CRAFT
Yesterday we posted Part Three of our article (co-written with author Elena Greene) on lessons writers could draw from Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings movies. I’m too lazy to link the trackbacks, but a simple scroll will get you to Parts One, Two, and Three.
Sigh. As I revisit the lessons, I grow nostalgic for the heady days when the movie-goer impatiently waited for the next installment of these Acadamy Award-winning films. Now that’s good storytelling. On to the next two tips!
7. Find the right blend of external and internal conflict
Pacing has been the downfall of many writers. One way to control it is to alternate action and dialogue, which reads “faster,” with a scene showing internal conflict or introspection. But how much to use and why? Though that decision is part and parcel with the alchemy of writing, lessons can be gleaned from the filmmakers, who were masters of pacing.
Wearing viewers out with big chunks of battle sequences was a real risk, but the filmmakers solved it by varying the action with a plethora of internal conflict scenes: Gollum debating with himself over what to do with his hobbit companions; Aragorn interacting with the besotted Eowyn; Frodo struggling to hold on to hope; Faramir weighing winning his father’s respect against sending his men into a hopeless battle.
Flashbacked moments of the romance between Aragorn and Arwen were used broadly and achieved a twofold purpose: slowing the pace while reminding the viewer what was at stake should Aragorn fail. The viewer was also granted a respite of beauty and peace before being thrust back into the carnage of war, sharpening the emotional response to both.
Readers cannot sustain interest in page after page of breakneck action or breathless dialogue. How’s your mix?
Read MoreTherese, Kathleen and their writer buddy Elena Greene had their article, Lessons from The Lord of the Rings published last November, and now they’re freeing it to share with the world (in part because Writer’s Digest doesn’t take reprints – bah).
But don’t start reading the article in the middle, my preciousesss, because we’re already up to tips 5 & 6. Here’s part 1, which contains a cheat list in case you need to know who’s who…and here’s part 2. Enjoy!
5. Find new twists for stale conflicts
To portray Frodo as the victim of his circumstance throughout three epic-length films would’ve become tedious to watch. The filmmakers mixed it up, though, emphasizing a different jagged edge in each movie. In the first, Frodo is a young and naïve hobbit whose conflict is clear: he doesn’t want to be the ring bearer, but there is no one more suited for the task. He also knows if the Ring isn’t destroyed, the Shire—which he loves more than anything—could be.
In the second film, Frodo’s original conflict still simmers on the backburner, but we see him increasingly agitated over the Ring and what it’s already done to one of its previous owners—Gollum. “I have to believe he can come back,” Frodo says as he fights to help the deranged Hobbit-beast, and we understand that he fears the Ring’s power to destroy not only his homeland, but the very fabric of his being.
In the final installment, the Ring’s toll on Frodo becomes marked. Their relationship slides into a drug to junkie dynamic. Frodo moves like an addict, is sleepless, jumpy and paranoid; he snaps at Sam for offering to “share the load” and carry the Ring for a while. (Even here the conflict is multi-faceted, because Frodo wants to protect Sam from the corrupting effects of the Ring, too.)
When you’re writing, think about how your conflicts can evolve, and how your characters can and must change to keep the variance fresh and alive.
Read MoreWatch out, Harry Potter! The hottest fantasy series for school-age children features not the young wizard with a scar, but a pack of feral cats struggling to survive in the wild.
Note: STARLIGHT, the New Prophecy, is #2 on the New York Time’s children’s bestseller list as of 4/13/06.
The series, WARRIORS, is the work of author Erin Hunter, who is actually the nom-de-plume of two writers, Cherith Baldry and Kate Cary, and the brainchild of Victoria Holmes, editor for Working Partners LTD. With 10 books in the series and more titles on the way, the cat-clan craze is sweeping the ’tween set.
Kathleen and Therese chatted with Cherith, Kate, and Vicky about writing for children and why this series has resonated so deeply with their readers.
This post has recently been updated so that parts 1 and 2 can be read together here.
Q: Our school-age daughters are crazy about your WARRIORS series, and they were both surprised that Erin Hunter is actually two people! How did you both come together as writing partners? Can you talk a little bit about how your process works and how you work to make two voices into one?
CHERITH: Kate and I aren’t writing partners in the sense that we collaborate. We each write individual books within the same series. We were both brought into Warriors by our UK editor, Vicky, who had the original idea. Now we discuss the storylines with Vicky and she makes sure that what we write is consistent.
