The book biz

I’ve contributed a couple of books (Forgive Me, I Meant to Do It and Writing Magic) to a silent auction in relief of victims of the shootings in Connecticut. There are many wonderful items in the auction, which you can view here: http://pubheartsconn.blogspot.com/2012/12/list-of-auction-items.html, and some of which have bearing on today’s post. There are manuscript critiques on offer, which may be great and seem to be at bargain-basement prices and the cause is certainly worthwhile. My only caution is that I don’t know the people making the offer, so before you bid, do a little research.

Back from poetry land: On September 4, 2012, Lark wrote that she was wondering “how to get published” or “the publishing process.” I know that’s a tall order, and might be a lengthy post- I wrote my 9th grade research paper on book publishing and got a C because it was WAYYY too long, was more of an instructional manual (!), and most likely mediocre at that because I’ve never been published- but as a FAMOUS 😉 published writer I, at least, would love to hear your thoughts on that. I’m sure that getting published is a main goal of at least a few of the readers here. 🙂

Well, this is fortuitous! I was going to post this link anyway, and it fits right in. A few days ago, on the Guestbook of my website, robin s. asked  if there are any novel-length contests for teens. I didn’t know, so I googled and found this opportunity from Scholastic: http://www.thisispush.com/write/. Scholastic is about as reputable as you can get, so I would absolutely trust it. If you have something ready or almost ready, I would encourage you to put on the finishing touches, follow the instructions, and submit. The deadline approaches.

If you can’t get ready in time, you can make next year your deadline and have it to work toward.

If you do submit, be sure to follow the instructions, which require a certain number of chapters with a minimum and maximum page length and an outline of a specified length. My guess is that if you don’t follow the rules your submission won’t be read.

When I googled “novel writing contests for teens” the Scholastic one was the only one that popped up that I recognized. There was one from Delacorte, but it seems to have been discontinued. If any of you know of any others that you can vouch for, please post the information. There may be online contests that are good. I’m just not informed enough to judge.

In fact, I’m not knowledgeable enough about online publishing to discuss it at all. Or self-publishing, which I understand is more and more an acceptable way to go. This post is about traditional publishing-house publishing that results in a print book and, probably, an e-book. My perspective is from the children’s book corner, which includes young adult (YA) books, which have recently been inching older and older into upper teens and even early twenties. And I think that most of what I’m about to say applies to adult publishing too.

This post can’t be nearly long enough to cover a subject that many books have been devoted to. The one I know is Harold Underdown’s The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Publishing Children’s Books. Mr. Underdown also has a super-informative website at http://www.underdown.org/.

Also, in October I gave you the name of an agent who is willing to read submissions from teens. Here’s the information again: She’s Brianne Johnson, an agent at the respected Writers House. She said to email her a cover letter describing the book and to send the first 25 pages in a Microsoft Word document, as an attachment. Brianne prefers to receive submissions via e-mail, at bjohnson@writershouse.com. In your e-mail, say you got her name from my blog. Your writing sample should be double-spaced in 12-point type and the typeface should be easy to read. Your name, address, phone number, and email address should appear on the left above the title. Your last name and the title of the book should be in the upper left-hand corner of every page that follows, like this: Levine/Ella Enchanted. This is in case a page gets separated from the rest.

I’m not sure if the Scholastic contest rules specify double-spaced, but assume that is the requirement, because it’s standard. The double-spacing gives an editor room to write in edits and comments. If an editor takes the time to do that, it’s a very good sign.

And, just saying, whether you submit to Brianne or the contest or both, make your manuscript as free of typos and punctuation and grammatical errors as is humanly possible, because those will rule you out in a heartbeat.

If you do submit to Brianne and the contest too, let her know in your cover email that you’ve entered the contest. Not necessary to inform the contest that you’ve submitted the manuscript to an agent. The contest editors won’t care.

In the regular publishing process, aside from contests and special arrangements with agents, you don’t need to say anything about your age, whether you’re fourteen or ninety-four. If an editor or an agent falls in love with your book you can confess then, and the likely response will be delight that you’re so young or so ancient. Either way, there’s a story there for the marketing folks.

Conferences are the best way I know of to meet editors and agents. The Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators (www.SCBWI.org) offers regional conferences throughout the year (and throughout the world, pretty much) and two national conferences annually. Alas, you have to be at least eighteen to join the organization and attend. The Rutgers One-on-One Conference (http://www.ruccl.org/One-on-One_Plus_Conference.html) is the absolute best conference You have to be at least eighteen for that one too – sorry! You may find other conferences online. There are certainly conferences for other genres, like mystery, romance, fantasy. Look for participation by agents and editors.

If you meet an editor at a conference or in any other circumstance, like through a college class, and the editor says you can send her something, then you can. Otherwise, the major publishers don’t accept unsolicited manuscripts – manuscripts that just arrive in the mail. Some smaller presses may – I don’t know. Most editors find new authors through agents.

AAR, the Association of Authors Representatives, lists agents on its website, which is www.aaronline.org. It may take a long time to load, so be patient.. I suggest you check out individual agents’ websites or, if the agent works at an agency, the agency’s website. When you do, look at the authors who are represented by that agent. Look up the books published by those authors. You can even go further and read one of the books to see if you like it, to see if you respect the agent’s taste. The website and the AAR site say what kind of work the agents is interested in seeing and how to submit. Follow the guidelines slavishly!

If an agent is interested in your work, he (or she) may ask for revisions before he’s willing to represent you. He should never ever charge for any editing he does. If his suggestions make sense to you, if you think they’ll get you to a better book, revise according to his guidance. Even after he begins to represent you, he may edit your manuscript just as an editor would, meaning that you don’t have to do whatever he wants. The edits have to seem right to you.

Most agents edit but not all. Mine doesn’t.

One advantage of an agent is his knowledge of the industry. An agent has relationships with lots of editors; he sees them at conferences; they meet for lunch. He knows who’s looking for what, who like what. My agent sent Ella Enchanted to a particular editor because she knew Alix was “hungry,” eager for new material. Often these hungry editors are just starting out and don’t already have a slate of authors they work with. For example, Ella Enchanted was Alix’s very first acquisition.

If you do meet an editor somehow and the editor wants your book, you may still decide to be represented by an agent, and you’ll have an easier time finding one if you already have an offer of a contract.

The agent will negotiate your contract, and here industry knowledge is essential. The agent will know what a reasonable advance is, what reasonable royalty rates are, will probably have a standard contract with the various publishers, so you’ll get the benefit of that.

When you reach this point: an agent wants to represent you, I think you should meet the agent if you live or work near each other. If not, I think a phone call would be a good idea. You want to be sure that you’ll work well together, that he sees your work in the same way you do, that you’re a good fit. My first (brief) agent didn’t like fantasy. You can guess how that worked out.

If you don’t want an agent, however – the agent will take fifteen percent of your advance and royalties forever – you can have a literary lawyer negotiate your contract or help you negotiate it. You’ll have to pay the lawyer, but all your earnings after that will go straight to you. However, do not involve any other kind of attorney in the negotiation. Any lawyer who doesn’t know the territory will find the contract terms unacceptable, and a deal will be impossible.

This post is going on too long. I’ll continue next week with a partial post or a whole one. Your prompt is to ask me questions. If there was anything you didn’t understand or if there’s an area you’d like me to go into in greater depth, please ask. If you have industry experience, please add your expertise.

Have fun!

Poetry finale

This is the last post on poetry for the time being, but I’d be happy to write more if more questions come in.

On October 19, 2012, Charlotte wrote, …on the poetry front, I’d be interested to hear about your own experience with poetry: do you do it intentionally or just when the mood strikes? What kinds of poems do you usually write? Do you switch things up? How do you edit your poems? How is your process for poetry different from fiction?

I spoke to the sixth graders at a middle school in Connecticut on Monday, where a girl asked me how I can write from a child’s perspective. My answer was mostly about how my most important reading experience was when I was little, and I mentioned that I’ve been writing poetry for adults lately, too, and it feels as if I step from one room in my brain to another to write for kids and to write poetry for grownups. For the new writing book chapters about poetry, I wrote a few poems. At first they were poems for adults, which felt dull for kids, so I had to make a conscious effort to move furniture from my kids’ writing brain room into the poetry room. Then I was able to write about a haunted house and about that “horrible hoodlum Robin.”

