Writer's Digest January 2015

SPECIAL WORKBOOK: CRAFTING CHRISTIAN & INSPIRATIONAL STORIES

[ This Is the Year You ]

Write That

NOVEL! • NEVER GIVE UP ON YOUR STORY: TIPS FOR MAKING IT TO “THE END” • 7 WAYS TO PLOT A PAGE-TURNER • BETTER DIALOGUE, STEP BY STEP • ADD DIMENSION TO YOUR CHARACTERS: PROVEN TECHNIQUES

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W D I N T E RV I EW

Rachel Renée Russell

Secrets to Successful Fiction Series

HOW THE DORK DIARIES AUTHOR TURNED A LIFELONG WRITING HOBBY INTO HER DREAM CAREER US $6.99

THE BEST ADVICE FROM HEATHER GRAHAM, BRENDA NOVAK & OTHER BESTSELLERS 0

JANUARY 2015 writersdigest.com

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If you want to be a great writer, it helps to read the right books. American Writers & Artists Presents

The Great Books Club J JANUARY The Elements o of Style SStrunk and White

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JUNE On Writing Steven King

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F EATUR ES

Write Your Novel in 2015! 21 30

Characters, Tension & Release readers engaged, you need to write a story Scene by Scene Towithkeep rhythm—and use those beats to drum up mid-

Dimensional characters are born from drama—not description. Here’s why (and how) to delve into your characterizations one defining scene at a time.

book climaxes, multifaceted plotlines, and promises of even bigger thrills to come. Here’s how to pull it off in 7 steps. BY STEVEN JAMES

BY DAVID CORBETT

26 34

How to Craft Why So Many Writers Flawless Dialogue Give Up Mid-Novel Character conversations are the gems (& How Not to Be of your story—but just as readers can appreciate fine jewels, so can they spot One of Them) cheap imitations of the real thing. Use these 7 steps to add quality and clarity to your story’s talk. BY ELIZABETH SIMS

Take an honest look at the real reasons our stories can stall—and discover 9 simple strategies to help you make it to “The End.” BY TRACEY BARNES PRIESTLEY

38

Installment Plans

What are the real secrets to writing successful series novels? We brought together four bestsellers across a spectrum of genres to find out. BY ADRIENNE CREZO

2 I WRITER’S DIGEST I January 2015

JA NUA RY 2 015 | VOLU ME 95 | NO. 1

INK W ELL

44

8 REVISING OUT LOUD: Not sure if your work-in-

progress is, well, working? Gather some friends, food and manuscripts and have a read-aloud.

THE WD INTERVIEW:


BY JOE STOLLENWERK

Rachel Renée Russell stopped practicing law soon after her first middle-grade novel charted The New York Times bestsellers list. Ten books and a film option later, it looks as if she made the right choice. BY TIFFANY LUCKEY

10 PLUS: 5-Minute Memoir • Grammar Booster:

Special Prepositions • Poetic Asides: Madrigal • #CompleteThisTweet • A Few Minutes a Day C O LU M NS

17 MEET THE AGENT: Adriann Ranta,

Wolf Literary Services BY KARA GEBHART UHL

18 BREAKING IN: Debut Author Spotlight BY CHUCK SAMBUCHINO

4 8 FUNNY YOU SHOULD ASK: Querying YA Fiction;

Questioning Copy Edits; Compiling Book Proposals BY BARBARA POELLE

5 0 YOUR STORY: First Things First, Contest #59 6 0 STANDOUT MARKETS: The Permanent Press;

American Short Fiction; The Progressive BY CRIS FREESE

6 4 CONFERENCE SCENE: Inland Northwest

Christian Writers; Women Writers’ Winter Retreat; Pamlico Writers Conference and Competition

W RI TER ’S W OR KB OOK

BY LINDA FORMICHELLI

Spi & C W

52

7 2 REJECT A HIT: Webster’s Dictionary SPOOF-REJECTED BY ALISSA KNOP

WRITING THE SPIRITUAL ESSAY

ON THE COVER

BY DINTY W. MOORE

5 2 Crafting Christian & Inspirational Stories 3 4 Never Give Up on Your Story: Tips for

5 4 CLICHÉS TO AVOID IN CHRISTIAN FICTION

Making It to “The End”

