Just words

This post is going to be about words, starting with Maddie’s question on November 11, 2010: I have a little spell-checker on my computer. It also tells me the average reading level of the stuff that I’m writing, and it’s not huge. Is it always necessary to add in bigger words, or is it ok to not use huge words as long as your plot is suitably twisted? (i.e., I don’t want to be the next Dr. Seuss, although I do love his stuff… :D)

My advice is to ignore the reading level on your spell checker, because it doesn’t tell you much that’s meaningful. Word length and reading level based on word length and average number of words in each sentence may determine the age of the child who can read a particular book, but they have nothing to do with the age of the child who should read it. Animal Farm (middle school and up) by George Orwell is a perfect example. I read it when I was in third or fourth grade and thought it an interesting story about animals. The allegory flew over my head until my older sister let me in on the secret.

In the case of Animal Farm, it’s not a matter of plot twists either. The story is straightforward, no subplots that I remember; the book is only 128 pages long. What’s sophisticated is the meaning.

Another example is What Jamie Saw by Carolyn Coman, which is a miracle of a book. It’s told from the POV of a nine-year-old boy. Very simple story, also no plot complications that I recall, only 126 pages long, yet it’s a young adult book, definitely not for actual nine-year-olds. In this case, the reason is the subject, which is child abuse.

I like short words (and long and medium-size ones). Short words have power. And so do short sentences. They’re punchy. Sometimes we can get a good rhythm going with short sentences – and sometimes with long.

POV is another determinant of the sort of vocabulary that best suits a story. In What Jamie Saw, the author was limited to words that Jamie would know, and he wasn’t a child vocabulary prodigy. If you’re telling your story from the POV of a child or someone without much education, you’re stuck with a limited vocabulary. But even if your POV character is erudite, she may prefer not to show off her erudition. She may like to be simple and clear, even when she’s in a complicated situation or dealing with a difficult subject, like chaos theory. The sesquipedalian word may come to her only when it’s the sole way to express an idea.

When you’re using a third-person narrator, it’s up to you and whatever serves your story.

When I’m reading I like to come upon a few words to look up, but I don’t want to need my dictionary three times in every paragraph. When I write I don’t dumb down my vocabulary for kids. If they need to go to the dictionary more often than I enjoy as a reader, that’s okay. They’re kids, and their vocabularies need building. On the other hand, I don’t want to write an impenetrable book. Sometimes I help by making a meaning clear through context.

A convoluted plot is unconnected to word choice. You can tell a complex story using simple language or six-syllable vocabulary. I don’t think most third graders will be able to follow a tale that weaves together six subplots, for example. Adults will get lost too in a Byzantine plot. I will, and I’ll give up unless I’m completely in love with some element of the story.

Moving along to a related topic, Mysterygirl, Alexandra, April, and Marissa, all posted comments about words that were banned in school. Some teachers called these “jail” words, mostly simple words. Mysterygirl gave examples: good, bad, said, sad, mad, happy, grumpy, big, small, medium, love, calm. One of April’s teachers hated nice.

I sympathize with these teachers, who want to develop their students’ vocabularies. If this is what your teacher is demanding, I suggest going along in your school work. I’d say go your teachers one better. Wow them. For example, instead of grumpy, give them irascible, peevish, querulous, vinegarish. Use your thesaurus. It will help all your writing. For the heck of it, try for words your teachers will have to look up – unless they have no sense of humor.

After you blow your teacher away with your fab vocab, you might ask for an exemption from her rule just for you, unless everyone in your class will hate you. But if you don’t get the exemption, tough it out.

And in the stories you’re not writing for school, forget about jail words and words that are allowed to run free. The dictionary is your pasture. Graze at will on the weeds along with the grass and the flowers. Be a free-range writer.

Out of curiosity I just did a word search on the word nice in one of my Princess Tales, Cinderellis and the Glass Hill. In that book I used nice eleven times, which I was aware of and did deliberately. The main characters in this book are simple people, even though one of them is a princess. Nice appears in the thoughts of the two mains. It’s what they’re both looking for. I used pleasant once, amiable not at all. Amiable wouldn’t have fit the tone I’d set.

Having said that, I am alert to word repetition when I write and when I edit. If I think I’m overusing a word, I write it in a list above my story, and when I’m done, I search for the word. If it is showing up too much, I hunt for synonyms to substitute. My editor is amazing at picking up word repetition too. She catches the ones I miss.

Obviously there are words we have to use again and again. Prepositions are unavoidable, for example, and we can’t do without the appearing a million times.

Marissa’s teacher didn’t let her students use the word said. Again, if you have to listen to your teacher, you have to. But said is a special case, and it should be used repeatedly. I devote an entire chapter to said in Writing Magic. In brief, said (and ask, too) disappear. We see who’s speaking and move on. Substitute words, like exclaim, question, state, just draw attention to themselves and away from the action and what’s being said. What’s more, exclaim and question and query are unnecessary because the punctuation tells us everything. Words like vocalize and express are simply awful, in my opinion.

Sometimes repetition sets up a rhythm that’s pleasing, and sometimes you want to break the rhythm. Sometimes you’re not sure and just have to pick, and sometimes both choices are equal. Aaa! Writing is hard!

Here’s a prompt:

I learned to read on the Dick and Jane books, which were heavy on repetition and low on excitement, but they did the job for me. Below are four sentences from one of the books. I don’t know why each sentence gets its own line within a single quotation:

Father said, “Down, Spot.
Run away, Spot.
You can not go.
You can not go in the car.”

There’s drama here. I wouldn’t want anybody’s father to tell the family dog to run away. Your challenge is to rewrite the dialogue at least three ways, fooling around with vocabulary. Father’s speech can go on for four pages. He can be a vampire if you like or whatever else. Spot can be a talking dog or a werewolf.

If you want to, turn the situation into a story, a novel, a seven-book series.

Have fun, and save what you write!

The End. Period.

On November 6, 2010, Marissa wrote, I have a question about endings… I decide if I like a book mostly based on how it ends and how it leaves me feeling, but I can never get that sense of closure in my stories.

Often when I approach the end of a book I’m writing, I want to have a bomb land on everybody. Problem solved.

But not satisfying.

A great story for satisfaction, in my opinion, is an anecdote in my friend Joan Abelove’s young adult novel, Go and Come Back (middle school and up). Joan was an anthropologist in the Peruvian jungle, and her book, which is told from the POV of a young tribal woman, is based on her experiences. Every incident in the book is essentially true.

In this one, Margarita, one of the two anthropologists is sick late one night. The narrator, Alicia, discovers this by hearing voices from their house. She asks what’s wrong and is told by Joanna, the healthy one, that Margarita has been vomiting for hours and nothing in their first aid kit has helped. Alicia asks Joanna if she has sent for Papaisi. Joanna snaps that she hasn’t, so Alicia gets him. He leads the sick woman out to the porch. By then everyone in the village has gathered to watch. Papaisi has his patient lie down. First he blows smoke from his pipe across her stomach. Then he seems to bite something off and immediately throws up over the side of the porch. As soon as he does, everyone in the village sighs with relief. Margarita sits up perfectly fine, cured.

Joanna gives Papaisi a pack of cigarettes to show her gratitude (this was the early 1970’s when smoking was much more prevalent). He accepts but then says that what he really would like is four aspirin.

End of incident. It’s just right. We have high stakes: the sick woman, the whole village as witnesses, the bizarre treatment from a Western perspective, the recovery. We start to wonder what else smoke blown across a belly will cure. Then, boom!, the request for a gift that’s almost a symbol of modern medicine.

That’s the ending with a twist. O. Henry’s “The Gift of the Magi” is a well-known twist story.