In my poetry room I’m less analytical and more relaxed than in my novel-writing room. I’m not bearing the weight of pursuing a long stream of events and a bunch of characters and needing it all to come together logically, satisfyingly. In a novel I relax and play in individual scenes. A blog post is contained too, and pleasurable for that reason (and also because I’m talking to you guys directly). And prompts are the tiniest of all and the most fun.

But I’ve wandered away from poetry. I go into more of a trance when I’m writing poetry. My mind settles.

I generally start poems by writing prose about what will be in the poem. For example, a few years ago I did something online called “poetry boot camp,” which is the brainchild of poet Molly Fisk. In poetry boot camp you have to produce a poem a day for a week. I have never been more observant!

During the week my sister and I visited our aunt and uncle. Aunt Naomi had a form of dementia that had deprived her of speech and the ability to walk, although she didn’t seem unhappy. I decided to write a poem about her, and I started by writing prose about the visit, about what had happened, about the details, about what might have been going through our aunt’s mind that couldn’t break through into words. I imagined what it would be like for her if the dementia went briefly away. That imaginative leap turned it into poetry for me, not just a journal entry. Then I started to arrange my lines. What resulted is a free verse poem that doesn’t rhyme.

If I’m writing a form poem, I’m thinking about the form as I write my prose. If I’m writing a sonnet, for example, I look for meter and hunt for synonyms that will work. When I rhyme I tend to go for simple – I don’t attempt rhyming with hippopotamus. If the form calls for repetition, I pay attention to ideas that can repeat, that are important to the idea of the poem.

You know from the blog that I love to revise. Poetry, the way I write it, is mostly revision. From the moment I get my ideas down in prose I’m in revision mode, happy, happy, happy.

Occasionally I’ll write a poem because the mood strikes, but more often it’s because I’m taking a class. I go to a poetry retreat every January, and write there and often revise when I get home. Sometimes I decide to look in one of my poetry books for a prompt, and then I write a poem. Nobody is expecting poems from me, so I have no deadlines.

Although I’ve written a bunch of poems, I still feel like a beginner, or at best, an intermediate student. Sometimes when I finish a poem, I feel sure about it, but more often I don’t know. A poem is such a little thing. A perfectly lovely poem can be about not much, but even so, often I’m not sure I’ve done enough. And sometimes I worry I’ve done too much, been obvious. I wish I had a poetry editor, like I have an editor for my novels.

I write all kinds of poems except long. I write free verse (no rhyme, no consistent meter, no set number of lines, no anything) and form poems, like the tritina, triolet, pantoum, sonnet. My poems are about almost anything. I wrote a sonnet about a genetically modified apple variety.

And writeforfun asked, …could you address the subject of publishing poetry? I mean, nowadays, it seems like the only thing poems are good for is song lyrics. Of course, you wrote Forgive Me, I meant to Do It, which is poetry, but aside from that, do people publish poetry? Or is it a dying art form? And if it is still alive and kicking, how does one go about getting published?

Forgive me, I Meant to Do It is for children and is the publishing arena I know best. I don’t think poetry is a dying art, but it seems to have limited appeal – which I don’t understand because it appeals mightily to me. I mean poems appeal to me if they yield themselves up to understanding pretty easily. Very dense poems confuse me at this point in my poetry development. But straightforward ones go right to my core and warm me or chill me or thrill me in a way that no other kind of writing does. I mean, I love fiction, but fiction worms its way into me more gradually through the medium of the story. Poetry is like a sword straight to my heart – in the best possible way!

Anyway, here’s the little I know about the poetry publishing world: A lot of people (including me) get the magazine Poets and Writers, which carries classified ads for journals and publishers seeking submissions. The publishers are usually looking for chapbook (from twenty-five to forty-five poems, shorter than a collection) or collection-length manuscripts. Poets and Writers also lists poetry contests that you can enter for a fee.

Here’s what I’ve been told by experienced poets: that contests are a good way to begin to become published; that by reading poetry journals and hanging around the poetry world, which I think is to a large extent an academic (university) universe, you get to know which are the best journals to get published in and you can submit to them.

The Association of Writing Programs (AWP) has conferences that poets attend (I’ve never been) where they network with other poets and with publishers. I don’t know much about this.

I’ve had a few poems for adults published, only one by submitting through Poets and Writers. I haven’t put much time into it. On one occasion I met two people at a signing who published a journal, and they asked me to submit, and they took one of my poems. Five poems got published because I audited a poetry residence at an MFA program.

None of them paid a penny. They paid, as is common, with a copy or two of the publication. That was fine with me. I was just happy to have them published. And publishing them was like dropping a pebble in a well. I’ve never heard back from a reader. I don’t know if my few poems have been read by a hundred people or by three, have no idea if they made an impression on anyone. If I weren’t such a newbie, I’d probably have an idea of who’s reading what. And poetry readings are probably the place to experience a direct audience response. I’ve certainly never read my poems except to friends.

Please! Anyone who knows better and more than I do, please comment!

Here are three prompts:

• Write a poem about something that seems entirely unpoetic, a hair knot, a fork, bumping your head, chewing gum. In the last stanza, find something significant to add. Twist whatever your little thing is into an important statement that lots of people should care about. Don’t start with significance. Don’t even think about going there till you get to the end of whatever you wanted to say about chewing gum or whatever. Naturally there’s a poetry term for this switch: the turn. The turn is a characteristic of lots of poems. We think the poem is taking us in one direction, but skreek! off we go in another.

• Write a poem in which several of the lines start with one of these words or phrases (the term for repeated beginnings is anaphora):
I wish
actually
when
do not
long ago

• Write a cinquain, which is a five-line unrhymed poem. The first line has two syllables, the next four, then six, then eight, and then, finally, two. Here’s an example. I wrote this, imagining someone looking down on the New Zealand city of Christchurch after one of the earthquakes that hit there in the last several years (I visited a few years before):

Vantage Point

Alone
she walks along
the heights above Christchurch
to see what looks the same and what’s
missing

Have fun and save what you write!

Rhyme time

Congratulations to NaNoWriMo participants! You did it! Admirable!

For those of you word nerds, this appeared in the New York Times, and for those of you who are thinking about jobs to support you before you become literary super-stars, lexicographer may be a possibility (I don’t know what the prospects are), but it’s an interesting article: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/03/opinion/lies-murder-lexicography-dictionary.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0.

And my husband found this interview with me on YouTube from my visit to the central library in Pittsburgh. It’s long, and the visual quality is pretty bad, but if you’re interested, here it is:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pB4ZZHLbJRc.

There’s this post and probably one more coming up on poetry. Then back to fiction. In her question last week, writeforfun asked about rhyme as well as meter, so that’s what this post is about. And writeforfun also asked about rhythm. Rhyme contributes powerfully to rhythm.

When I see rhyme or hear it, a pleasurable buzz runs through me, a little zzzt! Almost any kind of rhyme does it, sometimes with the added fillip of thinking, “Aren’t I clever?”

I say almost any kind of rhyme because there are quite a few. There’s the kind we all know, called end rhyme, obviously because it comes at the end of the line, like this:

Hickory dickory dock,
the mouse ran up the clock.

Dock and clock are end rhymes. But there’s another kind of rhyme in the first line of this nursery rhyme. Hickory dickory is an example of internal rhyme, because it happens inside the line, not at the end.

Here’s a poem (in a poem form called a triolet – see if you can figure out how it works) that I wrote for the poetry section of my new writing book:

Bad Day

When I enter the tall, tilting house on the hill
my hands make fists. I wish it weren’t Halloween,
wish the silence didn’t stiffen with ill will.
When I enter the tall, tilting house on the hill
I hear a voice. “At last, a guest. Welcome, Bill,
brave Bill, who won’t live to turn fourteen.”
When I enter the tall, tilting house on the hill
my hands make fists. I wish it weren’t Halloween.

Ill will in this poem is another example of internal rhyme. But for internal rhyme the rhyming words don’t have to appear right next to each other. It’s good enough for them to be in the same line or in a line nearby, and it’s more fun to discover them when they’re apart.

Aside from their internalness, these rhymes – ill will and hickory dickory – are just like the end rhyme example, dock and clock, in that they rhyme exactly. In sound they’re the same except at the very beginning. Such exact rhymes are called perfect.

There are a lot of technical terms in poetry! More even than I’m about to run through.

