Knitting a Novel

You can't just fall in with any group of writers and form a critique group. You have to have common ground to work from. You have to have other things in common, besides writing, so that you can understand where your partners' perceptions are coming from. At least, you do in my experience.

When it comes to this critique group, we have lots in common. Of the many things, in addition to the obvious writing thing, we all knit. (Well, I shouldn't say "all"; Sarah doesn't knit. Yet.) Yes, you heard me correctly, we knit. And not just in our private homes either. No, we have been known to engage in this completely granny-ish activity in public. In cars. In subway trains. In meetings. In restaurants even.

I'm new to the TriMu; I have no idea how knitting became a group activity. In my mind's eye, I have a fuzzy image of a poorly planned outdoor NaNoWriMo write in on one particularly chilly November day. The original TriMu sat there, plotting and trying desperately to keep typing away, even though they shivered so badly that they couldn't hit the right keys. ("Hey," they told one another bravely, "it's Nano -- it's not like you were going to write anything comprehensible anyway!")

"F-f-fingerless g-g-gl-gloves!" a Mythmaker shouted through chattering teeth. "What we need are fingerless gloves!"

At this point, I'm assuming someone had some spare yarn handy or maybe an extraneous sweater got unraveled for a good cause, and another of them happened to have a set of knitting needles on them for reasons at which even my whimsical imagination cannot guess. And thus a craft habit was born. As I said, I don't know how exactly it all went down. By the time I joined the TriMu, knitting was already the thing to do, and I was taught the craft as part of my induction.

I like how I say "induction" there, as though there was a formal ceremony and the TriMu didn't teach me how to knit in Tori's living room while we watched the California Raisins' Claymation Christmas Celebration last December.

In any case, we "all" knit. (It's only a matter of time for you, Sarah.) And as I was sitting on a train last weekend with my most recent knitting project, it occurred to me how very like knitting writing a novel can be.

Finally! I can hear you all thinking. She had to get to the point eventually.

You start out with a pattern, a plan for what you're going to knit and what stitches you're going to use to make it look the way you want it. This sounds suspiciously like an outline for writing a novel. As a pantzer, I don't hold with that kind of nonsense, but I do at least go into a new writing project with a vague idea of what I'm starting up. So maybe you don't always start with a pattern, but you at least sit down with some vague inkling as to the shape of what you want to knit. I'm fairly certain most knitters don't sit down thinking they'll knit a sock and come away with an afghan. I'm sure it happens that way sometimes, just like novelists sometimes sit down to write a romance and come away with an epic high fantasy trilogy. . . Not that I've ever done that. ;-)

So you have your pattern and you get your yarn and your needles and stitch markers and what have you together and you start off with the knitting. And maybe while you're knitting, you decide you like the way something might look if you tweaked the pattern a little here and there. Or maybe you make a mistake (this is something I never do. . . *innocent whistle*) and end up liking the way that new "pattern" looks and so you just go one with knitting it that way instead. Or maybe you make a mistake that you don't like the look of and so you sit there and spend an hour or so unknitting. Which is a lot harder than it sounds, by the way, so much so that unknitting is something I actually never do. (Incidently, why do we never notice these mistakes at the time we're making them? Why is it always rows and rows later that we realize them?)

Or, put another way, you get your research materials and notecards and word processing programs and what have you together and start off with the writing. And as you go, you might come up with a smoother way to make that plot you outlined earlier work or the characters might go off in a direction you didn't expect but really love or you might get six or seven chapters in and decide that your main character needs to die and someone else should be telling this story and so you have to go back and rewrite it all.

Or, put still another way, you work the craft, whatever it may be, and gradually make the project your own.

And then the project starts to really take shape. Your fingers get used to the pattern of the stitches and you get into a rhythm and rows (or words, as the case may be) just start to flow off your fingertips. There may still be tricky moments, mind you. You might have to sneak an extra stitch in here or there to make up for dropping one somewhere else, just like you might have to throw in a line of dialogue you didn't anticipate to set up the big twist at the end that you didn't see coming before. But the point is that things are starting to tumble and if you just keep going with it, everything will work out.