Another pleasing shape comes in the circular story. I wrote about this kind in my blog post of July 9th, 2009. A circular tale ends where it began. The Lord of the Rings, for example, starts in the calm, peaceful Shire and ends there, but Frodo will never be the same. Two of my books are circular: The Wish and Fairy Dust and the Quest for the Egg. Of course, a circular ending may not be any easier to achieve than a more linear one. We still have to figure out how to return to that point of origin.

Often the key to the ending lies in the story problem. In The Lord of the Rings again, the issue is danger to Middle Earth. By returning to the Shire, Tolkien demonstrates that order has been restored.

In Ella Enchanted, which isn’t circular, the problem is the curse of obedience, and the ending has to resolve it. Either Ella will be cursed for the rest of her life or she’ll escape for the rest of her life. In my Dave at Night, as another example, the problem is finding a home. Dave lives at an orphanage, which doesn’t feel like one. By the end he has to be where he believes he should be – or know that he will be rootless at least until he grows up.

Figuring out your ending may take some thinking about the problem at the heart of your story. We can get too involved in the showing and the telling to ponder what it’s all about. I had that difficulty with Dave at Night and figured it out at a book signing for Ella Enchanted. Nobody came, and I sat there at a little desk in the book store and thought about Dave. By the time I gave up hoping for customers, I had my ending worked out.

Once you know the problem, reaching the solution may still be hard. In the case of Ella, I couldn’t work out how she could break the curse. At first I thought she could do it through rebellion against the tyranny of Hattie, but that wasn’t strong enough. You’d think it would have been clear right away that her love for Char was the crux of it, but I took a long time to get there.

Delaying the solution can keep a story going through a series of books. If Tolkien had gotten the ring to Mordor in The Fellowship of the Ring, that would have been it.

Sometimes I know my ending from the beginning, and I write toward it, but provisionally, knowing that my conception may change. Or, more often, I foresee the ending in a general way, but no specifics. In The Wish, for example, I knew that Wilma’s wish had to end, and the reader understands this too by the middle of the book, but I wasn’t sure what shape Wilma would be in after it ended. This isn’t bad, just having a general notion. Security and insecurity mixed together are good for writing, I think.

When I follow a traditional fairy tale, I have the fairy tale ending glimmering ahead of me. What I have to figure out is how to get there. Marissa, and others who have trouble with endings, you might try expanding a common story, which doesn’t have to be a fairy tale. Could be a myth, a religious story, a family anecdote that has a satisfying shape and a settled ending. Consider this a prompt.

In Go and Come Back, Joan uses the simplest of devices to end the book. The anthropologists are in the village for a year, and the entire story revolves around their time there. When the year ends so does the book. There is no bang, but no whimper either. Much has happened, and Alicia, the narrator, has changed. What makes the reader really happy, though, is that she’s left a deep impression on the visitors. They’ll never be the same.

Any time period will work for this technique – last year of high school, a summer, an internship, whatever. Naturally, you need to create action during the time you’ve allotted yourself, and characters have to evolve, but you don’t have to invent a climax of high drama for the reader to feel closure.

I’ve used an epilogue in several books to tie things up and make the whole feel complete. As a child I liked epilogues, because I wanted to know what became of this character and that. If I loved the book, an epilogue never told enough. I wanted to follow the characters into the sunset and watch their happy futures unfold – which would have been boring.

But prompts aren’t boring. Here’s one. You may know the story, “The Lady and the Tiger.” If you don’t, it’s basically this: A princess, whose nature is jealous, falls in love with a man below her station. The king finds out and arranges a punishment for him. The man is thrown into an arena with two doors. Behind one is a beautiful maiden and behind the other a tiger. If he picks the maiden door, he lives, but he has to marry her. If he chooses the tiger door, he gets eaten. In the arena he looks to the princess, who knows what’s behind each door, for a signal. She has to decide whether to endure his marriage to someone else or condemn him to death. The story has no ending; the reader is asked to decide what the princess will do. So the prompt is to write the ending.

Have fun, and save what you write!

Villains galore

After my post of October 27, 2010, Jenna Royal wrote, Is it important to make your villains likable? It is common that in a good book I will both enjoy a villain’s strategy and understand and relate to their desires. I never really thought about making my villains likable, though. They were just the bad guys, nothing more. Would it add more diversity to my writing to make my villains a little more human and easier to sympathize with?

And Silver the Wanderer wrote, I also realize I might have to do some work on my villain, for I fear his character is a tad underdeveloped. However, he doesn’t play a huge role in my book. He’s the instigator of events, but we don’t actually see him until the end of the book. From hearing about him, we know that he is smart, devious, and a traitor. He is also no coward. He might be evil, or he might just have some messed-up moral standards. But sometimes I wonder if his motives are enough to make his wrongdoings believable. He can’t just be evil for the sake of being evil. Does anyone have ideas on how to craft a believable villain?
And Mya wrote, I find balancing a villain’s ‘evilness’ rather hard sometimes. More frequently though, it’s the opposite. I make the villains too nice, and can’t help but forgive, or let them be humbled at the end. Are there ways I can be more awful to them? =)

There is no one way villains should be. The villain – or if not the villain, strictly speaking, certainly the antagonist – doesn’t even have to be a character; it can be a disease (as in my Two Princesses of Bamarre) or weather or a cosmological force. In Norse mythology, as I understand it from my ancient Mythology, Timeless Tales of Gods and Heroes, by Edith Hamilton, evil is destined to win eventually – not a particular embodiment of evil, like Loki, but evil itself.

The antagonist can even be a belief. I once worked with a man who believed himself unlucky, although I didn’t see it; he had a good job, a fine mind, a sense of humor, a girlfriend. Whenever anything bad happened to him, he blamed it on his rotten luck. If he were a main character, there would be no human adversary, only an idea. Political theories can play the part of the villain. In Ayn Rand’s novels the underlying evil is Communism.

When your villain is a character, human or otherwise, it’s okay to make him – or her or it – entirely bad. The reader doesn’t have to like him in the slightest. Sometimes he operates in the background of the story, as in Silver the Wanderer’s example. The narrator can speculate about him from his actions, but the reader doesn’t encounter him directly. Moriarty in the Sherlock Holmes series is this kind of villain. He never becomes a fleshed-out character like Holmes or Watson, and the reader certainly neither likes him nor sympathizes with him.

When the reader does come face to face with a villain, however, he should be interesting, not necessarily likable or sympathetic. In my Dave at Night, the main villain is the superintendent of the orphanage where Dave lives. He is simply a terrible man. His name is Mr. Bloom, but the orphans call him Mr. Doom. Here are snippets from his monologue before he beats Dave up:

“Mrs. Bloom and I love the finer things in life, the theater, concerts…. Mrs. Bloom’s little hobby is following the doings of high society…. So one might wonder at my choice of vocation. I admit it’s a sacrifice, but someone has to do the dirty work. Someone has to take in children like you…. Otherwise you’d have nowhere to go. However, it’s like putting a rattlesnake to your bosom.”

He’s awful, but he has a personality, and the reader hates him even more for knowing him. At the end when he’s fired, the reader feels no guilt for rejoicing at his downfall. (I haven’t given very much away; there’s a lot more to the resolution of the book.) Happiness at the demise of an all-out villain is fun. In movie theaters we cheer.

Of course, in order for Mr. Bloom to be understood as evil, Dave has to be sympathetic. If he’s a young arsonist who’s just burned down an old age home, Mr. Bloom’s sacrifice may seem real.

Although it’s fine to create villains who are simply evil, diversifying is always good. Try your hand at a sympathetic villain. Make her more than likable; make her lovable. Maybe she takes such delight in her dastardly deeds that we can’t help but chortle along. Maybe he’s his own worst enemy, and everyone else’s, but his remorse makes us forgive him again and again.

