Dancing on Coals

On Creativity ...

2011-05-27T12:16:00.000-05:00

“Sometimes you've got to let everything go - purge yourself. If you are unhappy with anything . . . whatever is bringing you down, get rid of it. Because you'll find that when you're free, your true creativity, your true self comes out.” ~ Tina Turner

This one seems especially appropriate for me today. Are you the kind of writer who writes to escape what's going on in the real world? Or does everyday life interfere with your creative efforts? Try purging every morning, whether through prayer or morning pages or meditation. Take a few minutes to let go of what's worrying you before you sit down to write and see if that makes a difference.

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Dancing on Coals Online Workshops
http://www.dancingoncoals.com

2011-03-28T09:00:00.000-05:00

"There is always room at the top."

-- Daniel Webster

Persistence

2011-03-25T09:00:00.004-05:00

"Success is the sum of small efforts, repeated day in and day out."
-- Robert Collier

art courtesy Florida Center for Instructional Technology

Attitude is Everything

2011-03-24T09:00:00.004-05:00

I'm nose-to-the-grindstone on my book due next week, so blogging has to fall by the wayside until it's off my desk and onto my editor's. In the meantime, I'll be posting a few of my favorite quotes....

art by Jeff Bucchino, "The Wizard of Draws"

"Nothing can stop the man with the right mental attitude from achieving his goal; nothing on earth can help the man with the wrong mental attitude."

Thomas Jefferson----------

Pacing the Page

2011-03-10T09:00:00.005-06:00

Let’s talk now about pacing the page.

The biggest culprits that slow down the pacing on a page are unnecessary wordiness and repetition. Avoid repetition of information already provided to the reader unless it’s absolutely necessary for clarity.

For example:

She crossed to the table and sat. She linked her hands together on the table and met his gaze. His hands rested on the table, so close to hers they could have touched easily, but he made no move toward her.

reads much slower than:

She crossed to the table and sat, linking her hands together and meeting his gaze steadily. His hands were so close to hers they could have touched easily, but he made no move toward her.

She crossed the room and sat, linking her hands together on the table and meeting his gaze steadily. His hands rested just inches from hers, so close they could have easily touched if only he’d made a move toward her.

Can you feel the difference between the first example and the second? The first and third? The first example is okay, but when you compare it to the third you begin to recognize a kind of “sludgy” feeling that comes from using the word repeatedly. Using it once enhances the picture while keeping the pacing tight.

She tucked her notebook under one arm and slung her purse over the other arm.

Now remove just one word:

She tucked her notebook under one arm and slung her purse over the other.

Can you feel the difference there?

Using too many adverbs and adjectives can leave your work feeling cluttered:

Slowly, she descended the steps. Her hands trembled violently, and her breathing was ragged. She watched, scarcely breathing, as shadows of the two men danced on the wall. Suddenly, a shot rang out. She screamed shrilly and realized that she’d given herself away. She turned back as quickly as she could and raced rapidly up the stairs, praying that neither of the men had seen her.

That’s okay, right? Okay, but not great. In fact, -ly words can often be a signal that you’re telling more than showing. Check out this substitute:

One by one, she crept down the steps. Her hands trembled and her breath caught in her throat. She watched in horror as shadows of the two men danced on the wall in front of her. Just as she reached the landing, a shot rang out. A shrill scream tore from her throat before she could stop it and she knew she’d given herself away. Frantic now, she turned back and raced up the stairs two at a time, praying the whole time that neither of the men had seen her.

It’s rare to find any sentence in a first draft that can’t be restructured and made tighter.

The mood you want to evoke will have a lot to do with which words you choose and the pacing you use on a particular page, or paragraph.

Action scenes, scenes filled with suspense, will often need shorter words and sentences to create the right mood.

Romantic scenes might need longer words and more fluid sentences to create the right mood.

Movie makers can use various senses for invoking mood and atmosphere. They have script, they have visual action on the screen, and they have a sound track. When we write, we’re creating both the movie and the soundtrack for our stories, but the only tools available to us are words.

Use them wisely. Be lavish when that’s called for to create the right mood and tone. Be sparing when necessary. Remember that it’s the journey you create for your readers that matters.

Listen to the whispers of instinct that warn you when you’ve become repetitive or tell you that you’re moving too fast. Your own fiction instinct will be your most valuable tool when it comes to pacing if you’ll just pay attention to it. It’s the paying attention part that creates problems for most of us. We tend to shrug off those nearly silent whispers and talk ourselves out of our instinctive responses.

Learning not to do that just because you’re reading your own work is a vital step in learning to control the pace of your stories.

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Dancing on Coals Online Workshops

http://www.dancingoncoals.com

2011-03-09T09:00:00.000-06:00

Thanks to Mary Martinez for bringing this one to my attention. I liked it so much I had to add it to my favorites.

"There are days when the result is so bad that no fewer than five revisions are required. In contrast, when I'm greatly inspired, only four revisions are needed." --John Kenneth Galbraith

Pacing: What to Include. What to Cut.

2011-03-07T09:00:00.000-06:00

Weak turning points mean for weak scene goals and languid pacing.

Smooth pacing, with turning points and major events staggered evenly throughout the book, is far more likely to keep readers turning pages than stop-and-go pacing, in which very little happens for many pages and then, 100 pages from the end, everything gets tied up in a bow as the author rushes to meet her page quota.

Whether you’re a plotter or an organic writer, it may be difficult to pace your story smoothly without keeping these things in mind as you write.

One of the most common mistakes writers make in the early stages of their careers is to include “scenes” that serve no useful purpose within the story. The writing may be fine, the descriptions vivid, the use of imagery artful, but there is no compelling reason for the scene to exist.

The author may have conceived the idea and is now unable to let it go. She thought it would be so great to show the hero and heroine having lunch together in the piazza she visited during her recent trip to Europe. She took photographs and conducted research, and now she's dying to set a scene there. But if nothing new happens, no new information is shared with the reader, the relationship between the characters doesn’t change in any meaningful way, the scene may not belong in your story.

Whenever we include something in the story merely to indulge ourselves, we’re in danger of negatively impacting the story. A scene without purpose will bring your pacing to a grinding halt.

As I mentioned in an earlier blog post, it may be helpful to think in terms of firsts. The first meeting, the first real conversation, the first time the teacher calls our YA protagonist to task. The first awkward moment at soccer practice, the first meeting between neighbors. Whenever you begin to repeat information, you risk slowing down the pacing of your story and losing the reader’s attention.

It’s a matter of choosing what to show and what to tell.

Always show the scenes with the greatest emotional impact. (e.g., show the scene where the character learns her father has died, not the scene where she’s thinking about how she found out that he died or the scene where she's telling her best friend how awful it was.)

Beginning writers have a tendency to skip the scenes with real emotional impact and tell us about them later in scenes that have little or no emotional impact. It’s a natural tendency for most of us because writing strong emotion is difficult. Being honest to an emotionally brutal moment isn’t easy. If we’re uncomfortable with the emotion, we may decide it’s more comfortable to just tell about it later. We may not even make the decision to avoid the emotion consciously. But remember that when you write this way, you slow the pacing of your story almost beyond salvation.

Make sure to show the scenes which identify the characters’ patterns for us. Once you’ve shown the characters sharing an intimate Sunday morning breakfast after making love on Saturday night, you can tell us they did it again later.

Within the scene itself, don’t rush. If you’re writing a short book, don't skip on the detail that will make the book feel rich and lush. Instead, be more judicious in your choice of scenes to include, and then summarize the others.

Allow time to set the stage through the point of view character’s emotional filter. Don’t skimp on the sensory texture. You will gain nothing by rushing through this process. Don't drag it out, either. Set the stage, but don't waste time on repetition and lengthy introspection.

Allow time to make sure your character’s motivation is strong enough to carry even the most skeptical reader through the scene. Remember, not everyone will automatically react the same way your character does. You may think that any rational, thinking, reasonably intelligent woman would kick her husband to the curb if she caught him cheating on her, but there are a whole lot of women out there who wouldn’t, and for more reasons than you and I can probably imagine.Allow time to convince your reader that this is the only action your character can make--or at least that she believes it is. Skimping on the motivation will make your pacing sputter and jerk.

Allow sufficient time for the conflict play out. Another common mistake I often see is the tendency to rush past conflict. In the planning stages, the scene appears emotionally intense but when it's written, it turns into nothing special, either because the author is afraid of letting the characters face their conflict or, since the author knows what's going to happen in the scene, she lets the character move to the resolution of the scene too quickly.Skipping the conflict not only makes your story's pace suffer, it short-changes the reader. Approach each scene as if you didn’t know what the eventual outcome will be and let your characters react appropriately. If you can do that honestly, you'll begin to feel when you have enough conflict to fuel the scene.

John Cleese on Creativity

2011-03-04T16:40:00.000-06:00

Wow. Stumbled across this podcast and just had to share.

Drive your Story Forward

2011-02-28T10:00:00.000-06:00

One way to identify your turning points is to watch the story for place where a new question is opened for the characters. They may answer one question, only to find themselves facing a new one. They may resolve one conflict, onto to find that the resolution uncovers a new challenge.

The purpose of the turning point is to drive the story forward, so make sure you let it do its job. The turning point should leave both reader and character wondering what will happen now.

There are some “givens” when we write genre fiction. The readers of a romance novel know the characters will get together in the end before they read the first word of your book. The readers of a mystery know that the murder will be solved and the sleuth will live to sleuth another day. The readers of a western know that justice will prevail. There’s very little question in genre fiction about what is going to happen in the end. That makes how they get there extremely important ...

And “How” translates into turning points.

How are you going to keep the characters apart believably for 300 pages? How are you going to get them past the conflicts that keep them apart at the end of the book? How are you going to keep the reader from guessing who did it—or why they did it—in your mystery novel?

Pacing is also determined by deciding what to include and what to leave out.

Readers are generally interested in the first time anything happens in your book. The first meeting between hero and heroine, their first real conversation, the first time they share their secrets, their first kiss, the first time they make love, the first time they admit their love for one another.

Readers are generally not interested in reading endless repeats of those conversations, kisses, and lovemaking sessions unless they’re also getting new important information with each repetition. When you look at scenes and decide whether or not to include them, consider how much new information you’ll be revealing to the reader. If you’re not giving them enough new information, seriously think about leaving the scene out and summarizing the action at the beginning of the next important scene.

What kind of new information are we talking about? We’re talking about new pieces to the puzzle. A substantial piece of character development. A new secret previously unknown to the reader.

For instance, if you reveal the heroine’s entire past to the reader in chapter one, or let the heroine reveal it to her best friend in chapter two, when she reveals her past to the hero in chapter four, the whole chapter is probably going to feel redundant and slow to the reader. Your pacing will suffer.

If, however, you let the heroine and her best friend discuss her past in general terms in chapter two, build suspense by alluding to her past in chapter four and again in chapter six, by the time the heroine tells the hero everything in chapter eight, the reader will probably be eager to learn all the details.

Sometimes this works best if you decide where you want to reveal the Big Secret, and then work the other details in from there—sort of backward plotting. Whether you calculate it on paper or just think it through in your head, working backward can be a valuable tool for pacing.

Remember also that your characters will have specific goals for each section of your book (the chapters or pages that fall between turning points.) If, for example, your character begins the book with a goal to shut down the horse trainer’s business at the end of his lane, then his specific scene goals will reflect that goal until the first major turning point.

At the first major turning point, the story must dramatically change directions. So perhaps the character learns that the woman who owns the horse training business is a single mother who is struggling to support her children. Now, he feels like a complete jerk. How can he put her and her children on the streets?

