Technical Topics -- Paragraphing

I got asked about paragraphing down in the comment trail.  This is one of those topics a bit beyond my skill to talk about, but I will attempt it.

The problem with paragraphing is that it's nine-tenth easy routine. Obvious routine. But then the last tenth of paragraphing is magical handwaving and art.

Easy stuff first.

Add Cleverness

I hate it when the characters are supposed to do something particularly clever.

I put it in brackets. 
[Adrian and Justine figure this out, being clever] 
And then when I come back I sit and look at it and can't come up with anything.

I am not feeling clever at all.
The garbage disposal has stopped working, which may have something to do with a quantity of activated charcoal getting down into its little innards.  The light bulb on the microwave has broken. I have never had the lightbulb in a microwave stop working.  And the bottled water dispenser beeps at me when the water runs out. So stupid of it.
I know there's no more water.  I push the button -- see -- and nothing comes out.

I am disgusted with civilization.  I am going to get me nine bean poles and a hive for the honey bee and just not possess anything with electrons running through it except possibly the computer. 
Hah!!

I will get next winter's firewood delivered and go stack that and maybe put my spirit on a more even keel.

In other news, I have figured out that I own 80 linear feet of books.

I'm rounding the corner on the last section of the ms. Looks like the Very Rough Draft of JUSTINE is going to fall at 100,000 words. That means I'll be adding much layering and description to the Second Rough Draft.


I go back and forth on liking the plot structure. Right now, I feel ok about it.

I just finished reading Laura Kinsale's Midsummer Moon. 

(Pause to say -- Why did they give Kinsale such dreadfully bland and forgettable titles?  Why?  Why?  Why?  That one should have been titled 'What the Hedgehog Saw' and then I would remember the title and everyone else would too.)

I will not be able to read Kinsale again till I am at a stopping point in JUSTINE because she is so good she makes me want to cry and just stop writing prose and go be a greeter at Walmart or go back in the Foreign Service and get sent to Afghanistan.

Yet More Questions

Way down the posting trail . . . going back to January . . . there's a bunch of postings answering questions I got asked here and there. 

I didn't finish with them.  Here's some more:

So. 
You have questions?

12) You had some fresh and unexpected twists -- did these come to you with your first draft or did you work in these twists during your revision process?

I am delighted you think some of this was fresh and exciting.

Let me talk about the blindness plotting because it's fairly typical of how this works.

Annique's blindness was part of the original planning of the story. This was also the plot idea I had the most doubts about. I liked writing it, but I didn't think it would sell. Even in the final manuscript I was wondering if I shouldn't rewrite and pull it out.

I still don't know if the book wouldn't be better without it.

The blood relationship between Annique and Galba was also part of the original plotting. I needed this to make Annique's final welcome into the British fold plausible.

So, yes, the action/suspense/spy plot of the story was pretty much in my head when I began writing.

But then you have the surprises.

Annique's special memory was something I came up with the second or third or fifth draft of the story. Originally I had her smuggling around a book with all this information in it. Awkward and unworkable.


So some plot twists were there in the original basket.  Some of the plot ideas I started with got tipped out of the basket along the way.  And then there's some interesting stuff I picked up as I wandered tra la la down the path and I didn't think of it at all till I was in the middle of writing.


12)  Any authors or books you feel you learned from either fiction or non-fiction?

I steal from only the best, so   You know how they have these questions on interveiws about what books most influenced you?

I love this, because I pick up stuff everywhere and I just wish I could acknowledge it all.

When I was in grammar school, Fifth Grade maybe, I read Coming of Age in Samoa by Margaret Mead. The book said that the different roles taken by males and females, even the different temperament that is assumed to be proper to each sex, is determined by the society rather than by anything innate.

I never write a female character without asking myself . . . 'this bit that my heroine is doing -- is this something I could see a male doing? Am I assigning this character a 'female' role and making her passive or dependent by doing so? What am I saying about the female spirit when I write this?'