Believability may depend on genre. In a superhero story, for example, the reader checks her disbelief when she opens the book. If the hero can change from weak and mild-mannered to almost invincible just by changing his outfit in a phone booth, the villain doesn’t have to have much depth or motivation either. This kind of hero is born good and the bad guy is born bad. In some fantasies, evil needs no explanation either. In some thrillers too. As Kirk Douglas says chillingly in the wonderful old movie The List of Adrian Messenger, “Evil is.”

Complexity makes any character more believable, and I’m all for it. One way to craft a complex villain is through surprises. Your villain Monique is unlikely to be the main character, so you probably won’t have her thoughts to make her layered, but you do have all the other tools of character creation. If any of the story takes place at her house, the reader can discover that she collects Hummel figurines. If you want her to be sympathetic, she can bake cookies – not poisoned – for a homeless shelter. She can feed oatmeal cookie dough to her cocker spaniel.

In dialogue, Monique can be witty. She may be an American history buff or love puns. When your hero says something that puts him at a disadvantage she can astonish the reader by letting it slide – although she may use the information later.

You can reveal her diary in which she writes only about her visits to the homeless shelter and nothing about her cruel impulses. Or maybe she alludes to them in a vague way, like, “Mother scolded me today. I have no idea what she was going on about, but she was very angry.”

Even description can make her more complicated – dark eye makeup with pink lipstick. Pudgy face, muscular body. Terrible posture. An unexplained bandage on her arm.

If you decide to make Monique sympathetic, which usually involves complexity, there is the danger that the reader won’t understand when she acts on her wickedness. He may think, “I identify with Monique, and I like her, I don’t believe she’d behave so despicably.” The solution is to introduce her badness as soon as the reader meets her. Show her being awful, or have a character the reader trusts talk about some vileness she’s committed. Establish right from the start that she isn’t good.

Mya, I tend to let my villains off the hook too. Even when Mr. Bloom gets fired, the information is conveyed in a single sentence in narration. I don’t show him coming before the orphanage board and being publicly disgraced. I don’t say what follows, whether Mrs. Bloom has to give up her concert and theater subscriptions or if she divorces him and he winds up sweeping a factory floor for a living. I’m not sure it matters. At this point the story is over and what happens to Mr. Bloom is an afterthought.

However, if you want to be tougher, try it just as an exercise. Imagine five ways your baddie can be punished. Imagine the scenes and write them down. What do you think? If you decide that one of the grimmer endings is better, use it. (This is a prompt for everyone.)

Villains can be more fun to write than other characters. They can be over the top, think the unthinkable, do the unmentionable. So I hope you go all out with these prompts:

∙ The scene is a social event, could be a child’s birthday party, a charity benefit, the annual fairy ball. The villain Sammy (male or female), one of the guests, makes trouble repeatedly in subtle ways. Show him or her in action.

∙ Estelle and Joe have been assigned a homework project together in magic school, and they hate each other. Each plans to make the other look bad. They meet at Joe’s house to work on the project. As the omniscient narrator, show how it goes, dipping freely into the thoughts of each one. They should connive differently. Both are villains, but they’re differently bad. For extra credit, make us like one and hate the other, although both are up to no good, and both are fundamentally flawed.

Have fun, and save what you write!

Making Misery

On October 19, 2010, Mysterygirl123 wrote, I’ve started to love and protect my character so, so, so much, but I know something (else) bad needs to happen for the story to work. How do I get over that?

We create a lovable main character – let’s call him Sammy – so our readers will love him, and then we fall in love, too. The love we bring into being is a kind of self-love, not only for us but also for the reader, who lives inside that character. When I even think about making something bad happen to my main, I don’t want to do it, although I know I have to. When I’m reading a novel by someone else and a terrible event occurs, sometimes I have to close the book for a few minutes, or I may go forward very slowly.

Many years ago I read and adored a book for adults called Happy All the Time. As I recall, the author, Laurie Colwin, managed to write an amiable novel, catastrophe-free, that was riveting. So here’s a prompt, right at the beginning of the post: Write a short story, an interesting one, that’s upbeat from start to finish. There has to be conflict, because I don’t think you can have a story without conflict, but make it small; keep the stakes low. Picture books for very young children achieve this regularly, because their audience isn’t ready for Sturm and Drang. But your story needn’t be a picture book. If you try the prompt, I think it will be hard, but it’s just an exercise, so how the story turns out doesn’t matter.

Generally, the size of the bad events you subject Sammy to depends on the genre you’re working in. If you’re writing romantic comedy, the problem may be rejection by the love interest. His life in other respects can be fine. One might even want to tell him to Get Over It, but in this kind of story the scale is just right. In a middle-grade contemporary novel, there may be a bunch of problems – not being popular, flunking social studies, arguing with a younger sister – not serious, but serious in this world.

However, the heroine of a thriller would howl with laughter if she heard that Sammy was worried about popularity. In Jill’s story from last week she just lost her whole family in a civil war!

I hesitate to read a tragic book or a horror story. I’m a wimp. I’ve never read anything by Stephen King, for example, although millions can’t get enough of his books. But I’d have an easier time writing horror than reading it, and the reason is that when I write I have control. I may squirm but I recover. Hmm, should I make Sammy’s best friend die by poison, or should someone push her out a window? At this point I may pause in my typing to cackle gleefully. Whether I choose poison or defenestration should have nothing to do with which is an easier death or which will cause Sammy less pain. The decision should depend on what the plot consequences will be for each option and which is likely to better serve the story.

There are ways to comfort yourself, though. You can tell yourself that Sammy is going to prove himself through his suffering. He’ll learn from it and be better prepared for whatever comes next. You can point out that if nothing bad ever befalls him he’ll wind up a shallow person.

I read an article along these lines last week in The New York Times health and science section. Research was done on the happiness and satisfaction levels of people who’d survived a few terrible situations or many or none at all. The finding as I understood it was that the people who’d gone through a few serious difficulties were the happiest, the most satisfied, the most at peace. The ones who’d undergone the most misery and those who’d endured the least were the unhappiest. The theory was that people who’d been relentlessly traumatized became exhausted and lost hope. I don’t remember why the people who’d endured nothing were dissatisfied, but I do remember why those in the middle group were in such good shape. They’d been tested and discovered they could cope; they’d found out whom they could count on and strategies they could use to pull themselves through – valuable lessons for them and for Sammy, too. Your characters need the trouble you send them, but don’t overdo, because you don’t want to wear them or the reader out.

You may be writing a tragedy. If so, there will be no strengthening or happy ending for Sammy. But readers who like tragedy, who enjoy a good cry, will thank you. And secondary characters may be strengthened.

Writing Magic has a chapter on this topic called “Suffer!”, which got the entire book banned from a middle school district in Illinois. Here’s the paragraph that caused the trouble:

“Intensify your brutality. Make sure that we, your readers, know exactly how much your hero is suffering. Plunge us into his mind and heart. Tell us what Robin Hood is thinking and feeling when dire things are happening – and even when dire things aren’t happening. When we read the hero’s thoughts and feelings we are lifted out of ourselves and plunked down inside his skin. We breathe with him. We sigh with him. We see through his eyes, hear through his ears, think his thoughts, feel his emotions. We are in the story, exactly where you want us to be. No way we’re going to stop reading then.”

The banning came not long after the shooting at Virginia Tech University that killed thirty-two people. The Illinois school district administration worried that I was inciting children to violent behavior, not merely to – possibly – violent writing. There may be ill effects from violence in books and movies and on television – I’m not an authority – but I’m pretty sure that writing about writing powerful stories never hurt anyone and that bland writing never prevented carnage.

Mystery Girl123’s question came up on my list today, so soon after the shooting in Tucson, a sad time but an opportune one for this topic. Why is it hard to write a good story without suffering, humorous suffering or serious suffering? Why do we seek out entertainment in which people die, in cop shows or medical shows or dramas or even in comedy? I’m not sure, but maybe because we’re preparing for the worst that life can throw at us. When we make Sammy suffer we’re helping our readers, which should stiffen us to do it. We may hurt him, but we’re helping them.

