My discoveries as I search for the origins of King Arthur and discover the myths behind the myth. Plus research and revelations from my new WIP, set during the McCarthy Era. Also, a bunch of stuff I'm learning about writing and life. New posts on Mondays, New Zealand time (Sundays in North America.)
Thanks everyone for your suggestions on things to include in my course. It's a lot, so I decided to divide my course into two parts:
The Macro Level of Writing: All the stuff that goes into creating a compelling plot
The Micro Level of Writing: All the stuff that goes into creating a compelling scene. (I did several blogs on this back in 2011, by the way, if you want to check my archives.)
One of the things I gave my students was a handout on the books on writing that I've found most useful. Here's my list for the Macro Level of writing. Starred * books are the ones I recommend the most.
Most of these books can be purchased through Amazon.com.
You’ll notice a number of these books are about film writing. That’s because novelists have become aware that films can teach us a lot about how to write a successful novel. The structure is exactly the same.
*Bob Mayer. The Novel Writer’s Toolkit. A wealth of information on how to develop your characters and use them to drive your plot.
*Alexandra Sokoloff. Screenwriting Tricks for Authors. Can be purchased on www.screenwritingtricks.com. The best explanation of the 3-Act, 8-Sequence structure I’ve found. Countains lots of information on what goes into each part of your novel. A real deal at $2.99, downloaded into your e-reader.
**Donald Maass. The Fire in Fiction. While Maass’s intention was to help you write a book that’s a keeper, I found it full of awesome tricks to help you brainstorm your novel.
Donald Maass. The Breakthrough Novel and The Breakthrough Novel Workbook. Once you’ve got your first draft, use this book to revise your book. Maas gives all sorts of suggests to recognize and fix problems with your novel and make is more sellable.
Blake Snyder. Save the Cat! The late Blake Snyder was considered the guru of film writing. His techniques are just as pertinent to writing a great novel and he gave many workshops for novel writers.
Christopher Vogler. The Writer’s Journey. An alternative way to plot your book. Vogler uses James Campell’s research on mythical structure to explain how to structure a story. He also explains how to tie it into the standard 3-Act, 8-Sequence structure I describe at the end of this course.
**Martha Alderson. The Plot Whisperer and The Plot Whisperer Workbook. I just discovered her. She’s got great hints for how to plot your novel. She has the clearest explanation I've found for how to connect the character's inner transformation with the external plot.
Karen Weisner. First Draft in 30 Days. I wouldn’t recommend this if it were the only book on writing you were going to purchase, as it is very superficial and doesn’t explain some of the real essentials. But, it’s great on showing how one scene leads to another. And if you’re someone who thrives on worksheets, it contains a huge collection of useful worksheets that can help you keep track of everything.
**And my latest find: Les Edgerton’s Hooked: Write Fiction That Grabs The Reader at Page One and Never Lets Go. This is the best book I've found on writing the beginning section of your novel. While Noah Lukeman's The First Five Pages is considered the classic in beginnings, I'd say that Edgerton's book is even clearer on what has to go into an effective beginning and how to achieve it. Plus he looks at how it plays out in the various genres and when you can get away with the exception the rule.
You'll notice I didn't add Deb Dixon's book Goal, Motivation and Conflict. Not because I don't think it's important, but rather becuase it's so out of print that I've never been able to find an affordable version of it. Dixon's ideas are the core of every novel. Fortunately, if you attend any writing course, you'll find her quoted (and probably misquoted) left and right.
So what are your "must be in my bookshelf" books on writing?
I've got a new challenge. I'm teaching a course "Getting Started Writing Your Novel" for stark beginners. My class is full of folks who have never written a novel before -- not even the adolescent attempts I was famous for as a teen (I wrote six "books" back then, all so bad that they're not even gathering dust under the bed.)
This got me thinking: what does a beginning writer need to know? It's one thing for an experienced writer to talk about GMC or layering a scene. But for a stark beginner, it's easy to get the forest confused with the trees.
In the next few posts I'm going to be sharing what I think beginners need to know to get started writing a book. (Welcome, beginners!)
In the meantime, you more experienced writers, what is it that you wish you had known when starting out?
One of the great things about being a member of a critique group is you get a sneak preview of books before they come out. In my case, it was Anita Seymour’s Royalist Rebel. This historical novel, due to be released on the 17th of January is based on the early life of Elizabeth Murray, a fascinating woman who managed to walk the line between being one of King Charles’s most loyal supporters and maintaining a friendship with Charles’ enemy, Oliver Cromwell.
Here’s Anita’s cover blurb:
Royalist Rebel by Anita Seymour
Intelligent, witty and beautiful, Elizabeth Murray wasn’t born noble; her family’s fortunes came from her Scottish father’s boyhood friendship with King Charles. As the heir to Ham House, their mansion on the Thames near Richmond, Elizabeth was always destined for greater things.
Royalist Rebel is the story of Elizabeth’s youth during the English Civil War, of a determined and passionate young woman dedicated to Ham House, the Royalist cause and the three men in her life; her father William Murray, son of a minister who rose to become King Charles’ friend and confidant, the rich baronet Lionel Tollemache, her husband of twenty years who adored her and John Maitland, Duke of Lauderdale, Charles II’s favourite.
With William Murray at King Charles’ exiled court in Oxford, the five Murray women have to cope alone. Crippled by fines for their Royalist sympathies, and besieged by the Surrey Sequestration Committee, Elizabeth must find a wealthy, non-political husband to save herself, her sisters, and their inheritance.
The trouble with blurbs is that, although they give you a glimpse into the challenges the characters face, they fall short when it comes to revealing the author’s style. And in Anita’s case, the style is positively delightful. She has a gift for finding the précised world-building detail that brings you right back into the seventeenth century and at the same time adds a layer of meaning. While giving you a chuckle or two along the way. Her characters are multi-layered. The conflict within Elizabeth’s family is as compelling as the struggle between the Roundheads and the Cavaliers. Anita’s research is thorough and deep, and she’s put a lot of thought into making sense of Elizabeth’s motives and actions. By the time you’ve finished reading Royalist Rebel, you can see why Elizabeth had the love and admiration of the men in her life, including the leader of the cause sworn to undermine everything she stood for.
The good news is the Royalist Rebel is only the start. Anita’s already at work on a sequel and I can’t wait to see what comes next!
By the way, in putting this blog together, Anita and I had a discussion about the critiquing and editing process. Here's what she wrote:
Jen Black read the finished copy and she said it was so different from reading individual unpublished chapters spread over a long period. She thought the finished book was well edited and flowed much better than it did when she read it the first time.
That's good to hear as it underwent some major changes between the crit group and the submitted manuscript, and then again when we got down to edits - so it seems the system works - I just hope other readers feel the same.
Royalist Rebel by Claymore Books, an imprint of Pen and Sword, is released on 17th January 2013
About six months ago I downloaded into my Kindle six free books on writing. One of them was Les Edgerton’s Hooked: Write Fiction That Grabs The Reader at Page One and Never Lets Go. I could kiss Amazon’s feet for this find! It’s been far more useful to me than Noah Lukeman’s classic The First Five Pages.
OK, every writer knows that the beginning is crucial. If an agent or editor doesn’t like your first page – forget five pages – out it goes. Where Edgerton differs from Lukeman is that he explains, in great detail and with lots of examples, HOW to create that winning opening scene. Plus, he gives you the exceptions to the rule and how to recognize and deal with them.
So what does your opening scene need to have? Edgerton lists ten components:
1) Inciting incident
2) Story-worthy problem
3) Initial surface problem
4) The set-up
5) Backstory
6) A stellar opening sentence
7) Language
8) Character
9) Setting
10) Foreshadowing
The first four are crucial, the remaining are optional.
