TIPS: Plot = Meandering Paths or Superhighways

Well, I've been editing Curse of the Rose / The Butterfly Lady only to find something really annoying. The last third of the book meandered. I mean, no one wants to read a novel superhighway that just goes Directly to Jail and doesn't pass Go (makes for a short, predictable read) but the last third of my book just didn't know where it was going or what it needed to do to get there. So I'm going to have to do a whole bunch of editing / re-writing to make it fit.

I found that doing up a synopsis chapter-by-chapter really helped to show me which chapters were dull, which didn't explain themselves well, and which chapters really had to change. I only wish that I'd done a synopsis at the start of the editing process, if not at the actual first draft process.

Next time, I reckon I'll do up a synopsis from the word go. I can always go off course if I want to but at least this way I'll know what I'm veering away from and why. It should save costly last-minute major revisions.

So, anyone else write by synopsis / novel outlines?

TIPS: Plots ... now with Bees!

First, let me remind you all that one of the best ways to improve your writing is to leave the house (preferably by public transport so you can spend the trip learning through reading). This Sunday I went to the Torrens Island Quarantine Station tour with my fiance (yes, I'm missing the ` but I don't know how to add it so it'll sit right). Basically, the entire island is a secure facility because the ETSA power station sits on the single bridge to the island, and the now closed Quarantine Station facility is both heritage-listed and has problems with asbestos.

My visit really opened my eyes to all kinds of descriptive nuances, not to mention it gave me several new experiences in my memory banks that can be plumbed for later scenes. I saw how buildings left for decades without care could still withstand the test of time. I saw evidence of the youth camps that used to go there after it closed but before the big fears of asbestos. I saw how part of the old quarantine station had been bull dozed for a small sub-section of the power station. I saw how the wildlife was trying to take over.

In particular, I noticed that bees had taken up residence in two of the buildings (one of which was the morgue). It made me think that here was the perfect metaphor for re-using plots. It's pretty much been said that there's no new plots anymore. They all contain a structure from an earlier story - normally, the good ones also contain traces of dozens of stories in a rich cake of complexity. In a way, the novels we write are sort of like that quarantine station. They start off with a rather generic story structure (a semi-interesting tale of an abandoned quarantine station) but we add nuances and layers until they become something fresh and unexpected.

Until the bees move in, basically.

TIPS: Issues with Sparseness

In one of the published novels I've been reading, the plot zips along at a fairly rapid pace. I've only read the first 30 pages and in one scene there was a whole page and a half dedicated to a history lesson about this one minor character. Now, the history lesson was really cool. It delved into how he got this particular artefact, how a friend of his died, and why he was so desperate to get across town to give the artefact to someone else. The problem was that it read like a timeline and really would've been more interesting if the author had dramatised it. As it was, it got a bit dull.

Other sections of the book suffer from a similar problem although in those instances, it wasn't exposition to blame. It was a desperate desire to skip along to the next bit that led to whole paragraphs feeling like an exercise in ... and then ... and then ... and then....

Unpublished authors can also have trouble with this one, especially since they're encouraged to cut out every unnecessary word in the sentence. It doesn't help that most of the advice involves the Delete key. Throw out all of the POV slips, the adjectives, the 'was' and 'were', remove this, reduce that, and combine the other. It's rare to find an article that says: 'put more words in'.

Yet if you hear critters complaining about a 'lack of protagonist perspective', 'where are they, anyway?' or even that there's little sense of tension, it might be that you've written too sparsely. Perhaps you need to add words. Add a few choice adjectives, some internal dialogue, or some description. Perhaps you need to slow it down, pad it out, and keep it from sounding like a laundry list of activity interspersed with dialogue.

I know this used to be one of my problems. 'More POV' and 'More Description' they would clamor and I would be confused. Weren't my favorite authors known for their sparse writing and their snappy dialogue?

I went back to those authors and re-read them and I found that their pages weren't full of lines of dialogue and ultra-brief narrative elements. To make matters worse, I found that they could increase tension and add a sense of speed to a novel by adding block after block of well-written and meaty paragraphs. Counter-intuitive, I know, but they managed it.

So, as a writing exercise, I suggest you all go over to those legendary so-called 'sparse' and 'tight' writers you read and take a look to see how sparse they really are. If you're told about pacing difficulties, flat tension, confusion about locations, or a lack of character depth, consider whether you should add more words rather than take them all away.

Sometimes less isn't more. Sometimes, less is just less.