In addition to feeling sad over the recent events, I’ve thought about them fictionally. What world could I put what happened in? How could I reimagine it? Who would my heroine be? Could she at least save the nine-year-old girl who was there?

We’re lucky to be writers and to come to grips with these elemental subjects. Maybe I’m being grandiose, but I believe we work with the nightmares of the world and shape them, even make them beautiful, so that we all become stronger and grow in understanding of – eek, a cliche! – the human condition.

So the prompt is to use what happened in Tucson or any other real-life tragedy in a new story. You can pick a news event or a personal one that hardly anyone knows about. The bad thing that happens to your main character is handed to you by the event you choose. You can soften it a little to make it bearable or to serve the story. Don’t feel you have to stick to the facts. Your characters can be elves or jinns or barnyard animals. You’re looking for the essence. Shape your story so that it reaches an ending that pleases you, not necessarily a happy ending but a satisfying one. If the writing makes you sad, that’s okay.

Still, have fun and save what you write!

Book of the living dead!

On October 17, 2010, Jill wrote, I have just decided to go ahead and ask my complicated question that has been bugging me for a very long time now.
I am writing a story about revenge. This girl is getting revenge for her family. Her whole family was killed during a civil war in her kingdom (her family was in power, and she was the princess). Everyone except her brother was killed so she and her brother are working together for revenge, actually.
….How can I make the reader truly mourn for the girl’s family with her? I definitely want them killed off in the beginning. I have fallen in love with her family during all my planning and the fact is that I based them on my own loved ones (living and deceased), so I know I am mourning for them but how can I make sure the reader at least feels for the main character and doesn’t just think she is a drama queen who needs to get over the fact she isn’t in power anymore?

This is a specific question from a particular story, but there’s a more general question about making a reader feel sad about a fictional death.

I don’t know the ins and outs of this story, but let’s suppose the girl’s mother, father, grandparents, and two older sisters were killed, and let’s assume the girl (I’ll call her Octavia) was old enough when they were killed to have known them and to have a store of memories. We want to commemorate all the dead and make sure Octavia is sympathetic.

Suppose the girl’s birthday comes around, her first birthday without her family. Let’s say her present circumstances are bleak. She’s alone or with her brother, who is so unhappy he’s forgotten what day it is, and she remembers the last year’s celebration. This can be from her first-person POV, or it can be in third person. At the party the year before, her grandfather recited a poem for her, and she remembers the words and her grandfather’s rumbling voice as he said the words. A dish was served that she hated, and her grandmother helped her get away with not eating it. One older sister, who used to tease her about her wild hair, gave her silver barrette and spent an hour showing her how to roll her hair on top of her head.

The reminiscences don’t have to be all good. Octavia’s mother might have scolded her for not thanking someone properly for a gift. Now Octavia misses having someone who cares enough to scold, or she wishes she hadn’t snapped back at her mother. It torments her that their final words were sharp.

What I just suggested combines the qualities of the members of Octavia’s family and her perspective on them. If the mother had beaten Octavia with a belt or stopped talking to her for months at a time, Octavia might still grieve, but her feelings would be more complex. If Octavia were the selfish drama queen Jill is worrying about, her thoughts would all revolve around herself; she wouldn’t be capable of bringing the departed to life.

You can and probably should recall the beloved dead frequently. Doing so will keep them alive in the reader’s mind and will make Olympia more sympathetic too. There are lots of ways to pull this off. You don’t have to stage a birthday to make it happen. Olympia meets a possible ally and her sister’s voice in her mind sizes him up. She mentally debates a course of action and internally asks her father for guidance. In an argument with her brother she calls him by her mother’s pet name for him. Other people can remind her of her dead. She can see someone from a distance who has the same build as her grandfather and for a moment she thinks the killing didn’t happen. She can even think that the people she lost are so much with her that she’d like to get away from them occasionally. I don’t think that thought will make her unsympathetic.

Of course you don’t want to slow down an action scene with long memories. These are just touches, a little here, a little there.

If Octavia isn’t introspective or if she’s traumatized, the writer’s job is harder. Her feelings are suppressed. She may be sad without understanding why, or she’s always tired. When her birthday comes she may push aside the memories because a year has passed since the deaths and she thinks she should be over them. You may need a device to reveal the people you want her to mourn and the depth of her feelings. Make her find a box of letters that the reader can read. Or have someone else talk about the family. And think of other devices.

There may be after-effects of the killings that you can dramatize, ones that aren’t as personal. The country’s new rulers are despotic. The old queen, Octavia’s mother, wouldn’t have tolerated the corruption. The old king, Octavia’s father, strengthened the parliament, but the new king has dissolved it. Beggars’ Day, which Octavia’s grandmother initiated, is no longer observed, and the poor are rounded up and imprisoned.

Here are a couple of fanciful ideas:

• The dead can return as ghosts that only Octavia can see and hear or that everyone can. They’re not forgotten because they’re present. They can urge her on to revenge, as the ghost of Hamlet’s father does, or argue against it or disagree among themselves.

• This society can be ancestor worshipers. Octavia can light candles nightly at their shrines and pray to them.

Back to the worry about Octavia being a drama queen who’s sulking because she isn’t a princess anymore – this may be Octavia’s fear, that she isn’t really grieving for the people she loved, that she’s actually moping over a loss of status. If so, you can have her think this in writing, like, I missed being wealthy and having everyone notice when I entered a room and people talking if I wore my orange gown rather than my blue one. It was shameful to care about these things, and sometimes I wondered if I regretted the objects the war took away more than I regretted the people I lost. These thoughts don’t make her less sympathetic, in my opinion. Self-doubt is touchingly human, and the reader is likely to feel more for Octavia and know that of course she misses her family most.

A few prompts:

• Lon is haunted (literally) by ghosts of ancestors who died a century before in some terrible way. He is familiar with their story from family lore, but as far as he knows no other relatives have been visited by these people. Write a scene involving Lon and his ghosts. Make the ghosts come to life, so to speak, as individuals. If you like, go on to write a story about how Lon deals with them.

• Tina’s dad dies suddenly when she’s fourteen. They were very close, and she misses him intensely. Write a session between her and a grief counselor. Have Tina bring up some of her emotions that shame her, as well as more acceptable feelings.

• Sticking with Tina, a month later she and her mom move her father’s desk into her bedroom because his desk is bigger and better. Write about her first night with the desk in her room.

• Tina again. In the back of the top desk drawer she finds a big brown envelope. The contents – letters? newspaper clippings? a journal? – throw Tina back into turmoil. Write what was in the envelope and what happens next.

Have fun, and save what you write!

Moolah, loot, do re mi

Last week I forgot to mention an excellent website on publishing children’s books: http://www.underdown.org/. It’s the website of Harold Underdown who wrote the Idiots’ Guide that I’ve praised several times.

This week we’re taking another detour into the world of publishing. Next week we’ll be back to writing.

On October 10, 2010, Jill wrote …I spotted you saying again about being able to become a full-time author. What exactly does it take to do that? Publishing a lot of books and having your name be well known? I guess I am just wondering because that has been my dream for a long time and I just don’t know how to go about doing that!

I’ll tell you my story and then talk about how writers get paid. I hope that those of you who have publishing experience will weigh in with more information and clarification. I know how my income works, but I’m not an agent and there are ins and outs that I’m unaware of. This is a huge subject, and I’ll only graze the surface.