Fiction that influenced me? . . . well, it's all the usual suspects:  Bronte, Heyer, Austen, Sayers, Dunnett, Sergeanne Golon and another writing team, the Curtises, R.A. Heinlein, Bujold, Lackey,and Zelazny, (all great S.F. storytellers), Tolkien, (is there anyone who doesn't put Tolkien on these lists?)

Current Romance greats would include -- and Lord, this is not limited to these wonderful writers -- SEP, JAK, NR, Kinsale, Ivory, Chase, Kleypas, Beverley, Gabaldon, Gellis, Quinn, Putney, Balogh.
I've read every word these writers have in print.  I keep learning from them.

(ETA.  It was pointed out to me that I've used 12 twice.  Well, heck.)

14)  How do you feel winning the RITA impacted your career if it did?

The conventional wisdom is that winning the RITA has zero effect on sales. Readers have never heard of the award. They don't know what it means.  Marketing mavens who will slap on a big cover quote from the 'Yellowknife Morning Chronicle' won't bother to mention the RITA.

But writers know what the RITA means.  Writers award the RITA. This is writers honoring other writers.  So much an honor.  I'm still stunned whenever I see the golden lady sitting on my shelf.

Going back to the practical of whether a RITA win has an effect on sales . . .
There's this -- while readers maybe don't know the RITA, the people who work in agenting, editing, marketing and publishing Romance do. The book buyers for stores know what the award is.
So maybe the RITA will give me just a little blip of recognition with these folks.
It can't hurt, anyway.


I haven't run out of these questions, y'know.  I just figure folks are getting bored, along about now.
Not that that makes me turn off the spigot on a posting, generally.
Anyway, I'll be back with the other Q&A
eventually.

Dreaming . . . Dreams, dreams, dreams . . .

Thinking about using dreams in a story.

First off -- if anybody wants to write dreams, they should go for it. There's the vast panoply of Western literature to back you up. It's full of dream sequences.

The downside of using a dream sequence is . . .

-- With a dream sequence, the reader 'sees' the technique. She gets a glimpse of the stagehands moving the props around, as it were.  It's an inherently intrusive technique -- like chaptering.  But, unlike chaptering, it's unusual enough that the reader notices.  It's heavy handed.  Or heavy footed.  Or something.

Injecting Present Tense

I was pondering verb tenses the other day. Thinking about the tenses we employ when we write in Past Tense, as we generally do.


'Past Tense' should really be called 'past tenses' because you got yer
Simple Past Tense, [Myrtle hunted,]
and yer Past Progressive, [Myrtle was hunting,]
and yer Past Perfect, [Myrtle had hunted,]
and yer Past Progressive, (or Past Perfect Continuous,) [Myrtle had been hunting.]

And there may be some others, for all I know.  All these verb tenses carefully define relationships between the particular bits of the past when stuff is happening. They are the 'home tense'.

The JUSTINE Manuscript

Justine comes along slowly.
Slowly . . . slowly . . . slowly.

I've finished up a big section and I'm moving on to new territory.
Trying to limit the number of characters in the manuscript. 
Trying to simplify this maze of a plot.



I'm about 50K words into the Very Rough Draft.

More Maunderings About Saidisms

Responding in the comment trail, I got all talkative about saidisms and rules and thought I'd stretch out and natter about that in a post instead of trying to fit everything into the little comment box.

 I saw the Guardian article with many Writers' Ten Rules of Writing.  It's here,  I enjoyed it up down and sideways, of course, and found it interesting and educative.

One problem with rules is that they tend to tell you what not to do.
But people don't read books because of the tremendous number of adverbs the writer didn't employ.  They read books because of what the author is doing right.

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.

When to use saidisms.

A 'saidism' is one of those nifty replacements for 'said'.
He whispered, he noted, he declared, he suggested, he promised and so on and on and on.  

You run into the rule sometimes --
No Saidisms.

And it just seems so wrong.

