Wordcraft -- Secret to a great story: it’s in the bowl

When my adopted hometown of Dallas, Texas, came to a stand still from a recent ice storm I spent some of my enforced indoor time cleaning out bookshelves, finding information from writing workshops too good to part with. I vowed to share it, in an occasional series.

I’ll add a warning at this point: I don’t cook. If the illustration for this post made you dig out your cooking post, pass on by. But if you’re looking for a way to create the characters of your story, to make them multidimensional, to give them someone to fight and someone to fight for, embrace the concept of the spaghetti bowl.

Paradoxically, if you’re searching for ways to whittle down your cast of thousands to manageable proportions, you’ll find the spaghetti bowl is your friend also. Because what looks overwhelming at first sight may involve relatively few strands.

I was introduced to the “spaghetti bowl” by J. Suzanne Frank, author and director of the Writer’s Path Program at Southern Methodist University (SMU) in Dallas. The concept isn’t original to Frank, and I’ve heard it called other names. I like it because it helps me discover connections I hadn’t consciously known existed between characters. And besides, it’s fun.

To start cooking, draw a big circle and list the names of major and secondary characters around the rim of the bowl. Then simply draw lines between characters to indicate their relationships--parent/child, friends, doctor/patient, waitress/customer, and so on. Which characters have a lot of common bonds? Which have few?  Now try to find more connections between those characters to strengthen their relationships.

When I first dipped into the spaghetti bowl, I had a novel with a problem. The main character had overcome the obvious villain, the hulking, heavily armed, mean as sin character, by mid-book. But even with the villain out for the count, the good guy was still swatting a multitude of problems. In real life, these continuing crises might be coincidence. But coincidences are anathema to a fiction writer. (There’s a reason conspiracy theories always sound like fiction.) More likely, there was someone in the background, a bigger though still undiscovered antagonist behind my hero’s continuing problems.

Through the spaghetti bowl exercise, I found a significant character my protagonist had no, repeat no, relationship with. The two connected multiple times with other characters but not with each other. Why were they so intent on avoiding each other? The answer, to my surprise, was that the character the protagonist didn’t want to connect with was, although apparently a nice guy, the main character’s natural antagonist. At once, these previously unconnected characters had a relationship, a string of spaghetti I could exploit in so many ways to put them in conflict with each other.

(For more on why a story’s antagonist doesn’t always have to be a villain, see Pyr editor Lou Anders on “Bones of a novel, part 1” at this site, October 12, 2011.)

On the other side of the spaghetti bowl, what if you find yourself with more characters and character relationships than you (or your readers) can keep track of?    

Again, the answer may lie right in that bowl of tangled spaghetti. When faced with a multitude of characters who have similar relationships, consider combining the roles of those multiple characters. This automatically adds more thicker, stronger bonds between the remaining characters. Think of it as trading strands of angel hair pasta for fettuccine. J.R.R. Tolkien did so famously, condensing several secondary hobbits into Peregrin Took (Pippin) and Meriadoc Brandybuck (Merry).

I’ve found in my own work that a major character’s lawyer can also fill the roles of best friend and AA sponsor. An ex-girlfriend can become the best friend of a character’s new wife. Or the client of his worst enemy, forming a delightfully tangled platter of pasta. Try stirring that spaghetti for your own works and see what savory dishes emerge.

And for more about SMU writing classes, see www.smu.edu/Simmons/CommunityEnrichment/creativewriting/.

(Next Monday, I dish up more tasty writing tips from mystery writer Hallie Ephron’s upcoming workshop on romantic suspense.)

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One of my personal resolutions for 2014 was to highlight Texas literary birthdays. This week: Patricia Highsmith, born January 19, 1921, in Fort Worth; and Robert E. Howard, born January 22, 1906, in Peaster, Texas.
 

