Miniskirts -- A Writing Visual

Once upon a time, a friend passed on what I consider some absolutely fantastic writing advice: "Writing should be like a miniskirt: Long enough to cover everything; short enough to be interesting."

A lot of agents mention on their blog what would be about the right length for a book, depending on genre and intended audience. I have heard agents say that after certain word counts, they just put down the query, because they know the book doesn't have a teardrop's chance on a hot stove.

There's some disagreement on the particulars, but basically any agent will tell you that the key is not to waste any of your words. Basically, if you're writing an 93k YA novel, then those 93k better be worth getting through. How do you think J.K. Rowling got away with writing 160k words books? Because people kept on reading them. People thought the words were worth it. At least, worth it enough to keep reading.

Every word should be covering something that needs to be covered. It should not be there covering things that are best left uncovered. This would be one of those areas where underwriting comes in handy. Saying less to mean more (something that I can admit I don't do perfectly. Yet.) is a great way to tighten up your prose and create subtle works.

I'll admit it, when I write out my first drafts, they tend to meander a bit. Sometimes I get a little lost. Sometimes I come up with something I think is a brilliant ideas but end up abandoning or something that just goes nowhere. That's why I edit. I go back and remove the words that aren't contributing to my plots. I go back and remove the words that aren't contributing to my characterization. I go back and remove the words that aren't contributing.

Basically: Long enough to cover what I want to cover. Short enough to be interesting.

What's your policy on text, length, and editing?

Intellectual Pet Peeves

You know how some people can't stand knuckle-cracking or gum popping? Well, the thing that bugs me are certain intellectual facts that I just can't stand people getting wrong. This probably proves I'm a jerk, but there's stuff that bugs me. That probably makes me has been appearing in a lot of books lately, a fair amount of it wrong.

Now, if I wanted to cop out and blame my childhood, I'd say that my father used to always say that authors and screenwriters should not misrepresent or falsify history and then claim that they are telling truth, because people will believe that it is true when it isn't. (Let's just say, my father did not approve of Disney's Hercules.) I feel no embarrassment in having grown up to share this view.

When it comes to old stories being referenced in new stories, I get frustrated when people falsify the original story, and my flexibility on there is limited.

I mean, if you want to tell me that we were wrong about the Persephone story and it actually wasn't as shady as we've always thought, I'll accept that, at least to a point. Tell me how we got the story wrong and tell me what actually happened, and I'll accept that, so long as you haven't ignored the other facts (original mythos).

If you want to paint Artemis as a self-centered, shrill bint who only cares about clothes, I'm going to stop listening to you, because by that point you're just making stuff up and completely ignoring the entire base literature. To me, this is unforgivable.

So, yes, my intellectual pet peeve: people picking an original set of facts and lying about them/misrepresenting them.

This kind of pet peeve bugs a lot of people. It definitely bugs a lot of writers and artists, Captain Film Major for one. But I stand by it, if and only if because I already know from a lot of experience that it was not stop bugging me, to varying degrees. Just like my pet peeve will probably not stop bugging the people it bugs, again to varying degrees.

What's your intellectual pet peeve? Other pet peeves? Does my pet peeve bug you?

They're All Gonna Die

I recently read a certain book series that shall remain nameless, because spoilers are evil, but suffice it to say it was one of those series where people die all the freaking time, and not just Red Shirts either. And, honestly, I didn't feel too bad for most of the characters who died. It was just the nature of the beast. It was just one of those things where the author says, "Here's a passel of folks. They're all gonna die. Let's go."

In the end, the characters basically shook out into a certain break-down.

• 33% = The Ultimate Red-Shirts.
  No one cares about about these people at all, so when the writer bumps them off, people shrug and move on.
• 33% = Bad Guys
  These are the folks you aren't supposed to like. So, really, when someone -- the narrator, a character, whoever -- bumps them off, you kind of applaud. And, let's face it, you don't feel sad at all.
• 33% = Good guys
  When these people die, we all feel sad. Even if you know it's coming, that you the writer intends to kill him/her eventually, you're kind of hoping that isn't going to happen, that they'll find some way around his/her own rules and will keep that one.

The other 1% is the MC(s), who assumably, because you're reading a series, the writer has to keep around for the later books. It's functionally Contractual Immortality with a splash of Plot Armor.

Eventually, though, I'm just gonna say it, all that dying gets old. It's not that I have an inherent aversion to the death that some books just plain have to have. It's just that eventually that the time came that I felt like the writer was bumping off characters just to bump of characters. There came a point when I thought the writer was killing characters, and I'm included characters people liked who did not for any real reason have to die, just to prove that he or she could.