When I quit my job, I had just turned fifty and Ella Enchanted, my first published book, had been out for six months but had not yet won the Newbery Honor. I was working for New York State government and had been for twenty-seven years. I was due to collect a small pension in five years, a pension that would have grown bigger if I’d stayed on. My husband and I met with a financial planner to see if we could make it through the hiatus. The planner thought we could, and while we were meeting, the mail arrived with an offer from my editor for a three-book contract for what became The Princess Tales. I decided to make the leap. Still, I’m security-conscious, and I was scared. A beloved friend, a free-lance technical writer as well as a writer of young-adult novels, promised to teach me technical writing if things didn’t work out. That gave me an added comfort level.

Two months after I quit, Ella Enchanted won the Newbery Honor, and I felt even more at ease. No matter what happened, income from Ella would supplement my pension.

People have given up their jobs to write with a lot less in the way of resources than I had. Obviously the decision depends on your responsibilities and your tolerance for uncertain income. All worked out well for me. Sometimes I wish I hadn’t stuck so long with my government job, which I loved at the beginning but enjoyed less later on. Even before I began to write I might have had a more interesting career if I’d taken more chances. Still I am that security-conscious person and in spite of the advantage of hindsight, I might not have acted differently.

That’s how I did it. Now here’s an overview of a book writer’s income today. The industry is changing quickly, so some of what I say may be different in a few years.

When an agent takes you on, you usually sign an agreement that spells out your relationship, particularly how to terminate your association and her percentage of your writing earnings. If you do separate later on, she will continue to receive that percentage on those books for which she negotiated the contract. If royalties go on for decades after termination, she’ll keep getting paid for decades. That’s the deal, standard across publishing. Even if you don’t sign an agreement and just move forward on a handshake (as I did), the rules still apply.

When a publisher buys your book (Hooray!), it doesn’t buy your words in every circumstance forever, unless the deal is a “work for hire.” More about that later. The publisher buys specific rights, maybe the right to publish the book in English around the world or only in North America. Which rights it buys are part of the contract negotiation. The rights that you retain you can sell elsewhere. Which rights you reserve often depend on your agent and her agency. If the agency has a foreign-rights division or a film division, for example, you may retain those rights so the agency can market them and you will get a higher percentage of the earnings. This seems like a definite benefit – but the publisher may be better than the agent at selling foreign rights, for instance, and more sales means more money. You never know; you just have to choose.

If the deal is a work for hire, the publisher does buy your words forever in all situations. You don’t own the copyright; the publisher does. Usually you get paid and that’s it. This is perfectly legal. It’s all spelled out in the contract.

That’s all I’m going to say about work-for-hire contracts because I have limited experience with them. My Never Land fairy books are a hybrid form of work for hire.

In other contracts, not work for hire, the first money you get is the advance, which may come in stages, a portion when you sign the contract, another when the editor accepts your revision, and the last on publication. The size of the advance varies widely. For a first book it may be only a few thousand dollars. In some circumstances there may be no advance, only royalties.

There may be a clause that says that if the book wins an award like the Newbery or the National Book Award you will get an additional advance.

The advance, alas, is not a gift. You have to earn it back out of your royalties, so onto royalties, which are the percentages you receive for the sale of each book. For Ella Enchanted my royalty for hardcover books sold “through ordinary channels of trade,” which means bookstores and online retailers, was 10% of the retail price on the first 20,000 copies sold and 12.5% on copies after that. For paperbacks it was 6% on the first 250,000 copies and 8% after that. There are other royalty rates for other situations, but the ones I just named are the biggies. Your percentages will improve as your career grows, but the publisher will always receive the lion’s share. (A mega writing star may be an exception. I have no idea what percentage J.K. Rowling commands.)

(I’m omitting e-books, because they’re in flux at the present.)

If you have an agent, the publisher sends your royalty check to her. She takes her cut and then passes the balance on to you. I believe standard agent rates are 15%, but some agents’ rates may be higher or lower.

Royalties are paid twice a year, usually in October and April, which means no weekly paycheck, and you won’t get anything until the publisher recovers your advance. Plus, you can’t anticipate how much the royalty check will be because you don’t know how sales are doing. Your editor may be willing to give you an idea of how your book is faring, but you won’t know numbers until the royalty statement arrives. Sales are affected by factors way out of an author’s control, like the economy or school and library budgets or demographics (there’s a population boom or bust in the age range your book is meant for).

Your U.S. book sale may not be your only source of income, however. There may be sales of subsidiary rights. If, for example, a book club wants to publish an edition of your book, you’ll split the revenue from that with your hardcover publisher. I don’t know how it works if your publisher has its own book club. If your agent sells an audio version, you’ll get an advance for it (probably smaller than the book advance) and royalties. Likewise for foreign sales.

If your book is optioned for a movie, you’ll be paid for the option, usually a small sum. If the movie is made, you’ll be paid a lot more, and you’ll probably have a very good year financially.

Your head is swimming. Your eyes are rolling back in their sockets. Basically, your book revenue comes twice a year plus advances, which aren’t tied to the calendar.

If your book does well online and in the book stores, those other sales (audio, foreign, book club, and more) are likely to follow. If not, generally not. It can be scary. But an editor who loves your writing will fight for your future books. A publisher that believes in you will stay with you for a few books even if sales are disappointing in hopes that your work will catch on.

Two more sources of income for kids’ book writers are speaking at conferences and visiting schools, both of which will pay you an honorarium. These are worth pursuing not only for the money, but also because they’ll boost your sales and build your readership. I haven’t done this, but I believe you can make proposals to some teacher-and-librarian conferences and to writers’ conferences for sessions on subjects you’re qualified to lecture about (topics concerning writing, books, teaching, literacy). When you start doing school visits you won’t be able to charge much, but as you gain experience you can raise your rate. For some authors speaking engagements, especially school visits, are the biggest source of their income. You have to be on the road a great deal, but, boy, you learn geography!

You don’t have to pay your literary agent any part of the honorarium, but if you use a booking agent, you’ll have to pay him a percentage. I don’t use one, so I don’t know what the going rate is. For beginners, I’d guess that a booking agent may be worthwhile, because he’ll know about speaking engagements that you won’t and he’ll send some your way. Your publisher will also have a school and library person who may be able to offer you some opportunities, and you don’t have to pay this person. If you’d like to visit schools and speak at conferences, be sure to let your editor know. Publishers are happy if you’re willing to get out to promote your books.

If your writing career goes very well, you’ll be able to tell when you’re ready to shift over to full-time writing. Many writers never can, and there’s no shame in writing part-time and supplementing other earnings with writing income. Luck plays a big part in success, and some terrific writers never get to write full time.

This may have been too much information. Here are two prompts:

• Your main character gets a big bump in her allowance. At first she thinks this is all good, but she doesn’t handle the new status quo well. Maybe she has a brother who hasn’t gotten any more. Maybe she now receives more than her friends. Maybe she suspects her parents’ motive for the increase. Or anything else. Make trouble. Write the scene.

• Two characters have gone trick or treating, separately or together, doesn’t matter. Doesn’t matter if they know each other. They each go home after collecting more goodies than ever before. Write a scene for each, showing how they deal with their candy wealth. Create internal and external conflict, different for each.

Have fun, and save what you write!

Serial Writing

On August 19, 2010, Yvonne wrote, Ms. Levine, do you have any advice on writing sequels, prequels, or writing books set in the same world as a previous one? I know you did this with Fairest, and I was wondering how you did it and kept the same characteristics of the kingdom that you had in the first book.

Actually, in Fairest, in one important regard, I failed. In Ella Enchanted, Char describes the people of Ayortha as taciturn. But when I wrote Fairest I couldn’t stay with that. I couldn’t write a semi-serious novel about people who barely speak. If Fairest had been one of my Princess Tales, which were mostly comic, I could have pulled it off. In an early draft of the book, I put in a sentence explaining how Ayorthaians were terse with strangers, but I think even that got cut. A reader once called me on this, and probably many other readers have noticed. It’s a fine example of an imperfection.

