On being ready

My children are taking swimming lessons at the moment. My husband is an academic, and we often move in the summers, and swimming is one of those things we’re a bit behind in. We’re finally in a place with a) a pool and b) an affordable swim lesson schedule and c) we are not currently moving. So we are jumping in with full force. They are all at the same pool at the same time, and I watch them every day as they struggle to learn what their teachers have planned for their particular groups each day. And it makes me think of writing.

The younger kids are in the more beginning levels, but they are more likely to listen to their teachers, more likely to jump in without fear, and less likely to worry about consequences. I was excited to see one of my younger kids throw her head and shoulders all the way in and really swim today—as opposed to the jerky, gasping, one-move-at-a-time action she’s done until now. That struck me as significant—if you’re going to swim—or write—you have to throw yourself all the way in. You have to immerse yourself in the story, and you can’t be self-conscious or worry about failure or things not working. You have to be all the way inside.

The older kids are having to play catch up, which isn’t easy. They are more conscious of their shortfallings, and it’s harder for them to throw themselves all the way in. They want to, but letting go and submersing themselves completely, letting go of some control, letting the water take them—those are hard things. They’re old enough to know that water can hurt you. They’ve had longer to learn and practice bad habits. They’re less likely to really internalize what the teacher says. Even as they desperately want to follow the instructions, their bodies have a harder time mimicking the right steps. Their minds want to take shortcuts, fill in things they know from past experience, instead of really looking at what they’re doing.

On the first day, my oldest woke up a little cranky, and said something like, “Mom, I already know all the swimming strokes. I just need to go to a pool and practice. I don’t need lessons.” While I agree that they all need more practice time, I don’t agree that he already knows everything. But don’t we feel that way as writers sometimes? We’ve been writing for so long. We KNOW to “show, don’t tell.” We KNOW to ditch the adverbial dialogue tags. We KNOW how a plot works. And yet…we get in the pool, and all the million things we know still don’t add up to effective swimming. Despite all our work and knowledge, it’s like we’re treading water. The individual parts of the writing are nice, but as a whole, they still don’t add up. Something is missing. Meanwhile, other writers swim right on past. I watched my older kids’ class spend two solid hours on surface dives. Two hours of belly flops. Thank goodness for patient teachers, because I would have been very frustrated after all that, and no change.

But here’s a beautiful thing. After all of that knowing and trying and failing, my oldest finally leaned over today and dove in perfectly. Somehow, all that knowing finally meshed inside him. All of those loose bits of knowledge finally connected, and he dove. It worked. And it will work with your writing, too, if you just keep at it.

Last day to enter

Short notice, but there's a great interview up on Cynsations between editor Elizabeth Law of Egmont and author Allen Zadoff. Check it out here (and win a 30-page critique as well!).

My favorite books

I just finished reading A Wrinkle in Time aloud to my girls, and afterwards we talked a little about favorite books and what makes them our favorite. My all-time favorite books would be A Wrinkle in Time, Narnia, and Harry Potter. My younger daughter (who is only six) says she likes realistic stories best—Penderwicks, Little House on the Prairie, etc. She likes stories where the people could really exist. While my taste runs more to the fantastical, I do agree with her on that point—I want characters I could almost believe are alive. So I started thinking about what else makes these particular books my favorites. A lot of books resonate with me, but these are ones I’ve read too many times to count, so they’re sort of a part of me now. And I think the common themes are

1. loyalty and love—of family, friends, etc.
2. personal sacrifice for others and/or things that are right
3. deep spiritual themes
4. magic/miracles
5. read-aloud-ability, and
6. a strong plot/storyline.

I’d add one two more things that make a book resonate with me as well: emotional honesty of the main character (this is what I like about DJ Schwenk in Dairy Queen--I find myself thinking about her as if she was one of the teens I've worked with in the past) and immediacy (this is what I like about Hex Hall). I don’t connect as well to books that draw too much attention to their structure, whether it’s so much attention to prose that it strangles the story, or a style of telling that keeps reminding the reader that it’s only a story, and I am the Narrator, so listen up, missy!

I don't know that my own writing lines up exactly with all of this--after all, most people read much more widely than they write, for practical time reasons if nothing else. But I do notice--after the fact--that a lot of things I write center around loyalty, moral choices, and family relationships of all kinds.

