Writers in the Storm

by Jenny Hansen

You can thank my husband and his knee for this post.

The wear and tear of fifteen years of football finally took its toll this last year and he hurt his knee working as IT Wonder Man at a conference in San Francisco.

He came home limping and the pain got progressively worse until he had to cave and go to physical therapy.

In our heads, his knee would need replacement and he’d be doing physical therapy to get used to the new knee. In reality, his work at the conference threw his body out of balance and the therapist spent eight weeks strengthening key muscle groups until he was back in balance. (He's fine now and we're doing Crossfit.)

My bloggy self always perks up at the mention of words like "balance" and maximum potential, so I sent Hubby in with some questions.

What was their goal for him?

To strengthen weaker muscles to balance with the stronger muscles to keep his kneecap aligned. His pain was from his kneecap (patella) literally being pulled toward one side of his knee.

Keep reading about what they did to achieve this balance because I swear it sounds like what we do as writers.

There are three components that assist you in keeping your body in balance:

• Your vision
• Your inner ear
• Your musculoskeletal control

(Say what??)

The example they gave him:

When you hold your arm out in front of you, you see your arm. As you look at your arm, you remain upright through the balance of your inner ear (which is the only aspect of this that is really out of our control). You sense your arm through nerve impulses transmitted from the core strength of your muscles which attach to your bones.

All this lets you keep that arm held out straight and still, for much longer than you might think you could. Try it…the act of staring at your hand, out there at the end of your arm makes a huge difference in the amount of effort you need to expend for this exercise.

The reality is that if any of these three components are out of whack, the arm (or the leg, or even your entire body) will no longer be able to stay upright. Focusing all three components on the task is what makes it work.

So how do we relate this to writing?

Let’s change the order around a bit and dig a little deeper.

Part 1 – Your Inner Ear

Your inner ear is your voice. Voice is the cadence that is essentially you; it’s what makes your work stand out as unique.

The best description I’ve ever heard of “voice” is:

Imagine you are sitting in a café, telling your friend a story. The way you tell a story is quintessentially you. You don’t stop to think about how the story sounds when you’re talking to your friend, you just tell it. The visual and verbal cues you get back are what help you time the rhythm of your story and play certain parts of it up or down.

The best part, and the hardest part, about writing is that we do it alone. There is no one across the café table, or computer screen, to tell you what’s “just right” and what is falling flat. We learn to recognize what works on our own (through Craft) or we find a great critique group.

Part 2 – Musculoskeletal Control.

Techie Definition: This control is essential in our balance and vital to our ability to walk normally. The mechanics of human ambulation, or walking on two legs, is quite unique in nature. It has been described as consisting of a cycle of `controlled falls', which highlights the complexity of distinguishing between a fall or stumble and normal, controlled walking.

This definition immediately made me think of a blog Kristen Lamb wrote on the importance of learning to fall.

For the writer, “musculoskeletal control” is Craft.

The more you exercise your writing muscles, the more balanced and resilient they become. It took me ages to recognize (and accept) that it doesn’t matter whether you can lift a five pound weight or a fifty pound weight, what matters is that you can do it a lot and do it smoothly.

In writer-speak that means: a good writer with the courage to approach the page every day is going to be published long before a great writer that approaches the page sporadically.

Just like targeted physical therapy can turn a weak knee into a strong one, daily writing can turn a good writer into a wonderful, well-disciplined one.

Craft must be practiced and honed with daily writing. All the greats say this – Anne Lamott, Natalie Goldberg, Julia Cameron – and it has always been the thing that made me groan the loudest.

Who has the time? I can’t! I don’t wanna!  My inner Lazy Ass said all that and more.

The reality behind these complaints was: I’m scared. What if I fail? Won’t that make my writing so important I will want to die if I fail?

We all have these fears, just like we all have that rat bastard inner critic. The fact is, no one said it would be easy. Writers are a tough breed and my money will always be on us. Just hitch up those titanium panties and sit your butt in the chair to write (as soon as you’re done reading this post :-)).

Some great Craft posts:

• “A Deeper, Richer Understanding of Craft” Part 2 by Larry Brooks (THEN read Part 1)
• Any Craft post by Sharla Rae – she’s amazing at separating huge concepts into bite-sized pieces.
• New and Improved Writer’s Toolbox by Laura Drake

Part 3 – Your Vision

Your visual strength is what you rely on after you’ve gotten the words on the page. Your vision translates into editing.

I know wonderful writers who have lyrical prose and the ability to create fantastic worlds with engaging characters. Yet they are still fighting to be published. Why?

