Technical Topic -- The Elements of Writing

Somebody asked elsewhere, "How do I write a Romance?" and "How do I write, anyway?"

I was thinking what advice I'd give someone who was just struggling with the first draft of the first manuscript.

What would I say if I wasn't going to say,
"Why don't you become a lawyer or an accountant or the manager of a sporting goods shop instead since that is going to pay a lot better and your evenings will not be filled with angst and scribbling and desperate searches for a word that is not 'suspicion' but sounds a little like it and means something close and what the devil is it ... ah skepticism!"  That kind of evening.

Anyhow, I was trying to come up with something important and basic to the tendons and muscle of writing and also useful and a good first step into the business of thinking like a writer.  (Bit of a mixed metaphor there, isn't it?)  

Since I hate to waste advice, as I give it so rarely *cough* (not)... I am dragging the advice I gave there, back here.

What I said:

The first and best advice to a beginning writer is -- Read.

Read for fun, of course.  Read widely.  Read well.  (i.e. read crap but don't just read crap books.)  Read the best of your genre.  Read outside your genre.

But also read, not as a reader, but as a writer.  

This is maybe somewhat like looking at scenes

Since you are going to write Romance genre I will send you to pick yourself up a couple of books by Nora Roberts and Jayne Ann Krentz. They should be available in your local used book store. Try for short books, something not as thick as your thumb.

Go invest in a set of highlighters -- yellow, red, green, blue etc.

After you've skimmed the book, go back and look at the first scene in Chapter Three. You're going to mark the beginning of the scene by drawing a pen line across the page.

Scenes are the building blocks of the writing and that's why we're cutting one out and looking at it.
Since you're maybe at the beginning of analyzing books, you can ask yourself -- "what makes a scene?"

Speaking very generally, a scene is in one setting; it deals with one problem or intention; and the main character of the scene is there from beginning to end.  When you go somewhere else and start doing something else or you switch to another focus character, you're in a different scene. Generally.

Writers, being wonderful altruistic folks, are apt to put a little space at the end of a scene or change the chapter altogether.

So. Go hunt down and mark the other end of the scene.
How long is this puppy? (Pages in paperback average 250 words per page.)

I have a JAK in hand, Copper Beach. Chapter Three is one scene, a talking heads scene between the protagonist and a boat captain. It's seven pages which is roughly 1750 words.  In JAK's The Family Way, Chapter Three is 22 pages, 5500 words.  J.D. Robb's ( Nora Robert's) Reunion in Death is a less straightforward scene because it starts with a technically beautiful flashback, but it's sixteen pages, 4000 words.

One reason to look at the length of a scene is that a common problem with early manuscripts is the scenes are too short. They're too short because they leave out or shortchange some elements of writing.

So we're going to mark those elements of writing and study them squirming on pins, metaphorically speaking. 

Anyhow.  Let us mark.

Red, green, blue, and the ever-popular fuschia

Mark all the dialog -- the stuff inside quote marks -- in red.
Mark all internals -- that is, when we see the character's thoughts -- in blue.
Mark anything that shows movement of the body in space -- sit, turn, walk, light a cigarette, shoot somebody -- in green.
Mark description -- color, smell, placement of objects, landscape, shape of somebody's nose -- in yellow.

Anything that's concerned with stuff happening outside of the scene can be fuschia or whatever you have left. 
Fuschia is for backstory. 
Fuschia is for fascinating factoids about the Lost Kingdom of Horowitz or how the ion-drive works.

Sometimes this outsider wordage will be a narrative intrusionary. Often this out-of-the-here-and-now comes in internals. And there's fuschia chat between the characters where they inexplicably tell each other what they both already know.
What all this fuschia boils down to, though, is the writer talking to the reader, passing along information.

So if the character says, "That's a pretty flower," it gets marked in red.

Looking at the elements of story. Putting them together

If the character goes on to think, A rose. I wonder why she has roses on the table. Did somebody send them to her? It gets marked in blue.

If the character knocks the ash off his cigarette, it's green.

If the character then thinks, We had roses in the garden of the priory, when I was seven or I'm going back there someday to root them out of the ground or My mother was a great gardener or I could grow roses if I had to, that might be fuschia.
It's not in the here-and-now of the story.


Let's say you start out with:

"That's a pretty flower," he said, taking a joint out of his wallet. A rose. I wonder why she has roses on the table. Did somebody send them to her?  Has she found herself another werewolf? He didn't care much for that possibility. He patted through his pockets. He had matches in here somewhere. He remembered . . . Mother had been a great gardener. She loved the flowers more than her children. We had roses everywhere in the garden of the priory, between the wolfsbane and the foxgloves, back when I was seven. A few red petals had fallen from the bouquet onto the white tablecloth. They were the color of blood.

