Sunshine, and read through them all, you'd probably think they were written by three completely different authors. Not one of her books has the same 'voice', but they're each engaging and interest-snagging in their own ways.
On the other hand, Anne Bishop has written several inventive and interesting trilogies, and one 'twosome', but they're all the same. Notably, The Black Jewels Trilogy and what's listed as The World of the Fae on her website, are like reading two different versions of the same novel. Both trilogies are good, but they have exactly the same 'voice', and basically the same characters, rehashed, and the same basic idea, rewritten. It's like she's got cookie-cutters for her books, and when she starts a new one, she just recreates her old worlds and characters and renames them before setting them into a new plot. Even her Ephemera novels are slightly similar to the other two trilogies, but not in exactly the same way (which is something of a relief.) The world of Ephemera is utterly different than the worlds of the other two trilogies, but she undoes her good work with the world building by plopping the same, cookie-cut characters into those worlds. There's the dark, mysterious main male lead, the ditzy/clueless/otherwise innocent female love interest, the dark, mysterious, super-powerful outcast main female lead...
They're good books, don't get me wrong, but I don't like the feeling of rereading the same thing over and over again. If I want to reread the same novel, I'll open it back up and reread it. I don't want to spend money on three different sets of novels, only to find the same underlying themes and people running through them all.
This is a good way to improve your own writing. After you've gone through the bookstore and read the first page and decided why you'd continue reading or not, pick two or three off your list, and buy them, or get them out of the library, and actually read through them.
Did they live up to the expectations of the first page? Would you read them again, or was it a waste of money? Did you learn anything to incorporate into your own writing?
I own dozens of books. Scores of them. If I sat down and counted them all out, I'd probably have well over a hundred. And even for myself, looking over my collection, I think I must be slightly schizophrenic in my tastes, because there's no set genre. They span the range.
An example:
Directly behind me (I have no bookshelf, so the coffee table in my room is crowded over with books) there is approximately thirty books. (probably more; I didn't move any of the stacks, just briefly glanced over them.) Clearly visible are books like The Bride and the Beast, by Teresa Medeiros, Reliquary by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child, Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton, and Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by J.K. Rowling.
I make that one historical romance, two suspense fiction, and a YA fantasy. And that's just a sprinkling. Other favourite books of mine include The Crystal Singer Trilogy by Anne McCaffrey, and The Hot Zone by Richard Preston.
A sci-fi trilogy and one that I have no name for, (it's about ebola and marburg, the effects, origins, and outbreaks.)
My book tastes run the gamut, and it's made me a better writer because of it. I don't limit myself to just one or two authors (though I do admit to seeking some authors out repeatedly. If I see something by Michael Crichton that I haven't read yet, I pick it up. Likewise, Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child. And Teresa Medeiros is my absolute favourite historical romance author ever; I'm well on my way to owning every single book she's put out to date). Because of this wild and eclectic taste in novels, I have no shortage of places to turn if I'm feeling the dreaded Writer's Block. It's amazing how a little reading can turn that around. After staring at a blank word document for an hour and a half, all it takes is for me to sit down somewhere quiet with a book, and about ten pages in, I'm itching to go write for myself.
What amazes me is the amount of people who don't read, who can't read. I inherited my love of reading from my mother, and it's something I've never regretted. But then I look back on people I went to high school with, who struggled to read to themselves, and made me want to snatch the book out of their hands and beat them with it when they tried to read out loud. That these high school seniors - people about to graduate from mandatory school and either go on to further schooling or unleash themselves upon the world at large - can't read...
I suspect that many of these people who never willingly picked up a book in their life are the ones who attempt Nanowrimo and then immediately upon finishing their 50k words send it to publishers and editors and the like. It is, I'm firmly of the belief, utterly impossible to be a writer if you don't read.
*Addendum: I ammend that. Certainly there may be some books that start off that way, but it would be followed with something like this. "My sword cut a swathe through the vampire horde like a hot knife through butter. I'd been fighting them since I was fifteen years old, and my mother sat me down and said, "Michael, daddy's not coming home." and into the shocked silence this statement produced in me, went on to explain that he'd been taken by the vampires on his way home from work." Sure, it starts off right into the action, but then it takes a step back and introduces the main character, and gives you the reason he's currently 'cutting a swathe through a horde of vampires.'
Thursday, May 7, 2009
Things to Remember
What I'm listening to: Nothing. :/ My itunes is on the fritz. It should be Going Through Changes by Army of Me.
What I'm reading: The Dragonbone Chair, by Tad Williams
I've got something Ally Carter said posted on my wall. (Not facebook. My literal bedroom wall, right above my computer.) "Don't get it right - get it written." The day I put it up, everyone in my house passed through my room* and asked me about it. Basically means it doesn't have to be perfect the first time, as long as it's done. Editing can come later.