TIPS: 5 Methods To Build Emotional Realism

We've all been there. We're writing up our characters who we've said are enraged by a terrible injustice and yet (aside from a statement saying they're angry) their thoughts are all about how cute the secretary is, how much they liked the latte, and whenever they talk to someone, their word choices and sentence styles are the same as always. Or we've written a character who, despite signs around them that would make me crawl under the bed and hide, are just kind of chilling out and worrying about the hum drum issues that really wouldn't register in a fit of anxiety. I know I've done it. My first draft of Curse of the Rose / The Butterfly Lady involved a lot of critters telling me to give them 'more POV'.

What they meant when they said that was that they didn't know what the character was thinking / feeling. They were distant from the character. It also indicated that I hadn't fully set their emotional states on the page in any of the main forms. So, here are a few ways to realistically portray emotion.

1. Memory. Cast your mind back to the last time you were in pain, heartbroken, angry, scared, or what have you. What did you think about? What did you notice? I know, for example, that when I'm angry, my best friend's stroll can set my teeth on edge because an Angry Me is an Impatient Me. I know I'm not going to be thrilled about any queues, line ups, or anything else like that. Most people I know are the same way though they might express it differently (glares, passive aggressive increased walking speed, pushing in, snapping at someone, turning their anger directly at the victim).

2. Descriptions. Note how a queue can look differently depending on how you're feeling. If you're madly in love and have bumped into a friend in a queue, you might be happy to stand there and gush about your romance. If you've won the lottery (i.e. ecstatic), very little will wipe the smile off your face. If you're sad, you might not care where you are. What do you think those feelings will do to your perspective? How might you interpret the stimuli around you? Who would you notice? How would you describe it? Mood very much affects perspective so let your Point of View Character's mood affect what you describe and how you describe it.

3. Dialogue. The next time you're emotional (or someone else is) try to also pay attention to what you're saying and how you're saying it (a difficult feat in certain situations). Anger often makes sentences shorter and more abrupt. Excitement can create longer, flowing, muddled sentences. Happy people generally pay more attention to social niceties and are more interested in other people than sad people. These are all generalties, and there are other ways people express emotion through word choice and tone, so pay attention to them and then see how you might relay that through your dialogue.

4. Personality. Pay attention to how other people behave, on television and in real life, to certain stimuli. Television isn't always a good example as it's pre-packaged and fake, but if you pick scenes that resonated with you, odds are it had a believable element. I loved the fear responses in the movie REC. It felt very real to me. So, even though I have no way of watching terror in other people in real life, I can sit down and analyse the different personalities in that movie and how they displayed their fear. Some converted it into anger and targeted other people. Some panted and looked like they were going to throw up. Some just became very weak and helpless.

5. Brainstorm. Brainstorm reactions to those emotional events. This can really help you move away from stereotype. If you brainstorm 10 possible reactions per major event per character, you can then pick the most likely reaction rather than falling back on the old standbys such as Military Man converts fear to anger and wants to fight out his differences; Housewife falls down in a puddle of helplessness. It might be that this time, with this stimuli, Bob the Military Man falters as he expects to know what to do in a situation but this one is totally beyond his skills while Josie the Housewife is too busy keeping it together for her loved ones to fall apart and that focus helps keep her strong.

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So there you have it, 5 methods of getting across the emotional reality of your story. Hope this helped! If you have any more, or have examples you want to put across (especially movies / television shows / books that demonstrated an emotion really well), feel free to mention them in the comments.

TIPS: Diversify Your Dialogue

Well, since I'm facing this issue myself, I thought I'd do up a post about it so that we can muse together and I can share my thoughts.

What is manner of speech?

It is their tone of voice, the volume, how quickly they speak, their inflection, emphasis and pitch. Where film can actually let you hear all of these play out, books need to show you through clever use of punctuation and phrasing. Look at the difference between this:

“When I sit here and look at you there is nothing I would like better than to punch you in the throat.”

“When I sit here and look at you ... there is nothing I would like better than to punch you in the throat.”

“When I sit here and look at you, there is nothing I would like better … than to punch you in the throat.”

“Wh-when I s-sit here and look at you, there is n-nothing I would like b-better than to p-punch you in the throat!”

Read them out. How do they sound to you? Do you naturally change your pitch, the speed of the sentence? Emphasis and tone? And that's without going anywhere near the italics and how an italicised word changes the sentence. If you want to see how italics can play havoc with meaning by stressing certain words, just take one of those lines and repeat it over and over but with the stress on a different word each time. Different people would stress different words.

