Category Archives: The Fictorians

Waiting for the Muse?

Craft & Skills Mary Pletsch The Writing Life 3 Comments

The romantic image of a writer is often that of a solitary genius, communing with his muse and waiting for inspiration to strike.  When it does, he writes like a fiend, hammering out a fantastic story in a mad rush of glory.   And, yes, I’ve had the experience of waking in the middle of the night with a burning urge to write and a story that won’t let me be until I’ve recorded it in its entirety.  The fire of inspiration is an amazing experience, obsessive and surreal and fantastic.

But, like many of life’s other marvels, it’s not an everyday occurrence.

Anyone aspiring to be a professional writer cannot afford the time to wait for a muse to slap him upside the head and tell him to start writing her story already.  What does one do with one’s time while one waits?  If you’re anything like me, you get caught up in the hustle and bustle of the daily grind, fritter away your spare time with other hobbies, and then, on New Year’s, realize that the only thing you wrote all year was that one story from that one weekend where you couldn’t sleep because the muse had taken control of you.  That was the year I realized I wanted to write, professionally, and also the year when I realized that waiting around for inspiration was not the way to meet my goal.

If writing is a hobby for you (and that’s okay if it is-I know people who write, well, but prefer to direct their time and passion elsewhere much of the time) then it’s perfectly fine to wait until you’re really in the mood for some writing.  But if you hope to make a career of writing, to be a professional writer as opposed to writing solely for personal pleasure, then you can’t afford to wait for the muse to strike.   You need a body of work that you can shop around to publishers, agents, markets.   To create those stories, you need to make writing a habit.

Set aside time on a regular basis to write.  Prioritize writing-don’t cut short your writing time for socializing, housework, or other hobbies.  Create space and time in your life to write and use it.  If you’re stuck on one part of a story, try another part-or another story.  What you’re writing is not as important as the fact that you’re writing.  You’ll find out that the more you write, the easier it is to write; the less you write, the harder it is to get started or keep the momentum going.

Yes, inspiration has its place.  There are times when I’ve needed to set a story aside and spend some time thinking in order to get a grasp of a character’s motivations, to pick between two or more alternate plot twists (each of which would lead the story to a radically different ending), or to stop a short story from bloating itself into a novella by picking out what themes and ideas are the vitally important ones.  There are times I’ve needed to sleep on it, clear my mind by doing something other than writing, or hope to be ambushed by my muse in the shower or while making dinner.  Stories, after all, are powered by ideas.  But we cannot wait for an idea so strong that it wrests control from us; such ideas are too few and far between.  Instead, we need to make writing a habit, in order to create fertile ground for new ideas to be born.

Stop Talking and Tell Me Something: Using the Dialogue Scene

Character Craft & Skills First Drafts Leigh Galbreath Rewriting The Writing Life 2 Comments

Let’s face it. Dialogue is the bane of many a writer learning the craft. We overuse it. We unnecessarily pretty it up. Frankly, we overthink it.

The talking part isn’t really all that difficult. We all know how to talk. The only thing you really need to do if you’re having trouble writing realistic conversation is to listen to real life. A nice trick is to record a conversation between real people and play it back, writing it down word for word. Scenes from movies work well for this, too.

You’ll learn pretty quick that with spoken dialogue, less is more.

The truth is that most of the dialogue shouldn’t be spoken. The majority of communication between human beings happens through body language, part of that elusive phenomenon we like to call subtext. Even when we’re not talking, we’re still having a dialogue. In fact, people tend to believe a speaker’s body language over what they’re saying. This, I think, is why it’s so difficult to write a story only using dialogue. Real people need context to fully understand the meaning of what’s being said.

Think about it. You’re main character’s girlfriend is telling her about a conflict at work. While your main character is responding to the girlfriend as if she’s listening to every word in a tone that says she cares, she’s also watching a little boy play with a toy two tables down. Does your main character really care about what her girlfriend is saying? Not really, or she would give her complete attention to the conversation.

What about the protagonist who can’t keep his eyes off the gorgeous woman in red across the room, even though he tells his date he’s not interested in her? Which do you believe-the glances or the words?

Once you understand how this works, it’s a great tool to help you stay engaged in the writing and keep the words flowing. Let’s face it, it’s so much more interesting to write a scene where people are being active, and character’s talking to each other is the most engaging activity in most novels. It’s a fantastic source of conflict, especially when someone’s words don’t match their body language.

Take the first example above. Our main character isn’t really paying attention to her girlfriend, and the girlfriend knows it. She gets irritated and calls our main character on it. Maybe there’s someone at the table next to theirs who is paying a little too much attention even though he’s not saying a word. In the second example, the protagonist’s date isn’t stupid. She knows her man has his eye on the woman in red. And maybe that gorgeous stranger has noticed it, too.

