Guest Post featuring Erika Marks

I’m happy to have debut author Erika Marks as my guest here this week. Her post is a timely one; whether you’re a published author, or an aspiring one, fitting writing in during the holidays can be a challenge!

All I Want for Christmas is 200 More Words: Making Progress On One’s WIP During the Holidays, And Other Urban Legends.

by Erika Marks

For those of us who are accustomed to having chunks of our work day (and nights) to write, the holiday season can mean a bit of a schedule shake-up. With out of town guests arriving, priorities change (as well they should!) and with that change means having less time to write—or maybe putting the WIP away completely.

Now we all know that stepping away from a manuscript can be a good thing–but most of us will go kicking-and-screaming, especially when we are in deep in a WIP. There’s no question that shutting off our writer’s brain is about as easy as shutting off the I-want-another-glass-of-egg-nog switch. But writing during the busy holidays need not be feast or famine. There are a few ways in which a writer can maintain their cheer and their word count.

Here are a few things I try to remember when the muse doesn’t want to take a holiday.

Carve out a temporary workspace. Part of what can be hard during the holidays is that lack of routine and structure. Now don’t get me wrong: normally, I LOVE to mix things up. But when it comes to writing, it’s a tough adjustment to make—even temporarily. If you have guests staying in a space you might usually use to write (my office is our dining table so that’s definitely out), try making a temporary workspace in another room with a door you can close (Yes, that includes closets. I’m not kidding. I’ve lived in NYC—I require very little space). Just knowing you can still have access to your work in a private setting does wonders to quell those stress bubbles that can boil up.

Leave things on a good note. As Rita Coolidge sang, “I’d rather leave while I’m in love,” and nowhere does this apply than when it comes to having to leave my manuscript for a while. I don’t know about you all, but I can’t stand to walk away from a WIP if it’s going badly. Which is why if I know things will be getting busy and writing time will be scarce, I try my best to leave my manuscript in a good place. And by good place, I mean in the middle of a scene that’s really rolling—like-mac-truck-without-breaks rolling. You’re thinking, No! How can I do that? I have to finish it! But let me ask you something: Would you rather step away with excitement knowing you are going back to a scene that is working—or finish it off in the heat of the moment only to hate where that runaway truck has gone off the road and know you have to let it sit there in flames for days? Yeah, me neither.

Keep scrap paper nearby. You never know when inspiration will strike and free moments in the thick of a busy holiday are few and far between, which means seizing them when you can. Waiting to pick up a relative, standing in line at the store, washing dishes! Keep something to write on and with nearby so you can take advantage of those fleeting moments of writing/plotting time. (I speak from experience—my purse is filled with note-covered receipts that I sift through weekly).

Make your goal for broad strokes, not polished scenes. See this “break” as an opportunity to look at the larger issues within your novel. Don’t focus on trying to work through certain scenes (you won’t be able to dedicate the time to it most likely and will just end up frustrated) but rather use the time to flesh out bigger themes in your novel. Have fifteen minutes of quiet? Thumbnail-sketch several chapters. Or take a character and consider their motivation, their emotional impact—do you need to raise the stakes for them? Think outline, not fine line.

Give yourself permission to bow out of the festivities for a few minutes here and there. The holiday season won’t come to a roaring halt if you excuse yourself from your guests for a few minutes. It doesn’t make you a lousy host/parent/spouse/friend/child if you tune out and tune in to your writing in that private space we discussed earlier.

But along those same lines, give yourself permission to take a break. As important as it is to feel that you have the freedom to pursue ideas when they strike (and rest assured, there’s a very good chance that elusive solution to your problematic ninth chapter will arrive to you the instant you sit down for your holiday feast!), it’s also important to let yourself let go for a few days. In my experience, absence doesn’t make the heart grow fonder—except when it comes to putting away a manuscript for a break.

Now go have yourselves a wonderful holiday, everyone!

BIO: Erika Marks is a native New Englander who was raised in Maine and has worked as an illustrator, cake decorator, and carpenter. She lives in Charlotte, North Carolina, with her husband, a native New Orleanian, their two daughters, and their dog. LITTLE GALE GUMBO is her first novel.

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Feel the Burn

Taking Our Novels From Second Rate, To Great!

For those of you who have frequented workout classes and gyms over the years, you have undoubtedly heard the expression feel the burn. You know what it means: feel the pain of a weak muscle growing more efficient through use, of your body becoming more honed and tight. Wouldn’t you like to do that for your WIP?