BY JEFF GERKE

3 0 7 Ways to Plot a Page-Turner 2 6 Better Dialogue, Step by Step

5 7 HANDLING CONTROVERSIAL LANGUAGE

21 Add Dimension to Your Characters

IN CHRISTIAN FICTION

3 8 Secrets to Successful Fiction Series

BY JEFF GERKE

4 4 WD Interview: Rachel Renée Russell

PLUS:

4 online exclusives

5 editor’s letter

6 contributors

7 reader mail

Writer’s Digest (ISSN 0043-9525) is published monthly, except bimonthly issues in March/April, May/June, July/August and November/December, by F+W Media Inc., 10151 Carver Road, Ste. 200, Cincinnati, OH 45242. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to Writer’s Digest, P.O. Box 420235, Palm Coast, FL 32142-0235. Subscription rates: one year, $24.96; two years, $49.92; three years, $74.88. Canadian subscriptions add $10 per year for GST/HST tax and postage via surface mail. Foreign subscriptions add $10 for surface mail or $39 per year for airmail. Remit in U.S. funds. Canadian Publications Mail Agreement No. 40025316. Canadian return address: 2835 Kew Drive, Windsor, ON N8T 3B7. Writer’s Digest, Reg. U.S. Pat. Off. Vol. 95, No. 1. Periodicals Postage Paid at Cincinnati, Ohio, and additional mailing offices.

WritersDigest.com I 3

Right Now at

How to Reach Young Readers In our bonus Q&A online, Dork Diaries author Rachel Renée Russell (WD Interview, Page 44) discusses getting an agent, connecting with her audience, and more.

Tips for Drafting Dialogue Dazzling readers with dialogue takes careful rewriting and polish (“How to Craft Flawless Dialogue,” Page 26). Try this bonus method from WD Contributing Editor Elizabeth Sims for getting it written, then getting it right.

Peg Your Series to a Place

4

In “Installment Plans” (Page 38), four bestselling novelists discuss their successful series. In these interview outtakes, the group talks about using setting as a starting point. 4

Throw a Revision Party

Intrigued by the methods in “Revising Out Loud” (Page 8)? Learn more variations on the technique to try.

PLUS:

Let the WD blogs help you start the new writing year right 7 BITE-SIZED TIPS FOR A BETTER

WRITE A PERSUASIVE NARRATOR

BOOK BASH

Author John Mauk’s methods for writ-

Looking to plan a book launch with real

ing a convincing character borrow from

sizzle? 101 Things to Do With Bacon

the rules of rhetoric. In this guest post,

author Eliza Cross offers 7 ways to turn

he details 3 goals for your protagonist

up the heat at your release party.

—and how to achieve them.

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5 ATTRIBUTES OF EVERY GREAT GHOSTWRITER

There’s a growing market for ghostwriters, but the job isn’t for everyone. For those considering taking up ghosting, experienced freelancer Kelly James-Enger has a list of things you should know and do before you begin. tinyurl.com/n5hou4j


DIALOGUE, WINE AND BLOG PHOTO © FOTOLIA.COM; DORK DIARIES ILLUSTRATION; NIKKI RUSSELL

To find all of the above online companions to this issue in one handy spot, visit writersdigest.com/jan-15.

E DI T OR’ SLE TTE R JANUARY 2015 VOLUME 95 | NO. 1 EDITOR Jessica Strawser MANAGING EDITOR Adrienne Crezo GRAPHIC DESIGNER Alyson Boltz ASSOCIATE EDITOR Tiffany Luckey CONTRIBUTING EDITORS John Dufresne, Linda Formichelli, Jane Friedman, Steven James, Jerry B. Jenkins, Barbara Poelle, Elizabeth Sims, Art Spikol, Kara Gebhart Uhl

