Working your strong points

[Today's guest blogger is Chuck Ebert, who has been writing science fiction on and off since high school. He has a story coming out in the January 2012 edition of Strange Weird and Wonderful Magazine and one in the March 2011 issue of Aoife's Kiss. One of his stories was accepted by the magazine Eldritch Tales and he won an honorable mention in a short short story writing contest sponsored by Xignals. He published a short story in Aphelion and had a story win honorable mention in the Writers of the Future contest.  He is a librarian in Durham NC, and maintains a movie review blog called The Other Ebert.]

Should selling writing be more important than writing writing?

[Today's guest blogger is Jef Benedetti. Jef is founder and president of WordWork International, which provides artist representation in a guild atmosphere, enhancing creativity and increasing intellectual property value. A writer of two self-published children’s books, Jef is a veteran photojournalist and editor whose work has appeared in the computer trade, community newspaper, golf magazine and commercial packaging media. Thanks for joining us, Jef! --Faith]

You’ve written and printed a book. Your mom helps you sell a few copies to her friends, who are all grandmas.

“Verna, your son’s book is darling!” Mrs. Anyone says, a story Mom gladly retells to you later that night.

Unfortunately, my Mom is not an Amazon. All of a sudden-like, you’re in an organized crime family.

“How we gonna move dese books?” You’ve got an accent from watching too many crime movies.

“What’s the title?” a friend wants to know.

“My wife left me: Hooray!” you say.

“Man, that is good. With a title like that, you can’t lose!”

To answer the question, one needs to start, not at the creative process, or anything after it. Start, as my junior English teacher said, at the beginning.

I once heard a famous TV newsman lecture to a college crowd. After he finished, someone asked if he’d ever written anything for free. It took him nearly a minute to reel off an impressive list of pro bono clip sources that started with editor of the yearbook and school paper in both high school and college.

His first non-scholastic news story was a crime beat nugget that he didn’t even get a byline for; turned out to be his job application. He set me straight that day on the topic we discuss today.

“Once you get paid for your craft, you’re going to like getting paid for it. After that, when you get requests to write for free, you’ll start turning them down, but not all at once. Eventually, they stop calling. The day after that, you are a writer, a journalist. You might as well get paid for it.”

So, we’re all agreed, then? Selling is more important than writing. Need more?

In college, I had this friend Walter. We worked together on the school paper. He was a sports reporter in high school and he got paid $5 a story for his game coverage. It wasn’t a lot of money, but it got Walter used to being paid for his craft.

When he wrote his first bylined piece for our noble college rag, he didn’t get paid a dime. In fact, for going to the trouble of supplying our sports editor with an unrequested sidebar covering the coach’s halftime rant at the team (who was only down 4 points but came back to win), he got his ass chewed for going from good to great.

“And what have we learned here today?” I asked after we talked it out. “You never got your ass chewed by your high school editor.”

“No, not once. Why is that?” he wondered aloud.

“When you write and get paid for it, there is almost no ass-chewing,” I said. “Maybe they’re just more mature, people who pay you, I mean. When you get paid to write, and you don’t do it well enough to do it again, they just fire you.”

Silence on the other end of the line.

“Nah!” Walter said. The moral of this story is, if you’re gonna write, get paid for it.

My payment today is this link to the website for WordWork Publishing www.wordworkpublishing.com, the printing arm of WordWork International. I have linked with a literary agent of my own design, it seems at times. Peter August is the man who’s going to get me to the top, of something.

Speaking of the top of something, I was just watching Man vs. Food and there was a pile of fries on top of a hamburger, smothered in a mystically tasty sauce. I’m hungry. I gotta go.

Worldbuilding

Today’s guest blogger is Ann Gimpel, a clinical psychologist who practices high in the Sierra Nevada Mountains. A lifelong aficionado of the unusual, she started writing speculative fiction about three years ago. Since then, she’s managed to get four short stories and a novel published. A husband, grown children and three wolf hybrids round out her family.Thanks for joining us, Ann!

My muse chuckled in the background when I got your email accepting my offer to guest blog about world-building. That’s probably my weakest area; a fact she knows all too well.

Building a world is a highly specific adventure that, at least at first, has little or nothing to do with your characters. It seems to work better if you have the world in place before the characters start running about in it. This is because all worlds have rules. For you to write a credible piece, you need to stick to those rules and, if you’re also struggling with character development, motivation and plot structure, you’ll likely find your world gets short shrift. That’s how those niggling inconsistencies intrude. Any author who’s ever had to painstakingly cull through a five hundred page manuscript fixing a world-building glitch would agree that it’s far simpler to get the world in sync the first time round.

Let’s retreat to those “rules” for a moment. All worlds have rules, including the one we live in. In fact, there are often entire sets of rules. For example, the experience of a native woman in a primitive culture thatstill practices ritual female circumcision is radically different than my own experience living in the United States. To put a finer edge on that point, even parts of the U.S. can be quite divergent from one another. As an absolute baseline, you need to have a full and complete understanding of the world you inhabit before you can start shifting and bending those rules to create either a science fiction or fantasy world. That’s why so many fantasy writers put maps in their books. Somehow, having a map to look at with countries, continents, oceans and mountain ranges, gives the fantasy world a tangible reality. (It’s also helpful when you’ve noted that your protag sailed south out of Portsmouth and a glance at your map tells you she actually sailed east!)

