Posts by Dave King
Newton’s Third Law of Writing
For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.
Take a look at this passage from a workshop submission. It’s set in the depths of the depression. Mary Ruth and her family have just moved into a poor neighborhood, and she’s out walking past a home where two vicious dogs are tied outside:
Mary Ruth slowed when she noticed a third rope tied around an old, leaning tree on the opposite side of the porch. She started to move faster, fearing a third dog was loose. She saw the rope around the tree move. Slowly, very slowly the circle of rope moved from the back of the tree to the front, where she could see a shape attached. It was on four legs, crawling toward them. Mary Ruth stopped and took in slowly the figure of a young boy, naked, wearing only a collar of rope line. He stood up, his arms hanging in front of him. He stumbled toward her and the girls.
The boy’s mouth twisted. He was trying to speak. A guttural noise came from his throat like a bark. Mary Ruth said, “Hello.”
What’s the problem here?
Read MoreBegin at the beginning and go on till you come to the end: then stop.”
It was good advice when Lewis Carol gave it in Alice in Wonderland, and it still is. When your story follows a straight timeline, it’s a lot easier to show how one event flows into the next. This makes it simpler to show your characters’ growth and ramp your plot tension up toward your climax. It’s the way things unfold in the real world, and it’s usually the best way to tell your story.
But not always.
Not long ago, WU member Rebecca Vance posed a plotting problem on the WU Facebook page. Her protagonist, Sierra, a modern-day medium, needs to solve a murder that took place in a small mining town in Nevada in the 1870s in order to help the ghost of Rusty, the victim. At the same time Rusty, who had been a madam at one of the town’s brothels, helps Sierra overcome the damage of witnessing her own parents’ murder when she was a child.
It wouldn’t be hard to use Sierra’s memories and occasional brief flashbacks to show her parents’ murder. The details of the killing are less important than how it affects her. But to make the nineteenth-century mystery work as a mystery, Rebecca has to bring the characters and settings of the 1870s to life. You can’t really do that through secondhand description or snippets of flashbacks. The best choice is chapter-long extended scenes set in a past century.
So how do you build tension steadily with a plot that jumps back and forth in time? The trick is to pay attention to what your readers know and what they want to know.
Read MoreYou’ve taken your novel as far as you can. You’ve reworked it until you can’t really see it anymore, but still feel there’s something wrong somewhere. Or maybe your family and friends have raved about it, but have lots of questions about your plot and characters. Or your critique group agrees on the problems, but isn’t giving you any hints as to how to fix them. Maybe you just want to make sure the book is as strong as it can be to impress your favorite agent. In any case, you’ve decided it’s time to call in a professional editor.
A quick search uncovers a lot of editors on the market with varying degrees of expertise and honesty. How do you find the one you can rely on to help you bring your vision to life? How do you pick your editorial soul-mate?
One clue that will help you weed out the less competent is price. Editing is a profession. Skilled, experienced editors charge accordingly. My own hourly rate is a little more than a mechanic’s and a little less than a psychotherapist’s, which strikes me as the right balance. Editing is also time-consuming. You can’t skim through a manuscript and then know how to shape someone’s character voice or build tension toward an upcoming plot twist. When I’m working at my best, I can usually read no more than forty pages an hour, or edit eight to ten. So if you find someone who is willing to edit your manuscript for two dollars a page, don’t expect a considered conceptual edit. Chances are good you’re going to get a superficial proofread — occasional corrections to your grammar and punctuation and not much else.
Note: I’m not disparaging proofreading. I have a lot of respect for good proofers, and they provide a valuable service. Copy editors — who will often correct stylistic problems as well as grammatical ones – can be helpful as well. But if you’re not sure your story as a whole works, then it’s too soon to call in the proofers. The time to make every page perfect is after the plot, characters, and style are as strong as you can make them.
Look for an editor with experience, as well. You want someone who’s been in the business long enough to expose themselves to a wide range of writing styles – and learning styles. Some of my clients just need me to give them a few hints and then step out of the way. Others want more detailed, hands-on guidance. If you get an editor who doesn’t recognize how you learn, you’re likely to get good advice you won’t know how to apply. Reputation also counts for a lot. Ask other writers you trust for recommendations.