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When Something Clicks Light-bulb moments. Aha moments. Flashes of recognition. Revelations. Call them whatever you like. I like to think of them as clicks. In the writing life, the best kind of click is that moment something makes you realize exactly what’s been missing from the notquite-right scene you’ve been working on. Or the instant you put two plot points together and suddenly have a clear view of what’s really beneath your character’s behavior. Or the random tip on plot structure that magically conjures for you a map of how everything in your messy draft might fit together after all. Clicks. They’re satisfying, exciting, inspiring, invigorating. And they’re the stuff writers live for. We’ve done our best to fill this issue devoted to all things novel writing with the types of craft advice and writing techniques that help things click into place. Because whether your own moments of realization are quiet head nods or loud exclamations of triumph, as subtle as the click of a key in a lock or dramatic as a stack of papers launched into the air, we know it’s the bits of advice that resonate that can make all the difference for your novel-in-progress. First, award-winning novelist David Corbett shares what made his own characterizations finally click on the page—and how you can paint more effective pictures of the players in your own stories, too (Page 21). Then, longtime contributor Elizabeth Sims details techniques for mastering one of the most notoriously difficult elements of fiction: dialogue (Page 26). Bestselling novelist Steven James shows you precisely how to manage the flow of tension and conflict in your story—through multiple plot points, climaxes, subplots and more (Page 30). Therapist-turned-writer Tracey Barnes Priestley delves into the real reasons “Why So Many Writers Give Up Mid-Novel—and How Not to Be One of Them” (Page 34). And four bestselling series writers take you behind the scenes with their iconic characters to show you what it is that gives a novel that special something that makes readers want another installment, and another, and another (Page 38). We all know that writing a novel isn’t easy. But in those moments that something clicks, suddenly anything seems possible. Here’s to many ahas on the pages—and in the new year—ahead.

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F+W MEDIA INC. CHAIRMAN & CEO David Nussbaum CHIEF OPERATIONS OFFICER/ CHIEF FINANCIAL OFFICER James Ogle

STEVEN JAMES (“Tension & Release,” Page 30)

is the bestselling author of 11 novels, including the award-winning Patrick Bowers and Jevin Banks series. He holds a master’s degree in storytelling and has taught storytelling principles at conferences around the world. A contributing editor of WD, James’ latest work is the nonfiction book Story Trumps Structure: How to Write Unforgettable Fiction by Breaking the Rules (WD Books).

PRESIDENT David Blansfield GROUP PUBLISHER Gary Lynch CHIEF DIGITAL OFFICER Chad Phelps VICE PRESIDENT, E-COMMERCE Lucas Hilbert SENIOR VICE PRESIDENT, OPERATIONS Phil Graham VICE PRESIDENT, COMMUNICATIONS Stacie Berger

MARK PETERS (“A Few Minutes a Day,” Page 14)

is a freelance writer, writing teacher and humorist. He writes regularly for Visual Thesaurus, Salon and McSweeney’s (in the Best Joke Ever column). His own comedy has included writing and producing several sketch comedy shows in Chicago. He is also the brain behind the humorous Twitter accounts @wordlust and @CNNyourmom. Peters has written for All About Beer, Esquire, Psychology Today and Slate.

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Contributing Editor ELIZABETH SIMS (“How to Craft Flawless Dialogue,” Page 26) credits her motley life experience—reporter, tech writer, street busker, bookseller, corporate executive, ranch hand, symphonic percussionist, mystery novelist—with enabling her to relate to aspiring authors from all walks of life. Her instructional title You’ve Got a Book in You (WD Books) is in its fourth printing. Visit her at elizabethsims.com.

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JOE STOLLENWERK (“Revising Out Loud,”

Page 8), formerly the Education Services Manager for Writer’s Digest University, is a Ph.D. candidate in theatre and drama at Indiana University. He is the author of Today in History: Musicals. His plays include Catalina and an adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. He has presented papers related to his dissertation on women writing musical theatre at the Mid-America Theatre Conference, Comparative Drama Conference, and elsewhere.


JAMES PHOTO © EMILY HAND; SIMS PHOTO © THOMAS BENDER

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READERMAIL

“WD consistently provides the encouragement I need ... precisely when I need it.”

BEST OF THE BEST

I’ve been a subscriber of WD for years and always enjoy reading it. But your October 2014 issue—which contained several practical articles on book proposals, ways to faster book deals, steps for pitching in person, secrets to selling nonfiction books and a list of 28 agents seeking new writers—was the best so far. Even as a published writer, I found them informative and educational. We need more splendid resources for writers that provide step-by-step methods. Keep up the good work. Mansoor Ladha

Calgary, AB, Canada

NEVER TOO LATE

“The Late Novel” article by Boze Hadleigh (October) was a source of great encouragement to me. I’ve written and sold many magazine articles. Finishing my novel-length projects, however, remains a goal.

