Writers in the Storm

Writers In The Storm welcomes back double RITA finalist, Kara Lennox, a.k.a. Karen Leabo with her Plot Fixer blog series. Don’t miss Kara’s writing tips the first Friday of every month.

Here are the links for Parts 1-8:

Part 1 – Your Premise Isn’t Compelling
Part 2 – How To Fix a Weak Opening
Part 3 – A Lack of Goals
Part 4 – Is Your Conflict Strong Enough?
Part 5 – Raising The Stakes
Part 6 – 5 Tips To Help Improve Your Story’s Pacing
Part 7 – Pick Up the Pace
Part 8 -  Is Your Plot Predictable

By Kara Lennox

In my critique group, I am known as the Coincidence Nazi. I cannot stand when an author uses a coincidence to further the plot, because it's easy. That's just lazy writing.

Here is Kara's Rule of Coincidences: One per book. That's all.

Coincidences do occur in real life. And if you're writing, say, a paranormal, where you have a curse or a spell or some object that keeps landing in the possession of brides left at the altar, that is one thing. The coincidences are part of your world-building.

But if you need to have a scene between the hero and heroine, so you have them run into each other at the grocery store, and then at the post office, and then in an elevator, and then at a ballgame ... ugh, ugh, ugh. If your character is trying to solve a mystery, and she keeps stumbling on clues by total dumb luck, another triple ugh.

Many romances are fueled by a hero and heroine who are initially antagonistic toward one another, but because they are forced to interact, they eventually learn things about each other and come to understand each other's motivations, so they can work out their conflict. But simply throwing them together haphazardly is not the way to do it. You have to craft a plot that forces them together--naturally, logically. The best stories move along due to the characters' decisions and actions--not by stuff simply happening to them.

Sometimes a coincidence, or bad luck, or an accident can be the inciting incident that gets the ball rolling in a book, so to speak. Say, a woman is getting a manicure, and she overhears the conversation at the next station involving the manicurist's boyfriend. And the woman realizes that the manicurist's boyfriend and her boyfriend are the same person. This is a coincidence. But it could happen, and it could work as a first scene, the inciting incident that causes our heroine to cancel her wedding and go on to do ... whatever.

But you can't have that same woman continue to overhear conversations to further the plot, That would qualify as a contrivance, when the author manipulates the plot for her own convenience. Now, what you could do is have the heroine deliberately eavesdropping for the purpose of collecting information she needs. Do you see the difference? In one case, she overhears crucial information by dumb luck. In the other, she is deliberately pursuing the information. The first case is contrivance; the second is a legitimate, character-driven event.

Some luck plays a role in every life, and can be included in your book. (I confess, I’ve thrown a tornado or two into my books.) But having the character drive the story, rather than the author, is much preferred.

Paranormal authors are particularly guilty of manipulating the plot for convenience's sake. They take liberties with their magical world. If the heroine has telekinetic abilities, then suddenly in the middle of the book she develops telepathic abilities because the author needs her to learn something from the villain that the villain would never tell her, but those telepathic abilities are never explained and never occur again ... that is a contrivance.

But even in romantic suspense, or straight romances, authors sometimes have their story people behave irrationally or against character, because they need something to happen.

Here is what I do. If, as I'm writing, I discover that my character needs a particular skill that has never been mentioned before, I go back to the beginning and plant that skill. As an example, at the climax of a screenplay I wrote, the heroine swings from a chandelier and catches a flying gun with her feet. (Okay, this was a comedy, remember!) This woman was a former stripper, and I already had a short scene at the beginning where she was doing her act onstage. So I added a trapeze and had her catch a flower between her feet as part of her act. Later I revealed that she was a former child gymnast with Olympic hopes whose career ended with an injury. It all fed into her character beautifully.

Now I will tell a story on myself. I wanted to write a book about a tough guy who was stuck taking care of a baby. I wanted it to take place in a remote area of the Ozarks, and when the baby gets sick, I wanted the heroine to be the one who could step in and help him take care of the baby. So I needed the hero isolated. Where he couldn't just drive to a hospital.