His new goal might be to convince her to move back to Cincinnati, near her parents. This would be a win-win situation for him, right? So his specific scene goals for the next section of the book will support his new goal . . . at least until the next turning point when he learns that the heroine has a very good reason for not going back to Cincinnati.

Planning strong turning points which make the story shift direction makes it possible to have strong scene goals. Strong scene goals make for strong disasters. Your scenes begin to have purpose, and your story begins to move at a page-turning rate.

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Dancing on Coals Online Workshops
http://www.dancingoncoals.com

Keep up the Pace

2011-02-24T10:12:00.000-06:00

What is pacing? In the language of storytelling, pacing is the rate at which your story is told. Pacing determines whether your book will be a long, luxurious read or a quick one. Whether it’s a page-turner people say they can’t put down, or whether it’s a book they’ll read slowly and leisurely.

That’s the easy description, but just knowing that isn’t enough for most of us. Just what is the right pacing for our book, and how do we control it?

Of course, we need to be familiar with the type of book we’re writing in order to understand the best pacing for that particular story. Readers of action-adventure books don’t want to be slowed up by paragraphs filled with introspection and description, while readers of most romance novels—even the new breed of romances such as romantic suspense and romantic adventure—expect a certain amount of introspection and description. But those hybrid romances are still better when the pacing is faster than in a traditional romance. Cozy mystery novels fall somewhere in between the two. Mysteries considered hardboiled lean more toward the action/adventure genre.

A writer who doesn’t have a clear feel for the pacing of her genre will not only do herself a disservice, but quite possibly set herself up for failure.

There are many tools we can employ to control the pacing of the fiction we write, whether we’re talking about the pacing of the book as a whole, the pacing of a page, a paragraph, or a sentence. It’s not enough to worry about the pacing of the book. The pacing of the individual scenes, the page, and the paragraph are equally important.

But let’s start with the big picture and then move in for the close-up.

One of the big ways we control the pacing of our books is through the skillful use of turning points. What are turning points? They’re places where the story takes a dramatic and unexpected turn in another direction. When the story literally turns the corner.

From Point A to Point B, your hero may be annoyed by the heroine. At Point B, he is no longer annoyed. He turns the corner. His feelings change, and the story changes with it. From Point A to Point B, our spy hero believes that foreign arms dealers are responsible for the explosion outside the embassy, but at the turning point, he learns something that rules out the arms dealer as a suspect. It’s back to the drawing board for our protagonist, and the story changes as a result.

As a general rule, the more frequently turning points appear, the more rapidly paced your story is.

Notable turning points in a romance novel often include a first kiss. But if your characters are immediately sexually attracted, a first kiss, or even the first time the characters make love, may not be a turning point at all. Remember, turning points are those places where your story changes direction. If the story has been moving one direction because of an instant attraction and the characters move toward a logically anticipated step—such as that first kiss—the story hasn’t changed at all.

Think of turning points as those places that reviewers and readers often refer to as twists and turns. They’re the things that will hopefully keep the reader off-balance and keep her reading to find out what happens. If your story follows a predictable path—characters meet, characters are attracted, characters kiss, characters grow closer, one character discover the other’s hidden secret—and so on, the reader has no real reason to keep reading.

Turning points should bring surprises not just for the characters, but for the readers. Revealing a secret to the Hero that the Heroine has shared with the reader already isn’t really going to be a turning point in your story because even though the hero doesn’t know what’s coming, the reader does and she’s already anticipating the changes.

By skillfully weaving turning points from your main story with those from your secondary plot(s) you can keep even a long book twisting and turning with enough regularity to keep readers interested.

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Dancing on Coals Online Workshops
http://www.dancingoncoals.com

Punctuating Dialogue

2011-02-21T12:01:00.001-06:00

And finally, a word about punctuation within dialogue. In the past few years I've noticed an increase in punctuation done poorly in many of the manuscripts I've critiqued and judged in contests, and the last thing any of us wants to do is appear uneducated when we submit our manuscripts to editors and agents. Many of you may already know these things; some of you may not, but I promise that we'll run through the punctuation rules quickly.

At least in the US, dialogue is always set apart in a manuscript with the use of double quotation marks -- "

A quote within a quote is set apart with single quotation marks -- ' as in this example:

"She's horrible. Always nagging at me. Telling me what to do. Why just yesterday, she screamed at me. 'You're a worthless little thing.' That's exactly what she said."

If you're surrounding dialogue with action or emotion, always use a period at the end of the dialogue --

"She's horrible. Always nagging at me. Telling me what to do." Paulette brushed a lock of hair away from her eyes and sank into the chair. "Why just yesterday she screamed at me. 'You're a worthless little thing.' That's exactly what she said."

unless you're using a dialogue tag and/or a gerund phrase, in which case you'll use a comma --

"She's horrible," Paulette said, brushing a lock of hair away from her eyes and sinking into the chair. "Always nagging at me. Telling me what to do. Why just yesterday she screamed at me. 'You're a worthless little thing.' That's exactly what she said."

Whenever you use a comma to set off dialogue, you're signaling the reader that you're using some kind of tag to modify the dialogue. A cue as to the tone of voice used to say whatever has been said. If you punctuate the dialogue incorrectly, you'll pull readers out of the moment while they try to follow what you're saying. The more often you do that, the more you weaken your story.

And on the subject of tags, if you must use them -- and we all do from time to time -- keep a few things in mind.

In spite what seems to be an on-going love affair with the tag "hiss," no one can hiss a sentence without at least one S in it. "You're a creep," she hissed is physically impossible, and because it is, it's irritating to many readers.

If you're going to have someone grind out a few words between clenched teeth, keep it to a few words. It's believable that someone might say, "She's horrible!" from between clenched teeth. But it's very difficult to believe that anyone's teeth could remain clenched for two or three sentences at a time.

Writing something like this:

"Oh, Jonathan. You are by far the kindest, gentlest man I've ever met and I adore you," she laughed.

Is very likely to irritate readers. Try saying that much while laughing the entire time. Unless you're made of something I'm not, you just can't do it without sounding ridiculous or your laughter sounding false. Here again, about the most anyone can do is to laugh while saying a word or two. Maybe three. Far better to write it this way:

"Oh Jonathan." She laughed and touched his hand gently. "You are by far the kindest, gentlest man I've ever met and I adore you."

Don't forget to listen to the rhythm of your dialogue. This is another area where reading dialogue aloud can help you. When it's spoken aloud, it's much easier to hear where you need a contraction, where you should remove a word or two, and where you have too many dialogue tags in a row, or you need to add one. When you're reading the dialogue, you'll probably find yourself making the changes aloud that should be made to the page. Read it with a pen handy so you can mark what needs to be revised. You'll be amazed by the results.

Dialogue: When to Show and When to Skip

2011-02-17T12:01:00.001-06:00

Make sure that the dialogue has purpose and lends strength to the scene. A well-told story is one that's a good blend of strong dialogue and strong narrative. If you’re not sure how strong your dialogue is, strip away everything but the dialogue, then read it and see how it holds up.

If everything of value---all the strength in the scene---is in words the characters don’t say, it's time to rework your dialogue. You know it's strong when removing a line of dialogue or a sentence of narrative has a negative impact on the scene. If you can remove it and the scene doesn't miss it, then you're probably repeating yourself or you're wasting words and space on things that don't matter, so go ahead and leave it out.

If writing dialogue doesn’t come naturally to you, don’t lose heart. It’s a skill and it can be learned if you’re willing to practice and put forth the effort you need to learn it.

Orson Scott Card says:

“You don't "include dialogue" because dialogue is "good" or "not good." You write scenes because those are the most entertaining or important events, and you use dialogue because what matters is what the people say to each other. If you included meaningless dialogue -- for instance, conversation with a store clerk as your character buys gum, when that conversation leads exactly nowhere and the gum is never even chewed -- then it only makes your readers impatient for you to get on with the story (i.e., the things that are causally connected with the dilemmas they care about).”

As Card says, you write dialogue because what matters is what the people say to each other in the scenes your readers want to experience. Are you writing a scene in which your romance hero and heroine are learning key facts about one another? That dialogue is probably going to be important and should be included.

Is your heroine going to have to divulge a huge secret to the hero at some point in the book? Then don't have her revealing all the details of that secret to her mother, sister, or best friend before you reach that point. Save that important dialogue for when it's really important -- the scene when the hero is going to be forced to either love her anyway or turn his back on her. If the dialogue we read there is nothing more than a repeat of information we already know, your scene is going to lose most of the impact it could have had -- and that will cost you readers.

Be careful as you choose which scenes and conversations to show and which to summarize or skip. If you summarize or skip scenes that the readers really want to see, you end up losing them because you aren't satisfying their desire to see these people in action with each other. Resist the urge to let your romance hero and heroine indulge in countless scenes filled with witty banter. You may believe that you're building sexual tension and keeping your readers on the edge of their seats, but if the readers aren't learning new, vital information during each conversation, even the wittiest dialogue is going to fall flat on its face.

With dialogue, it's a common tendency to avoid the scenes our readers want most to read because we feel unequal to the task of writing it well enough. But there are no easy outs if you want to be successful at this. You must tackle the scenes you want to write the least because those are probably the ones you need to write most.

You must write the dialogue you’re most afraid of because it will probably -- if you persevere -- become the most powerful in your book.

Dialogue: Get the Author Out of There

2011-02-14T12:01:00.001-06:00

In modern fiction, the author should remain invisible. This is one reason why dialogue tags should be avoided whenever possible. There are only two tags that are, in essence, invisible: said and asked. But if they're overused, even those flash out at the reader and disrupt the flow of your work.

The only time you really need to modify “said” or “asked” with an adverb is when the dialogue itself doesn’t contain enough information to convey the proper emotion. If you're writing dialogue that's strong enough and clear enough, the dialogue can do its own work.

Take a look at this example:

"Keep your filthy mouth shut," she said.

With that statement, the author certainly doesn’t need to say, "she said angrily" or "she shouted,” or "she said in disgust." None of those are necessary. On the other hand, you might need to give the reader a little help if you write something like this:

"Keep your filthy mouth shut," she whispered as she wrapped her arms around his neck.

Here you need more because you’re actually contradicting the dialogue with the character's actions.

If the character truly hates someone, and you've done a good job of setting up the moment, then "I hate you!" doesn't need a lot of explanation. "I hate you!" she moaned as she wrapped her legs around his waist, is a completely different story.

When you start adding tags and adjectives where you don't need them, you're actually practicing a form of author intrusion. Author intrusion is one of the deadliest things to fiction since each time you use it, you make it difficult for the reader to forget that you’re there. When you become apparent to the reader, she remembers that she's not actually in the scene, in the moment with the characters. When that happens, you weaken your scenes and weaken reader identification with the characters.

Sadly, the overuse of dialogue tags is something many of us learned in school. Teachers without any real writing skills told us we needed to use the cheap and easy method for conveying emotion. It’s something most of us have to un-teach ourselves to become successful fiction writers.

The problem with excessive use of tags -- “I’m afraid the door is locked,” the heiress said alarmingly -- is that they constantly distract the reader from the story.

Consider this weak example:

“Go away,” she shouted angrily. “You made your choice, now live with it. I know I will.” She added the last sadly.

Is there anything in that example that pulls you into the moment? Chances are, there isn’t. As the author, I am more visible than either of the characters. The character who is speaking is only mildly visible, and we don't even spare the person she's speaking to a thought.

To add depth, surround the dialogue with emotion. Give it the quality of something else going on.

Nancy’s hands trembled and angry tears welled in her eyes. “Go away! You made your choice, now live with it. I know I will. I don’t want you to stay here tonight.”

