Write What You Know – Using Your Childhood to Shape a Story

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.

Layering Your Scene -- Enhancing Language

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!.

Layering Your Scene -- Endings

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

Layering Your Scene -- Theme

The next layer to add to your scene are the all the elements that have to do with the novel’s theme. For those of you who weren’t English majors (there must be a few of you out there) theme is basically the one-word definition of the abstract concept or ideal the book is about. For example, Othello is about jealousy, Hamlet is about revenge, Romeo and Juliet is about love. Often a work can have more than one theme. While Hamlet could be about revenge, it can also be about justice -- or indecision.

The theme is always a moral quality. It broadens the story’s scope, transforming it from a series of incidents that happen to a certain individual during a certain time at a certain place to a fable to which a broad audience can relation. In other words, the theme makes the story universal.

Although the theme itself is a universal quality, what each writer brings to a particular theme can be very different. For example, Titanic, Romeo and Juliet, and When Harry Met Sally are all about love. But they say very different things about love:

• Titanic: Love lasts forever.
• Romeo and Juliet: Love overcomes hate.
• When Harry Met Sally: Friends can turn to lovers.

Every scene should reinforce the theme. But how do you do that?

One way to state your theme is to use the formula put forward by Stan Williams in his book The Moral Premise:

            ___________ (virtue) leads to _____________ (positive
            outcome) but  _______________________ (opposing
            vice) leads to _________ (disastrous result).

Once you’ve stated your theme, ask yourself, “How does the scene support this premise?” In other words, what lesson does the reader learn from the scene?

For example, in the first book of my Arthurian trilogy, The Deadly Peace, the moral premise is “”Trust leads to allies and success; lack of trust leads to lack of allies and failure”. In the opening scene of the sequence in which my heroine, her best friend and her maidservant plot to set a day for my heroine’s coronation, my heroine’s inability to trust men leads her (a) to have powerless allies in the form of her female companions (b) to be reluctant to team up with a potential ally, the hero.

If your scene does not support either the positive or the negative half of your moral premise, your scene is not working hard enough. In fact, it may be totally superfluous. At this point, evaluate the purpose of the scene, especially if you’re running over your target word count. This may be one of those scenes you can omit.

Or, if there are good plot reasons why the scene is necessary, consider the following alternatives:

• Combine it with a scene that does support your moral premise (can you slide the information you need to convey from this scene into that scene instead?)
• Revise the scene to support the moral premise.

Once your scene supports your moral premise, you’re ready to add another layer to your text: symbolism.

In the workshop she gives on Layering Your Scene for Maximum Impact, best-selling romance writer Lori Wilde claims adding this layer made the difference that led to her first sale. Lori adds to every scene a “concrete symbol that represents the POV character’s state of mind or the plot or the theme or the misguided belief or the goal or their vulnerability.”

Often the McGuffin can work as a central symbol.

In the movie Titanic, for example, the gem “The Heart of the Sea” starts as the McGuffin that the treasure hunter (and later Cal) seeks. But it also represents Rose’s imprisonment in a role she deplores, and ultimately as the symbol for her own heart.

 While overarching symbols can contribute to the literary quality of the work, not every symbol has to be carried through the book. A symbol can be specific to a scene. For example, at the beginning Titanic, the porters bring a number of the works of early modern French artists into Rose’s cabin. They’re easily recognizable as the works of artists who are famous today, but back in 1912, they would have been barely known. We never see these paintings again, but they reverberate on several levels. Rose’s recognition of the potential of these undiscovered gems says a lot about the heroine’s artistic sensibility, but her financé’s scorn for the same works also tells us a lot about him. The paintings become the focal point for the conflict between Rose and Cal. They also foreshadow Rose’s relationship with Jack. On a wider scale, the later loss of these potentially priceless works under the sea mirrors the incalculable value of the disaster’s lost human lives.

 Checklist for theme:

• Scene supports the moral premise.
• Scene contains a symbol that “represents the POV character’s state of mind or the plot or the theme or the misguided belief or the goal or their vulnerability.”

Next week:
Layering the Ending and Language

 

 

 

Layering Your Scene -- Pace

For those of you who’ve joined this discussion of layering a scene in medias res, this is part of a workshop I delivered last month to my area chapter of the Romance Writers of New Zealand. This week we’re talking about layering to increase the pace of a scene.

No question, the emotional impact of a scene is tied to its pacing. Pace equals conflict. In my first blog, I talked about making sure that the scene was set up to contribute to the conflict inherent in the plot. Now we’re going to take a magnifying glass to the scene.