Here’s a bit of a ditty that used to excite and horrify me when I little. The versions I found online are different, but this is what I used to sing in a quivering voice:

“The worms crawl in,
the worms crawl out.
They eat your guts
and they spit them out.”

Poor starving worms, spitting everything out! The rhyme comes from the repetition of the word out. When a word rhymes with itself, it’s called identical rhyme.

Dock and clock above are examples of what’s known as masculine rhyme. Another example is debate and inflate. Masculine rhyme (those sexist poets of yore!) means that the rhyming syllable is accented. An example of feminine rhyme is mother and rather. The rhyming syllable here is unaccented.

Another kind of rhyme is called slant rhyme, and it may be my favorite. It’s almost rhyme, like stink and skunk. Look at the fifth line of “Bad Day.”

I hear a voice. “At last, a guest. Welcome, Bill,

Last and guest are (internal) slant rhymes – almost but no cigar. That’s the kind of rhyme that makes me feel clever when I notice it. Hey! I think, this poem rhymes! And that little buzz of delight goes off. Last week I mentioned not being fond of forced rhyme, and the example I gave was:

Then Jack did run
to have some fun.

Another example would be:

Jill did frown
when Jack fell down.

I’m here to tell you that frowned is an absolutely completely acceptable rhyme for down. The ear barely registers the ed.

Jill frowned
when Jack fell down

One kind of slant rhyme is called consonant rhyme, because the final consonants are the same but not the vowels, as in guest and last. If there’s consonant rhyme, naturally there must be vowel rhyme, also known as assonance. An example would be elf and spell because of the short e.

Moving right along, there’s rhyme that’s apocopated (I love the sound of this word – pronounced a-POCK-a – pay – ted – sounds to me like popcorn popping). Apocopated rhyme is a kind of slant rhyme, in this case when a syllable is missing, as in stinker and clink.

There’s even eye rhyme, when the sounds aren’t the same, but the letters are, as in lone and gone or dough and cough.

A great online resource for finding rhymes is Rhyme Zone. Here’s the link: http://www.rhymezone.com/r/rhyme.cgi?Word=boot&typeofrhyme=perfect&org1=syl&org2=l&org3=y.

My favorite kind of rhymed poem – I mean end-rhymed poem – is when the rhyming is so subtle and natural that I don’t notice at first. A poet who’s great at interesting and inventive rhyme is Molly Peacock (generally high school and above). Here are some end rhymes from her poem “Widow” about the sadness of a cat after the loss the other family cat: usual with dull, I let with toilet, and weight with wait. The last rhyme, weight with wait is called rich rhyme, which I learned just this minute .

Last of all, there’s rhyme for pure pleasure in the words. Here’s a poem by Edward Lear:

How pleasant to know Mr. Lear

How pleasant to know Mr. Lear,
Who has written such volumes of stuff.
Some think him ill-tempered and queer,
But a few find him pleasant enough.

His mind is concrete and fastidious,
His nose is remarkably big;
His visage is more or less hideous,
His beard it resembles a wig.

He has ears, and two eyes, and ten fingers,
(Leastways if you reckon two thumbs);
He used to be one of the singers,
But now he is one of the dumbs.

He sits in a beautiful parlour,
With hundreds of books on the wall;
He drinks a great deal of marsala,
But never gets tipsy at all.

He has many friends, laymen and clerical,
Old Foss is the name of his cat;
His body is perfectly spherical,
He weareth a runcible hat.

When he walks in waterproof white,
The children run after him so!
Calling out, “He’s gone out in his night-
Gown, that crazy old Englishman, oh!”

He weeps by the side of the ocean,
He weeps on the top of the hill;
He purchases pancakes and lotion,
And chocolate shrimps from the mill.

He reads, but he does not speak, Spanish,
He cannot abide ginger beer;
Ere the days of his pilgrimage vanish,
How pleasant to know Mr. Lear!

Runcible is a nonsense word Lear invented.

Here are some prompts:

• Pick a poem you’ve written and look through it for rhymes you didn’t know were there. Underline them. Look for synonyms you can switch in to add to the internal rhymes.

• Go to a page of one of your stories. Look for places to add alliteration or assonance without changing meaning. When you’re done, read the page over. Try reading it out loud both ways. If you don’t feel you’ve improved your prose, change it back.

• Try a bouts-rimes (from French, pronounced boo ree may), which requires at least two people. Each person writes a list of rhymed words, like joke, flop, smoke, drop, inhale, plate, derail, great. They exchange lists and each has to write a poem using those end rhymes. Be wild. Poetry doesn’t have to be logical.

• Use me as your bouts rimes partner and use my words: joke, flop, smoke, drop, inhale, plate, derail, great. Don’t worry about meaning. If you’re able to cobble together something that makes sense, fine, but go for the pleasure of the sounds.

• Look at my triolet and follow the form (repeat lines and rhyme sequence) to write your own triolet.

• Write a poem about yourself or about someone you know or about a dragon along the lines of Edward Lear’s poem about himself.

Have fun, and save what you write!

Poetic feet

I’m jumping ahead to poetry because I’ve reached that point in the new writing book, which (have I told you this?) I’m calling Writer to Writer, and hoping my publisher will go along.

On October 17, 2012, writeforfun wrote, I would love a post on poetry! What makes good poetry, how to find the best rhyming words, how to keep good meter…plenty more that I can’t think of right now. Actually, that’s my biggest problem – meter (am I spelling that right?). I tend to “Fudge,” as I call it, the meter so I can fit in the words or syllables to finish the thought, sacrificing rhythm for rhyme. I try not to let it become too extreme, although very few of my poems are consistent enough to be turned into songs. I also do have a hard time with rhyming, usually only using approximate rhyme, but that problem isn’t quite as extreme as the meter.

I’m still very much a student when it comes to poetry, although there are poems in many of my books and Forgive Me, I Meant to Do It is a poetry collection. Last year I took two poetry classes and every January I attend a poetry retreat for female kids’ book writers.

Assessing quality in poetry is trickier than in stories. Most of us, I think, are confident in our judgment of novels. Good or bad, we pronounce, and then we’re happy to spout our reasons, like, predictable or thrilling or boring or great characters, and so on. When it comes to poetry we’re not so sure. The only hallmarks of a bad poem, in my opinion, are forced rhyme and sickly sweet sentimentality of the sort we find in greeting cards – which are fine for that purpose. By forced rhyme I mean something like Then Jack did run, so as to rhyme with to have some fun. In normal speech or prose we’d say Jack ran. The did run sounds weird and calls attention to itself. Poems of long ago used forced rhyme. That was the convention back then and not a flaw. But modern poems go for a more natural feel.

Aside from those two, I go with what I like, and generally I like poetry that speaks to my experience or that opens me up to new experiences. I’m not fond of impenetrable poems that need to be puzzled over for hours, but many poetry hounds love poems that yield their meaning only slowly. Two poets I adore are Ted Kooser and Lisel Mueller. I don’t have permission to reprint any of their poems, but you can find samples online. Both generally stay away from topics that aren’t appropriate for kids, but they’re poets for adults, so you might have a grown-up take a look first. One of my favorite Ted Kooser poems is “A Jacquard Shawl.” Here’s a link to it, but first a warning: there’s nothing inappropriate, but it’s not happy: http://www.ronnowpoetry.com/contents/kooser/JacquardShawl.html. And my favorite Lisel Mueller poem is “Monet Refuses the Operation.” Here’s a link to that one, which is inspirational, and which, in a single poem, represents why I love poetry: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/236810.

The point is, decide for yourself what you like and what you don’t. Many poems don’t send me, but the ones that do are worth reading the others for. The ones I love pierce my heart.

As for meter, not all poems have it. Free verse, very common today, has no meter and no regular rhyme, although everything, poetry and prose alike, contains words that rhyme. In my last sentence, for example, no and although rhyme. Many many many fabulous poems are written in free verse.

My go-to book on the basics of poetry is The Teachers and Writers Handbook of Poetic Forms (high school and above, I think, but it may be okay for younger kids – check with a librarian). Here’s a snippet of what it has to say about free verse, “…it demands more of the poet, because he or she must question every word, test the shape and sound of every line, and be able to defend the choices made.” Sounds scary, but the idea is just that you should have a reason for what you do in a poem (which can simply be that it appeals to you that way). And that reason can change over time as we become more experienced poets. I confess that when I’m writing a free verse poem I can become confused about where to end a line. I try it one way and then another and then a third. I rearrange the whole poem and switch back and forth, and finally go with what I like best, which I may change a month later if I revise.