To me, it just looks like the writer was trying to shore up his or her Anyone Can Die cred. I get it, Anyone Can Die is a nice thought, because it establishes real world values in the text, exempting characters from MC Superpowers that annoy people, it maintains tension in the story but keeping stakes high, and it increases the motivations of any character who survives the death of someone they knew. But there's a line between Keeping It Real and Being Downright Arbitrary, and an overuse of the Anyone Can Die rule seems to be arbitrary and almost trying too hard.

I'm not going to lie, sometimes I worry I give my characters a little too much Plot Armor. I've bumped off characters before, but only because I thought it benefited the story and the plot. Once upon a time a character appeared in my head and one of the first things I knew about him -- lovely guy, great character -- was that he died in the middle. But I only knew he had to die, because the story would not have worked if he'd lived. Sometimes characters just have to die.

Sometimes they have to die. But they don't all have to die.

How do you feel about character's dying? How do you feel about killing characters? Do you do that a lot? How do you feel about writers who kill off a lot of characters?

Blog Memory and World Building

Every now and then, I look back into my blog archives and scan through older posts. It's a very interesting thing. It's sort of like having a link to my past thoughts and all the weird/stupid/crazy things I thought once upon a time.

Once upon a time, when I was working on something I think I called the Epic Thing -- it's possible I never got around to titling that project -- I put a post on the blog about world building. (I'm not linking back to it, because in hindsight it wasn't my cleverest moment.) Back in my younger days, I didn't know how to balance the story in my head with the story on paper. I thought somehow that because I'd figured out a universe and a back story in my head, it all needed to appear on the page. And, you know, that's just not true.

No matter how big something is in my head, readers only needs to be told as much of it as I intend to use later -- they only need to know what's going to help them understand. Everything else is just wasting the reader's time. It might be cool and clever and interesting, but it's still a waste of time, since I'd just be throwing it out there just to throw it out there.

A few years ago, I hadn't realized how annoying that would be. Nowadays, it's one of my pet peeves as a reader. "Dear Author, just because you thought up a long back story doesn't mean anyone cares." That sort of thing. And in my revisions, I try to boil off the excess, the stuff I included but never ended up using.

This isn't to say I've given up on the idea of world-building. I still do that a lot. I'm working on my edits for Cordamant's Heir right now with both my notes and an alpha reader's, and one of the things I'm trying to make clear this time through are the rules of the political system. This is world-building, but it's world-building I need to do to make the plot clear. Because that's what really matters.

How's your writing going? How do you feel about elaborate back story? How do you build your worlds?

Big Changes

So, Tuesday morning The Other One cut off my hair with a pair of scissors. A lot of it. Roughly 18 inches.

In her defense, this was preplanned, and I'm happy with the result. Still, it's a big change.

Embarrassing confession: The first time she came at me with the scissors, I screamed and ran into a corner -- notably with my hair to the wall to protect it. She carefully set the scissors down and said we'd try again when I was feeling better. This has brought her much amusement. In my defense, The Other One has always had a Use It and Lose It policy towards my hair. If it hit her, she was coming after it with scissors. She never actually cut it off, but there are some associations in my mind, apparently.

Eventually, my hair was considerably shorter, my old hair was laying neatly contained on my counter, and I was jumping up and down to see how my shorter hair bounced. (I promise I'm a reasonable person most of the time.)

The moral of this story is simple: Change is scary. (I know, no one's said that before.) Although I've been thinking about short hair for a while now (read: months and months), but actually gearing up to do it shocked me and took some adjusting.

Now I'm gonna circle this one back to writing, because I like to pretend that's what this blog is really about.

You ever look at an MS you need to edit and think about running away because oh my goshness you just have to make so many huge changes and it's going to be so hard and different? Ever get scared about a new idea, because it's just so different from everything you've ever done before and you just know it's going to be hard and messy? Ever stepped away from one set of characters to realize you've been with them so long you're not sure if you can write other characters half so well?

Growing as a writer develops messy and unpleasant things like thought and diligence and work. Sometimes it even involves changing our ideas, changing our stories and characters, or even changing in ourselves. But we have to do it if we ever want to be better, to be the best writers we can be. Yes, change is scary. Yes, new stuff is scary. But, yes, it is also totally worth it.

Any big changes on your end lately?

French It Up A Bit

This weekend, I finished my first draft of Imogen and Leander. I am, of course, at lose ends. Apparently, I don't know what to do with myself when I'm not writing.