And before you know it, it's time to cast off. Time to type "THE END". You've finished. It might not be what you set out to do, but who needs more socks anyway? Epic high fantasy trilogies are so much warmer.

Working Through It

It's been a pretty hectic couple of weeks for the TriMu. We've had a lot of writerly stuff going on and that's taken its toll on us all. (See Sarah's post from last Friday for more details of the tragic brain explosion.) I've also had some personal stuff going on that's been dragging my brain off in ten thousand other directions, none of which involves a familiar.

But through all of that, there are still things that need to be done, other projects that cannot be abandoned in light of our having other things to do. Deadlines are deadlines and even self-imposed ones must stand or the whole system falls apart.

So even though I was feeling tired and burned out and my Muse wasn't speaking to me, I kept opening up my WIP every day and pounding away at it. The words came with painful slowness, needing to be dragged kicking and screaming out of my imagination and forced through stiff wooden fingers to grind past the keyboard and onto the page.

To say writing was difficult for the past few days would be the understatement to end all understatements.

And then, as it always does, something lovely and amazing happened. I was sitting at my laptop yesterday, at a ridiculously late hour of the night (or a ridiculously early hour of this morning, if you want to get technical) because I was still several thousand words away from my goal for the day, when my Muse snuck back into the room.

She stuck her arm through the doorway, waving a white flag fashioned out of either a crumpled paper napkin or an Armani handkerchief. (I'm not sure which as I was tired and getting a little bleary-eyed.) She even offered to bring me a caffeinated beverage if I would just let her play with the familiars again for a few hours.

Two hours later, my word count goal for the day was met by over one thousand words and now the last few chapters of the book are sitting right on the edge of my brain, just waiting for me to let them fly out onto the page.

The morale of the story? Even when your brain is 'sploded and you feel like you couldn't string together a coherent sentence to save your life, keep writing. Write your way through it. It's the only way to get past it.

Or, as Kalayna says, the Muse comes to those waiting at the keyboard.

Points of View - Part 1

I feel like being a bit school marmish with today's blog post. -- Stop passing notes! No chewing gum in class! Stop picking on the boys! -- Do you feel like you're in grade school again? Good. Here we go. Point of View is one of the most basic aspects of writing fiction, however it has enough complexity that it can change the whole course of a story. In a recent post, Kalayna described how she had to change points of view to find the right voice for a story. I experienced something similar with a short story I am writing. I started to tell it from more than one character's perspective, but I lost the tension and, in the process, the plot.

There are four key aspects of POV--person, ensemble, distance, and omniscience. Each of these categories contains a range of possibilities with itself and the combination of the four makes for wildly varied creative choices. Most writers make these choices intuitively while they write a story, but being aware of the options will allow a writer more creativity, help them be more aware of POV inconsistencies, and possibly reveal to them why a particular scene or scenes don't work the way and author wants. I will tackle the two simpler aspects of POV today--person and ensemble--and wrestle with the more obtuse ones on my next blogging day. Why do hard work now when you can put it off, right?

The first key to POV is person. Person refers to the grammatical categories of first person (I, we), second person (you, y'all), and third person (he, she, it, them). Contrary to appearances, person in fiction does not define whether the reader is inside or outside of a character's head. Person does dictate perspective to a degree, but distance affects it much more. Person really comes down to pronouns--to what pronouns you use when you are writing. Most fiction is written in third person. Third gives the writer a greater choice in the other three aspects of POV, as well as being well known and well tolerated by the reading public. The next most popular person is first. First gives the reader full access into the mind of the character. First is limiting though, because it must be by definition close in omniscience and subjective in distance (see Part 2). Some readers are uncomfortable with first person because it is close to a loss of self or an invasion of someone else. Second person is rarely used in fiction, and it usually meets with poor results. People don't like being told what to do. Well, unless you're reading a blog. I personally write and read just as well in either first or third person. I attempted a second person story once, but I think I purged those files from my computer (I hope).