Wordcraft -- Beating the gong

It was an historic moment at the closing of this weekend’s DFW Writers’ Conference, in Hurst, Texas. The finale was the loved and dreaded gong show -- a panel of agents and editors hitting gongs to signal the moment they’d stop reading anonymous query letters from writers. It was three gongs and they’re out for every query, except one. For the first time in the contest’s history, official reader George “The Voice” Goldthwaite got all the way to the end of a letter without being gonged into silence.

Winning writer Seth Skorkowsky of Denton doffed his anonymity to accept the audience's applause for the query about his novel, Damoren.  (There's an umlaut over the "a" in the title, but I haven't figured out how to get my laptop to write umlauts yet.) 

And whether from second thoughts or the charm of reading the query read in Goldthwaite’s mellow baritone, an agent who had previously rejected the writer announced his willingness to reconsider.

The show’s grim discipline may be paying off. None of the other twenty-two chosen queries beat the gong test, but after hearing them panelists asked even losing authors to send them material for consideration.

Panel members were Lou Anders, editorial director of Prometheus imprint Pyr; Uwe Stender of TriadaUS Literary Agency; Louise Fury of the L. Perkins Agency; Katelyn Detweiler of Jill Grindberg Literary Management; and Alice Spielburg, representing her own agency. Agents in the audience also were allowed to gong as they wished.

Reader Goldthwaite and moderator Russell Connor were members of the DFW Writers Workshop (DFWWW) which sponsored the conference.

Query letters are written inquiries from writers trying to gain representation from literary agents. The letters typically include information about a story’s genre and word count and a brief synopsis to demonstrate the writer’s style and degree of craft. Even a successful query doesn’t guarantee an agent will represent a writer, only that she’s willing to look at extended samples of his work.

Query faults that repeated turned agents and editors off was vagueness -- the lack of specific information about the plot, its protagonist or conflict; as well as failure to pinpoint the story’s genre, that is, which shelf it would occupy in a bookstore. “A book marketed toward everyone is an automatic gong,” one agent said. Others gonged a story that claimed multiple genres -- mystery, young adult, and science fiction.

Panelists also disliked overwriting -- “fifty adjectives in ten lines,” one agent said. Anders added, “one hyphen plenty, two hyphens too many, three hyphens left the building.

They also gonged queries felt to be “gimmicky,” such as the metafictional concept of a story about a writer writing a story; implied threats (“it‘s childish -- if you want to threaten me, do it in person”, Stender said); clichés; and stories that simply didn’t grab them.

“People read to be transported out of the ordinary,” Anders said, “and so many pitches are telling me how bored (the characters) are.”

On the other hand, “it’s possible to be a good writer but a bad query writer,” a panelist said, noting that she’d heard a particular query directly from the author and found it much better than it came off in the letter.

Moderator Connor also said he’d heard the novel behind one of the queries and it was much better than the query implied (and no, he said, it wasn’t his own).

For those of us who may be better at writing stories than at summarizing them in query letters, one hope for finding an agent is to meet more of them in person. And DFWWW has a deal for us -- discounted registration for its 2014 conference next May, available through May 31. For details, see
www.dfwcon.org/.

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Favorite incentive one author gives herself for writing regularly: “I tell myself, if this sells, I can get another tattoo.”

Wordcraft -- Reading and the art of memory

When I started hanging around with writers, they asked, what are you reading? It’s a truism of writers that they can’t write without having read. But the question tongue-tied me. I read, but what had I read?

At the FenCon workshop in Dallas last fall, Pyr editor Lou Anders insisted that members read widely in their genre. And at Austin’s ArmadilloCon a couple of years earlier, guest writer Scott Lynch attributed the “overnight success” of his fantasy The Lies of Locke Lamora, to an intense program of study he undertook through reading in his genre.

When I began writing the “Adventure classics” posts that appear on Fridays in this blog, I expected to get by with books I’d already read. It proved impossible to write intelligently about a book read years, even decades earlier, so I re-read. And found, to my surprise, that the books often differed markedly from my remembrance of them.

