how to write

A Writer’s Greatest Crime

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This post, by Shannon Donnelly, originally appeared on Writers In The Storm on 1/6/14.

There are a lot of crimes a writer can commit—the torture of sentences, the mangling of meaning, the wrecking of words through using the wrong one at the wrong time. However, the greatest of these is the crime of lack—to forget to put in the emotion.

Now, emotions come in lots of ways and there are lots of opportunities to layer them in, but you have to remember you’re not just putting down words. You are constructing a believable scene with what should be memorable characters (people in other words). And people come with emotions.

Let’s look at the ways to make sure you get the emotion into your scenes.

 

1. Add emotion through actions.

This goes back to the old ‘show, don’t tell’ advice. You want to show your characters in action so the reader sees who your characters are. Does a character slam a door when he’s angry, or talk softly? Does a character laugh when nervous? Or pick her nose?

Little bits of actions can say a lot about a person. The man who stops to polish his side mirror on his corvette and wipe the speck of dust from its apple-cherry paint job reveals his love of his car. The woman who is always twirling a strand of hair is a flirt. The boy who pops his gum whenever his mother is talking is showing how little he listens to her. Those actions all say something about that character—they show emotions at work.

 

2. Let emotion color descriptions.

 

Click here to read the rest of the article on Writers In The Storm.

 

Perfectly Flawed

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This article, by Lionel Shriver, originally appeared on Financial Times on 10/21/11.

Complex but compelling, maddening but memorable, many great literary characters are unattractive. As the film of Lionel Shriver’s ‘We Need to Talk About Kevin’ is released, the author explores the appeal of the unappealing

Like most writers, I’ve received my share of rejection letters. The most common criticism lobbed at my earlier manuscripts was that my main characters were “unattractive”. Ironically, though the accusation was meant to consign my novels to the bin, in latter career I am now perhaps most celebrated for crafting characters who are, to a degree, unattractive. But what does this mean?

Let’s start with what it doesn’t mean. We’re not talking about villains, whom readers are invited to revile with relish – who are deliciously unattractive on purpose. Neither are we talking about the anti-hero: a protagonist the author has clearly portrayed as malign but for whom, curiously, we root anyway. An endearing mobster, Tony Soprano is an archetypal anti-hero. Ditto Calvin Piper in my fourth novel Game Control – a renegade demographer whose modest proposal to solve human overpopulation by killing two billion people overnight makes the man and his festive misanthropy no less beguiling. Anti-heroes aren’t actually unattractive – literarily, they function exactly like heroes – but morally they shouldn’t be attractive. We feel a little guilty about cheering them on, which is part of the pleasure, that daring little dance on the dark side.

Thirdly, we’re also not talking about characters who are unattractive by accident – whom the author intends to be loveable but who drive you insane. For example, Ignatius Jacques Reilly, the buffoon in John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces, got powerfully on my nerves. Sometimes you simply cannot bear the company of an author’s characters, who inspire the same claustrophobic desperation to flee as overbearing dinner guests, and in that case you should read a different book.

 

Click here to read the rest of the article on Financial Times.

 

62 of the Top Writing Articles from 2013 (That Can Help You in 2014)

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This post, by Brian Klems, originally appeared on Writer’s Digest on 1/2/14.

Over the past year I posted articles on this blog that covered everything—from grammar to writing better characters to getting published and more. Here’s a cheat sheet linking to what I consider the 62 best articles that can help you reach your writing goals. I broke it down into categories, as you’ll see below. These articles can help you no matter what phase of the writing process you are in. My goal is to help you move your writing career forward, and, by making this easy-to-reference guide, you’ll have a chance to bookmark it and have a one-stop place to help you have a successful year of writing.

Here’s to your best year of writing yet! ~Brian

 

Click here to read the rest of the post on Writer’s Digest. It includes links to 62 WD articles on everything from craft to marketing.

 

Not Every Sentence Can Be Great But Every Sentence Must Be Good

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This post, by Cynthia Newberry Martin, originally appeared on Brevity on 1/8/13.

