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Taming the Beast: What to Do with That Frightful First Draft

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by Kirt Hickman

You’ve gotten your first draft onto paper, but it doesn’t look anything like the novel you envisioned. Somewhere along the way, it took on a life of its own. It became grotesque: overblown, disorganized, and rife with inconsistencies. Your writing is flat, your characters are boring, and your plot contains so many dead ends it resembles a maze for some masochistic lab rat. Somehow it got so out of control that you can’t imagine now how to rein it in.

While this article doesn’t address all of these problems, it will answer this question: What now? Before you examine the structure of your scenes or the tautness of your narrative style (see “Revising Fiction: Ten Tips To Tighten Your Narrative Style“), you’ve got to tame the monster you’ve created. You’ve got to trim the fat and organize the rest.

Scene Cards

To organize, create an index card for each scene. Give each scene a name and number and write it on the scene’s card. Then read through your manuscript and make the following notes on the cards:

1. Scene Purpose

Each scene must have a purpose; it must advance the plot or develop character (preferably both). Any scene that doesn’t is either a digression or it just conveys information. Delete it. Find another way to provide the necessary information. Make a note on the card of any scene you plan to move information to. Ideally, each scene that you keep should also show conflict between characters, create suspense, and show how the day-to-day life in your world is different from your reader’s life. Jot down ideas to enhance these characteristics of each scene.

2. Type of Scene

Is the scene an action scene? A romance scene? A dialogue scene? Something else? Write it on the card. Don’t string too many action scenes in a row. You want to excite your reader, not fatigue him. Similarly, don’t put several passive scenes together; you’ll risk boring your reader.

Color-code the title row of your scene cards with highlighter markers (pink for action scenes, yellow for passive, orange for others) and lay the cards out on a table with the highlighted title showing. This will give you a good visual display of the distribution of the action. Look for scenes that you can move to create a better balance.

3. Inconsistencies

As you wrote your first draft you may have made decisions that created inconsistencies in your characters or plot. If so, decide how best to resolve them, and in which scenes. Note any necessary changes on your scene cards.

4. Suspense Elements

A suspense element is any question you’ve raised in your reader’s mind, any loose end you need to tie up in another scene. On your scene cards, note the suspense elements you introduced or resolved in each scene.

Then go back through the cards. On a separate sheet of paper, list each suspense element. Next to it, write down the number of the scene in which you introduced it and the number of the scene in which you resolved it. Did you resolve them all? If not, tie up each loose end. Either find a scene in which to resolve it, or don’t bring it up in the first place. Make notes on the appropriate scene cards.

Rewrite Your Scenes

Before you rewrite your scenes, save your manuscript and begin working on a separate draft. If you decide later that you need something you’ve altered or deleted, you’ll be able to retrieve the original.

During this rewrite, you’ll throw whole scenes away, write new scenes, and revise some so extensively you’ll have to start them over from scratch. Every scene will need some form of revision. Don’t let this discourage you. You must trim the fat from your first draft and bolster the weak or missing elements. You already know what changes you need to make; you’ve noted them on your scene cards. Now rewrite each scene using these notes as your guide. When you’re done, review your notes to make sure you didn’t miss anything.

Now your manuscript is ready for the more detailed editing required to clean up your scene structure, narrative style, and dialog. Those topics, however, I’ll leave for future articles.

WorldsAsunder125_2Kirt Hickman is a technical writer turned fiction author. His books include three sci-fi thriller novels Worlds Asunder (2008), Venus Rain (2010) and Mercury Sun (2014), the high fantasy novel Fabler’s Legend (2011), and the writers’ how-to Revising Fiction: Making Sense of the Madness (2009).

This article was originally published in the March 2009 issue of SouthWest Sage, and is reprinted here by permission of the author.



An Interview with Author Elizabeth Ann Galligan

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Elizabeth Ann Galligan, Ph.D, is a poet and retired educator from Eastern New Mexico University who completed her first novel Secrets of the Plumed Saint (ABQ Press, 2012) at the age of 73. She has also co-authored the early childhood book Count on African Animals (2014), a precocious child’s introduction to counting and reading with photographs by Florence H. Kubota. Elizabeth’s poems and essays have appeared in Voices of New Mexico, Too (2013) and More Voices of New Mexico (2015, Rio Grande Books in collaboration with New Mexico Book Co-op), and in the Fixed and Free Poetry Anthology 2015. Visit her website at ElizabethAnnGalligan.com.

Secrets of the Plumed SaintWhat is your elevator pitch for Secrets of the Plumed Saint?
Secrets of the Plumed Saint is a cozy mystery, a tale of intrigue, set in a high mountain valley in a small village in northern New Mexico in the 1970s. When the 100-year-old hand-carved statue of the Santo Niño de Atocha disappears from their chapel, the villagers are so embarrassed they decide to hide the secret from the Church hierarchy and try to find the culprits and discover their motives themselves.

What do you hope readers will take away from the book?
I hope readers gain respect for the people of northern New Mexico who honor their traditions and survive in a difficult environment through hard work, mutual support, wits, and religious faith. I wanted to explore the effects of major demographic changes that occurred in the 1970s which brought in outsiders who disturbed the equilibrium of the village.

What unique challenges did your first novel pose for you?
Never having the notion to write a novel, as well as not having time to devote to writing, I had to wait until I retired in 2007 to pursue various forms. I had always thought I might try to write about a holy man, a hermit, who lived in the area where Secrets of the Plumed Saint is set. I thought I could write a biography, perhaps, but certainly not a mystery. Once I decided to start writing, I found friends, family, and other authors who encouraged me. Incredible serendipitous events started. The right people came along just when I needed their expertise and help. I believe the Santo Niño de Atocha had a hand in it, too.