Allowing someone, especially another writer, to read your WIP can feel like exposing a newborn to the elements on a dark hillside. Yet it must be done.

We submit our chapters to beta-readers, writers groups, workshops, and writer friends. We take our beloved characters and plots and lay them at the feet of others. If we are very fortunate we know some good folks; some fellow writers who are willing and wise enough to help us.

If we’ve been doing this writing thing for a while we can by now distinguish the help that is truly needed, from the help that is just another writer’s opinion or prejudice. And that’s important. I don’t recommend taking everyone’s comments and using them. It’s your novel. You are the artist. Monet did not have somebody looking over his shoulder telling him not to use those greens and blues. (Or if he did, he knew enough not to listen.) We all have our own way we prefer a sentence to be structured, or punctuated, or a scene set. Those are suggestions to consider. They can sometimes be helpful, but…

There are the deeper, more weighty suggestions. Those that ask us to think about how a character is perceived by a reader. Those that question a plot twist, scene development, or pace. Those that highlight a sag in tension. These are the suggestions that set us to thinking and working on a weak slice of our novel, and if we stick with it, if we put in the effort, the result will be a leaner, more honed novel. One that will keep the reader licking her finger and turning the page.

I discovered a trick recently that I am going to share with you. It’s deceptively simple. But it helped me feel less overwhelmed by the whole rewriting process, because, like a weight machine in a gym helps us isolate a specific muscle, this little trick helps me isolate and focus in on one area, or solution, at a time. Here’s what I do:

1. I copy and paste a section of the novel— where I’ve identified a weakness— into a blank document.  (Usually between 4000 – 6000 words.)
2. I give the piece a name and save it.
3. Then I give myself a question that addresses the weakness that has become apparent, or been pointed out to me, like, what would my MC be feeling here? Or, how can I describe this scene so it draws the reader in? Or, how can I get across the information the reader needs, without giving away the twist?
4. I keep this flabby piece of the novel open on my computer for however long it takes to write it the best it can be. It can take hours, or days, but it doesn’t get put back into the novel until I know, with certainty, that it does what it is supposed to do, and does it well.
5. Then I copy and paste it back into the main body of the novel, and move on to the next Area To Be Improved. (I don’t allow myself to think of these as ‘problem areas’, because problem areas tend to become problems. Just a little Jedi-mind-trick I play on myself.)

I think the reason this method works so well for me is that it makes each issue seem smaller and more manageable. Instead of feeling the psychological weight of every place that needs work in the novel, I focus in on only the one I’ve isolated. I usually write anything new in red. But using track changes will work too. I like to work new parts in red because when I’m done I can see at a glance how much, or little, had to be changed. Sometimes there’s just a smattering of red in a section I’ve finished. Other times there are entire paragraphs of red.

I know there are many ways to handle whipping a novel in shape. I’d love to hear about yours.

Do you have any tricks for getting through the last rewrites? How do you go about the big process of honing your novel?

The Cult of the Short Sentence

Over the course of having my work critiqued in local writers groups I have gotten back this remark numerous times: This sentence is too long. It takes up two and a half lines, and should be made into two or more sentences.

Where does this belief that all sentences should be short stem from? Is it the result of the shrinking American attention span? Of over-exposure to ‘sound bites’ and commercials and texting and tweeting? Is it instilled by the pallid preaching’s of exhausted high school English teachers, struggling to cram some semblance of education into the hormonally preoccupied, marginally literate minds of teens hopped up on Red Bull and Monster?

I have listened while writers tell other writers that their flawlessly crafted sentence should be chopped into shorter lengths – “because it is too long, you see.” (And these were not sentences dealing with action…just to clarify.)

At a recent writers’ group meeting a lovely young woman who might someday – if she diligently studies craft and reads a lot – become a writer, told the group, with unblinking sincerity and conviction (for her JC English teacher had said so), that any sentence over 10 or 12 words was suspect of being a ‘run-on’ sentence. After a stunned pause while those around the table absorbed this proclamation a discussion followed, with some writers claiming that most readers don’t have the patience or intelligence to read a novel containing long sentences.

With the exception of age appropriate genres like children’s and YA, (and perhaps pulp fiction and detective novels), I disagree.

And so today, my darlings, to both rebuke and refute this erroneous thinking, I am going to regal you with very long, very beautiful sentences—written by literary masters.

