Time as setting

Beyond the physical there is a fourth dimension - time.

Time is a setting.

If you have the reader understand from the beginning of the story that it will take place over one day or three days you have laid out the 'landscape' for them.

If your story takes place over months or years you have to show the passage of time. Time influences things as much as where a character is in a physical space. You have to show a character moving through time like they move through a room.

Have the character doing things, small things, between the major incidents of the story. Things like making a cup of tea and sitting and watching while the sun sets, the room darkens and the undrunk tea goes cold.

Longer periods can be a sentence like: It rained off and on for the next three days or A week later Dad came home.

You can't jump from scene to scene without setting a timeframe if time has passed. That just confuses a reader and they will put your book down and never pick it up again.

Jennifer

PS: Yes, Margaret - this one's for you!!

How well do you know your World?

A sense of place is important whether you're writing fantasy or not. No-one just lives in their head and so the reader has to see/hear/feel/taste/smell what the character does.

Writing without describing place is like giving a reader a play script with no stage directions - a lot of words in a void.

I've said before not to spoonfeed the reader, but you have to give enough so the reader is with you - and then don't change the rules!

Don't, in the first paragraph, describe a sleepy seaside village with images of narrow winding roads and kids playing cricket in the streets and then have your characters driving breakneck down an old industrial road.

Don't make it worse by having your characters escape from the police by hiding in a bat-infested cave on said industrial road and describing vegetation, dust etc but never, ever mentioning a building, factory, workshop or chainlink fence.

Readers live in the real world predominantly through vision and a sense of space. You have to activate their inner eye and have them orientate themselves in the space you create.

Draw a map. Draw the interior of the house/shop/school and then place that house in a street, that street in a town etc. Know for sure where everything is and how to get there. Check back on it if you have to.

This applies to everyday fiction as well as fantasy. Make sure your reader can picture it - not with beautiful, meandering language but concretely with solid images.

Jennifer

PS: The sky was indigo silk is both beautiful and concrete [and brief].

Don't forget your head...

Points of view [POV] are many and varied. The most popular are First Person and limited Third Person.

First Person is the narrator telling the story as the character 'I' - 'I did this and then I noticed that. '

Limited Third Person is similar to First Person. The narrator is constantly looking over the main character's shoulder and telling the story they see from there only.

Neither POV can tell about things that the protagonist doesn't see.

Then there's Multiple Third person. This is used to tell the story by looking over the shoulders of several different characters . Usually each character is given a different chapter or the change in viewpoint is signalled to the reader by a physical break in the text on the page.

The modern reader is familiar with any of the above, but use them wisely.

Don't Head-Hop.

Head-hopping is telling the reader what one character is thinking and feeling and then in the next sentence telling us what the other character in the scene is thinking and feeling.

This can be confusing for the reader and is not an obvious flaw to a beginner writer who wants to tell everything about everyone and thinks it builds richness to the writing. Less is more - always!

Solution? Imagine your book is a reality TV Show where a camera is strapped to a motorbike helmet that your character cannot take off. Decide who is going to wear that helmet, then write what you see.


Jennifer

Roadblocks

"Just Keep Writing" sounds easy enough, doesn't it? But we all hit roadblocks eventually.

What to do?

Most stories are linear and chronological. That doesn't mean they were created the same way.

If a scene isn't working or a character isn't talking to you that doesn't mean you should ignore the others whispering in your ear or keeping you up late at night.

The writing can happen however it happens. I often write scenes as they appeal to me. This helps to invigorate me to go back to the others that have stalled.

What not to do?

Don't try to convince yourself that you have to write the book the way it will be read.

The start of the story you read is rarely where an author started writing. Often the first several thousand words of a draft are never read by anyone but the author. Sometimes those first several thousand are woven into the story later where they fit better.

It's OK to:

• jump all over the shop when you're first getting it down,
• blend/weave all the bits together in the editing process,
• move stuff around even if you've written it in a logical, linear and chronological order - it might add suspense and tension and make a better book.

It's all in the editing. The most work ever done on a book is the sorting out after it's written - so don't sweat the small stuff - and that first writing, the first draft, is actually the small stuff!

Jennifer

The thing about poetry...

The thing about poetry, with all its need for metaphors and brevity, is that studying it makes you read and write differently.

In poetry there is no room for 'mighta, sorta, kinda like' writing. It has to use strong, immediate and evocative language - even the use of similies is limited because the words 'like a...' are two too many.