Meter and form help with line ending decisions. In metered poetry, the line is divided into feet, each foot a unit of meter. Accented and unaccented syllables determine what kind of meter we have. Shakespeare wrote in iambs, which is one unaccented syllable followed by an accented one, sounding like ta dum, as in the word complain or the two words to eat.

Here are other major kinds of meter in English:

∙ the trochee, which is the opposite of the iamb. It’s an accented syllable followed by an unaccented one, as in the word screaming or the two words jump in.

∙ the dactyl, which is an accented syllable followed by two unaccented ones. The word carefully is a dactyl.

∙ the anapest, which is two unaccented syllables followed by an accented one. Into feet would be an anapest.

∙ the spondee, which is two accented syllables. Very few words are spondees, but here’s one I found online: shortcake. This spondee sentence example comes from my Handbook: “Bad heart, flat feet, sad shoes–bad news.” In that sentence every word receives equal emphasis.

If your head is spinning, maybe this will give you comfort, I once read that it’s impossible to figure out – called scanning – the meter system  in a prose sentence or in a line of free verse. You can see meter only if the poet put it there, which I personally find a great relief. I’ll tell you why with iambs, which I understand better than the others – because I took a class in prosody, which means the study of poetic meter and versifying, and our professor went into iambs very thoroughly.

It’s all in the pattern. Let’s take the first stanza from a sonnet I wrote about a new kind of apple. It’s a Shakespearean sonnet, which means it’s written in iambic pentameter with a certain (Shakespearean) rhyme scheme. Pentameter means there are five feet – five iambs (ten syllables) per line. Here they are:

The Arctic Apple, perfect apple, skin
a blushing scarlet, flesh as pale as snow–
flesh slow to brown and oxidize; it’s been
revamped, its genes were modified. It grows

If you read it out loud in a ta dum rhythm I think you’ll hear the stresses, the iambic-ness of it. Of course, that’s a terrible way to read the poem for any other purpose, like meaning or feeling, but  try it just for now.

Here’s how poetic notation shows the stresses:

The Arc’tic App’le, per’fect app’le, skin’

The syllable before the apostrophe gets the stress. For example, Arc is stressed and tic isn’t. I don’t know how to do it on my computer, but if you want to show the unstressed syllables, you’d put a little u above them.

And here’s how poetic notation shows feet:

The Arc’/tic App’/le, per’/fect app’/le, skin’/

What’s between the slashes is a foot (and the first foot doesn’t start with a slash).

Now let’s look at the word oxidize in this line:

flesh slow to brown and oxidize; it’s been

My professor explained that we look at relative stresses when we scan – figure out – meter. Oxidize is a dactyl; that is, the first syllable is stressed. But if we look at relative stress we notice that we emphasize dize a little more than that i in the middle. Because of relative stress, oxidize works as iambic. If it weren’t for relative stress, metered poetry would be really hard.

It isn’t so hard once you get used to it. If you write ten poems in iambic pentameter you’ll get the feel for it, especially if you use a thesaurus. If you switch words and move words around you can say anything in iambs, because much of English falls naturally into an on-off pattern of unaccented-accented syllables. To make it even easier, it’s okay in an iambic poem to throw in an occasional trochee (called a trochaic substitution) or an occasional extra syllable. It’s also okay to drop the first unaccented syllable in a line and to add an unaccented one at the end. Shakespeare does all of these frequently. Still, most of the poem needs to be in iambs so that a reader can pick up the pattern. Because I’m not very experienced with writing in meter, I try to stick to the straight and narrow, but that’s just me.

Let’s look at these two famous lines from Hamlet:

To be, or not to be–that is the question:
Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer

They’re written in iambic pentameter but each has eleven syllables, that last unaccented syllable hanging off the end of each line. Both lines contain trochees, trochaic substitutions. I wouldn’t feel confident enough to do it, but this is Shakespeare.

Here it is with the stresses and the feet:

To be’,/ or not’/ to be’/–that’ is/ the ques’/tion:
Wheth’er/ ’tis no’/bler in’/ the mind’/ to suff’/er

Having said all this in a very long post, I found a neat little shortcut to meter worries. For the beginning of Writer to Writer I wrote a writing spell, which I wanted to have a strong rhythm and to feel spell-like, so I looked at the witches’ spell in Macbeth and I pretty much matched syllables and stresses.

Here are two lines from Macbeth’s witches:

In the caldron boil and bake;
    Eye of newt, and toe of frog,

And this is what I turned them into:

On the paper, laugh or wail,
Days of joy and weeks of woe,

In some of the other lines I altered the syllables slightly but for the most part I stuck to Shakespeare’s meter, and the result has a strong rhythm. There’s nothing wrong with doing this. It’s not cheating.

So here’s a prompt: Pick a poem or a fragment of a Shakespearean play or song lyrics that has a strong rhythm and go syllable by syllable to come up with a new poem with entirely different words (except for the unimportant ones, like and and the).

And here’s another prompt: Look at song lyrics that you like and see what’s going on with the meter. Use what you learn in your own poem.

And another: Pick a poem you’ve already written and revise it so that it’s in iambs. Or write a new poem in iambs. It can be short, say six lines.

If you’re in need of poem topics, here are a few:

• a spell to make something happen or to keep something from happening;

• a poem about winter or something you do in winter or from the POV of winter itself;

• a fairy tale told in a poem.

And here’s a final prompt: Please tell me if this was much too complicated, if you wanted to throw your computer across the room, or if it was interesting, or if I went way too deep into the weeds of poetry. Tell me if you felt moved to try writing in meter. I don’t think I’m going to go into this level of detail in the book – or even if I’ll go into meter at all, but I would welcome feedback.

Next week, rhyme, which is a little less complicated.

Have fun, and save what you write!

The blog on blogging

On September 3, 2012, Leslie Marie wrote, …how about a post about WRITING blogs? Just a thought. I’d like to start one but have absolutely no idea what to write. I think my biggest block is just fear of some sort holding me back!

I follow only one blog, written by a former student about her unfolding experience in the Peace Corps in Moldova. Before, I’m not sure I’d ever heard of Moldova, which used to be part of the Soviet Union and  is the poorest country in Europe. Now, I know how warm and friendly people are, how education doesn’t seem to be as highly valued as it might be, how people are forced by poverty to work in other countries, leaving their children behind with other relatives, and on and on. Kerry posts irregularly but frequently, not at all some weeks, several times others. She includes photos and videos and links to articles, but mostly it’s her own fascinating (and well-written!) commentary on her experience. Interestingly, I almost never see any comments. I assume the blog is mostly read by family and friends, and they’re in touch with her in other ways.

Leslie Marie, I’m not sure if one of your fears is about finding blog readers. The way I started to build an audience was entirely accidental. I was invited to write a message for NaNoWriMo-ers and included the URL for this blog, which was pretty new. My message went live, and – boom! – I had followers. Whenever I speak at a school or a conference I give out information on my blog and website. The numbers continue to build, but slowly. In getting ready to write this post I googled “how to bring traffic to a blog” and found an interesting site. If you hope to attract a big audience, you can google, too. To start, however, you can tell everyone you know about your blog and ask them to spread the word if they like it.

I also googled “blogs about writing,” and found lists of the most popular sites, whose subscribers number in the thousands. At this moment I have 434 followers, plus, I’m sure, people who check out the site without ever signing up. The other blogs must have such visitors too. From what I read the most popular bloggers guest post on other blogs and include guest posts on theirs. They also have book giveaways. It seems that people can earn money by blogging, which I do not do – except when reading my blog causes you to buy one of my books. Some sites advertise books about writing written by other authors. If a reader clicks or buys, I’m not sure which or possibly both, the blogger gets paid (very little). I didn’t see general advertising on any of the sites I checked out, but some may carry ads and get paid for clicks that result. One of the blogs had a tab through which a visitor could hire him as a freelance blogger or writer, so that may be another source of income. The writing advice seemed useful. None of it – but I didn’t search extensively – made me sputter in outrage.

For any of you who are thinking about ways to be a writer and still eat while you establish your place in literature, blogging may be part of the picture, but you’ll have to do more research. Social media keep changing. We need to stay up to date.

