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TIPS TO GO PRO: SHOW MORE

Oct15

LiftWriters, if you do not want to look like a newbie who is just starting to learn your craft, there are a few things to avoid. Things that mark you as inexperienced—meaning your story is going to clunk. These things get between the reader and the story. These are things you need to fix, and that means you need to go hunting for these weak points.

1 – Show more by eliminating dialogue tags that tell everything. This means no more tags such as: he taunted, she exclaimed, he smirked, she pouted, he expounded, she tossed back, he leered, she sighed. All of these are telling the reader an emotion. You want to show emotion on the page.

Replace every telling dialogue tag with an action that better shows the character expressing an emotion. To do this, you must know your characters. How does your character pout? Does she stick out her lower lip, or bat her eyelashes? Does she fold her arm, or twirl a curl around her finger? How does your character leer? Does he overdo it, making it into a joke, or does his stare strip a woman bare? Show the emotion with actions.

2 – Show more, also, by eliminating places that simply tell the reader information. This is where you the author slip in to add a note.

For example, maybe you want to say something about a man’s grin, that it’s infectious, so you write: His grin widened and Sally found it infectious, so she smiled back.

This is you, the writer, are telling the reader the exact information instead of showing and letting the reader figure things out. Again, you have to know your characters—and this is where you show the grin being infectious, as in: His grin widened. Sally’s lips twitched, lifted; laughter rose like a bubble in her chest. Now you are showing Sally smiling back instead of telling the reader.

3 – Watch those lovely “writerly” phrases. Maybe you’ve come up with a clever line. The trouble is, if you’re deep into a character’s viewpoint and emotion, that clever line could throw the reader out of the scene. You have to look at the overall effect of the line—and you may need to cut it if you’re jumping out of character just to fit in the clever phrase.

For example, maybe you’ve described a woman as: Her honey-blond hair floated around her, a golden nimbus, a heavenly aura. That’s a fine description. But if you’re in the viewpoint of another woman who actually hates this honey-blond, you’ve gone for the clever phrase instead of showing the enmity between these women. This is where you save this clever phrase for another time and go for information that shows these two women being bitchy with each other.

4 – Do remember to show; get the emotion onto the page. A lot of novice writers forget about this vital part of the story. This is where you’ve got action, but the reader has no idea what the character feels about all that action.

For example, maybe you’ve got an exciting moment where the heroine of the story has jumped out to save a small boy from being hit by a car. She jumps out, grabs the boy. Great stuff. But…what’s she feeling? Is she frightened? Amped up on adrenaline? Is she angry, furious because this is her son and she’s told him five times not to go into the street after his baseball? Is she shaking? Is she covering up her feelings by acting tough because she’s a cop and she thinks cops should show emotion?

Again, you have to know your characters—and you have to give your readers a chance to get to know your characters, too, by putting in those emotions. Once you’ve finished the book (or any scene) go back and look to see if you wove in all those emotional reactions—or did you get just the action?

5 – If you show, don’t tell. Repetition shows insecurity—it means you are the master of your story. Trust the reader to get the information you’ve shown. You don’t have to show a guy slamming out the door and tell the reader in the next sentence: He was so angry he could spit nails. Trust your readers to get what the actions mean.

6 – Cut the clichés. We’re back to needing to know your characters—and needing to know them as unique individuals who do not have cliché actions and reactions. You want to show who your characters are by having them reveal their personalities with their actions and reaction—if you go for cliché actions, the characters become walking clichés, too.

This means no stalking into the room like a panther. No gazing into a mirror and doing an inventory of hair, eyes, and the standard description. No women (or men) who had their hearts broken once and so that person has vowed never to love again.

You want to know exactly why your character reacts or acts—you need to know that character’s motivations, and those motivations need to be based in deep, core personality issues. Your character must react in character.

7 – Show your character in action right away. This is vital. If you want the reader to believe your character is a kick-ass vampire slayer that character has to slay a vampire right off. It’s no good telling the reader this information, you must show the character being what that character is supposed to be. This is why Superman has to be super right off. This is why a crazy cop has to do something crazy right off so that everyone “gets” this is one crazy dude.

Start off by showing your character’s strengths and weaknesses right away—get those onto the page. It’s no good saying your hero is a healer—you have to have the guy heal someone. And it’s no good saying the healing costs him some of his own life each time—you have to show him aging or losing strength each time he heals.

Show more, tell less. Know your characters better than you know yourself and put that into the story. Get out of the way and let the characters carry the story. Everything else an editor can fix.