Lynch of Locke Lamora fame claimed to have increased his reading from about thirty books a year to more than a hundred. But if my faulty memory is any indication, how can more reading help? Won’t we just forget even more?

In his Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything, journalist Joshua Foer quotes sixteenth century essayist Michel de Montaigne on the problem of reading and retention.

“I leaf through books, I do not study them,” Montaigne wrote. “What I retain of them is . . . only the material from which my judgment has profited, and the thoughts and ideas with which it has become imbued. . . .”

Montaigne tried to remedy his memory dilemma by writing summaries in the back of his books.

I wrote lists. But since reading Foer’s book, I’m thinking of building a memory palace instead. It’s an idea also touched on in Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall, her Man Booker Prize-winning novel about Henry VIII’s adviser, the uber-organized Thomas Cromwell. (Although in the end Cromwell misplaced his head.)

Based on a first-century Latin textbook entitled Rhetorica ad Herennium, a memory palace is simply a visualized space to place memories in. Or rather, to place images -- the more bizarre the better -- that call to mind what a person actually wants to remember.

To show you how it’s done, Foer records the imagery he used to memorize a card sequence at a U.S. Memory competition. “Dom DeLuise, celebrity fat man (and five of clubs), has been implicated in the following unseemly acts in my mind’s eye: He has hocked a fat globule of spittle (nine of clubs) on Albert Einstein’s thick white mane (three of diamonds) and delivered a devastating karate kick (five of spades) to the groin of Pope Benedict XVI (six of diamonds.)”

Foer got a U.S. Memory Championship and a book out of his techniques. I’m already having fun. Maybe I can throw away my list of books. Or maybe not.

(For more about Joshua Foer and Moonwalking with Einstein, see http://joshuafoer.com/. Or if you want to test your memory against the champions, see www.worldmemorychampionship.com/.)

Wordcraft -- Bones of a novel, part III

With one week left in this November’s NaNoWriMo (national novel writing month), I’m hearing cries of anguish as even writers who have kept pace with goal of writing fifty thousand words in thirty days feel the strain. The main reason, I think, is starting the race without a map.

Okay, I’m crazy about structure. But I got crazy by learning the hard way how tough it is run a race without knowing where the track is. A reminder came earlier this fall at Pyr editor Lou Anders’ writing workshop.

I’m writing a contemporary novel, but, desperate to enter the science fiction/fantasy workshop, I pulled out the first chapter of a nearly decade old fantasy novel to enter. Despite some qualms, Anders liked the premise and characters, but when he asked for a pitch-length synopsis, I was stuck. The remainder of the novel sprawled too hopelessly even to summarize.

It’s coming together now, thanks to help from Anders’ one-day novel writing workshop.

I posted about the three-act format of screenwriter Dan Decker (author of Anatomy of a Screenplay) last month. But with only a week of NaNoWriMo to go, how about fantasy author Michael Moorcock’s suggestions for writing a novel in three days? Yes, THREE DAYS!

First step -- have a lot of people after the same thing. And make it something concrete. (Sorry, world peace isn’t achieved in three days.)

At first glance, this sounds like every fantasy quest plot. But the more I thought, the more it seemed to apply to a multitude of genres -- a search for a ring of power or a wedding ring. For Princess Leia or Rapunzel. For the evidence to convict a suspect or to clear a family’s honor.

Second step -- have a protagonist ready to walk out on the whole thing when something else comes along. Notice, you don’t need to open with the heroine’s birth. Just her moment of decision, her fateful choice, her call to adventure -- whatever term appeals to you. He gets an offer he can’t refuse. The doorbell rings and an old love appears. (Just don’t make it the alarm clock sounding. It’s been done too often. Trust me.)

Third step -- the end. (Wiping the sweat from your brow!) But don’t ignore the end. According to Anders, for the ending, Moorcock suggests looking back to the beginning and picking a character from the past.