Interpreting the elements, you might end up with something like:

"That's a pretty flower," he said, taking a joint out of his wallet. A rose. I wonder why she has roses on the table. Did somebody send them to her?  Has she found herself another werewolf? He didn't care much for that possibility. He patted through his pockets. He had matches in here somewhere. He remembered . . . Mother had been a great gardener. She loved the flowers more than her children. We had roses everywhere in the garden of the priory, between the wolfsbane and the foxgloves, back when I was seven. A few red petals had fallen from the bouquet onto the white tablecloth. They were the color of blood.

The 'parts of writing' -- dialog, action, description, even the excursion out of the scene and to another place and time  -- work together.
NR and JAK are masters of balancing these elements.

After you've done a dozen scenes from NR and JAK, go back to some of your own work and apply those highlighters. 

Class and the Spymaster Fictive Universe

I was writing to excellent reader Ann today, talking about the blog post I did on how we write about Regency-era slums and got to thinking about how I deal with 'class' in the books.

Do I consciously write about social class in these books?
Yep.  I figger we all reveal our attitudes and beliefs unconsciously as we write ... so I might as well be aware I'm doing this and use it.



Take Lazarus.
Lazarus is motivated by resentment of the class that ruined his servant-girl mother and drove her into prostitution.  This is the class to which his father belongs.  The class Lazarus would enjoy if he'd been legitimate. 

Lazarus runs an empire of violence and theft, in part, because he figures his minions are entitled to take what they want.  The rich do.  Why shouldn't the poor?  He's self-educated and brilliant.  He can't help but see the inequity in the laws of England.  He ends up with great sympathy for the French Republican cause.

In his private life, his special ire is reserved for women of the privileged class who commit crimes that would land a servant girl in jail or send her to the gallows.  Again, class motivates his actions.
 

Adrian's life journey is shaped by a desire to become 'a gentleman'.  He walks, like Hans Christian Andersen's Little Mermaid, on sharp knives every step of the way.  He finds himself, like Eliza Doolittle in My Fair Lady, unable to go back to what he was and yet unable to be comfortable with what he becomes. 

He measures his own success by his ability to pass as a member of the upper class. And yet, Adrian only passes for a gentleman; he never becomes one.  He watches, judges, and shrewdly assesses the rich and powerful . . . as an outsider.  He can never buy into their narrower view of the world.  He uses privilege, but doesn't believe in it.

Adrian originally admired the French Revolution, liking the leveling effect.  Then ... an outtake from Forbidden Rose has him watching a tumbril take a family with teenage girls to the guillotine.  We don't see the scene onstage, unfortunately, but that was a turning point of his life.  It outraged him.  He would never again be tempted by revolutionary violence.  Years later, he rejects Napoleon as an ambitious opportunist.  By that time, by 1799, Adrian is wholly committed to the British Service. 

But he never rejects France's social reforms.  Philosophically, Adrian is all for dismantling aristocratic privilege.  He doesn't act on this because social equality is never offered to him as a viable choice in the 1789 to 1818 timeframe. 
One reason Adrian gets along with Justine is they have no basic philosophical disagreement.


Doyle is more sympathetic to the idea of an aristocracy.

He plays at being a coachman or a laborer without assuming the interior life of one.  He's an aristocrat inside.  Born one.  Schooled and trained as one.

More than that, Doyle's a practical man rather than an idealist.  He believes a hierarchical society is inevitable, so he aims for a humane and workable system -- a fair, stable, well-run government with gradual change toward equality and social mobility.


The discussion Adrian and Doyle have at the beginning of Forbidden Rose is meant to show their different points of view.  (This is prior to Hawker's disillusionment with the bloody side of revolution in France.)

[Doyle and Adrian approach the orangerie at the chateau. It's savagely destroyed.]
 
    Hawker followed him, crunching glass into the gravel.  “The boys in that stinking little village waited years to do this.” 
   “Did they?”
    “They dreamed of it. They’d sit in those pig houses in the village with the shutters closed and the wind leaking in. They’d think about these fancy weeds up here, being coddled, all warm and happy behind glass. Down there,they were freezing in the dark. Up here, they were growing flowers.”
     “That’s fixed, then. No more flowers.”
     Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Hawker stoop and pick up a rock, draw back and throw. Glass fell with a thin, silver discord. The heroic revolutionaries of Voisemont had missed one pane. Destruction was now complete.   