But that doesn't stop me from thinking about my current word-count versus chapters, and despairing. Especially when I happened to catch a glimpse of the first few paragraphs when I restarted my computer, and re-opened Eversong (if it's right in front of me, I'm less likely to forget that I need to be writing every day) and those paragraphs ... really kinda sucked. XDD Not ... oh, what am I trying to say here? *bashes head into desk at specially marked 'Bang Head Here' on mouse pad* Not that it's bad. I believe it's really well written. As a long-time fanfiction author, I continually tell myself "This sucks, it's terrible, no one's going to like it, why am I even posting this crap!?" as I'm writing, post it, receive good reviews, forget about it for several months (or years, in some cases) go back, reread it, and utterly amaze myself at how wonderful it is. Not to toot my own horn or anything, although I'm firmly of the belief that a certain amount of ego is required for artistry - even if no one else in the world likes your work, you'll always know that you did a good job of it.
No, the problem is not that what I've written is written badly (though it can definitely be better, which will come later, and therein lies the problem) it's that they're short. They can be better. They can be more engaging. I'm starting into chapter two, and I only have four thousand words. Granted, it's only the beginning of chapter two, and I know for a fact that there's no 'set word count', specifically, but my goal is at least 75,ooo words, and the first novel is only 25 chapters long. (Give or take one or two. The original outline was set for 26, but the first chapter proved so reclusive that I combined what had been chapters one and two on the outline into chapter one, so that it would have some depth to it, and so that the story wouldn't take nine chapters to get started.)
It's like the devilish NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month, for the uninitiated) you have thirty days to write 50k in words. And not just "THIS SUCKS" over and over again, but an actual, coherent novel. The following instructions are then to shunt it to one side for at least three months and not even think about it until that three month time period is up, at which point you go back and edit, and revise, and polish, and generally drag it out of the slush pile before it has a chance to make it into said pile. I'm pretty sure there's an actual NaNoEdMo, or something similar (National Novel EDITING Month, in which those 50k word drafts get taken out of the milk crate, and get prettied up.)
Do not. Ever. Ever. Submit your unpolished manuscript from Nano to an agent or editor. I found an article about that (somewhere) and was absolutely horrified. It was talking about the massive increase in queries and MSS during December, particularly the first week, and that the majority of those queries and MSS were not only unpublishable, but almost unreadable. There were comments about said submissions that included things like "There were exactly fifty thousand words. EXACTLY. It stopped in the middle of a sentence." and "After every 1700 words or so there was a note reading "Done for the day."
I nearly cried reading that. Who in their right mind would submit something to professionals without proofreading it at the least? I left a comment on the post that said I was utterly ashamed to be among the Nano Writers, if they behaved like that after completion of their 'novel.'
Another thing that makes me weep. Miss Snark's First Victim holds a Secret Agent contest, in which people submit the first 250 words of their completed novel, and a real agent looks over, and comments as to whether they'd be hooked on the story or not. Other people comment, too, but it's a good way to get an agent to look at your work, as well as to get some constructive feedback on your story. It's a good excercise for the other aspiring writers out there too, when you're in a bookstore. Wander through, pick up random books, and read through the first page, and then think about whether you'd actually read the rest, and why, what worked for you, what was it about that first page that really caught your attention, and how the author made that work, and how you can apply it to your own writing.
But now on to the weepy part.
I could only get through five or six of the entries, and they were all horrible. I wouldn't read any of those books if you paid me to do it. Now I grant you, there were likely some gems hidden among the garbage, but wading through all that crap just to get to one good story seemed about as easy as dodging raindrops. It certainly gave me new respect for my future queried agents, and a new resolve to not allow my story to end up in the slush pile. There's a new Secret Agent contest starting soon, and I'm going to do my best to keep up with it, rather than have to read through fourty or fifty entries all at once. (250 words isn't a lot, but two hundred and fifty words in an unconvincing and uninteresting story makes it feel about as engaging as reading through the dictionary.)
*Note from above: My room isn't a bedroom in the normal sense. It's more of the downstairs den that happens to have a bed in it. My house is awesome, by the way. It's got three floors. The middle floor is where the front door is, and it opens into the living room, and directly off the living room is the kitchen. Upstairs is a bathroom, and three bedrooms, where my aunt, cousin, and brother sleep. Downstairs is the garage, back yard, another bathroom, and my step-parents room. Between my SP's room and the garage is an open space with a futon, computer, and television, and since I've moved back in with them, it's been filled to the brim with books. The garage is where the dryer, two chest freezers, and another stand up fridge/freezer are, so anyone needing anything out there passes through my room, hence the reason that everyone saw the sign.
What I'm reading: The Dragonbone Chair, by Tad Williams
I've got something Ally Carter said posted on my wall. (Not facebook. My literal bedroom wall, right above my computer.) "Don't get it right - get it written." The day I put it up, everyone in my house passed through my room* and asked me about it. Basically means it doesn't have to be perfect the first time, as long as it's done. Editing can come later.
