Technical Topics-- Those Gestures

Somebody asked elsewhere

 -- paraphrasing here --

"How do we find ways to describe the exact motion of jerking a thumb in some direction or nodding in agreement?"

It's hard to find lovely unique ways to describe some of those, "He jerked his chin in the direction of the cyclops," or "He pointed to where the treasure was buried," situations.

But we can step back and consider gestures in a wider sense.

The words that describe the movement of body parts depend on:
Whose POV are you in?
What emotion and meaning do the physical movements represent?
What reaction are you trying to call from the reader?

(My first advice is to get hold of some Dorothy Dunnet and watch her characters do gestures and indicate things. She is just so good.)

Now, I have my WIP in front of me -- the Pax Manuscript.  Let me look at some of the head/face/hand movements and try to figure out why I did them the way I did.

***
"Something stronger?" Galba nodded toward the upper shelf where a bottle of twenty-year-old brandy inserted itself into a row of books.
****

Simple straightforward nod. You get to do five or six nods in a manuscript. Don't beat yourself up about it.
Not everything has to be fancy.

(Never use nods to tag dialog. You're just wasting one of those five or six nods you're entitled to.)


***

She tossed her last handful of crumbs to the birds, dusted her hands, and motioned to the errand boy who was heading out into the square with a package under his arm.
***

Now 'motioned' is about as weak as you can get in the way of description.
Does she raise her hand up over her head and wave it back and forth? Does she make a beckoning with just her fingers?
We don't know.

But we don't have to know.
We can be vague for three reasons.

(a) The purpose and outcome of the gesture are crystal clear and straightforward and have no hidden depths.
The gesture doesn't mean more than 'come here'.

(b) We have a picture of what's going on. We 'see' her dust her hands of breadcrumbs. With that strong visual laid down, we can be vague about the beckoning part that comes next.

(c) Doesn't matter what the reader imagines that gesture to look like. We don't minutely describe it because it is inherently not important.

All that said, we don't use weak words like 'motioned', 'gestured', 'moved', 'pointed', 'indicated' and so on but two or three times each in any mansucript.


Here's another:
***
He'd left France with various English coins, handy for bribing. He fumbled one loose. Turned out to be a shilling.

He held it up. "There's two of these waiting for you at Number Seven, if I catch up with her." He

closed his hand and got ready to tuck the coin back in his pocket.

The boy's eyes shifted. "Down there." He pointed east. "She give me halfcrown to say she gone t'other way."

He flipped the shilling to the boy. Collect two more tonight."
*****

All these motions with the coin, with the boy's eyes, with his pointing, convey complex intention. But this is one of those counter-intuitive cases where the gestures are filled with information, but the intention doesn't live in the details of the motion.

We don't have to describe the exact gesture of tucking the coin away. The meaning of that gesture stands there shouting. It doesn't need the support of visuals. It doesn't need the internals to spell out what's going on.


Sometimes, a gesture needs support.
If we say merely,
She thumbed at the air behind her in the direction of Codyville.
"We go that way."
the motion sticks out like ... well ... a sore thumb, and we keep wanting to say something exciting and specific about the thumb motion itself.
But the motion of the thumb is not important.

It's the mood, intention, meaning and so on that's essential. So you put your creative energy into talking about mood, intention, internals and so on of the thumb stick rather than trying to describe the arc of the thumb with great beauty and vividness.

She clenched her teeth, making a sound midway between a dentist's drill and a pot boiling over. When she thumbed the air behind her in the direction of Codyville, it was if a particularly nasty ghost was following her and she had some hope of putting out its eye.
"We go that way," she said.

The second passage doesn't define the movement of the thumb any more clearly,
but we've added so much value to that motion in internals we don't have to add value to the simple physical act.

Thumbing toward something or jerking a chin in the direction of something you can maybe do twice in a manuscript.

After that your folks have to keep their chins and thumbs still and maybe just glance that way (2 times), indicate with a subtle lift of an eyebrow (once), roll their eyes toward (once), motion a languid hand in that direction (once), indicate with a hunch of the shoulder (once), nod toward (you have 5 or 6 nods, total), grimace at (once), twist to look at (once), notice over their left shoulder (once) ... well, you get the idea.

Another movement of hands:

***
She pressed her hands together in her lap, knuckle to knuckle, and waited.
****

Here, the motion and placement of the digits is important. We describe the exact location and placement of the hand because it is the visual that creates atmosphere for the reader. The visual itself becomes the comment.

