Rachel Starr Thomson

First, an Advent update: I am still working on revisions! I made such major revisions the last time around that a whole new ending was required, so I am currently writing that whole new ending. Writing should be wrapped up by July 10; first polish by July 15; and then I wait for feedback from beta readers. Thank you for caring.

It’s a MUCH better book than it used to be.

Now, to segue into today’s writing tip, I have noticed that every time I sit down to write I spend a lot more time sitting than writing. It’s HARD to come in from the cold and just start in on a scene, capturing its mood and emotions effectively. But I have developed a trick for helping myself get into the writing, a trick that also works to jump-start ideas or bring more sensory life into a scene: I call it entering the moment.

Pick a character from the scene you’re working on (ideally the character whose POV you’re writing in). Read what you’ve already written so you have the basic setting details in your head.

Now, close your eyes and enter the moment.

What can you feel? See? Smell? Hear? What colours meet your eyes?

Are you sitting, standing, running, riding?

If someone else is speaking, how are you listening to them? Are you emotional, detached, frightened, joyous? What does his or her voice sound like?

Try to sense the sun and the wind; try to smell the forest or the attic dust or the apple pie.

Just sit and soak it all up for a few minutes. Enter the moment as fully as you possibly can. Get inside your character’s skin and just feel.

Then open your eyes, type a few of those details, and see what happens.

For today’s post I’m going to plagiarize my own e-mail again. I received an e-mail from a writer friend who’s trying to start a new novel and facing a few blocks before he even gets going: he’s wondering about whether to kick the story off first or begin by informing readers of a few important facts, and also whether to write in first or third-person. Since you may be facing some of the same questions, I thought I’d share my thoughts with you too!

Don’t start by introducing the important facts. Sneak them in once you’ve already kicked off the story. Otherwise you’ll be writing one of those prologues that publishers dislike and many readers skip. The important principle is “show, don’t tell.” Make us like these people, make us care about them, and draw us into their tale before informing us of any back story. I’d advise writing a first chapter that centers around a situation, around action and relationship, more than it does around explanation or discussion of the past. Once you’ve hooked readers you’ll have plenty of time to explain things.

As to POV, that really depends on where the story will go and how you want to tell it. Would it benefit from the perspective of a single character–an old man’s perspective or a young boy’s? At any point will you want to write scenes you can’t write in first-person (for example, one of those “meanwhile, in the villain’s camp” scenes that are so popular in movies)? Maybe most importantly, does either of your main characters have such a strong voice that it wants to tell the story?

You could try writing an opening (or some other arbitrary scene) in both and see which feels more natural before you keep going.

My friend’s e-mail was timely; in revising The Advent I’m finding that the first chapter does too much explaining and not enough drawing in. So I’m going back to look at the first chapters in Worlds Unseen and Burning Light and why they worked, and I’ll have a look at a few other novels and writers today (probably while I’m hanging out at Starbucks and Chapters, where I hope to get a lot of writing done this afternoon)!

Which brings me to another piece of advice:  if you’re having a hard time starting your own story, you might try reading someone else’s. Inspiration and insight crop up in strange places, or you may just find that reading another person’s words is all the motivation you need to start writing your own.

There’s an old piece of writing advice that goes like this:

If your story is getting boring, bring in a man with a gun.

In other words, make something shocking happen. Mix things up. Send everything in a wild new direction. Shoot someone.

It’s not bad advice — sometimes. But (as per my recent post on making every scene count) you’d better make really sure that man with a gun ends up serving an important purpose in the overall plot. If someone gets shot, getting shot needs to affect that person for the rest of the story, and that person’s changed situation or perspective needs to influence the entire storyline and probably play into the way it ends.

Excitement that leads nowhere and has no lasting purpose other than to stir things up will ultimately frustrate and annoy readers. It feels like getting pumped full of adrenaline and never being allowed to release it properly.