Getting the Good Stuff In First

Oct9

There’s one think about all young writers (and I mean young by number of books written not age)–they all want to hold back on stuff. This crops up either in a synopsis (but I want to make the agent/editor want to read the book so I don’t want to tell the secret or big surprise), or in the manuscript (but I want the reader to get to the last part of the book before I reveal this big twist).

Darling writer–you’re not going to get that agent/editor to read the book nor are you going to get the reader to the last part of the book if you hold back on all the good stuff.

Get the good stuff in first. Or look at it this way–does a flower say, “Oh, I’m only going to blossom half way because I want to hold back.” No–it goes all out to give you its best as soon as it can.

Lead with your best. It is not wise or kind to hold back on this because basically you’re risking boring the reader (or worse, confusing the reader). Lead with your best because that’s the best way to hook a reader.

Ah, but now I hear you ask, “What about mystery? What about suspense? What about my great surprise?” Mystery and suspense comes from keeping information from your CHARACTERS (not from your readers). Play fair with the readers. Give them all the stuff they need to know. Then put in suspense by having your characters in the dark–make the characters struggle with understanding everything. Also, keep in mind that most readers don’t really want huge shocks or surprises–they can be very uncomfortable and if not handled well will throw the reader right out of the story.

So get the good stuff in first–it will give you happy readers who can’t wait to turn the page to see what the characters are going to do next. Getting all the good stuff up front, right where it’s going to temp readers into reading more.

Now I hear you say, “But if I use up all the good stuff up front then what goes into the rest of the book.” This is where you have to put in even better stuff. This is where your job as a writer comes into play–you think up even better stuff and get that to the reader as soon as you can.

LOVE YOUR VILLAINS

Sep17

NY MetNothing marks a writer as a beginner as clearly as the cliché bad guy. This is the bad guy who is ugly inside and out with no redeeming qualities—this is the “boo-hiss” melodrama mustache twirling villain. And this is an easy fix in any story.

What’s that easy fix? Lots of things can help, but here are five quick fixes:

1. What does this character’s mother love about him or her?

Give ever character a mother. In the animated movie Despicable Me, it was funny that the main character (a villain) was largely motivated to please his mother. His opponent—another bad guy—was motivated to please his father. This gave both characters additional dimension and something we all can relate to since we all have parents.

Now the character’s mother may not be someone who bakes apple pie—maybe she’s a bank robber, or she murdered her husband, or she’s otherwise no dang good. But figure out what does she love—and how does she hope her son or daughter turns out better? Maybe she’s proud her daughter is a hit-man? Maybe she thinks her son is just misunderstood? Maybe she thinks tough love will give him a better backbone? Maybe she thinks if she just harps enough at her daughter the girl will marry well? Parents matter—even to a villain.

2. What does this character love?

We all have our favorites—even if it’s just a kind of ice cream. Alan Ladd in This Gun for Hire earned his way into fame portraying a cold blooded killer—but the killer had a soft spot. He loved cats. He’d look after stray kittens, was kind to them—and he was a sociopath. Because of that one soft spot—that love—he was more than just another guy with a gun. That’s what you want for your bad guys—find out what they love and show it in the story. Make it important.

3. Why does this character do bad things?

Motivations matter—they really matter for your villains. It’s not enough that the bad guy wants the heroine for his wife (no matter that she hates him). Why does he want this? Does he really want her money? Is he obsessed with earning her love for another reason? What are the deep, deep roots for what the villain wants?

A villain who just wants to take over the world is dull—it’s been overdone. So give him better reasons. Look at real people—Alexander the Great wanted to take over the world. And his basic reason was to show up his father who’d been good at conquering, too. (See how you get back to parents so easily.) No one is born bad, so what twisted your villain into someone who does bad things?

4. What would make this character a hero?

Turn the story around and look at it from the villain’s point of view. What actions would make this character a hero? We’re all heroes in our own story—we do things that may be wrong but at the time we think we have good reasons and they are right actions. Even Hitler thought he was saving Germany and building an empire that would last a thousand years—in his mind, he was restoring his people to greatness (the problem being it was his ideas of “his” people).

Maybe your villain has great reasons for doing what he or she must do—maybe she or he even regrets the need for bad actions. Or maybe your villain has no regrets—what must be done for the good of all must be done. Righteous villains can be really scary people.

5. Give your villain a trait you’d love to have.

Make your villains easy for you to love (makes ‘em easier to write, too). Give them, a trait or traits, you’d love to have. Maybe your villain is a decisive person, able to make up her mind at once. Maybe your villain is like Cruella de Ville and is a style-monster. Maybe your villain sings opera and keeps songbirds.

Make this trait also matter to the story—Cruella’s obsession with black and white fashion drives the story in 101 Dalmatians.