First, check every paragraph to make sure it contains conflict. Get rid of what Margie Lawson calls “walking the dog”. “Walking the dog” are those bits of business (a theatrical term that means actions and activities) that don’t contribute to the conflict. Typical walking the dog segments include:

• getting up and getting dressed or ready
• eating a meal
• travelling, entering, leaving
• waiting (unless you’re able to show tension building)
• bickering (as opposed to where the argument stems from the characters’ goals)
• social conventions
• polite dialog, such as when the host offers tea and the guest says, “No thank you” (and there’s no subtext that indicates she thinks she might be poisoned)
• anything you wrote to fill pages while you figured out what happens next

The rule is get in and out of the scene as close to the central action as you can. Start the scene where the conflict begins. Show us the secretary asking for a raise from her stingy boss – forget the part where she drives to work. Get out of the scene as close as you can to where the protagonist achieves or fails to achieve his goal. Forget the polite good-bys the morning after they sleep together – but by all means keep the part where he says, “I don’t think we should see each other again.” (Lots of conflict there!)

 Next, highlight all lines of introspection -- you know, those places where your character is thinking. Introspection slows the pace.

 Scrutinize. Is it all necessary? Cut, cut, cut, right down to the bare bones. Then turn as much of the rest as you can into dialog, which is much faster paced.

 Closely linked to introspection is over-explaining. These are lines that look like,

 

     “The Apaches will attack at dawn.” He wanted his troop to be alert.

 

As if they’re going to sleep through the night after news like that.

 Not all lines of explanation are useless. Sometimes they add subtext to the story:

 

     “I’m on a diet.” She didn’t want him to think she was always this fat.

 

Now we know (a) she’s got a weight problem, or at least she’s concerned about her body image (b) she’s worried about what he thinks of her, perhaps as the first step towards a romance…

 Over-explaining merely adds padding to your text. Give your readers credit for their intelligence. Do you really need to explain this? They’ve probably already figured it out. Omit the repeats, and consider opportunities to add subtext.

 Backstory is another pace-slower. A whole blog – possibly a whole book – could be written on this. In an opening chapter, it can kill your sale.

 As a good writer, you probably know more backstory on your characters than you’ll ever need to tell.

 The rule for backstory is feed it to the reader only on a need-to-know basis. And only one line at a time. One speaker at last year’s RWA National Convention mentioned that in the first third of the book, there should be only one sentence of backstory per chapter. That’s not much.

 Look at it like this: your job in the first half of the book is to set up “story questions”, questions readers ask themselves that keep them reading to the end in order to discover the answers. You do that by dropping hints. For example, in the opening of my YA WIP, my first person narrator says,

 

     We haven’t had a lot of happiness.

 

Instantly the reader is going to ask “why not?” But not until several chapters later do they get the beginning of the answer. And then, only the beginning…

 There are two places where somewhat extended backstory will work:

•  The prolog (if your editor will let you get away with one) – Prologs are designed to provide the necessary backstory to set up the plot. But you need to open with action, just the way you would in a standard opening. And, bad news, a prolog does not get you off the hook of having a terrific Chapter One. Editors still want to see an “opening chapter” that pulls readers into the book.
•  A flashback (late in the book) – By that time, hopefully, you’ve dropped so many hints about what happened that you won’t need one. Warning: the minute you go into the past, you’ve taken the reader out of the conflict and the tension drops.

Research – historical or otherwise -- can also slow the pace with what editor Jennifer Enderlin calls “over-writing”. You’ve probably put a lot of time into making sure you’ve got the details right. You know your time period or your protagonist’s job details better than a real life person in your protagonist’s shoes. But, like backstory, you should include only enough for the reader to understand the plot.

Signs of overwriting include:

•  The POV character says or thinks stuff everyone around her/him takes for granted or knows. For example, the stable master does not have to explain to the groom how to harness a horse.
•  The tone changes. Suddenly it sounds like a college lecture. You’re no longer in the POV character’s head.
•  It pulls you out of the action of the story.

Sometimes you need that bit of historical or technical explanation, so how do you work it in?

• Introduce an “Expert” cluing in the newcomer/neophyte. For example, in the James Bond movies, this job of M and Q.
•  Refer to it in a way that is natural for the context, making use of subtext. For example, in the movie Gosford Park, there is a discussion below stairs over who among the staff will serve those guests who didn’t bring maids/valets. The subtext intimates that (a) it is expected every guest will have a maid or valet to help them dress and take care of their clothes (b) staff are expected to do extra work when there’s an event like a house party.

