Writers in the Storm

 

What is Cadence?

To me, it’s Like Porn, in that it’s not easy to define, but I know it when I see it.

Webster did manage to define it though (which makes me want to look up ‘porn’):

• The beat, rate, or measure of any rhythmic movement
• A slight falling in pitch of the voice in speaking or reading, as at the end of a declarative sentence

Though Webster wasn’t talking about writing in the above definition, he came close. To me,

Cadence = rhythm

This is a writer’s tool that is often overlooked, which is sad, because it’s a powerful one. It’s not just the words, but how they’re put together that can convey a mood. To the reader, it’s subliminal – they feel it subconsciously. It’s a way of layering your message – and it can work like glue to stick readers to your pages.

Examples:

“I was also a shrimper’s son in love with the shape of boats.” Pat Conroy, Prince of Tides

Yes, there’s alliteration there (repeating ‘s’ words), but there’s also cadence. Read it out loud. To me, it rises and falls with those ‘s’ words, making the sentence wave-like. Which is brilliant, because it ties to the subject – water. Have I mentioned that Conroy is my hero? ;)

“A nimbus of black curls overwhelmed her deathly pale, sharp-boned foxy face.” Laura Drake, The Sweet Spot

See how the stops of ‘sharp’, ‘foxy’ and ‘face’ help convey the hard planes of her face?

“Judy was a big sturdy woman, without much softness. Hers was the handsome, hard-chiseled face of a Western woman: strong cheekbones, wide mouth, hooded eyes.” Barbara O’Neal, The Secret of Everything

The sentences above convey hardness in the words, but in the cadence, as well. Read it aloud, and see how the beats are stops. Jerks. The ‘h’ words make a tiny pause.

You can also use cadence to speed up the action and convey fear or panic:

"My hand was on the door handle when for a split second out of nowhere I was terrified, blue-blazing terrified, fear dropping straight through me like a jagged black stone, falling fast. I’d felt this before, in the limbo instants before I moved out of my aunt’s house, lost my virginity, took my oath as a police officer: those instants when the irrevocable thing you wanted so much suddenly turns real and solid, inches away and speeding at you, a bottomless river rising and no way back once it’s crossed. I had to catch myself back from crying out like a little kid drowning in terror, I don’t want to do this anymore." Tanya French, The Likeness

See how the run-on sentence emulates your thoughts when you’re afraid? The hardness of “jagged black stone, falling fast.” Almost batter you.

“The bean bag chair had been slashed -- tiny styrofoam peas shifted in a line across the floor, dancing in the breeze from the broken windows.” Laura Drake, work in progress

The cadence and word choice in the above is at odds – ‘shifted in a line’ and ‘dancing in the breeze’ is lyrical, but ‘slashed’ and ‘broken windows’ foreshadows that something bad is about to happen.

“This is how it feels when you realize your child is missing: The pit of your stomach freezes fast, while your legs go to jelly. “

“There’s one single, blue-bass thud of your heart. The shape of her name, sharp as metal filings, gets caught between your teeth even as you try to force it out in a shout. Fear breathes like a monster into your ear: Where did I see her last? Would she have wandered away? Who could have taken her? And then, finally, your throat seals shut, as you swallow the fact that you’ve made a mistake you will never be able to fix.” Jodi Picoult, The Tenth Circle

Wow. “Blue bass thud. Sharp as metal filings. Breathes like a monster into your ear.”

All very well and good, but how do you do that?

• Word choice. I use the Thesaurus. A lot. Say you’re trying to convey softness. ‘S’ words do that. Words like: silky, sultry, soft, spongy, smooth, supple, serene. I’ve been known to spend ten minutes looking for a word beginning with an ‘G’ to convey abruptness.
• Read aloud. You may not catch the cadence reading silently, but I promise you will when you read it aloud. My final edits for any book I turn in involves reading it aloud to my cat (who is a tough critic; she sleeps through most of it)
• Be aware. Don’t expect that this stuff will just flow out of your fingers. I get the scene down first, then go back and layer this in. it takes rewriting to get it perfect. And you need that quality to hold your reader. This will seem hard at first, but the more you work with it, the more it becomes ingrained.