It’s that kind of love/hate that keeps readers intrigued with any bad guy—and you’ll have a lot more fun writing a villain you’d also love to be.

Originally posted at Writers in the Storm blog.

The Fear Factor

Aug22

“I’m convinced that fear is at the root of most bad writing. . . . Good writing is often about letting go of fear and affectation.” – Stephen King

Up in a balloonFear shows up in a number of ways, and hits each of use differently. It shows up a lot in the only workshops I teach.

It shows up in excuses (I’m too old, I’m too busy, I won’t try this because I don’t understand).

It shows up in procrastination (I’ll catch up later, I’ll try the exercises after the class on my own).

It shows up in perfectionism (I’m awful because I didn’t do this right, I failed, I suck, I’m stupid).

It shows up in a refusal to try new things (I’ll post this old story bit instead of writing anything new).

And I can see it every single time. Then we have the brave souls who face their fears dive in and fall on their faces. I applaud that. Because they’re learning. Which is the point of a workshop. It’s supposed to be a safe place to try things, to experiment. Instead, I see so many writers who are afraid to spread their wings—as if one mistake is going to be a disaster.

Folks—we learn from our mistakes. Go out and make more of them.

I am amazed how many people resist this idea. They want to be praised. That’s not good. That’s not going to help you learn. What does help is the rewrite and the revision and the experiment. Try something new. Write a scene. Then rewrite it from a different viewpoint. Just because. Throw stuff out there. Try something in first person if you’ve never done first person. Or in present tense. Just try it out. Tell yourself that:

a) it doesn’t have to be perfect

b) it doesn’t have to be good

c) it can actually be really awful

Just let it be what it’s going to be. Then read (aloud so you catch what you’ve really done) what you’ve written and look at what you can learn from what you did. Look at what works. Look at what doesn’t work. Keep the good stuff.

This happens when I cook, too. I’ve made some awful things—I once put too much baking soda into my gingersnaps. They came out Alka-seltzer hockey pucks—hard and fizzy if you chewed on one. Great for your digestion (if you needed it), and not something anyone would eat (not even the horses would go for them, despite the sugar on the outside). Learned a great lesson on baking soda from that one.

Same applies to my writing. I’ve written awful scenes (and I expect I’ll keep doing that). Sometimes the dialogue clunks like a flat tire. I’ve tried first person, third, second, even. Present tense, past tense—it’s all about stretching those writing muscles and trying new things. You don’t know what really works until you’ve tried it.

I’ve written books that are not for everyone (go read the reviews)—sometimes folks hate my character (hey, it’s better than indifference). And I worry about all of it. I still get the nerves going and I still wonder if I’m any good at any this—no amount of praise ever takes that worry away.

The point of this is you’re never going to get over your fear.

Live with it. Know it’s there. Let it flow into you and out of you again and go write anyway. Use the fear—let it keep you sharp. Let go, too, of the affectations that King talks about—which means get out of the way of your characters. Let them tell you their story and stop pushing them into plots that don’t work. Stop being so damn writerly and just get clean words onto the page.

And if you need more good words from Stephen King buy his book On Writing: Memoirs of a Writing Career. Or read more at: http://grammar.about.com/od/advicefromthepros/a/StephenKingWriting.htm

(First published at https://writersinthestorm.wordpress.com.)

Tensed Verbs

Jul16

Lately I’ve been seeing  a new trend that I don’t get—are folks not being taught verb tenses anymore?

This issue shows up in manuscripts that I see and not just a couple of them. Now, I can understand coma troubles—there’s a stylistic issue in play, so you can go for the less or more styles. Commas can be tricky and badly used can lead to awkward sentences. However, verbs tell the reader when something is happening. Get the verbs tense wrong and you’ve got a confused reader who has to stop reading the story to figure out what’s going on.

The worst of this shows up with past perfect tense.

If you’re writing in past tense and you need to talk about something in the more distant past, you need to use the past perfect tense to avoid confusion.

An example of this is you have two characters talking. Let’s say Sue and Larry are having dinner in a restaurant. Sue  thinks back to how she bought a gallon of milk yesterday. Maybe you write:

She bought a gallon of milk.

This sounds as if Sue is currently buying the gallon of milk in the middle of a conversation in the restaurant. And the reader goes, “Hun?” The reader now has to stop, reread, and has been thrown out of the story. Do this enough and the reader puts down the book.

The past perfect tense helps the reader figure out the time sequence. She bought a gallon of milk. becomes:

Yesterday, she’d bought a gallon of milk.