A final suggestion for increasing the pace is to look at your white space, paragraph length and sentence structure.

White space always speeds up the pace.

Period.

So do short sentences.

And fragments.

On the other hand, long sentences, as much as we enjoy their rhetorical and structural intricacies, slow down the pace, which isn’t always bad. In an idyllic scene where your lovers are enjoying each other’s company, a slower pace enhances the tranquillity of the moment.

Notice the difference?

So go back one more time and look at sentence and paragraph length. Decide what pace this part of the scene requires and adjust your sentences accordingly.

Next week: the moral and symbolic layers

Layering Your Scene -- The Emotional Level

When I submit a chapter to my critique partners, I ask them to mark MOEs – missed opportunities for emotion. Because for me, remembering to stick in the emotion is the hardest thing to do. After all, writing about the emotion forces me to feel the emotion. And you know, with what I put my characters through, there’s times when I’d just as soon not feel that.

But emotion is what readers crave.

Romance is all about emotion. But it’s not the only genre in which emotion counts. Readers of historicals seek the emotional link that connects our era with theirs. Readers of YAs chase the fist-punching-air “ha!” of victory and the soul-plummet of angst. Readers of thrillers, mystery and suspense go for the chill up their spine as the protagonist’s situation turns from dire to desperate.

Once you’ve gotten the mechanics of structure and issues with POV worked through, the next level of layering a scene is the emotional layer.

Start by reading the chapter over again in one quick swoop and mark all the places you’ve shown the emotion. This can be:

Naming the emotion:

      Now I’m facing Joseph, but I’m afraid to look in his eyes, afraid to see the hurt that must be there.

Body language:

     Joseph blushes and rubs his collar with his left hand. The way guys do with a new shirt when there’s a pin still sticking there that their mother forgot to take out. Except this is a pin he’ll never find. It will always be there, itching and rubbing, for the rest of his life.

Dialog:

      “Not again!”

Dialog cues:

      “I think,” she says in a voice cold as the snow that will start falling any day now, “you made your position clear.”

Internalization:

       My mind is going fast. I’ve forgotten everything I meant to say. But, then, I said it. I apologized. What else does she want?

Senses:

      The scent of gardenias drifting through the open window reawakened the sweet memory of an awkward boy’s blush as he struggled to pin a corsage to her prom dress.

Go back now and look more closely at the various ways you’ve shown emotion. Have you used them to the fullest?

OK, time for an unabashed and blatant promotion. If you really want to learn to write emotions well, take one of Margie Lawson’s on-line courses. In fact, take all of them. She is the dean of writing emotions, bar none. What I’m going to jot down here is just a drop in the bucket compared to what she knows and teaches. End of commercial. We will now resume our regular programming.

Naming the emotion

Naming the emotion is “telling”, not showing, but at times it’s ok to tell. Be judicial your use of naming the emotion. It’s not a blanket replacement when you can’t think of how else to show emotion. 

Body language:

 Most writers use facial expressions, but there’s a lot more to body language than whether the character looks, smiles, raises her eyebrow, etc. Other stereotypical body moves are touches, shrugs, nods, shakes and turns. Go beyond the standard repertoire. Think about:

• Where are the two characters in relationship to each other? How close? Does the space change? How comfortable are the characters with the space?
•  How are their bodies oriented towards each other?
• How your character uses his hands and feet? Where are they placed, what are they touching?
• Visceral reactions and their signs. Visceral reactions are the automatic responses your body makes to strong emotions like fear and attraction. They’re things like increased heartbeat and breathing, blood rushing to face and neck (and genitals), sweating, increased or decreased focus, etc. Whenever something important has happened, whenever you want a strong emotional hit for the reader, remember to include the visceral reaction. 

Dialog and Dialog Cues:  
Often the words in dialog itself convey an emotion. But if there’s potential ambiguity, then you can clarify the emotion with what Margie Lawson coined “dialog cues.” Dialog cues go beyond simple dialog tags to actually convey how a line is delivered. They indicate the speaker’s volume, tone, or pitch.

Internalization: 
Internalization is the character’s thoughts. It’s internal dialog, and it goes without saying it can carry emotion. But it’s a weak way to convey emotion, as intellectualization is one step removed from the actual feeling. Think about combining it with a physical reaction, as well.