Anyway, this is the first story I've ever seen all the way through that contained multiple protagonists. Guess who they are. While other projects I've worked on have had a male lead who went opposite my female lead, that guy tended to be more of a Love Interest than a Male Protagonist. He wasn't the guy I was following around, generally.

Still, as I was writing, I kept getting the feeling that instead of sharing the screen time, as it were, Imogen was really hogging the limelight. So, reverting to my theater days, I made up a French Scene Breakdown.

Technically, a French Scene is a scene that begins and ends with an actor’s entrance or exit. So a French Scene Breakdown shows you when the character enters and exits the scenes.

Or, a visual example from Imogen and Leander. (I started with just Imogen and Leander, but I tacked on breakdowns for their primary compatriots, largely for my own amusement.)



This sort of chart strongly backs up my suspicion that while Leander does appear on more than half the pages of the text, he really is comparatively less represented. I'm taking this as a serious reminder that in my next draft I really need to go back in a beef up his storyline. Because, really, as my Male Protagonist, he's got to be doing as much as my Female Protagonist, or I'm going about this story the wrong way.

I think French Scene Breakdowns are very useful for analyzing plots and keeping track of story threads. It's a visual indicator of how often you're hitting all of your notes, a fact that can easily slip away from you in a large project.

Do you ever make something like a French Scene Breakdown? Have you ever used something like this ever? Do you like doing visual breakdowns? What sort?

Got Dreams?

Last night, I watched the movie Tangled, an enjoyable film. In one scene, the MC tells several scary-looking men about her dream, and they begin sharing their's (a lovely return to the idea that there's a little good in all of us). It was nice. Later in the movie, a character remarked that the when one finishes one dream, the nice thing is that one gets a new dream.

This made me think. Because that's what all characters have. They have a dream, something they want more than anything else in the world. Maybe it's not what they're doing right now, maybe it's not something they think can ever happen, but it's something that's in there.

My present MC had a dream (live happily ever after with her husband). It fell off in the middle (she's pretty sure he's dead). She got a new dream (save her dad's life). Her dreams keep her going when all the other things are going horribly wrong.

Dreams are good for characters. They're definitely good for keeping them going. After all, they're something to hope for when everything else has already gone completely to heck (as things tend to do when a writer is in control and trying to raise the tension).

I've got a dream. It's got something to do with the stuff I tend to yammer about on the blog. As we might have guessed.

What about your characters? What do they dream about? What's your dream?

So Bad It's Good?

The other day, Captain Film Major mentioned that when he comes across a bad line or scene in a movie, he'll rewind and watch it over again. When I asked why he would want to inflict that on himself a second/third/umpteenth time, he said he wanted to make sure it was really as bad as he'd originally thought.

Though this originally struck me as a little unusual (read: crazy weird) it's since dawned on me that it's not the most uncommon thing. After all, when I'm reading a conversation that seems to be going off the rails or the character is saying something utterly ridiculous, I find myself pausing to redirect the scene or patch up the rocky bits. I find myself trying to save it. Is that so different from Captain Film Major trying to see if maybe it wasn't that bad.

This leads me to an interesting thought. Normally, as writers, we are told to revisit works we considered particularly fantastic so that we could study what that author did right. Might it not also be worth our time to consider some things that were particularly awful so that we can see just went wrong and, possibly how it could have been made better?

Maybe studying things that we thought we massive train wrecks could actually be a useful tool for finding the errors in our own work and learning to correct them.

Do you ever find yourself revising work that's already done/published/released for your viewing pleasure? Have you ever read/watched/studied something just for its level of badness? Is there something to be learned from work that was just plain awful?

Getting Into You

At the end of the semi-autobiographical play Yellow Face by David Henry Hwang, [SPOILER ALERT] Hwang admits that the character he's been playing opposite, the main source of the drama of the play, is fictional: "Marcus, is a fictional character, created by me...because I'm a writer, and in the end, everything's always about me."

[END SPOILER ALERT]

I think Hwang had a point when he says "I'm a writer, and in the end, everything's always about me." (Sorry for the repeat, but I wanted the key piece to be on the other end of the spoiler alert so I could do the post without giving away the ending.) As writers, it is always about us. Because, in much the same way every aspect of a dream is a representative of the dreamer's psyche, the aspects of the story are representatives of the writer's psyche.

Let's face it, these characters are fictional. They might be based on real people. They might be inspired by true events. But the long and short of it, these are all a bunch of people we made up. (Hint: if you didn't make these people up, there might be problems in your future, even if it's just the friend who gets very mad that you killed them in the end.) And, because we made them up, they are little bits of us, and they do what we say (usually) and they say what we want (usually).