1) Inciting Incident. The inciting incident is what sets the story in motion. It’s an event, not a situation. It upsets the equilibrium of the protagonist’s world and makes her realize she has a problem.
2) Story-Worthy Problem. The story-worthy problem is Edgerton’s term for what romance writers often call the internal conflict. It’s the flaw in the protagonist’s outlook or personality that needs to be changed in order for the protagonist to achieve his/her goal.
3) Initial Surface Problem. The initial surface problem is the protagonist’s immediate goal It’s the problem sparked by the inciting incident and demanding immediate action. For example, in The Hobbit (which I just saw – marvelous movie!), Bilbo Baggin’s surface problem is whether to accept the contract offered to him by the dwarves.
4) Set-Up. The set-up is just that, enough details to make clear what is happening in the opening scene. It gives the reader enough information on where and when the action is taking place and who the characters are. That much, and no more.
Every opening has to have those four elements. But what about the remaining elements Edgerton lists? Whether you include them depends on the story you’re telling.
5) Backstory. Every writer knows too much backstory kills your beginning. But how much is too much? Edgerton says, if possible, save the backstory for later chapters. Include just enough background information to keep the reader from becoming confused, but nothing more.
6) A stellar opening sentence. I’m sort of puzzeled by why Edgerton considers this secondary, since he says, “Spend an awful lot of time on this sentence.” (One of the delights of Edgerton’s book, by the way, is his chatty style.) This is the sentence that grabs the reader. On the other hand, no matter how good the opening sentence, if it’s not backed by the other four crucial elements, the reader isn’t going to read past the first scene.
7) Language. I thought Edgerton was going to talk about that elusive term “voice” here, but actually he focuses more on how you craft your language. Which is part of voice, but feels to me more like Creative Writing 101.
8) Character. The opening merely introduces your characters. It doesn’t give their life stories. But the key is “show, not tell.” The inciting incident is the tool by which you start to reveal character through the charcters’ reactions as the incident unfolds.
9) Setting. Too much setting bogs down a beginning, but carefully selected details of setting, worked into the action itself, make it come alive.
10) Foreshadowing. A good beginning will hint at the ending.
So there it is: a checklist, a way of looking at the first chapter of my WIP and making sure “it’s all there”.
In the good old days, before I became a writer, getting ready for a conference was easy. Pack and go. Not much thought to clothes because all conferences those days were "business dress" and I had my wardrobe of women's dress suits (a few of which I still have.)
Getting ready for a writers conference, even when you're just a participant, is a whole different ballgame.
First, I'm never "just a participant". I always pitch. After all, why pay the conference fee, if I don't take advantage of chance to meet people face to face. So that means getting a pitch ready and sweating over a one-line log line. I've done a few pitches now and I no longer sweat over the pitch. In fact, I've discovered that less is more. So I usually just put together one short paragraph that highlights the gmc and the thing that makes my story unique. (GMC = goal, motivation and conflict, the core of any novel)
What's really important about the pitch is what makes your story unique. If you've ever been in a plot workshop and read a bunch of gmc lines, you've discovered that they're pretty much the same. What catches an agent's or editor's interest is how you're going to take that standard plot line and make it fresh and new for your readers.
Anyway, getting that "right" can take me a week or two, if it's the first time I've pitched a book, less if I've already pitched or queried (I use a modified version of my pitch for my query and vice versa, depending on which I wrote first.)
Then there's the rehearsing. Or there was. Now I just read it over a couple of times to make sure it flows and then don't fret it. By keeping the formal part of the pitch (those cue cards) short, I've left lots of room for questions and answers and the whole pitch flows a lot better. I've also learned to ask questions about what the editor/agent is really looking for.
This particular conference the prep was a bit more detailed. One of the editors I'm pitching to wants to see a "one sheet". This is a single piece of paper that gives your contact details, a brief bio, and the essential facts of the work you're pitching (title, genre, word count, hook, brief summary, gmc). I'd never done it before, but I did have all the elements already prepared thanks to having already prepared queries and a pitch for my book.
The only trouble is, I'm terrible at formatting. Not that I can't do it. I'm a wizard at Word. Just that I don't have the artist's eye to make the page actually look good. No worries, I thought (now there's a NZ expression!) I'll just take one of the resume templates MS Word provides and modify that.
Oy! It took me four hours. It would have been easier to try to make my own template based on what theirs looked like.
Then there's the issue of clothes. "Casual but professional" was what the conference coodinators suggested. Obviously I wasn't the only one who was confused, because that was the announcement topic that generated the most chat. Anyway, I spent 2 hours this morning trying on clothes, because what works as conference casual in a damp, cold New Zealand winter is obviously not going to work in Arizona at 91 degrees F.
At least the evenings are conference casual, too. None of this bringing along a second set of formal outfits, as was the rule at RWNZ and RWA national events. Though I do miss "dressing up."
I still have to pack.
Still, the conference looks exciting and I can't wait. I'll report on it when I get back.
It’s a law of physics. You know. Like apples falling on Newton’s head. The more I really want something, the more I can count on getting it -- exactly when I don’t want it.
Susie from down the road pulls the elastic from her pony tail and shakes loose her honey blond curls. “Hey, Sophie. I’m going over to Polly’s to watch American Bandstand. Wanna come?”
Her invitation is for me, but her eyes are on my older brother. Like a cowboy in one of those Westerns he watches, Marek hooks his thumbs into the pockets of his chinos and leans against Dad’s wood-paneled station wagon. He’s trying to look cool, but he’s lapping up Susie’s adoration as avidly as our dog licks the trickle of ice cream from a melting cone.
A longing spreads across my chest with a hunger worse than three months of starvation hiding from the Polish Policja. After a year in the US, I still don’t have many friends.
Of course, Susie’s invitation comes at exactly the wrong time. I foolishly spent the morning clothes-pinning playing cards to the fat wheels of my little sister Viola’s red Schwinn bike, which she’s rolling back and forth. The tsking click accelerates like a Geiger counter measuring her worry.
As if I’d forget.
So starts an early version of my YA Exiled in the Sweet Land of Liberty. In my last blog post I talked about using childhood memories to add texture to a novel. This week's post is how it looks in action.
First, it's a way to clearly set the time and place -- in this case, a Long Island suburb in the 1950's.
Dick Clark's TV show American Bandstand, which ran from 1952 to 1989 (!!!) in various versions, was a teen icon. Top teen pop stars appeared live on the show, singing their latest hits. The show also introduced the concept of the Top 40, which has survived to today.
The show's original name was Bandstand, which is what it was called in 1956, but since most people knew it asAmerican Bandstand , I used that name. It ran in the afternoons, and rolling back the rug and dancing along with the music was almost an obsession among teens in the fifties and early sixties. So when Sophie is invited to watch it with friends, its a way into the "in" crowd at her new school.
I can't believe how big tv was back then, as big as it is now. By the mid 1950's most homes had a black and white tv and kids talked about the shows and the plots like they do today. American Bandstand came on around 4 or 4:30 -- scheduled to catch the teen audience -- and kids rushed home to catch it on tv.
Color started coming in in the early 1960's, but people made attempts to colorize their tv screens before that. I remember being really excited about one product and bugging my partents to buy a thick sheet of clear plastic that stuck to your screen through static electricity and promised to add color to the program. When light hit the plastic, some kind of coating on it would add hues of mostly red and green to the image. But the color came from the coated spots on the plastic, not from the image on the screen, so there was no coordination between the real color of an object and what you saw. You can imagine my disappointment at a green face or a red glass of milk. Needless to say, that fad didn't last long.
Rolling back the rug was another feature of the fifties. Back in those days, wall to wall carpeting was a luxury that only the rich could afford. Most people had homes with wooden floors (linoleum in the kitchen). Area rugs covered the center of the room. When exposed, the wooden planking made a great dance floor.