In “Letter from the Pulitzer Fiction Jury: What Really Happened This Year” (The New Yorker online, July 9, 2012), Michael Cunningham, one of the three Pulitzer fiction jurors for 2012, wrote the following about sentences:

– I was the language crank, the one who swooned over sentences. I could forgive much in a book if it was written with force and beauty, if its story was told in a voice unlike anything I’d heard before, if the writer was finding new and mesmerizing ways to employ the same words that have been available to all American writers for hundreds of years. I tended to balk if a book contained some good lines but also some indifferent ones. I insisted that every line should be a good one. I was—and am—a bit fanatical on the subject.

True to his word, during the jury process, Cunningham argued successfully to eliminate a contender because, “although there were plenty of good lines, there were simply too many slack, utilitarian ones.”

Since July I’ve been thinking about Cunningham’s insistence that every sentence should be a good one. I would periodically look for his letter online, and, having forgotten I’d already printed it, print it again. When I was going through a pile of articles in my office recently, I found I had three copies. Then, Pam Houston, when reading my novel-in-progress, marked a sentence with this word: boring. When I took a closer look, she was right. The sentence was boring. And utilitarian. Only there to move the reader from point A to point B.

I don’t read looking for bad sentences, and now I wonder if I read right over them. Or do the best books not contain bad sentences?

Is it possible to write a whole book of sentences that are at least good?

I pulled books from my shelves and searched through them. I ignored sentences I had underlined, and I ignored first sentences—both of books and of chapters. Where would a bad sentence hide? Page one hundred forty-three, I thought. That’s where a bad sentence would hide. So in each of the books, I turned to the first complete sentence (that was not dialogue) on page one hundred forty-three. Here’s what I found, starting with the language crank’s own sentences:

–The Hours: This cake says “Happy Birthday Dan” in elegant white script, uncrowded by the clusters of yellow roses.

–By Nightfall: Rebecca sips contemplatively at her coffee.

–Mourning Diary, by Roland Barthes: M’s fit of anger yesterday evening.

–The Two Kinds of Decay, by Sarah Manguso: This adrenal suppression occurs if prednisone is taken for longer than seven days.

–The Year of Magical Thinking, by Joan Didion: She was reaching a point at which she would need once again to be, if she was to recover, on her own.

–Stop-Time, by Frank Conroy: The balcony trembled.

We hear plenty about writing great sentences; what we don’t hear enough about is the bar we don’t want to slip below—the bar each sentence must meet. And that is not the bar of great but the bar of good. These six sentence examples are not great, but I believe each one meets the crank’s requirement of good.

What makes a sentence good?

 

Click here to read the rest of the post on Brevity.

 

3 Techniques to Proofread Your Story

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This post, by Andre Cruz, originally appeared on his The Word blog on 10/3/13.

After I complete a story, I just want to be done. Don’t you? I mean, to develop a story from mind to paper takes time and after spending a lot of it you want to kick your feet up and move on. You figure to have someone else proofread your story, since you’ve heard that it is better to have a fresh pair of eyes look at your manuscript.

In the beginning of my writing career, I felt that way. I figured that once I completed a story I needed someone else to look at it for proofreading. I thought that proofreading my own story was not only a waste of time, but toxic to my story’s overall success.

That is not the case. In fact, I have found that it is the complete opposite. No matter who you find to proofread your story. Even if they offer some of the best proofreading services, nothing beats you reading through your manuscript yourself for errors before you send it to a proofreader.

Think about it. No one knows your story as well as you do. So when proofreading your own manuscript, you are more capable of finding things that should be there, but aren’t, such as certain dialogue and narrative. A proofreader will only be able to correct what is there and if they are capable enough to feel something is missing in the manuscript, will they be able to correct it as well as you would? I don’t think so.

 

Click here to read the rest of the post on The Word.

 

12 Mistakes Nearly Everyone Who Writes About Grammar Mistakes Makes

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This post, by Jonathon Owen, originally appeared on The Huffington Post on 11/20/13.

There are a lot of bad grammar posts in the world. These days, anyone with a blog and a bunch of pet peeves can crank out a click-bait listicle of supposed grammar errors. There’s just one problem — these articles are often full of mistakes of one sort or another themselves. Once you’ve read a few, you start noticing some patterns. Inspired by a recent post titled “Grammar Police: Twelve Mistakes Nearly Everyone Makes,” I decided to make a list of my own.

