Avoiding 5 Writing "Mistakes"

I recently finished editing New Bohemia: Just One Night and am waiting to get it back from the first beta reader. Waiting for those comments is always nerve wracking. Instead of obsessing, I thought I'd share some editing tips I've learned from my "mistakes" along the way. The list below contains some of the things I check my work for before I end the first stage of editing.

1. Don't have disembodied body parts.

I owe my education on this one to Celina Summers, Head Muse at Musa Publishing. It was something that I'd never considered before she pointed it out. Now I can't ignore when it happens. I tend to make this "mistake" when I'm trying to vary sentence structure and not constantly start the sentences with a pronoun or proper noun.

What do I mean by disembodied body parts? When there's no person attribution and the writer uses only the unattributed body part to function as the sentence's subject. 

So, the sentence, "Fingernails scraped across the chalkboard" falls into this category. Really, the nails did it by themselves? They weren't attached to fingers and those fingers weren't attached to a hand? Unless, you're reading a zombie novel and the parts really can act without being attached to someone, it's probably better to write "Her fingernails scraped across the chalkboard." 

2. Watch out for unintentional distancing in the narrative.

My first editor at Musa, Jennifer Ayers, pointed this out to me. It was one of those face-meet-palm moments because it's brilliantly simple once you know what you're looking for.

One of the main benefits of a third person point of view (POV) is it creates a connection between the reader and the character. When we create distance between the reader and the character we run the risk of losing the reader's interest and having her put the book down. Unintentional distancing is a type of POV violation or redundancy.

You create distance with a sentence like: "Bob felt the coarse texture of the rough spun wool under his fingers."

Why? Because we're already in Bob's POV. So telling me that "Bob felt" takes me a step back. A "better" sentence might be "The coarse texture of the rough spun wool abraded his fingers." Why do I think that's better? The precatory language "Bob felt" is gone. Also, the second sentence is more interesting because it tells me more about Bob and the feel of the material.

3. Avoid talking heads.

There are days I wonder if I should have been a screenwriter. My first draft of a scene is generally mostly dialog. I don't fill in the character movements or blocking fleshed out. While "talking heads" scenes are fine in a first draft, there needs to be more detail before the first beta reader gets a look. Long stretches of dialog needs to be interrupted by action, even if that action is as simple as standing up,.

4. When you limit weak verbs, characters rarely just "stand up" or "walk."

Speaking of standing up, motion gives you a chance to show character. Whether a character eases down into a seat, perches on the edge or extends his left leg out straight ad stiff when he sits tells a lot about who he is or his emotional state.  There's a difference between a character who "danced" across the street, and another who "lumbered" across it. The words "dance" and "lumber" evoke different mental images. Did you see a female moving for "danced" and a male for "lumbered"? I did.

Verb choices matter.

5. Remember the setting.

I just finished reading 20 storied for Flash Fiction Online's slush pile. At a guess one quarter of those stories suffered from the White Room Syndrome. It is almost never appropriate to ignore the setting. It is almost never appropriate to set a scene in a white painted room with white furniture. Yawn. I've seen a character waking up in a fully white room work once in a story. Once. And that character woke up in a hospital cell in a futuristic Center for Disease Control Center.

Also, keep in mind that POV matters when describing setting. An interior designer will notice more and different details than a 5 year old when looking at the same room. But both will notice and mentally, at least, comment on the space.

I hope this was helpful, or at least interesting. Now I'll go back to waiting. Sigh.

Work In Progress Report

I realized the other day that it had been a while since I'd done a work in progress update, and thought it was probably time. So, here goes:

The King's Falcon (fantasy) -I finished editing in the wake of Dave Farland/ Wolverton's suggestions from his Novel ReWriting Workshop. One of my challenges on this one was that I needed to pull a plot line that hadn't started until after page 100 into the first fifty pages and blend it into the story structure better. Fingers crossed that I did this well since this story is currently out with an editor for review.

New Bohemia: Just One Night (Romance). The first draft is saved. I had a heart attack moment a while ago when I was posting this story in 1,000 word chunks to one of my writing groups. I hadn't realized that Word was pulling up the file from the remote backup device. So, when it opened on the screen the story only had 50,000 words rather than the 105,000 it should have had. Panic set in. About 20 minutes later I realized my mistake. Hands shaking, I saved a backup of the file and closed the computer for the night.  I haven't looked at this one in six weeks so it's about time to start edits.

Schrodinger Effect (Urban Fantasy Thriller). A wise friend, Lisa Scottoline, once said the difference between a murder mystery a thriller is in murder mystery someone is dead when the story starts, and in a thriller, someone dies after the narrative starts. By that definition, this WIP qualifies as a thriller. I tried picking at this story without the color wheel done, but kept having to stop to figure out the emotional resonance of what Vonna was seeing. So, I've finally finished my emotion color wheel, and outline. Now if I can keep the cat off my magnetic white board (although she's done some interesting things rearranging my outline), I should be able to get this one written. I'm about 5,000 words into it and so far so good.

Thanks for stopping by.

Finished!