Senses:
As writers, we’re told to use all five senses in our descriptions. Writer and medical researcher Marilyn Kelly (11 Senses: Who knew?) says actually there are eleven:

•  The 5 senses plus
•  Sense of temperature
•  Sense of time
•  Sense of equilibrium/balance
•  Sense of motion/speed
•  Sense of pain/pleasure
•  Sense of orientation
•  “6th sense” – intuition/ESP

If you're writing a  Paranormal: does your character have other senses?

When you’re writing in Deep POV, descriptions need to serve emotions. Characters don’t just see or hear something. They filter what they experience through their own world view. Your descriptions should reveal what they feels about what they see, hear, smell, touch, taste… 

      Photos of a younger Miss Pride, in slinky sequins and fluttery feathers, sneer at us as we follow her through the front hall and to the kitchen.

 In this sentence from my WIP, we don’t just get a description of the pictures on the walls; we get how Sophie, my POV character, feels about them. She feels looked down on, judged and found wanting by someone who considers herself superior.

 And there’s one more I haven’t mentioned: The subtext – what are the characters NOT saying or doing? Can you show internal dissonance? (Internal dissonance is when what they say contradicts what they do.)  For example, a shivering heroine can shrug off the jacket the hero tries to lay around her shoulders.  

     “I’m not cold,” she said through blue lips.

Now that you’ve looked at how you’ve handled the emotions in the places you’ve got it, go back again and mark every Missed Opportunity for Emotion (MOE). If you’ve got good critique partners, this is where they come in really handy. If you don’t have CPs to do this for you, you can still identify where emotions should come. Just ask yourself, “How does my character feel about that?” after every:

• Line of dialog
• Move by another character that
• Is overtly or subtly threatening
• Closes personal space (including touches)
• Opens personal space (including turning away)
• News or event that the character didn’t want
• News or event that the character wanted
• News or event that the character didn’t expect

Dig hard. Don’t let yourself off the hook. And think of fresh ways to show the emotion. Don’t let yourself get away with clichés, including less obvious clichés like “he glared, she shrugged, he grinned” that are simply shortcuts for what the emotion really looks like. Push yourself to make the way you express the emotion be as strong as the emotion itself.

Next week: Layering to speed up the pace

Layering Your Scene -- POV

Last post, I talked about making sure that your scene shows, rather than tells the story as it unfolds. One of the most powerful ways that you can “show” is by making effective use of Point of View.

 

For those of you who need a quick recap, the principle types of POV are:

• First Person – The narrator is the “I” of the story
• Omniscient – The story is told from the perspective of an all-knowing narrator. Characters are referred to in the third person “he” or “she”
• Third Person Limited , also referred to as Deep Third Person -- The scene is told from the point of view of one of the participants in the action, who is referred to in the third person, i.e., he or she.

 

Most writers these days use Third Person Limited POV (TPL). Omniscient is still sometimes used for thrillers, suspense or mysteries, but even these genres are shifting towards TPL.  YA often uses first person to heighten reader identification.

 

TPL is a powerful tool. Like first person, it allows an author to get into the head of one of the characters and enables the reader to identify closely with that character. But it gives the writer a little more scope for description than first person, especially in love scenes. It also facilitates the use of more than one point of view character much more smoothly than first person.

 

First, check your scene for POV consistency.

• Have you started and stayed in one character’s POV?
• When you switch POVs, do you lead with a sentence that flags to the reader you are now in a different character’s head?
• Have you chosen the most effective character as the POV character for this scene?

Popular wisdom says to select the character who has the most to lose as the POV character in any scene. This doesn’t always work for the most effective scene. If your scene feels weak, try telling it from the following alternative perspectives:

• the person whose scene goal is the most powerful.
• the person with the least knowledge in the scene
• the person who has a secret
• the person with the least power in the scene
• the person with the most power in the scene

One thing to be very careful about is too many POV characters. In fact, plural POV characters flag to an editor that a writer is a beginner.

 

Depending on genres, you can get away with one to three POV characters without editors making a fuss. More than that, and you’d better have a powerful reason to bring the reader into so many heads.

 

Third Person Limited, used well, puts you right in the POV character’s world. You see the world through their eyes. This has some major implications.

 

Anyone who writes historicals knows to be careful of anachronisms. But it goes beyond that.

 

First, as people we all notice different things. What we notice is influenced by the time period we live in, our culture, our social and economic background, education, how familiar we are with the setting, our job or position, our age, our personal limitations (including our weight, disabilities, language), and our world view.