I don't add internals. I pack information into the gesture.







****
Deliberately, she calmed her hands and set them together, loose in her lap. Her hands would whisper,

"I am not worried. I'm prepared to deal with you." It was an old saying of the Baldoni that lies are not words only. One deceives with every fingernail and toe.
***

And here we have both detailed motion and internals. Here the reader doesn't need to interpret the meaning of the hand motion and placement. I tell her what it means. Belt and suspenders, as it were.

A Regency Magic Lantern

Before moving pictures.  Before silent film.  Before black and white.  Before Clara Bow and Charlie Chaplin.
  

There was the Magic Lantern.



Let's say you're a Regency thrillseeker, out to squeeze all possible enjoyment from an evening.  You might go to a Magic Lantern show at a friend's house. You might put one on yourself.



People had known more or less forever that light shining through colored glass carried that color to where the light fell.  Every stained glass window in Europe, even every translucent leaf in the sunlight, every light source shining through colored glass cast an image.


The beauty of that.  A picture painted in light.



Read the rest here at Word Wenches ...

The Animals in Our Lives

Joanna here, talking about some of the animals who share my world.

I moved up to the mountains not so very long ago and, in the fullness of time, spring came tripping over the threshold.  Along about April I generally fill the hummingbird feeder and mount it on a pole.

Less appealing than Australian possums

This year I figgered it was kinda useless trying to attract hummingbirds.  I'm fairly high up.


But I'm a dreamer so I set out the nectar.

I called them and they came.  Beautiful humming birds were weaving back and forth in the air a half hour after I offered them a place to feed.
Lovely colors.  So magical.  So amazing.

Then there's my possum. 
He doesn't show up as much since I stopped waking up in the morning, shivering, stoking the woodstove, and opening the door to scatter two handfuls of seed out across the top of the snow for the birds up here.
All this before I got a cup of coffee.

There are those who advocate arising with the dawn and sitting down at the computer while the trailing mists of dreams still linger in the mind.  Somehow I never seem to manage this.


Other Word Wenches talk about the animals in their lives here.

Technical Topic -- When They Get It On and Story Structure

Elsewhere, someone asks
-- I'm paraphrasing here --

"Can I put my big consummation scene as the end of the story?"

I love to see the straightjacket sructure of genre Romance shaken up a little.  I really do.  But I had to be a bit discouraging about this.
 
This below is me being discouraging because I am just the slave and dogsbody of plotting structure.

Problem? -- Denouement resolves it

Romance genre books have a conflict, (often two conflicts -- one in the outer world, one in an inner, emotional world,) that keeps the H&H from their happy ending.

In plottingspeak, the scene where the conflicts come to a final, explosive resolution is the climax or denouement.

Digressing here: 

Dénouement is a French word meaning literally, the untying'.   
Dénouer = 'to untie'  Noer = knot.
Denouement seems to have entered the English language in the mid Eighteenth Century, before which we presumably didn't do this in our plots.

So, the resolution of about-all-conflict is the denouement scene.
And it comes near the end of the book because -- hey -- solve the conflict and the book is over.

To get a sense of how denouement works, pick thirty books off your keeper shelf. You know what the conflict/s are in each of these. Flip to the tail end and work your way backwards till you come to the moment these conflicts are resolved.

What does the author put in after that denouement?

All's well

After the denouement we generally get an 'all's well' scene or two, a return to normalcy, a tying up of any bits that weren't clear before, an epilog to show a happy future. And this part of the book is short, because the reader is already leaning forward in the chair, about to put the book down with a happy sigh and go fix a pot of tea.




In movies, we see denouement and falling-off ending very clearly.  When Luke blows up the Death Star, the next scene is a set-piece of him getting a medal. When the Disney Prince battles Teh Ebil and wins, the next scene is H&H riding off into the sunset.

Folks who watch more movies than I do would have better examples.
  

Does the Big Consummation scene belong after the denouement?

detailed consummation happening onstage

In straight Romance -- this isn't true of Erotica, of course -- a unique 'detailed consummation happening onstage' is a Big Deal Scene.
We expect emotional consequences of the First Sex Act.
We expect plot results.
We want to know what happens afterwards.
We are enthralled by it.