You can’t force world-building any more than you can force character development. Unfortunately, just as characters have a way of unfolding as you go, so do worlds. The problem is your world needs to be internally consistent from the beginning and it really needs to stay that way. If it doesn’t, readers experience a vague sense of dissatisfaction. What that means (there goes my muse again rolling about on the floor chortling) is no matter how you go about things—in your head, on paper, or with little scraps tacked to a bulletin board—your world needs to be pretty fleshed out from the get-go.

Much, but certainly not all, of what I write is contemporary fantasy. So the setting is pretty simple because it’s our own world. When I insert magic, though, I try very hard to puzzle through “natural” ways for it to just sort of sneak into things without feeling contrived or artificial. And then I stick to that motif throughout the story or novel. On other fronts, science fiction is easier for me than “high” fantasy, probably because it takes established scientific principles and then just applies them to a (usually, but not always) futuristic world. The internet has been a godsend in terms of ready access to information. If I want to know about suspended animation or zero g forces, all I need to do is type the terms into my browser.

In closing, just as you (hopefully) keep track of your characters—not just how they look, but their dialects and personality traits—you also need to keep track of your world. It helps to have an internal compass that has some way of grabbing your attention when you write something that simply does not fit. Interestingly, my muse just started nattering away about something in the novel I’m working on that really needs to be changed. It fits for the world in one of my other novels, but not for this one. So, trust the process. There’s a reason I signed up to do this blog and I just figured out what that was!

Ann Gimpel

www.anngimpel.com

Enter late, leave early

Today’s guest blogger is Christine Fairchild. She has been a writer and editor for 25 years, from journalism to marketing to fiction. She teaches fiction writing and editing techniques at http://editordevil.blogspot.com/. Welcome, Christine!

Enter Late, Leave Early

In Hollywood, the motto “enter late, leave early” is a standard screenwriting technique to deliver higher quality scripts. Not only does this technique reduce the clutter events and dialogue of a scene, it helps hone the audience’s attention to only the most important details of scene: the meat of the moment.

Reduce Clutter

Traditionally, Hollywood is less patient and more stringent about wasted words in a script, because every second of film represents thousands of dollars.

Script scenes are expected to only contain the gold nuggets, the key story moments. In fact, any action or dialogue that isn’t critical to a scene’s purpose or to the overall story is clutter. So when writing scenes, screenwriters stay close to the gold by lopping off their beginnings and endings.

Get to The Story Faster

First things first. “Enter late” means you start the action as late in the sequence of events as possible without losing meaning. In other words, you start as close as you can to the core action and/or dialogue of the scene.

Entering late means don’t tip-toe into a scene. Readers don’t like delay tactics. Avoid showing people getting in or out of bed, brushing their teeth, getting in and out of cars. All the build-up we do to start our day. The only reason to show such everyday tasks or details is if they are extraordinary or they have a core purpose to the scene (or story overall). In other words, all action or dialogue shown must be critical to the moment. Otherwise, they belay the key action, drag pacing and bore the reader.

Better to keep the reader moving by just throwing them into the deep end of the pool and trusting them to swim.

For example, if you had a detective story, you wouldn’t show the hero driving up to a crime scene, getting out of his car, saying his hello’s to all the officers, and then engaging the medical examiner (ME) about the details of the murder. Like most cop shows, the reader can fill in the blanks, so just jump to the moment the partner gives our hero the lowdown on the corpse.

But entering late doesn’t just mean cutting late in action. It also applies to dialogue. Don’t be afraid to jump into the middle of a conversation. That’s where the meat is, and most readers can quickly come up to speed on what’s being discussed. In fact, entering late, whether for action or dialogue, allows the reader to more deeply engage the scene because they have to figure out what’s going on (although don’t make it too elusive). And engaging the reader is always a good thing.

End on a High Note

“Leave early” means the scene ends the moment after the height of action/dialogue is reached.  Everyone knows the characters in a scene will keep talking or moving after the pivotal action ends and the critical moment is over. But why do we have to stick around to listen to it? Once the critical moment is over, the height reached, there’s nowhere to go but down. That means the energy and the pacing go down with it. So why would you want your reader to follow that path?

Long exits come across as rambling and unfocused writing. It can also make the author look insecure, as in “I’m afraid to just let the scene end, so I’m writing extra material to tidy up.”

Here’s a tip: if you are ending after the climax of action has passed and all has calmed, you are ending the scene too late. You should end it “earlier.” Don’t “tidy up” scenes. This more often leads to “pithy” remarks and phony behavior by the characters. Better to end when we the scene still feels raw, alive. This makes reader anticipate the next scene. Such as ending on an imminent decision, event, revelation or reversal is good for creating cliffhangers.

Final Thoughts

I’ll admit that in book fiction, “enter late, leave early” doesn’t always work as designed, because authors don’t have pictures to help get information across, so they have to use extra words. But it’s a good target. I’ve yet to see a book scene where applying this technique doesn’t improve the quality of the scene.

But let me advise this: don’t try to force this technique when you are in writing mode or you may shut down your creativity. Better to apply “enter late, leave early” as an editing technique when you can see the whole scene and best determine the gold to mine.