Tom Robbins says, “Challenge every single sentence for lucidity, accuracy, originality, and cadence. If it doesn’t meet the challenge, work on it until it does.” Seems a daunting task, I know. But if you want to grab readers, and sell well, that’s what it takes.

Tom Robbins, has been known to rewrite a single sentence 40 times. Yikes, right?

But cadence is worth the work, because this is the sentence he ended up with as the last line of Jitterbug Perfume.

The lesson of the beet, then, is this: hold on to your divine blush, your innate rosy magic, or end up brown. Once you’re brown, you’ll find that you’re blue. As blue as indigo. And you know what that means: Indigo. Indigoing. Indigone.

So what do you think? have I convinced you to work on cadence? We'd love to see some of your 'before' and 'after' samples in the comments!

About Laura:

Laura Drake is a city girl who never grew out of her tomboy ways, or a serious cowboy crush. She writes both Women's Fiction and Romance.

She sold her Sweet on a Cowboy series, romances set in the world of professional bull riding, to Grand Central. The Sweet Spot (May 2013), Nothing Sweeter (Jan 2014) and Sweet on You (August 2014). The Sweet Spot won the 2014 Romance Writers of America^®   RITA^® award in the Best First Book category.

Her 'biker-chick' novel, Her Road Home, sold to Harlequin's Superomance line (August, 2013) and has expanded to three more stories set in the same small town. The Reasons to Stay released August, 2014.

In 2014, Laura realized a lifelong dream of becoming a Texan and is currently working on her accent. She gave up the corporate CFO gig to write full time. She's a wife, grandmother, and motorcycle chick in the remaining waking hours.

Twitter  Facebook

Sierra Godfrey

Most authors have a day job, and sometimes we’re lucky enough for that be writing-related. They say that the creative brain has the ability to be creative in multiple ways, and you’ll often find those who write also paint, act, sing, compose. In my case, I’m both a writer and graphic designer –and I do a lot of different types of writing.

But the audiences for those things are not the same.

In the design world, one of the most important ways to ensure a successful brand or identity campaign is protect your brand. That means making sure nothing competes with or dilutes your image or message. Examples of this might be using another logo alongside yours, or talking about another service or business while promoting your primary business.

It’s the same thing if you write technical material for a living while promoting your fiction. The audiences are different, and so is your conversation and message.

Of course, there are situations where combining your online presence (website, Twitter, Facebook) for all types of writing makes sense—or at least, isn’t detrimental to either business. And let’s face it – maintaining separate accounts for your different businesses could get exhausting.

But would it serve you better?

In my case, I had a situation that required some choices to be made. I’m a big soccer fan (or football as it’s called outside the U.S.) and this year I began writing articles for football sites. I also followed a lot of football supporters on Twitter, and they followed me back. When my favorite teams played matches and I happened to be on Twitter (and really, when am I not on Twitter?), I was a bit….well, exuberant. A completely un-scientific poll of some of my followers on Twitter said that no one cared about me tweeting with a million exclamation points about teams my fellow writers didn’t know or probably care about. But as time went on, I felt increasingly uncomfortable.

I was having two separate conversations with two separate audiences.

I thought about it for a few days. Setting up another twitter account would be easy enough to do, but how much time and energy would it require? Would it really matter that much?

Eventually, I decided it would matter. Twitter, of course, is for having conversations and engaging with others. That’s why it’s such a terrific way for anyone with a business to reach out to people. Building my profile as someone who can write reasonably well about European football is a different goal than being an author of women’s fiction. I wanted to have different conversations with the two audiences.