This emotional impact, this expectation of fallout and change, this sheer story 'size' of scene, make the First Big Sex suited to the onrushing torrent of the main plotline. This Great White Shark of a scene doesn't fit well into the little spray puddle that is the plot space after the denouement.

Regency Pastels

I've just had Pax do a portrait with charcoal, ink and pastels.
Him being an artist of sorts.

So I have all this spare information about pastels floating around in my head, 
and I wrote a posting over at the Wenches for anyone who wants a very brief look at art materials of the Regency.

I found it all interesting myself.

 

He's using a brass pastel holder.

Regency visual artists were about half way along the technological journey between the Neolithic Cave painters and one of those high-tech computer painting programs.  The fine work, the beautiful work, the Regency artists created was accomplished with the most simple tools and a limited array of colors.
 
Let me talk about pastels, because Pax uses pastels.  I think of pastel as a portable and democratic art form in Georgian and Regency times.   If you are a spy pretending to be an artist, or vice versa, you would carry a sketchbook and maybe pastels because they're fast to use and cheap.
And, like, portable.

Portraits in these readymade crayons offered tangible advantages over oil for the artist and the sitter: they required fewer sittings as there was no drying time; less paraphernalia; the materials were easily portable and the costs were lower.
      The Rise of Pastel in the Eighteenth Century, Margery Shelley

Just a whole bunch of pastels.  From the Met

These pastels were made by grinding natural white chalk -- something you can pick up off the ground in places like Southeast England -- into a fine powder. You mixed this with pigment and a binder like gum arabic.  You rolled the mixture into thin cylindrical sticks or long square sticks and dried them.  These were 'soft pastels'.  They were just super concentrated colors that transferred readily to the paper.

They called pastels 'crayons' in the Regency -- so confusing -- because the waxy colored sticks we think of as 'crayons' wouldn't be invented for another century.

 The most exciting recent innovation for our Regency pastel artist would have been the Conté crayon,  invented in France in 1794.  These were made from kaolin clay and graphite and fired in a kiln.  They were much harder than the chalk-based soft pastel sticks, and came in a smaller range of colors.  They could be sharpened.  They were good for tight, crisp lines and fine detail, and often used to lay down the first sketch on paper.  
 

Detail of picture above

You had a potential for vivid color, but in a medium likely to crumble and come apart in your hand and smear.  So the pastel sticks were fitted into a sort of metal holder that protected them and provided control and precision for the artist.

A holder for Conté pastels, about 6 inches long, brass

Because pastels were intended to be inserted into a holder, they were thinner than the ones we use today.  A square shape gave them stability in the holder. That's why the Conté pastels are square.

 

 Find the rest of this posting at Word Wenches, here.

Technical Topics -- How Does Action Relate to Length?

Starting out with an honi soit qui mal y pense, we're talking about how plot action relates to the number of words we need to write it.

Down in the comment trail, someone asks:

. . .  how do you judge if your plot is long enough? if you've got enough scenes or enough things going on to make a full length novel? This is a problem for me because I end up never writing because I've fretted over the story to death, wondering over the length.

It's an interesting part of writing -- this relationship between what's going on in the book and how long the book is.  How many words will we use to convey our action?

Now, the short answer is; everybody has to find this out for themselves.

The Writer's Journey ... if the writer is a dog

What we do -- we write and write and write and build up a stack of stories.

This is the writer's 'prentice work.  This is the garage band years.  Among the very many things we're learning on this first leg of our writing journey is how many words it takes us to get a particular bit of plot action across.

We sit down and put words on the page and -- hey -- we find out that a fight with six bad guys in a back alley needs 2000 words.  A love scene, on the other hand, just keeps stretching out and stretching out till it logs in at 8000.   Walking across a street might be 30 words of action in one scene and the same 30-ish words plus 1000 words of introspection in another.

We learn the flavor and grit and idiosyncrasy of our own writing only when we have some writing to look at.

Some of those half million words, y'know

After the first half-million words
-- did I mention we serve a half-million-word apprenticeship? --
we get a practical sense of how much heft different sorts of scene are going to add to the manuscript.  We get a storyteller's 'feel' for how words run the pacing to build that narrative drive we want so much.

I guess maybe this wasn't the short answer after all.

Okay.  Short answer:
Everybody writes differently and you won't know how many words it takes you to write your action until you've done some writing.

Will you be one of those excellent writers who shoot through 60 plot points in 70,000 words and the reader does not feel rushed?  Or will you be one who tells essentially the same story in 120,000 words and not one of those words is trimable excess?