You can do all kinds of things to kick-start a flagging plot by introducing a dialogue scene. It’s where the characters figure things out and mess things up. It’s where they proclaim love and outright lie. It’s where characters show themselves even when their words say otherwise.

Your story, after all, isn’t about car chases or sword fights. It isn’t about the nefarious scheme your villain has hatched. Your story is about the people dealing with all that, and people don’t live in a vacuum or always agree with each other. They don’t always act rationally or know what they’re doing, and while it’s possible to show this in narrative, that can get boring for you and the reader. Get one or more other characters in the room to show it through dialogue and bring the situation out of the character’s head and into the real world. You’ll be amazed what can happen.

Why Revising is a good thing.

Craft & Skills Guest Posts Writing Tools 4 Comments

Guest Post by Dan Wells

Congratulations! You finished NaNoWriMo this year–a 50,000-word novel in just one month. Maybe it’s a full story, or maybe it’s just a beginning; maybe you printed out the little diploma and hung it on your wall, or maybe you didn’t even finish. Maybe you didn’t even do NaNoWriMo this year, but you have a book left over from last year, or a book that you wrote without any connection to NaNoWriMo at all. The point is, you wrote a book. Hooray! That’s a step most people never even make it to, and you’ve done it. Good for you.

Now it’s time to go back and make it better.

“Revision” is, for a lot of writers, a scary word. You may think I’m trying to give you a bunch of extra work. You may think I’m telling you that the book you wrote doesn’t count, and that you have to write the whole thing again. You may even think that the book you wrote is brilliant and doesn’t need to be revised at all. Rest assured that your book IS brilliant, and it DOES count, but that you need to revise it anyway. Revision is something that a lot of aspiring writers balk at, but experienced, professional writers never question. It is our very best friend, and, quite frankly, one of the primary reasons we are professional writers. Revision is a magical process that will turn your finished book into an excellent book; it will take your brilliant story and refine it in a way that will help everyone recognize its brilliance. Think of the recipe for your favorite food: even if you have all the right ingredients, the dish won’t turn out like you want it unless you combine them in exactly the right way–and even if the flavor is perfect, the best chefs will spend just as much time on presentation and serving, making sure that every aspect of the meal is perfect.

Or, to make things easier, I can sum up that entire paragraph in one sentence: your first draft is for what you want to say, and your final draft is for how you want to say it.

The revision process starts with distance. Remove yourself from your writing for a while–a few days, a few weeks, a few months, whatever it takes to give yourself a fresh perspective when you come back to it later. Work on other projects, read other books, and cleanse your mental palate. If you have someone willing to read your work, give them the manuscript so you can get some outside feedback. The purpose of this step is to help yourself see the book for what it is, not for what you think it is. Inside your mind you have an idealized view of the story you wanted to tell–you know what emotions you wanted to create, what reactions you wanted to elicit in the reader, and which parts of the story would be exciting or romantic or scary or sad. While you were writing it, you saw it the way you wanted it to be. Other people–and yourself, with enough distance–don’t have that idealized view, and they’ll see your story for what it really is. When you give yourself distance and come back with fresh eyes, you can compare the story on the page to the story in your head and figure out which parts worked and which parts missed the mark. WARNING: most of it missed the mark. I can tell you that without even reading it, because that happens every time, and it happens with every author. The more you write, and the more you develop your skills, the better your first drafts will be, but even your very favorite writers write bad first drafts. They do it all the time. I do it myself. The trick is to not let it get you down–don’t get depressed, don’t give up, just use this as an opportunity to fix what’s wrong. Again, think of a chef: when she tastes her latest creation and realizes there’s not enough salt, she doesn’t close her restaurant and move away and never cook again, she adds more salt. You’re not here to agonize over your problems, you’re here to solve them.

Step two, of course, is to look really closely at the problems you found in step one, and figuring out exactly what’s causing them. To continue the metaphor, step one is where you taste the food and realize something’s wrong; step two is where you figure out that it’s wrong because it doesn’t have enough salt. Like all things, this comes with practice, but you can start that practice by asking the right questions. It’s not enough to say “this book is bad,” you have to ask yourself why it’s bad. Is it boring? Are the characters unlikable? Is it hard to understand? Maybe your helpful friend who read the book told you he couldn’t figure out why the characters were doing what they were doing. Your job, as the author, is to look at those characters and their actions with a discerning eye: do they have good reasons for what they’re doing? Do those reasons connect as logically to their actions as you thought they did when you wrote it? Are those reasons clear in your mind but never really presented well on the page? Say the book is boring: does the reader have good reasons to care about what’s happening? Does the reader like the characters enough to be invested in their problems? Does the reader have all the information they need to be ready for the climaxes and the cliffhangers and the big emotional payoffs? No matter what the larger problems might be, you can dig underneath and find the specific issues that are causing them.