So here is what I came up with. He was a secret service agent, charged with protecting a Chinese diplomat's baby who had been threatened during some sensitive negotiations. I had him and the baby delivered to this remote cabin by helicopter. Then I had him LOSE his satellite phone, his only means of communicating with the outside world. The heroine found him when she trespassed on his property hunting for a medicinal herb, which was fine. But then I had him hike off the mountain with her so he could get to a phone, and then I just have him hanging out in this tiny hill-country community so he and the heroine can be together and fall in love.

How can I begin to list the problems with this story? I just read the rejection letter from my editor (and looking back, she was incredibly kind, she should have blasted me out of the water for this one). Really, it makes no sense. Why would a man who knows nothing about babies be assigned to do this, without any help? Why would he be left in a remote area, with no possible means of back-up should something go wrong? Why wasn't he just taken to a normal safe house? Why did he incompetently drop his phone down a crevasse? Is he a bad agent or what? Once he hikes to a place where he can make a phone call, why does he stay there? Why doesn't he return to his cabin or request a different safe house?

I had this picture in my mind of all these hill folk coming to the aid of our hero when the bad guy descends, defending him and the baby Ewok-style, with homemade booby traps and what not. This, in fact, was the ONLY thing my editor liked about the story! But to get there ... surely I can come up with something that makes more sense.

I mean, we are writing fiction, and fantasy, but logic must still prevail.

Look at your story now with fresh eyes. Do you have any coincidences? Do you manipulate events to further the plot? Are things happening to the character, or is the character making things happen? Are your characters' actions properly motivated? Report back, if you make any key discoveries.

In Part 1 of this series, we talked about using Microsoft Excel efficiently. You learned some fun finesse tools for moving around the program and laying out data.

Today, we’re going to get to the nitty-gritty part of Excel. We’re basically going to “just skip to the good stuff.”

What is the most common use of Excel?

There are many people who use Excel just to keep lists. And that’s OK. A spreadsheet is a fine place to keep a list! You can sort this list, filter it, Subtotal it. All these list-y things are built into the program and they’re cooo-o-o-ool. But as cool as they are, a list can’t add up your numbers, unless you learn to really dial in Subtotals. You need formulas to add up numbers.

This bonus Wednesday post is going to cover Formulas in all their glory.

After 15 years of teaching, I’m convinced that Formulas and Functions are the most popular words in Excel. They’re like solar panels here in California – everybody wants them but no one quite knows how to set them up.

Some important things to know about Formulas:

1. If you know basic math, you can do a formula
2. Formulas and Functions are two different things
3. All Excel Formulas and Functions start with “=”
4. Just like your stories, you will usually catch errors if you read them out loud.

Formulas are made up of the following symbols (called operators):

There is a default order in which calculations occur (called the Order of Operations), but you can change this order by using parentheses.

The default order of operations is that you Multiply and Divide before you Add and Subtract. That means that 3+4*10 will equal 43, rather than the 70 that some of you hoped for. How do you get the result of 70 for the above numbers?

(3+4)*10 will equal 70. THIS is what that blue paragraph above means – you can control the order with your parentheses. In Excel this would read:

= ( B4 + C4 ) * D4

My final thoughts on the whole “order of operations” thing...

The Negation, Percent and Exponentiation are actually the highest in this order (meaning they come before everything else). But, in 15 years of formula writing I've never used it...so we're skipping it.

Focus on the following rule of Excel when you do formulas and you'll be fine:
Multiply (*)and Divide (/) BEFORE you Add (+) and Subtract (-)

Do you have to know math to be good at Excel?

I’m going to confess something here…I have a really weak math muscle.

I can put logical things together with the best of them but in school, when we wandered from Algebra Land into Geometry Land (or worse, Trigonometry Land *shudder*), it gave me the Learning Trots. I don’t know how to describe it any better than that. Things just stopped working correctly on the learning front and I was either spewing wrong answers or I was completely blocked up.

When I started using Excel, I was terrified of it, because I thought I had to know math.

Um, no.

Excel is there to do the math for you. You just have to know how.

If you always start a formula with "equal" ( = ) and use the parentheses to group your order of operations properly, all will be a piece of cake on the Excel formula front. That brings us to Functions…

Strap yourself in for the ride, people, we’re about to pass from Basic Arithmetic Land into Algebra Land…

(Stop whining – you don’t have to actually know algebra, but Functions share the look and some of the principles of algebra.)