Surround it with action -- Draw it out. Give your characters props.

Nancy’s hands trembled and angry tears welled in her eyes. She slammed the book onto the desk and whirled back to face him. “Go away! You made your choice, now live with it. I know I will.” At the devastated look on his face, her anger evaporated and the pity she’d been trying so hard to fight replaced it. She turned away so she wouldn’t have to see his expression and added, “I don’t want you to stay here tonight.”

This paragraph is doing double and even triple duty now. Even better, the author is no longer visible in that paragraph. Now the reader can focus completely on Nancy (who finally has a name) and the man she's talking to.

Can you do anything else with it to make it any stronger? Depending on where it falls in the story....

Nancy’s hands trembled and angry tears welled in her eyes. She slammed the book onto the desk and whirled back to face him. “Go away! I should have known better than to trust you. You’re no better than my father was. Well, you made your choice, now live with it. I know I will.” At the devastated look on his face, her anger evaporated and the pity she’d been trying so hard to fight replaced it. She turned away so she wouldn’t have to see his expression and added, “I don’t want you to stay here tonight.”

Let the dialogue help to set the surroundings.

Nancy’s hands trembled and angry tears welled in her eyes. She slammed the book onto the desk and whirled back to face him. “Go away! I should have known better than to trust you. You’re no better than my father was. Well, you made your choice, now live with it. I know I will.” At the devastated look on his face, her anger evaporated and the pity she’d been trying so hard to fight replaced it. She turned away so she wouldn’t have to see his expression. When he made no move to leave, she gestured toward the window. “The storm’s getting worse by the minute. If you don’t get out of here now, you’ll never get through the pass and I don’t want you to stay here tonight.”

If you find yourself using frequent tags and logs of adjectives, then practice writing without them. Practice finding ways to convey emotion without having to tell the reader what the character is feeling. Your dialogue, and your narrative, will be stronger as a result.

Dialogue: Doing Double Duty

2011-02-10T12:01:00.013-06:00

One of the most powerful things dialogue can be used for in our manuscripts is revealing character. The words a person uses and the way she chooses to phrase them says a lot about her as a person. From just a few lines of dialogue we can learn a lot about the person we're talking to.

If you're writing a character who often says things like "by jingo!" then, by jingo, he needs to think that way too. If he speaks in short clipped sentences, his narrative thoughts shouldn't be long and lyrical. And, of course, the reverse is true, too.

Some of us are able to match dialogue to the character's background quite well, but others miss the mark wildly. If you're writing a character who is supposed to be highly educated and polished, make sure you personally have a broad enough vocabulary to create that character believably. There aren't many things more jarring than being told that a character is a doctor, a scientist, a psychotherapist, or some other highly educated person, but when he opens his mouth, he makes glaring grammatical mistakes in his speech.

If a reader is asked to believe two things that are at odds with each other; e.g., this is a highly educated person who speaks poorly, she will almost always believe what you show her, not what you tell she is shown, not what she is told. If the dialogue is what she is shown, then that which you, the author, have told her is going to feel false. And when the reader suspects that you've lied to her, you lose her -- not just for the one book she's reading, but for future books, as well. You lose your credibility, and that's just about the most precious commodity at your disposal.

Even little words can make or break the image you're trying to create. Never, never have your professional character open his briefcase or look down at the desk at the papers there. Do the research so that you know exactly what those papers are. A doctor might look at charts or medical records, an attorney at a complaint, a brief, a deposition, and so on. But letting a character refer to the documents of his trade as "papers" only reveals that you haven't done your research.

Read the following piece of dialogue and then think for a minute about what it tells you about the character.

“She left me. Two little slips, and she walked out the door. Left me on my own, the bitch. Said she’d had enough. Wants somebody who’ll cherish her--whatever the hell that means.”

What do you know about the speaker? He’s probably male. He cheats on his wife or significant other. He’s fairly obnoxious. Has very little respect for women in general, and certainly isn't a romantic. In fact, from this one tiny piece of dialogue, we come away with some very strong idea about his life views, his opinions about women and fidelity, and we'd probably be right if asked to predict whether or not he's a religious person. This is the power of dialogue.

How about this person:

“Because you wouldn’t do that. I know you wouldn’t. We’ve been together too long. Through too much. I don’t care what she says, George. You wouldn’t have betrayed me.”

Who is this speaker? My bet is that it's a female. She’s optimistic -- or at least pathetically hopeful. She’s trusting. Maybe a little too trusting. Whether or not that optimism and trust is justified remains to be learned. As a reader, your opinion of her will be clouded by your own life experiences. If you've ever been taken advantage of by a man and have kicked yourself ever since for trusting so blindly, you may see something different than the woman who has been happily married to the same man for thirty-five years. Remember that the same is true of your readers.

Dialogue is a powerful tool, but it must be combined with narrative to provide the right direction for your readers. It can also be used to create a sense of place, although it can be a pretty clumsy way to create a sense of place if you're not careful. We really don't want to read:

“Ooooh, cobwebs. Icky. And broken glass in the windows.”

“Gosh, yes, Mary. And be careful of that broken board over by the sagging doorway.”

But we might want to read dialogue that does more than provide an inventory:

“The dirt, the cobwebs, the broken glass...” She shook the web from her fingers and grimaced. “I know it’s useless, but I keep wishing . . .”

“What?” Kindness filled his voice. “That you will see again? Believe me, Fran, you don’t want to see this place.”

Dialogue can help to create a sense of time.

“The dirt, the cobwebs, the broken glass...” She shook the web from her fingers and grimaced. “I know it’s useless, but I keep wishing . . .”

“What?” His voice was kind. “That you will see again? Believe me, Fran, you don’t want to see this place. Besides, it’s pitch black in here since the sun went down. We’re on equal footing now.”

Check every sentence you write, every paragraph, every piece of dialogue to see how many different things you can accomplish with one set of words.

After you finish each scene, take a look at the dialogue and figure out for yourself what you’ve accomplished with it. Have you used it to accomplish at least two of the following?:

provide information

establish conflict

establish character

establish setting

establish the story’s or scene’s time-frame

As a general rule, the more things you can accomplish at once with the dialogue, the more powerful it is.

To Thine Own Self be True

2011-02-03T20:10:00.000-06:00

One common problem I notice frequently when I’m critiquing and judging contests is that the character’s speaking voice doesn’t match his “thinking” voice.

His thought patterns may make him sound very American and educated -- probably because that’s what you are as the author. Then he opens his mouth to speak and I’m shocked to discover that he’s a street thug from England. Even worse is when the author who struggles with grammar usage tries to write a character who must be well-educated to achieve the level of professional success I'm told he has. So when that neurosurgeon from the Mayo Clinic says something like, "I seen them yesterday," you've lost me.

Remember that unless you're writing in omniscient point of view, the narrative in your book is nothing more than silent dialogue in the character's point of view. His thinking voice must match his speaking voice. If he's a street thug when he speaks aloud, he's not likely to think in long, complex sentences when he's noticing his surroundings.

He's not going to think about the obviously inexpensive sedan in the driveway, he's going to think of it as Daniel's cheap-a## ride. Inside the house he's not going to notice body odor, he's going to think it smells like s##t.

Likewise, his dialogue must ring true for who he is. A member of the military on deployment in the middle-east isn't likely to say, "Gee whiz, Castor, the computer's gone!"

I'm not saying that you have to use language that you personally find offensive, but it's often better to skip the expletive completely than to substitute something a person in that situation wouldn't actually say.

As I've said before, keep in mind the roles the two characters play in each others’ lives. (This is one reason secondary characters are so vitally important to the success of your book.) The Lord of the Manor is unlikely to have a heart-felt conversation about his dead child with a servant, but I can't even begin to count the number of scenes I've read where he does just that.

To avoid tons of internal angst that might put the reader off, he needs to have the conversation with someone, but make it someone he would actually share the information with -- or motivate his decision to share it with an unlikely person so well that even your harshest critic won't be able to find fault with his decision.

The hard-nosed detective probably won’t share his true feelings over his divorce with many people -- but he just might occasionally break down to the bartender at his local pub.

Many characters will seem naturally reticent when you begin to work with them. Three-quarters of my characters (especially the heroes) begin life wanting to protect their privacy, even from me. But again, if you don’t find someone for them to have conversations with, you may lose readers during your characters' long bouts of angst-ridden introspection.

In short, when you're writing dialogue, the most effective thing you can do is to think through the set-up logically using your internal editor -- that skeptical side of yourself. Once she's satisfied, then turn your creative self loose. Just remember to remove yourself and your goals from the scene as you start writing. Scenes often go wrong when we fail to get ourselves out of the way.

Once the dialogue is written, send your creative side away and read the dialogue aloud. Read it to a spouse or a child. Read it to the dog or the cat. Read it to the wall if that's all you've got. But read it out loud and let your internal editor go to work again. If you've written a sentence without contractions, but those contractions feel natural when you read the work aloud, change the work. If you skip words, cross them out. If you add words, put them in.

Using a different sense to edit your work than you used to create it can be an effective way of smoothing out the rough spots.

2011-01-31T14:07:00.000-06:00

Dialogue is also frequently used to establish conflict. One of the common mistakes I've seen as I've judged contests and critiqued pages for people over the years is that writers often establish conflict in internal monologue and then repeat it in dialogue; i.e.,

She couldn’t do this. The memories were too strong and the past too close to ignore. “I’m sorry,” she said, turning away abruptly. “I can’t do this. I just can’t forget.”

Another common dialogue problem is the Why Now? Conversation. These are conversations that in real life would have taken place long ago, but are dropped into the manuscript to feed information to the reader. For example, a conversation like this between two long-time friends the scene before the hero (who just happened to be with the hit-and-run driver that fateful night....)

“I know you were in that accident when we were in college, but I’ve never asked-- Did you ever find out who ran into your car?”

“No. We never did. We looked and looked, even hired a detective, but we never found the guy.”

Unless these two characters haven't seen each other, had access to e-mail, text messaging, Facebook or Twitter for the past few years, they know the answer. This is not a realistic conversation for them to have. If you use unrealistic conversations like this, it's a form of lying to your reader--which is never a good thing to do.

How do you avoid making these mistakes? Simply put, employ some common sense. I think that mistakes like these should be a red flag to you as an author -- an indication that you aren’t seeing your characters as real people. You’re seeing them as cardboard pieces there for you to move around to illustrate a point or tell your story.

Ask yourself if two real people in the same circumstances are likely to have this same conversation.
Ask yourself how this conversation would go between you and a friend in the same circumstances. Read your dialogue aloud. Reading your dialogue silently on the page is not going to help you find the problem areas.
Have someone else read your dialogue aloud to you. Another person won’t disguise the problem areas the way you might for yourself. You’ll hear the dialogue exactly as it’s written, which allows you to know where inflection or punctuation may need to be changed or added.
Spend time eavesdropping on other peoples’ conversations to hear what kinds of things people say to each other. Figure out how much you can assume about those people from the conversation you hear.

Most of all, practice, practice, practice. That's the key to mastering technique, with writing as with any other artistic endeavor.

You Talkin' to Me?

2011-01-28T11:27:00.000-06:00

We all know that dialogue is often used to provide backfill. Providing that backfill in dialogue between a couple of characters can be a much more interesting way to share that information with your readers than resorting to a lengthy narrative information dump -- but if the dialogue isn't written well, there's very little difference.

This:

She walked into the house and took a deep breath. She'd spent many happy hours here as a child, sitting on the floor while her grandmother and her friends spent endless hours at the quilting frames, playing with the dolls her grandmother had kept just for her, escaping the turmoil her parents' trouble marriage created at home.

