Writers in the Storm

Today I'm sharing a really fun present to help you to ring in the new year. When I told Laura Drake about the new Microsoft Sway, she about lost her mind. It is extremely creative and cool, but super easy to use. Best of all, it integrates seamlessly with OneDrive and Office Online and it's FREE. Laura begged me to share it with everyone at WITS because y'all need it. 

Many people are comparing Sway to PowerPoint, but I think it's more like a digital scrapbook. Imagine being able to brainstorm and scrapbook your story in a format that could be shared via social media or embedded in a blog. Or gathering video and photos in one spot to spark your own creativity. Or being able to quickly fashion a video to share with a book group or your agent.

Welcome to the new world of Sway.

Laura's Sample Book Trailer - Sweet On You

We made this trailer in under 20 minutes. Half that time was taken up with Laura saying, "Oooh! Oooh! Try that one...no THAT one!"

I really like how it turned out for such a quick slap-together and I can't wait to do more, especially once the program goes beyond the Preview stage. We didn't add videos or links, just some photos and some text. There is so much more that can be done with this program.

[How fabulous is that? Feel free to click either of those social links to share it!]

Now that I have your attention, let's talk about Sway.

• The program is viable on any platform or device - Windows, Mac, tablets, etc.
• Go to http://sway.com if you want to get signed up.
• Sway Preview is now open to anybody (as of 12/15).
• Sway is perfect for storytelling - whether it's your book, a camping trip, or an ad campaign.
• Like paper scrapbooking, Sway is all about your imagination.

Current Limitations

• You must have a Microsoft account.
• There are limits to the current options like layouts, colors and styles. More are coming, but Microsoft is really taking their time collecting feedback before they go live with the "full" version. Here's the "official" Sway Suggestion Box.
• You need to get used to creating in the "Storyline" and then using the "Preview Pane" on the right to see the results. (But WOW, the results.)

The first thing I thought of when my friends at Microsoft showed me a demo was, "Book Trailers!" Sway is ideal for a visual pitch of your book, and I hope authors take advantage of it.

My favorite Sway features

• You can add content from just about anywhere on the web or from your own device (see pic to the right).
• You can also share content in tons of places, either via social media or by sending a link. The person doesn't even need to have Sway to view what you send.
• Since creating/editing Sways works in any browser, on any device with a screen width >600 pixels, it can work on tablets, Macs and PCs.
• It integrates with Office Online, which is also free.
• You can search the web for content from inside the app.
• Since it integrates with OneDrive, all my photos are easy to access.
• It's much more user friendly than PowerPoint. Example: it took me 10 minutes to give Laura the gist of Sway and turn her loose. It takes me at least an hour to get people up to speed on PowerPoint.
• Sway is very kid-friendly, and I expect to see tons of Sways at future school and scouting events.
• Microsoft actually really wants our feedback so the users have a golden opportunity to influence the direction and features of the software via UserVoice.

Here's a post with "5 Things To Know About Sway."

Demo of "How to Use Sway"

[youtube=http://youtu.be/wPNwJb3z80Q]

Okay, it's your turn! Had you heard of Sway? What are your questions? What ideas do you have for how this program could be used?

As a fun New Year's gift, I will pick a commenter and create a Sway based on their links, photos and text. Simply let me know in the comments that you want to be added to the drawing. We'll announce the winners next week and post their final Sways on the social media channel of their choosing.

Happy New Year, everybody!

~ Jenny
@JennyHansenCA

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About Jenny Hansen

By day, Jenny provides training and social media marketing for an accounting firm. By night she writes news articles, humor, memoir, women’s fiction and short stories. After 18+ years as a corporate software trainer, she’s delighted to sit down while she works.

When she’s not at her personal blog, More Cowbell, Jenny can be found on Twitter at JennyHansenCA or at Writers In The Storm.

Sherry Thomas

I like directions. I am, moreover, very good at following directions. Lately, however, I find myself balking at one particular set of directions: writing rules. Now I’m the last person to suggest that everything about writing is subjective and therefore any rule should be kicked in the gonads before it even walks through the door. But I have become quite impatient with how some of those general guidelines are presented: as implacable absolutes.