What was the most rewarding aspect of writing Secrets of the Plumed Saint?
People often tell me they pass the book along to family and friends. They frequently buy multiple copies. One day a woman of 80 years bought 11 copies and sent them to all her family. She told me, “Your book gave me back my roots.” Her comment made all the effort, confusion, and insecurity about my first novel worthwhile.

What do you struggle with most in your writing? What are your strong points?
I write a lot of words just to get my ideas down. Some call it wordiness—not a good trait, especially in mysteries. The trick is to go back and force myself to be more concise and make better word choices. I try not to use the first trite phrase that comes easily. We all develop habits in our writing that include certain patterns which we must overcome. Two of my bad habits are using too many adjectives and too many commas. I count finishing the Plumed Saint manuscript at age 73 as one of my best achievements. During the process, I learned I could write dialogue and poetic prose. Since I love New Mexico, I have a strong sense of place which I try to evoke in my writing. Plotting the story and sequence are still challenges.

Has writing nonfiction helped you write better fiction?
In academic or expository prose accuracy matters, so I learned how to research topics. But academic writing is often dry and of interest to only a few scholars. The pickiness of academic writing now annoys me. Writers of either persuasion have to overcome the ingrained editorial angel (devil?) that sits on their shoulder and says their writing is not good enough.

How has your work as a poet influenced your fiction writing? What can other writers learn from poetry?
Just because I had written poetry, I did not assume I knew how to write fiction. My own style in the Plumed Saint tends toward the use of metaphors and similes tied to the setting of the story. Fast-moving stories are not for me. I like to meander through the words. Luckily, so do some readers. Most poetry emphasizes concise language forms. In that sense, other writers can learn from poets to make careful word choices. Poetry also invites symbolic language and encompasses suggestions of the mystical and other-worldly realms. In short, any writer can benefit from reading good poetry.

What are you working on now?
A historical novel is in progress, again set in northern New Mexico, a sequel to Secrets of the Plumed Saint. I also intend to write the fictionalized account of a portion of the life of holy man and preacher Giovanni Maria di Agostini, the Hermit of Hermit’s Peak in northern New Mexico. It will be based partially on recent scholarship from the Brazilian scholar Dr. Alexandre Karsburg who made the link between the “holy monk,” as he was known in Brazil, and “our” New Mexican sojourner. Some amazing new research by David G. Thomas adds depth to Dr. Karsburg’s research. My book in progress (working title Holy Enigma) is a novelization of the effects of the Hermit on the people of the time who came in contact with the itinerant Italian preacher. Memories and stories passed on orally (some documented) indicate the holy man’s impact in the northern New Mexico Territory around Las Vegas and in the southern part near Mesilla. The Hermit inhabited a cave near Dripping Springs in the foothills of the Organ Mountains from about 1867 until his murder in 1869. Who killed him and why remains a mystery to this day.

What advice do you have for other writers?
Just begin. Trust yourself and your words. Forget many of the things you learned about “rules.” As Mark David Gerson suggests in The Voice of the Muse, there are 13 rules. The first is: There are no rules. The story exists and you are the vehicle which carries it. However, your publisher will have rules you need to follow.

KLWagoner150_2KL Wagoner (writing as Cate Macabe) is the author of This New Mountain: a memoir of AJ Jackson, private investigator, repossessor, and grandmother. She has a new speculative fiction blog at klwagoner.com and writes about memoir at ThisNewMountain.com.



Grammatically Correct: Mixed Constructions Make No Sense

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by Dodici Azpadu

061957-firey-orange-jelly-icon-people-things-people-singing200Sentence parts that do not fit together grammatically or logically result in a mixed construction. Although readers will see and hear the logical error first, the cause of the error is often mechanical. Writers force parts of speech to take on grammatical functions for which they are not designed. The example below shows both errors.

For athletes who play contact sports have increased risk of arthritis later in their lives.

The first part of the sentence goes off track between the words sports and have. Most readers hear and see the error immediately. The long prepositional phrase For athletes who play contact sports is in a subject position. By rule, a prepositional phrase cannot be a subject of a sentence. It can only function as a modifier.

Writers can start a sentence with a prepositional phrase by way of introduction, but then they need to add a proper subject and verb in an independent clause, as in the example below.

For athletes who play contact sports, arthritis is a risk later in their lives.

The same problem occurs with adverbial clauses in the subject position. And the same solution is available.

When students are late is very distracting to other students.

The adverbial phrase When students are late cannot be the subject of a sentence. Like prepositional phrases, the function of adverbial phrases is to modify.

When students are late, they distract other students.

But another revision is also possible. Change the adverbial phrase into a gerund phrase. The gerund phrase can be the subject of a sentence.

Being late to class is very distracting.

Or revise the sentence based on who or what is the actor/subject of the sentence.

Students who are late to class are very distracting.

A mixed construction also occurs when writers use a coordinating conjunction to separate a dependent clause from an independent clause. Review the FANBOYS acronym (from my article “Grammatically Correct: Fixing Run-on Sentences”) to remember coordinating conjunctions: For, And, Nor, But, Or, Yet, So.

Although celebrities live charmed lives, yet they can have serious drug problems.

Either although or yet needs to be deleted.