Is not much different from this:

She walked into the house and took a deep breath. "I can't believe I'm back here again," she said to Bob. "I spent so many happy hours here when I was little . . . I used to sit under the quilting frame while my grandmother and her friends were quilting. And she had the loveliest dolls. She kept them here just for me. It was really my only escape from the ugliness at home."

Putting quotations around the information doesn't turn it into strong, useful dialogue.

One of the first things you have to consider when you're creating dialogue that will divulge some of the character's backfill is who she's talking to. Obviously, here, she's talking to Bob. But who is Bob? If Bob is a long-time friend, their conversation will be different than if he's a new acquaintance, and different still if he's a family member. If he's only a friend, their conversation will be different than if he's someone she's developing romantic feelings for, and if those feelings are already developed, the conversation will be different still.

The first great key to writing believable dialogue is to remember who's involved and to tailor the dialogue accordingly. Remember that most real people are reluctant to just pour out information in front of people who don't know them very well, and no matter how honest we may pride ourselves on being, we are usually quite anxious to present ourselves in a favorable light.

One of the biggest mistakes writers make with dialogue is writing conversations in which people divulge information they wouldn't really share under the circumstances. Remember that everything in your book must be motivated, not just the character's back stories. Their actions and dialogue in every scene must be well-motivated, too.

Characters that move around on stage without good reason feel stilted and unrealistic, and the same is true for characters that say things without good reason. One of my least favorite things as a reader is to pick up a novel in which the characters are trying to learn some kind of secret. They visit someone who may have some information, but who has a very good reason not to share that information. Suddenly, for no reason except that the author wants to share the information with me, the character begins to share things no real person in those circumstances would share.

Dialogue that's only motivated by the author's need to get the information onto the page will never feel realistic. The characters involved have to be motivated to share the information. Sometimes the hardest work you'll do in a day of writing will be to figure out why a particular character would say the thing you need him to say, and then figure out how he'll say it.

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Keep it Real ... Or Maybe Not

2011-01-24T14:00:00.000-06:00

Writing natural-sounding dialogue is something that comes very naturally to some people, but it's also something that others will struggle with for a long, long time. Whether we're good at it or not so good, dialogue is a very important tool when it comes to story-telling, and it's one we can't afford to overlook.

Dialogue can be used to provide information. We all know this. But chatter just for the sake of providing information can create clutter in your work. Dialogue that exists only to provide information to the reader will almost always sound stilted and unnatural. What you tend to get is one of these conversations -- what many of us call the "As You Know" dialogue

"As you know, John, I’ve been blind since the accident that also left me psychic.”

"Yes, but didn't your mother tell you that psychic abilities also run in your family?"

"Why, yes, John. My great-aunt Freda, whom you met at the family reunion last summer, is also psychic. You remember that she told you about her husband who ran off with his secretary."

…or…

“Well, you know I’ve been trying to find someone to clean my house for the past three months.”

"Yes, and the last six people who applied for the job just didn't fit the bill. I don't blame you for turning away the woman you told me about who had the prison record."

Sometimes it's necessary to write conversations between people who already have all the information you're planning to share with the reader, but there’s a skillful way to work the information into a conversation. It takes a little more time, but the end result is worth it. Take the first example I just gave you. Instead, write something like this:

“I know it’s useless, but I keep wishing . . .”

“What?” His voice was kind. “That you will see again?”

She nodded. “It’s been three years since the accident and I still have trouble accepting that this is how I’ll spend the rest of my life.”

“Try not to think about what you’ve lost,” John urged. “Try to think about what you’ve gained.”

“I do try,” she said. “Some days it helps, but others . . . Tell me, John, would you consider exchanging your eyesight for the limited ability to see the future a fair trade?”

Or for the second example:

“Any calls today?”

“About the housekeeper’s position?” Marsha shook her head. “It’s been three months already. Wouldn’t you think I’d have found somebody by now?”

“You’ve had plenty of applicants,” Trudy said with a grin. “You’re just too picky.”

Marsha laughed. “You can’t seriously think I should have hired the ex-con?”

“Of course not. Just pointing that you’ve had options, that’s all.”

The trick to believable dialogue is to provide information to the readers subtly, so that it sounds natural and interesting at the same time.

Real dialogue, the kind real people engage in every day, is often almost unreadable and a lot of it is beyond boring. People interrupt one another, leave sentences unfinished, and say a whole lot of nothing, especially when they first come together in a room. As writers, our task is not to repeat real dialogue, but to create a facsimile of real dialogue that is actually worth the reader's time.

Just Write

2011-01-20T08:40:00.000-06:00

There is a huge difference between spoken and written language but a good writer is expected to bridge the gap as seamlessly as possible. Spoken voice consists of tone, inflection, emotion, body language, and words. Writing is words alone, and we have to express all of the spoken aspects of language by our choice of written words.

Those words convey the message we want to carry to reader, whether it’s anger, happiness, warning, or sarcasm.

So how do we do that? Through tone, for one thing.

What tone does your voice set on the page? Is it upbeat? Casual? Quirky?

RaeAnne Thayne’s The Valentine Two-Step is a great example of voice done right. Not only can you hear RaeAnne in the book, but her characters’ voices never waver. Her hero’s narrative is written in the same patterns and inflections, dips and swells, as his speaking voice. The same thing is true for the heroine.

When a piece of writing sounds cardboard, static and like something that anyone who can form a complete sentence could string together, you can be sure that your voice is absent.

Why does this happen? There are three basic reasons:

1) Your heart isn’t involved in the subject.

If you don’t care about what you’re writing, that will become painfully obvious to anyone who tries to read it.

Time after time, editors refer to that “spark” they’re looking for when they pick up a manuscript. That spark comes from you, from your unique outlook on life, from what you believe, what you find important, what you think is funny.

Think of some of your favorite authors. Think about what they bring to the book that keeps you coming back again and again. It’s more than plot. It’s more than character. It’s more than motivation, goal, and conflict.

What keeps you going back to an author time and again is that something in the author’s style appeals to you. You like the way her mind works, you share her sense of humor, and as you read, you feel almost as if the two of you have a special connection.

I don’t know exactly how to describe the authors whose works appeal to me most, but I do know the feeling I get when I start a book that has whatever the elusive quality is. It’s a sense of shared intimacy that I think can only come when the walls are stripped away and the pretense is gone.

I pick up the book, and I can almost hear the author say, “Let me tell you how it was,” and I say, “Yes, yes! Tell me!” And she has me, right there in the palm of her hand, as long as she remains honest.

Once she closes the door on the honesty, she’ll lose me. If she puts on airs, becomes pretentious, crosses the lines of (to me) acceptable behavior, or suddenly starts trying to instruct me, I’m gone.

Likewise, if she repeatedly insults my intelligence, I’m outta there. She has to respect me enough to tell me the truth -- all of it. Even the truth that hurts.

2) Your knowledge of your subject is too shallow and scattered to come across clearly and engagingly.

If you don’t know what you’re talking about, your references will become vague and shadowy. When that happens, your clear author’s voice is gone.

Of course, there will be some things you can write around, some details you can wait to look up. But if you don’t know, for example, where your story is set you’re going to run into trouble because you can’t be clear about the setting.

Don’t use this as an excuse to stop writing while you research! Use some discretion. But also don’t try to write about things you just don’t understand.

3) You’re trying to write the “right” way so you're bogged down in rules.

The trouble with voice is that it’s impossible to show in a few simple examples. Voice doesn’t become apparent quickly, and it’s not gained easily.

Voice is identified by an author’s entire body of work. Voice is something that becomes stronger with time, and the chances that anyone has a really clear, strong voice in their first book are relatively slim.

Most likely, an editor will find a hint of Strong-Voice-To-Come in your early efforts and will be willing to take a chance on your ability to develop that hint into something more substantial. But in order to do that, you must be honest about how you view the world, what you think is important.

The real story is not in statistics or facts, it’s in the people involved. Peter Jacobi (The Magazine Article: Think It, Plan It, Write It, Writer's Digest Books, 1991) describes it as: "sifting facts through personality, the personality of the people involved in the topic you're covering and your own personality as a writer."

How do you Develop Voice?

Try writing with your eyes closed so you can’t see and edit what you’ve written. (This works better with a keyboard than a pen and paper, and, of course, you want to be sure your fingers are in the right place before you start!) If you can't actually write with your eyes closed, try spending a few minutes with them closed before you write. Closing your eyes helps you focus inward where the story is being created, and what you hear in there is the closest thing to your true voice.

Learn to let the story tell itself and avoid the urge to get your fingers in the pie (at least until the editing and revising stages.)

Be direct and clear. Don’t try to sound like a writer. Don’t try to get fancy with your phrasing, just say what you mean.

Don’t belittle or demean yourself. Allow for the chance that maybe your voice is exactly as it’s meant to be so you can reach the people out there who will respond to your unique voice. Remind yourself every day when you sit down to write that your voice is no accident.

Work with your critique group and ask them to help you know where your voice is shining through and where it disappears and becomes safe or generic.

Don't listen to your critique group if they're trying to rewrite your stuff and force their voices onto your work.

If you just can’t relax when you’re writing something “real” spend time journaling or writing something that “doesn’t matter.” The more time you spend with your real voice, the more comfortable you’ll become with it.

Don McKinney (Writing Magazine Articles That Sell, Writer's Digest Books, 1994) writes:

"The simple, uncomplicated approach to a dramatic situation will have more impact than the kind of souped-up prose that too many writers feel is necessary.

“Your best/first move might be to forget everything you ever learned about the ‘craft of writing’ and get back to the basic approach, the direct, immediate, uncluttered way of telling a story you used when you were a child.

“To put it even more simply: Don't write like a writer--just write.”

When it comes down to it, that’s the only advice anyone can give about voice. Don’t write like a writer, just write.

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The Dangers of "Perfection"

2011-01-17T12:26:00.000-06:00

We’ve all had the experience of a story sounding great in our heads, but then it loses something when we try to put it on paper. That’s because in your head you’re telling the story to yourself in your speaking voice. When you write it down you’re suddenly trying to sound like a writer. You search through the thesaurus for the perfect word--a word you’d never use in normal conversation. (Hint: If you have to look it up, it’s [ahem] probably not part of your natural voice.)

Suddenly in that process of writing down what’s in your head, you’ve lost your voice and you’ve adapted the voice of someone else. Someone you consider to be a writer, perhaps. Or maybe you’ve just started using the voice you think your writing should have.

For many writers, the voice they consider their “real voice” -- the one that shows up when they first start writing -- is the least unique of their voices, and so it’s the one that least reflects who they are.

What we get instead is a generic, homogenized voice of clichés, of advertising, or popular culture. It is a voice without color or tone. Left unattended it becomes interchangeable with the next writer’s voice...

Once, several years ago when I was serving as president of my local Romance Writers of America chapter, I agreed to judge about twenty contests in exchange for getting other published authors to judge our chapter’s contest. I read so many contest entries that year, I swore I’d never judge another one. (A vow I’ve since broken.)

After reading several entries a night for nearly two weeks, something began to concern me. Nearly every entry I picked up was written in almost the same voice as the one before it and the one that came afterward. Sentence structure, word choices, and even plot were nearly identical. The more I read, the more I realized that there was nothing in any of those entries to set it apart from the rest. Unless there’s something to set your work apart from the pack, why would an editor buy it?

Like I said, even the plots were the same. Out of 10 entries I read over the course of a couple of days, eight were about women who got temporary jobs working for the hottest guy they’d ever met. Eight out of 10! Those odds aren't good at all.

