writing – Page 6 – MS Editors

How to Keep Your Reader Immersed in Your Story

Posted on April 22, 2015April 22, 2015 by Lara

Last week I heard about a project called “Immerse or Die.” It’s a rating system for books—when we are immersed in a story, we keep reading. When we are taken out of the story, we are more likely to abandon the book.

How do you keep your reader immersed in the story? Pay attention to how you are describing your world. (Originally posted on my blog Write, Edit, Repeat)

In today’s post, I talk about stage directions in fiction, writing natural descriptions, why some books are constantly reread by readers, and, to an extent, immortality.

Orderly Description

Ever played that “blind drawing” party game? You close your eyes or put a piece of paper on your head and someone gives you direction upon direction to cram into one picture?

Here’s an example for the party planning website Sophie’s World (which, consequently, is the title of one of my favorite books):

“I’d like you to draw the outline of a house. Just a simple little house, right in the middle of the page… Now, beside the house I’d like you to add a tree, a medium sized tree, not too big, not too small… Oh, I forgot! You need a front door on your house. Please draw a front door so that the people can come in and out easily… Oh, did I tell you there are apples in your tree? Draw a few apples, maybe 5 or 6, in your tree now… And don’t forget the windows in the house! I think two would be nice… Did I remind you to draw a chimney? Let’s put a chimney on the house, with some smoke coming out the top… Oh, and look! There’s a dog in the yard… And a picket fence… And of course there’s a family…”

This is the kind of experience a reader has when you describe something in an unnatural order:

blind drawing
It’s also what it’s like when description is given out of order. When describing a scene, consider camera shots. Zoom in from broad descriptions, ending on one specific detail. Or zoom out, starting on a detail and working your way out to observing the whole. Pan in one direction. Going in an unnatural order gives the nauseating effect of “shaky cam.” Adding details too late, after the reader has already created the image in his or her mind, gives what I like to call the “awkward goat” effect, after this GIF:

Writer: “I went to give the goat a kiss. Then the other goat—”
Reader: “Wait, there’s another goat?”
Goat: “SURPRISE! I’ve been here the whole time!” (maniacal goat bleating)

While this effect is used effectively in visual comedy, it doesn’t really work in fiction.

Overcomplicated Stage Directions

Another problem of ineffective description is overcomplicated stage directions. I see sentences like this all the time in unpublished manuscripts:

“Come with me,” he said and turned around while kissing my hand as we ran away together.

Though these are most often found in dialogue tags, I see overcomplicated stage directions all over. That sentence above is just one I made up, but let’s rewrite it so it doesn’t seem like “he” is doing a hundred things at once.

First, find the perps: “and,” “as,” and “while.” The two latter words can often be cut in stage directions. The former is a fine word that sometimes gets overused. Let’s focus on no more than two actions at once.

Said + turned, kissing + ran

“Come with me,” he said, turning around. He kissed my hand, inviting me to run away with him.

What did I just do? I took advantage of my friend the progressive verb.

A progressive verb is a verb ending in -ing. That ending tells us that the -ing verb is happening while something else is going on, while letting us cut the “while” or “as.”

“While” and “as” aren’t bad words. It’s not about the word, it’s how you use it. By all means, use “as” to make a simile (e.g., “as [adjective] as a [noun]”). “While” is an innocent preposition until proven guilty. The problem is using them to show more than one thing happening concurrently. Show me a manuscript which uses “while” or “as” in the first page in stage directions, and there’s a big chance that same construction will keep showing up over the next ten pages.

Doing a find/replace search for all instances of “as I,” “as we,” “as she,” “as he” (depending on your POV), repeating the search with “while,” will help you see if you’re going overboard. Use them a few times, and that’s fine. Do it a few times per chapter, and you’re just being unnecessarily wordy. Gone are the days when novelists are paid by the word.

The Divine Detail

Remember, your novel has to compete with online, in-demand television and movies. You need to keep your reader’s attention. That doesn’t mean your novel needs explosions or murders every other chapter; it means your prose needs to be immediate and precise rather than longwinded and wordy. You want to be Robin Williams giving his Seize the Day speech, not Ben Stein droning about economics. The difference isn’t just subject, it’s diction. Do diction right, and you’ll engage readers that otherwise don’t care one iota about your subject. That is, until they start reading your book.

When describing, choose one or two vivid details, referred to by editors as “divine details” that can set the scene or characterize, and let the reader fill in the rest of the image. Compare the chaos of the drawing above (ain’t I an artiste?) with expansion drawings done by children:

expand-drawing — Image via ArtMommie. Click for more images.

When the reader is allowed to contribute, your work takes on a new form. It evolves in the readers’ individual minds. It’s a spark which they build upon to create a conflagration.

Letting the Reader In

It doesn’t matter how brilliant of a writer you are—writing and reading are collaborative efforts, and that collaborative effort will bring more life and beauty to your work than you could hope to do by yourself.

Sometimes we write because we’re control freaks. We are the masters of the universe, and we will plot and plan and tell our characters exactly what they should do. But when we let our characters breathe and give them freedom, when we let the reader have some creative liberty, our work takes on a life of its own.

Maybe that’s a cliche, but if you want your work to live on after you’re gone, you need to let your reader experience your world naturally. You need to let them read between the lines and contribute to the meaning and world of your fiction. When you let them participate, readers will not only want to buy your books, they will want to reread your books over and over again, letting them become part of their life, seeing how their interpretations change over the years.

