Tip O'Day #382 - Writing is Hard Work

Guest blogger Jennifer Harlow says, “Oh, @%&^!”

She's done. The weeks of research, the months of writing, the weeks of typing, the month of editing, it's all done. She is ready to be read by my wonderful Beta testers who will see how splendiferous she is and confirm I am the genius I always knew I was. Huzzah!

Three Weeks Later...

Oh, @%&^. They hated it. They really hated it. They thought the main character was annoying. The male lead was too perfect (meaning no real man would act like that). I kept switching between too much description and too much telling and not showing. The entire first fifty pages were dull and redundant. And the grammar. Oy!

“Didn't they teach you anything at the baby Ivy college your father and I took out a second mortgage on our house so you could attend?” my mother asked. (Yes, that watching Frat boys play beer pong is not how I want to spend my Friday nights, thank you very much).

Well, did you like anything? “Yes. The chapter titles were funny.”

Anything else? “ I liked the character names.”

@%&^!

What do you do when what you've written the first time around isn't that great? Me, there was vodka and three Real Housewives marathons involved. (Kidding about the vodka.) It's hard hearing criticism about something that you spent so much time and effort on. When they're telling me their constructive criticism, I try to put on a brave face while inside I'm considering skewering them with a fireplace poker. (Once again kidding. It was a machete.) Then I watch more Real Housewives, calm down, and think about what they've said and the suggestions they give.

Like how to make the hero less of an archetype. Make the heroine have faults instead of her being little miss perfect. See how much of the beginning can be cut away without losing the characterization and world building you presented in those pages to get to the action quicker. Use a thesaurus as much as possible. When in doubt, use a comma. Really ask if you need to describe the leaves on all the trees. Then put on your big girl pants and get back to work. (Unless there's a Real Housewives of Atlanta on. Love me some Kim and NeNe.) With every word on the page ask if this is the best choice. Sound like fun? About as much fun as Andy Cohen has at the Housewives reunions. (I think I have a problem.)

Writing is @%&^#*! hard work. Most of my books have gone through at least five edits before I even present it to my agent, who does one more. Right now I'm on the third of the steampunk book I wrote, Verity Hart Vs. The Vampyres, cutting the first chapter entirely, working eight hours on the current first chapter, twelve on the second, and so on. My main character went from Cher Horowitz in Clueless to a pretty version of Jane Eyre. My hero now smokes, drinks, cusses, and is rude. There is more red ink on the pages than black. As it should be. Nothing comes out of the gate perfect, but if you're smart enough and trust in your skills and vision, it can certainly get pretty darn close.

Publishers are tough. I once got rejected because two character names were too similar and the reader got confused. So though it may hurt, and take for-bloody-ever, editing is probably the most important part of writing. I've learned that 80% of the time my Beta testers are right. As long as you have the backbone of the story and halfway decent characters with potential, then all is not lost. Most things can be fixed. And after all the hard work and tears, in the end you get this...

Jennifer Harlow is the author of Mind Over Monsters, the first in the F.R.E.A.K.S. Squad series (out now) and To Catch a Vampire (out in September 2012). To learn more, check out her website.

Tip O'Day #216 - How to Begin

Guest blogger Gary Ponzo on starting your story.

There was a time when people would ride their horse for days to travel a hundred miles. A trip to China and back could take months. Back then writers could take 3-4 chapters to develop their characters, revealing their idiosyncrasies, their flaws, their motives. Those days are long gone. Our lifestyle has changed so much, waiting for a light to turn green could easily mutate into road rage. While Twitter, Facebook and texting have caused our attention spans to shorten, our children's brains are actually being developed to handle the fast pace.

So readers no longer have the patience for long introductions. Certain literary fiction might have some immunity to the modern, frantic pace, but if you're writing any type of commercial fiction, you'd better upload the tension.

How do you do it? With great care - not tricks or gimmicks like the protagonist waking from a nightmare as he's about to be slaughtered. What will work, however, is anything with tension. And I don't mean it has to be a freight train bearing down on our hero. It could be as simple as a missed phone call the protagonist desperately wanted to hear. Use intrigue to lead us to the next line, then make sure the next line leads us into more questions. Resist the temptation to answer everything too fast. That's what keeps the reader reading.

Lee Child's first Jack Reacher novel, KILLING FLOOR, began with "I was arrested in Eno's Diner." Of course it begs the question, why was he arrested? Why does he seem so casual about it? My favorite opening line came from an old Jules Shear song, "I've never seen the weapon, but I know the prints are mine." Isn't that a great opening? I've tried for years to use that line, but never found the story to go with it. Maybe I never will. But one thing is for sure, I'll probably never open with something that doesn't cause the reader to ask, "Why is she in that predicament?"