Celebrities live charmed lives, yet they can have serious drug problems.
Although celebrities live charmed lives, they can have serious drug problems.

Sometimes artists draw with their non-dominant hand to bring attention to how their drawing tools affect their creative execution. A way for writers to bring heightened attention to their creative expression is to concentrate on their grammar tools. As a rule, writers do not want to impede the flow of words to page, especially in early stages of a draft. As an exercise, however, noticing subject choices and the verbs connected to them helps writers see where weaknesses in sentence construction occur.

TracesOfAWoman100

Dodici Azpadu, MFA, PhD is a novelist, short story writer, and poet. Her fiction publications include: Saturday Night in the Prime of Life and Goat Song (Aunt Lute/Spinsters Ink) and subsequently Onlywoman (London, England). Living Room (2010) and Traces of a Woman (2014), both by Neuma Books, are available as ebooks. She’s currently at work on a novel, tentatively titled Living Lies.

WearingThePhantomOut100Her poetry publications include Wearing the Phantom Out (2013) and Rumi’s Falcon from Neuma Books. Individual poems have appeared in Malpais Review, Adobe Walls, ContraACultura (online), Parnassus, Sinister Wisdom, Latuca, The Rag, and The Burning Bush. Her work has also been anthologized in Centos: A Collage of Poems and Hey Pasean!

Dodici teaches “The Joy of Poetry” and “Craft of Creating Writing” classes through University of New Mexico’s Osher Lifelong Learning.

This article was originally published in the May 2011 issue of SouthWest Sage and is reprinted here by permission of the author.



Whack-a-Mole Writing

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by Olive Balla

Olive Balla245Telling stories is great fun. But writing those stories in a way that will attract readers is a whole different stratum of the art. It’s a bit like the old arcade game Whack-a-Mole. The mole pops up and invitingly taunts the player. But just as the player takes aim, the mole disappears and the player’s mallet smacks air. It’s the same with writing. Just as the writer thinks he has a lock on what the reader wants, the reader moves on.

What can a writer do to set his work apart from that of the hundreds of thousands of other wannabes striving for recognition? What strategies, what tricks make one story shine brighter than the tales of all the rest of those yearning to become well-paid, or even moderately-paid authors? The problem of capturing the attention of today’s reader is a tough one, and the blame may not rest solely with the writer’s commitment and level of skill. It may boil down, in part, to recognizing and capitalizing on the continual metamorphosis of today’s reader.

Only since about 1840 has public education as we know it been available to the children of the poor as well as to the scions of the wealthy. As a result, the skills of reading and writing have become common to not only society’s scribes, but to the hoi polloi. And that’s a tremendous thing. It enhances the quality of life no end. But it doesn’t end there.

Thanks to the explosion of technology, thousands of storytellers are investing in laptops, blogging their pithy reflections on life, Facebooking, Tweeting, and working through their choices of hundreds of social networking sites. Tens of thousands of Baby Boomers are clacking out memoirs and novels of every description and genre. Websites dedicated solely to the preparation and presentation of self-published works are blossoming like my mom’s lilacs in May. We’re witnessing a supernova in the numbers of storytellers demanding our attention. So why is it that such a statistically few of us make it to press?

The answer to that question isn’t merely a matter of the writer’s aptitude for showing rather than telling, or his ability to resist the urge to explain everything, or his deft crafting of supercharged, vibrant dialogue. Nor is it a matter of simply offering a great three-arc plot and tightly-edited, attention-grabbing first five pages (thank you, Kirt Hickman). Of course, those are important precursors to publication. But today’s writer must do more—he must appeal to two generations of children raised on television shows of the Sesame Street ilk. And he must find a path to the growing numbers of readers with Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD) or Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD).

Today’s reader is more sophisticated, more world wise than her seventeenth or eighteenth century counterpart. And as a result of the growing numbers afflicted with ADD and ADHD, the same reader has a short attention span.

But beyond the increasing ADD and ADHD phenomenon, the research literature indicates the passive act of watching television actually rewires the brain, especially of those under 5 years of age. Since Sesame Street’s first showing in November of 1969, countless millions of children-now-adults have spent hours each day passively watching television. And that means there are tens of millions of folks with altered thinking processes out there trying to find something interesting to read.

A suggestion: Spend a day at Barnes & Noble scanning the bestsellers in various genres. Take a pad and pencil, and jot down your reactions to what’s hot in today’s market. Read the first two or three chapters. Open the book to the middle and read a couple of chapters there, and then read the last two. What immediately catches your attention? How many paragraphs must you read before action kicks in? Is the dialogue always grammatically correct? Is word usage up to par with your high school English teacher’s expectations, or does the author douse the pages with artistic license? How long do the sentences tend to be? Are there lots of words longer than two syllables, or few to none? How much backstory do you see in one place?

Although the answers to those questions depend entirely upon the author and his genre, paying attention to these details might help zero in on a few techniques to grab the target reader.

I’ve heard more than one published author intone the benefits of never giving up. But I’ve heard just as many admit that success is a mixture of hard work, persistence, and dumb luck. The latter is kismet, but the former two are up to the writer.

According to Andy Griffith, “Ain’t nothing easy.” Hang in there.

AnArmAndALeg72Olive Balla, author of suspense novel An Arm and a Leg, is mother of 3, grandmother to 13, great-grandmother of 4, a retired educator, and part-time professional musician. Having been everything from secretary at a used car dealership, a university student, and a high school Spanish teacher, Balla states her characters are, in part, amalgamations of people she’s met. Living with her husband Victor in the Albuquerque area, she spends her spare time in a small woodworking shop designing and building everything from breadboxes and wine racks, to a porch bench. Visit her website at omballa.com.