The second factor in POV is ensemble. Ensemble deals with how many characters will define your POV. We call the characters the POV character of the scene. The simplest ensemble choice is to go with one POV character--the writer follows one character all the way through the story. This can be done either through first or third person. Another popular tactic is to have an ensemble cast written in third person. This means that the entire book is written in third person and each scene or chapter follows a different character. The writer decides how many different POV characters they swap back and forth between. The POV character usually changes at the scene break. In omniscient view (again, you'll have to wait for Part 2), a writer can change POV character within the scene because the narrator keeps a distance from the action, but I'll get into that later. I wrote my first Nano novel in first person with an ensemble cast--the whole novel was in first person but I switched my POV character every chapter between the two main characters. Their voices were fairly distinct, so I think it worked most of the time, but the stronger, more sarcastic of the two definitely overpowered her sister in some chapters. She was just so fun to write.

The class bell is ringing, so you'd better stuff all your junk in your backpack and get out of here. I'll warn you, if you leave something behind, I'm keeping it. And if it's a caricature of me with dragon wings and snout, spewing fire, I'll hang it on my fridge, you sweet thing you. See you next time for more lessons in points of view!

Screenwriting for Better Novels

One of my smaller works in progress is a short story adaptation to film that I am undertaking for a friend. I have some (basic and quite pretentious) experience in writing screenplays, including a foray into the annual Script Frenzy, but screenwriting for me is nowhere near a honed skill. However, I do love the challenge of writing for screen as it forces a writer to impart character, plot, and setting through visuals alone. I am always amazed at how my writing improves through the experience.

For example, in novels, the writer is the director, location scout, camera operator, editor (for the most part), etc. You as the writer, are virtually the only name in the credits of your novel (unless you're like Sarah and have your own live-in craft services chef). However, when writing for screen, the writer only serves a small part in the creative process. While screenwriters are allowed to describe the general appearance of their characters and settings, they can only put in the few details salient to the plot. Even though you have to show the world you building, it's not your job to dress it fully. Your job is to get the foundation laid, and the rest of the crew will put up the walls and the plumbing and the crown molding. And you have to be prepared for the house to look completely different from your vision.

Also, there is no interiority in screenwriting. You can't go on and on in an internal monologue about how the salt shaker on the restaurant table reminds Dan of his favorite stones to skip during childhood summers with his now-dead drug addict uncle. We have all read and written interiority like this, and it can work in a novel, but a screenwriter would have to creatively attack this idea in another way. For example, there could be a scene showing Dan and his uncle in flashback, or Dan could talk about his childhood in expository dialogue, or, because Dan is a secondary character anyway and we are talking about salt shakers here, the writer should leave it out and use precious space for more important details.

Screenwriting challenges a writer by restricting choices and forcing new paths of creativity. These restrictions are not appropriate for every story or tolerable for every writer, but they do focus fiction writing in interesting ways I have learned not only to see my world more clearly, but to focus on the most important parts of it. If you want to join me in the screenwriting world, check out Celtx for open-source screenwriting software and go to Script Frenzy's resource guides for a crash course in screen formatting. It's definitely worth a try.

Worthless Excuse #487: I Simply Cannot Write When I Feel This Way

Any writer worth their words knows that there is never a perfect time to write. There will always be something else competing for your attention. Sometimes it's something very real and important competing with your glorious pages. Like children or day jobs or curing cancer. (This is not to say I expect everyone is secretly working on a cure for cancer in their cubicle at the office. I more meant that last one for those writers who are also, you know, oncologists and researchers and stuff.)

But other times silly things compete with your muse. In my experience, muses do not react well to being put on the back burner because it's a beautiful spring day and you just want to laze about in the backyard working on your tan. "Laptop lines and novelist's tans are all the rage these days!" she'd suggest sneakily. And you really don't want your laziness to be responsible for that kind of fashion trend, do you?

