Building and Feeling; What is Lacking Post NaNo?

So it is two weeks post NaNoWriMo and I am still reeling from the whole thing. I had my students participate and am floored at how many met and exceeded their writing goals. A couple hit 50K without breaking a sweat. My hat is off to them!

We're now entering the editing phase and one of the things I'm finding is that in the daze and craze of writing as much as you can...some things fall through the cracks.  Its evident in my students' work and also in my own.

The two biggest deficits are world building and character development...

So the kids and I all wrote either fantasy or science fiction so world building is paramount with this type of genre just to get the reader up to speed with the environment. What I'm finding is that a lot of the descriptions are either piled on too thick in huge chunks to get it out of the way or not added at all. I feel like I'm sort of in a "stock post-apocalyptic" urban scene and that takes away from what I feel are great stories.

I asked them to take out the huge paragraphs and thread them through the scene in dialogue and action beats. That seems to be working for them. I'll keep you posted.

As for character development...well it really is a lack of emotional response to the situation, I'm finding is the problem.  I think so much sweat and blood was spent this past month just getting the scenes out or the plot moving that we all forgot to anchor the character, and by extension the reader, to the moment with emotion.

We are all working on writing the character more present emotionally and to incorporate emotion and internal thoughts like doubt or worry or arrogance into the storytelling mid action sequence.  I hope this helps to cement otherwise frenetic sequences.  I will try this with my own fantasy and let you know how it goes.

What about you? What challenges are you facing now that "just getting it on paper" is crossed off your list? Are you doing massive rewrites...patches...or are you satisfied with your after-NaNo product?

By +Raquel Byrnes 

Killer Geisha with Knife Fans

Photograph by JackiePix

I took a writing class a few years back and our teacher had us do a weird mind game to get us thinking about our plot threads.  He put a bunch of random situations in a basket and we had to draw two out. Now the situations were not similar in any way.

For instance I got: A boy gets stabbed in an empty lot and The villain's dollar bill was on fire. 

This in and of itself can be a great prompt, but he added a genre to it. So he gave us either fantasy or science fiction or what not. What was great about this type of prompt was that it corralled the action, but left the circumstance wide open.  If you've read any of my blogfest entries in the past, you'll know that I actually used this years later in a novel I finished a few months ago.

He also had us take well known passages from famous books and turn them into sarcastic rants. For instance, Elizabeth Barrett Browning's love poem to Robert; How Do I Love Thee -- you know the one where she counts the ways, is actually quite funny when you put a different spin on it.

Photograph by Klearchos Kapoutsis

One of my favorite things was our "Cool Stuff That Never Happens" notebooks. Its where we write down really strange scenarios that we've seen in movies and read in books.  Things like a dirigible chase or swimming under an iceberg's craggy underbelly.  I have over a hundred such scenes, my personal favorites include running ahead of imploding catacombs and killer Geisha's with knife fans.  That always makes me laugh.

The point was to get you thinking outside of the normal action scenes. How might a car chase look with crappy cars or while running out of gas? What about a villain with an accent so terrible that you can't understand his threats and he ends up pantomiming?  Original ideas can come from simply asking yourself...what if?

I came away from the class feeling like I'd grown creatively because he taught us that thinking outside of the box wasn't really all that hard. If I could do it, then so can you.  Tell me...what kinds of mental exercises do you do to get the creative juices flowing?

Until next time...Go Write!

Driving Around Looking for Trouble

Have you ever read a book where the character seems to meander through the plot, not really stopping or thinking until the big finish?  They're like teenagers driving around seeking out adventure in whatever way possible only to end up sneaking a smoke behind the 7-Eleven and complaining about how boring their life is.

I've written stories like this...we probably all have. I hit a point in my book where I wondered why I started the story in the first place. My problem was that I didn't think of my book as a series of scenes, and that was a structure issue that lead to more problems down the road.

Because I am a total computer nerd, I sought help from other blogs about writing.  There are some great resources out there to help with story structure and pacing. Its important to find the one that fits with your style and method of writing.

My favorite approach is found at Randy Ingermanson's Advanced Fiction Writing website. In it, he describes the basic structure of a scene and its purpose.  I will try to paraphrase it below, but I urge to check out his website for a more detailed explanation.