All that said -- and wasn't that a lot of 'all'? --  I am not going to condemn you to months and years of writing before you get an answer to your question.
No.  I am not going to do that.
Because I know that would discourage me and I see no reason why it wouldn't be daunting to even the brave soul I imagine you to be.
So.

Sure to be interesting scenes in your story

Best answer to your question is to write maybe eight of nine scenes that occur in the story
-- scenes that you are particularly fond of and can picture very well --
and see how many words you use.

This will give you a ballpark estimate of your action-to-words ratio . . . remembering that your first ratio is not necessarily where you are going to end up after a year of hard work writing and thinking.


Two common problems writers may start out with are being prolix, (that is, being tediously lengthy, long-winded, verbose, flowery, writerly, indirect and generally slowing the pacing to a crawl,)  or, on the other hand,  telegraphing the story, (which is talking about the action and racing along, never adding the description and internals and suchlike that draw the reader in.)

The first sort of writer comes up with 257,000-word Historicals.  The second, with 45,000-word Contemporary Romances.  Both of these are ... problematic when it comes to selling them.

But, while the gift of storytelling is just that -- a gift -- and inborn, the craft of writing can be learned.  (Though 'prolix' may end up being fixed by your long-suffering editor who pulls out the blue pencil and just crosses out paragraph after paragraph of internal nattering.)
(Ask me how I know this.)

What's important here is that these technique problems and many others get fixed only after you lay down words to fix.  No draft material lined up in neat pixels on the screen = no way to learn how to lean down or buff up the prose.  No way to acquire the fine art of padding a too-short manuscript with an exciting subplot.  No set of deft editing scalpels with which to cut away the excess.  

Write because you delight in writing.  Let the story come as it will.  Trust that you will solve whatever technical problems beset you.

And if in the end you discover that your 'natural' writing length is epic fantasy or novella --

We live in exciting times.  There's a market for writing at about all lengths. 

stack of paper attrib elchupacabrito

Backstory -- Finally, Two Rules

For various complex reasons -- none of them interesting -- I was reading an old post I'd written about backstory.  I found two rules I've decided to repeat here, since -- heck -- it's already written.

Two Rules for Adding Backstory.

The first rule is the 'Packing for Tahiti' rule

which is to say

you don't need as much as you think ...

because mostly you'll end up swimming along fine

and wrapping a towel around you 
when you get out
and sometimes,

you can just go naked.

The second rule is the 'Tangled Skein of Fate' rule, where,
 (and this might only apply to me and my tendency to construct silly and complicated plot lines)
if you find yourself having trouble slipping in the backstory,
then maybe you should reconsider
the very existence of
your backstory.

Do you need all this who-struck-John complication?

But then, with me, the need to reconsider my backstory
strikes with great frequency.

Out-take from Spymaster's Lady

A bit of old draft attrib photostever

Doing other stuff today and writing on the WIP, I came across a bit of Spymaster's Lady that didn't make it into the manuscript. 
So I figgered --  I'm never going to use this.  Let's post it on the blog and maybe somebody can get something out of it.

This piece would have fit in the part of the story where Annique and Grey are first entering London.  Instead of passing through Covent Garden and heading off to Meeks Street, they stop for a while.   In this early draft version, Annique was going to write something important at this point.  That disappeared in a later draft.


The fictional locale -- this tavern -- continues to exist in the Spymaster's fictive world.  It just hasn't made its way into a book yet.

****

Covent Garden

ETA this first paragraph.

She had slept, on and off, through the night and the early morning while Robert, and the horse Harding, brought her all the way to London.  She awakened suddenly in the dawn to the sound of wagons on cobblestones and women in white kerchiefs selling ladles of milk from the huge cans on the back of their carts.  The sky was still pink when he brought her into the Covent Garden, which was not a garden at all but instead a market of incredible size, full of flowers and vegetables and chickens in cages, complaining.

In a street to the side of the market was the tavern called the Crocodile, which from the look of it was an accustomed meeting place of smugglers and other clandestine types.  They knew Robert well, but did not once say his name or look at him directly or ask for payment.  It was only 'Yes, Sir,' and they brought him ale to drink and a meal of beef which was a loathsome habit in the morning and thoroughly English.

