Ben Wolverton Accident and the Kindness of Strangers

It's humbling to know that we're all just a breath away from disaster, and needing to rely on the kindness of strangers. Sadly, for one of my friends and his family, that breath came on Wednesday.

David Farland/ David Wolverton's 16 year old son, Ben, was in a longboarding accident on Wednesday, April 3, 2013.  After falling off his board, Ben suffered from severe brain trauma as well as a cracked skull, broken pelvis, broken tail bone, burnt knees, bruised lungs, broken ear drum, as well as road rash and many scars. He is currently stable, but in a coma.

When he was taken into the emergency room, Ben had a 10-15% chance of survival. On Thursday, surgeons removed his skull cap to reduce the pressure on his brain. Today they started planning for the surgery to repair his pelvis and knees. It's a good sign, and the fact that Ben is stable is nothing short of a miracle.

Like many of the self-employed in America, they have no insurance. Dave's a New York Times best-selling author, but medical expenses like the ones they are incurring are catastrophic. The bills for the hospital and treatment in this instance can exceed a million dollars.

I met Ben at the first Superstars Writing Seminar where he was drafted for  (I mean, helping with) the book store, and generally helping where he could. I doubt Dave has ever refused a request for help.

If you can, please help out, even if all you can do is share this link. Please Donate

We're also putting together a Book Bomb for the family with Dave's books Nightingale and Million Dollar Outlines to help out. The Bomb is tentatively scheduled for Wednesday, but I'll post when we confirm everything.

Thank you.

Backwards Outlining or How I Kill My Darlings

I've said it time and again on this blog and elsewhere, I'm  a pantser or discovery writer. I often start my stories (whether short or novel-length) with the main characters, the main conflict and a proposed resolution, and that's it. I love the joy of taking the trip with them. The downside, of course, is when the characters get distracted, so do I. I tend to write FAR more than I really need to as a result.

I've floundered around a lot with how to take a 200,000 word novel and cut it down to something that's traditional NY publishable. Note, I say traditional NY publishable. Electronic publishing, theoretically, has changed what we can sell as completed novels since the cost issues are radically different when you don't have to print the text on paper. Still, the NY houses still set the guidelines. Will that change? Probably, but for now, being publishable means sticking within "normal" word counts for your genre until you reach a certain level of success. No one is going to tell Stephanie Myer, or Brandon Sanderson to cut 80,000 words of their novels to meet the "guidelines." Given the caliber of those writers, it's really unlikely there are 80,000 words that could be cut from a 200,000 word story without harming it. Sadly, I'm not there yet.

Where does that leave me?

Cutting words and strengthening the ones I do use.

Since going to Dave Farland's Novel Rewriting Workshop in August, 2012, I've become aware of a new metric I can use to edit my novels in a way that doesn't harm the story. I've talked about Dave's Million Dollar Outlines and Blake Snyder's Save the Cat before.  It's these tools I'm using to "outline" my completed novel as part of the editing process.

Right now I'm working on the novel I took to Dave's workshop, The King's Falcon. Let me give you

a bit of background so this makes some sense.  I've been working on it for far too long. Originally the first draft was a whopping 300,000 words. Yup. That's not a typo. I realized that I'd actually written 3 books and started breaking them up. The first story was heavily character driven so while technically fine, I'd get comments back that "nothing happened." Not a good comment. So, I took the second book, which focused on the civil war and started merging it into the first so the looming battle actually occurs in Book I. I wasn't really successful at doing this on my own. Enter Dave's workshop. I knew going into the workshop that I had, at least, a pacing problem - too much of the character stuff still happened at the front of the book and too much of the action was stuck in the second half of it. Dave showed me how to pull the two story lines through each other and merge them.

Guess what? The end result of that process is a story that needs its word count trimmed, again. But what to cut? What's a "darling" and what's really necessary?

I've started a process that I call "backwards outlining" using Dave's Million Dollar Outlines and Snyder's Save the Cat, I'm outlining the completed story. Each scene must justify it's existence. What conflict is there? Do the characters change emotional beats within the scene? What information is being imparted that is critical to the forward motion of the story. Am I hitting the right emotional beats or story turning points at the right time?

Let me give you an example:

There's a story beat that Dave labels the "Call to Action" and Snyder calls "The Catalyst." Regardless of what you call it, it's that moment when your hero's world changes and propels him into the story. It happens at the 12 minute mark in a 110 minute movie according to Snyder (he's right, by the way).  That's just a bit shy of the 11% mark. In a 120K word novel, its approximately word 13,200 or page 52 (250 words per page). 

Again, I know my story drags. I'm going to be missing beats somewhere and adding them other places they don't belong. So where did my "Call to Action" fall?

Page 32. 

But wait. I'm 20 pages early, that's good right? Nope. It means my next section (the "Debate") drags on far too long because my midpoint is spot on half way through the text. Now I know where at least one of my pacing problems is. I can go back in and fix it. So, I'm moving a scene from the "Debate" section that doesn't fit forward to the set up phase where it belongs.