So in your own writing/editing:

Don't quantify!

Nothing should ever be 'very' or 'nearly' or anything else wimpy. Even worse is 'very nearly'. If someone 'runs very quickly' [another double naughty] surely they could sprint, bolt or race. Think about your words.

Don't give them room to move!

To make something stronger in a reader's mind, things either are or they aren't.

There is strength and immediacy in a good metaphor - the sky is not LIKE indigo silk, it IS indigo silk...

Don't underestimate the intellgence of your reader!

Don't spoonfeed your reader. A lighter touch is better. Once you have it in your reader's mind that the sky is indigo silk, you don't have to expand. You don't have to add that it was a little lighter at the horizon or a bit darker or anything else. They get the picture.

Do... keep writing. It will all come out in the editing.

Jennifer

Cringe Editing

I completed my degree as a mature-aged student and graduated the year I turned 40.

Being 'older' gives you a different perspective and attitude to studies. It also influences your subject choices - I did a semester each of Anglo-Saxon and Middle English translations and could never explain to anyone who asked how that was going to help me.

But I loved it and learnt a lot about grammar and current English as well as reading [and translating] Beowulf [and others] in its original language

I also did two semesters of Creative Writing. The lecturer and tutor focused a lot on poetry - writing and reading. Other students weren't happy and complained but I could see we were being taught:

1. Careful and thoughtful word choice
2. Rhythm and flow
3. Brevity - making each word count
4. Style - there are many, many ways to write a poem
5. Clarity of thought and purpose

In our tutorials the writer being critiqued would read their work aloud, the rest of the group would listen and then give verbal feedback.

I think it's more important to hear someone else read your work aloud to you than it is to read your own work.

I remember another student reading his poetry and putting stresses and emphasis on words that didn't seem natural. When I read it in my head [and aloud] it didn't work, didn't fit - but when he read it he forced it to fit. Others in the group read it like me. He didn't change anything because in his mind it was right - but it wouldn't have worked out in the big wide world.

If you're part of a critique group, have someone else read your work aloud to the group. As well as hearing what they stumble over it lets you pick up a pen and cringe- edit - every time you cringe there's obviously something there that needs work.

Jennifer

Passive vs Active

Passive writing will kill your book!

Passive [indirect] writing is very wordy writing. It's easily identified by the words 'will be', 'been', 'being', 'was' and 'by', eg The boy was bitten by the dog.

Active voice or writing is direct eg The dog bit the boy.

Another way to tell indirect or passive writing is the use of imperfect past tense - the almost constant use of words ending in 'ing' eg:

The heavens opened and the light shower that had been trickling down turned to pelting rain, hammering the corrugated roof of the dilapidated building. The old seat, positioned on the pier and looking out to the bay, gradually appeared through the murky light. Rover was standing next to it. A figure was sitting silently on the bench stroking the dog’s soggy ears. Suspicion was Harry's first instinct; however, the fact that Rover was allowing the man to stroke him gave Harry some feeling of security.

Imperfect past tense will kill writing faster than cliches, overdone humour and adjectives up to your armpits - look for this basic mistake before you edit for Point of View, Voice, dangling participles [although this can be the reason for them!] or anything else.

The rewritten piece:
The sky opened and the rain now hammered on the corrugated iron roof. An old seat that faced the bay could be seen in the murky light. Rover stood beside it and the figure on the bench stoked the dog's soggy ears. Harry was suspicious but the fact that Rover allowed this gave him some security.

Still not great, but notice how the second piece is more immediate .

And 85 words [8 'ing' words that weren't nouns] versus 56 words [no 'ing' words] makes it an improvement for that fact only.

Oh, and there were 2 'ly' words in those 85 original words - ratio of 1:42.5

If the first piece above was your first draft - that's OK, keep writing. It'll all come out in the editing. But don't think the first piece will pass as polished work.


Jennifer

A Challenge

I've been thinking about the NaNoWriMo thingy.

Not something I could do as I live in the Southern Hemisphere and November just doesn't fit as downtime.

So I challenged a couple of friends of mine to do it with me in February. Not smart - it's the shortest month of the year!

But we all agreed to do something to push up our output. Some have been more successful than others and are managing some pretty good word counts.

Not so me. Life has seriously gotten in the way of my ambitions, however, I have managed 500 words a day.