Is it those mean editors? Those crazy publishers? I regret to say, it rarely is. Most of these writer friends tell me it’s actually because their editing or proofing is not strong enough yet. Practice makes perfect and we’ll all get there if we keep at it and build a powerful writing team to provide help when we need it.

There is a reason why Oscars are given for film editing – it is the art of separating out the unnecessary footage to keep the viewers hooked. It works the same with books.

There is a famous quote by Elmore Leonard that frustrates the hell out of most new writers: “I try to leave out the parts that people skip.” The structure of a story is a lot harder than it looks because we have to learn what parts people will skip and why.

Some fantastic posts I’ve found on editing are:

• The Three Simple Stages of Self-Editing by Jody Hedlund
• How I Edit by Nathan Bransford
• 11 Resources to Make Editing Your Novel Easier by Virginia Ripple (the one by Jami Gold is my fave!)

Wherever you are on your writing journey, DON’T STOP. The best is always yet to come because we keep improving the more we do it. What you hear with your inner ear and see with your writer’s eyes will eventually be translated by the “musculoskeletal” strength of your Craft.

I heard Linda Howard speak at a writer’s conference in San Diego some years back and I’ve never forgotten her words, which meant so much to me.

“Everybody dreams,” she said. “But writers are special because they write down their dreams.

“As writers, we can do anything and be anyone. You can be astronauts or spies or time travelers. Writers can go to amazing places and build imaginary worlds for others to visit.

“The sad fact is that no matter how hard you try, the music and the magic of your dreams will never be equaled by the words you put on a page.

“Do it anyway.”

Every writer in that room started crying because it IS so hard to translate the grand scope of our imaginations into words on the page. The words never seem quite big enough or important enough to express the magic that lives inside our minds.

My hope is that, even on those days when you feel that all is lost, when you wonder why you ever believed that YOUR words were important, you keep at it.

Do it because you have to. Do it because you need to. Do it because the act of sharing those words is more than most people will ever attempt.

And finally, do it because no one else will have the inner ear to hear the words exactly as you do, the strength to birth them onto the page, or the vision to translate those words into the perfect story that floats from your heart to ours.

Do it anyway. You won't be truly happy unless you try.

What part of writing do you struggle with the most? Voice, craft or editing? I have the hardest time with structure and editing myself, and head-hopping, and conflict and…Oh, sorry. Enough about me. What’s your writing albatross?

Till next time,
Jenny

About Jenny Hansen

Jenny fills her nights with humor: writing memoir, women’s fiction, chick lit, short stories (and chasing after the newly walking 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 jhansenwrites 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.

by Fae Rowen

Because I write science fiction, I have to immerse my reader in the most important facets of my story's world with the first words. When you add this into the requirements of an opening hook, portraying the "real world" of your characters, and setting up the inciting incident, etc., the beginning of the book can seem quite daunting indeed.

Here are the first two lines of Keeping Athena, a futuristic romance about two warriors from opposite sides of the battlefield of space.

Athena WARme stared out her singleship’s viewport at the fighters racing toward her squadron. Keep Sphere ships obliterated the black of space.

From this, you know she's a fighter pilot in a squadron, and she's engaged in a battle against far superior forces. Yep, she's in trouble. Let me explain my thoughts for choosing these twenty-two words to set up the action and the heroine's world.

1.  The heroine is named and placed in a ship by herself, so it must be small.
2. She's under attack.
3. A squadron is between eight and sixteen ships, so she doesn't have a lot of back-up.
4. The enemy is named and the attacking force is large enough to fill the emptiness of space.

The air hissing into her helmet tasted off. Her life support was failing. Too fast. She couldn’t separate the pounding in her head from the alarm bell in the cockpit. Sweat coated the inside of her glove. In seconds the atoms of her body would be dispersed to Agra-only-knew what quadrant.

After her ship is severely damaged, we understand what's happening to her, even though we've never been in failing spaceship. First, I engaged the readers senses: smell/taste (the air if "off"), hearing (pounding of the alarm bell), and feeling (pounding in her head and sweaty hands). The feeling is visceral, something she can't control, so the reader gets a sense of Athena's fear. The last sentence states that fear, as a fact. This shows her warrior mentality.

Soon afterward, she passes out, certain that she is dying. Here, she is regaining consciousness.

Since when is the cabin bulkhead on that side of my bunk?  She forced her eyes open, then squeezed them shut. The utter blackness couldn’t be classed as unusual, but the suffocating feeling of confinement screamed a warning.