Read MoreI recently started rereading a book I bought many years ago – one volume of an eight volume collected set of The Spectator, a London daily periodical from the early 18th century. William Addison and Joseph Steele wrote most of the The Spectator’s 2500-word, witty and wise essays on serious topics of social value. A typical piece warns against the dangers of using “party lying” (i.e. propaganda) to advance a political cause. Another is an extended meditation on eternity. Several offer a serialized, detailed review of Milton’s works.
This may sound like somewhat hard going, but The Spectator is nothing if not eclectic. It includes comic short stories involving a good-natured but dim country squire named Roger de Coverley. You can find parody advertisements a quarter millennium before Saturday Night Live — for an elocution school for parrots or a dentist who offered to extract teeth from masquerade goers without removing their masks. And in one memorable exchange of letters, a prim young woman named Matilda Mohair wrote to condemn the unseemly practice of young men pushing women on swings as an excuse to catch a glimpse of their legs. Within a week, four other correspondents wrote, claiming to know Matilda and saying she was only objecting because she had crooked legs. One even said she was with child “despite her crooked legs.” It’s an exchange I could easily see happening on Twitter.
The Spectator was wildly popular in its time, with an estimated daily readership, in London’s fashionable coffeehouses and salons, of nearly 20,000 at a time when books were typically printed in lots of 500. Even before the daily issues stopped running, publishers were collecting the essays into an eight-volume set that was reprinted every few years for more than a century. It only began to fall out of favor in the late 19th century.
My volume is part of a small (duodecimo) leather-bound, illustrated set from the 1767 London printing. Because The Spectator was so popular, you can still find individual eighteenth-century volumes in good condition for about the cost of a modern hardback. This particular volume played a role in my own life. When my wife and I were courting, I used to read the essays aloud to her. She particularly liked one that explored the value of a garden — the essayist suggests using evergreens to create a winter garden and recommends using plants native to the area, “such as rejoice in the soil.” (By the way, reading your favorite works aloud is not a bad way to find a soulmate.)
The thing that delights me most about this particular book, though, is the inscriptions written in the flyleaf by the book’s previous owners.
Read MoreWriting never feels more lonely than after you’ve sent your manuscript out to every agent and publisher you can think of and gotten nowhere. Of course, you can always take comfort in the long list of massively successful books that were initially rejected by nearly everyone who saw them. But for every brilliant book that gets rejected out of blindness or stupidity, there are thousands that get rejected because they’re just not very good. How can you tell which camp you fall into?
The quality of your rejections are a good sign. Granted, form rejections don’t tell you much, but if all of your rejections are form letters, it’s probably time to either start a major rewrite or put this manuscript in a drawer and start the next one. (If your manuscript is getting repeatedly turned down on the query alone, you might want to take a second look at your query letter.) If you’re getting glowing rejections (“I love the book, but it’s not right for our list.”) then you’re probably doing something right and should keep sending the manuscript out — though you might want to refine your agent search to make it more likely it will hit the right desk. And it’s still a good sign even if you’re getting, “I love the book, but . . . “ If a publishing professional has taken time to give you free advice, then your manuscript is probably worth the effort.
You don’t have to rush to take the advice. Individual taste matters a lot in publishing, so don’t rip into your manuscript unless most of your feedback starts to agree. If three different professionals tell you your main character is off-putting, that’s the time to consider if you’d like to hang out with this person.
Independent readers may give you a fair assessment of your manuscript, though the quality of that assessment depends on the expertise of your reader. For ego support, there’s always your family and friends. Fellow writers in mutual critique groups offer a bit more know-how, since they’ve at least gone through the same struggles as you. But writers often help you by telling you how to write more like them, which isn’t much help to you. Realistically, the best way to get a detailed, expert assessment of your manuscript is to pay for it – to hire an independent editor. I know that, when I’m reading a client’s manuscript, I can’t cover more than 40 or 50 pages an hour, and it takes me at least three hours to write up an assessment. So if your manuscript is 300 pages long, you’re talking about an investment of ten or more hours’ work. If you hire an editor who’s thorough, expect to pay accordingly.