Last year I wrote a series of lessons on writing. The first lesson on Plot says:

A good plot, like good dialogue, is tight. There are no throwaway moments in a tight plot. Renato Rizzoli wrote, “The plot must be ‘complete’ and ‘whole’ in that it must have a clearly recognizable beginning, middle, and end. That is why good plots should ‘neither begin nor end haphazardly,’ but be linked by causal necessity or probability; one criterion for the ‘completeness’ of a plot is ‘that the whole plot will be disjointed and disturbed if any one of its parts is displaced or removed’” (Wikipedia, “Mythos”).

So in some cases, you may want to put the gun away and give the plot some extra thought instead. Where is this story going? How will the gun help it get there? Will something else serve it better?

Have fun finding answers. And happy writing.

Today my Big Job is revising The Advent, as it needs to be all ready to go to my beta readers by the end of the month and there’s still a lot of work to do. And as always, revision teaches me things about writing (or at least recalls things I already know). Like the biggest question to ask of any scene: what means this here?

What purpose does this scene serve?

In nonfiction you could probably ask the same question of each paragraph/tangent/anecdote, but we’ll stick with fiction for this post.

There are three major purposes a scene should serve. (Ideally, each scene will serve at least two of these at once.)

• Moving the plot forward.
• Developing characters.
• Establishing the setting.

That’s really about it. Scenes that exist just to be funny or exciting or cute or tell a story you’ve always wanted to tell but do NOT move the plot forward, develop characters, or establish the setting should be cut or revised so they DO fulfill one of those purposes. And frankly? Establishing the setting alone is not a good reason for a scene. You can work most setting details in while you’re carrying the story forward or developing characters.

And with that, away I go to apply the rule to my (rather messy) manuscript. See you on the other side :).

Dear Rachel,

I have another question I would love for you to blog about whenever you have time. I know that to be a good writer, I need to be consistent and that means writing every day. I have a hard time making myself write. I am really busy so the best time is early in the morning or late at night but I tend to do others things or stay in bed. (Yes, I know, that sounds lazy.) Do you have suggestions for motivating myself to make sure it happens every day? Do you have a set time you write every day?

I always enjoy keeping us with you on your blog.

Love,

Annalisa

A famous writer once said that she didn’t like to write; she liked to have written. That’s true for most writers. We love to have written, but the actual process is often very difficult, especially when we take our writing seriously enough to not sit around waiting for inspiration to strike before we’ll write anything.

You’re right, if you want to be a good writer, you need to write consistently. Whether that’s every day or just every weekend or only Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays is up to your needs, desire, and schedule, so don’t feel like you must lock yourself into an unrealistic commitment. It’s important to set goals you can reach.

But it sounds like scheduling isn’t your problem as much as motivation is. I’ll be straight with you: it’s been a lot of years since all I did was write fiction. I do write every day, but much of that is writing like this blog post — it’s work-related, it’s comments on student papers, e-mails to editing clients, articles I’m getting ready for publication, it’s scripts or marketing materials for Soli Deo Gloria Ballet. I don’t work on my fiction every day.

However, when I have a project in the works (like The Advent), I do have some tricks for motivation. May these be of some help to you!

Set Deadlines.

Deadlines are power, even if you just set them yourself. Be your own editor and demand that the manuscript (or this or that chapter, this or that revision, this or that outline) be finished by a certain date. Break down the time you’ll need to spend daily to reach that deadline. Then stick with it.

If you talk about your deadlines, it’s extra accountability! And since in the real world deadlines are often accompanied by some kind of reward, you can make plans to reward yourself for any major milestones.

Establish a Routine

It’s amazing how much motivation power a routine can have. Some writers talk about “rituals”; I don’t like the word, but the principle works. I almost never sit down to write without a cup of tea. In many cases, I’ll have a favourite CD or group of CDs to play while I’m working. When it’s time to work, I make my tea, take it up to my desk, turn on my CD, and start writing. I’m not sure why this works so well — maybe I just need the tea-making time to decide that I actually am going to work — but it does.