Maybe one rule of sequel and prequel writing would be not to put anything in the starter book that you can’t live with in future volumes. But I’m not sure. I don’t want to encourage timid writing, which would be worse than my Fairest mistake.

Seems to me there are two kinds of series. In one kind each book tells a complete story and the end is a full stop. Books can be read out of sequence and it doesn’t matter. In the other kind, the Harry Potter kind, each book has its own conflicts, but they’re part of a larger story that isn’t over until the final page of the last book, and the books should be read in order. I haven’t written this second kind of series, although my Fairy Haven and the Quest for the Wand is easier to get into if you’ve read Fairy Dust and the Quest for the Egg. I assume that writers who write a continuous series know the entire arc of the plot and where each book fits into it.

At the moment I’m writing a second mystery in the world of my heroine, Elodie. If I can, I’d like to stay with her and her dragon employer, Masteress Meenore, and her friend the ogre Count Jonty Um for a bunch of books. Each novel will be its own separate story (the first sort of series), but some life events for the main characters may evolve over time. Elodie and Jonty Um will get older. One or both of them may find love. There may be loss. Dragons age more slowly, and there’s something immutable about Meenore, so he’s unlikely to change much. Or maybe he will. I don’t know.

Some series have a villain who provides story continuity. I’ve read only the first Harry Potter book, but I figure Voldemort is that villain. In the Sherlock Holmes series Moriarty is the villain, but those books can be read in any order.

I’ve mentioned before that for each novel I keep a document called “Remember.” In it go the details, which vary somewhat from book to book. For the mystery series I’ve continued the same “Remember” from one book to the next. These are some of my categories: geography, monetary system, apprenticeship system, Elodie’s mother’s rules for her, character descriptions, the attributes of an acting troupe, the dragon diet. I could continue, but you get the idea. A “Remember” document will help you be consistent and will save time, because you won’t have to hunt through your earlier books for the particulars you need.

Before I wrote Fairest I reread Ella Enchanted. I’d like to say I took notes, but I don’t remember whether I did or not. I should have. So read and take notes. Originally I’d thought Ella’s best friend Areida could be the heroine of Fairest, but I was reminded that Areida is dark-skinned and the Snow White character, obviously, needed to be pale.

You may want a similar tone from book to book. If you’re writing an adventure series, you probably wouldn’t make one book a brooding character study with little action. My Princess Tales are humorous. Fun is the point. I couldn’t have written a tragic Princess Tale and made it fit. However, you might change point of view from book to book. You could have a series about a group of friends. If a different character told each book, the voice and tone would have to vary or each narrator would seem like the same person. But you still probably wouldn’t want one book to be completely lighthearted when the others were utterly serious.

I tied my Princess Tales loosely together with humor and with features that readers would recognize from one book to the next. All of them take place in the kingdom of Biddle and most in the town of Snettering-on-Snoakes. The king’s name is always Humphrey, and the queen is always Hermione, Humphrey I and Hermione I in the first book, higher numbers in each succeeding volume. The fairies are always seven feet tall with huge, fleshy wings. In this kind of series you may not need much more than a few recognizable features like these and a relatively consistent tone to unify the books.

You probably need to think about whether or not you want character growth from book to book. Since I haven’t read more than one but I don’t live in a cave, I gather that Harry and Hermione and the others change as the series progresses. In contrast, Sherlock Holmes doesn’t evolve. He’s the same brilliant, easily bored, self-destructive fellow all the way through. His failure to grow gives the series poignancy. The reader sympathizes with Holmes and worries about him. Both are valid choices.

Here are some questions you can ask yourself as you decide whether or not you want to attempt a series:

Do these characters interest you enough to want to be with them for more than one book? There is no dishonor in a no answer. The characters in my Princess Tales, because the stories are so light, are paper thin. They were invented for a single situation, and they wouldn’t know what to do with themselves outside their original tales.

Do you have a big and complicated enough idea to carry a bunch of books? At one point while I was writing Ever I thought I had a series on my hands, but I didn’t. My concept sewed itself together in a single volume.

Do you know what themes you’d like to explore from book to book? I’m optimistic about the mysteries as a series because I plan to rely on fairytales, and it’s always been the mysteries that have fascinated me about them. For example, one of my favorite blog postings along with your responses was about the puzzling “Twelve Dancing Princesses.”

Three prompts:

• It’s a cloud, composition unknown, threatening the world of your story. It can begin small or full-blown. Write a paragraph or two about each book in a four-book series that starts with the cloud. The cloud can be the problem for the entire series, or not.

• Describe (in writing) the most fascinating person you know. Now add interesting – not necessarily good – qualities of other people in your life. Imagine this amalgamated being as the main character of a series. What would challenge her? What kinds of conflicts would she get involved in? Write notes about a series with this main character.

• Write a page of back story for your current project. Make up new material for this, not what you already know. Consider whether you have a potential prequel. Write about what it might be.

Have fun and save what you write!

Tick Tock, the Publishing Clock

On August 18, 2010, Charlotte wrote, I was wondering if you could give us a breakdown on how long it takes you to write an average novel, from the inklings of an idea to the first draft to the printing to promotion, etc. What takes the longest? Do different books take significantly different amounts of time? Do you have deadlines? Have you ever tried NaNoWriMo?

I’ve never tried NaNoWriMo. I don’t think I could win, because I’m not focused enough in a first draft. If there were a NaNoRevMo for revision, I could do it. I can sit still for hours to revise.

How long it takes me to write a book depends on the book. Some are a lot easier than others. The longest (about eight years) was Dave at Night, but I didn’t work on it regularly (I wrote Ella Enchanted in the middle). The longest book that I worked on steadily was Fairest, because I couldn’t get the point of view right. Fairy Dust and the Quest for the Egg took about nine months, quick for me. Most of my Princess Tales took only a few months, the longest six, and the shortest, The Fairy’s Mistake, an amazing eight days! I was so happy! That one started life as a picture book, which was rejected by a zillion publishers. My editor for Ella liked it and asked me to turn it into a short novel and write two more – the beginning of the series. When I expanded it I already had the story and knew exactly what I was doing.

I don’t think the books that took the longest to write are the best, just the hardest. Some authors are much speedier than I am, and some are much slower. They’re not better or worse writers; their methods are just different.

My books germinate, naturally, in notes. I start by speculating about what I might like my next novel to be. Often I reread some fairy tales. I keep a running list of ideas for future books, and I revisit that. I write more notes about the ideas that interest me – where I could take each one, what might happen. I continue with notes and trying out ideas until something clamors to be written. Even then I’m not sure, though, and I write more notes, until a beginning emerges plus a vague notion of the direction of the story and some of the characters. Usually I have a sense of how the story should end, nothing specific, and nothing that can’t change.

I start writing. When I’ve written three pages, I always think, “I’ve written one percent;” at thirty pages, I think, “ten percent,” which is ridiculous because the book may wind up longer or shorter than three hundred pages and because I know I’m going to cut lots along the way and fill lots in. But the percentage thought encourages me.

Lately I’ve been trying to write straight through, but in the book I’m working on now, a second mystery (how I did this is itself a mystery), I wrote 150 pages without introducing any suspects. Naturally I had to go back.

Eventually I’ve got a first draft. Revising is usually quicker than writing the draft, a few months tops. Then I email the manuscript to my agent and my editor. That part is different for me than for writers who are just starting out or for writers who don’t have a book under contract (meaning that a publisher has committed to publishing the book). In that case, assuming you have an agent, you’d send the book to her, and she’d send it to editors she thinks would be right for it. But I’m not going to get into that unless you want me to in a future post.