For her, by some miracle, they conjured up black coffee in a tin pot and fresh rolls, so she was ready to forgive them as much as they wished.  She allowed Robert to gift her with that coffee and another meal later in the morning.  She did not have the strength to argue with him any longer, being disheartened and frightened by what she was about to do. 

He was an even more important smuggler captain than she had realized.  He sprawled at the end of the bench, his feet propped up, his back to the wall, his coat lapped about him, and dozed all the long morning.  Men of all types and degrees, and a few women, came and went from the tavern.  Not one glanced in his direction.  Only important men can be so anonymous. 

He made her safe there, from the denizens of that place and from those far worse who lurked in the streets outside.  In safety, she could perform the next step in the great task she had set herself.  She chose her spot, near the window where the light was good, and wrote and wrote and wrote in the small black book she had bought.

She held it now.  To buy a blank-papered exercise book and ink and quills and blotting paper had consumed three and tuppence.  But that was not in any way the cost of the book she turned over and over in her hands.

"I did not know I would be this afraid," she said.  "Or that I would be ashamed."

Robert stood beside her with his arms crossed.  It was as if he were on watch while some smuggled cargo was landed – alert and focused and awaiting events.  The horse Harding would have been more inquisitive.

********

ETA:  This out-take above slid into another, also not used.  So I will add that.  Two out-takes for the price of one.  Hey.  Such a deal.

Anneka, in this draft, is carrying a coded book to England.  She has promised Adrian to drop it off at Meeks Street.  As part of her own plans, she is doing that.

In the later draft I simplified the story and eliminated the whole six- or seven- thousand word subplot.  Aren't you glad? 

*****

She held it now.  To buy a blank-papered book and ink and quills and blotting paper had consumed two pounds, ten, and tuppence.  But that was not in any way the cost of the book she turned over and over in her hands.

"I did not know I would be this afraid," she said.  "Or that I would be ashamed."

Robert stood beside her with his arms crossed.  He was a brew of complex emotions, most of them hidden from her.

 Number Seven was made of gray stone.  Thin, white curtains hung in the windows, so one could see out of but not in.  She did not know if anyone were watching her at this moment.  "I must reveal myself to these men," she said.  "I have the greatest wariness of them.  Fouché's organization is the best on the earth, of course – those are the men in France I worked for when I was a spy, you understand – but these British are nearly as good.  I have been their enemy all my life.  Now I stand in their country not twenty feet from their stronghold.  It is a sobering thought.  I must leave London immediately when I have passed over this book to them."

"Yes," Robert said.

"You are being silent to me again."  The book was getting damp in her hands because they were sweating so.  "You have not even asked what it is I do here."

"You're going to bring that book to that house."

"Truly one would think you were a fish, the amount of curiosity in you.  What I do here is risk my neck, all so I may become a traitor to my people.  It will keep me awake at night for the rest of my life."

"I doubt it."  He was a man of many certainties, Robert the smuggler.

"Hah.  I will show you."  She opened the book and let the pages flow under her fingers.  "Look.  This is code.  Not one I know, and I have no skill in dissecting them.  But I do not need to take the code to pieces to know what is in here.  When I saw it first in France I saw at once what it must be, written in so many hands, with the numbers in it, and organized just so.  This is a report on the ships that Napoleon builds to invade England.  When and where and how.  It is the work of many cunning men, this book."

"I see."

"You do not see.  For you there would be no problem.  You are not political  You would toss it overboard, or light a fire with it, or give it to those men ..."  She glanced once more at Number Seven, Meeks Street.  "... in there.  It would be all the same for you.  For me, matters are less simple.  A mile from here is a man named Soulier.  A Frenchman.  By all the duty of my life, I should take this book to him." 

"Why don't you?"  Robert crossed his arms.

"Oh ... it is complicated."  She scuffed her feet upon the pavement.  "I made a promise, for reasons that seemed good at the time.  That is some of it.  But, in truth ...  "

Truth stuck in her throat, as it did, occasionally.  She would say it, though.  She would admit to herself what she was doing.  "I am come here to put a weapon into the hands of the English."

"A weapon?"

"Of a kind.  Not a weapon of soldiers.  One of politics.  Battles do not hinge upon seven ships here and twenty there, most of which the British have been told many times.  And they do not know of the false hulls, which will never be completed, and the many ships hidden in the south and ...   well, many matters that make this book not so correct as the men who wrote it would like to believe.  But I will not tell you these things.  They are not good for you to know."  She sighed.  "The dangerous secrets ... matters of battle plans and troops and supplies.  I assure you, they are not in this little book."  They were firmly in her brain.  But of that she refused to think at all. 