What it is . . .

there's this unfortunate tendency of novice writers to pluck creative dialog tags, apparently at random, from a list they have in the back of their three-ring binder from sixth grade.

This leads the friendly folks who put together writing books to grow thin and haggard and tear their hair out and make a rule
No Saidisms
which probably relieves their minds considerably,

but it's, like, y'know, more of a guideline.

When do we use saidisms?

Lots of places.

Pretty obviously, the first thing we ask ourselves when we come up with a nifty saidism is whether this word
-- and all the information packed into this word --
has been put into a dialog tag because we need that information.

Are we writing he complained because the complaining is important
or have we just decided to tag dialog in a novel way because we're sick of using 'said' and Mrs. Grundy told us in sixth grade not to repeat words?

A dismaying proportion of the saidisms used by novice writers are information that
-- does not need to be conveyed,
-- or can be revealed another, better, way,
-- or is exaggerated or inappropriate.



When you use a saidism, what you get, a lot of times, is:

"I'll tell them to leave the mayo off your sandwich," Maurice stated . . . (or declared, cajoled, promised, expostulated, argued, complained, opined, or maintained.)

Really.  No.
Don't use that saidism.  Use 'he said.'
Maurice didn't promise or declare.
He just said it, for Pete's sake.


Before we use a saidism, we assure ourselves the saidism is logical and necessary and not exaggerated and we're dealing with information the reader must be told.


Even if this is necessary information -- is a dialog tag is the best way to get it across to the reader??

The brute force way to determine this is to try out a couple different techniques that convey this necessary and exciting information.

One way to convince ourselves we don't really need to tell the reader that Maurice is asserting and maintaining and cajoling about mayonnaise is to drag those saidisms out of the dialog tag and put them into action or internals.  That's when we suddenly realize that Maurice ain't doing any such thing as cajoling, nohow.

Anyhow . . . let's say we got this character is whispering.

First we satisfied ourselves that the character is really whispering
and not just 'saying'.  

We also decided we need to tell the reader the character is whispering
and we have decided that the nature of the dialog itself and the surrounding action does not at this time make it clear this is all in whispers.


Ok.  So, having got those questions out of the way, we look at our saidism as a dialog tag --

She whispered, with a child’s simplicity, “I do not need to see your face, Citoyenne Finch.”

We change it around a bit. Take it out of the dialog tag and put it into action or description or internals.

They could only speak in whispers. She said, with a child’s simplicity, “I do not need to see your face, Citoyenne Finch.”

We convey it in Internal Monolog.

I must not be overheard. She said, with a child’s simplicity, “I do not need to see your face, Citoyenne Finch.”

We drop the information into description.

“I do not need to see your face, Citoyenne Finch.” The words snaked out from under the rain; words made of cool wavery sounds.


When we look at these couple alternatives, the simplicity of simply laying out the whisper as a dialog tag is obvious.
We place the saidism in this sentence and we know it's right.
We can break that 'no saidisms rule' and still sleep easily at night which is nice.

Speaking generally, it has been my experience that verbs in the class of saidisms that relate to the actual mouth-moving action of speaking,
like whispered, murmured, muttered, yelled, spat out, grated under his breath, and so on
 are the most apt to become elegant and thrifty dialog tags.

They are simple, straightforward actions that lend themselves to expression as simple action verbs.

Having determined that we should tell the reader about the mouth movements, we may often do this with a saidism.


Moving along -- there is a much larger class of saidisms that show intent and emotion. Avowed, complained, averred, promised, guessed, questioned, concluded, wished, harassed, rejoiced, mourned, remembered, and so on.

These are the saidisms that end up getting latched onto sentences that do not deserve them.
What we tend to forget is that these are powerful words. You can't just drop them down anywhere.

This is where we get the infamous:

"I'll tell them to leave the mayo off your sandwich," he promised. Or avowed, stated, maintained, declared, cajoled, expostulated or stone-walled.