Turn the Internet Off.

Enough said!

Read Good Writing.

Nothing motivates me to write like somebody else’s amazing work. All those words get in there and just want to get out.

There’s not much else I can say on the subject. No two people are exactly alike, so no two people will motivate themselves exactly the same way. The above methods work for me. I hope they help you out as well!

Readers, weigh in: how do you motivate yourselves to write (or do other creative but non-necessary things?)

Dear Rachel,

I’m getting ready to revise the first book of a story of mine, and I’d like your advice on the subject. My plan was to read through my draft and just enjoy it as a story, and then I would read through it again with pen in hand. Do you have any other suggestions?

Sincerely,

Elisabeth

How can I turn away one of Inklings’ faithful Elisabeths? I can’t, so I wrote her back with my usual revision process. I hope you find it helpful as well!

Hi Elisabeth!

When I revise I usually read, as you said, just to enjoy it as a story. But things WILL jump out at you that need fixing, so I write notes on the pages or keep a notebook beside me and write them there. For this first read I try to focus on story issues–characters that need deepening, scenes that aren’t working, continuity problems (like plot threads I started and forgot about), anything that doesn’t make logical sense, new ideas that come to me–all that sort of thing. I don’t get bogged down in the wording on that first read-through.

Once I’m done that, I make a master list of all my notes, and then I go through the book and work on each thing. Sometimes it just means rewriting a scene, sometimes it means checking every scene that involves a certain character or plot thread and tweaking it so the character or thread is strengthened. This is usually the longest and most involved part of revising.

Then I read the book again to make sure the changes are working.

After that, I read through again to tackle the words themselves. I usually stick earphones in my ears, turn on some kind of soundtrack music, and read the book out loud to myself, editing as I go.

Once that’s done, I send the whole thing off to a handful of beta readers who tell me what they think is wrong with the novel and what they like :). I make any changes I’m going to make based on their suggestions, and then I proofread the whole book one more time. A new trick I’ve just learned is to change the font for that final proofread. It will help you see the words differently so that errors will jump out.

Congratulations on reaching this stage of your writing! That’s exciting :).

Blessings!
Rachel

Last week a blog reader who’s planning to strike into the world of Indie Authorship sent me an e-mail. Among other things, she said,

Sadly, I combine a strong streak of perfectionism with the ability to overlook glaring typos! I can’t afford to pay for a professional editor to work on my manuscripts and I know you’re a professional editor, so I’m definitely not asking you for free perks :) , but if you DO have any “fail-proof” tips for editing beautifully and professionally and catching ALL typos (!) to share with me and the rest of your blog readers, I’d be a happy writer … er … editor!

The fact that you’ve put “fail-proof” in quotation marks indicates you already know one thing:  you can’t do a fail-proof editing job on your own writing. In fact, book-length manuscripts are such complex things that it takes a whole staff of editors and proofreaders to catch everything, and as this article from Publetariat points out, recent cuts in editorial staffing and changes in job description affect even the books put out by major publishers.

But you can do a lot to improve your manuscript. Here are a few tips, mostly for the proofreading stage. Big-picture issues are not addressed here.

1. Read your work out loud. (And don’t speed read.) This will help you spot missing words and letters, wrong inflections, and confusing phrasing.

2. Run a spell check for homonyms and other easily muxed ip words. You know the ones: their/they’re/there, here/hear, were/where, you/your/you’re. Check your thens and thans to make sure you’re using the right one; ditto effects and affects. If you know you struggle with certain words, run spell checks for those too.

3. Check names, especially place names, to make sure you always spell and capitalize them consistently. For example, if you’ve been calling that mysterious firewalking child “the ale boy,” don’t suddenly start calling him “the Ale Boy.”

4. Ask your friends to help. Chances are you have some friends who are good at catching errors, and some of them might be happy to lend their eyes. You should offer to do them a favour in return, of course.