Sometimes I feel like I’m living the writer’s version of Mr. Holland’s Opus. The novels whirl around in my mind and I’ve become good friends with their protagonists. Life keeps getting in the way of letting them finish their stories, but now I can see the retirement finish line on the horizon. Perhaps it isn’t too late after all to release these characters who have been languishing in my laptop files for several years now. Thank you for this encouragement. Kathy Haueisen

Houston I’ve been writing for the last 20 years, but as a technical writer in government and industry. I recently completed my first novel, Climb Up the Steel Mountain, a medical roman à clef published in November. Oh, and I guess I forgot to mention: I’m about to turn 81 years old. So, it is never too late. Thanks for the article “The Late Novel.”

stop. I’ll keep reading and writing if you keep providing relevant articles. You’re a workshop in my mailbox.

can happen, and nobody tells you that.” But WD does, and you tell me precisely when I need it. So, thanks!

Barbara Clarke

Cully Perlman

Bainbridge Island, Wash.

Mableton, Ga. BETWEEN THE LINES

MASTER CLASS

Thank you so much for “Write Like a Master: What We Can Learn From Jane Eyre” (October). It was a great way to show writers how to learn from classics. Having the actual text and also how to decipher it was a wonderful way to show different techniques that all writers should know. Heather Robinson

Lakewood, Colo.

WORDS TO WRITE BY

Every issue of WD keeps me afloat. I’ve been writing since age 16, but these days I am married, have a daughter and another child on the way, work a demanding full-time job, and have other responsiLen Steiner bilities that make sitting Madison, Ala. down to work on my novels nearly impossible. But I Thanks so much for addo it. WD consistently prodressing my tribe, the late vides the encouragement bloomers, in “The Late I need. As Lisa Scottoline Novel.” Nothing like seeing said in the October issue, “it’s not too late” to keep us “You have to believe that writing—not that we could [getting published] actually

I’d like to thank WD for making the publication of my new YA novel, Honey Girl, possible. In 2012, I attended the Pitch Slam of the WD West Conference in Los Angeles, specifically to meet Thao Le from the Sandra Dijkstra Agency. I was her first pitch of the afternoon. Before my four minutes were up, Le agreed to read more of my novel. When I turned to leave, I saw a thick line of people behind me, an entire room full of other hopeful writers. Although I had a professional writing career before the conference, this event led to a new success. Le sold my novel to Sky Pony Press, as mentioned in “Find Your Agent Match” in the October 2014 issue. If you ever come across Honey Girl, think of me— one of your most indebted readers—and the opportunities your magazine affords to those who read between the lines. Lisa Freeman

Santa Monica, Calif.

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Revising Out Loud Not sure if your work-in-progress is, well, working? Gather some friends, food and manuscripts and have a read-aloud. Here’s how to get the party started. BY JOE STOLLENWERK


revision approach, as does poetry. Revising out loud is a great way to: • BREAK AWAY FROM THE SOLITARY

When you’ve been immersed in a project, it’s nice to have a writing-related excuse to spend time with friends. • GET PERSPECTIVE. Lines of dialogue, jokes or entire scenes that seem crystal clear in your mind might not come across that way to others. Now’s your chance to find out exactly where you need to clarify, change or cut. • IDENTIFY PACING PROBLEMS. In reading your own work, your eye and mind can travel at whatever pace you want. Hearing work aloud allows you to experience it as a first-time reader. WORLD OF YOUR WRITING.

You’ll find that some scenes that seemed properly paced on the page lag too slowly or gloss too quickly over important information. • CORRECT ERRORS. Reading aloud to yourself is a good proofreading method, as it forces you to read what you actually wrote—not what you meant to write. The group process is even better because you have outsiders doing a “cold read.” • RECHARGE. Sometimes I come to these readings feeling tapped out or painted into a corner. Hearing the work aloud and the reactions from the room never fails to get me back to writing. If you’re reticent to share a draft that you know still needs some work,