Once you’ve identified specific issues, step three is to figure out how to solve them. Let’s look at character motivations again: your readers (and perhaps even yourself, if you’ve created enough distance from the manuscript) are confused about why the main character is doing what he’s doing, and you’ve determined that this is because his motivations are never properly explained. There are many, many, many ways to solve this, and you need to figure out which is the right one. Do you just add a few lines of inner monologue where he explains himself? Maybe several lines, scattered throughout the book, where he reaffirms his personal beliefs? Maybe you need a new scene–the bad guys do something that affects the main character personally, so he has a clear and visible reason for opposing them. Maybe you need to add a new character: a dependent who the bad guys can hurt, or a buddy that the main character can talk to, or a romantic interest that will give the main character something to fight for. Maybe your character’s motivations rely on some key piece of knowledge she didn’t have access to in the first draft: oops! Figure out how to give her that knowledge, maybe with a mentor/traveler/newscaster/whatever who can explain it to her, or a scene of investigation or accidental discovery where she can learn it for herself.

It all boils down to this: when you look at your book critically and identify its weaknesses, you can drill deep down into what’s causing those weaknesses and figure out exactly how to make your book better. Once you’ve cleaned up the storytelling, you can do the same thing with the writing: polishing it and refining it until it’s not just good, but great. Learn how to revise, and your writing will become better than you ever imagined.

Dan Wells has a new book coming out in March called FRAGMENTS, the sequel to PARTIALS; it’s a post-apocalypse SF story about a group of plague survivors trying to rebuild civilization.  Also check out his e-novella called ISOLATION that’s kind of sort of a prequel to the series and takes place several years before the apocalypse.

Bio: Dan Wells lives in Germany with his wife and five kids. Why Germany? Why not? He writes a lot of stories, reads a lot of books, plays a lot of boardgames, and eats a lot of food, which is pretty much the ideal life he imagined for himself as a child.

What if? – Two words to unlock inspiration

Craft & Skills Frank Morin Writing Tools 8 Comments

Have you ever had a great idea for a story that thrilled you with the possibilities, only to struggle to develop it into a fully realized manuscript?  You have that scene that burns so bright in your mind, but just can’t seem to expand it into a full novel, or that character you know as intimately as yourself, but lacks the right scenes to shine? Or, maybe you just finished a work and you’re searching for the next big idea, but aren’t sure where to start?

Whatever stage of your project you happen to find yourself struggling in, there’s a simple yet powerful tool you can always turns to for inspiration.

The “What if?” game.

This game casts you beyond all bounds, out into the realm of pure imagination. There are no limitations, no hesitation. No idea is too crazy, no disaster too terrifying that you cannot consider it. Don’t hold back when playing the “What if?” game. Ask yourself, “what’s the worst possible thing that could happen in this scene, or to this character?” and then explore the possible answers.

The results can be a little scary. We need to torture our heroes, but sometimes we cringe back from the awful reality of just how bad we can make things for them. Or we hesitate because if we follow the newly illuminated road our ideas have revealed, it’ll mean a lot of mental struggle to figure out how to guide the heroes through the new difficulties to their eventual triumph.

Don’t hold back.

These are exactly the moments to take a second look and ask “what if?” again. That new, twisted, crazy idea might just be what our story needs to drive it from mediocrity to excellence. It might require more work on our part, it might torture our characters until we cry out with them, it may challenge assumptions we’ve made.

It may be awesome.

Of course, it may kill our story too by taking it off a cliff. In that case, discard that idea, ask “what if?” again, and explore a different road.

Sometimes we play the “what if?” game in the middle of free-writing a scene, when we’re struck by a sudden burst of inspiration and type a few lines that veer the story off the expected course. Again, we need to explore it, consider it, and decide if it was a false start or an exciting new twist.

In one manuscript, I wrote a scene where one character’s powerful magical weapon, which was critical to the plot, unexpectedly fell into the sea and was lost. I hadn’t planned it, but while writing the scene, I realized this was the worst thing that could happen, and I wrote it. The resulting scene became more powerful by entire magnitudes, although it left me quite literally shaking from the shock. At first I wanted to delete it, to shy away from the disaster I’d revealed, but that would have weakened the story and been the easy way out. Eventually, I figured out how to deal with it, and the story proved the stronger for it.

Recently I played the “What if?” game with a friend to explore the deep back story of a current work in progress, and after traveling far afield, we came up with some wonderful ideas I never would have considered without casting myself out into the world of limitless possibilities opened through “What if?”. Those answers now tie in aspects of the plot that were hanging a bit loose, and the resulting whole is consistent and far more powerful.

What experiences have you had with the “What if?” game? If you’ve never tried it, what are you waiting for?

What if it revitalizes your story?

What if . . . ?