She tried to sit up and banged her head against the same smooth metal her toes had rubbed against. Cautious, she explored the hard surface only centimeters above her face with her fingertips. Her breath came in short gasps, inhaling air that smelled medicinal. Where am I? 

Her heart raced. Panic set in. The Wraith had died in the battle, disintegrating with her inside. I’m dead, and this is my coffin.

Slowly, I'm doling out the technology of her enemy's world. I wanted to give the reader a sense of the "coffin" around her by showing how it felt as Athena explored it. Again, the visceral hits show her ratcheting terror, from cautious data-gathering, to medicinal-smelling air to panic. Terrified, she jumps to the conclusion she's dead.

Later, when she's a prisoner, the reader learns about the ecology and culture of the enemy planet only when Athena discovers them. Why would I want to make my reader wade through an encyclopedia of facts about an alien world, no matter how interesting that world is to me?

When world building, I have to restrain my enthusiasm for my creation so I don't info-dump unnecessary data.

Here, Athena discovers the enemy world is not like her own.

The metallic-tasting water irritated her eyes but made for great buoyancy. It probably contained a high level of useful elements that could, at some expense, be extracted. But then it could contain harmful substances as well. No wonder the Keep colonists developed a lifestyle using minimal fresh water.

The reader finds out the water tastes bad, but could be a resource, albeit a costly one, of useful elements. We have a reason for the extreme water conservation on the planet.

Soon, her swim takes a nasty turn.

A scaly florescent sea beast rose above the crashing waves. Jaws capable of swallowing her gaped open, revealing needlelike teeth, glistening and dripping a sticky pearly substance. The roar that came from deep in its throat was deafening. Slowly the creature slid back beneath the surface. The disturbed water collapsed on itself, filling the space the razorfish had occupied as if it never existed.

Laura Drake loves how I make up words to convey the idea of my worlds without having to use a lot of description. Razorfish is an example. You can build your own picture of a huge fish with razors for scales, for teeth--and I don't have to describe it any more than I did.

Here's an excerpt from my young adult science fiction WIP to illustrate that you can get a flavor of the culture through a short monologue. The main female character is a shuttle pilot.

“Okay, you dirt diggers. Listen up.” she shouted to the men who, duffels in tow, pushed into a crooked line. “I’ve got a couple of guests on this flight. They’re here to check on mine safety and production upgrades. If you’re real nice, they might listen to your suggestions.” She waved her tourists inside to take the seats she’d assigned them by the cockpit door. “Here’s your safety lecture. Same rules as usual. No pissing or puking anywhere but the heads. No fighting and no blood in my shuttle. If I have to hose down the inside between trips, I’m doing it with you inside. It gets rowdy, I make it real rough going in. Questions?"

She's just shy of sixteen, and fully in control of men twice her age. Yes, it's a rough world. And she's a no-nonsense, in-charge young woman.

One of the reasons I love science fiction is that the setting is usually tied directly to plot elements. And that setting dictates the futuristic society as well, if I've done my homework.

The same is true for historicals. Regencies have very specific settings--townhouses, country estates, ballrooms, carriages-- and societal rules which constrain the characters in ways that drive the plot forward.

Contemporary settings clue the reader to lifestyle. A young woman in Manhattan has a very different view of life than a single living in a sleepy resort town in coastal Maine.

Engage readers fully by setting your story in a world that strengthens your plot, characters, and their goals. When the setting also influences their motivation and conflict, you've used world building to its best advantage. Whether you blast your readers light years into the future or into the historical past, the world building rules and skills remain the same.

How do you use elements of world building, even if you're on Planet Earth, to enrich your plot and characters? Is setting your ally in the writing process?

Note: In case you missed Fae's World Building Posts, here are links to Physical Setting Part 1 and Social and Cultural Aspects Part 2.

Writers In The Storm welcomes back Kara Lennox, a.k.a. Karen Leabo for some more plot-fixing magic. Look for Kara’s writing tips the first Friday of every month.

This is the seventh in an ongoing series of Plot Fixer blogs by double RITA finalist Kara Lennox. Here are the links for Parts 1-6:

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

by Kara Lennox

The following two plot problems are related to pacing.

Plot problem #9 - The dreaded saggy middle

This problem is so common as to almost be a cliché. You have a dynamite beginning. The first three chapters practically wrote themselves. You know exactly how you want it to end. You see the scenes in your mind clearly. But you have no idea what happens in between.