A Function is a preset formula in Excel.

That's it...the big Function secret - it's built into the program so you don't have to make it up in your head like a formula.

Like formulas, functions begin with the equal sign ( = ) followed by the function's name and then some parentheses around the range of cells you choose. (If you want to get technical, what’s inside the parentheses are called “arguments” – since most of us are writers, we’re calling this the “range of cells.”)

The function name tells Excel what calculation to perform. For example, the most frequently used function in Excel is the SUM function, which is used to add together the data in selected cells (in the example below, cells D1 through D6).

The SUM function is written as:
= SUM ( D1 : D6 )

Other popular functions are:

• Averaging a group of numbers, called a range:  = AVERAGE ( D1 : D6 )
• Getting the lowest number in a range:  = MIN ( D1 : D6 )
• Getting the highest number in a range:  = MAX ( D1 : D6 )

You remember the Name Box from Part 1, right? Well to the right of the Name Box, up on Excel’s formula bar is the Insert Function key, which looks like “fx” (see below):

If you click the Insert Function key button, and “=” sign shows up in the Formula bar, a check mark and an "X" appear to the left of the "fx" key and the Insert Function dialog box appears:

There’s enough functions available in the Insert Function box to keep you busy for weeks if you catch the Excel bug - just click the drop-down arrow next to Most Recently Used and you'll see tons of 'em.

When I first found this place, I wanted to shoot my old Trigonometry teachers for wasting my time – all that sine and cosine business is right here. (My apologies to all you architects who actually use all that dreaded trigonometry the rest of us don't need.)

Can you type your own Functions in Excel?

Sure you can…start typing right inside a cell as show below or up in that Formula Bar to the right of the Fx button. I find it easier to type directly into the cell.

If I were to break the function above into stages, it would read as follows:

1. Go to the cell where you want the total number of books sold.
2. Type “=”
3. Type “SUM”
4. Type an open parenthesis “ ( “
5. Take your mouse and highlight the cells you want to add. A cell range will read as you see above “B4:D4”, which reads “B4 through D4”.
6. If you’re finished, you can just hit the Enter key and Excel will add the closing parenthesis. If you prefer to type the “ ) ” feel free to do so.

Presto, you’ve done your first Function! There’s certainly more, but we’ll cover it in Part 3 of this series. We'll get to those time savers I’ve been hinting at, but I wanted you to feel comfortable with the basics first.

What do you think? Do you think you can find a use for this program that some of you have been avoiding? Part 1's readers asked tons of questions and I hope you do too. Are there some Functions you’ve been dreaming about using? It’s OK, we won’t laugh at you for geeking out…you can tell us what they are down in the comments. :-)

Jenny

About Jenny Hansen

Jenny fills her nights with humor: writing memoir, women’s fiction, chick lit, short stories (and chasing after her toddler Baby Girl). By day, she provides training and social media marketing for an accounting firm. After 15 years as a corporate software trainer, she’s digging this sit down and write thing.

When she’s not at her blog, More Cowbell, Jenny can be found on Twitter at JennyHansenCA and here at Writers In The Storm. Jenny also writes the Risky Baby Business posts at More Cowbell, a series that focuses on babies, new parents and high-risk pregnancy.

Writers in the Storm welcomes Shannon Donnelly back, as this month, she makes an excellent argument for writing what you know-and better yet-tells us how.

by Shannon Donnelly

Writing advice can often seem mysterious. The phrase “write what you know” at first left me shaking my head. It’s often seemed to me that when you know too much about something that knowledge can make you the worst person to write about it—you end up assuming too much. On the other hand, when you know nothing about a subject, you don’t even know the mistakes you’re making. But I eventually had an “ah ha” moment about this.

This “ah ha” came when I was looking for a story idea. I’d contracted to do a couple of novellas (about 100 pages each, so a long short story). In the search for ideas, something happened in real life—something I’d confided to a friend got back to another friend. It was a small case of betrayal—both on my part for saying something in the first place and the friend’s for repeating a confidence—and it stung. It was, in fact, perfect material for a writer. Ah ha!