Let's go back to my "Call to Action" scene again. Here's the diagram of that scene:

Location: Interior, Sabryna's chambers
Falcon learns that Sabryna is dying. She wants Falcon to marry her widower to reclaim the throne and unite the kingdoms.

Emotional Beat: +/- Falcon starts curious as to what mission Sabryna will send her on, and ends up devastated by news of Sabryna's terminal illness.

Conflict >< Falcon wants everything to stay the same; Sabryna needs Falcon to be more than she is and accept her responsibilities.

That works, I have emotional change and a conflict. I also impart a lot of plot relevant information in the wrestling with the conflict. It's a scene I can probably leave alone other than to punch up verbs and tighten the prose.

What about a "darling" that I need to cut then?

"Coffee Clach" with Leesan and Iestyn
Location: Interior castle kitchen
Falcon catches up with her foster mother and best friend, and learns more about Mordent.

Emotional Beat: +/+  Falcon starts content and ends up curious.

Conflict: Ahm, I don't have one. Lessan wants the veggies cut up, Falcon and Iestyn do that. Leesan and Iestyn want to hear information about Falcon's trip, she tells them. Falcon wants to catch up on Court politics and they tell her. Everyone gets along too well.

Yawn.

So while there is needed information here and I love the relationship between the three of them. I can do a quick two or three line recap of the information needed in the next scene. This is a darling, not a required beat. It needs to go or it needs a major rewrite.

Anyway, that's my new take on editing. I'll let you know how the process works for me.

Happy Easter - In the Kitchen with Nancy

Well, it's that time of year again. You know? When a bunny lays eggs? And we not only want to eat those eggs, but we'll hunt through the woods to find them. Talk about magic.

It's time to celebrate new life, and the coming of spring. That last part would be easier for me if it didn't keep snowing in Virginia for goodness sakes. Anyway, I digress.

One of the ways we do that here is by cooking and eating far too much. We are, after all, Italian. Breakfast is a mix of chocolates snatched from Easter baskets when parents aren't looking, and Easter Bread. I couldn't find my Mom's recipe this year, and wasn't able to call her at a decent hour to ask so I had to rely on one from a book. Specifically, Greek Cooking by Lou Seibert Pappas (Galahad Books, 1973).  So here it is with some modification to make it more like Ma makes:

Easter Bread



2 packages (tsp.) active dry yeast
1/4 cup warm water
3/4 cup milk
1/2 cup butter
1/2 cup sugar
4 eggs
1 tsp.cinnamon
1/2 tsp. nutmeg
     (okay. I don't use this ingredient because I dislike the taste, but it's in the recipe and you can make
      your own mind up about it).
1/2 tsp. salt
5 Cups flour
6 hard boiled eggs, dyed in the shell
   (the traditional Greek recipe uses red dyed eggs, we've always used multi-colored ones though).
1 egg white, slightly beaten
gum drops (The Greek recipe calls for sesame seeds)

Sprinkle yeast into the warm water, stir to blend, and let stand until dissolved. Heat milk and butter together, until the butter melts. Pour milk/butter mixture into mixing bowl, add sugar, and let cool until lukewarm. Add (raw) eggs one at a time, and beat until smooth. Stir in yeast mixture, cinnamon, nutmeg, salt and 2 cups of flour, beat at until mixed (on medium speed - about 5 minutes). Gradually add the remaining flour with a heavy duty mixer or a wooden spoon.

Knead until smooth and no longer sticky. If necessary add in additional flour. Place dough in a greased bowl, lightly oil top of dough, cover with dish towel and let rise in a warm place until doubled- about 1 1/2 hours.

Here's where the Greek recipe and my Mom diverge again. I'm going with my Mom here.

Put aside some dough for decoration, Roll  dough into six oval loaves. In the center of each loaf make
an indentation or a nest. Gently push one of the hard boiled eggs into this spot. Roll the remaining dough into a thin strip. Place a section of the strip over the egg (to simulate a handle), pressing the ends of the strips into the bread to secure the eggs. Cover and let rise until doubled in size again.

Preheat oven to 325

Brush the dough with the slightly beaten egg white, and push the gum drops into dough as decoration. (The Greek recipe would have you sprinkling the tops with the sesame seeds).

Bake in 325 degree oven for about 50 minutes. Serve hot or let cool on a rack.

And after all your time and hard work, your children can also declare that they want pancakes instead.

Sigh. Now it's time to cook the leg of lamb. Odds on whether the boys eat that?

Anyway, have a lovely day everyone.

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.

Why?

We're in the middle of another round of winnowing at Flash Fiction Online. As it often does, winnowing makes me think about what goes into a good story. One of the things I noticed with this round of stories is that the ones I rejected as "NAS" (not a story) had something in common. They all failed to answer my "why" questions.