This article was originally published in the March 2013 issue of SouthWest Sage and is reprinted here by permission of the author.



The Writing Life: Having it All

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by Sherri Burr

SherriBurrWhen Anne-Marie Slaughter wrote “Why Women Still Can’t Have it All” in the July/August 2012 issues of The Atlantic, she caused quite a debate among women nationwide. Anne-Marie, a colleague from International Law circles, discussed her challenges of trying to balance being the first woman director of policy planning at the State Department in Washington, D.C., while her husband and 12- and 14-year-old sons remained in Princeton, New Jersey. Taking a government job proved so much more difficult for her work-family balance than her Princeton academic job of teaching, writing books, and giving speeches.

The work-family balance can challenge all of us, both women and men, whether we are married or single and whether we have children or not. It is of particular concern to anyone responsible for the bulk of the house chores necessary to keep families functional. What tipped Anne-Marie over the edge was when she took a job described as “typical for the vast majority of working women (and men), working long hours on someone else’s schedule.” From reading Anne-Marie’s article, the challenges of balancing work and family life seem to boil down to an issue of how much control you have over your time.

Unlike government, corporate or many traditional jobs, the writing life has the advantage that writers completely schedule their own hours. Even when they are on a deadline, writers decide how and when to meet the deadline.

Lucky writers can produce full time and earn a living from it, or a sufficient living combined with other income. They have the flexibility to write in the early mornings, get kids off to school, write while the kids are gone, and do household chores. If a writer has a part-time job, he or she still has a great deal of flexibility to set their own schedule.

Writers with full-time jobs where the hours are set on someone else’s schedule face a more difficult situation. They often have to rise early in the morning or stay up late to produce their work. They have to accept that producing an article or book is going to take much longer than if they could write full time. This requires discipline to write on the fringes of the day when you may be thoroughly exhausted. This kind of commitment demands a project that the writer feels called to produce. Nothing short of a feeling of a calling, and the accompanying stick-to-itiveness, will get a project done for those writers with full-time jobs and families.

I had to face this challenge head-on when my nephew Terrance moved in with me for two years to attend middle school, at a time when I had received a contract for my first book. About a month into his stay, he looked at me over dinner one day and said, “You look like you need a vacation.” From you were the words that immediately surfaced in my head. I was completely exhausted.

Soon thereafter, I spotted an ad for two seminars by parenting guru John Rosemond. I signed up for both of them, and bought his book. After listening to Rosemond extol the virtues of 1950s parenting for several hours, I came home and announced to Nephew that he would now have chores. I made a list of everything it took to keep the house running, including cleaning the house, car, and yards. I explained to Nephew that since he now lived with me he would be responsible for half of all the chores. He protested initially, but agreed after I said I would pay him a weekly allowance.

After Nephew forgot a chore, I just deducted an appropriate amount from his allowance and did the chore myself. Once his paycheck shrunk, Nephew became more careful about his responsibilities. I also taught Nephew how to cook and made him responsible for preparing several meals a week. If I got really busy, I offered to pay Nephew more if he would do some of my chores. He gladly accepted. Nephew’s help proved invaluable, and I ended up publishing two books during his stay.

Can women have it all? Can any parent have it all? It depends on how much control you have over your work and family life. A writer with a full-time job who is also the maid, cook, nanny, and gardener for the family is in for a challenge. The more help you can get both internally (by giving all able-bodied occupants chores) or externally (by hiring help), the more likely you can produce great works.

A Short and Happy Guide to Financial Well BeingSherri Burr is the Regents’ Professor of Law at the University of New Mexico School of Law where she teaches Entertainment Law, Intellectual Property Law, and Art Law. A graduate of Mount Holyoke College, Princeton University, and the Yale Law School, she has authored or co-authored 20 books, including A Short and Happy Guide to Financial Well-Being (West Academic, 2014). Sherri is also a long-time member of SouthWest Writers and a regular contributor to the organization’s newsletter SouthWest Sage.

This article was originally published in the September 2012 issue of SouthWest Sage and is reprinted here by permission of the author.



An Interview with Author Elizabeth Rose

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Elizabeth Rose was born in the foothills of the Himalaya’s during the last decade of the British Raj, but she makes her home on the other side of the world in Galisteo, New Mexico. Once a sculptor, she now funnels her creative passions into her writing. Elizabeth has received more than a dozen awards for her first book—her father’s story—Poet Under A Soldier’s Hat: An Unwilling Officer’s Adventures in the Last Years of the British Raj. Visit her website at GalisteoLiz.com.

PoetUnderASoldiersHat200What is your elevator pitch for Poet Under a Soldier’s Hat?
Based on my father’s biographical notes, Poet Under a Soldier’s Hat illustrates 100 years of British colonial Rule from 1850s to Partition in 1947 through the personal stories of one family…mine.

What do you hope readers will take away from the book?
I hope readers will see a broader picture of the British Raj than the one portrayed by Hollywood. Its people weren’t all from traditional military upper class backgrounds, but from all classes with diverse motives, who chose to devote their lives to India and her people.

What unique challenges did this work pose for you?
My father being deceased, and not knowing any of his living peers, I had no person to question or check if I had correctly portrayed the facts and his sentiments or those of the other characters. Another challenge was writing authentic sounding dialogue.