If you belong to the Cult of Short Sentences, gird yourself:

The world soon to be largely populated by men who would eat your children in front of your eyes and the cities themselves held by cores of blackened looters who tunneled among the ruins and crawled from the rubble white of tooth and eye carrying charred and anonymous tins of food in nylon nets like shoppers in the commissaries of hell.

And another:

The soft black talc blew through the streets like squid ink uncoiling along a sea floor and the cold crept down and the dark came early and the scavengers passing down the steep canyons with their torches trod silky holes in the drifted ash that closed behind them as silently as eyes.

From The Road, by Pulitzer prize winning author, Cormac McCarthy.

It looked like those farmhouses you ride by in the country in the middle of the afternoon, with the chickens under the trees and the dog asleep, and you know the only person in the house is the woman who has just finished washing up the dishes and has swept the kitchen and has gone upstairs to lie down for half an hour and has pulled off her dress and kicked off her shoes and is lying there on her back on the bed in the shadowy room with her eyes closed and a strand of her hair still matted down on her forehead with the perspiration.

And another:

I ate roast duck stuffed with oysters and yams and that wonderful curry they make in Savannah, which tastes good even to a man like me who loathes food, and drank rye whisky, and walked down those beautiful streets General Oglethorpe laid out, and stared at the beautiful houses, which were more severe than ever now, for the last leaves were off the arching trees of the streets and it was the season when the wind blows great chunks of gray sky in off the Atlantic which come dragging so low their bellies brush the masts and chimney pots, like gravid sows crossing a stubble field.

From All the King’s Men, by Pulitzer winning poet/author, Robert Penn Warren

“The Emperor Abul-Fath Jalaluddin Muhammad, king of kings, known since his childhood as Akbar, meaning ‘the Great,’ and latterly, in spite of the tautology of it, as Akbar the Great, the great great one, great in his greatness, doubly great, so great that the repetition in his title was not only appropriate, but necessary in order to express the gloriousness of his glory—The Grand Mughal, the dusty, battle-weary, victorious, pensive, incipiently overweight, disenchanted, mustachioed, poetic, oversexed, and absolute emperor, who seemed altogether too magnificent, too world-encompassing, and, in sum, too much to be a single human personage—this all-engulfing flood of a ruler, this swallower of worlds, this many-headed monster who referred to himself in the first person plural—had begun to meditate, during his long tedious journey home, on which he was accompanied by the heads of his defeated enemies bobbing in their sealed earthen pickle-jars, about the disturbing possibilities of the first person singular—the ‘I.’”

From The Enchantress of Florence  by Salman Rushdie  (contributed by writer, David Waid). In 2008, The Times ranked Rushdie thirteenth on their list of “The 50 greatest British writers since 1945″

It was a city in which the very old and the very new jostled each other, not uncomfortably, but without respect; a city of shops and offices and restaurants and homes, of parks and churches, of ignored monuments and remarkably unpalatial palaces; a city of hundreds of districts with strange names – Crouch End, Chalk Farms, Earl’s Court, Marble Arch – and oddly distinct identities; a noisy, cheerful, troubled city, which fed on tourists, needed them as it despised them, in which the average speed of transportation through the city had not increased in three hundred years, following five hundred years of fitful road-widening and unskillful compromises between the needs of traffic, whether horse-drawn, or more recently, motorized, and the needs of pedestrians; a city inhabited by and teeming with people of every manner and color and kind.

From Neverwhere by award winning author Neil Gaiman

“That something I cannot yet define completely but the feeling comes when you write well and truly of something and know impersonally you have written in that way and those who are paid to read it and report on it do not like the subject so they say it is all a fake, yet you know its value absolutely; or when you do something which people do not consider a serious occupation and yet you know truly, that it is as important and has always been as important as all the things that are in fashion, and when, on the sea, you are alone with it and know that this Gulf Stream you are living with, knowing, learning about, and loving, has moved, as it moves, since before man, and that it has gone by the shoreline of that long, beautiful, unhappy island since before Columbus sighted it and that the things you find out about it, and those that have always lived in it are permanent and of value because that stream will flow, as it has flowed, after the Indians, after the Spaniards, after the British, after the Americans and after all the Cubans and all the systems of governments, the richness, the poverty, the martyrdom, the sacrifice and the venality and the cruelty are all gone as the high-piled scow of garbage, bright-colored, white-flecked, ill-smelling, now tilted on its side, spills off its load into the blue water, turning it a pale green to a depth of four or five fathoms as the load spreads across the surface, the sinkable part going down and the flotsam of palm fronds, corks, bottles, and used electric light globes, seasoned with an occasional condom or a deep floating corset, the torn leaves of a student’s exercise book, a well-inflated dog, the occasional rat, the no-longer-distinguished cat; all this well shepherded by the boats of the garbage pickers who pluck their prizes with long poles, as interested, as intelligent, and as accurate as historians; they have the viewpoint; the stream, with no visible flow, takes five loads of this a day when things are going well in La Habana and in ten miles along the coast it is as clear and blue and unimpressed as it was ever before the tug hauled out the scow; and the palm fronds of our victories, the worn light bulbs of our discoveries and the empty condoms of our great loves float with no significance against one single, lasting thing—the stream.”