It sounds sort of crazy to separate out parts of yourself, but as it turns out, it wasn’t that hard. If you have multiple sides to your career, give some consideration to this idea. Here are some pointers:

Twitter

I created a new Twitter account for the football. It is only semi-annoying to switch back and forth between accounts on my mobile devices—but the Twitter mobile client makes this fairly easy with just a click. It was even easier on the laptop through Tweetdeck, which allows you to view a bunch of accounts all at once. Is it a lot of noise? Yes. But in a way it was also much quieter, because each stream is devoted to its topic. I also found I was able to really focus my message because now my tweets were consistent for each account.

Make sure that if you operate a tandem twitter account that you are willing to switch between them and tweet in each when required – I also found it good practice to include my twitter handle for each account in my profile. So for writing/publishing, I’m @sierragodfrey and my profile includes, “football writing is @sierragfootball.” Likewise for the football account.

Yes, people look at this. Yes, it matters because you’ll catch the cross-over people this way—those interested in both sides of you.

Facebook

For years, you couldn’t have multiple Facebook accounts, yet Facebook didn’t have a way for people to segment out their interests. This was especially problematic if you had a business or interest that you wanted to keep separate from all the pictures of your kids rocking out to music in their pajamas.

Now, Facebook lets you have fan pages for just about anything and you can switch between them with a single click—all on one screen. I have one for graphic design and one for me being a writer for posting all my published items. Those are in addition to my main (private) Facebook account where I put all the pictures of my kids.

Again, this is extra work, but setting up a separate page for your pig-farming business is going to ensure you can focus your marketing to bacon buyers, none of whom care that you write steamy erotic romance.

Websites

This is trickier, but I’ve seen this issue with a lot of authors: they have day jobs or other careers that they want to promote through their site, and yet want to promote their books. I also see that people probably wonder who in their right mind would have more than one website when it’s hard enough having one?

Again, it all comes down to focus and opportunity.

Whereas you can get away with diluting who you are on Twitter or Facebook, websites really must focus on one thing only in order to be effective and that’s because websites largely function as a billboard – visitors pass by and glean the purpose of the site in one go. If it captures their attention, they stay. Having one focus means a better chance of capturing attention.

Because my website is set up to house my published writing, I simply added a page that listed all my football articles to date. But…the site as a whole isn’t set up for that audience, and what would happen when I have a book to promote? What would happen when I want to interact with readers? My web traffic statistics showed that I was getting traction for the football writing. People wanted to see who I was. What would they make of my fiction writing? Would that be relevant to them? I decided it wouldn’t and that I needed a second site. Especially if I wanted to showcase my football journalism later in order to query other blogs.

This was easily done. Most web hosts allow you to have a free subdomain – so I added one: football.sierragodfrey.com. Simple, focused, and separate.

Now, if you’re not a graphic designer and can’t throw up a site in a day, then you’d have to pay for another site or at the least set up another template. There are a bunch of inexpensive options for this—Blogger or Wordpress.com. But again, if you have two businesses, you really, truly, have to stop and think about marketing for yourself. The purpose of splitting out your sites serve is to better serve your audience. And what does that get you? Future opportunities.

I hope this discussion opens up possibilities for you that you might not have considered before. No solution is easy or simple – but then, neither are we with our varied talents.

Have you split out your interests or businesses? Or have you chosen to consolidate everything? I’d love to hear about it in the comments.

About Sierra:

Sierra Godfrey writes fiction with international settings and most likely a mention of football (soccer) or two. She is a member of the Women’s Fiction Writers Association and a quarterly contributor to the Writers in the Storm. Her non-fiction essays have been featured on Maria Shriver’s Shriver Report and Architects of Change website, and in the anthology, Nothing But The Truth So Help Me God: 73 Women on Life’s Transitions (Nothing But the Truth Press, 2014). She writes for the football blogs Back Page Football and Retain Possession, and is also a freelance graphic designer. She lives in the foggy wastelands of the San Francisco Bay Area with her family.

Laura here - Sierra wouldn't dilute her brand by talking about her graphic design expertise here - but I can! We at WITS can vouch for that expertise; she designed our beautiful new website!