Tell us how the project came together.
About 30 years ago my father gave a typewritten copy of what he called Memoirs of an Eccentric Colonel to each of his three children. When I finally got round to reading it about 20 years later, I realized, although not publishable in that form, the historical facts, people, and places of whom we’ve all heard (but perhaps don’t know much about) were too important/fascinating not to preserve and share. Step one was to change the format from 8”x 5” English writing paper to standard format, and to edit gross typos—laborious conversion work over two years in spare moments using Omni-page on an ancient computer. I had no thought then of writing myself, just editing and perhaps publishing his notes as he had written them.

In 2009, when a writer friend suggested we should write together and critique each other’s work, we began with poems of first memories, and short stories. I found writing them so satisfying, it was then I decided to turn my father’s notes into a readable and expanded form, not a novel but as readable as one. I rearranged, cut, and embroidered the material into a logical and arced story line, and added descriptions from my own experiences of India and the Middle East. I used artistic license to weave description, dialogue, and interpretive thoughts around the actual events and people, and came up with a strong hook.

Not having written before, I joined SouthWest Writers to learn the craft through monthly morning meetings, afternoon sessions, and by entering their competitions to both build a resume and get the judges’ critiques, then rewrite as per their suggested improvements. I even resubmitted the same piece but with a different title. (As Hugh’s Footprint, the book won 3rd place in the Historical Fiction category of the 2010 SWW annual contest, and in 2012, Poet Under a Soldier’s Hat won 1st place in the Historical Novel category.)

What was the most rewarding aspect of writing Poet Under a Soldier’s Hat?
For me, the most important aspect of my writing journey was rewriting, editing, and learning little by little how to improve—person and tense use, make each chapter stand alone, show not tell, no clichés, reduce adjectives, get rid of as many “thats,” “likes,” and exclamation marks as I could. Until I joined SWW I’d never heard of a protagonist, let alone point of view, reversal, or an arc.

What was it about your father’s life that made you want to share it with the world?
The most important thing I wanted to share about my father’s life was how an unremarkable and repressed child can turn difficult, deprived circumstances into a successful, rewarding, and colorful, if unconventional, life. A sort of goal for not only me but others to never give up passion.

What did you learn about yourself from writing this book?
Despite what my repressive English boarding school taught me to believe, I was surprised to find I could write a passable sentence and how much I enjoyed the creativity of writing. So much so, I put down my chisel with a-been-there, done-that attitude never more to make sculpture, and took to writing. Not as strange as it sounds—verbal communication/non-verbal communication—two sides of the same coin to my mind.

How has your artistic nature helped you in your writing journey?
In my sculpture I deliberately avoided detail, so leaving the observer room to add their own interpretation. I’d like to bring the same respect to my writing by learning how to suggest images and situations strongly enough that I never need to tell. To me it’s as important as avoiding information dumping, something else I picked up from SWW. The other crossover I see between the arts is the freedom to create something from nothing—a bag of clay, a block of wood, canvas, and words on paper. I’ve found each medium equally satisfying.

What can fiction writers learn from nonfiction writers (or vice versa)?
Like a good fiction writer, I think a nonfiction writer has to present factual information in a riveting form, make every sentence and word choice interesting and unique. Not that I have this skill yet, but that is my goal for the prequel of Poet Under a Soldier’s Hat and all future work.

What would you do differently if you were starting your writing/publishing journey today?
I’d collected more information before choosing an editor. Weigh the options regarding self-publishing and the traditional route. In my case, being in my seventies, I decided I hadn’t the time it might take, so I went with self-publishing. My goal was not to make a million, but to get the information out there as a historical record. Again thanks to a SWW presentation, I discovered Ingram Spark and reprinted my book in a more professional way than the first edition with new format, cover, back cover, bio, etc. (having learned their importance).

If you had an unlimited budget, how would you spend your money for marketing and promotion of your book?
Money no object, I’d find a scriptwriter to convert Poet Under a Soldier’s Hat to a film script.

What writing projects are you working on now?
I am about 30,000 words into a memoir reflecting the last decade of the British Raj in India and recording my memories of that historical period. I also take mini-breaks; perhaps write a flash fiction piece, poem, or short story.

What advice do you have for discouraged writers?
I’m not one to give advice. We are all at different points in our writing journey. My advice to myself is, “Be like a Buddhist, focus on the process of the doing not the end product.” I try to write for myself, the best I can but without attachment, such as listening to critique and acting on it. I’ve found chopping a larger piece to flash fiction length and submitting to competitions, and paying for the critiques, is a great way to tighten a piece and get feedback.

KLWagoner150_2KL Wagoner (writing as Cate Macabe) is the author of This New Mountain: a memoir of AJ Jackson, private investigator, repossessor, and grandmother. She has a new speculative fiction blog at klwagoner.com and writes about memoir at ThisNewMountain.com.



On Write What You Know

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by Bentley Clark

Out of Ones Head1Write what you know. This ubiquitous advice is espoused on the first day of writing workshops, classes, and seminars all across the country. Need a story idea? Write what you know.

Story not going as planned? You must not be writing what you know. Won the Edgar Award? Congratulations, you wrote what you know.

As I’ve been polishing a short story for a contest submission, I’ve been trying to figure out what this advice means and whether or not I have successfully put it to work in my own writing.

Aged and experienced writers—whilst sitting in wing-backed chairs at their club, drinking brandy and comparing leather elbow patches—must discuss this advice on a semi-regular basis.
Someone muses about writing and knowledge and they all nod sagely. They jovially pat one another on the back and exchange the secret handshake. Oh, yes. These writers know what it means to write what you know.