My parents (and many families) had two sets of rugs -- gray wool ones for winter, and gray straw mats for summer. The rugs were fairly large and covered most of the floor, leaving about two feet around the edge of the room. It was a big annual project to shift furniture and change rugs. I can't remember where the kept the set that wasn't being used. Changing rugs made them last longer, though. My parents, when they built a retirement home out on eastern Long Island in the late 60's, actually brought the wool rugs, still in great condition, with them. By that time the rugs were 20 years old.
One of the things I loved about crafting Exiled in the Sweet Land of Liberty is that it’s set in a fictionalized version of my hometown. Dumbarton is Huntington, New York.
I’d discovered long ago when I wrote “The Last Gift”, the one-act play that was eventually produced by the Canadian Broadcasting Company, that my background is a rich source of material with which to texture a story. My grandmother’s American Foursquare home in Ozone Park, Queens, was the model for the home that my heroine reminiscences about, complete with the slanting row of stained glass windows that followed the stairs up to the second floor.
The central motif of Exiled is “the Castle”, where the major tragedy of my heroine’s life occurs. In real life, the Castle was the old Ferguson Castle overlooking Huntington Harbor. It belonged to Mrs. Juliana Armour Ferguson, the heiress to the Armour Meat fortune. By the time I was a child growing up in Huntington in the 1950’s, the estate had been long abandoned and taken over by the Township for taxes. “No Trespassing” signs hung along its poison-ivy covered walls, but they were no deterrent to a kid determined to explore its grounds.
Details count and that’s where one’s background becomes a gold mine. For me it’s things like the poison ivy, the signs, the gatekeeper’s house and the “tunnel” through the wall. Plus the quiet magic of a summer day on Huntington Harbor, with boats bobbing at their moorings, the swish of waves along the shore, the pounding of hammers at Knutson's Boatyard, and the sound of a radio from the deck of one of the boats moored in the crowded harbor.
There was a legend among us kids that there had been a terrible tragedy in the castle. After I’d done a lot of research, I discovered we had the Ferguson Castle confused with the Boldt Castle in at the outlet of Lake Ontario into the St. Lawrence River. But our mistaken rumor was enough to inspire what happens in Exiled. I promise a separate blog on Ferguson Castle, because the truth is even more fantastic than the stories we made up about it.
Dumbarton Combined High School is another major setting in my novel. The building itself was inspired by what is currently Huntington Township’s town hall. The town hall has been through several iterations and has been the site of various schools since early in Huntington’s history. The first school on that site, which overlooks the village green, was the Huntington Academy, built in 1794. It was replaced by Huntington High School, also known as the Union School in 1857.
What is now the Town Hall Annex was actually a separate school constructed next door and known as “Main Street School”. Built in 1898, it is the oldest part of the structure and originally housed kindergarten through 8th grade students. By the time I was a student there, it was the home of the school cafeteria (downstairs) and the math department (upstairs).
By 1910, the Union School building had grown too small for the needs of the growing farm community and had been replaced by a much larger “Union School/Huntington High School”, which was renamed the RL Simpson High School in 1950, after one of the township’s outstanding educators. By 1958 the school had again become too small for the area’s needs and a modern new high school was built about a mile away.
In the meantime, the township had outgrown its junior high and the old RL Simpson High School structure was renovated to become RL Simpson Junior High. It was linked to the old “Main Street School” – now called “the Annex” -- by a covered passageway, known as “the Portico”.
This is the setting for Dumbarton Combined High. Originally, I described the school as a junior high, with a much-younger Sophie as part of the 9th grade class and her little sister Viola starting 7th grade there. When I changed Sophie’s age to make her much older, I needed a school that allowed me to have the two girls on the same campus. A critique partner mentioned that she had attended a “combined high” housing grades 7 through 12. The two-building structure of RL Simpson Junior High was perfect. I could put the high school kids in the “big” building and the junior high kids in the “Annex.” Dumbarton Combined High was born.
The metal lockers jutting into the hall, the desks set in pairs in each classroom and the seat outside the guidance counselor’s office are exactly as I remember them, but I had to make up the Vice Principal’s office. I was never quite bad enough to merit a trip there.
The current Huntington High, which I attended in the mid-1960’s, much expanded, still serves Huntington’s students. At one time it boasted the largest auditorium on Long Island, seating about 3000. I remember particularly the huge overhanging balcony that shaded the seats below (and was a source of a major "scandal" that got all the honor students in serious trouble), the knobby upholstery, and the two, long sloping aisles that seemed to take forever to get down. I’ve “transported” this auditorium to Dumbarton Combined High, where, in a smaller version, it serves as the setting for some of the novel’s most crucial turning points.
But there are smaller details, as well. A return visit to Huntington reminded me of the cemetery and the old library (now part of the Historical Society museum), where Sophie snubs Joseph.
It wasn’t until I started writing that I remember clothes-pinning playing cards to the spokes of bike wheels to make a clicking sound as you rode, shaping“poppers” out of fallen maple seeds and how cherry Coke really was made. These are the details that make Exiled come alive.
What are the rich memories of your own childhood? I encourage you to explore your past. There you’ll find more texture for your scene than you can ever possibly use.
As soon as I put Chapter One of Exiled in the Sweet Land of Liberty up on my critique loop, I knew I had trouble. So I listened to my critique partners’ suggestions, took on-line workshops on building character emotion (not to mention all the other workshops I’ve taken over the years on “the beginning of your book”), rewrote, tried other places to start the chapter, cut a huge section of the book. By the time I had finished all my rewrites and polishes (with the whole book) and gotten the thumbs-up from my critique partners and teen beta readers, who loved it, I figured I had a winner.
Wrong.
The five or so agents I queried loved the premise, but returned my partials with comments like “I can’t seem to connect with the characters.”
Arrgh! What does that mean?
OK. There’s a lot of stuff out there about how to hook your reader. They include:
Start in the middle of the action
Show an ordinary guy in an extraordinary situation or an extraordinary protagonist in some way that shows the human/ordinary side of their personality
Cut the first three chapters, which are probably back-story anyway
Write an intriguing first sentence
Show, not tell
Work the scene-setting details into the action. Don’t waste paragraphs setting the scene
Set up the conflict immediately
Set up the characters’ goals by the end of the chapter
Start with the event that throws the character into the problem he/she must solve
Yeah, right. So I did all that.
It actually took something Bob Meyers said at his workshop at the RWNZ conference to make me realize what’s been missing. You have to do something to make the reader CARE about your protagonist and whether he/she actually achieves his/her goal.
So I did some more rewrites, went back to square one, took my first chapter to my husband and asked him to read it.
Now Phil’s my alpha reader (if there is such a thing.) He gets every first draft. He’s no literary critic – though he’s learned a lot over the years from hearing me talk about what I’m learning – but he’s great at connecting with the emotion of a story.
So after he read my newest version and he made some comments about what I’d done to change it (see, he has been learning), I asked him whether he cared about my protagonist.
Long silence. Finally, “No.” And he told me why.
A) She was a follower, not a leader. Things happened to her and she let them without taking her own action.
B) He wasn’t convinced she really cared about Viola, but she spends the book protecting her.
Phil summed it up with, “I figure she deserves whatever she gets.”
Wow.
I thought about it a lot. Protagonists don’t have to be the leader of the pack, but they do have to drive the action. Even the character running from pursuers still has a mystery to solve, something that will get the hounds off her heels.
More important is how much Sophie, my protagonist, cared about what was happening. As Robin Perini, quoting author Laura DeVries, put it in her article in the March 2012 issue of Romance Writers Report: “How much a character cares about his/her goals is in direct proportion to how much the reader will care.”
BINGO. I had to show Sophie’s caring, and that was a whole new ballgame.
So I rewrote my beginning (again), this time going back to what I’d had way back last August, but adding the details that show how much her siblings and family matter to Sophie. And gave it to Phil again, trying very hard not to hover over him as he read.