And still other times, emotional problems will compete with your writing. As novelists, we spend most of our time crafting and commenting on the human condition, but what we often forget is that we're doing that while having to be human ourselves. We have personal lives; we experience things. We would, realistically, be very poor artists did we not do those things, but sometimes it can feel like more of a hindrance than anything else. We like to be in the mood to write, and sometimes "the mood" has about as much chance of magically manifesting itself as my kittens have of sprouting wings so they can really chase those birds that have decided to nest in the hanging plant on my balcony.

Alas, at one time or another, we have all had that thought: I simply cannot write when I feel this way!

You're wrong!

I'm sorry, I wish I could sugarcoat it for you, but the plain and simple truth is that you're wrong. You can write when you feel that way. In fact, you must! And it doesn't matter, for the sake of my argument, what way you're even feeling. Because "write what you know" is the ultimate piece of writing advice and creating realistic emotions is one of the greatest challenges in writing. Writing emotions while you're right there in the thick of them is something of a match made in heaven then, isn't it?

The trick, of course, is finding a way to make those emotions make sense in context. I am not suggesting that, after learning your boss is a two-faced jerk, your bitchy demon-stalking heroine should start complaining to henchmen #3 about how underappreciated she feels. When you have a fight with your spouse, you should not have the hero of your romance novel start waxing poetic about how glad he is to wash dishes for his girlfriend every now and again and how wrong his mother really is about the course of his life. Remember, it’s the emotion you want to grab. Not necessarily the context.

Let me give you an example. Sunday, my husband got some rather bad news about something at work and, on his behalf, I was a bit angry about it. As in the kind angry that made the hour long drive back from the weekly TriMu critique meeting go by in just 45 minutes because anger increases the weight of my right foot for some reason. And once I got done shouting at the empty space in the car, my first thought was "I could write Serah a kick ass scene right now!" Serah is the somewhat emotionally-unstable assassin in my epic fantasy trilogy. The rest of my -- admittedly brief -- drive home was spent planning out a great new scene that will have to work its way into the story somewhere. Once that was done, I took out all my residual aggression on processing my notes from said critique meeting and killing off be-verbs.

The results: I feel better. I have a great new scene. My rewrites went much faster than usual. And my husband's boss -- though blissfully unaware of this fact -- has some poor unfortunate be-verb's blood on his hands.

So the next time you start getting all fussy about how you're not in the mood to write, sit down in your chair and force all that emotional baggage onto your characters instead. They might not necessarily thank you for it, but your eventual readers will.

Baby Steps Through the Pages...

I have to keep reminding myself where I am on my writing journey.

I've always wanted to be a writer.

Kindergarten: I wrote a small, bound (and illustrated...LOL) book about the day a dinosaur (from the pictures, it appeared to be a brontosaurus) appeared on my front step for a playdate.
...
2nd Grade: I handed in my natural science report on robins as written from the bird's perspective.
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5th Grade: I decorated spelling tests with flash fiction scribbled on the back using one vocab word in every sentence.
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10th Grade: I slammed through my history report, presenting it as written by a member of an archeological dig's team. Complete with photos and "ancient scrolls". Oh yeah.

I've always been a writer.

My brain frequently dabbles between short fiction, flash fiction, poetry, song lyrics, and random exercises in creative prancing. In 2006, I attempted my first novel, a complicated piece that was more self-challenge than thoughtful prose - something different. Sick, stressed, and distracted due to school, doctor visits, and work, I set it aside.

But I didn't stop scribbling.

The merry band of heroes and requisite universe of StarStones have been clanging in my head since 2002. I'd done dozens of short stories from their points of view, mini-adventures, before finally chronicling a more epic adventure - this time starring their younger selves - in 2007. Having finished the book, my very first wholly-complete deeply-flawed novel, I moved into edits and dragged it to a writing conference for some critique. By September of 2008, I had deleted and rewritten the ending.

In November of 2008, I completed my second full novel, set in a new place, in an unfamiliar genre. Yay!