Or if you want to avoid “had”:

She remembered buying a gallon of milk yesterday.

Had is not a bad word. Neither is “that” but there also seems to be a trend toward removing both words, and this can make for awkward sentences.

Reading aloud will help you catch these things. So will a copy of Strunk & White’s Elements of Style, a handy small book that every writer needs close at hand.

Character Arcs, Plot Lines, and the Synopsis, oh my

Jul3

My synopsis workshop finished up this past April for RWA’s Outreach International Chapter, and I’ve also been judging in some contests–boy do folks need to figure out their story arc and plot lines (and character arcs, too). This is one place where a synopsis can help you because it highlights every flaw in your story–all the weaknesses come out. Which is why I think editors really ask for these things.

So what are the THREE big flaws that I’m seeing (on a regular basis)?

1) The big one is that there is no plot line or story arc. In other words, the story rambles along and stuff happens.

This usually can be traced back to the main character (your protagonist) not having a strong, clear goal that’s well motivated and which kicks off the main plot line, or the main character’s arc in a more character-driven story. This goal can be as simple as survive a night in a haunted house in order to win a million dollars (motivated by the need for that money to save mom, who is about to lose the family farm), or it can be to win a contest to win her own self respect, or it can be as big as saving the universe. But there’s a couple of important things about this:

A) The main character’s goal must matter to that character–there has to be something personal at stake.

B) There have to be consequences for failure–ones that would shatter than character.

Once these are in place, the character has been set on a path. Now you’ve started a story arc. The stuff that happens now tries to push the character off that path (this is your plot). Worse and worse stuff happens until the character gets faced with a crisis–and this crisis had better be one that pits the character against wants and needs, so that the character has to make very tough choices. This is where the character gets stripped down to their core–to what makes that person tick. (And if you don’t know this, you need to get to know your characters better.)

Now stuff does happen still but it’s all related to the character’s struggles to get what that person wants. And you make it worse for the character by layering  in what a character needs. As in if you’ve stuffed your character into a haunted house for a night, what your character may need is sanity and a sane world, and that haunted house may strip both away from her. Now your character has internal conflict–stay for the money (external want) or leave to be safe (internal need). And now you can add in an antagonist with a conflicting goal.

This is going to complicate the pl0t–and give you more conflict.

Now your antagonist needs to be thought out–as in what does she want and need?

For example, what’s your ghost’s goal in driving everyone out? This is where you do not want to cop out and go for the cliche. In other words, don’t just go for “She’s insane” or “She’s angry because she was jilted.” Those are weak motivations.

Orson Scott Card in his book on Characters & Viewpoint notes that when you’re digging for your character’s motivations, the first three or four things that pop into mind will always be cliches. (If you don’t have this book, go buy it now, then come back to read the rest of this.) These great ideas are cliche because they are cliche–they’ve been used to death. Keep digging for better motivations. This is vital for any antagonist–write this person as if this character is the hero (we’re all heroes in our own stories).

Could be the ghost is trying to protect others from the damnation that caught her–except she’s driving them mad in the process. Or maybe the ghost has a secret she’s trying to hide. Or maybe the ghost is trying to find a body she can inhabit so she can live again. (And see how those cliches creep in as you’re batting ideas around–that’s why you keep writing down ideas.)

Find out what your bad guy wants as a goal. Find out what your bad guy needs, too. We all need love, right? Well, we all need our own internal rationalization systems, too. Even someone who is mad will have their own reasons for doing what they do.

2) The other biggie I see is that in what’s supposed to be a romance, but the romance is put in like an afterthought. The action overshadows the romance, so the story doesn’t seem as if it’s really about two people struggling to build a relationship. This one is tough.

In a romance, the romance is the main plot line. It’s the main story arc. So you have to have thought about both your hero and your heroine. What does each person want from a relationship? What does each one need? This can be different from the action plot line. It could be your heroine needs to save the world from a plague of vampires–that’s the action sub-plot in a paranormal romance. The plot needs to put her in conflict with a hero (and possible love interest). It makes sense that in this case the hero is the head of the vampires–that’ll give you great conflict in both the romantic plot and the action plot. But now you have to figure out what does each person need and want on a personal level–and how are these going to conflict?

Does the heroine need a steady guy? (And what’s her reason for that–did she grow up in an unstable home?) If she needs stable, you want to either pair her up with Mr. Seems-Like-A-Bad-Risk, or with Mr. Stable-But-Boring. And then you add in what she wants. Could be your vampire fighting heroine needs a partner to watch her back–and she gets Mr. Unstable. Or could be she needs a vampire to come over to her side–so she’s got to seduce one into helping her. The trick here is to keep looking for what adds more conflict and more complexity. Pair up the compulsive clean freak with the slob (The Odd Couple is really a great romance disguised by the fact that it has two guys). Layer in reasons for your romantic pair to be attracted to each other–and layer in plenty of personality issues to drive them apart. Make the relationship the focus of the plot.