 

Put someone in a familiar setting and generally they tend to notice less. They take the familiar for granted, unless something has happened, such as a loss or death, that gives the familiar new meaning. The widow who never noticed how her husband bunched his towel on the rack, so it never dried thoroughly, will notice it now that he’s gone and regret that she never straightened it so it could dry properly. The divorcee will notice the same towel with anger – no wonder their linens always smelled of mildew.

 

On the other hand, put someone in a totally strange setting and they will quickly go on information overload. When we first moved to China, it was all I could do to cope with startling new architecture, the sidewalks crowded with people and bicycles, the shops with their goods spilling out onto the sidewalks. Every street corner looked the same. I struggled to memorize landmarks. Two months later, all these strange sights were familiar to me and not only did I quickly recognize the difference between San Xi Lu and Er Xi Lu (3rd Street West and 2nd Street West), but I also noticed when a new shop opened or when the stationer changed his window display.

• Ask yourself, what would my POV character notice?
• What would he or she feel about it?
• Cut or alter things that aren’t true to character.

For example, a florist could give you the scientific names for the flowers in the centrepiece on William and Katherine’s wedding banquet table – and their provenance. A member of a bomb squad might not be able to identify the flowers in the centrepiece, but he would check it for a potential bomb.

 

Take the time to fine tune your imagery (including metaphors and similes) to reflect the character’s time period, occupation, interests. In my Arthurian trilogy, my heroine’s family is famous for raising war horses. Her POV contains a lot of horse imagery.

 

Now, look at the situation itself.

• A person with a specific job to do is much more likely to notice the details of the scene that relate to that job than those not related to the job.
• A person in danger or in a challenging situation is more likely to be aware of those things which challenge or threaten him or her.
• A character’s emotional state can also influence what he or she notices. In a well-structured romance, for example, the reader picks up on the little things the heroine notices about the hero long before the heroine admits to herself she’s falling in love.
• People who have just received a shock or blow of some kind often notice irrelevant details. Everyone in the United States who lived through JFK’s assassination can tell you precisely what they were doing the moment they heard he was shot – even though the incident happened forty-eight years ago.

How a POV character sees the details depends a lot on their culture, socio-economic status, and world view. For example, let’s take several different people walking today through District 6 in Cape Town, South Africa. They stop at the bulldozed down ruin of a house.

 

The story of District 6 inspired the movie District 9. District 6 was a multi-cultural part of Cape Town that happened to be close to the harbour and one of the most desirable pieces of real estate in Cape Town. During the apartheid period, the area was evacuated and its residents moved to one of the settlements. Before the neighbourhood could be turned to financial gain for the dominant whites, however, world opinion turned against South Africa’s apartheid scheme and the empty homes were left to rot. Eventually things got so bad, they were bulldozed down. Nothing has been done with the area, which now remains of a reminder of the earlier regime.

• One person looking at the house might have been a descendent or one of the original occupants. She might see in a bit of china sticking out of the ground a lost way of life.
• Another person – a developer perhaps -- might notice the prime harbour view and consider the waste that 20 or so square blocks of highly desirable commercial land can not be put to use.
• Another person may see nothing but rubble and feel shame that this ever happened.
• And so on…

 People don’t go through life merely seeing things. They have feelings about what they see. Put those feelings down on paper and you’ve turned POV into a powerful emotional tool.

Next post we’ll look at the emotional level of your scene and how you mine emotional opportunities.

 

Layering a Scene -- Show, Don't Tell

We’ve been working at layering a scene, digging through the layers of a scene, like an archaeologist working on a tell in Israel. The first couple of blogs on this subject were about structure and how the scene related to the plot. Now we’re getting into the scene itself and how you actually tell the story.

 The next layer is what I call the “Show and Tell Level”. We’ve all been told by our critique partners, our workshop facilitators and all those how to write books, “Show, don’t tell.” But what exactly does that mean?

 

Telling skims the surface. Showing immerses the reader in all the minutia of the moment, gives it meaning, and weaves a rich, sensual texture full of emotion.

 

 It’s not always necessary to show. There are times when telling is more effective. Some of these are:

• Summarizing action or dialog that has already been shown
• Condensing time in which the events that happened during that time period do not significantly contribute to the plot, conflict or character arc
• Condensing day-to-day or predictable activities that don’t contribute to the plot, conflict or character arc
• Filling in back story
• Filling in explanations (history, technical points, etc.) 

