Writers in the Storm

I'm taking a break from first page critiques this month, because something is bugging me and I have to get it out.

Continue to send your pages, though, I'll be back next month with a crit!

 

I traveled to speak at a writer's group last weekend (I do that, you know. Contact me if you're interested). I was talking to a writer there, and she bemoaned the fact that she didn't have this down yet.  She was still making mistakes. I've heard this many times. I'll bet you've said it to yourself, too (God knows, I have). So I thought a reminder of what 'writing' entails, might help you give yourself a break already!

First the science: (and thank you to Roger Manning for explaining this to me).

Higher-order thinking, known as higher order thinking skills (HOTS), is a concept of education reform based on learning taxonomies .The idea is that some types of learning require more cognitive processing than others, but also have more generalized benefits. You can read more about it HERE, but I think a chart is easier to understand:

Trust me, there are a lot more items in the lists, but I didn't want to bore you. But take a look at the items here - any look familiar? Yeah. Most of them are used in creative writing! YIKES!

"The reason typos get through isn't because we're stupid or careless, it's because what we're doing is actually very smart, explains psychologist Tom Stafford, who studies typos of the University of Sheffield in the UK. "When you're writing, you're trying to convey meaning. It's a very high level task," he said.

As with all high level tasks, your brain generalizes simple, component parts (like turning letters into words and words into sentences) so it can focus on more complex tasks (like combining sentences into complex ideas). "We don't catch every detail, we're not like computers or NSA databases," said Stafford. "Rather, we take in sensory information and combine it with what we expect, and we extract meaning." 

When we're reading other peoples' work, this helps us arrive at meaning faster by using less brain power. When we're proof reading our own work, we know the meaning we want to convey. Because we expect that meaning to be there, it's easier for us to miss when parts (or all) of it are absent. The reason we don't see our own typos is because what we see on the screen is competing with the version that exists in our heads.

This can be something as trivial as transposing the letters in "the" to "hte," or something as significant as omitting the core explanation of your article. In fact, I made both of these mistakes when I wrote this story. The first was a misspelling in a sentence that my editor had to read aloud for me before I saw it for myself. The second mistake was leaving out the entire preceding paragraph that explains why we miss our own typos."

You can read the whole article HERE.

See? We're trying to complete low level tasks and very high level tasks at the same time! Can you imagine how complex your brain is to be able to do that?

Then there's the mechanics:

SPELLING

Yes, we have way more tools than they did years ago (Thanks, Word, for telling me when I'm wrong-most of the time), but this is the nit-picky, in the mud, the blood and the beer editing that make my eye twitch. Even when we're careful, we tend to read what we meant to write, not what's on the page.

Suggestion: Have Word, or another program, read it back to you. You'll hear things you won't see: missing words, clunky sentences, change in tense, etc.  OR, pay someone to do it. It's worth it to me not to have to go over that ms one more time (and you know I'm cheap).

GRAMMAR

Sentence structure, punctuation, adverbs, pronouns, dangling participles! There is SO much to know here, and finding out you're doing something wrong after your book is published is uber-embarrasing. Word can suggest, and Margie Lawson is the queen of rhetorical devices, but when it comes right down to it, you have to know this stuff to earn your chops as a writer. Personally, I'll never get Lay vs Lie (had a college professor try) and I'll admit to comma-drama.

GETTING THE STORY OUT OF YOUR HEAD, AND ON THE PAGE IN A COMPELLING WAY

It seems so easy when you're reading a good book, but anyone who's tried to write can tell you, it's like the Olympics; Those little girls make gymnastics look easy because they learned it right after walking, and then practiced for years.

The only thing that works here is sweat-equity. Sorry, but if I knew a faster way, I'd be using it. Keep writing - you'll get better.

STORYTELLING

This is probably the highest thinking of all. We all know a story needs a beginning, middle and an ending. Sounds simple. It isn't.

ALL THE REST

• Writing fresh
• What tense to use?
• What genre?
• Jump-off-the-page characters
• which POV to choose?
• Where to begin
• Backstory

And you wonder why you keep putting e after I? Why you mix tenses?  Sheesh people, you're doing the equivalent of riding a unicycle and learning to swing a golf club, all at the same time!

It takes YEARS to master all of the above, and I haven't even mentioned voice! So give yourself a break. Give yourself time. Adopt a child's view of mistakes: they're just ways that didn't work.

Be gentle with yourself, people, keep going, and you'll get there. I guarantee it.

Do you scold yourself for mistakes? Friends who do? What's your worst offender?

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Like Laura's books/posts? There are two ways to get more!  Sign up for her quarterly newsletter, or her Write Stuff short podcasts on the craft of writing, and have them delivered to your inbox. What's easier than that? Want her to come speak or teach online to your group? You can do that here.  Oh and did she mention she has a December release?

Eldred Bird

Good stories are built around great characters. If readers don’t identify or sympathize with your protagonist, they’re not going to care enough to come on your character’s journey.