I'm not saying that everything that happens in a book in necessarily true of the author or the author's life, but that idea came from somewhere inside the author. It made it onto the page because the author had an idea and ran with it. Thus, some of that author did make it onto the page.

We are the music makers, and we are the dreamers of the dreams.

So, yes, in a way, it is all about us. Bits of us, anyway.

What do you think?

Shadings vs. Flaws

Once upon a time, when I was new to the whole writing thing (and by new I mean so wet behind the ears, you'd think someone would have handed me a towel) I showed a friend some notes for my second book (because, I was so new that I thought this would be easy and that my first one was already perfect). My friend told me she didn't think it was going to work. She said my characters seemed a little to perfect. She told me they needed flaws.

I was confused. Did I have to turn my characters into bad people just to make them real? Because that seemed to reflect a rather dim view of humanity.

It took me a long time (a really long time, an embarrassingly long time) to realize that my characters didn't need flaws per se. What they needed were shading.

There's a difference between flaws and shading. Shading fills out the character, adding layers and helping a reader see the depth to the character, much like shading in a painting demonstrates the three dimensional nature of the object shown. Flaws and bad things about a character are a type of shading. However, they should not be confused with shading in its entirety.

When painting a three dimensional object, there are shadows, but there are also highlights. You need both to show a three dimensions. When there are negative attributes to a character, there are also positive ones. Maybe your character pops her gum and is also a terrible procrastinator, but she also calls her grandmother every week and grows geraniums. Both make her into a fuller person, and they don't all do it by making her look annoying or frustrating or in the case of some flaws, just plain evil.

Characters need to be filled out so that they look more like people going through something and less like cardboard cut outs just forcing their way to fill out the plot.

It took me years, but I finally figured that out.

How do you feel about shading your characters? Anything that took you a while to figure out?

Stats are Whack (and Wicked Helpful)

Once upon a time, I was discussing Miss Snitch with my dad, and I mentioned that two of the secondary male characters were dating each other. Now, I tend not to bring up my characters' personal business unless it's actually related to what they're doing, and in this case it was. But my dad's reaction was something along the lines of "Isn't that a bit much for YA?"

Me, I didn't think so. Because, near as I can tell, most teens have met LGBT people. There are LGBT people in the schools YA readers go to. Most teens are fans of LGBT celebrities. Some readers will be LGBT people. To boil this down: No, because LGBT people are a fact of life and thus are fit for books.

Once upon a time, in the fantastic play The Importance of Being Ernest by the utterly wonderful Oscar Wilde, "I don't know whether there is anything particularly exciting about the air in this particular part of Hertfordshire, but the number of engagements that go on seem to me to be considerably above the proper average that statistics have laid down for our guidance." This is very useful advice, even when one isn't trying to get engaged.

In life, the shadow (stats) move in response to the sun (people), but in fiction, if you want it to look like life, the the shadows of actual life need to tell us, as writers, where our suns should be pointing.

Hannah from Invincible Summer once posed the question: Why aren't there more characters like me?

This is a good question. Readers want to be able to recognize themselves in the books they read. But, if that's really going to happen, books have to reflect actual life with characters like actual people. That includes the statistical minorities. They exist in life, so why aren't they in the books?

I, for one, think sometimes I try so hard not to make every character in my book just like me that maybe I forget to make them like people. To include a little something for everyone. But it's definitely something I'm trying to work on. Because everyone reads books, so everyone should have someone to relate to in them. No one should be out there thinking, "Why aren't there characters like me?"

How do you feel about this? Do you let stats or your life experiences tell you how to make up your world? Do you have trouble finding characters like you?

Where's my shady corner?

Hi,

I think we've met. I'm the villain with no motivation. I appear in movies, books, plays, and operas. I do bad things to good people for no particular reason.

You probably don't like me. That's okay. I'm doing bad things to good people and enjoy it. I kick puppies when I don't have anything better to do -- and sometimes when I do have better things to do as well. And, quite frankly, I'm a little bit boring, because, you know, I don't really have a reason to do any of these things or any redeeming qualities to make what I'm doing worth watching.

You probably wish you knew what I was doing here, because it probably looks like I cropped up for no good reason to make people's lives harder for no good reason. You probably wish I had any motivation, because that might make me vaguely understandable or cause me to in some way resemble a human being. You probably wish I weren't here at all, that someone much more interesting and, who knows, maybe even devilishly handsome would appear and take my place so you'd have something better to look at.