How do you choose which to use? Start by deciding how much emotional impact you want the information to convey.

• Showing creates emotional hits for the reader
• Telling conveys little or no emotion

It’s easy to see a “tell” when the manuscript says something like, “He hacked through an army of enemies and finally reached her.” We have no idea what the army looked like, what the hacking looked like, where she was and what she was doing (or feeling) and how he felt as he struggled to save the heroine. This is telling at its most blatant. It turns a whole scene, or even a chapter, into one sentence. The reader experiences little emotion, except perhaps a bit of relief if the reader has been worried about the heroine.

It’s a lot harder to recognize a “tell” when the words go something like, “He looked into her eyes and fell in love.” I mean, “looked into her eyes” does indicate an action that happens at a precise moment. So it’s got to be showing, right? All right, maybe you want to hear what colour eyes she had. Emerald eyes. There!

But what about “fell in love”? Here we have a crucial moment in the plot of every romance, and our author has left that moment to show something else (the next sentence of the story) without giving the reader any idea of the falling in love process. What was it that stimulated the falling in love? And what was his body doing while his emotions were transforming?

Another example, from my YA:

Tell (the original version):

         I got there a second before the bell rang.

Show (my rewrites): 

         I raced up three flights of stairs, taking them two at a time, my schoolbag banging at my back. Dodging around a locker someone had left open, I jerked open the classroom door.
        The room buzzed with what-did-you-do-after-school-yesterday chatter. Mr. Rebus was writing on the board.
        My hands and face slick with sweat, I slid into my seat. My heart pumped so loudly in my ears I hardly heard the bell. 

So how do you turn the “tells” into “shows”?

This could be a workshop unto itself. However, here’s a quick overview.

First, look at the action. Have you compressed it? Both hacking through the enemy and getting there before the bell rang are compressions of a series of moves. Start by decompression, breaking a bigger action down into its component parts.

Then take those actions and put them into what Dwight Swain calls Motivation Reaction Units.

Motivation Reaction units are the core of how we operate as human beings. It’s the concept that goes way back to Pavlov and Skinner, that a stimulus causes a response. In other words, we don’t just act, we react to something that we’ve just experienced (seen, heard, smelled, felt, etc.)

Successful writers, according to Swain, structure the action and emotions in every scene as a series of Motivation Reaction Units.

The first part of every Motivation Reaction Unit is a stimulus.

Newton’s first law of thermodynamics says “Every action has an equal and opposite reaction.” That goes for psychology, as well. Every stimulus has a response. Or, to put it inversely, every response MUST have a stimulus.

So if you’ve got your heroine doing, thinking or feeling something, start with “what caused her to do/think/feel that way?” 

Next you need the reaction. If it’s a simple stimulus, all it may need is a simple response, as in the following dialog run from my WIP, Exiled in the Sweet Land of Liberty:

     “What’s your name?”
     “Sophie Jaworski.”  

That was the first draft of that little bit of dialog. Simple stimulus and simple response. As I rewrote the passage, though, I decided that I needed to add a little tension, which I could do through adding my heroine’s thoughts (she’s being challenged).

     “What’s your name?”
     No use lying. “Sophie Jaworski.”  

Now there are two kinds of reaction. One is verbal – the answers to his questions. The other is internal – my heroine’s thoughts. There can, in fact, be several kinds of reaction, strung one after another. Here’s the falling in love scene in my YA WIP. It’s set in 1956. The hero’s been singing along to a love song on the Jukebox.

      He looks in my eyes as he sings. His voice has a husky catch. It wraps around me like the old horse blanket in my grandfather’s barn in Poland, full of prickly hairs that scratch my skin, but warm, body-soothing warm.

      I blush, shift my eyes away, wish Mr. Ellis would march over and pick up my empty glass. But he just wipes his cloth along the shiny, dark counter. Ignoring us just I ignore the urge to slide my hand across the short field of Formica between us and connect with the warmth of Joseph’s fingertips.

  

Let’s break the reaction (the second paragraph down).

The first reaction is Visceral. Sophie blushes. A visceral reaction is something the character can’t control. It’s an automatic physical reaction to a stimulus, such as the heart beating faster, palms sweating, stomach getting queasy, etc. 

The second reaction is an automatic thought or action. “I shift my eyes away”. Again, the character has little control over this. It just happens. Sometimes it can be a bit of dialog that’s an automatic response, such as “Ouch!”