The conflicts were all nearly identical, as well. Sometimes the job was working as a nanny for the hero’s children, and sometimes it wasn’t, but the hero was always torn between his lust for his employee and the rule (whether written in a manual somewhere or his own personal rule) against fraternizing with employees.

At the time, I was teaching a class that included weekly critiques, so I decided to try an experiment. Each of us wrote 10 pages and submitted those pages to class for critique. Instead of letting the others know who wrote them, we left all identifying markers off. We mailed the pages to my daughter and let her distribute them to each of us so that nobody involved with the class knew who wrote what. The goal was to see if others could identify our work by voice alone.

Keep in mind that we'd been working together for three or four years at that time, and we’d all read a lot of pages written by the others.

Those early efforts weren’t all that successful. Some of us could tell, and some of us couldn’t. In the years since, we’ve all worked hard at letting our individual voices ring true in our work, and the last time we did “Mystery Pages,” I think we had just two wrong guesses out of 36.

There is no color to the generic voice. There is no attitude. There’s no sense of humor. There is no uniqueness of phrasing. There’s no climate. No sense of place. No hint of background.

Peter Elbow, author of What Do We Mean When We Talk About Voice in Texts? said, “Writing with no voice is dead, mechanical, faceless, without sound. It may be logically organized; it may even be a work of genius. But, it is as though the words came out of a mixer rather than a person.”

He goes on to say, “Because they stop so often in mid-sentence and ponder, worry or change their minds about which word to use or which direction to go in, their writing lacks voice.”

Aspiring writers who haven't yet found their voice write with one purpose, to give someone else what they think that person wants.

Depending on who you’re trying to reach, you may be trying to sound scholarly and profound, witty and exciting, young and fresh, dark and brooding -- whatever you think the editor of the line you’re targeting may be looking for.

Voice is one of the hardest things to critique and judge in a contest because it’s hard to say to someone you don’t know well (or at all) that their voice isn’t ringing true. But it’s the first thing that hits me when I start reading someone’s work. I know immediately if the author is talking to me and telling me a story, or if she’s trying to sound like a writer. There’s an immediate and noticeable difference between generic voice and true voice, even if you’ve never met the author.

When we listen to someone talking, we hear the way their voice rises, where the stress falls, where the pauses are. We also hear inflection, which often indicates attitude.

Years ago, a weatherman on my local TV channel had a specific speech cadence that drove me crazy because his voice always dropped and paused mid-sentence. Then he rushed over the periods at the end of the sentence as if they didn’t exist. His sentences didn’t run from capital to period, they ran from middle to middle.

If I were writing dialogue and trying to make you hear the rhythm of his speech, I’d write something like this:

“Highs today will be in the mid-fifties but lows tomorrow. Will only reach into the twenties that should bring. Some much-needed precipitation to the area. On Sunday we should see. Clear skies and warmer temperatures...” and so on.

The music and rhythm of a person’s speech helps us to follow and remember what they say and who they are. The music of speech is the pattern of pitch changes: down up/down up. Rhythm deals with stress (soft/loud) and length—duration (short/long).

If you don’t hear this already when you listen to people talk, spend some time listening to the speech patterns of strangers so you can hear the music of their speech. I think this is one of the reasons Southern writers are often so popular. The music of their speech patterns often fill their books with rich melody.

When we read, we need similar sound cues—cues that can only be provided by the writer’s sentence patterns and punctuation. But in the generic, homogenized, safe voice, there are no patterns. There is no music or rhythm.

If you want to find your voice, let your words sing on the page.

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2011-01-13T12:00:00.003-06:00

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Just One of the Guys

2011-01-12T09:00:00.007-06:00

Many years ago--probably close to 20 now--I was an aspiring writer who'd never actually finished a manuscript. I had never submitted a thing. Never entered a contest. Never heard of Romance Writers of America, Mystery Writers of America, Sisters in Crime, or Novelists, Inc. I’d never even heard of half the publishers out there. I knew nothing about marketing, nothing about publishing, nothing about the production process of a novel. I just knew that I wanted to write.

I became friendly with a man named Joe Walker and his wife. Joe and Anita lived in my neighborhood and attended my church. Joe and I had gone to the same high school many years before, and Joe also happened to be a writer.

At the time, he’d written a number of articles for some magazines published by our church, and he’d ghost-written a few books. Joe and I talked often about writing, and soon our little circle expanded to include a third person. After a while, Joe, Karen, and I decided to meet twice a month to discuss writing. My first critique group. I felt like a writer, but I was terrified to show them my stuff.

Gathering all my courage, I wrote a story and carried it to our first meeting. Joe brought a wonderful piece about something that had happened to him during the week, and Karen brought a thoughtful, articulate, and beautifully written story that left me speechless and filled with envy. By comparison, my offering was short, clumsy, and juvenile-sounding.

At some point during one of our weeks, Joe complimented Karen on her beautiful writing style. I don’t remember everything he told her because it was just too painful for me and I blocked it all out. I only remember the part that speared me straight in the heart: when he said, “Sherry and I just write like...one of the guys.”

I was crushed! Devastated! I could scarcely breathe! I was mortified. And I was absolutely certain that I would never write another word as long as I lived. How could I dare? I wrote like one of the...guys!!!!

Completely distraught, I crawled home and pouted for a while. I tried everything I knew to put Joe's comment out of my head. Eventually, I started reading some of the old things I’d written. I remember in particular a passage from my journal written during a time when I was trying really hard to sound like a writer. I’d written it during a trip to Illinois, and in it I described the vast fields of corn and sorghum (I think) in lofty terms that included as many fancy words as I could come up with.

The fact was, they were fields of green corn stalks and squatty sorghum plants, and even I had to admit (in retrospect) that my lofty descriptions sounded utterly ridiculous. I think I even described the sorghum as majestic.

I read a few other passages—the ones that actually sounded good—and slowly began to realize that I wrote best when I wrote “like one of the guys.” The thing is, I don’t speak in lofty terms. I have a good vocabulary, I think, but the first words that come into my head when I’m speaking aren’t the longest and most difficult ones to pronounce. I talk like one of the guys, too, I guess.

After a long and painful journey through my own psyche, a lot of soul-searching, and a couple of two-by-fours upside the head, I began to accept that my voice was my voice, and that it was exactly what it needed to be in order to tell my stories and reach my audience. There are other people whose task it is to write to other people, and their voices will be different out of necessity. But there is nothing wrong with writing like one of the guys. For me, there’s something very right about it.

I learned to accept my voice and then to embrace it, and shortly after that I wrote No Place for Secrets, the book that went on to be my first sale and earn me a three-book contract in the bargain. The "blow" that Joe Walker landed that night so many years ago was actually one of the greatest gifts anyone has ever given me in my writing journey.

Joe has gone on to write a few books, including the charming Christmas on Mill Street. He also writes a syndicated column called ValueSpeak available in newspapers across the country. If you ever happen to see one, read it. Joe writes just like he speaks. And while you’re reading, say “hey!” to Joe from me :) I owe him a far greater debt than I’ll ever be able to repay.

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Dancing on Coals Online Workshops

http://www.dancingoncoals.com

Playing it Safe

2011-01-10T10:00:00.001-06:00

We know that all stories start with an idea. Maybe we read something in the newspaper, have an experience, have a dream or overhear a conversation that lights a spark within us. We might see someone on the street, or overhear a snippet of conversation, or hear a report on the nightly news and think, “There’s a book in there somewhere.”

After we get the idea, we start plotting the story in our heads. We begin thinking about characters and making up dialogue. We test ideas on ourselves, trying to find the perfect situation to drop our characters into. Maybe we worry because we don’t know the end, or maybe we embrace the unknown and write to find out what happens.

We dig until we find the right conflict and bang our heads against the wall over motivation. At this stage, the story might lose its allure. It’s no longer the magical tale that had us so excited a few weeks ago. In fact, it’s starting to look an awful lot like work.

Before you go any further, stop and ask yourself why you need to write this story. Look for a reason that goes deeper than the need for a paycheck or the desire to become published. Forget about your audience. Forget about your critique group, editors, agents, and contest judges. Just ask yourself what’s in this story for you?

If you don’t know the answer to that, you may find it hard to keep going when the going gets truly rough—and it will. So be selfish for just a moment and figure out what in this story speaks to your heart.

Don’t ask what you need to say in this book, what incredibly valuable piece of information you need to share or what philosophy or spiritual truth you’re supposed to include. Don’t think about entertaining your audience or wowing an editor. Consider instead asking what you need to learn from this book. Why would you read it if someone else wrote it?

Is it truly magical? Does it make you feel happy? Alive? Free? If you can’t find the place where the heart of the book connects with the heart of the writer, you may have trouble writing the book during crunch time. If you can’t find that connection, you may always be the writer telling a story. And if that happens, you’re probably going to sound like somebody trying to sound like a writer—and that’s probably not your own, unique and natural voice.

There must be something about the story that speaks to you besides the quest for advances and royalties. Something that calls to you besides the desire for publication. Something that touches your soul and begs for you to give it release.

Those are the things that appeal to the part of your voice that isn’t vocal, and these are the parts of the story that mean only you can tell it as it needs to be told. If you try to write like someone else, like anyone else, like everyone else, you’ll be shutting down the very thing that makes the book yours in the first place. Shut that down, and your chances of appealing to an editor, an agent, a reader will take a deep plunge.

I began my writing career with a mystery about a 73-year-old man named Fred Vickery. Fred wasn’t the protagonist I planned, but Fred took over in my quiet creative moments when my internal editor wasn’t allowed at the keyboard. After a brief battle, Fred became my protagonist.

Fred appealed to me because he was kind, compassionate, and wise, and because he said aloud many of the things I only dared to think at that stage of my life. Fred taught me never to edit my characters when they start talking to me, and though I do have to fight the urge in the beginning of almost every book, I can flip open one of my “Fred” books and remember within just a few pages all the lessons Fred taught me so long ago.

Why Do We Need Voice?

A story without a strong voice doesn’t come alive for the reader. It doesn’t touch the reader’s imagination, and that’s because the author isn’t present in the story.

I can hear you all shouting now! What do I mean? Aren’t I always harping on you to stay out of the story? What about author intrusion?

Well, you’re absolutely right. The author’s place in a book is a tricky subject. One of our goals is to remain invisible. We want our readers to become immersed in our stories and to forget that someone is behind the words.

We don’t want readers to break that very necessary suspension of disbelief which would lead to realizing that a person other than the viewpoint character created the story.

But if we remove ourselves entirely from the book, the story will have no soul.

Your author’s “voice” is something timeless. It should reach through generations and across the years to connect with the reader on his or her level. Our favorite books are the ones that whisper to us, “I know what you’re feeling,” though we don’t understand how.

Our author’s voice does the same thing. It says, “I know what you’re feeling,” and says it in a way that only you can. But of course, you can only say that if you are feeling what the reader is feeling. You can’t fake the emotion. You can’t fool the reader. Never lie. Even if the reader can’t identify the lie, she can feel it. Every time. Never fail.

You won’t find your voice if you aren’t in touch with your deepest self.

So how do you get in touch with your deepest self?

Mystery author Earlene Fowler told me once that the best advice she ever received about writing was to write about what frightened her most. She took that advice to heart and wrote a book about her greatest fear -- a woman trying to get on with life after the death of her husband.

That book sold, and Earlene’s career took off flying. Why? Because she wasn’t afraid to look deep inside herself to find where her own emotions would be most raw. Or maybe she was afraid, but she looked anyway.

If you routinely write about subjects that are safe for you, it shouldn’t be any surprise that your voice, that raw emotional part of you that you can’t create, might remain hidden behind those safe walls.