"Why is the main character acting like this?"
"Why is the world like this?"
"Why do I care?"

Okay, that last one grows out of the first two.

The best stories answer questions. I'm going to use an imperfect analogy for a moment. If you equate a novel with a movie, then a flash fiction piece is a short discrete section with its own beginning, middle and end. A short story or flash story doesn't work when it's only a scene. So, let's take Dangerous Liaisons (1988). If you were to write the sword fight scene toward the end of the movie as a flash piece you're going to have a problem. Valmont makes two decisions based on what's come before in the movie. We know why he makes the choices he does because the groundwork was laid. Without the groundwork, the fight scene and its conclusion are unfulfilling.

But wait, why did the Sixth Sense (1999) work? Wasn't the biggest why hidden throughout the story and only revealed at the twist ending? Not really. When you go back and watch the movie again (and again), you start noticing that the writer and director, M. Night  Shyamalan, littered the story with clues, some subtle, some less so. In fact, one of the characters tells you flat out the why and why it's "hidden" early in the story. We just don't notice. But our subconscious picked up on them in the first viewing which is why we don't feel cheated at the final reveal.

I believe that the reader needs to know or, at least, be given the clues to put the why together through the story.

Let's take another example.

The first few minutes of Disney's Up (2009), show the main character, Carl, as a young boy meeting the girl he'll eventually marry. We see the heart break of their learning they can never have children and the life they make for themselves. We see Carl's losing Ellie.

Why is showing Carl as a young boy, and then through his marriage, important? Because those minutes, a story story, tell you why Carl won't sell the house, why he's shut himself away from the world, and why he reacts the way he does when the mailbox is damaged. So, when Carl then makes the decision that changes his life, we understand it. Heck, we want him to succeed.

If you strip those moments off, and just start with present day Carl and his house surrounded by construction, the story no longer works. After all, it's just an old house. Why doesn't he get with the program and move? Carl goes from being a sympathetic character to just a grumpy old man standing in the way of progress. He hasn't been shown to have capacity to be more. It's a different movie all together.

If the why is only revealed in your "twist" ending, you might want to reconsider your story structure. Either show me, or give me hints to let me figure out the  big "why" of your story, let me know why your main character acts or is the way she is, and I'll keep reading. Let me wonder about her motivation, and it's easy for me to put the story down.

Winner - Spectrum of Speculative Fiction Blog Hop

A big thank you to everyone who visited during the Spectrum of Speculative Fiction Blog Hop over the weekend. Sadly, there can be only one - - - -winner.

And so, the winner is. . . .

WARREN

Warren - please e-mail me at nancy at falconsfables dot com so we can coordinate what format you want Paths Less Traveled in.

Integrity

Integrity has been on my mind lately. In the continuum of human actions there's a whole lot of grey between black and white. Some people wallow in gray. Most companies do. So, when Maker's Mark announced in early February that it was going to lower its alcohol content from 45% to 42%, I took notice.

Why?

Most companies hide when they are going to give us less. Take for example my 5 pound bag of sugar. Oh wait. You can't.  Across the board, all the sugar producers very quietly, and at the same time, went from 5 pound bags to 4 pound bags. Oh yes, and the price stayed the same. So consumers were tricked into a 20% price increase. This sneaky change didn't endear the sugar companies to me.

But Maker's Mark let us know that it was changing its product because it wanted people to be able to buy more than one glass when they were out. It was honest. A trait rarely seen on our playgrounds anymore, much less corporate America. Anyway, after lots of hue and cry, Maker's Mark decided not to change its product.

Some (like Forbes) have speculated that the whole debacle was a publicity stunt to increase brand awareness. And, I'm not naive enough to discount the idea. It might have been. But I suspect that if people hadn't complained, Maker's Mark would have gone ahead with its plans and diluted its alcohol content to sell more liquor.

Here's where Maker's Mark won me over, even if this was a PR stunt, it came right out and told consumers what it was going to do and why. It didn't engage in a sneaky price hike by reducing what I get for my money and not telling me.As a result, Maker's Mark will remain a brand I trust.

To me integrity in writing means having integrity means keeping your promise to your readers. There are writers who I know will give me a good story, and great world building for each novel I pick up no matter how different this series is from what's come before. Those writers have earned my trust because of their integrity. I could name drop, but I won't unless you ask which writers I trust in the comments.

Not surprisingly, I'm leery of picking up stories by other writers because they don't have story integrity for me. These are the writers whose plot twists only existed because that writer withheld information a POV character knew.

We make thousands of choices every day. Most of them don't have long term implications in our lives. Some that seem immediate - like what to have for lunch - can have longer term effects. Every once and a while, though, we face a choice that can change our life.

We work all our lives to build our reputations, both personal and professional. One bad choice can destroy a reputation.

I'm going to suggest that when you're standing at one of those crossroads, whether as a writer or some other part of your life, choose the path that shows your integrity. People will keep coming back if you do.