But that doesn't stop me from thinking about my current word-count versus chapters, and despairing. Especially when I happened to catch a glimpse of the first few paragraphs when I restarted my computer, and re-opened Eversong (if it's right in front of me, I'm less likely to forget that I need to be writing every day) and those paragraphs ... really kinda sucked. XDD Not ... oh, what am I trying to say here? *bashes head into desk at specially marked 'Bang Head Here' on mouse pad* Not that it's bad. I believe it's really well written. As a long-time fanfiction author, I continually tell myself "This sucks, it's terrible, no one's going to like it, why am I even posting this crap!?" as I'm writing, post it, receive good reviews, forget about it for several months (or years, in some cases) go back, reread it, and utterly amaze myself at how wonderful it is. Not to toot my own horn or anything, although I'm firmly of the belief that a certain amount of ego is required for artistry - even if no one else in the world likes your work, you'll always know that you did a good job of it.
No, the problem is not that what I've written is written badly (though it can definitely be better, which will come later, and therein lies the problem) it's that they're short. They can be better. They can be more engaging. I'm starting into chapter two, and I only have four thousand words. Granted, it's only the beginning of chapter two, and I know for a fact that there's no 'set word count', specifically, but my goal is at least 75,ooo words, and the first novel is only 25 chapters long. (Give or take one or two. The original outline was set for 26, but the first chapter proved so reclusive that I combined what had been chapters one and two on the outline into chapter one, so that it would have some depth to it, and so that the story wouldn't take nine chapters to get started.)
It's like the devilish NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month, for the uninitiated) you have thirty days to write 50k in words. And not just "THIS SUCKS" over and over again, but an actual, coherent novel. The following instructions are then to shunt it to one side for at least three months and not even think about it until that three month time period is up, at which point you go back and edit, and revise, and polish, and generally drag it out of the slush pile before it has a chance to make it into said pile. I'm pretty sure there's an actual NaNoEdMo, or something similar (National Novel EDITING Month, in which those 50k word drafts get taken out of the milk crate, and get prettied up.)
Do not. Ever. Ever. Submit your unpolished manuscript from Nano to an agent or editor. I found an article about that (somewhere) and was absolutely horrified. It was talking about the massive increase in queries and MSS during December, particularly the first week, and that the majority of those queries and MSS were not only unpublishable, but almost unreadable. There were comments about said submissions that included things like "There were exactly fifty thousand words. EXACTLY. It stopped in the middle of a sentence." and "After every 1700 words or so there was a note reading "Done for the day."
I nearly cried reading that. Who in their right mind would submit something to professionals without proofreading it at the least? I left a comment on the post that said I was utterly ashamed to be among the Nano Writers, if they behaved like that after completion of their 'novel.'
Another thing that makes me weep. Miss Snark's First Victim holds a Secret Agent contest, in which people submit the first 250 words of their completed novel, and a real agent looks over, and comments as to whether they'd be hooked on the story or not. Other people comment, too, but it's a good way to get an agent to look at your work, as well as to get some constructive feedback on your story. It's a good excercise for the other aspiring writers out there too, when you're in a bookstore. Wander through, pick up random books, and read through the first page, and then think about whether you'd actually read the rest, and why, what worked for you, what was it about that first page that really caught your attention, and how the author made that work, and how you can apply it to your own writing.
But now on to the weepy part.
I could only get through five or six of the entries, and they were all horrible. I wouldn't read any of those books if you paid me to do it. Now I grant you, there were likely some gems hidden among the garbage, but wading through all that crap just to get to one good story seemed about as easy as dodging raindrops. It certainly gave me new respect for my future queried agents, and a new resolve to not allow my story to end up in the slush pile. There's a new Secret Agent contest starting soon, and I'm going to do my best to keep up with it, rather than have to read through fourty or fifty entries all at once. (250 words isn't a lot, but two hundred and fifty words in an unconvincing and uninteresting story makes it feel about as engaging as reading through the dictionary.)
*Note from above: My room isn't a bedroom in the normal sense. It's more of the downstairs den that happens to have a bed in it. My house is awesome, by the way. It's got three floors. The middle floor is where the front door is, and it opens into the living room, and directly off the living room is the kitchen. Upstairs is a bathroom, and three bedrooms, where my aunt, cousin, and brother sleep. Downstairs is the garage, back yard, another bathroom, and my step-parents room. Between my SP's room and the garage is an open space with a futon, computer, and television, and since I've moved back in with them, it's been filled to the brim with books. The garage is where the dryer, two chest freezers, and another stand up fridge/freezer are, so anyone needing anything out there passes through my room, hence the reason that everyone saw the sign.
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