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Dancing on Coals Online Workshops
http://www.dancingoncoals.com

More Thoughts about Voice

2011-01-06T08:30:00.000-06:00

Voice tells us something about the author. We make assumptions about the author and her view of the world based on the way he or she deals with the subject matter she’s tackling.

Nora Ephron wrote and directed movies like When Harry Met Sally, Sleepless in Seattle, Michael, and You’ve Got Mail. If she doesn’t have a strong personal belief in fate, she’s an awfully good liar.

Dean Koontz must have a strong religious philosophy because it’s present in all of his books—even if they are shelved in the horror section at the book store. C.S. Lewis’ Christian view of the world is clearly evident in his books.

Anne Tyler’s books are always peopled by quirky characters from the “real” world most of us inhabit—blue-collar workers, people struggling to make ends meet. You rarely find Anne Tyler writing about glitz and glamour, but that is the world of Danielle Steel.

Voice is what lets each of us start out with the same premise and come up with completely different stories. We are different. Our speech patterns and word choices are different when we speak aloud, and that’s what we want to reflect in our writing as well. Those who know us well should be able to hear us talking when they read our books—and not because the characters sound like us.

You’d think that voice would be the easiest writing technique to “learn” because it’s not actually something new or foreign. Your voice is already inside you and has always been. Learning voice is more about remembering than learning. But it’s also one of the hardest skills to teach because it requires the author to trust himself.

Let’s face it. By the time you’ve hung around this industry for a while, you’ve heard so many rules about what’s right and what’s wrong, what you must do and what you must never do, it’s very difficult to trust yourself when you sit down to write. But the rules and fear are probably the very things robbing your work of its natural spark.

If you’re one of the many writers out there who have lost their voice amid all the rules and regulations, all the workshops and advice, don’t worry. To find your voice again, you’ll first have to know the other skills that go into a book so completely that you don’t really even have to think about them. It’s when you can stop thinking about the rules that you can finally relax enough to let your own voice shine through.

So it’s probably a good idea to learn the “rules” and to study story format and scene structure and characterization and all the rest so that you know instinctively what you’ll gain and what you’ll lose with each choice you make.

Finding your voice isn’t a function of learning yet another rule that makes your shoulders tense and your head ache. It’s a matter of relaxing enough to let your natural talents shine again.

Why? Why? Why?: Creating Believable Motivation

2011-01-04T09:00:00.001-06:00

One of our most popular workshops is now available for download. This is an intermediate workshop focused on creating strong, believable motivation for your characters. Just come to our website and click on the Booklets for Download tab at the top of the page!

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Dancing on Coals Online Workshops

http://www.dancingoncoals.com

Thinking About Voice

2011-01-03T10:35:00.000-06:00

I spend a lot of time thinking a lot about the craft of writing. If you’re going to teach other writers about the craft, you have to think about it. A lot. Lately, the subject of voice has been in the front of my mind. Specifically, what is “Voice,” and why is it so important?

Simply put, voice is you. It’s your unique way of speaking, of thinking, of communicating. It’s your background, where you live, and how you feel. It’s what you know and what you think. Voice is made up of dialect and word choices, but it’s so much more. It’s your unique view of the world.

Voice is important because unless you find and embrace the way of communicating with the world that is uniquely yours, you may have a hard time inviting readers into the worlds you create, whether in fiction or non-fiction, short story or novel.

We know, of course, that physical voice is the way we know who’s speaking when we pick up the phone, or overhear a couple of friends talking. But your soul’s voice is deeper than that. As a writer, our voices are also made up of what we believe is important, what we find funny, how we view and judge others and our philosophies about life in general.

That philosophy of life is where our creative voices begin to differ. That’s what makes Jerry Seinfeld different from Jerry Lewis. What sets the comedian Gallagher apart as he smashes watermelons while dishing on the world in general and stupid people in particular. It’s what made Larry the Cable Guy famous and what helped Oprah soar to heights most of us can’t even imagine.

Compassion for the less fortunate made Red Skelton unique. Mister Rogers had a far different voice from Bozo the Clown. Listen to the Beatles music and you’ll hear how they went from just another long-haired boy band to adult men with deep observations to make about the world, and their views of the world set them apart from songwriters everywhere.

Even within the Beatles, you can tell the difference between a John Lennon song and one written by Paul McCartney. If you know classical music, you’ll know there’s a very big difference between Beethoven and Mozart, between Mozart and Chopin, between Chopin and Brahms.

That’s voice.

Disney has voice. You know what you’re getting when you go to a Disney movie, and you know a Disney movie when you see one, even without the mouse ears to clue you in.

Quentin Tarantino has voice. Spike Lee has voice. Norah Ephron has voice. Ron Howard has voice. If you see a movie with any of these names on it, you know what you’re in for. The projects aren’t identical. No one would have any trouble telling the difference between Splash!, Cocoon, Far and Away, and Apollo 13, but there are similarities in all those movies—and those similarities are voice.

Likewise, Jennifer Cruisie has voice. Susan Elizabeth Phillips has voice. Curtiss Ann Matlock has voice. Anne Tyler has voice. Victoria Holt had voice. Suzanne Brockman has voice. Deborah Smith has voice. Taylor Caldwell had voice. James Michener had voice. Whether or not you like what they do, you always know what you’re getting when you pick up one of their books.

But that’s not true of everyone out there writing books today. If you spend much time judging contests within the romance world, you’ll know that many, many hopeful authors are opting for a “safe” voice in an effort to break in with that first sale.

A few years ago, I judged over 70 contest entries within a very short period of time. Before long, I started to realize that nearly every entry sounded almost exactly like the one before it, and almost exactly like the one that came after it. Those contest entries were so homogenized, it was almost impossible to tell them apart. None of them made a positive impression on me as I read and, in fact, the only detail I remember from that whole pile of entries was that a frightening number of authors had even chosen the same basic plot setup to write about that year. In fact, the only thing that kept me from thinking that they’d all been written by the same person was the occasional use of a different font or header format.

In our rush to get published and do things “right,” some of us are losing the very thing that makes us unique, but it’s that unique voice that might land the publishing contract we’re so anxious to get.

There was nothing wrong with those contest entries. The writing in all of them was pretty good and technically correct in almost every aspect—but “pretty good” writing doesn’t win publishing contracts, although it might win contests because, after all, someone has to be awarded first place, even if every entry is mediocre.

Voice goes deeper than word choice and sentence structure. Voice is life philosophy. You don’t pick up a Jennifer Cruisie book or one by Susan Elizabeth Phillips if you’re not in the mood to laugh. You know that even when they’re tackling serious subject matter, they’ll treat it with humor.

Their outlooks on life are light and somewhat irreverent, and they write about people who live their lives with the same outlooks. Voice is why one screenwriter gets us smiling while we watch a movie about dying wives and heart transplants, but the next guy sends us out of the theater feeling raw and empty.

Voice is not generic. It is always, always, always unique. That means that if your work sounds like the work produced by the person sitting next to you, you probably haven’t found your voice yet.

Check back on Thursday for more thoughts on the writer's voice.

Dodging the Dreaded Saggy Middle

2010-12-21T09:57:00.000-06:00

The Dreaded Saggy Middle. It can happen to any writer at any time. There you are, happily writing along, when suddenly you realize your novel has run aground. Maybe you’re out of story, or maybe what you’re writing is so lifeless even you aren’t interested anymore. Worse, you can’t end the book for another 100 pages.

How did this happen, and what can you do about it?

One- or two-sided characters are one of the reasons a book may wilt in the middle. The nice heroine is always nice, the thoughtful hero is always thoughtful, the quirky best friend is always quirky, and the villain is always evil. Once we’ve introduced the character, we have nothing new to show the reader. We’re left writing scenes in which that one trait repeats over and over again.

Our spunky heroine shows up on page and exhibits spunk when her car breaks down. When she finds out she’s going to be running the family business with the hero, she has a properly spunky reaction. Later, she’s spunky with her friends, with her father, her ex-boyfriend, and the cop who pulls her over for speeding. No matter what comes her way, she’s spunky. Even a good character trait can get old after a while.

Try making that heroine spunky in her public life, but quiet and introspective in private. Or make her fearless in the business world and insecure in her romantic life. Create a villain who hates children and loves dogs. Just make sure the character’s contradictions are well-motivated and that you remain consistent when you’re in her head. She can’t love being in control here and hate it there, but she can love being in control here and long to be in control there. Multi-faceted personalities not only make a character more interesting and realistic, they can also provide keys to subplots that will keep readers eagerly turning pages.

Next, take a look at the scenes in your novel. How many highlight some of the other aspect of the characters’ personalities while still moving the story along? Are the different aspects of your characters’ personalities key to the plot or a subplot, or do they seem incidental or accidental? Your opera-singing trash collector might be quirky, but if his love of opera doesn’t directly impact the story you may not be using those quirks to your fullest advantage.

If you feel that your character is dry and lifeless, try looking for something your character would never willingly do, and then make her do that. If my heroine would never lie, I’ll look for a reason she has to lie, and I’ll make that reason bigger than she is so her decision doesn’t feel forced or unrealistic. She won’t lie to avoid embarrassment, but she might lie to save her son’s life, to keep the antagonist from taking over her family business, or to make her grandmother’s last days happy.

If you’re writing about people who lack passion for what they’re doing, you might run into a saggy middle in your story. The real world may be filled with people who aren’t driven to support a cause or make the world better, but nobody wants to read about those people. We read to renew our faith in the human spirit, and to do that, we want to read about people who are passionate about what they do, and who will take risks to accomplish their goals.

Once you’ve given the character something he cares deeply about, make sure he has a plan of action for accomplishing the task. If we’re going to ask readers to invest time and money in our story, our characters can’t be the kind of people who talk big but fail to follow through unless that weakness is part of the character’s growth arc.

Likewise, characters must have something at stake driving that passion—a reason for them to keep going when the going gets tough. A real person searching for her birth mother out of simple curiosity won’t keep looking when people and circumstances turn against her, or when the search drags on for a long time. Forcing a character to do something unrealistic may cause readers to stop identifying with her. Once the reader disconnects, your story begins to sag, even if your scenes seem action-packed on the surface.

Again, that “Something at Stake” must be bigger than the character to keep the story moving when the opposition ramps up. It must be bigger and stronger than any inconvenience or danger that gets in the way. That spunky heroine who’s searching for her birth mother out of curiosity about her origin might give up temporarily after several doors are closed on her. If she’s searching for her birth mother to save her son’s life, nothing will derail her.

Another characterization problem that can cause Saggy Middle Syndrome is moving too quickly or slowly through the character arc. Let’s say we start out with a heroine who is timid and afraid of fires, but who will be called upon to save someone from a house fire later in the book. Rather than showing her gaining courage subtly, through small, almost unnoticeable steps as the story progresses, we rush through the pivotal moments in her development so that she’s ready to face her ultimate challenge far too early. Or maybe we delay showing those small steps for too long, making the middle of the book long and dull and the end feel rushed.

If you establish the heroine as someone who is absolutely frozen in fear by the sight of fire because her mother was killed in a house fire when the heroine was a little girl, and she barely escaped with her own life, you having nothing new to share with the reader until the heroine’s ready to begin changing later in the book. You can solve that problem by letting her begin as someone who shows a strange reaction to fire in chapter one. Slowly reveal that she’s terrified of fire, that she was nearly trapped by a fire when she was young and, finally, that her mother was killed in that fire trying to rescue her. That final piece of information may not come until late in the book, and that’s okay.

Every story we write—every story we write—is a mystery. Readers pick up our stories to learn the answers to a handful of key questions: who, what, when, where, why, and how. Authors use the answers to those questions to create the mystery that will keep readers turning pages.