Then go back to your action sub-plot. Just remember if the main plot line or story arc is all about action, then you’ve got something other than a romance on your hands. In a romance, the relationship is at the center of the story.

3) The third big thing is that every character’s motivations needs to be clear–that means this info must make it onto the page. This is one where I often feel, as I’m reading, as if the writer knows this stuff, but it hasn’t gotten to the page.

There is the story in your head. There is the story on the page. There is the story in the reader’s head. Ideally, all these match. If one is off, the story flops. This is where you want to ask–“Did I put in WHY my character acts this way or feels this way?” In a synopsis, you simply tell the reader–“He hates cats because he was once locked in a closet with ten of them.” You want to make sure the reader understands WHY your character acts as she does.

The other part of this is make sure your reader understands the setup for the story–how the plot line or story arc kicks off. Get a friend you trust to tell the truth to read this, too, and make sure you are not fudging things. It’s too easy to think, “This is good enough.” You need outside eyes here and someone who’ll say, “This doesn’t make sense” or “I don’t believe this.” That is something to fix with stronger motivations. (You can have a character act out of character or do amazing things only if this is sufficiently motivated–if you have cake-making mom suddenly pull out a sword and behead someone there’s got to be something in her background that would explain why she can do this, or she’s doing this because her child is threatened and she’s got adrenaline making her into super-mom.)

Too often I’m reading something and all I think is “why”. Why did that happen? Why does she feel that way. The worst is when a synopsis just says: And they fall in love. Well…why? What’s different about this relationship and love story? What’s motivating the emotion. Again, this is where a friend who will write “why” all over your synopsis can help. Answer every why–or leave the reason for the question coming up out of the synopsis.

There’s other stuff you can do, but if you cover the big three, you’ll have a much stronger book (and a stronger synopsis).

Throwing the Reader into the Deep…

Jun26

SeaThere’s a recent trend in the contest I’ve been judging, and not a good one. And I think the confusion comes from the idea that you want to open fast and with action. This can be a good thing…or very, very bad.

First, let’s look at some wrong ways to open a book with a fast pace.

Action that’s just action for the sake of the characters doing something does not help your readers. The opening needs to set reader expectations about the tone of the book—so just action ends up giving the reader a mistaken idea about the book. Much better to open with your main character in a scene where something key about the character is show—and even better to have the action relate to the main plot.

Characters piled into the first few pages is another way to confuse readers and make it hard to get into the story. This is like walking into a party where you don’t know anyone—you tend to want to walk out again. Start with main characters and ease the reader into introductions.

Setting skipped past is yet another way to leave readers wondering about the story. This one is easy to if you’re busy with just a fast-paced happenings—but the reader has to known where and when the scene (and the book) starts. What’s the time of day, is the weather cold or hot, and the world like? The reader needs a little time to settle into the scene and the book. Every book needs this, but this is vital with historical, paranormal romances, or any book with an other-world setting.

Danger is often put into the first page and that can work, but only if the reader cares about what’s going on. A better way to think of this is that conflict and tension do not have to be instantly dialed up to ten—an opening scene with something as simple as a child’s lost shoe can involve the reader in the story if you first take the time to establish characters the reader can care about.

Dialogue can lead to a good or bad opening—this one can be tricky. You might have a great line—but if it feels stuffed into the opening, it’s not going to work. I’ve seen scenes that were obviously twisted to try and fit some clever dialogue into the opening. Instead, the scene came out stiff and as if it didn’t belong with the rest of the book.

Backstory, if laid in too heavy, is also going to kill your opening. The thing to remember here is that if you’re going back in time to put in stuff that happened in the past, you are not moving the present story forward. This is where you have to find the balance between weaving in enough information to keep everything clear and understandable, but not so much that you give the reader huge chunks of the past. Keep it to a sentence here and there. Not paragraphs. (Unless, of course, they are utterly brilliant paragraphs—and do not lie to yourself and tell yourself they are brilliant when they are not.)

Those are the main ways to do it wrong. How do you put in an opening that grabs the reader?