All those words are too important and exciting to get attached to a sentence about mayo.  They are BIG.  In this case, he didn't promise or declare.
He just said it, for Pete's sake.


Speaking very generally again,
these saidisms that carry intent and emotion are full of complex information and abstract concepts.

The concepts are so big and floppy they want to spread out comfortably in Internal Monolog, in other internals, or in the dialog itself, or in really sneaky and significant accompanying action.
 The information -- and we are assuming it is vitally necessary information and relevant and all that -- doesn't like to be crammed into a dialog tag.

Let's say we have something to say about Hawker's state of mind.

“You don’t eat your own donkey. And you don’t use your own woman as bait,” Hawker complained. "That’s one of those delicate distinctions gentlemen make.”


or

“You don’t eat your own donkey. And you don’t use your own woman as bait,” Hawker said sarcastically. "That’s one of those delicate distinctions gentlemen make.”

But let's put it into action instead.

“You don’t eat your own donkey. And you don’t use your own woman as . . .” Hawker kicked a loose chunk of cobble in the gutter. It rolled end-over-end and rapped up against a wall. “bait. That’s one of those delicate distinctions gentlemen make.”

The action carries the big, complex emotion in a way the dialog tag can't.

 If we have an emotion to convey, we take it out of the dialog tag where it is all cramped up and simplified. We stop trying to compress big important emotion into the tone of a voice. In IM, in action, in description, we can use more words, basically.
And it lets us pull in some images we got lying around in our brains doing nothing in particular.

The final class of saidism is the fairly innocuous
replied, answered, repeated, interrupted, cut off, and so on.

These talk about the mechanics of the dialog train. Useful friends of the writer, this lot, but only if the answering or repeated or interrupting is significant.

We don't use them when it is obvious that one line of dialog is in answer to the other. (Well . . . duh.) We don't use them when the act of answering or repeating is not in itself important.

The whole -- 'when do we use saidisms' question -- is like talking about anything else in writing.  You read the advice in the writing books.  Take some.  Leave some.  Some gets rained out.

And we got book covers pretty much galore

In the interests of bringing exciting covers to my blog ...  Here is Cathy Clamp's Serpent Moon and the May trade reprint of Spymaster's Lady.
Annique certainly gets around, doesn't she?

(I moved all these covers below the cut, so browers won't have a hard time loading the blog, which I think they may do, sometimes.)

Happy Chinese New Year

This is especially fun for me since I have Chinese relatives.

photocredit Susan Watkins Schwartz

More work on the galleys

This is @ Ev, Linda and Annie down in the comment trail.  I started a reply to comment and then it just growed.  So I pulled it up here to make a regular post out of it.
I get prolix. This is why I do not tweat.  Or tweet.  Or whatever.

The galleys . . . I think I am a little dyslexic or something. I have never been able to spell and if there are two periods where there should only be one, I literally do not see it.

Trying to fix the galley drives me insane.

Though sanity may be over-rated.

I sit here right now, looking at
(jo checks)
page 335 out of 392 densely-written pages. Yet another page to check line by line by line by line, (This is like getting your teeth cleaned with the little buzzy drill at the dentists ouch ouch ouch,)
all the while getting yelled at by my Internal Editor who says I could have done this or that much better.

The cat walks over the keyboard, gently shedding cat hairs, generously adding random keystrokes.

The dog -- she is my henchdog --(hench comes from OE hengest meaning horse so this is probably not a logical formation but whatthehell, Archie. Toujours gai.) sits and WATCHES me, ready to rise and accompany me on our next foray. (From ME forrai, to plunder.) Having something lie there and be intensely loyal to you is very distracting.

We will not take our usual walk. The big lumberyard where we've been going to do walks had all its building roofs cave in last week under the weight of snow. The irony of an establishment that sells pre-assembled roof trusses for a living having its own roofs fail did not escape me.

And there might be wolves, y'know, coming down from the hills. There might be wolves.