KATE: It is Vicky, our editor, who brought us to the project – she is the “hub” of Warriors. Cherith and I have never met! I suspect we were chosen for the project because we both instinctively had the right voice, so it comes to us both quite naturally. We take it in turns with the writing – for the first series, I wrote Into the Wild and Fire and Ice, then Cherith took over for the third book, I did the fourth, and Cherith did books 5 and 6. Vicky works hard to keep continuity – there’s a big cast list and it changes and grows all the time! Cherith probably has her favourite characters, just as I do. Sometimes it’s hard to put a character into someone else’s hands; but I trust Cherith to retain the essence of characters I’ve created (like Yellowfang and Graystripe) and I hope I nurture the cats Cherith has created (such as Squirrelflight and Brambleclaw). Fortunately we have Vicky at the centre of it all to keep an eye all the cats and make sure they don’t stray from their original nature.
Q: Vicky, did you think it was risky, bringing two authors together to work under one name?
Read MoreA few decades back, I posted on ways a face can express the emotions sadness and agony, suggesting there’s a great wide world for the writer beyond descriptions of crooked eyebrows. Paul Ekman, in his book Emotions Revealed, gives us a lot of think about when considering yet another powerful mood, anger.
Before I get to facial changes, I want to touch on what’s behind anger so we know when to write it. Warning: This is a long post. (Kathleen’s going to kill me.) I’ll ask you to humor the psych major in me, but if you really only want the skinny on faces, skip to the end! Grumble, grumble, grumble…
How anger starts. Anger can kick off when we’re feeling frustrated, rejected, disappointed, when we’ve been offended, attacked or the recipient of someone else’s anger. Everyone has different thresholds, but when anger happens, it’s because someone’s personal line has been crossed.
The goal of anger is to gain some control over a situation or to retaliate or punish, and there are almost always warning signs in a person’s expression and action. Says Eckman,
It is the person who harms without anger who is not understandable, and who is often seen as truly frightening.
(Bring to mind the visage of people convicted of heinous crimes who barely blink when their terror is laid before them? They are scary!)
How anger evolves.
Read MoreYesterday we posted Part One of our published article LESSONS FROM LORD OF THE RINGS (co-written with author Elena Greene). Today we post the second part of our article. Warning: though hard-cord nerdiness is helpful when reading the following, it is not essential. Good writing transcendes the genres.
3. Tap into sources of inner conflict to create character arcs
The filmmakers made controversial changes regarding the character of Faramir. Denethor does not appreciate this second son, a less outwardly bold man than his brother. While guarding the eastern border, Faramir waylays and questions Frodo and Sam, who are on their way to Mordor to destroy the Ring. Taking this powerful object seems to offer Faramir not only a chance to save his beleaguered country, but also to win his father’s respect. In Tolkien’s version, Faramir allows the hobbits to continue their mission, saying he is “wise enough to know that there are some perils from which a man must flee.”
The filmmakers made a different choice:
Read MoreTherese and Kathleen readily embrace their “inner nerd” when it comes to The Lord of the Rings. They, along with fellow nerd and writer buddy Elena Greene, even wrote an article about Peter Jackson’s movie version of the story, focusing on choices he made that all writers can learn from. The following is the first part of that article.
Lessons from Lord of the Rings
Even if you’ve never read the books or seen the films, you’ve undoubtedly heard of The Lord of the Rings. The 1,000 page story is so complex and broad in scope that even the author of the books, J.R.R. Tolkien, said they could never be translated to film; word is he sold rights to MGM for a mere $10,000. There are many people, including the three of us, who are elated he was proven wrong.
As a writer, it’s practically impossible to read or see interviews with Peter Jackson, Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens, the triumphant triumvirate who adapted the book for the big screen, and not take notes. Copious notes. (Henceforth, we’ll refer to Jackson, et al., as ‘filmmakers,’ though we feel it’s about as adequate as labeling Viggo Mortensen, Orlando Bloom and Sean Bean as ‘passably handsome,’ not to mention Elijah Wood, Karl Urban and David Wenham…not that they have anything to do with our love for the movie. Ahem.) So much of what the filmmakers did in creating and then editing their work is what we writers strive for when polishing a manuscript: pinpoint the heart of the story and stay true to it, cut what can be lost, and always direct conflict and pacing.
Okay, how did they do it?
Read MoreYesterday, Kathleen and Therese dished–and disagreed–about the effectiveness of Peter Jackson’s remade classic, King Kong. Here’s part two of their roaring debate.
Therese: What did you think about the authenticity aspect of the film?