Offending rule #1: Don’t start a book with a prologue

I used to shrug at that, even when I was a rank beginner. Surely, I thought, since there are so many good and successful books that start with prologues, that fallacy would die a natural death before long. Sadly, I was wrong. I last came across someone asking serious questions about whether a prologue was verboten only a month ago.

A quick trip to my own bookshelves returns with some very prominent titles that start very prominently with prologues. Lord of the Rings, for example. The Da Vinci Code, yes. Switching genres slightly, The Secret History by Donna Tartt also features a prologue. Strictly speaking, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone does not have a prologue. But if your chapter 2 starts with “Nearly ten years had passed since the Dursleys had woken up to find their nephew on the front step,” I’d say your chapter 1 is a prologue in everything but name.

Closer to home, Lord of Scoundrels by Loretta Chase opens unabashedly with a prologue—and that book has sat at the top of the All About Romances Top 100 Romances poll for at least a decade. And Born in Ice, the first Nora Roberts book I ever picked up? You guessed it, prologue!

Don’t write boring prologues, if you must have rules about prologues. But let’s stop badmouthing prologues in general. If a book opens well, who cares whether it is a chapter 1 or a prologue?

Offending rule #2: Stay away from adverbs

Don’t mix your prints. Don’t wear black with navy. Don’t wear white after Labor Day. These used to be fashion maxims, taken as self-evident and immutable. Well, they have all fallen by the wayside in recent years. And winter white is considered terribly chic these days.

Not that I think adverbs should ever be in fashion en masse. It doesn’t hurt for writers to go for nouns and verbs, which are stronger, more impactful words. But we should be cognizant that sometimes an adverb can be the most efficient and elegant of way of saying what you want to say.

I need to apologize to the blogger who brought this to my attention: I can’t remember or find out who you are. But the article is from People.com, concerning an on-air faux pas on the part of Kathy Lee Gifford, who didn’t do her homework before she interviewed the actor Martin Short. Mr. Short had lost his beloved wife fairly recently. Ms. Gifford, ignorant of that, pressed him for answers about his relationship.

"How many years are you in love with her now?" inquired Gifford.

Short, already looking stricken, quietly replied, "Thirty-six."

Quietly. That word made the sentence. Sometimes adverbs simply do it better.

 Offending Rule #3: Show, don’t tell

Now I am veering into sacred-cow territory. No matter, one person’s sacred cow is another’s future steak. Not that I have anything against showing—most of my time is spent trying to guide readers deeper into the hearts and minds of my characters via showing. But telling has its place in, well, storytelling.

The movie equivalent to telling would be narration, also known as the voice-over, often disparaged as a cheap trick by directors who can’t do what needs to be done visually. But as this Movieline.com article by Nathan Pensky points out,

Even the most anti-narration snob would have to concede that the larger film canon contains some pretty notable exceptions to this rule. The Naked City, A Clockwork Orange, Sunset Boulevard, GoodFellas, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, The Big Lebowski, The Shawshank Redemption — all use narration, and far from stalling story or characterization, with them it pushes everything forward.

Why do people persist in telling, instead of showing? A lot of times telling is the most efficient way of getting information across, especially at the beginning of a work. The most important job a writer has is to suck in her readers. No reader cares whether you are telling or showing, as long as you are effectively sweeping her along.

I never tire of using the example of Kristan Higgins’s opening—in the prologue, no less—of her book Too Good to be True.

 Making up a boyfriend is nothing new for me. I’ll come right out and admit that. Some people go window shopping for things they could never afford. Some look at online photos of resorts they’ll never visit. Some people imagine that they meet a really nice guy when, in fact, they don’t.

If that’s not telling, I don’t know what is. And that is a tremendous beginning. Certainly pulled me right in.

I often open my own books in the third person omniscient point of view, because I want to situate readers in the story as quickly as possible. For my YA fantasy The Burning Sky, after a dozen different beginnings and much hair pulling, I decided I needed to tell, rather than show. And this is what I did:

 Just before the start of Summer Half, in April 1883, a very minor event took place at Eton College, that venerable and illustrious English public school for boys. A sixteen-year-old pupil named Archer Fairfax returned from a three-month absence, caused by a fractured femur, to resume his education.