In Randy's approach, you try to imagine the scenes in your book strung together like beads on a chain. The chain in its entirety is the plot. Your character has to hop from one bead to the next in a logical, timely, and interesting way or you lose the reader. 

To do that, each scene can have only one of two reasons for being there: either the scene pushes the story forward, or it shows how the character reacts to the plot point you just revealed. 

Thats it. Anything else just eats up time and patience. You don't want your reader wondering why you're taking the time to describe your MC's morning routine. Toothbrushing isn't fascinating in real life. It won't be on the page.

Easy right? Well the beads, or scenes, have to have structure in themselves.

The plot-pusher bead has three parts:

• There has to be a reason for your character to be in the scene - a conversation, action sequence, internal monologue, etc.
• Something that goes wrong or gets in the way of what they wanted to accomplish in the scene - get information, compel someone into action, stop a disaster, etc.
• The outcome - disaster, disappointment, confusion, danger, etc. This propels the character into the next scene as they react to what just occured.

The reaction bead has three parts:

• Your character changes because of what just happened - either their thinking, their goal, their motivation, etc.
• A new conflict shows up - how do they deal with what just happened or learned?
• They form a plan and act on it - this leads them to the next scene and provides you with a cliff hanger or hook into your next chapter.

With a novel, time is a commodity.  The clock is ticking down on your reader's patience. To incorporate all the elements of a story: set up, conflict, back story, worse conflict, red herring, climax and ending...you have to move along at the right pace.  Too fast, and the story reads like a frantic, jumbled race. Too slow, and your book gets put down halfway through. 

With bit of structure, however, you can incorporate all of your creative and original ideas while cutting out unnecessary fillers that slow down the pace.

What about you?  How do you structure your book? Do you have an outcome in your head and work backwards?  Are you more of a 'see where it goes' type of person?  How do you keep your story on track?

Oh! And don't forget to read the great entries for the Character Interview Contest tomorrow at Echoes of a Wayward Mind. Great idea, Sangu!

Until next time, my friends, Go Write!

Photograph by mshades. Photograph by horiavarlan. Photograph by sk_vel.

G is for Genre Hopping

One of the best ways to learn how to write is to read...a lot. This something I've been told over and over again, both by writing teachers and other writers. I'm in luck on this one. "G" is for Genre Hopping and I love to read all genres; the hard-boiled detective drama, historical romance, weepy chick-lit. I like to read books multiple times and take them apart, figuratively, to find out why I like them so much. Is it the pacing? Are the characters memorable, if so, why? What compels me to keep reading? I underline and dog-ear my books like they are my college texts.

One of my favorite Genres is cop dramas. I got hooked one day on a flight to a funeral. My dad had one and I read it, despite the fact that it was not what I usually read, and loved it. The one I read in particular had these incredible frenetic chase scenes. They were like running with the cops while looking through a video recorder. The author gave tight shots of people through quick, fragmented descriptions of their actions during the chase.

The rest of the sentences in the scene were long, not quick and staccato like I’d thought. I decided that I had to try to learn from this guy…so I practiced in my own writing, the technique he used. It was awkward and forced at first, but eventually, I put my own twist on it.

Hemingway is great to study for dialogue. He uses gestures to punctuate the words and it’s powerful. Hemingway often contrasts mundane tasks, like nail hygiene, with menacing dialogue. To see the everyday human behavior on a killer makes what they are saying that much more threatening. To get an idea of what I’m talking about, try reading his book, The Killers, it’s amazing.

If you’re interested, The Poetry Resource Page has a great writing exercise on creating a character with gestures alone. And if you're into blogfests, there is a Body Language Blogfest going on at the Labotomy of a Writer Blog on April 24th.

My challenge to you today is to read books you felt were most potent, most riveting, to you as a reader and find out why. I’ll bet you’ll learn some great new techniques without the fee and travel of a writing class. What can you learn from your favorite writer?  Is it pacing, do they have great character quirks, or is it something less definable?  I'd love to know what you found out.

Until next time, Go Write!

Photograph by Hamed Saber, Uploaded on August 24, 2006. Photograph by austinevan, Uploaded on August 24, 2007.