By December of 2008, I had deleted the ending of StarStones again. Boo!

And somewhere in there, in the midst of life and living, I decided I could never NOT be a writer. Editing REbegan in earnest. Fellow Tri Mus accepted me into the ranks. Goals were hashed out, mashed out, and then made realistic. Research began on submission deadlines and formats, publishers, agents, editors, query letters -- all things publishing. Another writing conference was scheduled. StarStones now has yet another ending. And there are many, many more edits to follow. Many, many mistakes to make. Support from the hubby: immeasurable. I determined I could indeed write, write, write forever. Good or bad - it didn't matter.

Where I am on my journey is just past the starting blocks: Committed to my writing path. No longer close enough to home to run back and grab those few things I forgot on the desk before starting off again, but still tentative in uncharted territory. I shouldn't feel like I'm behind, rushed. I don't have an external deadline (save the tantalizing open submission dates for some spiffy short story anthologies).

These are the days for making amateur mistakes, taking small steps, shaking off doubts. These are the days for soaking up all the education I can on the writing process and publishing world. And these are the days to vow (in application!) never to stop learning, never to stop listening, never to stop watching, never to stop writing. This - THIS! - is the beginning.

Searching for a Truth

It is one of my fundamental beliefs about literature that at the core of every novel you read, there is a Truth. A message, usually complex and yet simple at the same time, that is the basic assumption the writer is proving with the story. I'm not talking about the plot here. If the Truth of a novel is related to anything, it's more like the moral of the story.

Sometimes this Truth is overt, a recurring line or even the title of the novel. It's out there, letting you know "Hey! This is what the story is really about!" Other times, it's more subtle, never said explicitly, but implied in a thousand different ways. Sometimes these more subtle Truths are ones that we take in as we read without noticing it; we accept them and learn them, but we don't actually become aware of them until we see them in a commentary or something.

Let me give you a couple of examples of what I'm talking about.

On the explicit end of the spectrum, I just finished reading the Black Jewels Trilogy by Anne Bishop. (Those are some marvelous books, by the way, if you're looking for something to read.) All throughout the story, there is one phrase repeated over and over again. "Everything has a price." It gets thrown back and forth throughout the dialogue. Characters think it with resigned sighs. It slips into the exposition. Every now and again, it appears as one of those single-line paragraphs, powerfully opening or closing a chapter. Over the course of those three novels, she must say "everything has a price" three or four thousand times.

Except that she doesn't say it three or four thousand times. She just weaves it into the story often enough that you begin hear it behind every thought, every feeling, every action of the story. Your brain starts automatically translating every single word -- even the mundane words like "a", "and", and "the" -- into "everything has a price" until it's running on a loop in your head. Everything has a price. Everything has a price. Everything has a price. You leave the Black Jewels world with that one phrase pounded into your head, a Truth, undisputed.

If you're looking for something a bit more subtle than that, let's take another fantasy trilogy: J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings. (I really never expected to use LOTR as an example for subtlety!) The Truth we learn from journeying through Middle Earth is that everything, once touched by evil, diminishes. I don't think he ever explicitly states this, but you can't find a single character in the entire trilogy -- and there are a lot of them, aren't there? -- who, once touched by evil, hasn't lost something. Oh, they might be better off -- we would, in fact, hope that most of them would be better off, because otherwise why work so hard to defeat evil in the first place? -- but they all lose something. Nothing can ever be the same for them; they can never be as great, as beautiful, or as innocent as they once were. Everything, once touched by evil, diminishes.

When I wrote my Aundroma trilogy, I knew my Truth from the outset. And that helped me with my story building. I used that idea to set up everything, because I wanted it to be one of those subtle Truths, one that I never came out and said, but that was there, present in everything. The same idea applies to every aspect of the story, from the design of the binary star system, to the social structure of the races, to the relationship between my main character and his love interest, all the way down to the internal battles of my main character. I knew from the beginning that I wanted to write about that Truth, and so I did, though I never actually wrote it down (not even here).