Hopefully, neither will you.

BTW, here’s the opening line from Gary’s second novel, A TOUCH OF REVENGE: “The bullet left the sniper’s rifle at 3,000 feet per second.”

Tip O'Day for Authors #173

Guest blogger Freddie Remza on where to start.

I once was told that after writing a good portion of your story, stop and ask yourself, "Where does the story take off?" Once you decide on that, make it your first chapter. It works! I'm currently writing a novel and I ended up starting the story with my Chapter 3.

Tip O'Day #17

Make sure your first page engages the reader.

You walk into a book store (for future readers – a retail establishment selling words printed on paper). You pick up a book and turn to page one. You might read for 30 seconds or so, maybe 15-20 lines of text, to see if the prose has any appeal. Sometimes that's all it takes - Grisham's "A Time to Kill" had me hooked from the first few lines.

So that's the test: does the prose intrigue us? Does it set up a dramatic or humorous situation, a unique character, or a fascinating locale? Does the author have a Voice that grabs us by the collar and won't let go? Is there some intangible quality to the writing style that we've admired in other books? For a real eye-opener, check out the one-page posts on WeBook website. Some are awesome but it’s amazing how other wannabe authors can fill a page with word after word and yet NOTHING HAPPENS. For some amazing examples of first paragraphs, check out Nate Bransford’s “finalists” blog post – link is to the right.

Allow me to inflict upon you an early version of the opening for my crime thriller, "Montana is Burning”. I don't have the emotional distance to tell whether this is any good, but my aim was to intrigue the reader with an interesting protagonist, locale and situation.

Paul Longo eased his lanky frame into a chair at the New Accounts desk and waited for the statuesque blonde – Elizabeth from her nametag – to get off the phone. Her shimmering emerald dress clung to all the right places. Paul didn’t mind the wait. He looked around the lobby. A small bank for a small town. Some of the windows had the bluish, dimpled look of antique glass. The pressed tin ceiling looked authentic, suggesting the building was a hundred years old or more.

The guy pushing through the copper-and-glass doors didn’t seem the slightest bit authentic. A little man, maybe five-foot-four and 130 pounds, who looked full of meth. Bulging eyes flicked nervously around the lobby, and one cheek twitched a furious beat. Still had prison pallor from his most recent stint. Both hands jammed deep in the pockets of a down vest, despite the unusual autumn heat.

Detective Paul Longo slipped the 44 caliber Super Redhawk from the shoulder holster and dangled it behind his chair. The end of its nearly ten-inch barrel touched the floor.

Showing "A Typical Day"

At the first writers conference I ever attended, I had the opportunity to have a literary agent critique the first 50 pages of my premier novel. It started with action, just as a hundred other writers had suggested, but the agent didn't like that. I needed to show what a typical day was for the protagonist, she said, and do a better job establishing the setting. So I went back to the computer and did exactly that.

Ever since, everybody who's looked at my story says the same thing: start with action and knock off all the description.

Okay, okay, back to the opening scene where the flawed detective is sitting in the bank lobby when a meth-fueled robber walks in. But when you buy Montana is Burning, this is the descriptive, textured opening you will miss:

An Indian kid was dead, and nobody seemed to care except a lawyer barely old enough to shave.

Detective Paul Longo looked across the street at a storefront law office. Main Street in Kintla stretched all of ten blocks, and nothing much moved in either direction this autumn afternoon. Just dust and a dry wind. Paint blisters pockmarked the brooding gray edifice opposite Paul, revealing previous incarnations of chocolate brown and light blue.

The town straddled both banks of a river on the floor of a narrow valley, so the cigar box building stood stark against lodge pole pine and western larch that swept up the foothills from a mere three blocks away. Years ago, somebody had removed the large letters that ran across the second story of the stucco facade but hadn’t bothered to repaint, so the outline was still clear: Woolworth’s. On the right side of the building, a sign said Kowboy Kafe, but that door had been boarded up for years. On the left, amateurish gold lettering on the plate-glass frontage proclaimed the law office of Kevin Waagel, Esquire, the attorney retained by the tribe to look into violent or suspicious deaths, on or off the nearby reservation.

Paul pushed back the new Stetson and wiped his forehead dry. He liked the hat, a present his first day on the job from Sheriff Clyde Frye. The only nice thing anyone in Mullen County had done for him so far.