Kathleen: One thing PJ and co. do really well is set a mood. The music, the Depression-era culture, the rust-bucket boat…it was spot on. Show-biz
America was just a fig-leaf over immense suffering, which fed everyone’s desperation. So returning to Jack Black’s character, I bought his desperation. It took me a few minutes to get my head away from Jack Black’s “Jack Blackness” but after a while, he became Denham to me. Everyone was desperate in this story: Denham, Ann, the ship’s captain and crew, the cannibals (were they cannibals?), Kong, and finally, America itself, a country that would fetishize a giant gorilla just to escape their troubles for a few hours. What did you think?
Therese and Kathleen are both nerds extraordinaire when it comes to Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings. In fact, they crafted an article (along with co-nerd, Elena Greene) about writerly lessons that can be derived from the film, and the article was published last November in the romance association’s craft magazine, the RWR. So when we heard Peter Jackson and company were tackling King Kong together, we were excited, but—surprise!—we came away with very different feelings about this remade classic.
Therese: I’m a huge Peter Jackson fan after his masterful work on Lord of the Rings, so I went to the theatre just to see him shine again with his latest furry baby, King Kong. On the whole, Kong entertained me; it was trademark PJ, with great world building and authentic characterization. What did you think?
Kathleen: I was really looking forward to Jackson’s followup effort after his kick-butt rendering of LOTR. I was so disappointed. I thought it suffered from massive bloat that dragged down the narrative. He could have lost at least an hour. I also got the impression that he was so hung up on this ‘lost world’ island he created that he lost sight of the storyline.
TW: I think the story had a character-driven engine, playing homage to each character’s journey and arc; this choice probably made for a slower ride than if PJ had chosen a plot-driven engine. (I can’t remember who it was now, but one of the actors or maybe PJ himself called this “a relationship movie,” and I agree.) The New York City sequence also essentially played the role of a looong prologue, IMO. Again, this was necessary to establish characterization, but it probably slowed down the story for some. Where do you think he should’ve snipped, Kath?
Read MoreI’ll admit that, like many of my countrymen, I’m hooked on American Idol. How could I not be when the show has all the trappings to suck a viewer in: a few underdogs, beautiful people, loads of conflict (involving the judges, contestants, audience and the host), an ever-evolving saga with a guaranteed happy ending… Last Tuesday night’s show featured guest artist Kenny Rogers, who had a lot of good advice for the singers, including one great chestnut that applies to almost every kind of art: Since you need to hook your audience early, you should focus your energies on those first few notes, otherwise they may not stick around to listen to the rest.
We all know the importance of a good hook, but how often do you stop to appreciate the first few lines of a story? Does the opening of your wip chime crystalline or might it make Simon say humiliating things to you on national television?
Here are some of the first “notes” from some of the most popular fiction out there, taken from a wide variety of genres. I’ll focus only on the first 2-3 lines.
Read MoreAgent Diedre Knight is the founder of the well-respected The Knight Agency. Recently, Knight broke out of the box, becoming an author herself! In fact, her first novel was published just this past week, on April 4th. Therese and Kathleen recently spoke with her about these changes and what she does to balance her parallel lives.
This interview has recently been updated so that parts 1 and 2 appear together in this one post. Enjoy!
Interview with Deidre Knight
Q: You are the ultimate Agent Unboxed, Deidre – coming out with not just a single novel, Parallel Attraction, but a unique series of your own. The obvious common denominator between your two jobs is a great love of writing. How did it all start; how long have you been writing; and when did you decide to pursue becoming an agent in particular?
A: Wow, that’s a wonderful compliment! Thank you so much. When I was about nine years old I was fortunate enough to be placed in a creative writing program at my elementary school. We did things like visit the art museum, then write poems about what we’d seen. Around that same time I decided I wanted to be a writer when I grew up, so my mother gave me a journal and told me that I should write in it every day. I also decided to write a novel, and began typing it out on an old manual typewriter. I don’t remember much about that “book” except that it was about a girl and her horse. Also at that same time I read GONE WITH THE WIND, and was mildly obsessed with it for a while (flash forward—I love historical romance. You can probably sort that one out!) I wrote a sort of “fanfic” based on GWTW, which I still have to this day!
Anyway, writing fever never left me, though at times it ebbed. I didn’t write that much during college, for instance, but right afterward began writing screenplays. Although I was always frustrated by the minimalist approach in scripts, I think it taught me to focus on two key elements—story and dialogue. To this day, I think of my novels in that same kind of structured way.
Read MoreI’m a big fan of Raymond Obstfeld and his book FICTON FIRST AID. Every writer should have this book in their craft library.