1. Confusing grammar with spelling, punctuation, and usage. Many people who write about grammar seem to think that grammar means “any sort of rule of language, especially writing.” But strictly speaking, grammar refers to the structural rules of language, namely morphology (basically the way words are formed from roots and affixes), phonology (the system of sounds in a language), and syntax (the way phrases and clauses are formed from words). Most complaints about grammar are really about punctuation, spelling (such as problems with you’re/your and other homophone confusion) or usage (which is often about semantics). This post, for instance, spends two of its twelve points on commas and a third on quotation marks.

2. Treating style choices as rules. This article says that you should always use an Oxford (or serial) comma (the comma before and or or in a list) and that quotation marks should always follow commas and periods, but the latter is true only in most American styles (linguists often put the commas and periods outside quotes, and so do many non-American styles), and the former is only true of some American styles. I may prefer serial commas, but I’m not going to insist that everyone who doesn’t use them is making a mistake. It’s simply a matter of style, and style varies from one publisher to the next.

3. Ignoring register. There’s a time and a place for following the rules, but the writers of these lists typically treat English as though it had only one register: formal writing. They ignore the fact that following the rules in the wrong setting often sounds stuffy and stilted. Formal written English is not the only legitimate form of the language, and the rules of formal written English don’t apply in all situations. Sure, it’s useful to know when to use who and whom, but it’s probably more useful to know that saying To whom did you give the book? in casual conversation will make you sound like a pompous twit.

 

Click here to read the rest of the post on The Huffington Post.

 

Put Yourself into Your Writing

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This post, by Steven Ramirez, originally appeared on his Glass Highway site on 10/10/13.

There’s nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein.

That quote—or variations of it—has been attributed to the sportswriter Red Smith, among others. I’ve thought a lot about it over the years, trying to determine whether the writer was (a) being funny, (b) over-dramatizing or (c) attempting to impart real wisdom. Recently, I’ve come to believe that C is the correct answer.

Good writing is about the mechanics. Great writing is about putting yourself into the words. Actors talk a lot about this—putting themselves into their character. I once asked a friend of mine who had studied method acting at the Actors Studio, “Do you actually become the character?” “No,” he said. That would mean I’m insane. Good point.

So, must writers become the characters we are writing about? No, but there are three things I believe to be essential if you want the reader to believe they exist.

You Must Understand
Without understanding, you’re doomed to writing thin, unbelievable characters. I should know—I’ve written enough of them. We all have. In screenplays, people always talk about a character’s backstory. Screenwriters spend a lot of time writing detailed histories of their characters, things like where they went to school, whether they have siblings, the kind of music they enjoy, etc.

Me, I don’t do that. I always start with someone I know or someone I’ve met. Sometimes, I create a composite. The point is, by honing in on a specific person, I’ve already got my backstory. To me, it’s a waste of time to create a fake history when there are so many real, interesting people in the world. And this is not say that I don’t embellish.

 

Click here to read the rest of the post on Glass Highway.

 

Creating an Ironic Tone in Your Fiction

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This post, by Jack Smith, originally appeared as a guest post on Elizabeth Spann Craig’s site on 12/9/13.

Let’s say you want to create an ironic tone in a story or novel—it’s just needed.

First off, what is tone? On the one hand, we might say that it’s the apparent attitude of the narrator toward the characters and the world they people. But it should also be said that everything in a fictional work relates in some way to the tone. If every character in your story drives crazily and exceeds the speed limit, this will certainly affect the tone. If all the clocks are off twenty minutes, this will too.

To create the right tone, you need to think about character actions, dialogue, and setting. All of these will affect the tone of your story or novel. But you also need to attend to matters of style.

Being something of an iconoclast, I tend to go for irony. An ironic tone is, of course, the right tone for satire—which is my usual medium.

And so when I’m thinking about creating an ironic tone in my work, I find myself—and this tends to happen as I write—depending on the following useful tools:

1. Diction—words that create a witty, humorous tone

2. Irony and Paradox—both deal with contradiction, the first with the gap between what you expect and what you get; the second with apparent contradiction.