We all know these openings when we read them. Go out and read them. Take them apart and see how others do this. Dick Francis, the mystery writer, is a master of the fast opening that sets up the world and gives you an immediate likeable, sympathetic character. Nora Roberts is another writer who always starts her stories at the right place. When you find writers who give you great openings, don’t just read the rest of the book. Stop, take the writing apart. Look at the descriptions, the balance of narrative to scene (telling to showing), look at the viewpoint control, the words used, the sentence structures, the metaphors. Then look at your own work. Are you applying the same techniques? (Techniques, not same word—your writing will come across as stale if you try and put in sentences and phrases already used by others.)

Most of all, keep in mind the question—are you leading your reader by the hand into a nice swimming hole. Or are you pushing them into the deep end without so much as a lifeline? No one likes to be shoved into something, least of all a reader. Introduce your characters to your readers. Set the stage. Make the world come to life with just enough of the right descriptions (the ones that matter most to the story and the characters). Readers everywhere will thank you.

Susan Squires Guest Blog: Set the Stage – Part II

Jun14

Do You Believe in Magic?Today Susan Squires Guest Blog Part II on Settings, with examples from her own work….

Susan Squires is New York Times bestselling author known for breaking the rules of romance writing. She has won multiple contests for published novels and reviewer’s choice awards. Publisher’s Weekly named Body Electric one of the most influential mass market books of 2003 and One with the Shadows, the fifth in her vampire Companion Series, a Best book of 2007. Her latest book is Do You Believe in Magic? which is available in print or as an ebook.

Susan has a Masters in English literature from UCLA and once toiled as an executive for a Fortune 500 company. Now she lives at the beach in Southern California with her husband, Harry, a writer of supernatural thrillers, and three very active Belgian Sheepdogs, who like to help by putting their chins on the keyboarddddddddddddddddd.

And now let’s hear from Susan:

SET THE STAGE PART II

As an exercise, look at your current work in progress to be sure that every setting has at least some description. Then ask yourself, “Have I used the most telling details, ones that not only describe my setting, but my theme or my character?” Then continue with the question, “Do I need all this description for my reader to get the idea I’m trying to convey?” That’s a good place to start.

Now, I still struggle with this every day. Here are a couple of examples from my latest book, Do You Believe In Magic?, the first in my Children of Merlin series about the big and very successful Tremaine family who are descended from the wizard of Camelot. Each sibling will come into a magic power when they meet and fall in love with another who carries the Merlin gene. This first book is about Tris, the bad boy brother who doesn’t believe in his destiny. He certainly never suspects that he’s met his future in the middle of Nevada in the person of one Maggie O’Brian, a spitfire little rodeo rider.

First, a light description that introduces Maggie and Tris, in Maggie’s point of view, in the second scene of the book. We won’t be back to the diner, but her truck and Tris’s bike tell us a lot about them.

It was a hundred miles into Fallon. She’d been so anxious to get away, she hadn’t eaten breakfast. Since she was flush, at least for a minute, she decided to stoke up on some of Jake’s steak and eggs. Maggie O’Brian’s rig clattered into the dirt parking lot next to the diner. The four-horse trailer was one of those old iron slat jobs where the horses were tied in at an angle. It made a God-awful racket when it was empty. Truck wasn’t exactly new either. Ford F250, vintage 1970. But the big 390 diesel did the job. You couldn’t see much of the faded red paint under all the dust anyway, so the dings and dents didn’t matter.

She climbed out of the cab. A kick-ass black Harley with minimum chrome and scarred leather saddlebags leaned on its stand in front of the diner windows, no doubt so the owner could keep an eye on it. Covered with road grit and sporting a couple of dings itself, it wasn’t a Sunday afternoon ride for some rich Hell’s Angel wannabe. That bike had seen action. Maggie pulled open the ancient screen door, the smell of grease and fried pork product wafting over her.

The only people in the diner at this hour were usually locals. It was too early for tourists in the “living ghost town,” of Austin, Nevada. The counter was filled with single old guys, leaving only one empty seat next to a really broad-shouldered man. He was the youngest guy in the diner by probably forty years. She didn’t recognize him. He must be the owner of the cycle. His black leather jacket was slung over the low back of the barstool, leaving a faded blue work shirt, longish black hair, and some three-day stubble the only things she could see.

This, on the other hand, is a major description of the Maggie’s house as the Tris sees it for the first time. The house will be the setting for a climactic scene later in the book and it says something about Maggie, so I took some time with the description. The old rusted truck, the propane tank and the windmill will all be important to the story. Could I have cut it? As I read over it, I think maybe so. We all just keep trying to find the right balance.

A motel actually seemed like a safe haven. Tris couldn’t imagine spending the night under the same roof with Maggie and her father. Or rather he could. He could imagine what she’d wear to bed. Probably a tee shirt. And nothing else. He could imagine hearing her undressing in another room. He could see her slim, muscled rider’s legs and imagine them wrapped around his hips…. Shit. Apparently he’d gone from not giving a damn about women at all, straight to what probably amounted to addiction. Do not pass go. Do not collect two hundred dollars.