Justine is my most ideological character.  In 1818 she's going through a period of disillusion, as idealists will.  She's seen Napoleon fall.  She's seen Paris turn away from the Revolution and accept the Royalists back in power.  It'll be a few years before she gets her political fire back. 

Justine saw her degradation and loss not as a male/female issue -- not so much, 'men did this to me' --  as a class and power issue.  'The rich can get away with anything.' "In a just society these things would not happen.'  She responds to her hurt with a desire to right the wrongs of society.  She becomes a political person.

Justine's journey is one of rebuilding herself after absolute destruction.  Part of this is reclaiming her place as an aristocrat. Though she's despised aristocrats, ironically, it's a measure of her complete healing when she can say,

     “I will come to live with you in your great mansion and be a lady again. I will be a DeCabrillac, and face down the world if they make accusations. I will shake out your haughty mansion like an old rag and make it comfortable to live in.”

She becomes something she has fought against, because Adrian needs this from her.  It's her gift to him.


Justine, too, is someone who doesn't buy into the class paradigm.  She may claim her name and position, but I see her taking her aristocratic space cynically.  She's gotten subtle in the Police Secrète.   Give her a few more years and she'll be the Grande Dame of the Reform Movement, infiltrating the camp of the enemy, still fighting the good fight.

Technical Topics -- Flying into the story. Or driving.

I was commenting on a snippet of a first chapter that had been posted for comment.  The hero was in a car, headed for a party:

So I said,
Ahem.

One of the standard openings for novice manuscripts, one that lands in the slushpiles of New York with great frequency, is the protagonist on a means of transportation.

What it is -- the writer has facets a, b, and c she wants to reveal about the protagonist's character. She has factoids d, e and f that are backstory she wants to fill in. So the writer puts her characters in a box and lets them talk about or think about items ' a' through 'f'.

Things could happen in the car, I guess

This seems a simple and straightforward way to tell the readers all this nifty stuff.  It's a relatively easy scene to write because there isn't any distraction.

Problem is, nothing much happens while the writer is telling the reader 'a' through 'f'.  Nothing can happen till everybody climbs out of the transportation.


Speaking generally, whether it's the opening scene of Chapter One or the closing of Chapter 22,  a good way to approach it is to ask ourselves what story action is taking place.

A 'story action' is something that must happen for later events to work.  It's something significant.  If the hero and heroine don't go to the old Gold Mine, they won't discover the miner's body.  If Marvin doesn't kidnap Cecelia, Horace can't ride to her rescue.  That kinda thing.
Driving around in a car is very rarely story action.

We don't put all story action on stage.  Some of it isn't suited to dramatic, real-time presentation.  But story action is the backbone of the manuscript.  Most of what we do put 'on-stage' should be story action.

What kind of story action might appear in Chapter One, Scene One?

Boy meets girl

We could walk in on a crime in progress, if the story is about solving that crime.  We could set someone to making a decision that sends her in one direction on her journey instead of another.

We're Romance writers here, so let's say we make our first scene to contain the story action of 'boy meets girl'.



We can compare a mode-of-transportation beginning with the 'story action' beginning of the 'boy meets girl' type.

We can put the new schoolmarm in the stagecoach for four or five pages and have her look out at the cactus on the way to Dry Gulch, wondering what her life will be like in the West. And when we've done that for five or six pages, we can start the story action.

Or we can plunge in and write the story action and let that information and character development catch up as it will.

According to her schedule, in one hour, Miss Ermyntrude Wells was supposed to arrive at the Dry Gultch Hotel with three trunks of school equipment and one trunk of sober, sensible clothing.

That wasn't going to happen, was it?

She leaned out the coach window. "You can just put that gun down right this minute, young man."


Our protagonist is a cook hired to prepare a spectacular dinner party for a millionaire. We can put her in an airplane, circling in to land at an exotic island paradise. She thinks about why she's taken this job so far from New York and what she'll serve at the party and how things will be different in Santa Rosalita. She wonders why the millionaire requested her in particular.

versus

Or, y'know, peaches

"My peaches! You're bruising my peaches!"

Nobody stopped. Nobody paid any attention. The men kept heaving boxes around and ripping them open. Fruit bounced out of string bags and rolled across the tarmac. Drug-sniffing dogs picked their way through the carnage.

"Doesn't anybody here speak English? Damn it! If I wanted to get mugged I could have stayed in New York."

"I speak English." The chief of the uniformed thugs leaned against the hood of his patrol car, six feet of lean, dark, indifferent muscle, watching his men destroy good ingredients and watching her.

In the car, here's Mitzi and Donna are headed for the their job at the hospital. They talk about how the High School's bad boy, Tad Turner, has come back to town after 20 years. Mitzi remembers her own experiences with Tad, things she's never told anyone.

versus

The road was dark. Equally dark in both directions. And very quiet. The tire was very flat. "It's beginning to rain," Mitzi said.