5. Tighten up. OK, this isn’t exactly a proofreading tip — but the number one problem I see in amateur writing is a need for tightening. Be concise. Be exact. Say things only once. Don’t say “He dropped down to his knees in the dirt on the ground.” Say “He dropped to his knees.”

Have fun editing! I hope these tips are helpful to you.

I recently finished reading this book on writing about literature. (Tough slogging at times, and I learned anew how nuts the modern world can be, but I learned plenty.) It’s a guide for university-level students who are studying literature, meant to teach them how to analyze what they’re reading so they can pen intelligent essays about it, whether they’re writing about fiction, drama, poetry, etc.

Much of the authors’ advice boils down to this: Pay attention to your responses while you’re reading. Note your thoughts and feelings as you go. Return to your notes once you’re finished, bringing your overall knowledge of the story to bear, and figure out WHY you responded as you did.

This is excellent advice for a writer. Dig out some of your favourite books. Read them over again, even if only in sections, and think about why you respond the way you do. I just pulled Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time off my shelf, flipped it open to the first page, and read this:

It was a dark and stormy night.

In her attic bedroom Margaret Murry, wrapped in an old patchwork quilt, sat on the foot of her bed and watched the trees tossing in the frenzied lashing of the wind. Behind the trees clouds scudded frantically across the sky. Every few moments the moon ripped through them, creating wraith-like shadows that raced along the ground.

The house shook.

Wrapped in her quilt, Meg shook.

It’s a marvelous opening, but think about it. Does it grab you? Does it create a certain atmosphere or make you feel that certain things are more likely to happen than others? Why? Is it the use of words full of emotion and violence, the moon “ripping” through the clouds and the shadows “racing”? Is it the contrast of Meg, wrapped in a quilt in her attic and thus making a very small figure, with the hugeness and wildness of the world outside? What do YOU think?

Try the same thing with some of your favourite authors. Look for specific things, positive and negative: Does this opening grip me? Is this conversation moving? Have I ceased to care about a character here? Is this scene especially atmospheric? Why is my heart racing at this point in the story? WHY? What is the author doing to call forth this reaction?

In any profession, you’re wise to learn from the best. And the first key to learning is a simple question: “Why?”

In her recent comment below, Elisabeth asked,

On the subject of writing, I have a question.  I’ve been writing under the impression that if you come up with an idea that fits “the blank,” but you don’t like that idea, then don’t use it.  In other words, use the ideas you like, and not just the ones that work.  Is that a good principle to use?

It was good of Elisabeth to ask this question, as I was at a loss for what to blog today and it’s a good question. As I understand it, she’s asking something like this: When I go to furnish my house, should I acquire a chair just because it’s capable of being sat upon, or should I only acquire those chairs which appeal to me aesthetically too?

To which question my answer is Both. When one needs to sit, one needs to sit, and to impose too many rules on suitable places for sitting will border on the ridiculous. On the other hand, when you CAN choose a chair both for its sitability and for its aesthetic qualities, by all means do so. You know why? Because chances are you’ll sit in that chair far more often.

When you pick up an idea for use in a story, it’s a big advantage if you really LIKE that idea; if something about it inspires you to work on it, to play with it, to celebrate it. If you use an idea just because it works, you risk ending up with something you’d much rather stick in a dark corner and not have to look at again. So yes, most of the time it’s a good principle to stick with ideas you like, but balance is important too — you might just find out, once you’ve given it time, that one of those fill-in-the-blankers has an odd sort of charm.

Today’s writing tip is cheating because I didn’t write it; I read this article in the Writers Digest newsletter earlier today, and it was so good I had to share it. (I’m also sort of somewhat on vacation, which makes less likely to blog with absolute faithfulness.)

The article, which urges writers to test their novel and short story ideas to see if they have “legs,” is an excerpt from The Constant Art of Being a Writer by N.M. Kelby. It’s got great practical suggestions along with a fascinating analysis of how a story is birthed. Check it out!