I love having the end mirror the beginning. I’ve heard suggestions elsewhere to have the final scene echo the opening one, but with a difference. Bilbo returns to his hobbit hole, only to find all his possessions being sold at auction. Or, to look forward to Friday’s adventure classic, A Wrinkle in Time, the opening sentence, “It was a dark and stormy wind,” is permuted into the final one, “But they never learned what it was that Mrs. Whatsit, Mrs. Who, and Mrs. Which had to do, for there was a gust of wind and they were gone.”

I’ll write more later about structure, and suggest you take a look at what author and former editor Kristen Lamb has to say at www.warriorwriters.wordpress.com/ But for now, watch out for the bones, and a happy ending to all!

Wordcraft -- The bones of a novel, part II

Editorial director of the science fiction/fantasy imprint Pry, Lou Anders, promised the members of his recent writing workshop at FenCon a discussion of the three-act method for structuring their novels. Then he spent the first half of his discussion, based on Dan Decker’s Anatomy of a Screenplay book and classes, instructing us about characters. Did he misspeak?

He insisted he had not -- that the characters must come first in writing a story. “Page counts, events at act breaks, ups and downs are all by-products of proper Character Structure,” Decker wrote. “Putting the by-products first is writing backwards.”

Accordingly, in defining the functions of Act I (read: approximately first quarter of a novel), Anders listed the introduction of the main character, the villain (opponent or antagonist) and relationship character. In a screenplay for a two-hour movie, these occupy the first thirty pages. Within the first eleven to thirteen pages of the screenplay, the main character must make a fateful decision -- a yes or no answer to a choice that determines whether there will be a movie (or novel) or whether we’ll quit and go home.

Although the page numbers are for 120-page screenplays, I’ve noticed that even in 300-400 page novels the main character’s decision arrives almost as quickly as in a screenplay. It was a lesson all the workshop’s participants seemed to have absorbed. With rare exceptions, their protagonists made the fateful choice at least by the end of the first chapter.

The first half of Act II -- up to the story midpoint, whether for screenplay or novel -- consists, Anders said of “asking questions.” The act’s second half begins to answer those questions and ends with the low point that finds the protagonist as far as possible from the goal. The purpose of Act III is for the protagonist to fight from hopelessness to win the goal. The last act’s tension, Anders said, “is not for ‘will she win?’ but for what she goes through to achieve it.”

He reminded us that achieving a goal doesn’t mean the ending is always the happiest one. Using the movie Casablanca as an example, the main character, Rick, doesn’t walk off the screen with his lover Ilsa. He doesn’t get what he wanted. He gets what he needed -- redemption and purpose.

Writing partner Robin Yaklin (see her blog at http://debutauthors.wordpress.com/) and I are on a novel structure jag that includes Randy Ingermanson’s “fractal” approach. There’s so much more that after a break next Wednesday for another topic, I’ll be back with more ways to structure a novel, including additional suggestions from Anders.

(By the way, Anatomy of a Screenplay is temporarily out of stock at http://www.amazon.com but available at another online book source, http://www.alibris.com/ And if you read this before Friday, you’ll get to see a new Halloween skeleton illustration from another one of my favorite sites, http://commons.wikimedia.org/ Or see its link at the bottom of this page for wonderful copyright-free images.)

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Correction to Monday’s blog -- The Heard Museum’s Halloween event is this Saturday, October 22, instead of October 29, as originally reported. Tickets are available online for Halloween at the Heard, http://www.heardmuseum.org

　


　

Wordcraft -- Bones of a novel, part I

image: Wikimedia commons

On the last day of the recent FenCon writing workshop, workshop leader Lou Anders wanted to teach us to write screenplays. Why, some participants must have wondered, would Anders, editor for a press that publishes novels, want to discuss screenplays in a nonscreenwriting workshop?

Because when he taught it to other novelists, he said, their beta readers went from merely sighing to weeping aloud at the climax of their books after putting the principles of Dan Decker’s Anatomy of a Screenplay into practice. And maybe because Anders, who has taken Decker’s classes, is a former screenwriter himself. And he’s the guy you’ve got to please if you want to get published at the Pyr imprint where he’s the editorial director.