Almost every word in the preceding sentence is false. Archer Fairfax had not suffered a broken limb. He had never before set foot in Eton. His name was not Archer Fairfax. And he was not, in fact, even a he.

This is the story of a girl who fooled a thousand boys, a boy who fooled an entire country, a partnership that would change the fate of realms, and a power to challenge the greatest tyrant the world had ever known.

Expect magic.

 

Telling? No doubt. A better opening than any of the dozen that preceded it? No doubt.

At their core, all the rules I rail against today are well meaning and good to keep in mind. As best-practice guidelines and not absolutes. In writing, as in anything else, different circumstances require different approaches. And it’s generally better to have more tools at our fingertips than fewer. So go into those trenches with a full arsenal, if you can.

(And of course, everything in this article is a suggestion, not a rule.)

Do you have a writing rule you're afraid to break? Or maybe you'd rather share your own successful rule breaking?

USA Today-bestselling author Sherry Thomas loves nothing more than the mix of explosive action and combustible romance. In her career so far, she has written more romance than action, but she is making up for it with a YA fantasy trilogy and a wuxia-inspired duology. Her books regularly receive starred reviews and best-of-the-year honors from trade publications, including such outlets as the New York Times and National Public Radio. She is also a two-time winner of Romance Writers of America’s prestigious RITA® Award.

And by the way, English is her second language.

You can find out more about Sherry’s books at SherryThomas.com

 

It’s the day after Christmas, and if you’re anything like me, you’re probably exhausted and have a jolly hangover. So let’s just hang out and swap stories.

Orly and I were chatting in an early email over coffee the other day about yet another way that we writers are seen as a different species by the rest of the population: Writing in Public.

You’ll find our kind mostly in coffee shops. We’re easy to spot. We’re the ones either hunched over, squinting at a laptop screen, or staring with an unfocused gaze into space. That’s the socially acceptable stuff. But then there’s the other stuff – you know, the behavior that makes us stand out, even though we’re usually oblivious to that fact.

 

Solitary oddities:

Twitches – I was writing in the library the other day. My protagonist was thinking, when someone came up and laid a hand on her shoulder. You know that twisting, duck-out-from-under move? How do you write it without doing it, over and over, while you’re writing? I’m sure I looked like I was having involuntary nerve spasms.

 

Faces – Have you ever been writing an expression, say, an irritated mother butthole-lip-purse – then realize you’re staring at another person? And that they’re looking back with that, are-you-looking-at-me-and-what-the-heck-did-I-do-to-you look? Yeah, of course you laugh. And the other person gets uncomfortable enough to leave, because you’re obviously unbalanced.

Laughing – sometimes you’re just so clever, so funny, that you can’t hold it in. I’ve done it too, along with an ‘I’m so awesome’ seat dance that I’m sure is entertaining to others.

Choreography – your hero is in the fight of his life – hand-to-hand combat with the bad guy. You can’t write that without a little chair-choreography, right? But can you do it without looking like you’re grappling with an imaginary friend? And if you’re in your normal author uniform, you could be mistaken for a schizophrenic homeless person and be asked to leave.

 Staring – Even if you’re managing to keep everything in your head, you’re going to be looking somewhere while you do it, right? If a person happens to be in the line of your unfocused gaze, they’re going to get uncomfortable by the second or third minute. Promise.

 

Group weirdness:

We also meet our own kind there, like zebras at a watering hole. There is safety in numbers.

But we also tend to feel more comfortable and let down our guards. My crit group met for years at a B&N Starbucks. We’ve got great stories of inappropriate behavior.

Sex – today’s society has come a long way, but discussing unusual body positions and demonstrating them is still not seen as appropriate. Trust me on this.

Murder – discussing how to kill someone and dispose of the body without getting caught – let’s just say getting asked to leave isn’t the worst than can happen to you.

Anarchy and mayhem – I’m surprised I’m not yet on no-fly lists. 

Awkward Silences – you know how when you’re talking in a crowded room, and there’s a sudden lull? You don’t want to be discussing deer antlers, and how the velvety outside and bonelike inside reminds you of . . . well, just take my word for it. You don’t want that to happen.

Okay, your turn. We want to hear your funny stories public writing stories in the comments! We know you have them!

Hey, if I can tell my ‘deer antler’ story . . .

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.

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