"So it is," Donna agreed.

"You know how to change a tire?"

"Not the least particle of an idea. I don't even know where the damn spare thing is."

"Ah."

Neither of them got in the car. That would be giving up. They both looked at the tire. In the distance, a low drone told of an approaching sucker.

"Sounds like a sports car," Mitzi said.

You see all the things we don't know when the action of the story starts rolling? When we start with story action, we don't know why Ermyntrude has come west or that Mitzi's a nurse who had a fling with Tad 20 years ago. We don't know our New Yorker is a cook or anything about the millionaire.

The reader doesn't need to know all the background to get involved.   She just needs something interesting going on.

Technical Topics -- Character Development Scenes

Somebody says -- "I have a couple of scenes that are basically only used for character development, and I'm having a hard time writing them . . .  I feel a little strange about writing it because hardly anything noteworthy actually happens."

That's the sort of scene you cough a little and say -- "That's a character development scene," when somebody asks why it's in the manuscript.  It's the sort of scene that showcases and explains the character --  well, lots of scenes do that --  but when you think about it, nothing important to the plot took place.  There's no necessary decision, no character change, no story action. The scene could be removed without affecting what happens later.

The problem with character development scenes (and flashback scenes, talking head scenes, and prologues of this type,) is that they're written to convey information, rather than getting on with telling the story.

Now, IMO, there's nothing inherently wrong with having a few no-progress scenes in the manuscript. We have all this cool information lying around, after all, so why not pass it along to the reader?

But if the writer's going to drop the reader into a static, informational scene, the writer has to know he's stopped telling the real story. When he's done with his flashback or his character development scene, he's going to pick up the plot again in the same place as before. No forward movement. The writer had better want to slack off on the pacing, because that's what he's just done.

Readers don't so much want the story to stop dead in the water, so the writer had better make this digression interesting.

Some writers always start out with a couple just informational scenes as warm-up writing. It's an exercise that helps them organize their thoughts. It's part of their process. They pull the scenes out later and expect to.
No harm, no foul

But I think sometimes no-progress scenes arise from a misunderstanding of the old saw, Show Don't Tell. Folks feel they have to lengthily 'act out' specific information instead of just having somebody remark -- 'George has always been shy as a wild rabbit,' or 'It's been ten years, and Elinor has never admitted her passion for canasta,' -- while getting on with more important business like sawing up their latest victim or rearranging the political face of Europe.

Technical Topic -- Just a minithought on Show and Tell

Mostly, I hate to use the terms 'show' and 'tell' because I find them confusing.

I'd rather talk about basically the same concepts by calling them 'Here&Now' and 'Being Elsewhere'.

When the POV character is immersed in the sensory components of the scene or is involved in on-going action or is speaking dialog that deals with what's right there underfoot in the scene -- that's being in the Here&Now.

When the POV character is talking or thinking about stuff that's not going on at the moment in front of him, he's gone Elsewhere.  The character does this when he's adding backstory or infodumping or describing what happened last week or to his cousin who lives in Altoona or thinking about what he might do in the future and stufflikethatthere.

John picks up the toast and bites into it, tasting jelly -- Here-and-Now
John burns his mouth on the hot coffee -- H&N
John remembers his mother made good coffee -- Elsewhere
John hits Maurice over the head with a hammer -- H&N
John sees Maurice fall down dead -- H&N
Three hours later John describes the murder to Mary -- E
John thinks about the morality of murder while driving home -- E
John is afraid he's going to get arrested and hides under the sink -- H&N
John buys bleach to clean up the murder scene - H&N
John and Thomas plan to bury the body --E
John and Thomas bury the body -- H&N 

In general, I try to stay in the Here and Now of the scene, because that's where the story is happening.

It's all very Zen, y'know.  If I stay with the POV character and he's immersed in what's going on around him, the reader gets to move through the scene and watch it unroll, event by event.  Everything is solid, sensory, relevant to this fictive instant, logically successive in time, each emotion related to the next action, showing motivation that forms minute by minute.  The reader is caught in a stream of events that pulls him along.

Whenever I take the reader Elsewhere, I relegate the experiences to second hand.  I pull the reader out onto the bank to show him birches and willowtrees.  They may be interesting, but they are static.  He's plucked out of the story.  No longer dragged along by it.

Somewhat, this is the difference between information and story action.
I get all philosophical here and ask myself about the nature of fiction.
The fictive experience does not lie in the knowledge of events.  It's being part of the events.