From The Green Hills of Africa by Pulitzer prize winning author, Ernest Hemingway  (Yes, this is all one sentence…all 424 words of it.)

Do you have a favorite long sentence? Do you know someone who fears them—for whom we might perform an intervention?

Dialogue: 4 Easy Ways to Improve Yours

There are a variety of mistakes to be made with dialogue. Thankfully, none of them are life-threatening. If you make them your neighbors won’t find you unconscious on the floor of your study and have to call 911.

These mistakes should still be avoided, however. They show up in most of the stuff I read by new writers. And they sometimes (cringe) show up in my own first drafts. But that’s before I have gone in after them, Bowie knife clenched between my teeth. (It’s a red pen, really, but I like to pretend.)

The first one of these boring little tension ruiners is dialogue that is too direct, as in the case of these two characters who meet in the break room where one of them is using the copier:

“Hi, Sandy. How are you?” Crystal put her papers in the copier and pressed start.

“I’m fine, Crystal. How are you?” Sandy walked over to the copier.

“I’m okay. I’m busy today.”

“Oh, you’re busy today? Me too.”

Blah, blah, blah…you get the idea. Who gives a hoot about these two chicks, right? This exchange doesn’t tell us anything about what’s going on inside these characters’ heads. It’s all surface. They sound like robots. And there’s no tension in their exchange. Tension comes from conflict. Conflict in dialogue is attained by showing that one character wants something that causes the other character to resist. Like this:

Man: “I think we should move in together.”

Woman: “I think you should put your shoes back on. Your socks stink.”

Okay, admittedly I am writing this late at night and am possibly a little punchy from lack of sleep. But you can see what’s going on here, right? He wants to talk about moving in together, and she doesn’t. They are in opposition.

To write interesting dialogue you must first know your characters, and you must understand what their motivations and desires are.  And then you must thwart them, as soundly as possible. And, while you’re at it, if you can amuse your reader or arouse some other unexpected emotion in them, so much the better.

So…dialogue should have conflict, and be interesting or amusing.

Another dialogue mistake I often see is the dreaded information dump:

“Hello. My name is Sam Brown and I have been sent by xyz detective agency, where I am the top P.I. to investigate the murder of the beautiful stripper who was killed here late last night when nobody was around to hear her screams.”

Ugh, right? Wouldn’t Sam be more interesting if he was portrayed as a cool cat with an air of mystery about him? And some of this could certainly be given to the reader as exposition or description. Like this:

A man in a black suit stepped into the back room of the strip club. Taking care to avoid the congealing pool of blood on the floor around the body, he withdrew an ID from his breast pocket and flipped it open for me.

“Sam Brown, xyz agency.” He lifted his chin in the direction of the girl on the floor. “Beautiful girl.” He flipped his ID closed and it disappeared back into his pocket. “Family’s hired me to find out who ruined her day.”

Leaving your reader wanting to know more is rarely a bad  thing. It’s what keeps them turning pages. We don’t have to front load every detail into a scene. Just give them enough to keep them reading, and to avoid confusion. More than that is too much.

So…have conflict and interest, but don’t spill the beans.

The third dialogue mistake I see in manuscripts is all dialogue, and no description or exposition or internalization. This can work for a while, but when it goes on for pages and pages, it’s boring. Not even Hemingway could pull this off. So, unless you are better at dialogue than the Grand Poobah of dialogue himself, best to steer away from endless dialogue. Give the reader some info about who’s speaking, what’s going on, and why the reader should care.

Lastly we come to the use of tags.