Be careful, though. There are plenty of scammers out there happy to give you the praise we all long for just to pry some money out of you. So be leery of praise from people with a vested interest — agents who ask a modest up-front investment to represent you, e-presses that will publish your book for a reasonable design and marketing fee, or small presses that promise to publish your book if you’re […]
Read MoreBack in 2004, Mark Zuckerberg and some friends launched a social networking website in his dorm room — Facebook. By 2007, he was a billionaire. In 1995, J. K. Rowling typed the manuscript for Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone on a manual typewriter and, after numerous rejections, sold it to Bloomsbury Press for an advance of fifteen hundred pounds. In 2004, Forbes named her the first person to become a billionaire solely by writing books.
Most writers realize that their chances of selling like Rowling are about as likely as having their blogs turn into Facebook. But when you’re putting the finishing touches on your first novel – or holding the galleys of your first book in your hand — it’s hard not to imagine it going out in the world and finding a large and grateful readership. Truth is, releasing your manuscript out into the world is a bit like the opening day of a small business. Exciting as the moment is, the real work is still ahead of you.
That work is usually frustrating and full of setbacks, and sometimes outright failure. You may run through every agent you can find on the internet and get nothing but rejections. (Note: I’m assuming your manuscript has been revised, edited, and proofread until it’s genuinely ready.) If you publish with a small press or self-publish, there’s a fair chance you’ll sell three dozen copies in your first two years. If so, the good news is, this is pretty typical – it doesn’t necessarily say anything about the quality of your writing.
The bad news is, this is pretty typical.
Read MoreA handful of plotting techniques have been so overused by generations of hack writers that they’ve picked up their own nicknames. Heavy foreshadowing (“If only she had known”) for instance, or getting your hero out of an impossible situation by an equally impossible plot twist (“With a mighty leap . . .”). These techniques are rightly mocked as awkward attempts to generate tension – plot mechanics at their creakiest. But another nicknamed technique has, I think, been unfairly relegated to cliché status—maintaining two parallel stories and ending your scenes so that you cut between them at moments that leave your readers hanging. Or, “Meanwhile, back at the ranch.”
The nickname dates to silent movies, when transitions were accomplished through title cards interspersed between scenes. In the earliest days, studios didn’t make new cards for each movie, but used a set of stock cards: “One Year Later,” “Comes the Dawn,” or “Wedding Bells.” “Meanwhile, Back at the Ranch” was the card used most often when the action cut away from the heroine just as the log she was tied to was being fed into the sawmill.
The literary version of this technique dates back to at least Homer, but it was probably perfected in the nineteenth century, when most novels were serialized in newly-popular magazines. One of my favorite old bookstore finds is two bound volumes of Harper’s New Monthly Magazine from 1852/53. They contain a number of literary gems, such as a contemporary review of Moby Dick (“Beneath the whole story, the subtle, imaginative reader may perhaps find a pregnant allegory, intended to illustrate the mystery of human life.”). They are also home of the first American serialization of Dickens’ Bleak House.
Since Dickens needed to keep readers interested enough to wait a month for the next chapter, nearly every installment ends with a cliffhanger – another silent movie term that made the leap to literature. For instance, the January, 1853, installment ends with Krook’s spontaneous combustion (with an illustration), and readers have to wait until February to see the outcome. But for many of the transitions, Dickens ends at a critical moment, then picks up the next month’s installment with another thread, forcing readers to wait two or three months before circling back to the original. December, 1852, ends with the revelation that Miss Summerton is Lady Dedlock’s daughter. We don’t get back to Lady Dedlock until February. The gap may have left readers frustrated, but it certainly sold magazines.
Jumping from one thread to another at a critical moment lets you create a cliffhanger within your novel.
Read MoreIn the days when many professions were controlled by guilds, your masterpiece was not your best or most celebrated work. It was your first halfway decent work – the piece you presented to the guild judges to show you deserved to be named a master of your craft. I’ve been thinking about this practice as I’ve watched clients go through the long, often disheartening, battle to get published. I so often want to remind them – your first published work is going to be your weakest. It is, after all, the first piece that shows you can write well enough to survive in the marketplace. It’s your masterpiece.