A novel takes about a year from submission to publication. Now we get into publishing. I’m involved in some of what happens and have a rough idea of the rest, but I’m not an expert. For an expert, you might like to read Harold Underdown’s The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Publishing Children’s Books. There may be other great books on the subject, but this is the one I know. April, I think you know all about this, and you may want to add some remarks too.

So I submit the manuscript and start biting my nails immediately. After a day or two of no more nails without any word (a ridiculously short span of time), I’m sure my editor hates the book. But I’m not going to go into this either unless you ask me to, and then I will.

After a few weeks, Rosemary, my editor, sends me an editorial letter by snail mail along with the manuscript on which she’s written her initial edits. That’s how she and I work together. Some editors do a lot of the initial book discussion in a phone call or a meeting. An editor may not mark up the manuscript at all at this point; she may just suggest the direction the writer should take in the revision. I prefer to see edits. If Rosemary says my main character needs to be more likeable, I want to see the places where my main isn’t or I won’t get it.

When I’m finished with the revision I email it back. After she goes over it she sends me a blessedly shorter letter and her second edits. If things are looking pretty good after that round, she gives the manuscript to the copy editor. If it’s not yet in shape, there’s another cycle of revision between us before the book goes to the copy editor.

While all this is happening, internal publishing stuff has begun, and the internal side continues until publication. First of all is the decision about when the book will come out. Publishers have seasonal lists, meaning the cohort of books that will be released in summer, fall, and winter. There used to be a spring list, but now it’s called summer, at least at HarperCollins.

Deadlines are attached to the list decision, and this is unknown territory for me, except that if I were very late with a revision the book might have to be pushed back to the next list. I assume the deadlines have to do with when the manuscript goes to the copy editor and is returned, when the cover art is commissioned and finished, when the design decisions are made.

Back to me. The copy editor sends me the manuscript by email with e-edits in the margins and in the copy. I think the edits are in a Word program, but I don’t know. I print out the manuscript and write my responses in ink and mail them back the old-fashioned way. This is not because I’m a technology-challenged dinosaur – it’s just what I’m told to do. The copy editor and I go back and forth twice, I think, before the book emerges as galleys.

It becomes galleys after the decisions are made about type and the design of the page. Is the book typeset at that point? I don’t know. Once the book is in galley form, electronic editing is over. Changes are made on the physical page again.

The first iteration of the galleys is called first pass, which my editor sends to me, and I make my changes, and they’re incorporated into second-pass galleys. The book is in good shape by now, and many writers don’t look at second-pass galleys. But I do, because I’m a chronic fiddler. I don’t look at third pass, and I don’t know if there is a forth pass.

First-pass galleys are bound into the Advanced Reading Copy, the ARC. The ARC is a paperback book even though the real book will be released in hard cover. HarperCollins’s ARCs have the cover art, although not all publishers do this, I think. For A Tale of Two Castles, which will be out in May, the ARC has just been produced, and I got a copy in the mail last week. The cover art is also not the final version, but it’s close. I celebrate when the ARC arrives, because it’s the first time I’ve seen my manuscript in book form.

The ARC is a big marketing tool. It’s sent to reviewers and to important people in the world of children’s literature who can help the book. It’s sent out even though it still has mistakes, and readers are warned that some of the copy may change.

Other things happen behind the scenes. There’s a decision about the size of the print run (the number of books to be printed initially). A publicity and marketing plan are developed. The book is integrated into the programs that the publisher uses to market and promote every book. Editors present their books to the in-house sales force, the people who will sell it to independent and chain bookstores. Sometimes a book tour is organized.

Oh, and the book is printed! Then it’s sent to distributors, who receive the orders and fill them.

After all this – and I’ve probably left out a ton – it’s a wonder that the process takes only a year.

There isn’t really a prompt that goes with this, but I hate to end without one, so here are two:

• You all know that Ella Enchanted was my first published book after nine years of rejection for everything else I’d written. What you may not know is that Ella was the first book my editor ever acquired, which made it special for both of us. Write a first-person account of a fairly new editor meeting his or her first writer and taking him or her to lunch. My editor and I did get along, but make these two fail to. Make the lunch a disaster.

• Now indulge in a little fantasy. Write from the point of view of a newbie author meeting his or her editor for the first time. Make it go marvelously well. If you haven’t been published yet, make it a dream come true. This is one time you can indulge your Mary Sue and let her shine.

Have fun and save what you write!

To Be Or Not To Be Funny

First: CONGRATULATIONS to all you NaNoWriMo’s! Double kudos to those who met your goal. But whether you made it or not, the effort is a big deal. A lot of back patting is called for.

And I bet you’re relieved it’s over–and maybe feeling a little let-down, too . But, hey, there’s still all that revising to do. In recent posts I’ve gotten questions about revision, and I’ve referred people to my post on the topic from 11/18/09. If you have questions that I didn’t cover there, please ask.

Second: A reminder about my signings in Connecticut on Saturday, details on the website. If you’re in the area, I hope you come.

Third: With the glow of poetry school still hanging over me, I want to say something about how poetry affects my prose. Chiefly, it makes me more aware of the sound of my words as I write. For example, in the last sentence I happened to write the alliterative makes me more. (Alliteration: identical initial consonant sounds or double consonant sounds, like stay still. Write well isn’t alliterative, even though both words start with w’s, and cautious king is, even though one word starts with a c and the other with a k. It’s the sound that counts.) In the example, makes me more, I didn’t alliterate intentionally; it just came out that way, but I could have changed the wording to increased my awareness. Same meaning but not as appealing to me (in a very minor way).

Same thing with assonance, similar vowel sounds, like keep and sweet. Also words that happen to rhyme. I notice them more nowadays. Sometimes I add in alliteration or assonance, and sometimes I take it out. In prose, I often find it annoying when I accidentally rhyme, so I revise and remove.

Here’s a prompt: Pick a paragraph of your current story, any long paragraph, not dialogue. Underline the alliterations, the assonances, the rhymes. See if you can create more of each by changing words. Do you like the result better or less well? There’s no right or wrong answer. You decide. The advantage is just more consciousness as you write.

I also recommend reading poetry, because poetry is wonderful, and you can learn a lot about language from it. I get a daily poetry fix from Writers Almanac, http://writersalmanac.publicradio.org/. As a subscriber, a poem arrives in my email every morning, along with a short narrative of major historical events of the day. I click listen and read the poem along with Garrison Keillor’s resonant voice.

Now for today’s topic. On July 25, 2010, Rose wrote… How does a writer decide whether to make a story mainly funny or mainly serious? I’ve been writing a story that I saw as humorous, but it’s been getting very serious already, and I’m not sure if this is a bad thing. If so, can someone help? My tastes naturally tend towards the dramatic, though, so it’s probably just that. . .

Often the decision is made for the writer, who is either a writer of humor or of serious fiction. One or the other usually comes naturally, no decision involved.

Not that it’s necessarily so cut and dried as that. Serious drama can have funny moments, hysterical ones, even, and funny stories can turn temporarily dark or be uniformly dark and funny. Serious writers can pull off comedy occasionally, and humorists can write tragedy once in a while. But I think most writers know which camp they find themselves in.

I generally prefer funny. I’d rather read funny and write funny, and I think humor isn’t taken, er, seriously enough as literature. It’s just as hard, maybe harder, to write good light as to write good heavy. I frequently look for a bit of levity to add to my stories. Doing so just makes me happy.

Some of my books are more serious than others. Ever is the most somber book I’ve written, but even it has funny moments. And after I finished it I had to escape to something lighter. A Tale of Two Castles is lighthearted. The sequel I’m working on now is more serious, so I may cycle back and forth.

Of course subject matter helps determine whether or not a story is serious. I challenge the funniest person on earth to write a comedy about the abuse of dogs. If this is your subject, you probably have to be serious.