That said --  there is a place for just plain laying down information.  You have to do it.
But don't mistake conveying information with putting the character inside the ongoing story, which is your main objective.

Technical Topic -- So how do your write relationship scenes, anyway?

Someone asked, (more or less):

I don't write Romance, but I want to add a romantic scene.  How do I do this?

A 'romance' scene falls into the category of intense, interpersonal scene.

There are many kinds of scenes. You got yer 'individual concentrates on something' scenes like 'Frodo climbs the cliff in Mordor'.
You got yer brisk, big-movement action scenes like 'George kicks the villain in the teeth' or 'Marvin drives a car really fast'.
You got your scenes of internals like 'Harold remembers his boyhood' or 'Martha plots a murder'.

A romantic scene is a two-person interaction scene. Similar interaction scenes are 'an argument', 'a confrontation', 'a persuasion', or a close, emotional dialog of any kind.
Even if your folks don't have a lot to say to each other, that's the kind of scene it is.


What are the characteristics of a close interpersonal scene?


1) Very tight focus on the other person. The corollary, that's the next point below, is a lack of focus on the surroundings.

Most visuals are going to be of the other person -- the non-POV character -- and they are going to be small details. This is where you talk about the shape of an ear lobe or the crooked eye tooth on the lower jaw. Not -- he's tall. Not -- he's wearing vintage cowboy boots.

When someone is in the most intimate zone of contact with the POV character, description includes smell, taste, touch, hearing small sounds. This is when he notices the smell in her armpits, the taste of her hair, the sound of her stomach rumbling, the fleshy mumble of his ear lobe.

You convince the reader that these two people are propinquitous by using details that are only apparent upon close contact. 
We note the small changes in the eyes or mouth that signal feelings. The POV character is intensely aware of the other person's expression.


2) We tend to leave out most description of the surroundings.

So . . . not so much talking about the semiraker and dohinki on the engineering panel. Not so much commenting on the clouds floating over the fleecy red fields of the planet Florami. Not so much dwelling on the color of the damask curtains.

This is why it's nice to put the romantic encounter in scenery that has been used before and described before. The reader already knows what the galley looks like before you move your protagonists in there and set them to making love on the counter.

This 'I have no time to talk about the color of the couch' is true in 'fight scenes' and 'intense dialog' and 'escape scenes'. If you've nailed the description down earlier -- even just walking through the place -- you don't have to sketch it in now.

3) You do add description that enhances the purpose of the scene.

This is true in any scene, of course. In an intensely emotional scene, you have one or two emotional themes you're playing with. You highlight scenery description and stage business to follow the emotional theme.

If the scene is sensual, you might describe the furs and velvets on the bed. (And yes. There is no reason space travellers wouldn't have furs and velvets on the bed.) The smell of flowers in a vase. The gems on the perfume bottle on the dresser. The ozone and mineral smell of the warm bath that's been run in the room next door.

If an issue in the relationship is the strength, lethality and touchiness of the female, your stage business might be she's chopping carrots for dinner. The glint of the knife becomes part of the dialog, symbolic of her own dangerous edge.

4) Dialog, dialog, dialog.

A romance scene is about communication between the protagonists.

Build the dialog by giving them something to talk about.

Now it might be simply 'my room or yours', but if this is an important relationship, there's probably more to it than that.

What you do here is ask yourself -- 'In this scene, what changes in the relationship?'
That's what the dialog is about.

Techniques for building this 'what changes' dialog:

-- Have a character say something true. Truth is tremendously powerful in dialog. "I hated it when you went to bed with Jerome." "I'm planning to do this once, and then walk off and leave you." "You're not really pretty."

-- Make the character sound like himself. You always do, but if there are tricks that give your character his voice, this is the time to put them in place.

-- Take some of the words the character is thinking and put them into speech. When the words are said out loud, the other character can respond to them.
If a character says, 'the sheets are cold', you have dialog about this. If he thinks about the cold sheets . . . the perception stays small and lonely.

-- Let them talk about the problem that has kept them apart for the eighteen chapters before this.

-- Let them talk, (or think,) about what happens next. (No.  Not just the horizontal rumba.  What happens next week?)


5) Dialog is couched in relationship terms.

Dialog is always responsive, of course. That is, when something gets said the returning words are an answer.

In a relationship scene, the words do not merely respond to what is said. Each bit of dialog is also responding to where the relationship is right at that moment.

She: Where did I leave my car keys?
He: On the table.

versus

She: Where did I leave my car keys?
He: Here. No. Don't get up. I'll pass them to you.

That moment, the relationship is at a place he wants to give something to her.