I’m proud that many readers of this blog are teenagers and  that some are even younger and that some of you post comments and questions. And I’m over the moon that you’re wild about writing.

I also clicked on some of your blogs. Agnes, you haven’t kept it up, but I think your idea of a blog as a resource for homeschoolers is great. If you continue with it, please let me know and I’ll post the URL, because, as you probably know, a lot of homeschooled kids read this blog. I suspect there would also be interest from other people (such as me) in what it’s like to be homeschooled – homeschooling is entirely different from my school days.

Agnes, you have a few blogs going, each with a different purpose. That’s terrific, too. You can fool around, try one thing, then another, and another.

One kind of blog can be about yourself and your life. I checked out the blogs of some fellow kids’ book writers, too, and many of them are chronicles of their days along with insights into the sorts of people they are. A friend suggested that I do that, which in a way is making myself – and yourself – a character, because we can never present our whole selves in all our complexity. We have to decide what aspects of us we want to share. I imagine this kind of blog is similar to writing a memoir. The memoirist becomes a character, someone whose company the reader enjoys.

And this sort of a blog would be somewhat like journaling if you were writing for more than yourself. Suppose you visit your Aunt Susan and you blog about the day. Well, you want to give your reader an image of your aunt, so you write that you adore or despise her or love her for the first hour until she starts driving you crazy. You say that she wears her brown hair pulled back in a ponytail, and her lipstick is always fading. Is there a brand that sells faint lipstick? you wonder. (You can post photos of her, too.) When you hug her tight you’re surprised again at how thin she is under her big wool sweater. Then she starts questioning you about everything and you’re grateful for her interest until she asks about Nora, your best friend until the two of you fought last week and you really don’t want to talk about that, and you say you don’t want to discuss it and she says, “All the more reason to get it off your chest,” and you’re wishing she had lost her voice.

The point is, we want to include as much detail in our blog as we put in our fiction. Blogging is writing, after all.

This is all amusing and interesting with Aunt Susan, but suppose your thoughts are more hostile than wishing that she’d lost her voice. In your journal, to be read only by you, you might write those angry thoughts. You might let yourself be whiny and resentful. You might wonder why you’re cursed with such a nosy aunt and why she has to heat her house to ninety degrees, and why she can’t cook anything but meatloaf that tastes like shredded cardboard. That’s fine in a private journal. Ranting is one of the joys of journaling. But not in a blog. These things follow us for decades!

(One of the joys of writing fiction is that we can make a character whiny, and no one will connect the character with us.)

And remember that when you post, you are publishing. A blog is a form of e-publishing.

Now that I’ve scared you silly, I think blogging is very worth doing if you’re careful.

In addition to writing about your life in general, you can:

∙ pick a single aspect of your life to blog about, like public or private or home school or babysitting or your writing;

∙ take a journalistic approach and report on doings that interest you;

∙ blog about the news and present your own take on events;

∙ have friends write guest posts;

∙ present interviews of interesting people in your life;

∙ write a how-to, how to make pie crust from scratch, how to paint with watercolors, whatever;

∙ combine all the above.

Like Agnes, I chose to blog about a subject I know well, and my blog is a kind of how-to about writing. I’m very aware of you blog readers out there in cyberspace, so I set a tone, which I hope is friendly, encouraging, down to earth, funny. The blog does create a version of me as a character. I’m friendly, etc., in real life, too – but not always.

I aim for clarity and usefulness. I want you to be able to put my thoughts to work in your stories. If I’m ever less than clear I would welcome being told.

I don’t know what I would have done if you hadn’t started asking questions. I could have written about what I was grappling with week-to-week in my writing, but I wouldn’t have thought of all the topics you’ve raised. So I’m grateful. If you comment a few times I start to feel that I know you a little. E. S. Ivy, to single you out, I think of you as supremely helpful and supportive. You’re not the only one who helps, though. One of the things I love about the blog is the aid many of you give other writers against the confusion that sometimes afflicts us all.

Then there’s the frequency of your blog. If you’re collecting an audience you don’t want to disappoint them by dropping out of sight for six weeks. Some people post daily, some weekly, and some when the fancy strikes – but I don’t think bloggers in the last group are concentrating on readers. As you all know, I post weekly. If I have to skip a week I give you advance warning.

And there’s length. Some who post every day deliver short bursts. Others write lengthy daily posts; I don’t know how they find the time. I feel I want to give you your money’s worth (hah!), so my posts are substantial and I’m not satisfied until I fill two single-spaced pages and start a third (this post is exceedingly long).

Last: prompts. Naturally not every blog offers prompts, but I do, because what’s a writing blog without exercises? And I love writing them. How do I do it? Well, I consider the problem of the blog, in this case blogging itself. I’ll do it now, to demonstrate. First, what’s inside this post that I can use? Hmm… Aunt Susan! Maybe Nora, too. Where can I find conflict?

And I think about the blog topic itself, in this case blogs. What can I do with that directly? And with the possibility of trouble from exposing oneself unguardedly online?

Here goes. These are the prompts I came up with:

∙ Whether or not you actually set up an online blog, write a post for three different kinds of blogs.

∙ Write a story about your main character Madison and her Aunt Susan. Create an argument. Resolve it happily or not. Have best friend Nora come up.

∙ Madison blogs about the confrontation with Aunt Susan. She’s careful not to write anything that will hurt anyone, or so she thinks, but Nora reads the post and reads between the lines, too. Write Madison’s post and what follows from Nora. Again, resolve it happily, or not.

∙ Madison applies to a music school (or starship school or unicorn training school) she desperately wants to get into. Her audition goes brilliantly well, or so she thinks until the school rejects her. She’s furious and posts her rage on the blog, suggesting that the school’s admission policies are rigged. Write how this post changes her life.

Have fun, and save what you write!

Mountainous hyperbole

An interesting report on the radio this week got me thinking. I may not have it exactly right, but this is what I understood: Researchers compared attitudes toward learning in the U.S. with attitudes in Japan. In the U.S., according to this study, children are praised for catching on quickly, and such kids are called smart. In Japan, children are praised for working hard, and I heard no mention of intelligence. Researchers visited a classroom in both places and gave the children a math problem that was impossible to solve. The American children gave up in under a minute; the Japanese kids struggled for an hour until the researchers told them to stop. The report concluded that each society yielded different weaknesses. Japanese children tolerate prolonged effort well but aren’t very creative, and vice versa. And I thought that we writers are the perfect combo of East and West. We need that creative spark, but it comes to nothing without a lot, A LOT, of hard grunt work, which we may not honor enough. After all, I felt embarrassed when the last novel, whatever its name will be, took so long. I thought it should have come more easily, but now I’m taking comfort. Writers have it all!

Now onto this week’s topic. On September 1, 2012, Leslie Marie, aka Kilmeny-of-the-Ozarks, wrote, I have a writing question. It’s about the use of hyperbole. I was reading an excellent article on the subject this morning and it reminded me of an instance where my writing instructor said I had used hyperbole and should delete it.


The problem is, my story is Christian fantasy based on Norse myth–and the hyperbole was the World Ash Tree that, according to myth, the world is built upon. I described the trunk of a tree as “larger than a mountain.” I didn’t think it hyperbole but logical for my imagined world–if it’s holding up the whole world then surely it would be bigger than the mountains! She said it’s too big a stretch of the imagination.


My instructor has been very helpful, so I want to listen and learn, but this seems like a necessary “hyperbole” for my story! The article I mentioned, used Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Barsoom series (e-texts can be found on Project Gutenberg–fun read!) for an example–that hyperbole doesn’t work well when everything is stretched to the limit. Like all the women are gorgeous, all the bad guys are the cruelest he’s ever met, the hero has no faults…but it seemed to me that I had enough contrasts in my story for the huge tree to stand out…


So, I guess what I’m asking is, what do you think of hyperbole? How can it be done well and when should it be avoided?

First off, the comparison between a tree that supports a world and a mountain doesn’t seem like hyperbole to me, just a reasonable comparison that gives the reader a sense of scale, a way to judge size.

But I do agree with the article about hyperbole overload. When everyone and every feature of landscape are maxed out, that sense of scale is erased. It doesn’t sound like you did that.

Generally, I like hyperbole because hyperbolic language is lively and economical. Here’s an example from my Dave at Night in which Dave describes Mr. Bloom, the superintendent of the orphanage where he’s just been left. Mr. Bloom is the main villain of the book.