What about you? What makes a book your favorite to read? And how closely do the books you write come close to that?

Mulling over queries

I think queries are about a hundred times harder than novels to write. First there's just boiling down your story to a few sentences. But then there's the spin you put on it. It's like having a loom with threads strung from one end to another. Each thread has a weight on it that you can move up and down. Or, if you like, it's like guitar strings depressed at different frets. All the same strings, but changing this changes the pattern, changes the tune, gives you a different impression of what it's all about. And I'm convinced that every single person you ask to read it will want a slightly different tune. Sometimes this is to your advantage, because you can stress slightly different aspects of your book to appeal more to different people you may be querying. Sometimes it's frustrating, like if critique suggestions turn it into an entirely different story than you ever meant to tell, or if they strip out all the voice you wrote into it, or substitute the critiquer's own voice. That's the hard part about queries (and about critiques in general)--sussing out the things that will make your writing stronger versus the things that will just make your writing different.

But aside from that issue is the issue of getting the right information into your query. I used to think that a query should be mysterious, not give away too much, and therefore make an editor/agent HAVE to request to read on. Well, you do want that response, but a vague, mysterious query won't do it. You have to give away some of what happens in the book. Not the ending, no--but you HAVE to specifically talk about something that happens on screen, in the active running action of the book. Miss Snark had one model of the query on her blog (she said there were many ways of writing one, and this was just ONE way--so don't get tied into fitting it exactly):

X is the main guy;
Y is the bad guy;
they meet at Z and all L breaks loose.
If they don't solve Q, then R starts and if they do it's L squared.

So basically, the first two lines are about defining your main character, what s/he wants, and what the opposition (human or otherwise) is about. People usually do pretty well here. At least, I find this part a little easier to write. How much attention you put on this depends on the kind of book you have (slice of life vs. high action, etc.). But all this is setup/backstory. It is not enough to end your query here. You can't just include this and then a mysterious line about the genre or danger or whatever.

The part that gets harder, though, are the last two lines. I think what line 3 means is that you have to actually reveal the specific action your character takes that starts to complicate things. Maybe that could be the inciting incident, what sets of the motion of this story (as opposed to the backstory/setup). And the last line? That would be the complications of taking that action, the next choice/situation it forces on the MC, and the possible complications resulting from that second action.

See? No spoilers--we aren't anywhere near the end of the book yet--but there's still an open-ended situation to intrigue a potential reader. It lets you know the genre and the specific plot of this book--as opposed to all the other books in this genre. So if you can figure this out, I think your query will be ever so much stronger.

Then you can send it to your critiquers, who will all have a different take on the tune, and worry about the first part all over again.

Voice workshop parts 3 & 4

Day 3: Emblanding

We each picked a passage and rewrote it to remove the voice. That was interesting. We noticed that a good deal of our emblanding had to do with removing the show and sticking in a telly summary, instead. Also, it involved taking out all the interesting phrases a character might say and using generic language in its place.

Day 4: Rewriting our own stuff

This was by FAR the hardest part of the week. We had to take one of our own passages and rewrite it to jack up the voice. Very hard! I think it would almost be easier to start over from scratch and write something new and voicey than to fix something that’s not there. Which is probably why editors say they can work with an author on plot, but not on weak writing.

Overall it was a really good experience. I think with something like this, it's not enough to just sit in rapture at the feet of an expert. This is the kind of thing you really only learn by discussing and doing.

See other takes on the workshop from other members of the group:

Sandy Carlson (starting with her introduction)

Voice workshop part 2

Day 2: Samples

We each found passages from published books and analyzed them for what made them voicey. For copyright reasons I won’t post all the passages here, but we had selections from the following fabulous books:

Wicked Lovely, Melissa Marr
Junie B. Jones is (Almost) a Flower Girl, Barbara Park
The Tale of Desperaux, Kate DiCamillo
Sharp’s Rifles, Bernard Cornwell
The Midwife’s Apprentice, Karen Cushman
Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, JK Rowling
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, JK Rowling
Tom Sawyer, Mark Twain
Just Take My Heart, Mary Higgins Clark
The True Meaning of Smekday, Adam Rex
Scumble, Ingrid Law
Crossing to Paradise, Kevin Crossley-Holland
London Calling, Edward Bloor
The Star of Kazan, Eva Ibbotson
A Curse Dark as Gold, Elizabeth C. Bunce
Rules, Cynthia Lord
Alcatraz Versus the Shattered Lens, Brandon Sanderson
Palace Beautiful, Sarah DeFord Williams