But with my new project, I'm not sure what Truth I'm writing about. The idea came upon me rather suddenly and I've just been writing it in true pantser style, with almost no planning or thinking beyond the scene I'm working on. But I'm getting to that point in the story where I should be coming up on turning points, where the plot should be taking shape, and I'm wondering to myself "what am I really writing about here?" I throw Truths that I already know into the room with my characters and see if they react to them, but nothing happens. So far, that's not stopped me writing -- I'm still pounding out about 1,000 words a day -- so I'm not too terribly concerned about it, but it still makes me wonder.

For the first time, I'm thinking that I might need to learn a new Truth myself, that my characters might have to throw one out at me.

Magical Montage Moments

Writing is an art that must be accomplished over time with much effort, toil, and revision. We write, write more, scrap, write more, rewrite, scrap, write more, with the hope that someday, somewhere, we'll get it on a bookshelf for an unsuspecting reader to shuffle home with, open up, and be whisked away to another kingdom with our mystical guidance. Chief among the things we must do to reach that goal is to WRITE. Sit down, pull out the tools, and get to work.

There is no 80's montage.

Don't get me wrong, there are magical moments that occur between the pen and paper - when everything is perfect, never to be revised again - but these are few and far between. That is why they are called 'moments'. Truth: If we had it that easy all the time, they would be hardly magical. They would be normal. And we wouldn't appreciate them quite so much.

There is no sudden soundtrack of 80's pop music that will explode in your head while you are writing, somehow defeating time and space to bound through the task of writing 300 pages (in 2 seconds), selling your book for the quadruple-million figure book deal (in 5 seconds), watching your book fly off the shelves (in true omnipotent fashion), and finally, as the final notes of the montage taper off, panning in to see yourself from above, happy and relaxing, a job well done.

Cherish the moments, and cherish the toil.

The toil is what gets us to the endgame. The moments are the carrots along the way, reminding us that some good things happen within these pages. I wouldn't trade the effort and experience for the world. There's all of this cool stuff about my worlds and characters that only I know - and I learn a bit more about them every day. Discovery is part of the journey. Enjoy the moments you spend with your characters. Get to know them, get rid of the ones that annoy you (untimely deaths via ink are all the rage), and come to love them. There will come a time when you revise a scene and think "Woah. He would never say that." followed by "Instead, he would...". You have to spend the time getting to know them before you can make that call. It's like having dozens of friends - all inside a neat little package of gray matter.

Last week, I finished the second chapter of my science fiction novel for the seventh time. The first time, it was exciting. Verbose and clunky, but exciting. The second, third, and fourth drafts stripped out the bad stuff. And suddenly, the character was dull. Utterly lifeless on the page. He spent a good seven pages talking to himself and feeling sorry for the misfortune of others. Going back to my scraps, I found the good bits and put them back in for versions five and six. He still wasn't right, still thought too much. I added a new character, and that ember began to glow once more. My husband looked over my shoulder and made a tiny suggestion. I stared at him as if he had grown another pair of eyes. How in the world does he know my characters better than I do?

It was a solution that had been staring at me since I started revisions; I was merely fighting it. That's right: The magical moment was sitting there tapping its foot, yelling at me from time to time (this explains the recent headaches) and I only had to let it through to the page. Lesson: Stand aside and let those come through. Just because they are rare doesn't mean that you should ignore them when they come to the window.

I rewrote the whole chapter in a few evenings (not seconds!) without bothering with my previous material. The adventure was back! They were alive! And I was still able to go back and pull some of the old material forward when I was done. Now, it will be changed again over time. For now, however, I have a good draft of a chapter that stays true to my characters as they should be - exciting, insane, and raring for adventure. Wouldn't trade that time for the world.

Besides - don't you think being in the montage would make you really, really dizzy?