Yet, for many of the rest of us, the subtle—and even the overt—meaning of “write what you know” seems open to interpretation. Some opine that the advice should be taken literally: Live in New York; write about living in New York. Grew up poor; write about growing up poor. Others assert the advice is a commandment to write about your truth-with-a-capital-T: Married to an alcoholic; write about the mutually destructive nature of co-dependence. No siblings; write about loneliness and feelings of alienation. No doubt, both approaches have led to great literature.

One of my favorite authors is a lovely, well-coiffed, happily-married, mother-of-two living in Dorset, England. She also happens to write dark psychological thrillers with disturbed main characters who perpetrate garish misdeeds. So, given this paradox, how does “write what you know” come into play in her work? Surely she doesn’t actually know how to kill a person with a scold’s bridle. Not literally anyway. Not the actual mechanics of the task. And I doubt when she was in the planning stages of her book she looked to her diary to consider which of her recently successful murders to mine for her craft. But I bet she knew what it was like to loathe a gossip monger enough to want to murder her. (And what better way to accomplish it, really, than with a scold’s bridle?)

Now, while I admit I live for the vicarious experience of doing something unseemly, something taboo, I also find myself questioning the mind that created the experience for me. With stories that contain even the hint of something untoward, I assume that the writer knows whereof they write and I fear the same.

So, imagine my surprise when a character came galumphing out of the shadows of my imagination about a year ago demanding that his rather grotesque story be told. As soon as he appeared, we had something of a come-to-Jesus-meeting, he and I. I sat him down and informed him that I was not the right person to write his story—I am a nice person from a nice family who doesn’t write about the sort of deeds he had in mind. Rather self-righteously, I also informed him that I couldn’t write his story because I don’t know a single thing about who he is or why he wants to do the things he wants to do.

His solution to the problem of my ignorance was to hound me for months. I would be sitting in the car at a stoplight and he’d tell me all about the career he wanted or about the type of girl he would date. I would be shopping at Target and as I walked past the shoe department, he would pick out the pair of shoes he couldn’t live without. In short, this character of mine was working to ensure I would have no time to myself if I didn’t put his story down on paper.

So, I opened up a new document on my computer and I wrote his story—filled with the things I know: idiosyncrasy, obsession, solitude, and a singular need to capture the world as I see it. My character had already fleshed out (no pun intended) his physical appearance and the comings and goings of his everyday life. The only gap left in my knowledge was the scientific details and consequences of his deed. Easy research.

Now, I can’t say that I have the answer to the definitive meaning of “write what you know.” But I can tell you that by infusing a character with some of my truth-with-a-capital-T, I was able to create a piece that I’m quite proud of. Even at the cost of having to research pig putrefaction.

BentleyClark125In 2011, Bentley Clark had a conversation with the character she writes about in this article. Click here to go to Anne Riley’s blog to read that exchange.

This article was originally published in the May 2012 issue of SouthWest Sage, and is reprinted here by permission of the author.

Image “Out Of One\’s Head, Relax The Brain” courtesy of thaikrit / FreeDigitalPhotos.net



From Idea to Story II: Climax & Resolution

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by Chris Eboch

AdvancedPlotting200

In my article “From Idea to Story: Situation & Complications” I talked about turning an idea into a story by breaking it down into four main parts: situation, complications, climax, and resolution. I covered the first two parts in that post. Now we get to the climax and resolution.

Can She Do It?!

Your character has faced complications through the middle of the story. Finally, at the climax, the main character must succeed or fail. Time is running out. The race is near the end. The girl is about to date another guy. The villain is starting the battle. One way or another, your complications have set up a situation where it’s now or never. However you get there, the climax will be strongest if it is truly the last chance. You lose tension if the reader believes the main character could fail this time, and simply try again tomorrow.

In my new romantic suspense novel, Rattled, the climax comes when the heroine is chained to the floor of a cave by a villain threatening to kill her and her friends. If she can escape, maybe she can stop the bad guys and save her friends. But the penalty for failure is death—the highest stake of all. Short stories, different genres, or novels for younger kids might have lesser stakes, but the situation should still be serious.

Tips

  • Don’t rush the climax. Take the time to write the scene out in vivid detail, even if the action is happening fast. Think of how movies switch to slow motion, or use multiple shots of the same explosion, in order to give maximum impact to the climax. Use multiple senses and your main character’s thoughts and feelings to pull every bit of emotion out of the scene.
  • To make the climax feel fast-paced, use mainly short sentences and short paragraphs. The reader’s eyes move more quickly down the page, giving a sense of breathless speed. (This is a useful technique for cliffhanger chapter endings as well.)

Happy Endings

The climax ends with the resolution. You could say that the resolution finishes the climax, but it comes from the situation: it’s how the main character finally meets that original challenge.

In almost all cases the main character should resolve the situation himself. No cavalry to the rescue! Today, even romance novels rarely have the hero saving the heroine; she at least helps out. We’ve been rooting for the main character to succeed, so if someone else steals the climax away from him or her, it robs the story of tension and feels unfair.

Here’s where many beginning children’s writers fail. It’s tempting to have an adult—a parent, grandparent, or teacher, or even a fairy, ghost, or other supernatural creature—step in to save the child or tell him what to do. But kids are inspired by reading about other children who tackle and resolve problems. It helps them believe that they can meet their challenges, too. When adults take over, it shows kids as powerless and dependent on grownups. So regardless of your character’s age, let your main character control the story all the way to the end (though others may assist).