"Useless is it?"  Robert looked at her without any change of expression.  For all he was a smuggler captain and most intelligent, she could be speaking Romany to him.

"Useless to soldiers.   This is another sort of weapon.  Words can be most powerful, my Robert.  Your English diplomats will lay this tally of ships upon the conference table and give the lie to Buonaparte when he claims that he wishes peace and demands concessions."  She scowled at what she held, since it tormented her with several hard choices.  "This book will be the cat in the pigeons of many dovecotes.  The French, themselves, do not know of these ships.  The ordinary people.  They do not want more war."

"Nobody wants that."

"Perhaps not.  But those nobodys do not become traitors this fine morning."  She wiped first one hand, and then the other, upon her skirt.  "So I will tell the French what Citizen Buonaparte keeps up his sleeve.  And it may be the men of Paris and Lyon and Rouen will see that those hundred ships never sail at all.  I have planned this for a week, my betrayal of my country.  Now I must do it.  When I have finished, I shall be so disgusted with myself I shall not even care if Duval finds me."

"Don't be silly, Anneka." 

"You are right.  I shall still care and for that I despise myself also."  She shrugged.  "But this is to make a drama.  I have been well trained not to make the dramas.  Stay here, mon ami, when I go across and do this thing.  These are not people you should involve yourself with."

"I go with you."  He said it in a voice not susceptible to argument, being like paving blocks, set closely.  So she let him come because she was frightened and wanted him next to her, even if it were dangerous for him, a little.  With a man such as Robert beside her she could face even this. 

Dull and respectable was written on all the stones at Number Seven Meeks Street which showed that even stones could tell lies.  The wide door was placid, as if it were a mouth that had swallowed a thousand secrets and grown fat on them.  It was a solidly built house with bars on the windows.

"Go ahead, Anneka," Robert said.  "Let's get it over with."

So she rapped loudly, using the knocker which was in the form of a curled rose.  In a minute, a boy opened the door, taller than she was, but probably three years younger.  Anneka dropped the book quickly into his hands.  "A man asked me to bring this to you."

But the boy wasn't looking at her.  He was looking past her.  At Robert.

Robert took her shoulders, which startled her for it was the very first time he had willingly put his hands upon her.  The boy stepped back and Robert pushed her carefully and rapidly across the threshold, into the house, into a room which was a dull, tasteless parlor, stiff with disuse. 

"Robert ..."  She tried to turn, confused.  His hands tightened.  "I don't want to be here, Stop it, Robert."  The boy locked the door behind them and went to unlock another door on the far side of the parlor.

At Virginia Festival of the Book

This Saturday I'm signing at the Virginia Festival of the Book.
I would love to see folks there.

Also -- get a look at this lineup:

Tasha Alexander,
Grace Burrowes,
Mary Burton,
Kristen Callihan,
Liz Everly,
Jeaniene Frost,
Kim Harrison,
Madeline Iva,
Joshilyn Jackson,
Joyce Lamb,
Lydia Netzer,
Pamela Palmer,
Vicki Pettersson,          
Mary Jo Putney,
Deanna Raybourn,
Rosemary Stevens,
Jehanne Wake,      
Lauren Willig

Come hear them speak.  Meet them.  Buy their latest books.  Get some books signed.

Me, talking about books and the writing life

I'm HERE, at WMRA radio, talking about writing books and my life and my philosophy of storytelling and probably a few other things thrown in.

At the top of this interview I give an extemporaneous reading of an excerpt from The Black Hawk just to let everybody know why I do not generally attempt to give public readings that involve characters with British and French accents.  

Technical Topic -- Character and Query Letter

Someone asked elsewhere --

(I'm paraphrasing here)  "My story is about several main characters.  Which one do I build my query letter around?"

I have answers for about anything.

An ensemble cast of four, heigh-ho

So let's say your story follows four characters' intertwined lives. You want to know which of these four stories to emphasize in your query letter.

The really short answer is -- Any of them.
Your query letter can approach the manuscript  using any main character as your focal point.
I don't say you necessarily can talk about this manuscript mainly from the experience of the dog, but close.