Her father would kill him if he saw the hungry look in Tris’s eyes.

He chewed the inside of his lip as she turned the truck down an unpaved road, really just two tire tracks in the sandy dirt where the mountains flattened out into desert. The tracks wound through a dry streambed that would have to be forded in the rain. In the distance a clump of feathery gray-green Palo Verde trees clustered around a weathered house with a corrugated iron roof and a sagging front porch. The whole shack seemed about to disappear into the gray and brown colors around it. The roof barely supported a TV satellite dish. A white propane tank that looked like a Tylenol pill settled out a ways from the house and a windmill towered behind it, blades spinning lazily in the desert wind. That well must be their source of water way out here. A pickup, circa ’48, more rust than metal, sat on blocks next to a late ’70s station wagon with peeling white paint. No yard. But he could see a lean-to full of hay bales out back and some pipe corrals with horses milling around in them, peering over the rail toward the approaching truck. He recognized the mustangs he’d watched her gentle but there were others too, less rough looking. As they got closer, he realized the horses were much tidier than when he’d last seen them. The lean-to was freshly whitewashed and the water barrels in the corrals were painted a bright blue-green in contrast to their desert surroundings.

Someone took care of the horse part of the property—the house, not so much.

He caught himself wondering what his family would think of a girl who came from a house like this. Sere and hard. That’s what her life must be like.

Her mouth was set in a grim line as she pulled up behind the station wagon. She cut the engine. Staring straight ahead, she said, “Don’t pay attention to Elroy. You’re my guest here.”

“Okay.” He hoped that word wasn’t loaded with the dread he felt. He tried not to let in an ounce of judgment either. He had no right. But he saw why she wanted to be on the road.

To read more about Tris and Maggie, and learn about Susan, visit www.susansquires.com.

Susan Squires Guest Blog: Set the Stage, Part 1

Jun11

Bestselling author Susan Squires is guest blogging today on settings.

Susan SquiresIn addition to being a New York Times bestseller, Susan is known for breaking the rules of romance writing. She has won multiple contests for published novels and reviewer’s choice awards. Publisher’s Weekly named Body Electric one of the most influential mass market books of 2003 and One with the Shadows, the fifth in her vampire Companion Series, a Best book of 2007.

Susan has a Masters in English literature from UCLA and once toiled as an executive for a Fortune 500 company. Now she lives at the beach in Southern California with her husband, Harry, a writer of supernatural thrillers, and three very active Belgian Sheepdogs, who like to help by putting their chins on the keyboarddddddddddddddddd.

And now over to Susan (and the Belgians)….

SET THE STAGE – PART I

Learning to write good settings for your stories can serve two purposes. Setting the scene of the novel helps draw the reader into the book immediately, giving them time and motivation to connect to the characters. Setting makes them feel as if they’ve “gone to another place.” Readers love to be carried away. And if you can connect the setting to the characters, you deepen the reader’s understanding of them, also increasing reader satisfaction. So–setting the scene well is a good thing, no matter what kind of books you write.

First, I admit that description is scary. How much do you describe? How do you know you have described your setting in a manner that will engage the reader? In the end, there are no single right answers to these questions. But I can share a few tricks of the trade I’ve learned along the way.

The concept of using “telling detail” has helped me immensely. First decide what the milieu of the scene will be. Is this midnight in a circle of standing stones? A sumptuous Italian palace in the early nineteenth century? The cubicle farm of a giant technology company? I’ve used all of those. Put yourself there in your imagination. Look around. Listen. Take a whiff. Feel the effect the setting has on your body. Take a moment to really understand what it would be like to stand there.

Okay, got it? Now comes the hard part. If you really described all that, the reader would be snoozing. So pick the important details. What’s important? Well, it’s what tells your reader most about the setting itself, the characters, and about what you want them to get from the story. Do you want the jungle in the Caribbean to be dangerous? Then make it night. The air is so heavy with heat and humidity that your characters can hardly breathe. A reptile of some kind always represents danger for me, or describe noises your protagonist can’t identify. What if you’re describing a small town main street in a contemporary setting? Well, what role will the town play? Is the town poor and your character is aching to get out? Is your town a symbol of the simpler times the characters never want to leave? Those decisions will tell you what details to include.

It goes without saying that you try to involve as many senses as you can. That draws your reader into the milieu whether they want to come or not! You don’t have to mechanically tick off inserting every sense into every description. Pick the senses that will most evoke your story and use them.