Finding a Purpose for Passives

Most writers who listen to any writing advice at all, know to avoid passive voice. It’s an excellent piece of advice, because what most writing mentors mean when they say it is “strengthen your weak writing.” The writer who receives this advice doesn’t quite know what to do with it, though. They usually go on a hunt, brutally murdering all passive construction in their writing. However, what writers need to understand is there is a difference between the esoteric concept of passive voice (i.e. weak, mushy writing) and passive construction. Passive construction is a concrete grammatical process, which can be utilized to create focused, strong writing. I hope this blog entry will give writers a tool for working with passive construction in their writing.

The first thing I need to do is define passive construction. It is not simply using be verbs. The sentence I just wrote used a be verb as its main verb, but it was not passive construction. The hallmarks of true passive construction in English are threefold: (1) the direct object is “promoted” to the position of subject, (2) the verb takes on an auxiliary be verb, and (3) the main verb becomes intransitive (not requiring a direct object). The former subject may not be mentioned in the passive sentence at all. However, when it is, it does not become the direct object but usually becomes the noun in a prepositional phrase starting with by.

For example, look at the following active transitive sentence: Kalayna slew the dragon. The sentence has a subject, Kalayna, a transitive verb, slew, and the required direct object, the dragon. To passivize the sentence, we first promote the dragon to the position of subject. Now the sentence is about the dragon, not Kalayna. Second, the main verb takes on an auxiliary be verb, was. Third, the verb is transformed from a transitive into an intransitive, slain. We end up with The dragon was slain. I know you’re asking “but what about Kalayna?” If a writer wanted to show who did the slaying, she could say, The dragon was slain by Kalayna but acknowledgement of the former subject is not necessary in passive construction. The point of passive construction is that it focuses the reader’s attention on the receiver of the verb’s action, rather than on its cause. Writers can use this function to their advantage.

Strong writing does, in fact, use much more active construction than passive, and it is a good rule of thumb to slay passives. That said, I think passives in a first draft can serve a good purpose in strengthening our writing. Let’s say you found the sentence, The dragon was slain by Kalayna, in a manuscript. Your first reaction would probably be to replace it with the active construction, Kalayna slew the dragon. But think about the function of passive construction. It focuses attention on the receiver of the action. When you wrote that passive sentence, your mind focused on the dragon. Why? Before jumping in with the first active construction that comes to mind, a writer should ask herself two questions, (1) “what is this sentence doing?” and (2) “where should its emphasis lie?” Maybe you want to put Kalayna at the fore: Kalayna slew the dragon. Then again, you may want the reader to focus on the dragon: The dragon was slain or The dragon was slain by Kalayna. There is a third option, though. Kalayna may not be important to the scene and you do want the reader to think about the dragon, but you still want an engaged, active tone. Therefore you could use a completely different intransitive verb: The dragon died. That last option may never have come to mind if you had not thought about why you used passive construction in the first place.

Written v. Spoken English

I just started taking a graduate course in linguistics and I wanted to pose one of the discussion questions that came up in class for blog readers and mythmakers alike to ponder.

One of the students commented on the text's examples of how language changes over time. He said, "rather than seeing these examples as 'language change,' I see them as examples of the distance that printed English always needs (for one reason or another) to put between itself and spoken English." I so wanted to ask him what his reasons were, but since I didn't I'll ask you. Why would spoken English need to be different than written English? To go even further than that, since we are writing fiction, especially dialogue, does there still need to be a disctinction between the grammar of written and spoken English? This includes pauses..... ah, and maybe how we, er, stumble over our words when we speak. Should these be part of written dialogue? If so, how much?

Inspirations and Secondary Characters

This will be a short entry because it's late. I have been at a loss creatively for about six months now. And after that long hiatus, I have begun writing and creating again in the last few weeks. I understand it may just be time for my creative dry spell to end (for now), so I'm not going to give sole credit to one writing technque or force of will or anything that pretends to be useful to others in the same situation. I do, however, want to share a craft tool I have been playing with during this spurt of inspiration.