Mr. Bloom was huge, not fat.  His chest and head loomed over his desk like the Hebrew Home for Boys loomed over Broadway.  He pushed back his chair and stood up.  Scraping against the wall on the way, he walked around to my side of his desk and bent down to inspect me through thick spectacles.  He smiled, showing a million teeth.

I guess there are two examples of hyperbole here, the comparison between Mr. Bloom looming and the orphanage dominating the street, and the million teeth. The reader knows he doesn’t have that many, but she gets the picture: big, fake smile showing lots of teeth, which I could have said straight out, something like this, Mr. Doom’s big smile, which revealed a lot of teeth, seemed fake. See? It’s not as lively, and it uses up more words; it’s not economical.

Besides, hyperbole gives an opportunity for character development. Imagine Phil is describing Zelda, a very short person (like me). Will he say she’s small as a Barbie doll or a hamster or a dot of dust in sunlight? The answer suggests the cast of Phil’s mind by the kind of similes he’s drawn to.

We can also use hyperbole to reveal a character’s emotional state. In the grip of terror, a character can see a threat unrealistically, hyperbolically. The gun in the mugger’s hand can seem to glow; the mugger himself can appear seven feet tall. In the grips of romance, Phil can describe Zelda to his friend Petra as having emerald eyes, skin as perfect as satin, and the delicacy of a butterfly. Petra, who’s maybe a wee bit jealous, meets Zelda and comes up with her own hyperboles when she thinks, Yeah, right. Eyes the exact color of pus, the kind of thin skin that makes you look eighty by the time you’re thirty, and skinny as a pencil.

The barbie-hamster-dust simile, whichever is chosen, when delivered by an impartial narrator, gives a sense of Zelda. A hamster creates quite a different picture in a reader’s imagination than Barbie does. And dust in sunlight is fascinating. Is Zelda dirty? Fragile? Both? We can’t wait to learn more about her.

Hyperbole is characteristic of tall tales and part of their charm. For example, the fish that got away was as big as a whale.  When we use wild hyperbole we employ a technique of tall tales that adds flavor to our story. I say, go for it.

Here are three prompts:

∙ Write a tall tale about one of your friends or someone in your family. Pick one of her most important qualities and exaggerate it and its effects. For example, my father was pretty charming, so in my tale I might have him charm the painted bird off a plate and go on from there.

∙ Pick a character in one of your stories and describe him hyperbolically. Go way over the top. Consider the result and, if any of it fits, insert that part of the description in your story.

∙ Fairy tales, which deal in exaggeration, are perfect for hyperbole. Retell a fairy tale loading up on the hyperbole. Don’t worry about overdoing. If it gets funny, so much the better.

Have fun, and save what you write!

In the rearview mirror

On August 4, 2012, MNM wrote, I’ve been working on a story that is written in first person and I’m having issues with putting in the background or writing flashbacks. I can bring them into the story easily enough, but I am having trouble getting back on track without a choppy transition. Any tips?

Here’s a confession: I’ve started to put together a second writing book, this one based on the blog, and I’m about to write a chapter on flashbacks and back story, so this question is exactly on time. Thank you, MNM!

The first consideration with back story (background) and flashbacks is whether they’re needed. If not, I say leave ‘em out. No matter how smooth our transition, the reader has to quit the forward movement of our tale to journey to an earlier time and, often, a different place. When he returns he has to get immersed all over again.

Let’s go back to last week’s post about Queenie, the Queen of Hearts in Alice in Wonderland, who specializes in shouting, “Off with his head!” Suppose Queenie’s love of execution comes from a childhood tragedy. Her father, Daddy Card, the late King of Hearts, was assassinated, stabbed in the neck, eek! The assassin was never found, but the Chief Constable and Queenie are convinced he or she is still at court. We want the reader to understand Queenie, maybe have some sympathy for her, so we decide to show what happened. There are lots of choices.

One way is a flashback. We want a smooth transition so we plan it ahead of time. Let’s say Daddy Card liked to write lengthy letters to family and friends on pale purple stationery in his distinctive spidery handwriting. In present time, Queenie is in her study when a Nine of Clubs, a servant, brings in her mail, among which is a letter in a pale purple envelope, not the exact tint Daddy Card favored, but close. Hands trembling, she picks up the tiny silver dagger she uses as a letter opener, and thinks, Ten years in a month.


That day she’d been in this room, too, opening replies to her birthday party invitations. She’d issued eighty-nine invitations, and eighty-nine children had accepted. As she was mounding the responses in a triumphant pile, feet had thudded in the corridor outside. She hardly heeded – the servants were always rushing about. Then came a soft knock, her lady-in-waiting’s shy tap, but an instant later the woman opened without permission.

We’re in. Notice that I started with had been and had dispatched, but switched to simple past in the sentence, The servants were always rushing about. That sentence marks the complete shift to the earlier time.

The flashback continues. We see the shaken maid delivering the terrible news. Whatever follows follows: weeping, rushing out of the room, going to Mommy Card, could be anything. Finally we bring Queenie back to the study and start the return transition:

She sat dully at her desk and stared without comprehension at the party replies. Oh, she’d finally remembered, the girl she used to be was going to have a celebration. For the first time, on that sad, long-ago day, she’d collected her hair in a bun at the back of her neck. Then she’d picked up another letter and had slit it open.

The mauve envelope in her hand now had nothing to do with a party. There was no party. She hated parties. Who would be stupid enough to choose this color?

And we’re back. Did you see that I repeated the tense switch on the return? Two devices make the transition smooth: the tense shift and an action that bridges the gap in time, in this case opening the mail.

But if we don’t want to interrupt the story, what are our other choices?

Suppose Queenie always touches her throat before calling for an execution. If Kingie, who thoroughly understands his wife, manages to put his arm around her quickly enough, she relaxes and doesn’t give the order. A newcomer to court can observe this and ask her uncle to explain. In a short bit of dialogue the father’s assassination can be revealed.

If we’re writing in Queenie’s POV, the revelation can come in thoughts, something like, Ten years in a month. I was nicer before the assassin. Then we go back to the action. Five pages later, she might think something else, like, Dr. Two of Spades says I lost my father at a girl’s most formative moment, no matter how he died. What a Two he is! She makes a weighing gesture with her hands. Heart attack – assassination. Heart attack – assassination. Not the same. More action. Later on she can finish the back story by thinking, I probably killed the assassin long ago, but as long as he could still be playing croquet, I’ll keep the executions coming.

If we’re writing from another character’s POV, he can be present for one of Queenie’s execution orders and think about the past in a sentence or two.

Or the reader can do without. Everyone knows Queenie orders people’s heads off. It’s one of the facts of her rule. People avoid playing croquet with her and are terrified when they have to. The history doesn’t have to come to the fore. If she’s an important character, we can show her touching her throat, loving Kingie, seeming relieved when her husband pardons people. She’ll come off as a complex character. Excellent.

I would ask the same questions about a back story as about a flashback, and if I can, I would do without.

But suppose you need to put it in and the back story is the history of this card kingdom. Let’s imagine that Alice has a mission in Wonderland and in order to have a chance she has to understand the place. She can find a tome about it in her parents’ library, and we can put a page of the book right in the story. We can have her stop in the middle to gasp or to get a glass of water, whatever. For suspense, we can have her leave the room for the water and find the book gone when she comes back. She knows part of the story and she has to find out the rest, which moves the back story into the front. She can ask the university historian, and we can include their conversation. If we break up the back story, again we haven’t suspended the forward story for very long. In the first instance, we leave the back story to get the glass of water. In the second, the historian can look at his watch and say he has to teach, and we’re out. The trick, I think, is to plant the seeds for the return from the back story in the way it begins, for example, with an action that the character can return to.

Here are four prompts:

∙ The White Rabbit is hopping ahead of Alice. From his POV write a flashback that explains his urgency. In Lewis Carroll’s story, he and Alice separate and the story follows her. Stick with him and invent what happens.

∙ Write the back story  that explains the history of the card monarchy.

∙ Let’s use a modern weather event, Hurricane Sandy or a tornado or a blizzard, and have Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz show up in it. Provide a back story to explain how she got there.