If you have a strong instinct to cast the query using the story of LolaJo instead of Kindle, Edward, or Framis, then do so.
Nobody knows the story better than you.


But which is the optimal character?

Oh.  You want optimal?
I'd look at the manuscript as a whole and ask myself:

What's the point of the story?
What am I saying here?
Who gets the most on-stage time?
Who is present from pretty much the beginning to the end?
Who feeds us the most internals?
Whose problem fuels the action?
Whose resolution provides the emotionally satisfying ending?
Who has the most to gain or lose?
Who does the reader identify with?
When the last chapter rolls round, whose goal has been reached?'

This sort of stuff tells you who owns the story.

The general shape of the story also tells you.

Selecting the most important character in the room

If the manuscript is paced and plotted as a mystery -- if the point of the story is that a mystery gets solved -- I'd use the mystery-solver as the center of my query.
If the story is a Romance, I'd talk about the romantic couple.
If it's a coming-of-age story, I'd talk about my young person coming of age.
If this is a story of transformation of the antagonist, I'd choose the antagonist to talk about.

Your main and most active character is probably the one to pull front and center when you talk about your manuscript in the query.

ALA RUSA Shortlist

May I take a moment to toot my own horn say how proud and happy I am to have made the shortlist for the American Library Association, Reference and User Services Association Reading List.

"The Reading List annually recognizes the best books in eight genres: adrenaline (including suspense, thriller and adventure), fantasy, historical fiction, horror, mystery, romance, science fiction and women’s fiction. This year’s list includes novels that will please die-hard fans, as well as introduce new readers to the pleasures of genre fiction. Librarians can use the lists as resources for reader recommendations and collection development at their own libraries, or to build their personal to-be-read lists."

The Romance winner is:

“Firelight” by Kristen Callihan (Grand Central)

Bartered as a bride to the masked nobleman Benjamin Archer, Miranda Ellis – a woman with a supernatural secret – becomes his only defender when he is accused of a series of murders. This is a dark and smoldering Victorian paranormal where love redeems two complex and damaged characters.

Short List:

“The Black Hawk” by Joanna Bourne (Berkley) (Me! Memememe)
“At Your Pleasure” by Meredith Duran (Pocket Star)
“Lucky in Love” by Jill Shalvis (Forever)
“A Lady Awakened” by Cecilia Grant (Bantam)

I am in great company.  Just great.

Technical Topic -- The Regency Post Office

This is a very small historical tidbit post here.

It's the sort of thing I'd normally put into Word Wenches,
except that I find myself without the patience to ask permission for all the images I want to use.  I do not like to add links to a Wench posting because links do not last forever or sometimes even into the next month.

Anyhow, it's 1802.  (This is the Pax manuscript.)  We're in a country village near Cambridge -- the fictional Brodemere.  My character Cami looks over some correspondence that's landed on her desk. 

She picks up a letter that's come all the way across England, from London.

NOT from 1802 for oh so many reasons

The first thing you -- as a visitor from the distant future perched comfortably in her head -- would notice, is that there's no envelope.

Let me show you what the letter would not look like.
It wouldn't look like this over here to the right:

Her letter wouldn't be an envelope, with a pretty colored stamp, cancelled across the stamp by the post office. 

Envelopes on postal service delivery are still a generation in the future.   In fact, they weren't mass produced till 1845.   The post office charged by the sheet and an envelope counted as an extra sheet.  This is yet another piece of history driven by government regulation.

No stamp.  The first gummed postage stamp -- I'm talking here about a bit of paper you apply to a letter rather than stamping ink on with a big ole inked stamp -- is the 'Penny Black'.
It dates to 1840.

That's Queen Victoria on the Penny Black, btw.


"Wait," you say, for you have been paying attention.
"No envelopes?" you say.  "That's so weird," you say.


Well, yes and no.
I think letters often did often come in envelopes.
Just not letters delivered by the post office. 

Folks sending the footman crosstown or the groom cross country to hand-deliver invitations and secret love notes and blackmail requests probably made envelopes from their fancy writing paper in an origami sorta way.  Spies sending secrets in the diplomatic pouch probably used envelopes, and rich folk who didn't count the cost, and, I suspect, noblemen and MPs who franked their mail and got it free.

Mail was not universally envelope-less, IMHO.  But if it came by post, it often was.


Anyhow, there you are sitting at Cami's desk and you've remarked there's no envelope and no pretty colored postage stamps.