Then you've got sentence structure. This also requires punctuation changes but it's more than that. It's how wordy they are. How many frills, bells, and whistles they use. How many similes, metaphors, and how simple or convoluted they speak. Some might speak in overly long paragraphs that indicate breathlessness (though don't overuse these or you might strain the reader's mind) while others might be terribly succinct.

“I sit here. I look at you. I want to punch you in the throat.”

“I sit here, right, and I'm looking at you, and all I'm thinking about is punching you in the throat.”

“I can't stand sitting here and looking at you. All it does is make me want to punch you in the throat.”

Last but not least, you have the actual spelling changes to indicate accents. This is the last one I'm mentioning because, unfortunately, it's quite easy to just mess with the spelling and keep everything the same. While this tactic will still make the lines of dialogue recognizably different, there is, of course, further you can go.

“I can't stand sittin' 'ere and lookin' at ya. All it does is make me wanna punch ya in the throat.”

“I cannot stand sitting here and looking at you. All it does is make me want to punch you in the throat."

Finally, you've got the actual metaphors, slang, and similes they might use. In South Australia, people disparagingly talk about those with low IQ as being 'Mindas' as there is an organization called Minda that assists people with very low IQ. Even people who don't know about the institution will probably know the word. People in the Northern Territory, probably wouldn't use that term.

In Curse of the Rose / The Butterfly Lady (really must settle on a title), a lot of the slang used are either nautical terms, mystical terms, or terms related to the ghastly salt plains that raise the dead. “Salt it!” becomes a terrible swear word and polite people therefore avoid asking for anyone to pass the salt and instead ask for seasoning. It's not a taboo word like our F word or even the C word but it's still stronger than 'damn it' as it conjures up images of rotting flesh. Other phrases include 'barrel fever', 'loose canon' and 'having a cold soul'.

So, do you have any advice about how to make characters sound different and diversifying your dialogue?

TIPS: The Story Behind a Place

In 2010, I started looking around me. I'd never done it before, not really, not in my entire life. I'd gone to university and kept my mind on daydreams and chores and reading books. I've bussed to many locations and not really seen them. For some reason, perhaps because I catch the bus at the same time twice daily now that I work, or perhaps for some intangible reason of personal development, I actually opened my eyes and started looking.

I noticed so many things. How the cockatoos toss their heads in flight at dusk, screeching and squawking. How a car alarm sounds when surrounded (or perhaps causing) bird song and how in Australia it's sometimes hard to pick out the alarm at all. How beautiful the birds look and how insane they sound. The stages of bark on the trees. First they're all barked up, then it starts sloughing off leaving green beneath, then it starts toughening up again over summer - leaving me lots of crunchy bark pieces to jump on. How some bits of pavement are concrete, others as asphalt (often covered in loose gravel) and others are beaten dirt. How often you can see glass from old smashed windows, perhaps from decades ago, glittering like gems in the dirt by the side of the road.

Then there's the buildings. Chipped paint, gleaming paint, patterns of fresh and older paint. Corrugated iron roof tops - new or freshly painted, faded or rusted. Sagging verandahs. Shiny iron lace. Trees, plants, a dozen types of fencing.

I look around me and I see, hear, and smell all the places around me and I wish, truly wish, I could capture this experience and put it onto paper. The trouble is, of course, a plethora of details won't help me capture that experience so I guess it's all in the telling details. Each description of a place should be an anecdote. A story. A tale. It should imply much even if it says little.

Have you told any anecdotes in your descriptions lately?

TIPS: Show the Unexpected

Well, there I was lurking on other people's posts when I found this little gem described by Liana Brooks. Come up with five things that your reader wouldn't expect about your darling little characters and find a way to drop one or two of them into the story. These can certainly add a lot of depth to what might otherwise be a derivative character.

I'm wondering if that's what my personal favoritest Writer of Fiction, Ed McBain, did. All of his characters, including his minor characters - no, especially his minor characters - were rivetingly interesting because he'd take your expectations and play with them in some way. People had their eccentricities, their foibles, their strange ways of perceiving the world, and even when all those details weren't brought onto the page, you could just sense the hints behind the words of a deeper, crazier world of people who could have stepped onto the stage from Real Life.

So, go on everyone ... come up with 5 unknown facts about your characters, major or minor, and see if that can have an impact, even if it just means that the minor character you see for a page is a little gentler and better-educated than the stereotypical truck driver.

Of course, there are limits: no need to do this for characters that have a three-line entry and exit. They're just setting details!