It’s easy to forget that the early work of every writer, no matter how gifted, is usually mediocre at best. Some years ago, I read a very early novel by a writer I admire a great deal – Rex Stout, the creator of Nero Wolfe. The novel I found was written almost a century ago, more than a decade before the first Wolfe novel. It was unreadable – so wordy, stilted, and melodramatic that I couldn’t finish it. So when clients tell me that reading some brilliant writer has left them feeling intimidated, I usually tell them to find an early work by the same writer. It almost always cheers them up.
Of course, today Stout’s earliest novels would probably never have sold. Back then, the publishing industry was a lot more receptive to writers who hadn’t yet mastered their craft. Radio was years away, and television decades, so books formed a large part of an evening’s entertainment, creating a voracious market. Writers tended to stick with a single publisher as well, so an editor like Max Perkins could nurse budding authors like Hemingway and Fitzgerald through their early, less masterful works, knowing they would stick with Scribners once they hit their stride. Today even the most promising authors are competing against a huge and diverse entertainment industry, and acquisitions editors expect big success with every book they buy. It’s a tough market, and you need a much higher level of mastery in order to break into it.
So if what you thought was your masterpiece has collected 137 polite rejections, don’t be discouraged. It may simply mean you still have a ways to go before you’ve mastered your craft. According to Malcolm Gladwell, you become expert at something by doing it for 10,000 hours. You can write quite a few novels – or rewrite one novel quite a few times — in 10,000 hours. As I once heard it put, you can learn to write well by writing badly for ten years.
There are shortcuts available.
Read MoreThe book I’m most proud of having worked on is the memoir of a holocaust survivor – Mark it With a Stone by Joseph Horn. As you might imagine, he had a gripping, important story to tell. But when we met, he was a businessman and lacked the narrative skills he needed in order to tell his story effectively. He also warned me before we began that, because the events he was writing about were so traumatic, he might find it hard to tolerate criticism.
But he was motivated. Horn had once watched a fellow inmate in a work camp scream, “No, I must live, I must tell!” just before he was executed. Horn lived. And he told. I was able to coach him gently through revisions that made his narrative more effective, the book published, and a copy is now in the library of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.
His story raises an interesting question, though – what does it mean for a memoir to be accurate? One of the largest issues we dealt with was the matter of dialogue. He wanted to be absolutely scrupulous, telling stories precisely as they happened. But in his original draft, his characters only spoke when he could remember what they said word-for-word. Since the manuscript was written years after the fact, this meant he used very little dialogue – mostly bursts of highly memorable lines like, “I must live, I must tell!” Nearly all the rest of his conversations were narrative summary, and many of his scenes felt flat and distant as a result. He was telling the story to readers rather than letting them experience it.
Read MoreLately, I’ve seen quite a few beginning writers coming on the Writer Unboxed Facebook page to ask about their process. Are they outlining enough? Should they be using a looser outline? What sort of software is available to help them keep everything organized? How do you do this? Am I doing it right? These are understandable questions when you’re first starting out. And the WU community usually comes up with pretty good advice, generally of the “Do what works for you” variety. But I’d like to take it one step further – don’t even think about your process.
Your readers certainly won’t. They’ll be paying attention to your story and your characters, and you should do the same. Granted, when you’re just beginning, you might want to experiment with various processes to find which one feels most comfortable to you. But you should never worry that you’re not doing it right. There is no right.
As an editor, I’ve worked with writers who have used techniques across the entire spectrum. Some started with a particularly clear scene, or character, or even a title, and let their stories grow naturally, learning what came next as they wrote it on the page. Others have written up not just outlines, but spreadsheets of character attributions and plot points. Either technique can produce widespread success. J. K. Rowling developed elaborate outlines of each of the Harry Potter novels, and is now richer than the queen. Rex Stout reportedly wrote a single draft of all the Nero Wolfe novels. Last I checked, every one of them is still in print.
Then there’s Noel “Hot Lead” Loomis.