∙ After an election I always wonder how it feels to be the winner or the loser, but a prompt on the actual election seems too close to home, so let’s imagine one in the republic of Tulipe, where Mistress Prunette of the Globule Party ousted Master Rosto of the Concavities. Each has asked to be alone for a few minutes to reflect on the contest. Write a flashback for each that gives personal meaning to the outcome.

Have fun, and save what you write!

Off with his head… nicely

First off, thanks to all of you who turned out in Pittsburgh! I was delighted to see you!

Now for the post. On July 19, 2012, capng wrote, …my WIP is told from the view of the Queen of Hearts from Alice in Wonderland. She’s pretty evil at the beginning of the book (and conceited, too!), but gets better as the book continues. How do I make readers dislike her but still worry for her? Or is that even possible?

Sure, it’s possible. End of post.

Just kidding. I’m giddy from muddling through Hurricane Sandy. Our little backwater didn’t get the worst of it, only a few hours of no power (and we have a generator). No trees on the house. Reggie (the dog) survived confinement without eating the couch or us. Hope all of you are okay, too.

Yes, it’s possible, and fun; it’s delightful to fool with the emotions of the poor reader.

If the Queen of Hearts is going to improve, then the seeds of her better self already exist. One way to make the reader care is to reveal the tender shoot in her that will grow slowly into a more likable character. For example, suppose Queenie pets her flamingo before using it as a mallet in the croquet game, and she clenches her jaw and looked pained when she hits a hedgehog. The reader glimpses a kind person locked up in there, even as she’s being cruel. Since this is told from her POV, she might wish for a gentler way to play croquet. If only, she can think, the mallet and ball don’t have to be alive. Then, because she isn’t good yet, she can add, But I must have my game. And the fresh air is excellent for my complexion.

When the reader learns that the flamingos and the hedgehogs are plotting against her, he doesn’t entirely want her destroyed. He’s rooting for her to have a chance to reform.

If she’s fun on the page, glorying in her evil, the reader will enjoy being in her company and won’t want anything to remove her from the story. Queenie in the example above is fun, and I hope Bombina, the fairy in my favorite Princess Tale, For Biddle’s Sake, is too, regardless of her fondness for turning people into toads. She’s not precisely evil, since she adores Parsley, my main character, but before Parsley comes along, she’s a fairy criminal. Here’s a sample:

Once, when her footman Stanley failed to open the carriage door quickly enough, Bombina turned his bushy red beard into a purple Fury-Faced Trudy toad. It looked funny, hanging upside down from Stanley’s chin. Bombina laughed, and Parsley would have too if Stanley hadn’t looked so shocked.

Admittedly, the book is lighthearted, which may make my task easier.

However, there’s little humor in Vollys, the dragon in The Two Princesses of Bamarre. She’s evil, but she’s good company, and the reader sympathizes with her. She also loves my main, Aza. So loving someone can help make even an evil character likable.

It’s an advantage to be telling the story from Queenie’s POV, because the reader sees everything through her eyes. Her narrative might go something like this:

I pronounced judgment, “Off with his head.” Diamond Jack’s eyes darted to my dear husband, Kingie. Two guards grabbed Jack’s arms, but didn’t pull him away. We waited for the pardon that would surely come.
Kingie, who liked everything just so, was pulling a loose thread on his doublet. He may not have heard my sentence.
I repeated, louder, “Off with his head.”
“Darling,” Kingie said, holding out the thread and issuing no pardon, “the silk is unraveling. Help me.”
What to do? I felt the blood drain from my face. I didn’t want this, but if I pardoned Jack – I couldn’t! My reputation would be destroyed. “Take him away.” I gestured to the guards, whose faces had paled too. Jack’s lower lip trembled. I looked away and heard them march him off. “Sweetie…” I fumbled in my purse. A shudder ran through me, and I could hardly control my hands. “I have a scissors.”

She’s behaving terribly but she’s suffering, and I think the reader has to empathize. If the story were told from Jack’s POV, she would probably be a lot less sympathetic.

Character worry is a great goad to reader worry. If Queenie is anxious, the reader will likely be too. Suppose Diamond Jack has powerful friends… Queenie is terrified of the consequences of his death, whether he actually dies or not. She’s bewildered about her husband’s failure to come through with a pardon, and she’s unable to break free of her bad queen persona. In every possible thought direction, there’s trouble. The reader paces mentally while she paces physically.

The key is making Queenie someone the reader can inhabit comfortably, can see himself in, even when she behaves badly. If she’s stuck in a position she doesn’t like but can’t figure out how to get free of, the reader thinks, Oh, yeah. I’ve been stubborn about something I didn’t really mean, too.

I just googled “making difficult characters sympathetic.” A link suggests three conditions that will guarantee sympathy: a noble goal; obstacles to its achievement; a great love or passion, which will humanize the character. This is a tad formulaic but interesting. It might work if our character isn’t annoying. Let’s take the sentences above. If Queenie doesn’t seem to like Kingie, we’re going to have a hard time liking her. If Kingie is just her husband, not her dear, if she thinks, Kingie, whose pitiful brain was often distracted by nonsense… instead of Kingie, who liked everything just so, the reader may prefer a cockroach’s company to hers. With thoughts like this, she’d be unsympathetic even while curing cancer against all odds and being sweet to her poodle.

Here are three prompts:

• Queenie inherits a kingdom that’s impoverished by defeat in war. Her glorious goal is to raise her people out of poverty. The obstacle is that the peace treaty calls for costly tribute. Her passion is for music, and she’s an accomplished violinist. Her flaw is that she will not tolerate dissent. Write a scene and make her likable.

• Turn her around in the next scene and make her impossible to like.

• Write “Sleeping Beauty” from the POV of the fairy who wants Sleeping Beauty to prick her finger and die. Make the fairy likable. You can use the three conditions I found online. As you write, you may discover that you have a new story on your hands. Keep going.

Have fun, and save what you write!

Destination unknown

On July 12, 2012, Lizzy wrote, …I had started a short novel a bunch of months back off of an idea that I couldn’t keep in my head any longer. For the first couple days I wrote like a mad women, trying to get down all the ideas flowing through my head. Many pages later I slowed down and finally I stopped. I had come to a ‘dead end.’ I wasn’t out of ideas but the current idea I led off from made me realize something when I came to the ‘dead end,’ I had no idea where the story was leading off to! When I started writing I had a couple of ideas to some events which I wanted to happen but then I realized that I hadn’t really thought of any ‘main problem’ or climax, no real moral, and or no ending. It has been months since I have touched the story and I really want to get back into it. Should I edit up what I have, start anew or continue where I left? Have any advice?

I’ve been listening to Brandon Sanderson’s lectures online that Caitlyn recommended. This will soon be relevant for Lizzy’s question, but as an aside, the lectures are quite interesting although I suspect not complete, which makes sense, since students pay for the real thing. Quite a few are devoted to publishing, especially to publishing fantasy and science fiction. For those of you who are at that point you may find the information very helpful. Mr. Sanderson’s experience is more up to date than mine, since I broke in in 1997, which now seems an age ago. The link again is, www.writeaboutdragons.com.

Back to Lizzy. Mr. Sanderson describes two kinds of writers, those who outline and those who don’t. Those who don’t he calls discoverers, and I count myself in that category. We “discover” our stories as we write. The trouble is, we can get lost. We wander around and start over and over and over. (Outliners have problems of their own, according to Mr. Sanderson.)

Before I start writing a book itself I write notes, which is the closest I come to outlining, and the distance is still vast. Usually by the time I think I have a solid idea and often a vague notion of the end, a beginning comes to me and I plunge in. But because I haven’t thought the whole thing through I make disastrous mistakes. I call it getting stupid. I’ve mentioned here that I wrote about 140 pages of the new mystery while forgetting to include any suspects and then about 260 pages of the same mystery. This time there were plenty of suspects but the mystery couldn’t be solved. Sigh. I went back to the beginning.

In my mistakes, however, I generally find something that leads me in the right direction that takes me finally through to the end. It’s not efficient. Obviously! I’m always hoping that the next book will run more smoothly.

And some have. A simple story shape is easiest for me. I don’t mean a simple story, just the shape. If I can see the arc I can throw in complications galore and still see my way through. My historical novel Dave at Night has such a shape. Dave, an orphan, needs a home. Everything that happens (mostly) has bearing on that essential problem. In Ever Kezi is on a quest to find her future – pretty straightforward. Princess Sonora and the Long Sleep is based on “Sleeping Beauty.” What could be simpler? It was a blast to write.