He sighed, wondering again at the wisdom of his move to Montana. A glance at his watch -- twenty minutes early for his deposition. He decided to take care of some business he’d been putting off for a month. The office of Kevin Waagel, Esquire, would still be there when he finished.

A Mullen County patrol car pulled up to the curb across the street. A deputy sheriff climbed out and nailed a sign to a telephone pole reading Re-elect Sheriff Frye. One block north, another deputy rounded the corner and stopped to pound a Holland for Sheriff sign into the library’s front lawn.

Paul shook his head and started toward Kintla State Bank.

Five minutes later, he eased into a chair at the New Accounts desk and waited for the statuesque blonde to notice him. It took awhile, what with her chatting on the phone while she rasped an emery board across a fingernail. Her shimmering emerald dress clung to all the right places. Paul didn’t mind the wait.

The tempo in these small towns, he mused, took some getting used to. Back in Phoenix, a bank would pink-slip any employee that didn’t handle the required number of transactions in the requisite time with fewer than the allowable amount of errors. This quiet valley in northwest Montana ran at a different pace than Paul had grown up with. The important things got done but with fewer ulcers in the process.

The blonde ended her conversation. Blue eyes sparkled as she pasted on her best customer service smile, but it seemed a shade brittle. I save my warmth for people who don’t sit down uninvited, the smile said.

“Elizabeth, I’d like to open a checking account.”

“Do I know you?” She wrinkled her nose. “I think I’d remember someone as tall as you and--”

“And with a nose like a hatchet, I’m not so easy to forget.” He pointed at the nameplate on her desk.

“Oh.”

“Anyway, I’m getting paid next week and figured I should put my check someplace safe. A bank came to mind.” He reached past the shoulder holster into his blazer’s inside breast pocket and pulled out a fifty. “This can start things off, until I get my first paycheck.”

Elizabeth tried her smile again. “New to the valley?”

“Been here long enough to get all my clothes out of cardboard boxes. About four weeks.”

“Goodness, how ever did you last that long without a checking account?”

Paul shrugged. “Mostly use cash.”

Her brows bunched together.

"I work for the Sheriff, Elizabeth. Believe me, cash is perfectly legal.”

“You’re that new detective, aren’t you?” The pleasure of discovery lit her face yet a shadow lurked in her eyes. Paul wondered what she’d heard. The new detective with all the big-city ideas? The one who acted too good for the local cops? The square peg?

She tapped a couple times on her computer keyboard and began taking Paul’s vital statistics, seemingly glad to be in safe territory. He answered automatically as he glanced around the historic building. With a pressed-tin ceiling, the bank must have been at least seventy-five years old, maybe a hundred. Some of the windows had the bluish, dimpled look of antique glass. The main doors were sheathed in copper both inside and out, maybe from the mines in Butte, and Paul guessed the appearance of Old-World craftsmanship was authentic.

Then a man walked through those same doors. He didn’t look one bit authentic.

The Opening Chapter

Nate Bransford is a literary agent in California, and is both a brilliant and dedicated blogger. This week he has a guest blogger, Valerie Kemp, who did an insightful post on the characteristics of a novel's first chapter. Here's an excerpt from that post:

The Hunger Games - In the first chapter of The Hunger Games we get to see Katniss' everyday world. We learn about the Hunger Games and the Reaping and the high chance that Gale and Katniss will be picked. We see that Katniss is responsible and protective of her sister, Prim, whose name is in the Reaping for the first time. And in the very last sentence of the chapter there's a shock as Prim's name is called.

This is a GREAT end of a first chapter. As a reader we're left with a sense of dread. We know what Katniss must do, and we know that we're in for an exciting ride because we're going to experience the Hunger Games with Katniss. We're also introduced to the mechanics of Collin's writing - cliffhanger chapters. Both with story and with structure, she has shown us what to expect, and how to read her book. And she delivers.

Now imagine if The Hunger Games started differently. What if the first chapter was an ordinary day at school for Katniss, followed by time at home with her family, and hanging out with Gale. Suzanne Collins could've started there and gone into greater detail about Katniss' troubled relationship with her mom, given us more history on the District, how life in The Seam works, etc. She could've had the Reaping happen in chapter 3. By then we might be expecting the book to be a family drama or something else completely unrelated to a reality show about teens fighting to the death. If Collins had started her book this way, she probably would've lost a lot of readers. I know I would've been flipping back to the cover over and over again, wondering when these supposedly awesome Hunger Games were going to start. I probably would've put the book down before the action started and picked up something else.