He closed the file on my computer and said, “I almost cried at the end of this version of your chapter one. I really felt Sophie’s loss.”
“Do you care?”
“Yes, very much.”
Which is exactly want I wanted.
A few more rewrites to succeeding chapters to pull them in line with Chapter One and I’m ready to pitch again. Just in time for the Desert Dreams conference. Wish me luck.
I just finished working through Donald Maass's The Fire in Fiction. This book, like Maas's others, The Breakout Novel and The Breakout Novel Workbook, is intended for for authors who have finished at least their first draft and are in the revision stage. But I found The Fire in Fiction an ideal brainstorming tool, as well.
Maass starts by asking the question, why is it some books end up on your keeper shelf, while other books by your favourite authors feel like they've let you down? He then analyses what he considers stand-out fiction and provides excercises for your to produce the same type of effects.
After chats at the 2010 RWNZ conference with really productive authors like Stephanie Laurens, I came to the conclusion that I need to plan my novels, rather than letting them evolve organically on the page. As a result of using Y-Writer and a few brainstorming tools gleaned through various workshops and on-line classes, I was able to finish the first draft of Exiled in the Sweet Land of Liberty in six weeks.
I've now started my new YA Headfirst Down Breakneck Moutain. At the 2011 RWNZ conference I got myself Karen Weisner's First Draft in 30 Days, thinking her worksheets and her methodical plan would be really useful. Well, they are. But I still need something to trigger ideas. I happened to listen to Donald Maass's TheFire in Fiction Part 2 workshop on the DVD of the 2010 RWA conference, and the exercises he suggested got my brain buzzing. Weisner got put aside the minute The Fire in Fiction came in from the bookdepository.co.uk (a life-saving website for NZ writers who don't want to pay NZ prices and all that postage!)
One of the chapters that I found the most useful was "Scenes That Can't Be Cut". These are the scenes that are supposed to drive your plot forward but somehow fall flat. Maass talks about finding the emotional turning point in these scenes and building your scene around that.
In fact, one thing I took from the whole book was the importance of emotion in driving an outstanding work of fiction. Emotion is what makes the hero heroic yet human and the villan frightening (even more so for being human as well.) The emotion we're talking about here is the internal emotion of the characters themselves -- the passions that drive them. And Maass suggest finding that by looking inside yourself.
What are you passionate about? What do you rant about? What about the story you're telling makes you angry/excited? Use one of the characters your story to give those emotions a voice.
When you're writing a scene, what is the core emotion the POV character feels? When did you feel that way? Maass walks you through reliving that emotion and then suggests you use those details to make the emotion real for your character.
Action scenes are also based on emotion, what the characters feel, not what they're doing. Their actions get filtered through their emotions. And if it's conflicting emotions, even better.
So I decided to try some of this stuff out in the first chapter of Headfirst Down Breakneck Mountain. Here's what I discovered:
The scene is about winning. Thinking about when I wanted to win brought me back to my days doing combined driving, the carriage driving equivalent of three-day eventing. That high when I realized I was going to win...
Rikki wants to win. But she wants to win honestly, not because of an accident.
Rikki thinks it's cool to beat her mentor. It shows how good she's become. But she doesn't want to lose her mentor's friendship.
Suddenly my first chapter, which was about a mountain bike race, was full of layers, and my heroine, whose motto is "Winning is Everything" is on the way to the first lesson in her character arc.
It’s a Wednesday morning not unlike other September days in Tauranga, a small coastal city on the North Island of New Zealand. Clouds skid across the sky; raindrops clatter on our steel roof. The phone rings, unusual for 7:30 AM, but in the six months we’ve been in New Zealand we’ve learned to expect early calls.
“I know you haven’t got a TV, but I think you want to know this.” It’s Carole, Phil’s cousin in Auckland. “Last night two planes crashed into the World Trade Towers in New York.”
No, we don’t have a television, but there’s one at the language school where we both teach. Phil and I turn on the radio, race through breakfast, and head downtown. We’re both too stunned to speak.
Like all Americans, we thought America was invulnerable. Now, like the rest of the world, we’re sure it’s under attack.
When we get to school, the staff is crowded around the one TV, which someone’s dragged into the meeting room. Maori, European, we stand shoulder-to-shoulder hypnotized by the footage of the towers collapsing again and again.
Students straggle in, their voices loud in Chinese, Thai, Japanese, Korean and a smattering of European languages. Most know the Twin Towers have been attacked, but lack the English to understand much more.
Our own minds still numb from the shock, we herd the students into the classrooms and attempt to calm them and explain what has happened. Our own English fails as we recount the details in simple terms they can understand.
In every student’s mind are the questions, “Should I go home? Can I get home?” We answer questions, reassure. All thought of English lessons for the day are forgotten, but the students receive practice in English they’ll never forget.
Gray clouds continue to darken the sky. A typical spring day in New Zealand. But nothing will ever be the same.
I just got back from the Romance Writers of New Zealand Conference in Auckland. The line-up this year was impressive, with best-selling authors Tess Gerritson, Bob Mayer, and Maria V. Snyder as keynote speakers, and four editors and a US literary agent there to both speak and take pitches. Here are highlights of some of the things I learned:
The prologue isn’t dead. Both Sue Grimshaw, editor for Ballentine Bantam Dell’s new e-book imprint line and Bob Mayer confirmed it’s ok to use a prologue to set up your story.
It’s ok to multiple-query publishers. Bob Mayer recommended this in his workshop and said they expect it these days. Once you’ve been asked for a full, though, you need to go exclusive with your pitch.
Tess Gerritson in talking about how she comes up with her gripping plot twists suggests scanning the media and paying attention to your emotions. What gives you a “punch in the gut” when you read or hear about it?
Tess’s stories are known for their horrific crimes, but Tess said it’s not necessary to show the victim being tortured. What readers are looking for is tension, not gore. That can often be captured by showing the scene after the torture, where someone walks in on the results of the crime. When I talked to her afterwards a bit more about this, Tess indicated that there are times when it’s appropriate to show the “torture” scene. You may want to show, for example, how determined your character is not to reveal information. You need to think out your purpose for the scene.
Lucy Gilmore from Harlequin Mills & Boon talked about writing with originality within the confines of category romance. She said the trick is being unpredictable with those parts of the story readers have come to expect. Unpredictabilty isn’t:
Far-fetched plot twists
The “cute meet” that has nothing to do with the core conflict
Characters acting out-of-character
Meshing genres for the sake of it
An excuse to replace conflict with plot devices.
In developing character, she said make sure your hero and heroine have emotional barriers to overcome before they fall in love. Overcome the barriers is what enables them to get together and have the happily ever after ending readers expect.
Bob Mayer gave a full-day workshop on planning and writing your book. According to Bob Mayer, you have only 4 hours a day of creativity. Use it! He also said, don’t keep your ideas in your head; write them down. He gave us some amazing worksheets that simplify plotting a book.
When you’re developing the plot for your book, include the antagonist’s complete plan. This doesn’t mean you have to reveal it all in your manuscript, but you must know it thoroughly.
Characters have layers of motives. There’s what they say they want, what they really want, and what they need. You need to know and show them all.
In developing your characters, don’t forget to include their blind spot. The blind spot is the part of their character they’re in denial about. It’s the part of their character that needs to change.
Every character (including your antagonist) needs what Bob calls a “spark of redemption” – some tiny indication at the beginning of the story of the better person that person could be if she/he changed.
Bob also had something interesting to say about the point of view you use and info dumping. Generally, info dumping is a no-no, as it slows the pace and takes you out of the POV character’s head. It turns out this is true only for third person limited POV. You can info dump in first person, where the narrator would be sharing a bit of info he/she thought you as reader/listener should know. (Even so, you want to be cautious about your use of info dumping, as it still takes you out of the scene and can slow the pace.)