So for Lizzy and others with our problem, I suggest you think about your story shape. Even the books I had trouble with, like The Two Princess of Bamarre, for example, became possible once I found my story shape, in this case a quest for the cure to the Gray Death in time to save Addie’s sister, Meryl.

Since you haven’t looked at your manuscript in months, you might start by reading through it. If you can resist jumping in, just think about what you have. Write notes. Ask yourself questions that will help you continue. Here are some question suggestions:

What’s the main character’s main problem? You may not know, so other questions follow. What are all her problems? Which seems the most significant, the one that can sustain a lot of spin-off problems, that suggests more events in your story?

Who is your main? If you don’t know, who interests you the most? For whom do you feel the most sympathy, care about the most? Whose company do you enjoy the most? (That doesn’t have to be your main, but most often it will be.)

If what you have seems like a hopeless mess, stop calling your story names! But is there something, some incident, bit of dialogue, thought monologue, that pleases you? Where might it lead? Is that your story?

What does your main want? What, among your pages, have you thrown up as obstacles to the achievement of her desire? What else can you come up with?

What would finally solve the problem, happily or tragically? What might three alternative endings be? Think of two more after that. Which satisfies you the most?

Imagine an epilogue (which you may not need when you get there). Who would be there? What would the mood be?

An organized person, reading this post, would likely roll his eyes and say, Why didn’t you ask yourself all these questions and answer them before you started?

Because discoverers don’t work that way. We throw out lots of bait and let our stories find us.

The answer to the questions Lizzy ended with may be obvious by the time you finish answering mine. If not, I have an opinion. If it’s possible to just keep going and not start over, I think that’s best, because it will get you quickest to the end and the pleasure of revising, since most discoverers love to revise. It’s our great strength – if we don’t get so obsessed that we can never release our story.

But if your fingers feel paralyzed and your brain turns to mush whenever you try to continue (this happens to me), then probably you need to start over. It’s what I do when I must.

Here are two prompts:

∙ An outliner and a discoverer meet at a party. They hit it off, find that they both love the same books and both are writing a post-apocalyptic fantasy. In a burst of mad enthusiasm they decide to collaborate, but when they meet to discuss what they want to do, everything starts to fall apart. Write the scene. Keep going for a story of friendship or love or hatred.

∙ Start with a chase. Irena is fleeing a creature with the body of a horse, the head of a snake, and the spiked spine of certain dinosaurs. Meanwhile, her boyfriend Pasten is in a mud wrestling contest with the champion from their rival village, who does not fight fair. And her sister is at home, surrounded by three men from the rival village. Sew all this together into a coherent story, asking yourself the questions I ask above.

Have fun, and save what you write!

Writers’ range

So I was at a writers’ conference this past weekend and I mentioned the blog to Brianne Johnson, an agent at the respected Writers House, and told her the question that comes in fairly regularly here, about how teens can get published. She said she’d be happy to look at manuscripts from teens, and I leaped six inches into the air.

If you decide to submit to Brianne, send her a cover letter describing the book and send the first 25 pages in a Microsoft Word document, as an attachment.  Brianne prefers to receive submissions via e-mail, at bjohnson@writershouse.com. In your e-mail, say you got her name from my blog. Your writing sample should be double-spaced in 12-point type and the typeface should be easy to read. Your name, address, phone number, and email address should appear on the left above the title. Your last name and the title of the book should be in the upper left hand corner of every page that follows, like this: Levine/Ella Enchanted. This is in case a page gets separated from the rest.

After you send it, be patient, patient, patient. And good luck!

And here are some questions for everybody. Are you writing poetry? Would you like some posts on the subject? Do you have questions? I’m not as experienced a poet as I am a fiction writer for kids, but I have been published, and I love to read and write poetry. Right now I’m reading a fascinating book of essays about poetry called Structure and Surprise, Engaging Poetic Turns, edited by Michael Theune, on a pretty advanced level, high school and above, I’d say. Anyway, I’d welcome poetry questions. I probably won’t have definitive answers, but we can explore together.

Now for the regular post. On June 1, 2012, Michelle wrote, I’m homeschooled, and recently in one of my school books I studied novels/novelists. The book talked about ‘range’: an author’s limits and experiences, and his or her ability to work with them. They used Jane Austen as an example, saying that even though the Napoleonic Wars took place in her time, she chose not to write about them because wars were outside her range. Now, after pouring my heart into a fantasy series for over three years – a series that does include numerous battles – I’m wondering if I tried writing way outside my range. I know nothing about fighting other than what movies and the many books I read tell me. Do you think I was wrong to write outside my range? Can books like that still be successful?

The old adage is, Write what you know. If we all followed it, there would be no fantasy genre, no sci fi, no horror, no paranormal, no historical fiction earlier than its author’s childhood. So, no, I don’t think you were wrong.

However, if the books you’ve read and the movies you’ve seen are entirely fictional, you might want to supplement that with some nonfiction and documentaries and see if the wider reading changes or confirms what you’ve written. You may find first-person accounts particularly helpful, even if you’re writing medieval fantasy and the weapons are swords and pikes, or if it’s a space drama and the soldiers fire ray guns and wield energy shields. You’ll learn how it feels to be in the middle of a battle, what the after effects are, what the relationships are in the unit, and more. Surprises will come along that you’ll use.

If any of you are writing realistic fiction, readers who are familiar with the weapons you include, for example, will notice if you get a detail wrong. If you’re writing historical fiction, to take another example, readers will hope to learn about the period, and it would be a shame to let them down.

When I write fantasy often I avoid elements that are too closely tied to our world. I made an important dog character in A Tale of Two Castles be a Lepai mountain dog, a breed that doesn’t exist outside my book. If I’d made him a poodle, that would have brought up associations with contemporary life. On the other hand, when I made Kezi in Ever be a gifted weaver, I learned about weaving. It didn’t seem to me that a made-up process would have been good enough.

The book you cite said that Jane Austen chose not to write about the Napoleonic Wars as outside her “range.” I suspect she knew a lot about the subject, which must have been much in the news and much discussed. “Range” may merely mean the kind of writing that suited her temperamentally. Narrow domestic concerns – marriage, family, fortune, local characters – were what interested her. You, Michelle and many others on the blog, unlike Jane Austen, may be more into the broad canvas of war, at least at this point in your writing.

Let’s consider the adage. It’s been around for a long time and, I suspect, must have some truth. What we all know most fundamentally is ourselves, our emotions, thoughts, physical sensations. We know what it’s like to feel well and to have a fever. We know our environment, the late afternoon sun shining slantwise on the street outside our house, the smell of a parent’s closet, the cell phone ring tone, and a zillion other details. Next level of distance, we know friends, family, pets pretty intimately. After that it gets more and more remote.

If you bring what you know well into your fiction, if you use a losing game on the soccer field last week in a battle between your heroine’s battalion and the invading aliens from the seventh planet circling a distant star, you’ll still be writing (partially at least) from what you know.

Complete knowledge is often impossible. Yesterday I shopped for groceries and asked a young woman if the store had any more of the ice cream my husband loves. When she came back with a case, she called me Sweetie. I’m about forty years older than she is! Where did that Sweetie come from? I didn’t mind. It was affectionate, so maybe it came from an excess of benevolence. Or maybe from a cheeky testing of the boundaries. I can guess, but I can’t know. Still, I see nothing wrong with putting her in a story and giving her a motive. I can call her Della Louise and make her live with an adored grandmother, or a hated one. I can turn her into a mermaid who’s living among humans and is really two hundred years old, so I’m a youngster to her. Not knowing, being outside my range, is a gateway to opportunity! If Della Louise comes across as real on the page, readers will slip inside her as easily as she slips into her scaly tail at midnight every night.

Here are three prompts:

∙ Your main character is lost in a forest filled with bears. Write what happens, and make sure the bears are part of the story. If you know a lot about bears and not much about aardvarks, make the forest full of aardvarks. Do no research! If you like, make the story fantasy.

∙ Read about bears or aardvarks. Write again, either a new scene or a revision, using your research. Compare. (I’m not thinking one will necessarily be better.)

∙ Write about an inventor, inventing an anti-gravity machine.

∙ Your main character parachutes into a battle in progress. Write what happens. Again, this can be fantasy.

Have fun, and save what you write!