Some writers feel these should never be anything other than he said, she said. That we should never say she yelled, or he whispered, he whimpered or she cried. I don’t agree. I do think these should be kept to a minimum, however. And well written dialogue can make these sorts of tags unnecessary. But sometimes they are okay to use, and as long as they are not excessive I think most readers are fine with them.

No tag at all is the best option, as long as we don’t lose or confuse the reader. One of the best ways to accomplish not using a tag is to use an action to identify who is speaking:

“I think you should put your shoes back on. Your socks stink.” Jezebel held Fred’s shoes out to him.

“Won’t you at least consider moving in together?” Fred reached for his wingtips.

For the next few lines of dialogue you could get away without identifying the speaker. We are following their conversation and the opposing sides are enough to tell us who is speaking. But after several lines it is a good idea to add another action to verify for the reader who is speaking. If the reader has to stop and try to figure it out, that’s bad. We’ve lost her, and the flow is interrupted.

You could even add something to this scene by giving the reader a peek inside one character’s head. Like this:

“I think you should put your shoes back on. Your socks stink.” Jezebel held Fred’s shoes out to him.

“Won’t you at least consider moving in together?” Fred reached for his wingtips. He knew he should have done a more thorough search for the Camembert he’d dropped down the couch last week.

Puts a whole different spin on what’s happening, doesn’t it? Poor Fred. His feet don’t really stink. He’s just a shoddy housekeeper.

Still…I don’t think Jezebel should move in with him. Maybe it’s the wingtips.

So, to recap: dialogue should have conflict and should never be mundane or boring. It should not be used to give too much information. It should not go on and on for pages without any description or action to break it up. And should not distract us with the overuse of tags.

Dialogue should also move the plot along and give the reader insight into the characters. But if you master the four techniques I’ve suggested, then the rest will follow.

It’s none of their business that you have to learn how to write. Let them think you were born that way.
                                                                                                                                                                                          Ernest Hemingway

 

Writers: What things bother you when you’re reading dialogue? Is there anything you find distracting?  What dialogue situations cause you problems in your own writing? Do you prefer writing dialogue or descriptive passages? How do you know when you have the balance right? How do you feel about the use of tags?

Going Deeper

Pat Conroy

Since the moment I cracked open my first Pat Conroy novel many years ago I have been a fan. The Great Santini, The Lords of Discipline, The Prince of Tides: these are great classics. Long delicious reads filled with lyricism and passionate description.

So when my friend, writer Char Bishop, loaned me her copy of Writer’s Digest  (she always shares them with me – so generous – but that’s Char) and I discovered it had an interview with Pat Conroy inside, I raced home and devoured it.  (It’s the May/June 2011 issue, if you’re interested. The interviewer is Lynn Seldon.)

Much of the interview is about Pat Conroy’s marriage to writer Cassandra King, author of The Sunday Wife. It’s a peek into the home life of two writers cohabitating. Interesting stuff. But one question was asked that produced an answer from Mr. Conroy that sent my little writer brain into paroxysms of ponderation. The question was a simple one: If you could each give one piece of writing advice, what would it be?

Mr. Conroy’s reply? Go deeper.

Now, sometimes when I read a famous writer’s advice I scratch my head, mumble something profound like, hmmm, and then move on. But this response made me have to put the magazine down and take the dog for a walk – one of the activities I engage in when I have to do some heavy thinking.

Because I knew exactly what Mr. Conroy meant. It was a light bulb moment for me. I knew following this advice would make Sword of Mordrey better. And I wanted to go over the novel in my head and find the places where ‘going deeper’ would achieve that.

Were there places in my novel where I could go deeper into what my characters were thinking and feeling, and why? Could I bring this out, not just in their interior monologues, but in their behavior and reactions, as well?

And not just my characters, but the medieval world I’ve created too. Are there places where I can show more? Maybe in just a few brief words that suddenly make the atmosphere gritty and visceral and get right up in the reader’s emotions? I knew I had to seek those places out too.

By the time I got back to the house I realized I would have to do yet another full rewrite. Not a fun prospect on the surface. I’ve already done so many. But as I sat at my desk the following morning those two words still strobed in my head like a lighthouse beacon. And the mists were beginning to clear.

Writers, what does ‘going deeper’ mean to you? Are there places in your WIP where you could go deeper? How do you identify them? What do you feel the overall effect would be on your novel? And more importantly, on your novel’s readers?