Carriages play a big part in historicals, and, no surprise, so do carriage accidents. The trouble is, over and over again it’s the same old, predictable disaster scene. The horses bolt; the hero, at great risk to his own life, stops them, and the heroine is eternally grateful. After a dozen of these, what was supposed to be a thrill for the reader is just a ho-hum. And if you know anything about carriage driving, they don’t ring true.
In this blogpost, I'll guide you through some real carriage accidents (fortunately, U-tube is full of them), analyze what went wrong, and show you how you can make your driving accidents look more authentic.
Where do I get the qualifications to do this? Well, I spent 20 years working with horses, 10 of them competing in combined driving, a highly skilled and challenging form of carriage driving. I’ve trained my own horses and competed and won in competitions around the US, been the course designer for the Arizona Combined Driving Event, judged combined driving in the US and New Zealand, put together weekend workshops on driving, and been the president of a regional carriage driving association.
So let’s start with a typical accident. This is a young, inexperience pair being driven through Acadia National Park, on Mount Desert Island, Maine. The park is criss-crossed with lovely driving roads and is the venue for the American Driving Association’s weekend drive, which is what I think these drivers are.
As you can see, the horses saw something at the side of the road that frightened them and jumped sideways. The driver easily regained control over this well-mannered pair.
Spooks are the most common kind of driving mishap. Basically there are three kinds of accidents: bolts, spooks and crashes. The kinds can be combined. Horses have two instinctive reactions to a fright: flight or fight. The preferred mode is flight. A spook is a sudden action (usually sideways) in reaction to a fright.
In this accident, the consequences were minor. The horses went off the road, but fortunately, there was a level clearing that they were able to go into. No one fell out of the carriage. Imagine what would happen if there was a fence or ditch there. As a writer, this is how you can complicate your accident.
Let’s look at another incident with the same pair. At this point they are just starting their drive.
This is a typical bolt. The pair spooked first, then ran. The driver lost control of his/her horses, who ran, but then the driver was able to get control back again in a very short distance. Driving horses generally are bred for their calm, docile disposition and are extremely well-trained. They’re reliable animals, so most bolts – if they happen at all -- are very short. When the horses continue to gallop out-of-control for a long distance, then things get scary. Very scary.
I’ll show that later. Right now, let’s talk about what went wrong.
This is a young, inexperienced pair, though they have been trained well. Young horses are more likely to spook or do stupid things than older, more experienced ones, who learn to take a lot in stride. This situation, where both horses in a pair are inexperienced, is something you’ll find in the twenty-first century, but was unlikely in the age of carriage driving. Usually then, an inexperienced horse would have been paired with a steady, experienced one, who would have transmitted his confidence to the youngster.
This is how Black Beauty was trained. When I was in the foothills of the Himalayans in Yunnan province, China, where carriage transport is still used, I had a chance to drive with an old man whose “pair” consisted of the mother, who was pulling the carriage, and her yearling foal, who was tied loosely beside her. The youngster wasn’t in draft, but he learned the ways of the road and would have become a calm, steady horse by the time he was actually put to the carriage. (“Put to” is the technical term for hitching a horse to the cart.)
So… since he was driving inexperienced horses, the driver in this clip should have been the alert for trouble. I get the feeling this driver is inexperienced, too, not a good combination with an inexperienced horse. Or he may have just been distracted by all the people around him. Which is common at a carriage driving event, where your friends are driving, too. Certainly the camera person isn’t paying attention to what’s going on.
With horses, distraction can lead to disaster.
Rerun the clip and watch the horses’ heads and ears. Notice how they’re turning their heads to look at something on the side of the road. Horses will signal a spook this way. (Look at the first clip and you’ll see they’re signaling loud and clear.) At this point the driver should have done something to get their attention. Just pulling on the right rein and asking them to turn their heads to the right would have probably done it. Horses cannot hold more than one thing at a time in their minds.
Another element of the accident-waiting-to-happen is the camera person, whom I suspect was supposed to groom for this driver. The job of the groom is to help control the horses and stabilize the carriage (if necessary.) With an expensive piece of video equipment in his/her hands, my guess is the groom would have been more concerned with saving the camera than dealing with horses. Of course, there could have been others in that vehicle, which looks like a wagonette. A wagonette is a cross between a carriage and a wagon. There are seats for the driver and a passenger or groom up front, and then two seats in the back, facing each other, for additional passengers or grooms. It’s a vehicle often used in combined driving today, and can be pulled by either a pair (2 horses) or a team (4 horses, also called a 4-in-hand).
The next two clips are serious bolts, where the horses have an extended run. Look at the way the driver is bounced around in this first clip. I really have to admire this guy. Here’s a hero for your book. (Something like this happened to me once, and it was not fun, especially since I got jammed in the boot – the area where the driver puts his/her feet – and then my horse stopped and began kicking the carriage apart.)
Notice how the driver here regains control of his team, by circling them tightly. A horse cannot run flat-out in a tight circle. This works for this wagonette because it is designed for combined driving, where you have to make sharp turns. If you try to do this with a two-wheeled cart or with a traditional carriage or coach, you risk flipping the vehicle.
The driver WOULD NOT try to walk up the pole (the piece of wood between the horses), as you sometimes see in Westerns. That pole is tied very loosely to both horse and carriage. Even if it was able to support a man, his weight would twist the harness in a way that would, at the very least, add to the horses’ frights, or tangle in the horse, injuring it. Plus, as you can see from the way the driver is being bounced around IN the carriage, do you think anyone could actually stay balanced on a pole that’s not even the width of his boot?
In this next clip, the team – a four-in-hand of gorgeous Friesians -- have somehow broken loose before the driver was able to mount the box seat (get up in the carriage.) Look at the chaos they create in the carriage yard. Here people on the ground are able to detach the leaders (the front pair). Modern turnouts (the term for the complete ensemble of horse, carriage, driver, grooms, livery and equipment) usually feature safety devices such as “quick-release” clips that allow grooms to quickly unfasten the horse from the carriage.
Trying to grab a running horse from the ground is dangerous in itself. Basically an 80 kilo (170 lb) man is trying to stop a frightened 500 kilo (1100 lb.) animal that can easily pull its own weight. The next clip, another display of great courage, shows what can happen. And this is only a 225 kilo (500 lb.) pony.
What happens if the horses bolt and the driver isn’t able to regain control? The last of my clips is the ultimate horse show nightmare, but it could just as easily have happened in an 1815 London street.
The other drivers in this scene have followed what is standard horse show procedure for a run-away. They’ve come to the centre of the arena, leaving the outside track clear for the running horse. The trouble is horses are herd animals. The run-away wants the safety of his kind. And he’s dragging a carriage.
The smart drivers and grooms have un-hitched. You’ll notice the ones that get into trouble are those who stay in their carts.
What went wrong here? Driver error, again. Replay this clip and you’ll see the horse even as he enters the arena is very nervous. He is an accident waiting to happen. This kind of driving class – known as a pleasure driving class -- features hot, spirited horses, but they should be well-mannered and well trained. They should be eager to go forward, but not nervous and scared. In this case, the horse is tense. He signals his fear mostly through his head – up in the air – and the way his neck is bowed, not arched (look at the other horses and compare.) He should never have been brought into the arena. The driver probably hoped he would settle down, or had the erroneous idea that fear would heighten the horses “action” (his high-stepping stride) and catch the judge’s eye. What happens here is entirely due to the driver’s bad judgment.
At the end of the clip, when they force the horse to stay on the ground, this is not cruelty but about the smartest thing they can do. First, it keeps the horse under control. Secondly, a downed horse will usually stop struggling and start to calm. Third, it gives them a chance to remove tangled equipment and also to do any necessary emergency vet work. Once the horse is calmed, they would release it and allow it to regain its feet.
