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.

The Joy of Discovery

If you asked me which moment I liked the best, the one where I get to type "The End" and the one where I confront the blank screen for the first time, I wouldn't hesitate in answering. They're both amazing moments,  but the moment of creation,  when that first word hits the screen, is a just shy of ecstasy. 

There's very few things I enjoy more than opening a book for the first time. The world is full of possibility. Anticipation of a really good book has raised goose bumps - no joke. You remember that moment when the prequel to a popular movie franchise came out? The theme music started. I practically vibrated with excitement. The event was so visceral. While the movie ultimately disappointed, for that one moment, the moment of creation when the music started, anything could happen. Hope and possibility ruled. Starting a story is like that for me.

I'm in an interesting place right now in my writing. I have two completed novels (King's Falcon and New Bohemia: Just One Night) that are in various stages of editing, and as of Sunday, I just started writing my next novel - Schrodinger Effect. It's actually why this post is late. I've been visiting Vonna's world.

My resistance to outlining is that the one time I tried it, the whole process took the joy of discovery out of writing for me. But Vonna's world, and her stories are too complicated for me to completely discovery write. So, for this one I have an outline of sorts with some nice big wholes that I can discovery write in.

If you haven't read  Flashes of Life from my Paths Less Traveled  short story collection, shame on you. Seriously though, the new novel features Vonna, the psychic detective from that story. One of the things I find fascinating about Vonna is the quirks in her psychic abilities. While she's an empathy, she doesn't feel emotion, she sees is as color around the person.

The connection between colors and emotion goes back a long way. People are green with envy. We associate different meanings with the colors of roses- red for love, white for friendship, and so on.

Robert Pulchik , a psychologist, used a color wheel to help categorize intensities of what he considered to be the eight primary emotions - anger, fear, sadness, disgust, surprise, curiosity,  acceptance and joy. People have since built on that model to take into account additional emotions. The wheel to the right is an example of an emotion color wheel.

Vonna's a bit more complicated than that. Her ability to see emotion is, essentially, her 6th sense or, if I were writing a different kind of story, her superpower.  I have to thank my editor at Musa Publishing who pointed out that Vonna would notice the emotional colors as a non-gifted person would notice hair color. In other words . . . always. I realized that to sustain her gift/curse over the course of a novel, I'd have to account for gradients of emotion that none of the existing wheels did. As a result in preparing to write about Vonna's next murder investigation, I spent quite a bit of time coming up with the colors in her world. Her color wheel doesn't match up to Pulchik's or even the one above.

Similar emotions fall into the same primary color, except when the don't. For example for Vonna:

Love is spring green;
Adoration is Aqua;
Fondness  is Lavender; and
Like/ liking is Lavender Blush.

We're crossing primary colors (green,. blue and red) for emotions that are somewhat similar in nature. Also, because we don't have enough words to encompass all the gradients of emotion, Vonna had to make up her own descriptions of the colors she saw, and the more complicated the emotion, the more elaborate the color. As an example, "Trust" is sunset teal because I wanted to show that "trust" as an emotion was a combination of many lesser emotions and, thus many primary colors joining together.

So for the moment, I'm in the grip of a new love. So, please forgive me if I'm so wrapped up that I forget the outside world. I'll let you know how it goes.

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.