We writers generally have a picture in mind when it comes to the characters in our books. We know what our heroes and villains look and sound like. Height, build, hair, eyes, accents—it’s all etched inside our brains. As we write, we want the readers to see exactly what we see . . . or do we?

Les Edgerton stated, in an earlier post here at WITS, that giving too much description can actually keep the reader from investing in a character. His theory is that by giving only information essential to the story and letting the readers fill in the blanks with familiar images, the characters become more personal and recognizable.

What happens if we remove all character description?

We bring our own biases and perceptions into the characters we create, often pulling in elements of ourselves and people we know. I was curious to see what readers would do when my own vision was removed from the equation (to the extent that it’s possible), so I did an experiment.

My hypothesis:

In the absence of physical description, the readers would paint their own picture and reveal their own biases.

To test my theory I wrote a short story, Treble in Paradise: A Tale of Sax and Violins. I left out any physical descriptions or details that might influence how readers would picture the protagonist: gender, religion, physical attributes, ethnicity. I included only a vague idea of age. I kept the language gender-neutral as well.

The story was written in first person POV in a journal entry style, as we have a tendency not to describe ourselves physically in that format. That choice made leaving out those details feel more natural.

At the end of the story, I asked readers to close their eyes and without referring back to the text, picture the protagonist and describe that person to me. I wanted to know who they would see without my words guiding them to build the image.

Results:

Though a couple of readers came close to my own vision of the protagonist, no one described the character I’d seen when I wrote the story. Only one person mentioned noticing the lack of description, but indicated that it was not an issue for them.

An equal number of men and women took the time to respond to the question. All but one respondent pictured a male protagonist. To my surprise, the lone respondent who saw a female was a man. This might say more about societal expectations and bias rather than that of the individual readers.

What did the readers tell me?

Beyond the near unanimous agreement on gender, the descriptions covered a wide spectrum.

• People guessed the age of the musician as anywhere from mid 30s to late 50s.
• Body types varied from thin to chunky, but most everyone saw pale skin and dark hair with at least a tinge of gray.
• A couple of people admitted to seeing themselves, and a few even scoured the internet and provided images matching their vision.

Though I had only asked for a physical description, many people responded with emotional descriptions as well. Two readers even built a back-story for the protagonist. I don’t think I could ask for a closer reader connection than that.

What have I learned from this experience?

1. My first take away is that sometimes less really is more. Trying to force my image of the character into the mind of the reader may push them away rather than bring them closer.
2. Removing all description is extremely difficult, and not always practical. There may be certain physical details that are required for the story to work.
3. The big lesson is to TRUST THE READER.I have a tendency to over-describe or over-explain because I fear people won’t get the idea. Believe me, they get it.

While the physical descriptions from the readers often differed from my own vision, the emotions described didn’t, and emotions are what our stories are all about.

This experiment had a profound effect on me as a writer.

Telling a story is about taking the reader on a journey, not just getting them to a destination. Never again will I attempt to spoon-feed the readers information. Instead, I’ll leave more to their imagination so they can fill in the blanks with familiar images. I want them to have a personal experience with the characters I’ve created. Building in too much detail can create a brick wall that blocks their view of the story.

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About Eldred

Eldred Bird writes contemporary fiction, short stories, and personal essays. He has spent a great deal of time exploring the deserts, forests, and deep canyons inside his home state of Arizona. His James McCarthy adventures, Killing Karma and Catching Karma, reflect this love of the Grand Canyon State even as his character solves mysteries amidst danger. Eldred explores the boundaries of short fiction in his stories, The Waking Room and Treble in Paradise: A tale of Sax and Violins (Treble is free on Amazon for the next few days).

When he’s not writing, Eldred spends time cycling, hiking and juggling (yes, juggling…bowling balls and 21 inch knives). His passion for photography allows him to record his travels. He can be found on Twitter or Facebook, or at his website: http://www.eldredbird.com/.

Lisa Wells

Every book needs a dose of laughter. Even hard-core, freak-out scary stuff needs a scene or a sentence or a word intended to allow the reader a moment to breathe out some of the tension you’ve mummified them in for pages and pages and breathe in ease.

This post will acquaint you with five make-them-laugh techniques you can choose from when you want to give your readers a giggle, chuckle, snigger or even a good old-fashioned, snorting,  belly laugh.

5. K -- the sound it makes is the funniest letter

This rule appears to be universally agreed upon by comedians. So much so, that in Neil Simon’s 1972 play The Sunshine Boys, there’s a scene in which an aging comedian schools his nephew on comedy and the letter k:

"Fifty-seven years in this business, you learn a few things. You know what words are funny and which words are not funny. Alka Seltzer is funny. You say 'Alka Seltzer' you get a laugh ... Words with k in them are funny. Casey Stengel, that's a funny name. Robert Taylor is not funny. Cupcake is funny. Tomato is not funny. Cookie is funny. Cucumber is funny. Car keys. Cleveland ... Cleveland is funny. Maryland is not funny. Then, there's chicken. Chicken is funny. Pickle is funny. Cab is funny. Cockroach is funny -- not if you get 'em, only if you say 'em."