In the clips I’ve analyzed, you’ve seen many crashes. There is another kind of crash known as a hang-up. Driver error usually causes that, too. The turnout is going too fast and not able to make a turn, or the driver misjudges the clearance between carriage and obstacle. This kind of crash is common in combined driving events, where part of the competition involves going through tight-tricky obstacles (know as “hazards”) as fast as you can. Usually the driver and groom are able to get the carriage un-hung-up and they continue on with the competition, merely losing time, as in this clip.
As I mentioned, driving horses are generally very calm. When there’s a hang-up like this, usually they will just stand still and wait for their driver and groom to rescue them. Occasionally they panic and start kicking and rearing. They injure themselves and also make it very difficult to free them. They can damage equipment and hurt their handlers.
U-tube is full of carriage driving accidents. If you’ve got one in your story, watch a few clips first and your writing will be richer and more authentic. You can find more clips by doing a search for “carriage driving accidents”.
The first of the Cathar strongholds Phil and I visited was Bram, a town along the Canal de Midi. Built in concentric rings around a late medieval church, there is no sign of the castle that once stood there, so we didn’t stay longer than it took to find batteries for my camera.
Bram is the sight of one of the most gruesome incidents of the Albigensian Crusade. After capturing Bram, Simon de Montfort sent the hundred survivors to the castle of Cahours. Sounds like an act of mercy? Not for de Montfort. The defenders of Cahours looked out their gates to a horrific sight: a staggering line of soldiers, minus noses, lips and eyes, guided by one survivor to whom de Montfort had left the use of one eye.
As for Bram itself, de Montfort’s army levelled the place. The charming town there today grew up after the Cathar crusade.
From Bram we drove the 30 kilometres into the Montaignes Noire (Black Mountains) to the next Cathar castle we planned to visit. During the drive I filled Phil in about Simon de Montfort.
After Pope Innocent III called the Albigensian Crusade, Simon de Montfort was given charge of the crusading army. He was the father of the Simon de Montfort who gave the King Henry III of England so much trouble a generation later.
De Montfort started in the north and worked south across Languedoc with a ruthlessness that earned him a reputation for butchery. He took the city of Beziers and slaughtered the entire city’s population. To be fair, the massacre was not entirely de Montfort’s decision. He asked the papal legate what to do with the prisoners and was told, “Kill them all. God will recognize his own.”
From there he moved on to Carcassonne, the seat of the Trencaval family, who held the Languedoc as vassals of Count Raymond of Toulouse. Carcassonne quickly fell under the pressures of starvation, thirst and the August heat. By the time the crusading army reached Saissac, de Montfort’s fearsome reputation had become a weapon in itself.
The village of Saissac
Coming up from the plains, you can see Saissac long before you get there. When you get close it’s a different story. Perched on a v-shaped outcrop projecting a vertical escarpment in the Montaignes Noires (Black Mountains), you actually have to go downhill, through the village of Saissac to get to the castle itself.
Entrance to the castle from the village
Even so, with only one, narrow wall accessible to anyone approaching the castle, and that protected by a deep moat, Saissac should have been impregnable.
But its lord, Bertrand de Saissac, abandoned the castle rather than give his fealty to de Montfort, who by that time had been given all the lands held by the Trencavals. Bertrand then became one of the faydit – Languedoc lords who were condemned by the Church and technically considered heretics and outlaws. He would have been a man on the run. Eventually he joined Raymond Trencaval in his unsuccessful attempt to recapture Carcassonne and the Languedoc. Interestingly, a part of the fief of Saissac was eventually restored to Bertrand and his heirs by King Louis IX.
The other part Saissac – which included the castle -- remained in the hands of the crusaders, who took control of the fortress for the King of France. And this is where the next interesting bit of its history appears.
In 1979 a treasure trove was found by construction workers helping to stabilize the castle walls. Hidden in a clay pot buried in the ground, it consisted of 1954 deniers and 3 obules, dating between 1180 and 1270, with the bulk from the mints of Kings Louis VIII and IX).
The money represents a turning point in the history of European currency. Towards the end of the Carolingian era (9th century) the king lost the exclusive power to mint coins. By the 11th century, local lords were minting their own – and by the 12th century, there were a multiplicity of local mints, all on a small, artisan level. On a political level, this independent state of coinage reflected the independent local sovereignty that was the reality throughout southern France. The King of France might call himself “king”, but the fact was, he had little power beyond central France. And this was particularly true in southern France, where Count Raymond of Toulouse was almost a king in his own right.
For the King of France, the Albigensian Crusade was an opportunity to consolidate his power over southern France, all legitimized by a religious cause.
Once Louis VIII gained control of Languedoc, he forbade the minting of local coinage and made his own coinage the sole legal tender of the realm. The Saissac treasure trove must have been accumulated during that period in history. The majority of the coins are from Louis VIII’s and his successor’s mints, but the handful of locally minted coins shows that a few of them were still in circulation.
How the hoard got there is the subject for much speculation. A denier is the medieval French equivalent of a penny. (In fact, the British system of pennies, shillings and pounds came to England through the Norman conquerors.) Two thousand deniers would have not been a lot of money – enough to buy a cow, or two or three sheep, or a nice set of clothes for a common man’s wedding, or food to keep a family through a winter. So this is obviously the savings of a villager, not the treasure of the Lord of Saissac. 1270 marks a period in which the faydit Languedoc lords made one final attempt to regain their lands. Possibly the villager hid his savings in hopes of keeping it out of the hands of marauding armies. Then something happened to prevent him or her from returning to reclaim the coins.
View out over the plain toward Carcassonne
Today, with the exception of the one building restored as a museum for the treasure trove, most of Saissac is in ruin. It covers three terraces, running downhill to a narrow point looking out on the plain. As a fief of France, the castle was expanded and held against the Protestants during the Wars of Religion during the 16th century, but it eventually fell into ruins after the French Revolution and was the subject of major looting during the middle of the nineteenth century.
Figuring out what was where has challenged modern archaeologists, who are still at work. Structures aren’t always what they seem. Ovens look like dungeons, storerooms like castle halls. What appear to be defensive structures for pouring out boiling oil along the castle’s edge, for example, are actually medieval latrines. I found myself fascinated by some multi-coloured stones at what would have been floor level -- but have no idea what they once were.
Phil and I sit on the terrace of a café in the medieval town of Lagrasse in the Languedoc region of France and warm our hands around cappuccinos. It’s July. The temperature should be in the 30’s (90’s F) but the Sens, a cold wind from the north, has sent the temperatures plummeting to 20 degrees (68 F). We’ve been in France three days and I’ve already concluded cappuccino is not something France does well. The four I’ve had so far – all at different restaurants – have all been disasters. The latest, at least, with its cap of whipped cream is a decent imitation of Viennese coffee.
Lagrasse is in the heart of what, during the 12th and 13th century, was the homeland of the Cathar heresy. Half the sightseeing brochures we’ve picked up indicate that this castle, or that abbey or that village is somehow linked to the biggest bloodbath the south of France experienced. I’ve just found a history of it written in French by a local author, and am reading bits to Phil. As a Medievalist, I knew a little about the so-called heresy, which the church of Rome saw as such a threat that it called a crusade, but I’m amazed at how much of what I thought I knew is wrong. Like my search of the “real” King Arthur, it’s another indication of the vast extent of new information Medievalists have uncovered in the 30 years since I studied for my PhD (and then dropped the whole thing to go into advertising.)
LaGrasse
In 1208 Pope Innocent III called the king and nobles of France upon a Crusade to eliminate the Cathar heresy that had spread through southern France. In the thirty years that followed, more than 40,000 Cathars, their supporters and innocent bystanders fell under swords of the crusaders. The principle cities and fortresses of the Languedoc were captured and destroyed. Northern France, at last, gained political and economic dominance over the vast, rich territory it had coveted (and which technically but never in political reality was a fief of France.) A civilization – the one that had spawned troubadours, chivalry and courtly love -- had been destroyed. And the Catholic Church initiated the Inquisition.