And a couple more we didn’t discuss but which have strong voice:

Dairy Queen, Catherine Gilbert Murdock
I Shall Wear Midnight, Terry Pratchett
Flipped, Wendelin van Draanen
The Underneath, Kathi Appelt

What I learned from these—ie, what gives them voice:

--specificity of language

--language that that character would know

--concerns that character specifically would have

--sometimes, what is NOT said as well as what IS said

--sometimes, the dialogue/interaction between two characters

--sometimes, the irony of the real situation and what the character believes is reality, causing humor or a surge of pity on the reader’s part

--surprises

--turning a known story or phrase inside out

--depending on tone of story, making narrative sound more like dialogue (specifically, how a certain character would talk, even if it’s rambling)

--tells you something about your POV character, even if it’s technically while advancing plot or describing setting

--uses strong, exact, meaningful language, with a preference for nouns and verbs over flabby modifiers. (Some modifiers okay, of course—but used in moderation)

--more attention paid to the right words for the right character/situation than to a prescriptive set of rules (ie you can see things like “a bit” and other “weak” modifiers in some of these examples—but for this specific setting/character, they are the RIGHT words to lend character)

--Rhythm can be important, showing how quickly time seems to flow for the character (whether they want it or not). It can make you HAVE to read a book out loud. It adds to mood and character.

--Sometimes books stick very close to the characters' voices so that you are in their heads, as if it is really happening. Other times, the voice is more of a whole-book emphasis (like the Appelt or DiCamillo examples), where the point is to gather you up and tell you a story, as if someone is orally relating this to you, and the whole experience--storyteller plus story plus listener--is what's important, not *just* the story.

Voice workshop! Part 1

My critique group has spent the past week doing a workshop on voice. At first we were hesitant to do this, as none of us feel particularly expert. But we decided to forge ahead, and I think we’ve all learned a lot. I have, anyhow! Here’s an overview of what we did, and some of the things I learned in the process.

Day 1: Definitions.

Read and discuss articles that ARE written by experts on what voice is and how you develop it. Here are links to the articles we read:

Editor Caroline Meckler on voice: http://tabwriter.blogspot.com/2008/12/voice-giving-us-voice.html (EXCELLENT, clear definition of voice and its aspects--read this first)

Editor Martha Mihalick on voice: http://christyscreativespace.blogspot.com/2008/04/martha-mihalik-editor-at-greenwillow.html

Verla Kay discussion: http://www.verlakay.com/boards/index.php?topic=45917.0

Margot Finke on character voice: http://www.underdown.org/mf-powerful-voice.htm

Cheryl Klein on voice: http://chavelaque.blogspot.com/2009/03/faq-9-i-think-questions-about-voice.html (and read the comments, too, because there are some good ideas down there)

And an interesting writer's take on critiquing voice: http://katieganshert.blogspot.com/2010/08/dont-take-my-voice-away.html

http://cba-ramblings.blogspot.com/2010/07/what-is-writers-voice.html

We concluded that there was such a thing as author voice, and also such a thing as character voice. Author voice is like your face. It’s YOU. The YOU-ist You you can write. Character voice (or even different kinds of voice for different books) is like different clothing or hairstyles. People will react to you differently and expect different things from you based on how you look, or what kind of voice your book has. It’s important for your characters to all have their own voice.

Strong, exact nouns and verbs tend to be important for voice.

Voice is rooted in character.

You can have such a thing as strong voice and yet not everyone will like it. Voice subject to taste.

Voice helps you get inside a character’s head. The more in a character’s head you are, the more you feel, which usually affects how much you like a book. (Of course, if you find the character annoying, you might not want to stick around. Like I said, it’s subjective.)

To see what others in my group have to say about it all, check out the following blog:

Sandy Carlson, starting with this post.
Jaclyn McMahon's take here.