Let me tell you about the storm.

The day before the big snowstorm, in the spirit of longstanding storm-panic tradition, I decided to pick up a spare gallon of milk.

There are two grocery stores in my neck of the woods.

There is the old Food Lion where you can buy chicken necks and slim jims and collard greens and there is the big new shiny Harris Teeter where you can buy wasabi and sushi and there is a choice of four kinds of organic, free-range eggs.

(I do not buy eggs because I have an 'in' with a woman who keeps chickens. I know the name of the particular hen who lays each of the eggs. Some of the eggs are green. I find this weird.)

Anyhow. I went into Harris Teeter and the shelves were . . . eerily empty.

It was like one of those movies where the world is going to end so everybody grabs up their arsenal of automatic weapons and climbs into their RVs, (8 mpg on a highway,) loads up on Little Debbies and Ding Dongs and Classic Coke, and heads out to the wastelands where they will naturally be invisible to the technology of aliens who have just crossed interstellar space.

Nothing on the shelves. No milk, no eggs, no soft drinks, no snack chips, no cheese, no bread, no oranges, no strawberries, no blueberries, and one lone, battered and unappealing melon. No yoghurt.

The clientele is admittedly pretty Yuppie-heavy, but what kind of emergency strips out every brand of yoghurt?

Every shopping cart was in use. I went through the checkout line -- I'd picked up a loaf of raisinbread that had somehow been overlooked since I was there anyway -- and had a nice chat with the lady from the accounting department who had been pressed into service. Apparently, it had been frantic-horde-of-locusts all day.

The bottled water was all gone.

(Hello . . . People. What do you think is going to fall from the sky? Lead shot? Cornmeal?)

So I went across the street to Food Lion where they had milk and tortillas and lettuce, all of which I bought, and then I went home to hunker down, somewhat underprepared for Armegedon, but then, who among us is not?

I worked onward.  Page 120.  Page 185.  Page 236.  Every time I got so disgusted and weary I couldn't look at the galleys for one more minute I went in and made brownies or something else unhealthy. If I have to face the end of the world, I'm not going to do it on yoghurt.

You know how there are background tasks that go on when your computer is working on somethingelsealtogether? You can look at the task manager and see them in realtime, using up 5% of CPU or 8%.

That's how it is with me and the JUSTINE manuscript. All the time I'm proofing galley I'm working on JUSTINE in the background about 5%.

The good news is I changed my mind about how to handle the first lovescene in JUSTINE. I have a roughed-in a first draft of something unambitious in the way of tab A and slot B. But now I think I'm going to do something more risky. (Risky, not risqué. *g*)

If I write it to do everybody justice, I'll be working a good bit beyond my technical competence and my writerly skill and my all-round maturity and I will definitely be out of my comfort zone. I will probably flop badly. But I guess I gotta try.

So that's what I decided while I was snowed in with the galleys.

And the cat.

And the dog.

the photcredit for the supermarket is nsub1 and it's not me locally.  but that's what it all looked like.

Prooding the glleys

Proofing the galleys, I mean.

This takes a while.

What you have is a copy of the manuscript,
your manuscript,

and YOU ARE NOT ALLOWED TO FIX IT

except for typos.

If I could SEE the bloody typos I wouldn't have made them in the first place, now would I?

All I can see are things that it is too late to fix.  Hah!

I find this frustrating and become forlorn.

So I am including a picture of my cat because my cat is a very restful and centering creature even though she has the intelligence of bovril.

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.

Technical Topic -- What is 'voice'?

This is another of those bits of writing that I posted elsewhere and decided to drag up here to my lair,
just on the chance it might be useful to someone.

Looking at Voice.
Not saying anything about how to write voice just here and now  . . .
But looking at 'What is voice?'

When an author has a strong 'voice' you can flick the book open anywhere and the vocabulary choices, pacing, cadence, imagery and so on tell you that you have a Dorothy Dunnett in your hand as opposed to a Wodehouse or an Agatha Christie or Dorothy Sayers or Wilkie Collins.