One time when this happened to me, I turned the novel into a novella. But if that isn't an option (and usually it isn't) you need to figure out the middle before you write. Otherwise you have your characters stumbling around aimlessly, engaging in one pointless activity after another. It might be amusing, or reveal character, but if it's not moving the story forward, it's going to sag and you're going to get a rejection letter that says your story is "episodic." This means it doesn't build, and one scene doesn't logically lead to the next. (More on "episodic" when we talk about theme in a later lesson.)

The cure for this is plot points.

Now, I promised at the beginning that we weren't going to get into plot points (or turning points, I use the terms interchangeably). I lied. But this will be short and painless, I promise.

You need at least three major turning points, when something majorly important happens, and they need to be interspersed throughout the book.

There should be one at roughly 1/4 of the way through the book, one at the halfway point, and one at the 3/4 mark. Think of these as loose guidelines, something to play with as you ponder the plot points in your book.

The following applies to a 400-page book; adjust the page numbers accordingly if your book is shorter or longer.

ACT I
Introduce major characters, setting, tone, but as little backstory as possible.

We're going to lay this out by page number below:

40          10%     Inciting incident should occur before this point
60-80   15-25% Turning point that twists action into new direction. The point of no return. Hero or heroine makes a decision. Character goals must be revealed at or before this point.

ACT II
Escalating conflicts, twists and turns, allies and enemies, complications, character growth

200      50%     Major emotional turning point--SECRET REVEALED or LOVE SCENE or FIRST KISS, for example

300      75%     (or later) Turning point (dark night of the soul) New decision propels action in a new direction. Often prompted by a move from the villain/antagonist

ACT III
New goal, black moment, action inevitably hurtles toward the ending

page 340          85%            Last secret revealed (black moment, all seems lost)
340-80             85-95%      Climax--highest tension
360-400           90-97%      Plot twist--character sacrifices all--leads to resolution
396-400           99%            Resolve romance (or other personal issues, subplots)

This little cheat sheet isn't meant to be a straight jacket. If you can't make it work, toss it out. If just looking at it gives you hives, toss it out.

Some people find this sort of list helpful in hammering out their story's structure or spotting what's missing, or they use it as a springboard for brainstorming. Have fun with it.

Plot Problem #10 - The plot moves too fast

I don't see this as often as a too-slow plot, but often enough that it needs mentioning.

A plot that moves too fast leaves the reader's head spinning. Sometimes the author simply doesn't explain enough, or describe enough. You don't want to weigh down those first few chapters with info dumps, but neither do you want the reader to be completely lost and confused.

If you have four or more scenes per chapter, each one very, very short, this could be a warning sign. If your readers (critiquers, editors) are asking a lot of questions because they don't understand, it probably means you need to slow down and clarify.

Make sure every scene is grounded in a time and a place. If you just jump into the middle of a conversation--certainly a legitimate way to start a scene--make sure you fill in pretty quickly who the characters are, where and when. Some introspection is needed.

If you are deep into a character's P.O.V., they are going to be filtering everything they see, hear, touch, taste and smell through their unique outlook. Make sure your introspection is true to your character. If we feel we are inside a character's head and we know what he or she knows, it has a grounding effect.

Another way a too-fast plot manifests is if the drama doesn't build. I read a book once (published, so obviously this wasn't a fatal error) where the heroine was in constant distress. She received a threatening phone call. Her apartment was tossed. She was almost driven off the road. Someone keys her car. Someone tries to poison her dog. The entire book was one event after another after another, and it was exhausting to read.

The problem wasn't that the heroine was in constant trouble. The problem was, the danger didn't build. She was driven off the road fairly early, THEN her car was keyed. That is no way to escalate stakes.

If a number of bad things are going to happen to your character, try to arrange them from least horrible to most horrible. And give the reader a bit of reaction time between scenes of high drama or high action or danger, so they can catch their breath. Then, just when the reader has relaxed a bit, BAM, you hit them with something else.

Think in terms of scene & sequel. Something happens, the character reacts, then they make a decision which leads to the next something happening. (Check out Dwight Swain's Techniques of the Selling Writer for more detail on this, or Scene and Structure by Jack Bickham.)

Next time, we'll talk about how not to be predictable.

Do you have either of these plotting issues? What is the most difficult part of plotting for you? Where do you get stuck? Kara is here to answer questions in the comments!

About Kara

Kara Lennox, author of Project Justice series for Harlequin SuperRomance. Kara is an award-winning, bestselling author of more than sixty novels of romance and romantic suspense, for both Harlequin and Random House.

Six titles now available in e-book or print!

Hidden Agenda now available.

Sweet Romance Hard to Resist now available from Harlequin Heartwarming. Also, Callie’s Cowboy is an August release by Karen Leabo from Bantam Loveswept e-books.