The extra little twist I've challenged myself with though, is to finish each daily little 500 word output on a cliffhanger a la Days of Our Lives.

The cliffhanger can be good or bad but has to be at a higher level of tension than when the piece first started. So over 1500 words you should get the ooh, aah, ooh, aah, ooh thing happening with your readers.

1. 1st 500 - build to an ooh,
2. 2nd 500 - resolve [aah] and then build to another [higher] ooh,
3. 3rd 500 - resolve [aah] and then build to another ooh.

See how it works? Try it yourself. If you're stuck with any of your writing just put your characters into an unfamiliar situation and see what happens by constantly challenging them for 1500 - 2000 words.

Jennifer

Scoresheets

Last year I was a judge for a YA writers competition for the second year in a row.

It's always an interesting thing to do. The contestants each submitted 3,000 words to be judged. What struck me, to the point that I started keeping a scoresheet, was the number of adverbs and adjectives some writers used and that they were either not aware of them or hadn't polished their work well enough.

One piece of writing had 29 adverbs in 3,000 words - an average of one per hundred! It doesn't seem a lot but can be distracting if everything is 'beautifully', 'wonderfully', 'awfully' etc.

How to stop yourself making the same mistake [or at least recognising if you do it]:

1. Choose five of your favourite authors and five different books.
2. Select five pages from each of those books and count how many adverbs and adjectives are in those five pages.
3. Keep a list or scoresheet.
4. Choose five pages of your own writing and see how your score compares!

How to fix this if it's a problem for you:

Look at the verb or noun the adverb or adjective is describing

1. Make that verb or noun stonger, clearer
2. Play with calling a sound a taste or a sight a sound!

And write - just keep writing. All of the above can be fixed in the editing.

Jennifer

Just Write

I'm reading the Gotham Writers' Workshop Writing Fiction: The Practical Guide From New York's Acclaimed Creative Writing School. What a title - it says it all!

Anyway, I was reading about Plot - what it is, what it isn't, plot vs story arch etc - when I realised how intimidating it must be for someone who wants to write, is insecure and lacks confidence and then buys themselves a 'how to write a book' book.

A piece of advice - don't do it! Just write!

All that other stuff comes with the editing. Plot is usually there if there's a story to tell. When you edit you get to think about all the other stuff because you start to think about how to make the story better.

If you just write and end up with 50,000 words, by the time you finish editing you'll have 80,000 words. Editing isn't all about getting rid of stuff - it's about making the stuff you have better.

So - just write!

Jennifer

Meeting with a Mentor

Even though I mentor others, I also take advantage of meeting with the 'great and infuential' when I can, and I did so last week.

I made a very basic mistake. I had found out about the opportunity at the last minute and was lucky enough to get the very last spot available. Then I started making mistakes.

The biggest mistake: NOT HAVING SPECIFIC QUESTIONS TO ASK!

I thought he would give me incisive and direct feedback and criticism of the 20 pages I submitted to be read - not so. He had a lot of people to meet, a lot of stuff to read and so his feedback matched that. He liked my story. He was able to point to specific things he liked, but they were the same things that other people liked.

I did myself no favours by not having questions to ask!

When you have an opportunity to meet with anyone who will help your writing, always have questions ready to ask. We are all busy people and your mentor [or whoever] might have more than one piece of writing to consider.

Be specific in your questions:

1. Did the voice work?
2. Do you feel the start is strong?
3. Is the ending an effective ending, etc?
4. What are my strengths/weaknesses?
5. What hints can you give me for getting an agent?
6. Do you have any names of people you think would be interested in my work and,
7. Can I use/drop your name?

Be mercenary - you have paid the money so there is no shame in getting your pound of flesh.

Jennifer

Doorways - Metaphors and Similies

I've just finished Joanne Harris' 'Runemarks'. [Check out her webpage here]

I noticed - maybe it was obvious or maybe I was reading as a writer - the use of metaphor and simile.

All of the metaphors and similes were direct references back to the world that the protaganist would know and only that world. So anything new that she experienced was compared to something from her previous frame of reference.

Sounds obvious, doesn't it? And really necessary when you're creating fantasy fiction, but you'd be surprised how many writers don't do it. These writers might not use similes from our contemporary 'real' world but they're not so careful about living within their character's frames of reference.

Something to think about when you're doing the hard slog of editing!

Jennifer