Although your main character should be responsible for the resolution, she doesn’t necessarily have to succeed. She might, instead, realize that her goals have changed. The happy ending then comes from her new understanding of her real needs and wants. Some stories may even have an unhappy ending, where the main character’s failure acts as a warning to readers. This is more common in literary novels than in genre fiction.

Tip

How the main character resolves the situation—whether she succeeds or fails, and what rewards or punishments she receives—will determine the theme. To help focus your theme, ask yourself:

  • What am I trying to accomplish?
  • Who am I trying to reach?
  • Why am I writing this?

Once you know your theme, you know where the story is going and how it must be resolved. For example, a story with the theme “Love conquers all” would have a different resolution than a story with the theme “Love cannot always survive great hardship.”

The next time you have a great idea but can’t figure out what to do with it, see if you have all four parts of the story. If not, see if you can develop that idea into a complete, dramatic story or novel by expanding your idea, complications, climax or resolution, as needed. Then readers will be asking you, “Where did you get that fabulous idea?”

BanditsPeak150Chris Eboch writes fiction and nonfiction for all ages. In Bandits Peak, a teenage boy meets strangers hiding on the mountains and gets drawn into their crimes, until he risks his life to expose them. The Eyes of Pharaoh is an action-packed mystery set in ancient Egypt. The Genie’s Gift is an Arabian Nights-inspired fantasy adventure. In The Well of Sacrifice, a Mayan girl in ninth-century Guatemala rebels against the High Priest who sacrifices anyone challenging his power. Her writing craft books include You Can Write for Children: How to Write Great Stories, Articles, and Books for Kids and Teenagers and Advanced Plotting.

Learn more at www.chriseboch.com or her Amazon page, or check out her writing tips at her Write Like a Pro! blog. Sign up for her Workshop newsletter for classes and critique offers.

Chris also writes novels of suspense and romance for adults under the name Kris Bock; read excerpts at www.krisbock.com.

This article was originally published in the May 2011 issue of SouthWest Sage and is reprinted here by permission of the author.



What the Right Comparison Can Do for Your Story

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by Kirt Hickman

A picture is worth a thousand words (pardon the cliché, but it’s true). Good fiction draws the reader away from his mundane life and transports him to a world of wonder wholly different from his own. Whether this difference is physical, cultural, psychological, or situational, metaphors and similes can help bring your fictional world to life.

Description

When you use these comparisons, you draw a mental picture that relates an element of your story to something within the reader’s realm of experience. In the following example, several characters in my science fiction novel, Worlds Asunder, cross an open expanse of the Moon’s surface.

…the four of them made a dash for the building. They ran side by side. In the Moon’s gravity, they rose slowly with each stride and returned to the ground just as slowly, only to bounce again and again until they reached their destination.

This passage contains a detailed description of how my characters run in low gravity. It tries to invoke an image that will bring my setting to life and show how the Moon is different from Earth. The problem is, I’ve used so many words that by the time the reader gets to the end of the description, he no longer cares about the image. He just wants to get on with the story. Comparing the characters’ motion to something familiar can invoke the desired image more clearly, and with fewer words, than literal description:

…the four of them made a dash for the building, bounding up and down in a ragged line, like so many horses on a merry-go-round.

Taking the merry-go-round out of context, putting it on the Moon, and using it to describe running makes the comparison unexpected. I’ve used a familiar object to show how my setting differs from the reader’s here and now.

Yet I can improve the passage further. The word “building” lacks description. How big is this building? What does it look like? I’ve missed an opportunity to remind the reader that I’ve taken him to another world. In an earlier scene, I described the building like this:

The habitation dome was maybe a hundred meters in diameter with the semi-cylindrical protrusion of the equipment garage on one side, the only obvious entrance to the structure.

Can you picture the building? What if I add this sentence:

From afar, it looked like a giant igloo on a vast stretch of dirty ice.

The comparison solidifies the image. In Worlds Asunder, I refer back to this description in the merry-go-round scene by changing the word “building” to “igloo”:

…the four of them made a dash for the igloo, bounding up and down in a ragged line, like so many horses on a merry-go-round.

Emotion

You can use comparisons to invoke emotion. The following passage describes the wreckage of a crashed space ship:

…the fuselage came into view, jutting skyward from the flat terrain, surrounded by sparkling debris.

Perhaps this invokes an image, but a couple of well-drawn comparisons will enhance the emotional impact.

…the fuselage came into view, jutting skyward from the flat terrain like a solitary tombstone in a garden of glittering metal.

When the fuselage becomes a tombstone in a garden, it forms the emotional image of death. It reminds the reader of something he already knows: a body lies here, probably inside the fuselage. The viewpoint character is approaching a grave.

Viewpoint

Comparisons can express an idea or a character’s viewpoint more effectively than direct narrative.

…a tremendous pop reverberated through the cavernous hangar from the huge doors in front of the cockpit window. The squeal of the unused rollers filtered into the cabin like a scream of protest against this change in military posture…

This passage doesn’t specify what the change in military posture is. Nevertheless, when I use “scream of protest” to describe a simple sound, I don’t have to tell the reader how the viewpoint character feels about the change.

Use Comparisons Carefully

Look for opportunities to use comparisons in your fiction, but don’t overdo it. A well-placed comparison that invokes the right image, at the right time, will enrich your story. But if every paragraph contains one, you’ll force too many unrelated images upon the reader. Your own world will get lost among them.