But I'm not going to let any of those happen.

Why?

No reason. Because I'm the villain with no motivation. So I want to make your life harder.

(The Angel on Your Shoulder will now take this moment to ask what sort of villains you love, what sort you hate, what sort you write. Drop her a line. The Villain with No Motivation probably won't answer, because he doesn't care about what others think, but you should feel free to leave him a note too.)

Do You Need A Calendar?

Sorry about no post on Friday. I promise I didn't forget you, my lovelies, but I was out of town Thursday and Friday in a place where I had no Internet access, and I hadn't scheduled my post to come out.

In other news, I'm working on something new (so new it doesn't even have an official title), and I've hit a snag.

My times are off.

This is a new one for me, but for some reason, things are not unfolding in chronological order. My Male Lead and Female Lead are in different places and thus are following their own threads for quite a while. Somehow, and I'm not quite sure how or when this occurred, my Male Lead Thread got three days ahead of my Female Lead Thread, so every time I move back to my Female Lead, I'm always backing up a bit.

How big a sin is this?

I know I'm not alone in non-linear or nonchronistic stories. Lord of the Rings gets straightened our and put in chronological order for the movies, but most of the books follows one set for a considerable ways and then jumps back to the same point to follow the other set for a while.

But they follow the same set for an extended period, and they pick of at the same point. I'm not quite doing that.

My only thoughts right now are that I'll figure out how off it can be for others when I pass this one out to betas. Until then, I'll go with my gut and keep the nonchronisitic order.

How about you? Do you always follow a chronological order? How do you manage multiple threads?

Refile to the Recycle Bin

On Monday, I mentioned the idea of scraping off the paint -- undoing what one has done -- in the effort to create art. I think this is fitting. Sometimes, it seems to me, that the biggest part of editing is not finding the right word to put on the page -- though that is important -- but actually finding all the words that do not belong on the page, and getting rid of them.

In a letter to F. Scott Fitzgerald in 1934, Hemingway wrote, “I write one page of masterpiece to ninety-one pages of shit. I try to put the shit in the wastebasket.” Yes, even Hemingway produced some bad writing. No one is immune.

He's not alone in cutting the rubbish. John Green claims the best part of his books come out in the revisions and that he's lucky to use 10% of the original draft.

Sometimes, the key to good writing is just cutting the junk.

While I hope my ratio is slightly better than 1:91, that's sometimes how I feel about my writing. For The Thief Book, a good 70% of the original draft probably made it into the rubbish bin. In my revision of my first draft of Cordamant's Heir, I sliced a good 10k off. And, you know, I really feel both projects were the better for it. The Thief Book just ended wrong, and it all had to go. Cordamant's Heir came in really heavy and contained either plot threads that weren't going anywhere because I didn't want to develop them or had parts that were just redundant.

The first time we write things, they are generally not brilliant. Sometimes, they just need a spit shine. Other times, they need a fair amount of nipping and tucking. Other times, they just need a hacksaw and a trip to the recycle bin.

The trick is telling the junk from the masterpiece.

Do you feel like you end up binning most of your original MS, or are you often able to keep most of what you put down? How do you feel about major cuts?

A Touch of Light

While I usually compare my writing process to sculpture, today I'm going to branch out a bit and talk about painting. Shouldn't that be fun?

It has been explained to me by a few people that painting with watercolors and painting with oils are very different experience. A key difference between the two is the light.

In oils, light is the last thing you do. You do all your objects and background first, and the light is the final touch of color to show were on the objects you've drawn, your light hits.

In watercolors, things are much trickier. To a certain extent, light is actually the first thing you do, because the light is the space you leave in from the beginning. Light is, in effect, the space where you do nothing.

It seems to me, in some ways, writing is like both of those things, depending on who you are. It's all a matter of the planning.

Some people are planners. They can see right from the beginning where they're going to go, how they're going to get there, and what the scenery is like where they park. They can tell where to leave the light in.

Some people don't know quite so much in advance. They change direction midway through. People appear who weren't even imagined at page one. And, heaven help us all, sometimes we end up somewhere not at all like where we meant to go. Hey, things happen. In that case, you put the light in last, once you've figured out what the picture's really going to look like.

The point is, both styles, while different, produce fantastic artwork.

Me, I think I write like a Cezanne painting. You've done your darks. You've added your light. It's still not done. So you turn your brush around and scrape off some of the paint, baring things down to the canvas. Hey, if it get's the job done...

How about you? How do you paint? Water or oils? Back of the brush?