Next, you will note that everything is handwritten, (with a quill).  This will not surprise you since nobody's got a printing press at home and  I need hardly point out that the typewriter is an 1860s invention.
Third class junk mail is not even a bumf on the horizon.

Crossed. No relation to cross-eyed.

You may see an indecipherable mess of writing like that to the side.  Thrifty folks 'crossed' their letter so they didn't need to pay for an extra sheet.    They wrote first one way and then the other.
I would probably strangle somebody who did this to me.

What next?

Okay.

When Cami picks up her envelopeless letter from out of town, the paper -- quite possibly a single sheet -- is folded in three and sealed with red wax.
Because that's what you do when you don''t have an envelope.

Folded letter with red seal

The wax might -- probably did -- have a seal pressed into it.  This could be a complex family crest or a simple design, like an initial.

The theory was the unbroken seal proved the letter hadn't been opened.  Let us all stop to appreciate the delightful naiveté of those who bought into that particular fiction.

What you need to seal a letter

The set up for applying seals looked somewhat like this to the left here.   Camille would have most of this stuff sitting around on her desk or in one of the drawers.

Coming to the paper itself:

"Hand made papers were made in molds, hence one could readily observe the paper marks and ribbing from the parallel wires in the mold. Often these “laid” papers also bore distinctive watermarks."
 From 'Jane Austen's World'

'Laid paper' is made by catching linen pulp onto a flat, closely wired sieve and letting it dry.  The resulting paper retains a faint cross hatch pattern.

I have saved the best for last.

When a letter travelled through the postal service, it acquired postmarks.  A letter heading from London to Cambridge and then to the fictional Brodemere would collect several.

There'd be a colored circular postmark from London, giving the date it was mailed.  The letter, in 1802, would go by mail-coach to Cambridge (I'm fairly sure) and there's be another postmark from Cambridge as the destination post office.  There might be a square stamp showing fees or postage added during the trip.  Mileage might be stamped -- but more usually handwritten -- in pencil.  The final cost might be written in pencil likewise.  Toll fees might be noted, again in pencil. 


At the excellent Bath Postal Museum we find Here, here, and here Bath to London 'straight line' letters from 1801, 1807  and 1805.  A letter to Andover in 1808 is here.

For further perusal, if you are just fascinated by postal stampage:


Here is a franked 1822 letter from Kilmarnock Scotland to Isleworth Middlesex that shows several interesting features.
.

A complex seal for some letter

This one has a crowned 'Free' handstamp of December 2, indicating the recipient in Middlesex was entitled to receive mail without paying postage.  That's the 'franked letter' we read about.  Seems to work for both sender and recipient, which I didn't know.
On this, we see a 'Kilmarnock - 427' stamp, showing the mileage.  That would have been struck upon sending.  And there's a Glasgow transit stamp with the date November 29, 1822.  


Another very relevant set of postmarks is about halfway down the page here.   Scroll down till you reach the post titled, 'Entire written 22 September 1803 from Fakenham Norfolk to Andover'.  This has a date stamp, and mileage and price written in pencil.

(I've seen some indication that mileage marks record the distances to London.  The recipient post office didn't try to calculate the byways and pathways from all points in the kingdom.  Charges were simply based on (a) how far from sender to London and then (b) how far from London to the recipient.
This doesn't sound very fair, frankly)

n.b The next letter in that discussion is sealed with black wax, because it's a condolence letter.

Moving on ...

about halfway down the page here, in the post beginning "Heck I'll pay you $3 Brummie", is an 1829 letter with two colored handstamps and two penciled notes.  A post or two further down is the same letter laid flat to show the sender's address.
I can't tell for sure, but it looks like the sender's name might be folded inside when the letter is sent ...? 

That whole six-page thread is interesting if you're dealing with Regency-era or Victorian correspondence. 

London postman 1830

Here is an 1839 cross-London letter.


Finally ...  How much did delivery of Cami's London letter cost?

Letter Rates for 1801 for a single sheet, within Great Britain

Not exceeding 15 miles				3d.
15	to	30	miles	4d.
30	to	50	"	5d.
50	to	80	"	6d.
80	to	120	"	7d.
120	to	170	"	8d.
170	to	230	"	9d.
230	to	300	"	10d.

This is from The Development of Rates of Postage, by A. D. Smith

Anyhow, that's about 8d for the London letters.  Less for the ones from Cambridge.

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.