Having struggled with the structure -- rather, nonstructure -- of the fantasy novel I pulled out of my files for the workshop, I was willing to learn more. I’d read enough books on screenwriting to be a fan of adapting the three-act structure of screenplays to the longer format of a novel. But I’d struggled not only with the structure but also with character relationships.

Protagonist I could pretty well get, although it helped to hear Anders point out that the protagonist’s desire -- the overriding reason for the story -- must be concrete. “It can’t be ‘happiness,’” Anders said.

Okay, but why, when I picked out a bad guy, didn’t he (or she) always work the way an antagonist is supposed to?

Surprise, Anders said, clicking through the stills from classic films that illustrated his talk. The antagonist is out to prevent the protagonist from achieving his desire, but he’s not necessarily a bad guy. So in the movie Casablanca, the antagonist isn’t the Nazi. He’s “good guy” Victor Laszlo -- because Laszlo and protagonist Rick want the same thing -- Laszlo’s wife, Ilsa.

And when Anders mentioned a third party, the “relationship character,” most of us looked knowing until he told us, this person isn’t necessarily the romantic interest. Instead, the relationship character is the one who accompanies the protagonist on his journey, has often “been there” before, and is the person to whom the protagonist expresses the theme of the story. Or who may express it himself. So in Casablanca, the relationship character isn’t Ilsa. It’s Claude Rains’ Captain Renault, who insists that Rick is a sentimentalist at heart, and who stays with him to the end, even when Ilsa leaves.

Those less steeped in older classics might find Anders’ analysis of the Batman movies more helpful. The relationship character is the Joker -- he’s always there.

Now we had a triangle of character relationships -- protagonist, antagonist and relationship (also known as dynamic) character. Need to expand the list of characters to fill the needs of a novel-length work? Give each member of the trio her own corresponding triangle, remembering that every antagonist and relationship character is the protagonist of her own story, every protagonist is somebody else’s antagonist or relationship character. Happy writing!

(But wait, is that it? Where are the three acts? Coming up next Wednesday, in bones of a novel, part II.)


　

Wordcraft -- What an editor wants to read

Recently, Lou Anders conducted what he says on his blog was his first ever writing workshop at FenCon VIII in Addison, Texas. Few workshop leaders would be better equipped to tell us what an editor wants to see in the first pages of a novel. He’s this year’s winner of the Hugo Award for editing, long form, and the editorial director for Pyr books. He hears twelve to fifteen pitches for books daily, and he and his assistant at Pyr look at, by his calculation, a thousand manuscripts annually. Of those, Pyr publishes thirty.

After talking through a few of the nineteen workshop submissions, he tactfully formulated “the no prologue, no multiple POV (point of view), no unlikable protagonists rule” of things that turn off readers within the first few pages. Our starting goal as writers is to “give people as few reasons as possible to drop out” of reading a story.

What else turns him off? Perhaps surprisingly for a hard-boiled looking guy -- profanity. “I like to save profanity for the moments that count,” he said.

That’s partly because, he said, for all the emphasis on action in science fiction and fantasy, women and girls constitute the overwhelming majority of readers -- 75 to 90 percent. For YA (young adult), the reader demographic is even stricter -- teen girls and their mothers. Writers must master the art of “getting it past the mothers -- and getting the mothers to read it.”

So what does Lou Anders like? Contemporary sounding language, for one thing. Telling details, for another. He commended a writer for a passage in which a character flipped her long hair from under the handle of her bag, although admitting he might forget to add something like that because “I don’t have hair. . . (but) little tiny details that are realistic prepare people for the nonsense to follow.”

He also likes humor. “Find a way to be upbeat even when you’re downbeat. . .Even dark books have moments of humor, and the darker they are, the more humorous.”