These writers have a recognizable 'voice'. It is found everywhere in the book, in all character POVs.

Now, just to be confusing, we use the same word -- 'voice' -- when we talk about aspects of characterization.

Each character in a good work of fiction has a distinct voice in dialog. That's his 'voice'.
The same dialog 'voice' is found in the POV character's internals.

In POV we are also immersed in the POV character's distinct worldview and beliefs, the character's physicality, observations, memory, knowledge, and the character's emotional reactions.

These attitudes and motives are also part of the character's 'voice'.

A 'Narrator' may be added to a story as a distinct character. In this case, the Narrator will also have a distinct voice.
As a general rule, none of the character voices -- not even the Narrator --represents the author talking to the audience. A Narrator is just as much a fictional creation as Peter Rabbit.

So ...

-- An author's 'voice' is how the author writes every part of the story. Stephen King's voice or Emile Loring's voice.

-- Character 'voice' belongs to each fictive creation -- Heathcliffe or Eliza Dolittle or Sinbad the Sailor's voice. This character voice is found in (a) dialog, (b) the language of internals, (c) the constellation of belief, motive, and emotional response that is the character persona.

image attribution josephthornley

Your suggestions welcome . . at Yale.

Want to add your comments/book suggestions to the
'Reading the Historical Romance' Course
at Yale?

In the comment trail, Cara Elliott (Andrea Pickens, Andrea DaRif )  writes:

*********

Hi Jo,


Thanks for posting the syllabus and reading list here. Lauren and I are having an amazing time teaching this course—the student discussions are wonderful!

I know we're going to get LOTS of comment about the reading lists. We know we've left off many great books, but we did it rather quickly and consider it a work in progress. Everyone should feel free to give us suggestions. Just visit my website and send me an e-mail.

Best,
Cara Elliott

**************

Information on the course here.  Syllabus here.  Supplemental Reading List here.

So many books . . . so little time ...

Bibliography of Romance Novels

In re the Academic Study of Romance.
For all you home gamers:

Here -- I don't know how long this will be posted so you may want to copy it -- is the
Supplemental Reading List for Yale College seminar, “Reading the Historical Romance Novel”  Instructors: Andrea DaRif (Cara Elliott) and Lauren Willig

First Chapters and The Central Conflict

Yet again taking words I've written elsewhere and tucking them in my cheek pouches and bringing them home --


In a discussion of whether stories should start with the central conflict
or not . . .

My characters hit the ground running. They are immediatrly in action that is directed literally or metaphorically towards the main plot conflict.

The last couple chapters solve the central problem.
I want my first chapter to open the central problem of the story.
And just to be holisitc and fancy about writing, I want an 'echo' between the beginning and the ending chapters.

If the conflict is resolved when (a) the hidden plans are disposed of and (b) the villain is foiled . . .
I want to open the story with the heroine being tortured by the villain in re the whereabouts of those plans. 
(The Spymaster's Lady)

If the conflict is resolved when the heroine succeeds in (a) freeing the hero and (b) saving what is most valuable from the wreck of civilization . . .
I want the story to open with the heroine's determination to free the innocent and the wreck of civilization still smoking in the background.
(Forbidden Rose)

So, the first chapter is not just a hook, not just interesting action, not just: 
this is where everything changes;  this is the point of no return; this is the hero's worst day ever.

The first chapter sets the protagonist point blank against the central problem of the story. And he, (or in my case, she,)  is taking action.

Galley of Forbidden Rose

The galley has arrived.

And the betas are on board.

Once upon a time this galley would have been a big ole pack of paper, brought to the door by UPS.  Now it is a pdf file, and I print it out myself and mark it up and e-mail a list of corrections back to the admirable Editorial Assistant at Berkley.

This is much more efficient. 

The galley is when you see 3000 things you want to change and you can fix 32 typos.