Now let’s talk about how settings are related to your characters. The description is either from a character’s point of view, or if you don’t specify, by default it’s from the author’s point of view. The author talking, (omniscient POV) makes the reader feel like she’s watching the scene, not living it. While this was common in novels of the nineteenth and early twentieth century, it’s no longer enough to keep readers reading. Hook your description to a particular character’s POV.

How do you do that? Well, you’ve experienced your setting in your own imagination. Now think about how your character would think about those details, based on who he is, his background and his most recent experiences. How does that change the description? Is the person in your Caribbean jungle a fearful young girl who knows nothing about nature? Is he an ex-military man trained in survival? These two characters would experience the setting differently, and HOW they experience it will tell us something about them. This can be an exciting way to introduce hints at a character’s background and personal characteristics, too.

New writers often make the mistake of piling on the descriptors, thinking it makes their settings more evocative. Nouns are not carefully chosen, every noun has an adjective (or two or three) and multiple clauses say basically the same thing in different ways. This just makes the prose heavy going for the reader. It’s much more effective to choose the right noun and add adjectives sparingly, so they stand out in the reader’s mind. Don’t worry about this in the first draft–just write. But when you go back and revise, cut out the excess. You’ll never believe what a difference it makes in your prose.

Not every setting needs the same detail either. A setting that’s important to your character, or one where much of the action occurs, should have a fair bit of description devoted to it. But if the setting is used only in a single scene and it’s not important to any of the characters, an evocative word or phrase will do.

Do you have to do the description of setting all at once in a big paragraph? Absolutely not. It’s better, in fact, to layer it in. But be sure to start with a little bit of description to ground the reader. I’ve read many contest entries that do a wonderful job with setting, but only get to it three-quarters of the way through the scene. Meanwhile the reader has been wondering, where are these people? Annoying, even if the annoyance is subconscious. You never want to produce a subconsciously annoyed reader.

In conclusion, descriptions don’t have to slow your story down. They can be satisfying in themselves. Choose only a few telling details. Describe the setting through a character’s eyes. And take the time to find the right nouns and a few right adjectives.

 

Check back Wednesday for Part II with some exercises and examples on better settings. To find more out about Susan, visit www.susansquires.com.

What You Feel

May29

There’s a lot of books about writing techniques–and this stuff is important. If craft stuff gets in your way, it ends up bending the story in ways that are not good. Tangled sentences and awkward paragraphs can kick a reader right out of the fiction. However, it’s not just about the craft. You have to have something that matters–to you.

This is where I think so many writers go wrong. A writer heads into vampire territory since vampires sell, or writes a historical without really having a deep passion for that era and a longing to dip a toe into living in that time, or gets caught up in what should be a cool idea. But the passion is missing. This is where you get the good book–the writing may work, but there’s just something off. It’s like eating a pizza where all the ingredients are there, but someone didn’t add the fire needed to take okay into amazing.

You can fake almost anything, but you cannot fake passion.

You also need this because at the end of a couple hundred pages even the hottest need to write has cooled so if you start out anything less than desperate to write a story odds are not good for getting the thing finished.

For me, this passion, the feeling that works to keep working comes from loving the work (and hating it sometimes, too), from needing to write the story, from not being able to stay out of that fictional world. It’s got to be there or you end up with words on a page. Which is not a bad place to start. But at some point you have to put more into it.

And that the scary part–you don’t always know when you’ve got that more.

Sometimes writing is worse than ditch digging (I’ve done both, and the digging breaks your back, but writing can break your soul by inches). Sometimes it feels bad but it’s actually really good stuff. You just don’t know. You lose perspective on it, and that’s what you want. You want to be so deep into it you have no idea. You have to throw everything to the winds and dive in and you just have to be willing to make a fool of yourself.

You have to be willing to write god awful stuff and write stuff that may just be tripe and you have to be willing to write stuff that others may hate, because that also may be your best stuff. To me, this is only fun if you’re taking chances. And what’s the worst of it? Someone slams the work (and, yes, that does irritate, but so what–the work is done and has that person ever written a book?), or someone slams you (not the work, which is even more irritating and these folks need to learn the artist is not the art–there are only glimpses of the artists at that moment in time in the art). But this is also where a cool thing happens.

If you’ve written something you really put yourself into, you don’t care as much about what folks say. Because you have the work in your hands. You’ve done your job and if you’ve given it your best there’s a satisfaction in that. You have something that matters to you–and that’s what you hang onto.

The other good news is that the more you do this, the more this becomes a habit. It never gets easier. But it becomes the default way to write.