Who has the time?

Posted on April 1, 2015March 31, 2015 by kaleighwalter

At the heart of everything, I am a writer. And to be a writer is to, at times, struggle.

I certainly know what it’s like to struggle. To fight for each word that appears on the waiting page. To suffer from writer’s block, self-doubt, fear, and fatigue.

My biggest mountain lately is time. I have none. And in the time I do have, my brain tends to be very mushy and useless.

I’ve heard from countless writers that it’s important to write every day. And I wholeheartedly agree…in a perfect world.

So, you ask, how have I mastered the art of writing and time management? Simple. I haven’t. Not even close. But that doesn’t mean I give myself permission to stop trying. Here’s my motto: anything is better than nothing, and routine is better than anything.

My advice: be realistic, start small, and stick to it.

My current writing goal is to sit down at my computer and create something at least twice a week. Yes, only twice a week. Why twice? Because it’s all I think I can manage. And that’s okay because it still allows me to create. I’m still working, still plugging away every week.

So develop a schedule, something that works for you, that inspires you, and that won’t make your brain mushy. And keep going back. A little bit at a time. It’s worth it.

How does your novel grow?

Posted on March 25, 2015May 4, 2015 by Lara

Some people write like they mow lawns. They start at one side, and when they get to the other end, they’re done. They wait a few weeks, then comb through it again.

I’m more like a gardener when I write. Planting seeds, weeding, transplanting, watering, planting more seeds, pruning, harvesting.

I’m not a very good gardener. I have a board on Pinterest called “Gardening for the Bewildered” which makes me feel like I’m actually making an effort without actually making any effort.

We can read all the books about gardening we want, we can watch other people mow their own lawns, but we’ll never get anything finished if we don’t start.

I’m all about planning out my writing, but sometimes I get to the planning stage, I plan for a while, and then I stop. But planning isn’t actually writing.

I read a great blog this week by Laini Taylor in which she talks about exploratory drafts. Not first drafts, exploratory drafts. It’s a great read.

I also read and participated in #VeryRealisticYA on Twitter.

Like planning, inspiration is a part of the creative process (I once blogged about the 10-Step Creative Process for Writing a Novel). But again, it isn’t writing.

I devoured Understanding Comics the other day and I cannot wait to share some of the things I learned about the journey of artists. Except I can wait, because that deserves its own post!

Today I took out a scene on which I’ve been stumped for a while. Reading my notes from Understanding Comics helped, since I’m writing a graphic novel, but I still never would have finished the scene if I hadn’t thought about all of the possibilities and explored some of them through writing. It was exploratory drafting, and I got through it.

Are you writing or exploring? Are you filling up your creative tank? Are you blocked?

If the latter, listen to Tadashi:

Now go get writing!

Coping with your critics

Posted on March 11, 2015March 11, 2015 by Megan

I recently spoke with an aspiring author who had been hearing a lot of criticism about her manuscript. To the critics, her plot just wasn’t believable, her character was too well-adjusted. This is not an uncommon phenomenon. As aspiring authors, we all have to undergo a vast amount of critique (even self-critique) to wade through our first MS.

But even well-known authors—the published, famous ones—have probably seen the internet rants of critics calling their work “sub-par,” “elementary,” “contrived.”

It stinks, but in some form or other, criticism will be part of our writing experience. So instead of running from it, we need to find some ways to cope and even use this criticism to our advantage.

3 ways to cope

1. Don’t take yourself (or your work) so seriously. No matter how artful and ethereal your poetry is, no matter how well-rounded your character, you are still a human being that shares earth and oxygen with the rest of us; therefore, you are fair game to be criticized.

I found this “critique” in a favorite zine of mine called Funwater Awesome 3. The author clearly doesn’t take himself too seriously and decided to include this critique from “Hester Heckles” in his second edition of the zine:

Zach: Most people are fine with the pointless feel-good of your zine, but I, for one, want more than what’s in the flabby folds of your head. There is nothing practical in your zine! Nothing of quantifiable SUBSTANCE! Where are the true Tumwater tales, the lessons, the stories of some use to people of today? Good minds want to know. —Hester Heckles

2. Fish out the practical pieces. If someone says your writing is weird, well, you don’t have a whole lot to go on. Put it out of your head and move on to something more practical. If a critic or editor says your work feels wordy, you have something concrete, something you can begin to re-craft with. Just like Heckles told Zach a few specifics (she wanted some Tumwater stories and lessons), you need to look beyond the crazy parts of the critique to find the practical pieces that will improve your MS. Obviously, you will need to ensure you can trust the source behind the critique before you go slashing words and hacking your MS apart.

3. Find a friend to balance the scales. Sometimes we need someone to encourage us and lift us up when all we’ve been receiving is negative messages. And sometimes we need a friend to bring us back to earth when our flag is flying a little too close to the thunder clouds. The key is to find someone who is balanced: NOT a people-pleaser, but a person who can both encourage and criticize from a place of truth and tact.

Now that you have my three little ways to cope with criticism, go off and conquer your own Hester Heckles!

Note from Lara: Chuck Wendig wrote a related post today about critiques, “How to Make the Most out of a Writing Critique: Ten Tips.” His post is a nice complement to Megan’s, but note that his blog contains graphic language.