Read MoreI recently caught an interview with Aaron Sorkin about the new season of “Newsroom.” He explained how he generates tension when viewers already know what the main plot twists are going to be – the current season deals with the 2012 election. It’s hard to surprise your readers when your major story developments are literally last year’s news.
This problem shows up in writing more often than you might imagine. Writers of historical fiction have to deal with the fact that history happened and we’re stuck with it. A lot of mysteries have to spell out the situation that leads to the killing before the body drops, which is hard to do without having readers guess the victim. And sometimes the nature of the story just makes some developments inevitable.
There are techniques that can help you disguise these plot twists — I’ve collected a few on my website — but these techniques only go so far. How do you generate surprise or maintain tension when your readers can see what’s coming?
Read MoreWhen the Madonna of the Veil came to light in 1930, the art world celebrated it as a newly discovered work of Botticelli. But doubts began to creep in four years later when Kenneth Clark, director of the National Gallery, noticed something suspicious about the Renaissance masterpiece. Subsequent tests of the paint revealed it was a forgery, but the big tip-off was that the Madonna looked like a silent movie star. Jean Harlow, to be specific.
Every era has its blind spots – things that people simply cannot see at the time that become obvious a few years later. The forger who created the Madonna didn’t intend her to look like Jean Harlow. That was just how women looked in his day. If you’re writing historical fiction, recognizing and reproducing these blind spots can make your readers feel like they are truly immersed in the era you’re recreating.
One reason Alan Gordon’s Fool’s Guild mysteries work so well is that his characters inhabit the early thirteenth century. If you’re not familiar with the series, it involves members of a jester’s guild who work behind the scenes to manipulate nations toward a gentler, more humane government. Jesters, after all, can say anything to the king without fear of being beheaded (well, without much fear). One of the authentic details Gordon recreates is that everyone assumes the way to create the best government is to make sure the right man winds up as king. Someone has to have absolute power, because how else are you going to govern a nation?
Obsessions are another form of blind spot. One way Peter Tremayne creates the seventh-century atmosphere of the Sister Fidelma mysteries is through the frequent arguments over arcane religious customs, like how to calculate the correct date of Easter. Everyone agreed that Easter was the first Sunday after the full moon that follows the vernal equinox. The disagreement was over whether a day began at sunrise or sunset, and your answer could lead to you celebrating the holiday five weeks earlier or later than your fellow believers. Granted, there was also some politics involved in the question, but it’s still hard not to look back now and say, “Just flip a coin, guys.”
Of course, it’s possible to go overboard in showing your historical characters’ obsessions.
Read MoreI ran into an intriguing editing problem recently. A client had a character who was disguising the fact that she was a woman. What made it tricky was that she was the narrator of a number of scenes, so we had to construct those scenes so as to mislead both the other characters and the readers. You’d be surprised how often gender gets mentioned in interior monologue. The client and I got a lot of practice at avoiding personal pronouns without looking like we were deliberately avoiding personal pronouns.
This started me thinking about the unreliable narrator, a technique that’s shown up in a couple of my favorite books. If, as we discussed last month, writing techniques should be treated as tools, what do you use the unreliable narrator for?
SPOILER ALERT: If you’ve never read Agatha Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, go do it now. I’ll wait.
Okay, welcome back.
As you’ve just seen, unreliable narrators are a great way to set up a surprise ending. According to a lot of commentators, Christie’s revelation that the narrator was actually the murderer was a milestone of crime drama and may well have been her masterpiece. She took advantage of the fact that readers naturally assume the narrator is telling them the truth. Writers can also give readers a shock at the end because readers assume that the narrator is alive (Ambrose Bierce’s “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge”), or sane (Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club).
To pull off this kind of surprise without alienating your readers, the narrator has to tell the truth, at least technically. One reason the unreliable narrator is hard to write is that you’re using your readers’ assumptions to slip stuff past them that would otherwise raise red flags – like the way my client’s character never uses personal pronouns in interior monologue. Christie’s book works because, at the end, Dr. Sheppard reveals how he described the actual murder without revealing that he was the one committing it. For readers, subtle misdirection is a terrific trick, but outright lying is an insult.
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