Beware misused, imprecise, or cliché comparisons. Misused or imprecise comparisons can confuse your reader, and cliché comparisons will have no emotional impact.

WorldsAsunder125_2Kirt Hickman is a technical writer turned fiction author. His books include three sci-fi thriller novels Worlds Asunder (2008), Venus Rain (2010) and Mercury Sun (2014), the high fantasy novel Fabler’s Legend (2011), and the writers’ how-to Revising Fiction: Making Sense of the Madness (2009).

This article was originally published in the February 2008 issue of SouthWest Sage, and is reprinted here by permission of the author.



An Interview with E. H. Hackney

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E. H. “Hack” Hackney is a retired engineer turned fantasy writer who lives on the east slopes of the Sandia Mountains of New Mexico. His articles and essays have appeared in East Mountain Living magazine, Albuquerque the Magazine, East Mountain Telegraph, The Independent, and SouthWest Sage. He published his first novel By the Blood, Book One: Revelation in 2013 under the pen name Geoffrey Ganges. You can find Hack on his websites at EHHackney.com and GeoffreyGanges.com, and on Twitter at @ehhackney and Facebook at E. H. Hackney, writer.

By_The_Blood200What is your elevator pitch for By the Blood, Book One: Revelation?
Quint is a wizard and healer—and a dwarf, abandoned by his mother as an infant and tortured by his stunted, distorted body. By accident he discovers that the Torg, an ancient enemy of his people, are returning. While he and his apprentice are drawn into a dangerous quest to find the Torg, Quint begins to discover his own history. As the wizard confronts his origins his world is shaken. He doesn’t know that of all the dangers he faces his own heritage may be the most deadly.

What unique challenges did this work pose for you?
The biggest challenge was creating this world and making it and the characters believable. It is a fantasy, so there’s magic, but I tried to make everything, including the magic, genuine and rooted in nature. My goal was to set it in a real place you would like to visit, populated with characters and creatures you would want to meet.

What was the most rewarding aspect of writing it?
Regardless of sales and reviews, writing a book is an achievement. That is a reward in itself. Most rewarding is that a number of readers have enjoyed the book and get what I’m trying to do.

Tell us more about how By the Blood came together.
The seed of the novel was the first chapter of the book, which was to be a short story. When I got into it, I realized there was a great deal more to tell. I didn’t know it would be a trilogy until halfway through the book. It took a year and a half to reach a version I was willing to show my first readers. That’s a long time, but I was writing a book and learning how to write a book at the same time (and still am). A little less than a year passed between sending drafts to my first readers to completing the final version.

Some of my characters surprised me along the way. For example, I didn’t know Quint, my main character, had a lopsided walk until I saw him walking in my mind. That’s one of the reasons I don’t develop extensive character profiles beforehand. I don’t really know the characters until I see them in action and involved with other people, even animals.

The development of the story surprised me, too. Once I realized By the Blood was going to be book length, I developed a complete outline down to brief descriptions of each scene. The first half of the book mostly followed the outline, but the last part changed drastically. I tried writing an outline of the second book of the trilogy and failed. Now I don’t feel like I am inventing the story, but that it is being revealed to me as I write.

How has your experience with nonfiction/technical writing helped with your fiction? What did you have to learn in order to write fantasy?
I was an engineer in a previous life and contributed to many proposals to government agencies. Proposals are page limited, so you need to make your words count. The second thing that carried over from my earlier work is to strive for clarity. Regardless of how brilliant your ideas might be, they will be lost on your readers (or proposal reviewers) if they don’t understand them. The one thing I’m learning now is to trust my instincts. As an engineer I planned and worked with reason and logic. I relied mostly on my technical ability. Now, writing fiction, it is hard for me to trust in my creativity (or that I have any).

What are you most happy with in your writing, and what do you struggle with most?
When I think about By the Blood, there are a number of scenes I still feel very good about. There are some scenes with humor that I had fun writing and I hope people get. What I struggle with most is fear of failure—those times when I ask myself, “Who do I think I am, trying to write a book? Who would ever read this drivel?”

Does music play a part in your creative process?
I feel a kinship between music and writing. Sometimes I can see rhythm and tempo in dialog, or in short or long paragraphs, or short vs. long sentences. I can sometimes see theme and variation, one of the foundations of music, in writing—varying words with similar meanings or changing word order.

Why did you decide to use a pen name?
My full name is Ewing Haywood Hackney. There was no form of that name that sounded like a good author’s name to me, especially for a fantasy. I have used the nickname, Hack, for half a century, but that was no help. Geoffrey Ganges sounded like a good name for a fantasy author. Also, I have started two action-adventure books, a young adult novel and a contemporary morality book, and have written several short stories. If I were to publish in another genre, I would want a different pen name, anyhow.

What writing projects are you working on now?
I am 80,000 words into the first draft of Book Two of By the Blood. I am also working on what might be called a self-help book, about how to live life. It is the closest I have come to writing a journal. I doubt if it will ever be published, but if it is, the subtitle will be “Life lessons from seventy years of dumb decisions, most of which seemed like good ideas at the time.”

KLWagoner150_2KL Wagoner (writing as Cate Macabe) is the author of This New Mountain: a memoir of AJ Jackson, private investigator, repossessor, and grandmother. She has a new speculative fiction blog at klwagoner.com and writes about memoir at ThisNewMountain.com.



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