Catharism itself was a grass-roots movement of itinerant preachers calling for religious reform at a time when the Catholic Church was growing increasingly corrupt.
Most of what has entered popular knowledge about the Cathars was actually disseminated by the Catholic Church, the Cathars’ worst enemies. Even the name was a Catholic invention, having been given to the group by Benedictine Abbot Eckbert of Schonau in 1163. Cathars themselves had no name for their movement. They called themselves “Bonne homes” – “Good men”. Eckbert himself, in one of his sermons, admits that the members of this group were called different things in different locations. In fact, the movement, which is probably the best term for what the Church considered a heresy, was widespread throughout Europe. There were large pockets in the Rhineland, where Eckbert wrote, Burgundy, Bulgaria, Languedoc, northern Spain and Tuscany and Lombardy in Italy. Depending on the location, the Church referred to them as Bogomils, Bulgarians, Buggers, Publicans, Piphels, Lucifarians, Arians, and Cathars. The many names may have been the Church’s attempt to play down the wide-spread nature of the movement. Or to cause confusion regarding its nature. The church also spread much misinformation about Cather beliefs and practices. It’s only during the past fifty years that historians have unearthed original Cathar documents and been able to sort truth from propaganda.
So who were these Cathars? And what made them such a threat that Church and State united to destroy them?
Join me over the next couple of weeks while I share what Phil and I learned.
A big part of the plot of Exiled in the Sweet Land of Liberty circles around Sophie’s parents’ divorce. Exiled takes place in the 1950’s in an imaginary version of my Long Island hometown. Back in those days, divorce was very different from the no-fault, bye-it-was-nice-knowing-you system prevalent throughout the US today. And New York State had the most draconian of all divorce laws.
For those of you who don’t live in the United States and didn’t have to sit through an interminable term of what our high school teachers called “Government”, laws concerning marriage, divorce, birth control, driving, education and a lot of other things differ from state to state. That’s thanks to a quirk of the US Constitution that reserves to state governments everything not specifically mentioned in the Constitution.
In 1956, the year Exiled takes place, every state was different. Laws ranged from Nevada, where you merely had to establish six weeks residence, file a petition and get a divorce, to New York, which restricted divorce to only those who could prove the adultery of their spouse. Even then it took ages to go through the complete process to the final “Decree Nisi”, which said the marriage was officially ended and the parties could remarry.
Early New York divorce law had an interesting quirk. Until the state constitution was modified in the early 20th century, there were two routes to divorce. The one was a judicial route, in which a party could be granted divorce upon proving the infidelity of the spouse. When the law permitting this was originally proposed in 1787, it also stipulated that the adulterous party would not be permitted to remarry, but when it was actually passed two years later, that provision was dropped as too onerous.
The other route was called a parliamentary divorce. It allowed the parties to apply to the state legislature, who could then pass a special law permitting the divorce. This allowed a much broader range of grounds, but was very hard to get.
As a result, even as early as the 19th century, a large number of New Yorkers sought divorces outside the state, in what is known as “migratory” divorce. This was the route my own father took in 1946 when he split from his first wife (who was not my mother). The states preferred for divorce were those with very short residency requirements, chiefly Alabama, Nevada, Florida, Idaho and Wyoming. The wealthy often went overseas. There were divorce “mills” in Paris, Havana and Mexico.
There were domestic scandals, as well. Several times in the state’s history, divorce “rings” were exposed, in which professional “co-respondents” were paid to attest to having sex with one or the other of the parties in order to provide the necessary grounds.
Of course, in Exiled, Marta’s adultery is a proven fact. Even so, Jan needs hard evidence for court, which is why he appears to stalk her. Courts were not favorable towards women caught in adultery, by the way. Happy Murphy, who divorced her doctor husband to marry Governor Nelson Rockefeller in 1963, was forced to give up her four children by Murphy.
By 1956, citizens were clamoring for reform and a commission was created to study the divorce laws, but its limited mandate prevented it from accomplishing anything. In fact, reform was strongly blocked by the Catholic Church, which had a strong hold on the lower and more populous half of New York State. It took another ten years before the 1966 Divorce Reform Law was adopted. This law allowed for a wider range of grounds, including desertion, imprisonment, “deviant” sexual behavior and “cruel and inhuman treatment”. It also permitted “no-fault” divorce based on legal separation, which was carefully defined.
The reforms, while an improvement, were by no means equitable. In the 1960’s, the majority of women were still economically dependent on their husbands, and legislation did not guarantee a divorced woman sufficient means of support. It wasn’t until the feminist movement and further reform in 1980 that this was addressed.
Finally we’re at the part of layering the scene that most new writers consider “editing” or “revising” – enriching the language. By now, if you’ve been following my Layering Your Scene blogs through all nine parts (has it really been that many?), you’ve discovered there’s a lot more to enhancing a scene’s emotional impact than “fixing” the words.
Actually, words are the last thing you should look at, because by the time you’re finished puttering with everything else, those words may not even be there.
OK, you’ve got your scene working hard, contributing to the novel’s plot, conflict, theme, character development and building tension as it goes. Your scene has a strong beginning that jumps right into the central conflict of the scene and it has a hook that spins the characters off into a new direction.
You’re ready to look at the words.
Backload your sentences to strengthen their power.
Tighten the language. Get rid of redundancies and unnecessary verbiage.
Replace clichés with fresh writing.
Layer in rhetorical devices that heighten the emotional impact.
There is already so much good advice on the internet on how to enrich your language that I’m not going to repeat it all. Instead, I'll to point you in a few choice directions. So here goes:
"Backloading" is an expression that I think was coined by Margie Lawson, though she’s not the first place I discovered the concept. Backloading a sentence means putting the most powerful word in the sentence in the most powerful location in the sentence: its end.
Power words (also called “loaded words”) are words that resonate with readers’ emotions. They’re strong words that carry their own baggage, words like death, prayer, rape, caution, silence, blood, guilt, knife, edge, fall. Words that contain connotations of death, injury, disaster, chaos, pain, joy, love are all power words, as are many action verbs.
There are two ways you can backload a sentence.
Chop off words and phrases that aren’t necessary and that cause the power of the sentence to trickle away.
Thinly scattered streetlights reveal vast lawns, long, curving driveways, and tall, old trees whose bare branches twist like witches’ arms in the moonlight.
The power words here are “witches’ arms”. I’ve already mentioned streetlights, so I certainly don’t need moonlight. It can go.
Thinly scattered streetlights reveal vast lawns, long, curving driveways, and tall, old trees whose bare branches twist like witches’ arms.
Here's another original that can be chopped:
I remember now the ambulance arriving, and realize they must have come up the same lane we did.
Revised, it looks like this:
I remember now the ambulance arriving, and realize they must have come up the same lane.
Another way to backload is rephrasing the sentence so the power word is at the end. Here's the original:
We were both sitting cross-legged on our beds, our summer blankets pulled over our shoulders, even though it was hot outside
Rephased to move the power words to the end:
Even though it was hot outside, we were both sitting cross-legged on our beds, summer blankets pulled over our shoulders.
My revision has other problems, namely lots of fat, so let’s move on to my second bullet point and look at how to tighten it.
Mr. Stewart, my junior year high school teacher, introduced me to Strunk and White’s Elements of Style close to fifty years ago. The book was already a classic text for writers then, and still is now. It should be in every writer’s reference library. Mr. Steward repeated Rule 1 of Strunk and White so many times that it still rings in my ears: “Omit needless words.”
So what needless words can go?
First, anything that the reader could have guessed from context. Like “both”.