Next, we get a rational thought. In Sophie’s case this is her wishing that Mr. Ellis, who owns the soda fountain, would come over, disturb them and get her off the hook of having to respond to Joseph.
Lastly, there’s the rational action (which can also be a rational piece of dialog.) At this point, the character has control over his/her action (or dialog). He/she chooses to do what comes next (the action or dialog.) Sophie chooses to ignore what she really wants to do.

There’s a pattern here, and it’s crucial to all responses. It goes:

     Automatic physical response – automatic thought. Controlled thought. Controlled action.

To help myself remember this pattern, I broke it down as follows:


    The big picture is: Involuntary first—then voluntary.

 Within each pair of reactions, however, the subgroup is reversed:

 

     Involuntary: physical first, then mental

     Voluntary: mental first, then physical

 If you’re an analytical person, this may help you remember the pattern. If not, just go back to memorizing the pattern:

 

       Automatic physical response – automatic thought. Controlled thought. Controlled action.

 

 This pattern is crucial, because it’s how humans operate. If you follow this pattern, your writing will ring true to your reader. If you don’t they’ll feel uncomfortable. The writing won’t feel credible to them, even if they can’t tell you exactly why.

 

 It's ok to leave out parts of the response pattern. In my earlier example, a lot’s been left out.

 

     “What’s your name?”
     No use lying. “Sophie Jaworski.”

The response consists of a rational thought followed by a rational action (dialog.) It works, however, because even though I’ve left out parts, what I’ve left is still in the correct order.

 

 The rule is this: you can leave out parts, as long as the parts that remain are still in the correct order.

Checklist for Show and Tell Level: 

• Do you want to have the information convey emotional impact?

              No – might be ok just being told
              Yes – needs to be shown

• Can the event/activity be broken down into smaller steps or stages?
• List the steps/stages
• Are the steps/stages organized into Motivation Reaction Units?
• Are the reactions organized into the response pattern?

 

Next post: Layering the POV Level

Layering A Scene

I’m in the middle of rewrites for my YA. I’m one of those writers who plow through a very rough draft, getting it down as fast as I can, so that I can get to the good part – the rewrites. For me that’s mostly layering the scenes to add texture and meaning.

 

Why layer? Ultimately writer’s goal is to achieve Maximum Emotional Impact, and layering your scene is one of the tools for increasing emotional hits. Also, how you layer a scene also helps create that elusive thing we call “your voice”.

 

Layering is something you work on after you’ve finished the first draft, primarily because it involves analytical/critical thinking. When you’re drafting, you should be in creative mode and stay in the mode. That means turning off the internal editor. (I have a piece of paper tacked over my computer that says, “I give myself permission to write crap.”) Layering turns the internal editor back on, so it’s best saved for after you’ve finished the first draft, though as you get more comfortable with the things you need to layer in, you’ll find yourself doing some of it automatically as you draft.

 

First some definitions:

 

A “scene” is a continuous piece of action that takes place in a single location and has a specific beginning and end. It covers a distinctive and usually short period of time.

 

A scene is:

 

• Breakfast the first day of school in a household with teens. Teenage daughter comes down inappropriately dressed.
• The entry of the heroine at a Regency ball and the reaction she gets. (That could be a complete scene, depending on how long the ball sequence is.)

 

A “sequence” is several contiguous scenes whose action leads up to a climax or turning point.

 

For example, in my novel The Deadly Peace, one of the sequences is:

 

1. In the armory, the heroine and her companions discuss how to push the heroine’s Regent father into setting a coronation date for her. They formulate a plan, which the heroine doesn’t like because it involves the hero, whom she considers an ally of her father.
2. In the infirmary. They bargain with the hero to help them.
3. In the library. The hero is caught by the father giving help and grilled.
4. In the father’s workroom. The heroine is brought to task for trying to go around her father’s back. The heroine gets an unexpected ally in the hero, whom previously she thought her enemy.

 We’re focusing here on scenes, not sequences. When you’re working on layering, each scene needs to be analysed separately and also for how it contributes to the sequence.

 

I go about layering level-by-level, starting with the highest level, which I call the “Plot Level”. Levels are my own arbitrary term. Working at layering this way helps me to keep my thoughts focused.

 

The Plot Level is about whether the scene is doing its job within the story. Today scenes need to pull a lot of weight. The length of the average single title has gone from 100,000 to 80,000 words. Author Beth Cornelison, in her workshop on sagging middles at the 2010 RWA conference, says that every scene needs to have at least three reasons to be there.