But even dire topics can be spoofed. Think of disaster movies. And, while dog abuse may be off limits, pet abuse probably isn’t. For example, you might write about a character who keeps pet cockroaches and isn’t nice to them. The reader wouldn’t know which side to sympathize with.

There are also topics that most lend themselves to comedy. One of my students once wrote a story about toe jam. Tragedy and toe jam do not mix, or do not mix easily.

And there are many topics that can go either way. Romance, friendship, coming of age all leap to mind.

Whichever you’ve chosen, you can nudge it temporarily in one direction or the other. Imagine even a hospital scene. Your main character’s mother has something terminal. A clueless doctor comes in and says all the wrong things, maybe putting a weird spin on a conversation that was just taking place. The dying continues, but the characters have laughed and the reader has smiled. Or you can make the scene funny by going overboard with the sadness, intense lugubriousness, so over the top that the characters notice and the tragedy lifts for a moment.

Comedy can tip into drama too. Suppose Essie has given her best friend Riva a joke gift of hand puppets. They’re in Riva’s bedroom, acting out the behavior of a tyrannical teacher, having a fine time, being clever and funny until Riva has the teacher puppet say something hurtful to Essie that Riva has wanted to say. The remark goes back to an old incident that’s been festering. In a single line of dialogue the story’s mood shifts. It may shift back just as quickly in a page or two, but for the moment the reader has stopped laughing.

Even when stories stay funny they can have serious meaning. Think of Mark Twain, one of my favorites. His Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, for instance, is wonderfully humorous and touching at the same time. Think of Jane Austen, one of the funniest writers ever, in my opinion, who was writing not only about finding love, but also about finding a life. Think of your own examples.

Here’s a prompt: Write about a camping trip. Can be a family trip, a scout troupe, a gathering of elves, whatever. In as many pages as you need, take it from humor to drama, back to humor, back to drama. End on whichever you like. Do the same for a bank robbery. Now do it – aaa! – for an airplane crash. Don’t worry about being ridiculous. Go for it!

Have fun and save what you write!

Forced

I had a terrific time in poetry school. I heard lectures about odes and elegies and the use of time through verb tenses in a poem and much more. The five poems I submitted ahead of time got careful criticism, and I learned a lot. Thanks to everyone for keeping the blog humming in the meanwhile.

On July 24, 2010, Lauren wrote, I was rereading part of one of the stories I’m writing, and I just realized how forced the writing sounds. How can I change it? Should I completely re-write it, or just change bits and pieces? How can you edit your work without getting totally discouraged and wanting to give up?

I asked for clarification, and Lauren gave it the next day: I mean when the writing sounds fake. Kind of like what you wrote in that one chapter in WRITING MAGIC, where you gave two kinds of dialogue involving a couple of girls and weird smells one of them thought was coming from the science lab, but was actually smoke? One was very formal and didn’t sound like two tween/teenaged girls, and the other one did.

Sometimes I want to give up too. Usually this happens to me in the first-draft stage. I love to revise. By the time I get to revision the major plot kinks have been ironed out and all I have to do is to make my prose shine. Truth is, it’s fine and possibly even universal to want to give up but not fine to actually do so. If you stick with your revision, your story is likely to improve. If it doesn’t, you can start a new story, but I hope you won’t stop writing entirely.

I’m glad you’ve read Writing Magic!

Your dialogue problem may have come about because you’re putting information into speech that belongs in narration. Dialogue is likely to feel forced when it passes along facts that both speakers know – simply in order to bring the reader up to speed. If, in the example from Writing Magic, both characters are already aware of the smoke that issued from the science lab, they’ll be unlikely to talk about it.

Dialogue seems to be a lively way to introduce back story, but it’s not, in my opinion. Usually such conversations come off as stiff. Much better to tell the reader directly in narration. If you’re writing in third person, you can merely say that a science experiment has gone bad. If in first, your main character can notice the lingering smell of burnt rubber or whatever.

I can imagine circumstances when it might be appropriate to rehash known events. Suppose your main character Penny suspects something fishy went on in the science lab but she doesn’t have all the facts and she wants to find out. Maybe she’s an amateur sleuth. Then she would have a reason to bring up the accident, and, if she’s not experienced at sleuthing, she might do so awkwardly. As the conversation gets going she might reflect on how stilted she sounds. The reader will be content, because he’ll worry about whether she can pull off her subterfuge and because there may be real danger.

Or maybe Penny wants to establish a relationship with someone, so she brings up the science lab because it’s all she can think of. The reader will be okay with this too and will probably suffer along with Penny as her overtures proceed. Will she be accepted or rejected?

It comes down to why people talk.

Obviously not all talk in real life is fascinating. Much of it isn’t, but the motivation for speech often is, and sometimes the motive is more meaningful than the words. When a character, Warren, say, makes chitchat because he’s nervous, what comes out may be drivel, may even be forced-sounding drivel, but if the reader understands what’s going on, she won’t mind. She’ll be squirming along with him; the worse it is, the more she’ll squirm.

Or let’s say Warren is trying to find his sister who’s gone missing. He’s made contact with a woman who may be able to lead him to her. They meet for the first time outside a particular bank branch. She’s said he’ll recognize her, and indeed he thinks he does. There’s a woman at the revolving doors wearing a wide-brimmed red hat, a red wool coat tied at the waist, and high black boots. Her face is beautiful, her expression bored. He goes to her, and, scared, spouts the same nonsense as in the example above. The reader can’t turn the pages fast enough.

Not that Warren has to do it this way. He can master his fear and ask the woman straight out if she’s the right person and if she knows where his sister is. That’s fine. It depends on Warren’s character and the tone of the story. The direct dialogue will still engage the reader if she cares about Warren and his sister. One way is no better than another.

There are myriad reasons for characters to speak – anger, fear, warning, affection, love, for fun, to convey news, and more I’m sure – and myriad ways for them to express themselves, as many ways, I guess, as there are characters.

Some people and some characters are more comfortable talking than others; some are more comfortable being quiet. Here’s a prompt: Tomorrow, notice whenever you talk and when you’re silent in company. Pay attention to what prompts your speech and what shuts you up. At night write about what you discovered. Write whatever you remember of actual conversations. On Friday, observe the speech of others. Write about those discoveries too. If you’re feeling inspired, use what you found out in a new story.

Lauren also asked whether she should rewrite only the parts that are problematic or start from scratch. There’s a middle ground. Don’t scrap your entire effort, but do go through all of it. The seeds of the forced writing may start before the trouble begins, and if you fix the earlier part, the rest may fall into place. Revision is a big job. Bette Davis once said that old age isn’t for sissies, and neither is revision (or writing). It’s hard, and we have to push through all our writing frailties. Above all, we need to be thorough. If any place feels off, try other ways to express what you’re getting at, either in notes or in your story itself, but don’t delete your earlier versions.

Occasionally, tragedy strikes and you lose your entire story. If this happens and you start over, sometimes a little miracle occurs. You remember the plot, and it comes out more smoothly. Your subconscious or some good angel has taken over and fixed things, maybe to comfort you for your loss.

Let’s use that angel in a prompt. Think of a part of something you’re working on that you’re not satisfied with. Don’t look at it. Rewrite from memory. Don’t strain to make it better, just write.

Here’s another dialogue prompt: Your main character, Yona, is at her cousin Ivan’s birthday party where she doesn’t want to be. Her mother has threatened dire punishment if she isn’t nice. Ivan is annoying but not evil. This is not Yona’s finest or kindest moment. In dialogue Yona gets revenge on Ivan for existing and having a birthday, but she does it so subtly that he only knows that he feels worse and worse. Yona believes she’s said nothing that will get her in trouble. Write the dialogue.

And another: Your hero, Kyle, needs information that a particular dragon can provide. Unfortunately, the dragon speaks only in riddles. Write Kyle’s attempts to discover what he needs to know.

Have fun and save what you write!