Next, anything that can be said more concisely: “Even thought it was hot outside” can become “Despite the heat”.
Third, look at the verb. Compound verbs that contain “begin to”, “start to” or anything similar can be reduced to the main verb. Progressive tenses (is + verb+ing) are also suspect. No, they are NOT passive voice, though critique partners and contest judges who have a mediocre grasp of grammar will try to tell you so. A progressive verb indicates that something, while active, is happening (see a used one right there) while something else happens. In other words, it indicates synchronicity. But you don’t always need progressive tense. Test the sentence by replacing the progressive form with the simple form of the verb. Does it still work? If so, use the simple form.
My sentence now looks like this:
Despite the heat, we sat cross-legged on our beds with our blankets pulled over our shoulders.
Now that "pulled over our shoulders" – the power words that indicate there’s some strong emotion making these kids feel cold – is at the end of the sentence, the phrase “cross-legged on our beds” seems to intrude on the main idea (the emotion). When that happens, ask yourself, “Do I really need that image”? Ninety percent of the time, the answer’s “no”. Often, when the answer’s “yes”, you can find another place to work it in (possible a different sentence) without weakening the sentence you’ve just strengthened.
I’ve merely scratched the surface tightening your writing. Author/agent Lois Winston has an amazing blog post that covers it in detail.
Clichés crop up at us when we least expect them. There are two that sentence. “crop up at us” (which I think is a misuse, as well) and “when we least expect them.” The point is it’s easy to write clichés. They’re so strongly embedded in our culture that when we open to the door to our Muse, there they are.
The trick is recognizing them and replacing them with something fresher. Fresher equals stronger.
Having trouble recognizing them? Just Google “cliché lists” and you’ll find over five million lists.
There are also plot clichés -- those predictable bits of action that bore the reader. You know, the hero who spots the unknown heroine at a ball and just has to pursue her, the girl who trips so the hero notices how pretty her ankle is, the dog that eats the crucial piece of evidence (otherwise known as “the dog ate my evidence”), and so on. Hopefully by now you’ve gotten rid of them, but if you’re still new to writing, you may need help recognizing them. Google will point you toward websites with lists of them, as well. One of my favorites is http://www.moviecliches.com/.
That leaves layering rhetorical devices. Rhetorical devices are the things you learned in poetry: metaphors, similes, hyperbole, alliteration and so on. Actually, there are heaps more. If you’re serious about upping the standard of your writing, take any of Margie Lawson’s courses. Her EDITS course includes practice in many rhetorical devices that writers use all the time, but that you probably were never aware were RD’s and could be used to create specific effects.
That wraps up my series of blogs on Layering Your Scene. Have fun revising!.
Over the last few weeks, I’ve been sharing the content of a workshop I gave for the C2C chapter of the Romance Writers of New Zealand. We’re nearing the end – and appropriately this blog is about the scene ending.
So let’s look at the ending.
Does it have a hook?
Is the hook fresh and interesting?
Does it move the plot in a different direction?
Does it have a “Shrek moment”?
Not sure whether your scene has a hook? Read your last few paragraphs to a partner. Get feeback on whether the hook’s working.
Every scene should have a hook.
Most paragraphs should have a hook.
Most sentences should have a hook (I’ll talk about how to do this in the next blog).
First draft writing looks something like this, from my WIP, Exiled in the Sweet Land of Liberty. This scene is from a chapter that I eventually cut entirely from the book. In it, Sophie and her father are at the beach discussing her brother Marion’s tragic death.
Dad slapped at a mosquito. Like Marion, he was blond and gray-eyed with the finely chiseled features of a handsome man. Mosquitoes loved him.
“Time to go home.”
It’s not bad, but there’s nothing about it to make the reader turn the page. Mary Buchanan, in one of her workshops, says that every scene should end with a hook that drives the reader to go on to the next scene.
Usually, however, the first draft of any scene ends on something that would put a potential reader to sleep. That’s because beginning writers have the urge to feel closure. It's what happened with this scene. You know what’s going to happen next. They’re going home. I could have shown them packing up their picnic and loading the car, but by the time I wrote this I’d gotten past writing most of what Margie Lawson calls “walking the dog”.
Signs of walking the dog at scene endings include:
Saying good-bye (unless there’s something about the good-bye that spins the characters on their heads)
Putting things away
Any of the rituals of leaving (putting on clothes, shaking hands, opening and closing doors, walking away.)
While this is logically how the action in the scene would play out, there is no conflict in any of these actions. Without conflict it is dead.
That doesn’t mean you can’t use good-byes to end a scene. But if you do, they have to be laden with conflict. Last night I was curled up in bed with Margaret Mahy’s YA Alchemy. Look how she turns a good-bye into a page-turner:
Roland, the hero, has been pressured by a teacher into getting to know Jess, a classmate who has no friends. Roland sums up the courage to visit her at her home, where he’s welcomed with the warmth of an Antarctic winter. Here’s the end of the scene:
Jess thrust his game of Viper towards him, then walked on to fling the front door wide. Stepping out onto the porch, Roland turned, shooting an apparently casual glance over her shoulder as he did so. There was no one and nothing on the landing. All the same, a moment earlier, he had seen – he had seen – he knew he had seen…
Of course, the reader wants to know, what has Roland seen? Mahy, right at the end of her scene, sets up a story question that propels us into the next part of the book.
My favourite “good-bye” at the end of scene – one that works dramatically well – is the penultimate scene from Gone with the Wind, in which Rhett walks out on Scarlett with the famous line “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn”.
But if you look at the scene itself, you’ll see that although he tells her he’s leaving, we don’t actually see him walk out the door. Not until the next – and final – scene in which Scarlett picks herself up from the disaster, determined to go back to Tara, which always gives her strength, and figure out a way to win him back.
As a writer you don’t need to begin or end the scene where the character enters or leaves the setting. Begin it as close to the central conflict of the scene as possible and end it as soon as possible after the scene reaches its climax. In the Gone with the Wind scene, the climax is the line, “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn”.
The ending to the GWTW scene twists around not just love scene we as readers expect (Scarlett entered the scene determined to tell Rhett she finally realized she loves him), but the whole the Happily Ever After ending, as well.
As a hook, the scene works magnificently, setting up at the last minute a new story question that leads us to read the last scene, which is not action, but introspection. GWTW is one of those novels in which the novelist doesn’t tie up all the loose ends, but the author has painted such a vivid portrait of a young woman who always manages to get what she wants, that the reader know Scarlett will somehow find a way to win back Rhett. On the other hand, it does leave open the question of how. If Margaret Mitchell had chosen to write a sequel, it, like GWTW, would have been a runaway best seller.
We can learn a couple more things from this scene:
Good hooks often set up story questions – things the reader is dying to know.
Good hooks surprise the reader.
Look at your scene ending. Is it predictable? How can you twist the scene and make it different?
Lori Wilde, to whom I am indebted for much of what I’ve learned on layering, suggests a couple of ways to do this:
End the scene the opposite of how you begin it
Look for a different motivation for the character’s behaviour
Add what Lori Wilde calls a “Shrek Moment”. A Shrek Moment – taken from the animated film Shrek – turns a cliché on its head. Shrek is filled with these. Most of them take iconic Disney conventions and give them an ironic twist. My favourite is the morning after Shrek has rescued Princess Fiona from the dragon. They are still in the forest. She hears birds singing and spots a mother bird on its next. In a typical Disney animation, this is a cue for the heroine to burst into song. Instead, the next scene shows a frying pan full of eggs.
Alexandra Sokoloff says that a good scene ending should contain a “disaster”. Like the ending I quoted earlier from Margaret Mahy, it should swivel the protagonist and the plot around in a new direction.
To create a disaster, ask yourself:
What surprises can occur?
How can I make things worse?
Next week: Layering Your Scene by Enriching the Language