Come visit her at www.sierragodfrey.com (or, you know, football.sierragodfrey.com) or talk with her on Twitter @sierragodfrey (or, you know, @sierragfootball).

Rhay Christou

 

Agents want it. Editors want it. Readers are begging for it. Deep point of view is all the rage.

But what is deep point of view?

Deep point of view is intense. It not only represents the sights, sounds, and actions filtered through a POV (point of view) character but goes deeper into emotions as well as a character’s unique worldview. In deep point of view the character owns the page and the author becomes nonexistent. Deep point of view allows the reader to live vicariously through the actions, reactions, and emotions of a character.

How do you go deep?

The key to deep point of view is understanding the rules, the tricks, and the tips for getting deep and then using deep point of view to empower your story.

Let’s dive into four tricks that create deep point of view.

1. Make your tags disappear

While speech tags clarify a speaker, they are blips on the deep point of view radar, reminding the reader he is reading and not living a story. In deep point of view tags are often replaced by action, body language, voice description, emotion.

Replacing your tags makes the story feel genuine.

How the words are said and the actions behind the words act as subtle cues to reveal more about a character, his emotional state of mind and the story.

Example:

Distant point of view: “I don’t want to talk about it,” he said.

From his words we have no real understanding of what he truly means. Does he really not want to talk? Or is he saying something he doesn’t mean? Does he want to talk but not know how to talk?

Deeper: “I don’t want to talk about it,” he said, shredding the napkin.

We are closer. Shredding the napkin gives a clue that whatever he doesn’t want to talk about is upsetting him. However, that he said isn’t only a blip, reminding the reader he is reading. He said is also redundant. Reading rules tell us that if dialog is in the same paragraph as the character’s action, then the action character is also the speaker. You don’t need both.

Deeper still: “I don’t want to talk about it.” Focused on his fingers, he tore a long strip from the edge of the recycled napkin and then another and another, until a paper mountain stood between us.

This character’s body language is closed in. He is focusing on something else instead of the person he is with. He is creating a mountain between them. The specifics also give us a bigger context of story. He doesn’t just shred the paper, but tears it into strips. This takes time. This takes concentration. This tells a lot.

2. Make your thought words/sense words disappear

Everyone tells you to get rid of those filter words, but they rarely say why. Thought words/sense words are telling words. They not only put an author on the page, but also create a distance between character and reader. They are disingenuous to the “real life experience” of deep point of view.

How often do you think, I’m thinking? Or I’m wondering if I’ll get a raise. How often do you think, Oh, I see bad boys up ahead.

You don’t. And if you’re truly in deep point of view, your character won’t either. He will think. He will wonder. He will see, hear, feel, but he won’t add the filter words. He’ll just do it.

Example: He felt the pain shoot through his gut and wondered if he was going to die.

The reader is kept at a distance. He hears what the character’s thoughts are but doesn’t feel what the character feels. He doesn’t think what character thinks. He is told about these feelings and thoughts and as a result there is a filter between the reader and character.

Deep: Pain shot through his gut, and he clutched his stomach. This was it. He was going to die.

No thinking. No wondering. Just what’s happening and the reader is pulled in deep.

3. Understand your POV character

This is my favorite trick. However, this is the trick that most writers skim over with “Of course I know my character. I created her.”

You know your character better than anyone else, but do you know your character well enough?

Answer the following questions in the character’s voice capturing words, phrases, her syntax, unique worldview. Pay attention to her body language and let her carry you off-topic..

Give it a try: Sit down with your character and see if you discover anything new.

• How does she carry herself? How does she walk? What chair does she chose? How does she sit? Note her body language. Think about what this is telling you about the ‘who’ of this person.
• Note how you would approach this person. Is she approachable? Will you dive into your questions or ease into these questions? How does she make you feel?