 

If you’re a pantser (a person who gets an idea and, trusting your Muse, starts writing without doing much planning), you’ve probably got scenes that don’t need to be there or that somehow got off track or aren’t pulling their load within the novel. I started as a pantser, but with my WIP Exiled in the Sweet Land of Liberty, I actually outlined the whole book, as I wanted to learn to be more efficient in my writing. As a result, I managed to draft the thing in about 6 weeks. But when I was stuck, I would just say to myself, “Write anything. Just write. You can fix it later.” So there are a number of scenes that have needed first aid.

 

The Plot Level asks the questions, “Do I need this scene? How can I make it work its butt off to move the story forward?”

 

To answer this question, you’ve got to start with the underlying conflict that drives the book. Michael Hague, in his scriptwriting workshops (one of which I took centuries ago when I was a selling playwright), suggests creating a 2 x 2 conflict grid in which you list

• the protagonist and antagonist’s goals in the first column
•  the actions which keep them from achieving their goals in the second column.

 If you’re having trouble visualizing this, Jennifer Cruise has it up on her blog. (The post is full of hints on how to set up the basic conflict, a great place to start if you're struggling with that.)

 

If you’ve got a strong conflict, the actions that keep the protagonist from achieving her/his goals should be the same actions that the antagonist takes to achieve his/her goals, and vice versa.

 

Once you’ve got that grid, look at your scene and ask how does the scene advance the conflict?

 

For example, in the sequence from The Deadly Peace I described above, my heroine’s overall goal is to be crowned as the Queen of Rhyged, King Arthur’s largest subkingdom. There’s a ticking clock on this, as an old prophesy says that if the Heiress isn’t crowned by her eighteenth birthday, she never will be. My heroine’s father, the Regent, wants the crown for himself and his sons (traditionally it passes down through the female line, but the times, they are a-changing). So he has done nothing about the coronation. My heroine’s goal for this sequence is to get the date set for the coronation. The first scene sets up the problem, presents a possible solution – go around her father’s back and set the date herself – along with complications, and reveals the heroine’s character flaw (more on this in my next blog.) In other words, it sets the heroine on the first step of her journey to get her crown. It advances the plot.

 

In the example of breakfast scene with the single mom trying to get her kids off to school, the appearance of the inappropriately dressed teen daughter could send the story off in a number of ways:

 

1) Argument over clothes. Mother fails to assert herself and teen wins. If Mom is the heroine of a romance, this could set up a whole book in which Mom’s failing to assert herself leads to unhappiness and disaster.

 

2) The phone rings in the middle of the argument. It’s Mom’s father who says in a tense, frightened voice, “Don’t send the kids to school. Put them in the car and get out of town. Don’t pack. Don’t do anything. Just go.” Before he can explain, there’s a horrible sound at the end of the line that sounds like something’s happened to him. Now the argument with the teen is forgotten. And Mom is thrown into an adventure in which she and her kids are running for their lives – or she is struggling to find and save her father. Or both.

 

3) Argument over clothes. Mother wins. Daughter changes. Kids get off to school on time. Ho hum. Yes, there’s conflict, but this scene isn’t pulling its weight. Unless you can figure out a way to tie it to the overriding conflict of the book, this is a scene to cut. And don’t tell me you’re just trying to show the protagonist’s Ordinary World. In today’s novels, that can be incorporated into the Inciting Action – the event that sets off the conflict and puts the heroine on her journey.

 

If you’re waffling back and forth and really don’t want to kill that darling, here’s a tip: I never hit the delete button when I cut a scene. I cut and paste it into a separate file and put it into my Outtakes folder. I may want it back. Or possibly I might use it as bonus material on my website when the book gets published.

 

Rhay Cristou (her YA novel Color of Truth made it to the semi finals of the Amazon Breakthrough competition in 2010 and her current WIP Bliss is in the 2011 semi finals) sent me this titbit that helps me focus on whether the scene is advancing the plot:

 

“One of the questions that my advisor Norma Fox Mazer always asked me in grad school: "Rhay what does your character want and how does this scene move her/him to or away from obtaining that want?" I know it's a basic question but one that I think we often forget to ask ourselves when living our stories. Once you keep asking yourself that question-- What does she want and more importantly how does this scene move the character to that (and yep you have to be able to write out that answer) -- then you'll know if these scenes are really doing the job you want them to do.”

 

“What does your character want?” leads to the next level of layering a scene: the Character Arc Level. Which is the topic of next week’s blog post.