He: A little onion. A few olives. That's done. Pass me the crisper.
She: Here. I'll take it out to the table.

versus

He: A little onion. A few olives. That's done. Pass me the crisper.
She: Here. That looks remarkably tasty. I'll take it out to the table.

Because she's thinking how tasty he looks.

I do not mean you fill the conversation with innuendo. You just take into account that people talk to each other differently when they are in a romantic situation.

6) Because a romantic relationship scene is about sexuality and sensuality, describe the internal physical response of the POV character.
Try not to be purple about this.

And the POV character sees signs of sexual response in the other person.

7) Direct address.
Mostly characters do not address one another by name. The usual advice is to pull these direct address names out -- and very good advice that is.
In a relationship scene, though,  I think he can call her Sue-Ellen or Gigi once or twice.

8) Pacing is generally slow in relationship scenes. There's lots of talk. You get a pause now and then. Lots of internals.

You can slow pacing with a few complex and longish sentences interspersed into the page, or by adding stage business that the reader will see as taking a long time.
'He crossed the room and then paced back again.' is nine words.
'He hunted the shelf till he found the dictionary.' is also nine words -- but that action is going to slow the reader's perception of the pace of the scene.

When you get to scenes of actual sexual activity, the pace should pick up for at least part of the scene.
This sort of scene benefits from noticeable changes in pacing.

9) It is a Romance genre convention that POV can be switched once, or more than once, in sex scenes. This gives the reader two POV glances at the same material.
Not by any means necessary, but something to think about.

Technical Topic -- How much abuse

Someone asked elsewhere . . . 

How much physical abuse do we put the character through?

To which I respond . . .

A reader is probably less interested in the abuse per se --
than in what the abuse means to the character
and how the character reacts.

The interior of the scullery boy plotting revenge in a I'm going to pee in her soup before I bring it to her way while he nurses his aching head and scours the pots
is actually more interesting than the cook hitting him over the head with a spoon. Boink ouch boink ouch pain suffering.



The underlying problem with hapless suffering, in a story sense, comes when it happens to someone without freedom of choice.
Abuse or pain endured is, (like a typhoon or a swarm of army ants or crippling illness or crop failure or the Empire at war,) a story problem.
Story is character choices and character action.
Story is the character doing stuff.

Starving to death on the farm is story problem.
Jack climbing the bean stalk is story.

The wicked stepmother and step sisters is story problem.
Cinderella making her own dress to go to the ball is story.

Pollyanna losing her family is story problem.
Pollyanna choosing to look on the bright side is story.

It isn't about suffering. It's about agency.

If your protagonist is acting and choosing, then the sufferings spotlight the importance of his choices. It's story. Go ahead and abuse the poor protagonist. Frodo's sufferings on his trek through Mordor are story.

In Frodo's case, suffering raises the stakes.  Privation and pain make the protagonist's courage or innocence or steadfastness shine.  But we don't mistake the suffering for the story.  We concentrate on what tells story.

The 'story' in Oliver Twist is not about Oliver starving to death in the workhouse. It's about Oliver standing up and saying, 'Please, Sir, may I have some more?"


This is why the protagonist's stay in the kitchen under the heavy hand of the spoon-wielding cook or the child growing up with a sexually abusive uncle will often be introductory to the story.

The reader is given enough background to emotionally understand why Cedric-the-cooksboy is desperate enough to run off in the middle of the night through war-torn Madreltonia or why Albert-the-schoolboy poisons his uncle's tea. Then Cedric and Albert get on with the business of doing something instead of being somebody's punching bag.

Just general writing advice

Someone asked --"How do I make myself write?  How do I get writing again?"


First off -- congratulations.  You're way ahead of most folks who want to write.  You're doing it instead of talking about it.


Let me offer a few random pieces of advice.

-- Follow a writing routine.  Same time.  Same place. 

Put your butt in the chair.
Write every day.

Treat writing as a job.  You don't complain that you can't do the accounts today or you don't feel like teaching sixth grade this morning.
Write as if you were working for somebody else. 



-- The edges of sleep are strong writing times. 

Keep your computer set up and ready to go in a quiet place.  If you have ideas when you're falling asleep, get out of bed and go type them.

Write early.  Get up in the morning and head directly to the computer and work. 
Eat later.  Shower later.  Walk the dog later.  Don't talk to anyone.  Hold onto the dream state as long as you can.

If this works for you at all . . . give the first hour of the morning to your writing.

-- Write in little corners of time.  Keep a laptop with you, or a notebook and pen.   Write while you're eating lunch.  While you're waiting for the kid to finish dance class.  On the flight to L.A.