One of Obstfeld’s nuggets to milk tension out of a scene is a writerly sleight of hand he calls the suspense pocket. He writes, “[It’s] a little device that creates a misdirected suspense moment within a scene to reveal something else”[p. 47]. In other words, don’t reveal the scene’s payoff immediately. Delay. Feed the reader vital information about other things—characterization, conflicts, etc. The reader, wanting the payoff, painlessly gets what they need while you, the writer, have avoided the dreaded info dump and injected tension into your story.
Here’s an example of a suspense pocket from Eoin Colfer in his latest Artemis Fowl offering, THE ETERNITY CODE.
Read MoreNo bloggers in the world of online book reviewing have carved out such a distinct niche in so short a time as Sarah and Candy of Smart Bitches Who Love Trashy Novels. The duo are legendary for acute observations on the world of women’s fiction, and romance in particular, delivered with unbridled snark and a liberal dose of profanity. Recently, the two indulged Kathleen and Therese’s curiousity about reviewing books, what readers are looking for, and why man-titty covers are here to stay.
Q: Where did the concept for Smart Bitches, Trashy Books come from?
Sarah: Well, there was this tsunami.
The short answer is that Candy used to comment on my personal site (at LENGTH – you have never met a person in such dire need of her own blog before) and I mis-remembered her as being from Indonesia. So after the tsunami of Christmas 2004 I looked up her email address in my archives and sent her a message saying that I hoped her family was ok.
She responded kindly instead of pointing out what a geographical moron I am, and we got to emailing back and forth. Somehow we ended up on the topic of romance novels, and how much it drove us nuts to pay so much money for a book that ended up blowing donkey butt, and how few honest reviews there are of romantic fiction. Then one of us said, “We should do a website all about romance novel reviews.” And whichever one of us didn’t say that also didn’t say, “You’re nuts, freakshow,” and instead said, “Yeah! We should!” We bought a domain, made a design, and started posting reviews and random bits of stuff about romance novels.
And Smart Bitches, Trashy Books was born.
Candy: Ohmigod, yes. I left many monstrously long comments on poor Sarah’s blog. Oh dear. Anyway, we wanted to start a romance novel review website that was irreverent and independent and scrappy. One that allowed us to say whatever the hell we wanted to say, even if it was completely non-politically-correct, and even if it was offensive.
So, that decided, we tried to think of an appropriate title that would reflect our sensibilities. Sarah initially suggested “Chink and Jewy’s Romance Novels.” After I picked myself up from the floor, I suggested that if we wanted to make fun of her race instead of her religion, maybe we could try for “Chink and Round-Eye’s Romance Novels.” Another idea we bandied around was “Man-Carrot and Chowder,” which…yeah. Heh heh. Somewhere down the line, “Smart Bitches who Love Trashy Books” came up, and it just felt right. We were both reasonably intelligent women who’ve gotten a lot of shit about our love of romance novels, and we decided, what the hell, instead of cringing in shame, we’d fling those words back in their faces. Taking the term back for empowerment, if you will. Or something like that.
Q: Describe your review process. What makes a satisfying read? What’s a wall-banger? Do you think you’ve had any impact on an author’s sales?
Read MoreAnd so it’s done, 450 pages of the best writing you are capable of at the moment. You’ve chased down every loose thread, expunged all the adverbs and adjectives possible, vetted every line of dialogue for authenticity and relevance. Then you went through and made sure every character tag wasn’t trite, every passive sentence was active, and junked passages that didn’t move the story forward. And then you did it some more, until the goose has been roasted to perfection.
You send it out to your agent or editor, certain socks will be blown off clear to Topeka, you sleep good that night, secure. Two weeks later, a letter arrives. “Cut 12,000 words,” it says.
WTF? you think. You’ve already cut as much of the story as humanly possible. It’s been parboiled within an inch of its life. Goof with it any further, and the whole thing will fall apart.
Nah. Take some Advil with a Cuervo chaser and pull up a chair, mon amie. Perhaps my experience will be instructive.
Read MoreMy children think the term “tighty whities” is about the funniest thing in the world next to Captain Underpants, so I hope some young-at-heart person out there enjoys my odd post title today!
Ray Rhamey at Flogging the Quill recently demonstrated how an overplump piece of prose should be trimmed of its fat, leaving a clean-and-lean scene in its place. There’s little doubt after reading the original that Ray’s editing worked wonders, but can a writer learn to write tight in the first place?
Here’s my analysis of Ray’s great approach:
* Nix the backstory. Introduce history as it’s needed and not a moment before. Backstory is not only a spacehog, it can also be boring. Besides, a LACK of information can often provide a HOOK. Readers want to know why people are acting as they are, why things are unfolding as they are, and they’ll keep reading to get to that info. Don’t hand readers the key to your story too soon.
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