In genre fiction, such as romance, some of those questions are answered for us before the story begins. A romance reader knows the answer to “what” since she knows that the hero and heroine will end up together by the end of the book. Except in books containing an element of suspense, the reader knows “who”—the hero and heroine. She knows “why” they end up together—they’re deeply, madly, truly in love. After the first few lines of the book, she also knows “when” and “where.” So “how” becomes the key question in a romance novel. It’s smart, then, to hold back some “what” and “why” answers to such things as the character’s past or the motivation pushing him to achieve a particular goal to reveal in the middle of the book.

With only one real burning question to carry a book through the saggy middle, a romance novelist has to be very careful not to reveal too much too soon. We are told again and again to make our characters sympathetic, so often we share too much information too soon, hoping to explain our characters so clearly that readers can’t help but identify. Instead, those information dumps often kill perfectly good romance novels before their time.

Keeping secrets from the reader is vital to bridging the saggy middle. Choose which secrets to keep, and which to reveal in each scene you write. Give the reader only the information she needs to move forward for now. There will be time to reveal more later. Choose which pieces of information will create natural turning points in your story and use them to do exactly that.

In Laura Abbott’s October 2003 Superromance, My Name Is Nell, the author holds back a key piece of information and uses it to create the book’s first turning point. She could have easily revealed the information in the heroine’s first scene but she chose not to—and the effect of learning it for the first time after the hero’s back story has been established, after the initial attraction between the two characters is firmly established, and after they’ve even developed a fledgling relationship is chilling.

Abbott couldn’t have chosen a better place to reveal the heroine’s secret. She was able to use her book’s middle to reveal the heroine’s back story little by little and firmly establish what kind of woman she is now. In doing so, Abbott was able to create a sympathetic heroine out of a character that may not have felt sympathetic to many readers. The result is a very satisfying read, and every part of the story was necessary.

What if the characters aren’t the problem? Sometimes a saggy middle means that we simply don’t have enough story to see us to the end. That wonderful plot that got you writing in the first place suddenly seems to dry up, leaving you with 100 or 200 pages left to write, but nothing to say.

One of the reasons this happens is that we haven’t included enough subplots. In a romance, the plot is very simple—boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl. What makes the story complicated is how you get them there and the way in which you choose and then weave in various subplots.

The beginning one-third of your book is devoted to setting up the situation by establishing your characters’ ordinary world(s), unveiling the problems they’ll face, and issuing the call to adventure. The last act of your book is devoted to the actual resolution of conflict, the black moment and the climactic ending. It helps to remember that the middle also has a definite role to play. The middle serves to pit the character against conflict in the form of people, places, or things. It exists to establish enemies and allies for your main character(s) and to move the characters relentlessly toward the black moment, when the character nearly loses all.

It’s when we forget that the middle serves a distinct and important function that we write ourselves into corners and find ourselves in an endless loop, showing the same things happening in different ways. The hero and heroine have met and a spark has ignited between them. Now we write scene after scene in which they feel and think about that attraction and all the reasons they can’t act upon it. The story isn’t moving forward, it’s sliding sideways and that makes it begin to feel stale.

We can use subplots at this stage to make things worse for the people in our stories. Sometimes those things will be obvious, sometimes not so obvious. This entire conglomeration of plot, subplots, conflicts, motivation, and increasing trouble is also called plot by most people in this industry—but I think that for many of us, , especially when we’re writing our first few books, thinking of this huge multi-layered thing as “the plot” can be overwhelming. Very often, this is what sends us into panic attacks, creates blocks in our writing, and keeps us from sitting down to actually write in the first place.

For our purposes here, “plot” is the main thread of my story—the romance between man and woman, the investigation into murder, the relationship between mother and daughter—whichever I’m focusing on, depending on the genre I’m writing.

“Subplots” are all of the other smaller stories, related or seemingly unrelated, that create conflicts or provide motivation, but which always affect the main plot in some crucial way—the rebellious daughter who hates mom’s new man, trouble on the job that throws a kink into their relationship, renovations on the house that prevent the sleuth from following leads, the ex-husband that mom blames the daughter for losing, and so on.

I also consider slowly unveiling the characters’ pasts to be a story line separate from the main plot even though it impacts the main plot directly and may be the catalyst for moving from one stage of the main plot to the next. Revealing that the hero is kind, loves children, but hates dogs may convince the heroine to fall in love with him. Revealing later in the book that he never sees his own child since his divorce may cause her to rethink her feelings and even leave him.

Once you’ve decided on plot and subplots, identify the turning points in each story thread, and then stagger them so that something is always changing. Maybe your hero and heroine are in that “We’ve established our attraction and now we’re just getting to know each other better” stage, but you can keep their scenes from feeling stale and repetitive by including a turning point from one of your story’s subplots.

That way, we get to watch the hero and heroine sip wine and listen to a Michael Bublé CD together as their relationship deepens, but we’re kept from becoming complacent by choosing that moment to send the story in a new direction by letting the dog run away, learning that the heroine’s mom has walked out on her dad, or letting the hero get a phone call telling him his business is on fire. Using this method is a great way to deepen characterization, add conflict, and underscore motivation, while keeping your story moving forward all the time.

Instead of a plot that looks like this:

INCITING INCIDENT. . . . . .TURNING POINT. . . . . . . [S-A-G-G-Y M-I-D-D-L-E]. . . . . . TURNING POINT. . . . . . END

You might have a plot that looks like this:

INCITING INCIDENT. . . .TP. . . TP. . . .TP. . .TP. . .TURNING POINT. . . .TP. . . .TP. . .TP. . . .TP. . . . .END

I can’t end without mentioning conflict. A good, solid conflict or two can keep your story moving relentlessly forward. Weak conflict, anticipated conflict and remembered conflict are all causes of the saggy middle. Remember that conflict isn’t just a woman who was once in an abused relationship or a man left standing at the altar. Those are statements of fact, not conflict. They only become conflict if something equally strong is at work in your character’s life, pulling her in a different direction at the same time. She wants A and she wants B, and she can’t have both.

The abused woman who still has strong feelings for her abuser is in conflict. The man left standing at the altar who must be married by Christmas is in conflict. The woman who doesn’t believe in lying but must lie to save her child is in conflict. If the push and the pull aren’t equally strong, your conflict suffers and so does your book.

Be careful not to let your characters spend too much time thinking about the possibility of conflict, or your scenes may drag. Ditto if your characters frequently think about past conflict or if you create a current conflict that’s too easily resolved.

Strong characters with rich lives, backgrounds revealed one piece at a time, subplots with staggered turning points and strong realistic conflict are your best bets for avoiding the saggy middle—not just in your current work-in-progress, but in every book you write.

___________________

This article first appeared in the May 2010 issue of Romance Writers of America’s Romance Writers Report.

In and Out: Putting Characters in Conflict -- Available Now!

2010-12-18T13:56:00.000-06:00

An intermediate workshop designed to help you create strong, believable, realistic conflict for your characters in every book you write.

We’ll focus on the art and craft of conflict, both internal and external, and on weaving those conflicts together in ways that are fresh, exciting, and powerful enough to catch an editor’s eye.

In this booklet, you’ll learn to understand how a character’s core beliefs create conflict, how internal and external conflicts work together, when to hang onto a character’s past and when to let it go, and much more!

Go to http://www.dancingoncoals.com and click on "Booklets for Download."

----------

Dancing on Coals Online Workshops

http://www.dancingoncoals.com

We Have a Winner!

2010-12-17T11:59:00.000-06:00

Congratulations to Sandy Rowland, who just won a free copy of "In and Out: Putting Characters in Conflict."

The booklet is now available on our website. Just follow the link below and click on the booklets tab at the top of your screen to get your own copy!

20 "Rules" for Writers

2010-12-17T07:29:00.000-06:00

1. Believe in your talent. Your desire to write is no accident.

2. Dare to imagine.

3. Don’t think about publication while you’re creating. Your muse probably works well under certain types of pressure, but may shut down under the pressure of trying to make your book fit a publisher’s guidelines. Making it fit is a job for your internal editor. So create with joy and abandon. Write as if no one will ever read what you’ve written. You can always worry about “fixing” it later.

4. Don’t undervalue your internal editor. She has a specific job to do, so when the time is right, move your creative self out of the way and let your editor get to work.

5. Remember the reader’s journey. Give her what she came for. Never make choices in your writing based on what’s easiest for you to do. It’s always about the reader.

6. Don’t try to sound like a writer. It will kill your work.

7. Leave your ego at the door.

8. Try something new every day.

9. Leave the page once in a while. Get outside and live!

10. If what you’ve been doing isn’t bringing you the success you’re looking for, try something else.

11. Writer’s block may just mean that you’re approaching your work from the wrong perspective. The muse often shuts down when we try to force the wrong thing onto the page.

12. Accept change.

13. Don’t expect approval for telling the truth.

14. Every experience in your life has purpose -- both the good and the bad. Embrace them all. They’re here to give you something to say.

15. Remember that novel writers are, by nature, risk-takers. Take risks.

16. Forget about critics. Reviews, both good and bad, can impact your creativity negatively. If the review is bad, you’ll begin to doubt yourself and your talent. If the review is good, you’ll either worry about whether you can do it again, or you’ll begin to believe your own press and lose the hunger that gave you that edge.

17. Forget your parents, your siblings, your children and your neighbors when you sit down to write.

18. Tell your truth and the truth of your characters. Don’t worry about anyone else’s.

19. What you don’t write does not exist in your characters’ world.

20. There are no rules

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Dancing on Coals Online Workshops
http://www.dancingoncoals.com

Act, Don't React

2010-12-16T15:59:00.000-06:00

It may sound like simple advice, but "Act, don't react" is one of the most powerful things I know about writing.

Characters who are motivated by a negative desire are very difficult to motivate and move through a book as you write it. When I say a "negative desire," I mean that the character wants an absence of something in their life. He wants to not accomplish something, or he wants to avoid something. Maybe the character wants to avoid being fired. Maybe she wants to avoid a divorce. Maybe he wants to not get behind in paying his bills. She wants to not argue with her mother. He wants to not go back to his home town. She doesn’t want to work with her ex-husband on the big case. He wants to not have problems with the remodeling job he’s just contracted. She wants to not fall in love ever again.

So what's wrong with that?

Simply this: These people are reactors, not actors. Even though they’re very much like a great many real people, it’s extremely difficult to build reader identification with these people because they are not in control of their lives, and they are not really making any attempt to be in control.

The fact is that if my hero really and truly wants to not return to his home town, it’s extremely difficult to make him go and still convince the reader that I’m telling the truth. If he really doesn’t want to go, he won’t go. Period. End of question. It won't matter what reason I throw at him. So if I toss a reason at him and he caves in, all the pages I spent blathering about how he didn’t want to go now feel dishonest to the reader.

And that breaks the one and only real rule I have when it comes to writing. Never lie. Never ever lie.

I have found, through much struggle and hours of bashing my head against brick walls, that the best way to build reader identification is to give your character a goal that she is actively working toward. To make her sympathetic, regardless of what that goal is, she must have a plan for reaching it. It’s not enough to want. It’s not enough to hope. It’s not enough to dream. The character must have a plan and be brave enough to take the steps required to achieve it.

To tell the reader that the heroine desperately wants to keep her book store open, but then allow her to be buffeted by the winds of change, making her someone who reacts to people and events around her instead of someone who acts, is to be dishonest with your readers. If she is truly desperate, she will be the one to take action, and each time she runs into a setback, she’ll change course and try again.

People whose motivation is to avoid something will avoid it. If they don't want to go to the company Christmas party, they won't go. If they specifically (and honestly) want not to fall in love again, they will go to any lengths to avoid anyone who might make them change their minds.