This weekend saw me typing "The End" on the first draft of my work-in-progress: New Bohemia: Just One Night. About a year ago, I put another WIP on hold because this story kept interrupting me when I sat down to write. I figured New Bohemia would be a quick short story or a novella, at best. Boy, was I wrong.

One of the down sides to being a pantser (a writer who doesn't outline the story in advance but writes by putting the characters in a terrible situation and asking what would happen next) is sometimes a story will take a turn onto a different road. Well, that's what happened with New Bohemia. For this romance, I'd gotten the two characters together and now needed an obstacle. What happens when you need an obstacle? You hit your characters where it hurts most. For Maysoon, the female main character, that meant forcing her to give up her career as a lawyer for low income individuals in the worst section of Washington, DC to accept a position in the family business. Their overcoming that fairly huge obstacle, and coming together again changed the story from a novella to a full length novel.

As you might have guessed being a discovery writer has its downsides. If I'd had an outline worked out in advance, I would have realized the commitment I was making to May and Pete much sooner than I did. But, there are some benefits of pantsing it too. One is that I get to experience the happily ever after moment (a must in a romance) when the characters do. Typing "the end" is as fulfilling for me as it is for the characters.

What happens next for New Bohemia? Well, it gets to sit in the proverbial drawer for the next month to "cool" before start on edits. During that month, my plan is to work on edits for my other novel (The King's Falcon), and finish the preparation and research work for the urban fantasy WIP that was pushed aside for New Bohemia.

My goal is to have both New Bohemia and King's Falcon ready for the submission rounds by summer. Although given that it's snowing in Virginia today, summer may be a long way away. I'll keep you updated on my progress.

Work in progress update for November

 

With the first two major fall holidays past, thoughts turn to the dying of the light, and the old year. While 2012's not over yet, it's been a heck of a ride so far. I expect December will keep pace.

I'm still experiencing transition pains with the new law firm. I (read that as my very manly husband) moved from the basement office where I was squatting into my new office on the second floor this weekend. That means Matt had to carry my very heavy (so he tells me) furniture up two flights of steps. For some reasons houses built before the Civil War don't have elevators.

New Bohemia was my NaNoWriMo novel this year. I added the 30,000 words I wanted, but like most discovery writers, I learned I was still 20,000 words from that magic phrase "the end." So, December's goal is to get that done. I did write nearly every day in November so NaNo was a sucess even if I don't get to put that little banner up.

Apollo Rising, which released on September 10, 2012 from Musa Publishing, is free on Amazon from December 3-5, 2012.  Please check it out. This is the buy link if you want a free copy and are reading this during the promotion period.

I've rewritten 130 pages of Falcon, the novel I took to Dave Farland's rewriting seminar. If my estimate on New Bohemia is right, I should be able to get half of Falcon rewritten by the year's end.

So, that's my plan for the rest of 2012. What's yours?

What's in a name - part II - odd writer's block.

I've written about the importance of names on this blog before (-> here <-), but in working on my current WIP - New Bohemia - I noticed something else about names.

 Now, a bit about how I write to put this in context. I don't outline. My attempts to do so have failed. When I start a story, I usually know my main characters, their history, and their major story arc, and the ending. While I don't outline, I do a lot of pre-writing (a David Farland term, or at least one I learned from him). I spend a lot of time imagining a scene before it ever hits a page.  When I don't have a character's name or a detail I need to research I use "XY" as a placeholder. During the first round of edits, I search the document for "XY" and fill in the missing information. Using XY instead of a character name has never been a problem. Until now.

But in working on New Bohemia, I had to write a scene where a character (May) gets a phone call that changes the direction of the story, and places another obstacle between her and happily ever after. Now, I knew who was making the call, what her history was, how she was going to impact the rest of the story, the reconciliation needed between the two women, and what she had to say during this particular call. What I didn't have was her name.

The story languished for two weeks without more than a few words being written each time I sat down to work. I couldn't figure out why. It wasn't really writer's block. I knew what I needed to write, and most of the dialog. So why was this so tough?

Turns  out, I couldn't write because the character, who is a fairly major one, didn' t have a name. But I didn't realize that yet.

First, I chalked up the inability to progress on exhaustion. The day job was frantic and the kids were back in school adding another dimension of crazy to my life. Sleep had climbed up higher on the need list after all. Still, catching up on sleep and wrestling control of my docket didn't get me writing again.

Figuring I was missing knowledge I needed for the following scenes, I paused and researched avalanche rescues, and whether an entire town has ever been lost to an avalanche. Turns out there was a large avalanche, triggered by an earthquake, that flowed into a town. Thirty-four people died. It was a horrible, and unexpected disaster. Now, I had a real world basis for my catastrophe. Content, I sat back down at my keyboard.

And. . . still nothing.

Fine. Maybe, I'll flip through Sherrilyn Kenyon's Character Naming Sourcebook and  see if I could fill in some of those XYs while I pondered the full stop in my forward momentum. I knew my character was from Wales but had grown up in the household of Indian natives living in England. So, I flipped to page 381 of the book where Welsh names start. About twenty minutes later, Tegan Brice was born, or at least named.

Guess what? I finished that scene, the first one she appeared in, half an hour later. Having a name let me fill in other details that I hadn't considered yet.

So, what's in a name? Sometimes everything.