-- Write even when you're writing crap. 
Write bad stuff.  Just write something.
Nora Roberts said, "I can fix anything but a blank page."
Fill up the page and edit it later.  Just get something down.

-- Treat your writing as serious work.  It's not a hobby. 
It is more important to write than to have a clean kitchen floor.  You can send out for pizza.

-- Trust yourself.  There's endless creativity inside you.  If you lose an idea, it returns to the sea of your unconscious.  It will emerge again, that or something better.

And

Technical Topics -- The Scalpel Approach

Somebody asked:

But what about the wonderful scene in Chapter One. 
I know it's backstory,
but it's really good. "

(I'm kinda parphrasing what was said here.  He had lots more excuses, for one thing.)






       
 This giraffe is really great backstory put into Chapter One.  I mean, as a visual concept.


What I said:

I, too, hate to discard good writing.

Lookit here.

See Joanna discard good writing.  See Joanna suffer.
Sometime there's a scene you have to write and you can't use because it don't fit in the action of the book.
Live with it.

We don't add scenes because they are interesting, beautiful and cool. We set scenes in place because their action, tone, pacing, emotional content, and movement through the character arc
TELL THE STORY.


[/shouting]

If the reader has to edge his way around a kitchen sink in the front hall, we take the sink out. It doesn't matter that it's a beautiful kitchen sink.

Be ruthless. Does that scene drive the narrative forward . . . or slow it to a grinding halt?

Which is all very fine and philosophical, but how do we actually DO this?


1) Finish Draft One.

2) Set the ms in front of you and take out a sharp knife.

3) You are going to cut out everything that is not essential to the action.
If you remove a scene and the story still works, it is not an essential scene.

Especially take out
dream sequences,
flashbacks,
old men reciting prophesy,
descriptions of sunrise over the steppes,
scenes of somebody thinking about things,
talking heads explaining what somebody's grandfather did.

4) You now have two piles
(a) the working action of the manuscript, and
(b) literary kudzu.

This is where you can indulge yourself.
You get to take an amount of kudzu no greater than 5% of the total mass of the ms and fold it back in.


This is a WeightWatchers indulging of oneself --
i.e. you get a piece of chocolate cake the size of a postage stamp --
but it is better than nothing at all.



5) Reread this new, sleek Draft One. It's better, isn't it?

Writin' slow

Can I tell you what annoys me?

Well, of course I can.  You're not going to jump through the screen and throttle me, after all.

Before I tell you what annoys me, can I just say 

FORBIDDEN ROSE 

IS OUT IN STORES AND YOU SHOULD DROP THE SPATULA AND LET THE HOTDOGS BURN ON THE GRILL AND GO BUY IT

!!

Okay.  Got that out of my system.

Forbidden Rose is not actually 'out' yet.  That is, it has not yet let down its hair and made an official bow to society and gone to its first ball and got permission from the patronesses of Almacks to dance the waltz.

It's more like Forbidden Rose is leaning over the stair rail and sneaks down to dance with her cousin and everybody smiles nostalgically and looks the other way.  That kinda 'out'.

So Forbidden is in some stores, but not in others, depending on who was stocking the shelves and whether 'release date' means anything to them or whether they are just wild-eyed anarchists.  Forbidden won't really be 'out' till Tuesday.

So you can go ahead and carefully deal with the Memorial Day hotdogs if you want.

But I digress.

Anyhow . . .
I was talking about what annoyed me.  I mean, besides leaf-blowers on Saturday morning and heavy perfume in places where I am trying to enjoy a meal and squirrels.


I am annoyed by people who write with the speed of lightning.

Fight Scenes

I was thinking about fight scenes. 

I'm not about to write one just in the next week, but I will need one near the end of JUSTINE.
So I am pondering the physical aspects of violence in the back of my mind.

You got yer 'one guy attacks another guy' kinda scenes. 
These do not tend to be fair fights because if you want to 'attack' somebody, you bring a gun and shoot them or you pick up a baseball bat and jump out and hit them over the head.

Plot, Story and Chapter One

I found myself nattering on elsewhere about opening chapters and when to introduce the central conflict.  As I hate to waste a good natter, I brought it back here.


The question was -- when do we start talking about the central conflict of a story?  The first chapter?


Says I, at tedious length . . .

Fiction tells a story.  'Story' can usually be boiled down to a few sentences.  The brevity is part of how you know you've got to the heart of the story.  As in;

-- Luke Skywalker is called to become a hero. He overcomes his own doubts and fears, faces evil, and defeats it. He grows up.

-- Elizabeth Bennet must establish herself. Challenged by forces that attempt to abash and belittle her, she is steadfast in maintaining her own worth. This makes her the equal of a man of superior rank and she marries well.