This is an easy way to add a touch of subtle humor to your writing. Any author can give the diner their character is hiding out in a funny k-name. (Crunchy Cracker Café). By the way, according to my research, these sounds are funniest when you put them in the middle of sentences. (I don’t write the rules -- I’m just reporting them.)

4. Shock

If you want to make your readers laugh, shock them. According to Author Scott Dikkers in his book How To Write Funny, this funny filter includes anything you shouldn’t say in mixed company.  He also says it’s a method best used like a garnish. Never the main course.

Example: The television series The Black List deals with grim storylines. The kind that make you me want to close your eyes and turn down the sound. Here is one example of how they used shock to elicit laughter in the midst of a tense scene in which Reddington is trying to extract information from a guy who is part of an illegal organ transplant ring. The bad guy has a heart condition, and Reddington (the bad guy you can’t help but love) has spiked his drink with Viagra.

"Those drinks you’ve been enjoying on the house? They weren’t from the house. They were from me. I hope you don’t mind. I took the liberty of adding a special surprise ingredient. Something to treat any localized dysfunction you may be suffering. Has the little man been falling down on the job? It’s a miracle drug, not so much for a glutton with a bum heart, however. But look on the bright side, you’ll die with a marvelous erection."

3. Misdirection

As an author, you can easily set your readers up to they think they know what’s going to come next -- and then throw them a curveball.  An example of this can be found in another scene from the show The Black List.  The character, Reddington, is standing in front of this huge portrait of a woman hanging on the wall in someone’s house, and he says:

"Last night I got up for a scoop of orange sherbet and she caught my eye. I just stood here in the dark, squinting at her. She’s breathtakingly unattractive."

The curveball is the word unattractive. Up until this point, the audience thinks he’s going to wax poetic about her beauty, and he doesn’t. Not only is she unattractive, she’s breathtakingly unattractive. Breathtakingly misdirects us to think beautiful. Had he said very unattractive, the laugh wouldn’t have come. But he used a word that our brains are trained to pair with the word beautiful. We were misdirected, and as a result, we laughed.

2. Exaggeration

Columnist Dave Barry is known for his humor. Humor that is often a result of exaggeration. Below is an example of how he uses exaggeration to paint a picture of a delusional man in Revenge of the Pork Person:

"A man can have a belly you could house commercial aircraft in and a grand total of eight greasy strands of hair, which he grows real long and combs across the top of his head so that he looks, when viewed from above, like an egg in the grasp of a giant spider, plus this man can have B.O. to the point where he interferes with radio transmissions, and he will still be convinced that, in terms of attractiveness, he is borderline Don Johnson."

In this example, Dave doesn’t just stop with one exaggeration, he really piles them on.  The key to exaggeration is to not be afraid to go over the top. Exaggeration is no time for subtlety.

1. Innuendo

A veiled remark about someone or something that indirectly insinuates something. Often, the something has a shock value to it. Example:

"He had the sort of face that makes you realize God does have a sense of humor." -- Bill Bryson.

With innuendo, you don’t want to spell out for the reader why it’s funny. They either pick up on the play on words or they don’t.

There you have it -- five techniques you can use when you want to add a bit of humor to your writing. If you study the examples, you’ll see that humor is often created by combining several methods. How many methods are there? Over thirty. I learned these methods while spending over a year researching, researching, researching how to make people cry.

The easy answer -- surprise them.

And because I’m an educator by trade, I took what I learned and turned my effort into a class on how to add humor to anything.

If you’d like to learn more about this class, check it out. I’ll be teaching it at Lawson’s Writer Academy in October. http://bit.ly/2N5Xc5R

Tell me your go-to-author when you want to laugh, and I'll include your name in a drawing for a $10 gift card to Amazon. The drawing will be on the 25th.

About Lisa

Lisa Wells writes romantic comedy with enough steam to fog your eyeglasses, your brain, and sometimes your Kindle screen. On the other hands, her eighty-year-old mother-in-law has read Lisa’s steamiest book and lived to offer her commentary. Which went something like this:  You used words I’ve never heard of…

Lisa’s the author of the Off the Wall Proposals series from Entangled.

She lives in Missouri with her husband and slightly-chunky rescue dog. Lisa loves dark chocolate, red wine, and those rare mornings when her skinny jeans fit. Which isn’t often, considering the first two entries on her love-it list.

To learn more about all of Lisa’s books, visit:

Website:  www.lisawellsauthor.com

Twitter: https://twitter.com/lisawellsauthor

Facebook:  https://www.facebook.com/lisa.wells.737

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lisawellsauthor/