Ask her the following questions and write down her answers. Try writing the answers in her voice, capturing her words, her phrases, her syntax, her unique world view. Pay attention to her body language as she speaks.

• Who are you?
• What do you want more than anything?
• How far would you go to get it?
• Why is what you want so important?
• How do you feel about the people in your life? This could be story time people or past people. Both will reveal a great deal about the ‘who’ of the character.
• How do you feel about the people in your life?
• How do you feel about yourself?

Here’s an example of three ways that a writer might write a description from a character’s point of view. I hope Maggie Stiefvater does not mind that I not only borrow from her wonderful novel The Scorpio Races, but that I also spend a couple of paragraphs blanding her work.

On the surface: On the day after the character Puck has decided to race in the deadly Scorpio races, she goes to the barn to feed her horse.

Simple to the point, giving time, temp and place.

Slightly deeper: The morning is raw and early as I make my way out to Dove’s pasture. It’s not cold enough to freeze the mud, however, so I slide and stomp and shiver my way across the muddy yard. I’m nervous but trying not to be.

We have a bit more specific detail. It is nice writing. We tie the cold to her emotional state of mind. She is shivering from the cold or from being nervous. We are deep, but are we deep enough? Could this excerpt only be this character’s worldview or could you find the same description in any novel?

What Stiefvater wrote: The morning is raw and pink as I make my way out to Dove’s pasture. Cold as a witch’s tit my father used to say, and my mother would say is that the sort of language you’re teaching your boys? And apparently it was, because Gabe said it just the other day. It’s not cold enough to freeze the mud, however—only a few years does it ever get cold enough for that—so I slide and stomp the muddy yard. I’m trying not to notice that I’m nervous. It is nearly working.

Just wow! In that short paragraph we have so much more character. We are so deep into her thoughts. All tied together, all bringing forth setting, backstory, emotion. All bringing forth the character’s voice.

4. Understand your POV character’s worldview

A worldview is shaped by experiences and expectations of self, life, and society. In any given situation a person/character brings those aspects to life in facing a new situation. How he will face or describe each situation or place will be colored by his worldview.

For example: Many years ago, I visited Jamaica with my father. If asked today to describe, the place, my experiences, my adventures, I would inevitably pull out the time that my father and I had travelled out of our guarded hotel into the streets of the city.

As the night drew closer, I was mesmerized by the color, the lights, the crowded sidewalks, the wonder of all that was different and vibrant and glorious to me. A truly magical experience.

My father would have a very different take on those events. The crowds, the noise, the young men standing at the corner with a baseball bat. I’m sure Dad’s heart pounded and I know his hand sweated around mine.

My worldview was that of innocence and the invincibility of youth. My father--more jaded by the news, his life, and his role as protector--saw the exact things differently. (BTW: The guys were really nice, not only showing us to our hotel but refusing payment for their trouble.)

The point is that each character comes to a page with a particular worldview and by knowing that worldview you can manipulate the reader’s emotions and reading experience.

There you have it. Four quick tips for diving deeper into deep point of view.

Keep in mind there are many more ways to explore deep point of view and there are many reasons to break the rules. That’s the great thing about writing. There isn’t just one way to tell a story. Explore the tips and tricks, discover more and then use what works for you and your story.

Above all never forget. Your journey, your story, your way!

Enjoy your journey!

So, constant WITS followers - what do you think? Ready to try a deep POV?

About Rhay Christou 

Two of the things I love are teaching and creative writing. With my MFA in writing from Vermont College, I have had the great fortune to combine them. I’ve taught everything from creative writing to academic writing at the university level as well as writing workshops in the USA and on the lovely island of Cyprus, where I live.

I teach three courses online for Lawson Writer's Academy:  Create Compelling Characters and From Blah to Beats: Giving Chapters a Heart and Diving Deep into Deep POV.

My first novel, I Do Not will be released in May of 2016 by Spencer Hill.

Rhay is teaching an online class for Lawson Writer's Academy in November: Diving Deep into Deep POV.