 

Click here to read the rest of the post on Elizabeth Spann Craig’s site.

 

The Dreaded DNF: 10 Things That Make Me Close a Book for Good

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This post, by Roni Loren, originally appeared on her blog on 10/14/13.

This is a revamped post from a while back, but since I had two books back to back this weekend that I couldn’t finish, I thought it was a good time to freshen up this post since my reading habits are constantly evolving.

Up until a few years ago, I had this problem when I started reading a book. Once I peeled back the cover of one, I was compelled to finish it. No matter if I was fully enjoying the book or not. It felt like starting a book was like signing some contract. I bought this book. I’ve chosen to read it. And now I must read it all. I was the Chronic Finisher.

But then a lot changed in my life. I got published (yay!) and started writing 2-3 books a year on tight deadlines. Everything got infinitely busier. And my reading time shrunk to this minuscule sliver of time. So I found myself putting down books that didn’t capture my interest. And then I wouldn’t get any reading done because I felt like if I was going to read, I needed to finish whatever book I had started. But I wasn’t into that book so didn’t pick it up at all.

Well, finally, I came to the conclusion that I had to put the Chronic Finisher in rehab. I was missing out on good books by forcing myself to read ones I didn’t love. My reading time is too short and my TBR pile too big to be doing that. So if a book hasn’t grabbed me by page 50 or so, I’m probably putting it aside. And sometimes even sooner if it’s clear a book isn’t working for me.

And each time I put down a book in the DNF (did not finish) pile, first–I am sad. I want to like every book I pick up. But I know that’s impossible. But second, the writer in me wants to evaluate WHY I didn’t feel compelled to finish it. What put me off? (And how can I avoid making those mistakes in my own books.)

Here’s what I’ve discovered:

What Makes the Chronic Finisher Put Down a Book:

 

1. Didn’t connect with the characters

If I can’t relate to the hero or heroine at all, if I don’t like them, or if they’re not interesting enough, I find it next to impossible to get into the book. I must be emotionally connected by chapter 3 at the very latest. And it’s fine to have a not so likable character as long as they are compelling and interesting enough to take a journey with. But this is probably the most common reason I put a book down.

 

2. There was no chemistry or not enough build-up between the hero and heroine in a romance.

Obviously, I write sexy romance and enjoy reading it. But nothing will bore me quicker than throwing two people together when there hasn’t been any tension or chemistry set up beforehand. This doesn’t mean you can’t have the characters get together quickly, but the author better have done a fabulous job building up that tension.

 

Click here to read the rest of the post on Roni Loren’s blog.

 

6 Keys to Revising Your Fiction

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This post, by Chuck Sambuchino, originally appeared on his Writer’s Guide to Literary Agents blog on the Writer’s Digest site on 9/20/13.

1) Make sure you’re in love.

I’m not a genius, my stories are not born lovely and perfect, their language strong, their plot lean and exciting. I have to work at it—a lot. And I don’t mind, because I enjoy editing. But I know there’s a big difference between revising a story I love and revising one I’m just fond of.

Perhaps this is obvious but to me the most important factor in ensuring successful revising is to be working on a piece that has legs or emotional resonance for you. If not, you’ll probably give up long before it’s in the best shape possible.

So what’s the key to knowing if it’s love or just infatuation? I once listed all of the stories, screenplays and plays I’d written—over 30—and looked at the themes, characters and plot, and I was able to see certain patterns. Not surprisingly, whenever I loved a story and its themes and characters, I ended up revising it enough that it was perfect—or as perfect as I could make it. And that story usually resonated with others.

 

2) Start from the beginning but don’t get stuck there.

We all know the first pages of a story or novel are critical, have to be sharp, enticing, fresh—generally amazing. These are the pages when a reader (agent, editor or final reader if you get that far) says either “Yes! I’m in” or the dreaded, “Ah, maybe not.”

Because the stakes are so high it can be tempting to stay on those first pages to the point of forgetting about the rest of the piece. Revising can become a sort of trap in which you start to judge the material so much that you never finish. It’s important to know when to move on so that you can get to the end and have a completed piece to revise.

 

Click here to read the rest of the post on Writer’s Digest.