And how to get those sympathetic protagonists? Not by making them pathetic or overwhelmed. But for a struggling character, “If we see what she’s given up and what she’s juggling, we’ll sympathize with her.”


Want more of Lou’s writing advice? See his blog, “bowing to the future,”
http://louanders.blogspot.com And check back here next Wednesday for his discussion of novel structure from a former screenwriter’s point of view and ways to break into writing.

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Looking for markets? Don’t get tricked into forgetting these small publishers’ deadlines timed to coincide with Halloween:

CLIFFHANGER BOOKS -- Submissions window for its second anthology of Paramourtal romances closes October 31. See www.cliffhangerbooks.com
DARK TALES OF LOST CIVILIZATIONS -- Also closing October 31. See
http://ericjguignard.blogspot.com

NAKED READER PRESS -- Quarterly open reading period ends October 31. See www.nakedreader.com

Other deadlines at www.duotrope.com/ although Naked Reader wasn’t there when I last checked.

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Society of Children’s Books Writers and Illustrators, North Central/Northeast Texas, holds its annual conference this Friday and Saturday, October 7-8, at Fielder Road Baptist Church, 2011 S. Fielder Road, in Arlington. Authors, editors and agents will be there. See
www.scbwi.org for registration and details.

　

Totally Texas -- Science fiction for the people

FenCon VIII/DeepSouthCon 49

Crowne Plaza North Dallas,

14315 Midway Road, Addison

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The fan-run literary sci-fi and fantasy convention known as FenCon returns to North Texas this coming weekend, September 23-25. It’s not just about wild costumes, although there are always plenty of those at the Con, now in its eighth year. Many fans, like the young man in the illustration for this post, design and make -- in some cases, build -- their own wearing apparel. And FenCon has workshops to help you get them right, concentrating this year on steampunkish Victoriana.

Not sure what steampunk is? You’ll know once you’ve seen the “Hustle in Your Bustle” demonstration on Friday’s program schedule. But even if you’re not into bustles, literally or otherwise, the convention offers readings and book signings by local and nationally-known authors, editors and artists.

Or fans can visit discussions on everything from choosing e-readers to the evolution of women in comics. From a discussion of cartoon characters Phineas and Ferb to a workshop on the making of professional-looking wings. Programming for children and young adults runs all three days as well and ranges from serious NASA science to arts and crafts projects on Harry Potter wands and the construction of dragons from chenille pipe cleaners.

The breadth and variety of programming prompted local CBS station KVTV to list FenCon VIII as one of the best literary events this fall in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. Memberships for the entire event or one-day will be available when registration begins at the Crowne Plaza hotel at 9 a.m. Friday. See www.fencon.org/ for information on events and membership prices.

I’ll be there, participating in a writers’ workshop led by Hugo award-winning editor Lou Anders. Sorry, that workshop is sold out. But maybe I’ll see you in the panels or at a party or Saturday night’s costume parade. I’ll be the one dressed as a writer and you’ll be the one -- well, I can’t wait to see your bustle!

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Other good stuff this week -- some of it free:

Rosalyn Story returns to Dallas Tuesday, September 20, to read and sign her newest novel, Wading Home. Ms. Story is a violinist with the Fort Worth Symphony and was one of the featured writers at SMU’s literary festival earlier this year. At Skillman Southwestern Library, 5707 Skillman Street in Dallas. Refreshments at 6 p.m., with reading at 6:45. Free.

Shakespeare Dallas is back at the Samuell-Grand Amphitheatre, 6200 E. Grand Blvd., Dallas, starting Wednesday, September 21. Enjoy Hamlet outdoors in the cooler fall temperatures. Times and ticket prices at
www.shakespearedallas.org/

Autumn at the Arboretum currently boasts nearly 50,000 pumpkins imaginatively displayed. You’re bound to find plenty of photo opportunities if only you can get the kids to stay still long enough. At 8525 Garland Road, Dallas. See www.dallasarboretum.org/ for details.