Writing what you know means taking out either your experiences—or those of your closest friends—and putting them to use. Meaning giving them to characters and seeing what they do. It means taking things you have experienced—such as this betrayal—and writing about it. Everything else you can research, but if you don’t have the emotional background, it’s going to be hard to fake it.

I think this is why Somerset Maugham advised writers to go out and live first—you need to know a few things about life before you can write about it. And I see this mistake cropping up in manuscripts.

Recently I trained as an EMT First Responder—we live in a rural area and we need all the local help we can train. That training has changed how I look at accidents and illness—I could write better now about any scene with trauma or trouble. And I read differently too—when folks have EMTs staff doing dumb things like hauling someone out of a car without a long spinebord, I cringe. That’s writing what you know—if you don’t know it, you have to find someone who does and pick their brains. Make their knowledge yours. And if you can't find the right person, time to do the research.

You can know something very well from books. Mary Stewart did all of her traveling before she wrote via book. And Nora Robert’s fantastic descriptions of a glass blower in Born in Fire all came from her research instead of hands-on knowing.

Now all this may seem obvious, but the advice had to hit me upside the head before it took. From the manuscripts I’ve seen in contests, other folks need to learn this as well. Get some knowing under your belt before you start into that writing—and if you don’t know, go and find out. Live a little more. Then write about it. Or change your characters into someone you do know.

You either write about yourself—or you write about those around you whom you know. But you’ve got to know the truth of your characters deep in your soul.

Whether you came down on the side of Laura Drake or Fae Rowen in the Write What You Know WITS Throwdown, Shannon has offered compelling arguments for writing what you know. What experience do you have with writing what you know? Or writing something you know nothing about?

BIO
Shannon Donnelly’s latest book Burn Baby Burn, an Urban Fantasy, has just come out from Cool Gus Publishing.

Her writing has won numerous awards, including a RITA nomination for Best Regency, the Grand Prize in the "Minute Maid Sensational Romance Writer" contest, judged by Nora Roberts, RWA's Golden Heart, and others. Her writing has repeatedly earned 4½ Star Top Pick reviews from Romantic Times magazine, as well as praise from Booklist and other reviewers, who note: "simply superb"..."wonderfully uplifting"....and "beautifully written."

Her work has been on the top seller list of Amazon.com and she recently published Paths of Desire, a Historical Regency romance, of which Romantic Historical Lovers notes: “a story where in an actress meets an adventurer wouldn’t normally be at the top of my TBR pile; but I’ve read and enjoyed other books by this author and so I thought I’d give this one a go. I’m glad I did. I was hooked and pulled right into the world of the story from the very beginning…Highly recommended.” Paths of Desire and her other Regency romances can be found as ebooks with on all ebook formats, and with Cool Gus Publishing.

She has had novellas published in several anthologies, has had young adult horror stories published and is the author of several computer games. She lives in New Mexico with two horses, two donkeys, two dogs, and only one love of her life. Shannon can be found online at sd-writer.com, facebook.com/sdwriter, and twitter/sdwriter.

Burn Baby Burn
Can a demon hunter raise a little hell?
When a half-demon baby puts Mackenzie Solomon’s life—and her job as a demon hunter—on the line, she can’t turn her back on the half-pint of evil. But ‘Junior’ is actually part of a trap to turn Mackenzie’s partner, Josh, and his extraordinary charming skills to the dark uses of the ancient, fallen Grigori, the angels once assigned to be Watchers over humanity. Is she going to have to make a choice about the men in her life?

Can a charmer talk his way out of his destiny?

Josh learned months ago that the bad blood in his demon hunting partner brings out a part of he can’t control—including his desire for her. With a prophecy out on him, he’s more than a little worried some of those bad things should stay burried. But is Mackenzie really the start of something bad—or could she be everyone’s salvation?

Can a couple of humans move Heaven to save Earth? 

Mackenzie’s bosses at The Endowment—the place responsible for keeping the peace between heaven and hell—want her to bring in the baby demon and not for anything good. With the Endowment after her and demons to stop, Mackenzie knows she’s on her own.

 But she’s going to have to learn to trust Josh—and to use what’s sparking between them. Because it's going to take the kind of love that bonds souls forever to keep the world from ending.