Sometimes we mistake this struggle for conflict -- but it's a "conflict" on the surface only, and it’s not one that works well over the course of a novel because it's one-sided. Conflict isn't conflict without two sides of equal strength. The guy who honestly doesn't want to meet women will not start up a conversation with the flame-haired beauty by the punch-bowl. It’s just not going to happen. If you try to force him to do it, the scene you write will ring false to the reader. Either the character is being dishonest with the reader about what he wants or you are being dishonest in what you tell the reader. Either way, once the reader feels that you have veered from the truth, you’re in trouble.

Now turn that guy into the last bachelor in his group, someone who longs for love and commitment as much as he fears it or believes himself incapable of sustaining it, and you have real internal conflict. Both sides of the question have an equal pull on him, and the ensuing internal struggle is real and honest. This guy will step up to the punch-bowl and have a conversation with that stunning red-head, even though he argues silently with himself after every word he speaks aloud.

When we give our characters negative motivations and then force them to act against their will, we make victims of our characters. No person who is really made into a victim can feel strong and sympathetic to the reader. Maybe the Woman In Jeopardy is victimized for a few minutes, but what makes us like her and keep reading is the way she fights back.

Think about which of these two people you identify with most, and which you feel most sympathetic toward:

Deirdre is a 32-year-old woman who has been beleaguered by debt since her mother’s funeral. She has tried everything to get a loan, but no one will help her. After a particular harsh weekend during which she dodged bill collectors and process servers, Deirdre closes up her apartment and drives across three states to move in with a friend. If she’s lucky, she’ll find a job and maybe earn money before the bill collectors catch up to her.

Belle is a 32-year old woman who has been beleaguered by debt since her mother’s funeral. Belle has tried everything to get a loan, but no one will help her. After a particular harsh weekend during which she dodged bill collectors and process servers, Belle becomes desperate and takes a part-time job as a belly dancer in the evenings. She’s embarrassed and she doesn’t want anyone to know--especially not the members of her church group--but if she keeps her nose to the grindstone for six months, she’ll be debt free and able to concentrate entirely on her law career.

I think most of us like to believe that we’re the take-charge type who act instead of react, who move forward instead of stepping back when challenges arise. Because we want to believe that about ourselves, we are more likely to identify with and cheer for the character who takes charge, even if we don’t agree with the decisions she makes.

Before THE CHRISTMAS WIFE (Harlequin Superromance, November 2003) became an actual book, I struggled with the story for a year or more -- not with the actual writing of it, but with the conceiving of it. It's a reunion story, and the seed germinated when I was listening to the Toby Keith song, "How Do You Like Me Now?" There’s a book in that song, I said to myself, and I decided right then and there to write it -- but not the story Toby Keith told, and not until I could find an honest plot and people who felt real to me.

For months, I toyed with having the hero leave town shortly after graduation and stay away for years because of some incident. The hero was, of course, in love with the heroine all through school, but he never told her. Sound familiar? Well, it should. There have only been about a million romances written with that identical plot. And while there's nothing wrong with that, those of us trying to write the tried-and-true plots today had better include something that makes it different.

I spent months (on and off) searching for the one thing that would make my story different. I tried to stay away from the tried-and-true story where the hero was a bad boy who got in trouble with the law. That’s been done. Besides, my own personal past just won’t allow me to find a convicted felon attractive no matter how tight his jeans are, or to believe that the kid who was in serious trouble all through high school has turned out to be a productive member of society. Could happen, but not in my personal experience, and I wasn't interested in hanging around any hero who fits that bill long enough to find out.

My personal truth is that bad boys are a whole lot of trouble with very little redeeming social value. I can’t write something I personally believe to be untrue and make a reader believe that it is true, so that particular plot was out for me.

I took the hero through many different incarnations during the months I struggled with the story's concept. He was a boy raised by loving parents, a boy raised by foster parents who were mean to him, a boy raised by foster parents who were nice to him, a boy raised by a loving aunt, a boy raised by grandparents. In every incarnation, I searched for the Inciting Incident that drove my hero away from Serenity, Wyoming in the first place (not so tough) and kept him away for 15 long years (big, big trouble!)

In every incarnation, my hero felt selfish and childish for refusing to set foot back in the town where he was raised -- and in every incarnation, every word I wrote felt like a lie because Beau/Nick/Jonah/Mark/Wyatt was actually not a surly vagabond who avoided Serenity like the plague. In reality, he was a friendly sort of guy who likes people and is well-liked in return. He proved that to me every time he came on stage, and each time I tried to force him to be something he wasn’t, I was being dishonest -- with him, with myself, with my readers.

After much gnashing of teeth, I decided to let the hero be what he is anyway, and to send the heroine away instead. (I wish I could come to these brilliant conclusions much faster than I do, but if wishes were fishes . . .) Anyway, I worked on that idea for at least a month, writing and re-writing scenes in which Emily/Kate/Annie/Libby/Molly comes back to town for some reason. I created an abusive ex-husband to keep her away, but that didn't work. She was too jumpy, and (again from my own experience) women who are too recently out of an abusive relationship are not heroine material. I created an abusive step-father to keep her away, but that just made her even more determined to not come back to Serenity where he was living. So weeks passed and I kept running up against a huge brick wall and getting nowhere.

Finally, I resolved once again to start over. I spent most of one day re-plotting the book with yet another scenario in mind, yet another set of circumstances, yet another motivating emotion. And then it finally occurred to me for the first time what my mistake was. I'd been trying to work with a heroine who was reacting rather than acting, She didn't want to come back to Serenity, but I was turning her into a victim over and over again by coming up with ideas that would force her to return.

But let’s say I made her come back -- why would she attend the homecoming parade? The game? Why would she go to the dance? The truth is, she wouldn't. Either she's lying about not wanting to be there, or I was lying when I said she did all these things. But I needed her to do all those things. I needed her to walk with the hero and spend time with his kids. If she didn't, how could I convince the reader that they would all be emotionally safe together by the end of the book?

The only way my story would work is if Molly wanted to be in Serenity and wanted to take part in every activity that came along. Anything else would have been dishonest, and the reader will always feel when you’re being dishonest with her. Always. You simply can’t hide a lie when you write one. It’s impossible.

Once I discovered the true reason Molly left town, I didn't have to force her back home again because she went willingly. She went because she was curious to know what happened to her old friends. She went because her recent divorce left her feeling adrift and she was searching for a place to belong. She went because in the process of being unhappily married, she forgot who she was. She’d lost her dreams, and she wanted to find them again. And most of all, she went back to Serenity to find out what really happened the night her mother died.

My advice to you is to look at the people in your current work in progress. Are they working actively toward something, or are they just busy trying to avoid something? Do they begin each scene with a specific goal in mind? Something they can accomplish in this moment? Or do they begin each scene with the same old desire to avoid the same old thing? Are they strong active characters, or are they victims of their own circumstances?

After you study your own work, take a look at some of your favorite books written by other authors. I think you'll discover that the people you've enjoyed reading about most are those who are taking active steps to accomplish something specific rather than those who muddle through trying to avoid something -- those who act rather than react.

Thought for the Day

2010-11-23T14:50:00.000-06:00

"I get up in the morning, torture a typewriter until it screams, then stop." -- Clarence Budington Kelland

DROP SANTA A FEW HEAVY HANDED HINTS: 70 Gift Giving (and Receiving) Ideas for Writers - Blogs - Savvy Authors

2010-11-20T22:58:00.001-06:00

DROP SANTA A FEW HEAVY HANDED HINTS: 70 Gift Giving (and Receiving) Ideas for Writers - Blogs - Savvy Authors

A couple of Dancing on Coals workshop booklets were included in this terrific list of gift ideas for writers.

Thanks for the mention, Beth! I’m definitely keeping a copy of this list handy!

In the Mood

2010-11-20T20:44:00.000-06:00

"One must be pitiless about this matter of 'mood.' In a sense, the writing will create the mood...I have forced myself to begin writing when I've been utterly exhausted, when I've felt my soul as thin as a playing card, when nothing seemed worth enduring for another five minutes...and somehow the activity of writing changes everything." (Joyce Carol Oates)

The Selling Synopsis at RWA

2010-11-12T08:58:00.001-06:00

Our workshop, The Selling Synopsis, will be available at RWA University sometime this month! Watch for it at http://www.rwanational.org/ under Member Resources!

Thought for June 28

2010-06-28T09:15:00.001-05:00

Substitute "damn" every time you're inclined to write "very;" your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be. ~Mark Twain

Workshop Booklets

2010-06-26T09:35:00.001-05:00

Don’t forget that workshop booklets “Plotting the Organic Way” and “Riding the Emotional Roller-Coaster” are available for purchase any time at Dancing on Coals Online Workshops.

Thought for June 26

2010-06-26T09:34:00.001-05:00

"What I like in a good author is not what he says, but what he whispers."

~Logan Pearsall Smith, "All Trivia," Afterthoughts, 1931

Thought for the Day

2010-06-25T09:30:00.000-05:00

"The difficulty of literature is not to write, but to write what you mean."

Robert Louis Stevenson

Thought for the Day

2010-06-24T13:48:00.000-05:00

"Be yourself. Above all, let who you are, what you are, what you believe shine through every sentence you write, every piece you finish."

John Jakes

Registration Open for October's Online Critique Group

2010-06-24T13:28:00.000-05:00

We're trying something new in October -- a month-long online critique group. If it's successful, we'll do it again. Space is limited and registration is open now. Don't miss your chance to be part of the group! For more information or to register, go to http://www.dancingoncoals.com

Registration open for Avoiding Author Intrusion in August

2010-06-24T13:26:00.000-05:00

THERE'S NOT ROOM ENOUGH FOR THE TWO OF US: Back by popular demand! Author intrusion is one of fiction's deadliest diseases. it jars readers, slows the pace of your work, and puts a barrier between your story and the reader. Learn how to avoid contrived or impossible situations, and how to keep yourself off the pages of your novel.

In this workshop you'll also learn to identify and avoid:

* Ineffective point of view;
* The information dump;
* The elusive spy syndrome;
* Smoke and mirrors;
* Characters who can read minds, and much more.

This is one workshop you won't want to miss.

Don't Miss Our July Workshop

2010-06-23T23:00:00.000-05:00

Yesterday at 7:47pm | Edit Note | Delete

In July, Sherry will be conducting her very popular workshop, IN AND OUT—PUTTING CHARACTERS IN CONFLICT, at WritersOnlineClasses.com. This workshop focuses on the art and craft of creating realistic, believable conflict for your character(s), both internal and external, and on weaving those conflicts together in ways that are fresh, exciting, and powerful enough to catch an editor’s eye. We’ll focus on:

Understanding how a character’s core beliefs create conflict
How internal and external conflicts work together
When to hang onto a character’s past and when to let it go
Keeping conflicts realistic
Creating layers of conflict
Why urgency matters in conflict
Applying conflict to each scene you write
Avoiding anticipated and remembered conflict

Instructor Bio: Sherry Lewis is an award-winning career writer with more than 30 published books to her credit. Writing as Sherry Lewis and Sammi Carter, her books include traditional mystery, contemporary romance, romantic suspense, and time travel romance. A long-time member of Romance Writers of America and a member of Sisters in Crime, Sherry is a frequent judge on the contest circuit and has taught writing classes both on-line and in person for more than fifteen years. Her focus is an honest, sympathetic approach toward producing a manuscript that will be marketable in today’s changing publishing world. Writing as Jacklyn Brady, she’s currently at work on a new mystery series set in New Orleans and the world of cake decorating.