As I mentioned last month, I am going through the Snowflake method for plotting my new Nano. Over the past few days, I have been writing one-paragraph story summaries from the POV of each character. This task has helped me immensely with uncovering the overall plot of the novel. I have always struggled with thinking up plot events (Vikki, by the way, is very good at that). But this process of learning from the characters, what happens and how they all respond, has breathed life back into my novel. With every character, even minor ones (in some ways, especially minor ones), I learn something new about the story, the characters, and the large-scale structure of the novel. I can see the parallel stories occuring simultaneously and interweaving with each other. Minor characters have forced their way into important roles. I have subplots emerging, which is a first for me as well. The story has begun pulling itself together in ways I did not expect. For the first time, I feel like this novel might just work after three years of fiddling with it. I'll keep you posted.

When was the last time you had a creative dry spell end?

The countdown begins

Less than three months lie between now and the world's biggest writing frenzy - National Novel Writing Month, affectionately known as Nano (or "the month I stop existing in a conscious state"). The question is, since you can't officially write until the fated first day of November, what are you going to do for these remaining months of sanity?

Tie up loose ends: Several of the Tri Mus are working to finish up writing projects they started long ago. Kalayna has been working through a full rewrite of last year's Nano manuscript. Vikki is, as she announced in her recent post, trying to finish her work in progress before the Olympics are over in two weeks. Also, someone really ought to tie up the old Pass the Plot we had going...

Plot: I'm going to work on this one. I have several tools in my arsenal, including the fantastic tools from Advanced Fiction Writing. The "Snowflake Method" has helped me in the past and I am definitely going to utilize the principles in "Writing the Perfect Scene" for plotting this Nano. I have never plotted a novel before - I usually fly by the seat of my pants (it's called being a pantser in Nano terminology). After pantsing my way through two Nanos only to realize I have no plot whatsoever, I think it's time to graduate tothe world of preplotting.

Develop Characters: This goes well beyond the basic physical characteristics for me. I have spreadsheets that list things like mental ability, character arc, motivation, worst fear, etc. I personally love personality tests. I like to get in my character's head and answer the questions for him or her. Not only do I discover what my character's Myer-Briggs code is, but I also learn something about how he or she react to circumstances by paying attention to the questions themselves. For online (free) tests, Similar Minds is my favorite site. They have a bunch of different types of tests. Aslo, to determine your character's Hogwarts House (which could be interesting even if you're not writing fan fiction) go to Personality Lab's House Sorting Test for a very detailed exam.

Skive off: Another great way to spend the three months until Nano is to ignore it completely! There are plenty of things to do if you plan to wait until October 31 to start thinking about your novel. Here are a few suggestions: blog, knit a sweater, bake a pie, go skydiving, rope cattle, find the cure for cancer, learn Mandarin Chinese, scale Everest, etc. Be creative with your procrastination. I mean, come on, Nano is three months away!

So, how are you going to spend your countdown?

Writing is a Craft

Writing is more craft than innate talent, more discipline than intellectual gift. Yes, I’m stating the obvious, but sometimes we are viciously reminded of the truth. I’ve spent the last two weeks staring at a blank computer screen waiting for the first line of my Bite re-write to magically flow off my fingers onto the page.

Guess what happened?

You got it. Not a thing except that two weeks went by without me writing a word on my Bite. Last night I went to the library with Kalayna. I sat down at my computer, determined to pound out something…anything at all. So I did and about halfway down the page, stuck in the middle of a paragraph, there it was. The first line of my Bite. Finding the first line of my novella has enabled me to write the first two pages without further ado and all because I decided to stop waiting for the first line to magically appear.

My father was a basketball coach and a math teacher and he always told me that math and basketball were similar in at least one way. You have to practice to be good. I think I would add writing to this list.

With my awkward segue and attempt to relate writing and sports, I would like to leave you with a quote that I read this week from the Pittsburgh Steelers head coach, Mike Tomlin.

“The one common bond that the really successful people I've met have is they're ridiculous dreamers. I'm a ridiculous dreamer. Continue to dream. Don't let the reality of the world diminish those dreams.”