-- Meg Murry must rescue her kidnapped brother. Her angry, adolescent stubbornness fuels her fight to his side, but it is a recognition of the mature and generous love inside her that saves him.

That is 'story'.
This is what the book is 'about'.

Kinds of Romance

I'm a 'Character-Driven' writer myself. 

I come up with a character and get to know her and I ask myself,
"What is her story?" 

and

"Who does she deserve to get rewarded with after 347 pages of being brave and soul-searching and maybe getting shot at
or at least misquito-bit?"

In the most basic way, that's where the stories come from.  From that heroine.

Other folks look at plots.
And they come up with lists of plots.
Which is kinda interesting and something that I would never do myself.
Find lists of Romance plots here,  here, here, here.

The picture up top, in case you were wondering, is my very favorite photo from catsinsinks.com

But this one here is pretty Romantic too.  From Lolcats.

Some questions

I received a few questions lately from a couple places.  Thought I'd share the answers here. This is the first two questions.

1) What's your process? Are you a plotter or does the story unfold as you write?

Both, I think.

Way back at the start, first thing, I dream up my characters. I get a sense of the story I want to tell about them.
Then I write a 'plot outline' that says what happens.
Then I sit down to do the long, discursive, inefficient, stiff, stupid, misspelled, repetitive rough draft.

So the first thing that gets written down is a stark little outline of the action. This is plot. This is What Has to Happen.
This 'plotting' is sketchy. Think of those three-line blurbs you get from the TV guide.

What the plot outline looks like:

Scene: The Bad Guys fire through the windows in Meeks Street and run away. Nobody gets hurt.
or
Scene: Annique and Grey go walking along the Dover Road. Something exciting happens.
or
Couple of scenes: Annique gets away from Grey and goes to England.


So first I have the Story in my head. 'Annique grows up. Annique must make a choice.'

Then I come up with a plot. The plot is the set of actions I use to tell that Story. The plot is how I pace the action and set it in logical sequences. The plot gives me a structure where problems get presented one-by-one and then solved one-by-one or stored up to get solved at the end.

Then, when I have a plot, I sit down and tell the Story inside the plot structure.

So I would 'plot' a set of scenes of Annique and Grey walking the Dover Road. I know this has to be an 'on stage' journey because the action is there to give me space to do Relationship Stuff. Also, I need to give the reader a sense of time and space passing.
I plot that, 'something exciting happens,' because the hero and heroine can't go all that distance all smooth and easy like a couple of UPS packages.

But I don't know that somebody takes a shot at Annique till I sit down to write the rough draft.

I don't go into the rough draft cold. Even while I'm writing along, I'll be using my leisure time when I'm washing the dishes and chopping onions to think about the scenes that lie ahead. I remind myself of the practical stuff I have to accomplish and the pacing needs. I shuffle possible places and characters back and forth in my head.

By the time I sit down to write the first rough draft of the scene, I have pictures and dialog. I can drop into the scene. I can go in there and throw words down.
But the rough draft continually tosses up stuff I didn't plan. I never saw it coming. Stuff that surprises the heck out of me.


2) Did the idea for THE SPYMASTER'S LADY arise from your love of the time period or did you research as you wrote?

I was familiar with the time and place.  Writing gave me an excuse to learn even more.

I knew I wanted to write genre Romance in the Napoleonic time period.
(Such sexy clothes.)
What I love about this era . . .
This two or three decades when the Eighteenth Century turned into the Nineteenth is the great watershed in how people in the Western World think about human rights and freedoms, about the importance of the individual.

There is a tremendous philosophical battle going on in this period. When the Declaration of Independence says -- "We hold these truths to be self evident; that all men are created equal." -- this is a New and Exciting Idea.

image attribution Blastmilk.

Progress on JUSTINE

I'm going to have to get used to calling this manuscript JUSTINE, instead of ADRIAN.

I'm 16,600 words into the first rough draft. 

Maybe this sounds like lots of words.  But not so much.   These are wild, whirling, mostly useless words that are me seeing the story in a blurry way and reporting on it very fast as the film runs by.

Most of the words will never make it into the final manuscript.  What the First Rough Draft mostly does is show the shape of the scenes.

First Rough Draft Progress:

Now I'm also about 4000 words into the 120,000 words that will make up the second draft.

Why I'm setting toe into the second draft . . .

Normally I'd finish Draft One all the way through before I started Draft Two,
but I needed chapters to send in with the book proposal, so I took the first four chapters of the rough draft and polished them up a bit.

Second Draft Progress:


The sun came in through the window this morning, so I thought I'd share with anyone who's clouded over today.