PHOTO © ISTOCK.COM

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riting can be a lonely, solitary endeavor. And from time to time, we all get stuck, unsure of how to improve upon what we’ve written or stay passionate about what we’ve started. I combat these writing demons by inviting friends over to read my drafts aloud with me. I arrived at this interactive revision method by combining my experience as a creative writer, editor, writing instructor and theater director—and it’s become an invaluable part of my process. While you can do this at any stage of writing, it’s most helpful when you’ve already completed a draft and done some revising. If it’s too early in the process or if you consider the work finished, you won’t get as much out of the reading and conversation that follow. Reading aloud can benefit writers of any genre. Having adapted the work of Margaret Atwood and Dorothy Parker for the stage, I’ve found that any prose piece that uses language in interesting ways is beneficial for the writer to hear aloud. Works of fiction or nonfiction that are dialogue-driven or have a lot of action lend themselves well to this

don’t be. These are your friends, not teachers armed with red pens. They’ll be excited to hear what you’re working on and will enjoy playing a role (literally!) in your writing process. All writers need to find a way to overcome the discomfort of sharing their work and taking criticism; this is a great way to start. You’re in control— you decide who comes, what gets read, etc. And while you might end the evening thinking exclusively about how your writing was received, your friends are more likely to head home remembering the delicious cookies you provided and the uniqueness of the evening. The writing is just one part of that. GETTING READY TO READ

Know what you hope to accomplish with the group. If your work is too long to read in one sitting, choose passages that you feel need the most revision, favoring those with narrative arcs so that your reader-friends have something to hold onto, story-wise. Also consider what will have the most impact when read aloud. Dialogueheavy chapters might seem like a given, but comic bits, figurative language, alliteration, rhyme and rhythm can all come to light in this arena. If you’re skipping over key parts of, say, a full-length novel or memoir, plan to being the evening with a brief summary of what you’ve omitted to provide context for the reading. Invite as many people as you can comfortably fit in your living room. You don’t want people packed in like sardines, but you also don’t want so few people that your shyer friends feel too much pressure. Offer food and drink. Short of cutting them a check, this is the best

way to repay your friends for their time and energy. I love hosting wine and cheese readings; just be sure to keep your own head clear throughout the night. Print copies of your work for everyone ahead of time. With a script, you’ll want to divide up the roles and designate someone to read the key stage directions. With fiction or nonfiction, you have two options: 1) Having different people read for different characters, which can be a truly dynamic way to hear your work. 2) Having friends take turns reading a page each, which for certain types of stories can be easier (not to mention less confusing)— and just as helpful. Don’t feel the need to cast your characters by type. It can be more instructive to hear a character read by someone of a different sex, age or sensibility. You also can have multiple people take turns reading a lead character to get a very literal idea of how different readers might interpret that character’s voice. STAGING THE READING

Read first; discuss later. Establish an energetic pace. Don’t be a director. Your friends may not all be the best readers in the world, but they’re doing you a favor, so don’t overburden them with instructions. Your job is to sit back, listen and take notes. Try not to participate in the reading—if you do, keep it minimal. You want to have time not only to listen to each person reading, but to take in the real-time responses from your audience. Where do they start to look bored or restless? Where are they attentive and engaged? What jokes get good

TURN UP THE MUSIC Find more revision party ideas at writersdigest.com/jan-15.

responses—or not? Do people laugh when you didn’t intend them to? You might preface the reading by asking your readers questions that you want them to keep in mind as they read, but don’t load them down with too much to think about. Be careful not to color their perceptions by asking leading questions such as “I think this part might be offensive— do you agree?” or, “Tell me what you think about the symbolism of the dog.” Let the reflection come after they’ve heard it aloud. FOLLOWING THE READING

Come prepared with questions for the group. Think about what you want to get out of the reading and steer the conversation that way. Write down every suggestion. This shows your friends that you value all of their opinions, but aside from polite manners, it’s also good to have a record. You won’t use every suggestion you receive—some will probably even contradict one another—but you never know when one suggestion that seemed odd at the time might spark a tangential response in your brain. Remain neutral. Don’t defend, apologize or explain. Your job is to be a sponge—soak up ideas and process them later. Joe Stollenwerk is a Ph.D. candidate in theatre and drama at Indiana University. He is the author of Today in History: Musicals. His stage plays include Catalina and an adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale.

JOIN THE CONVERSATION: Revising your work-in-progress now? Log onto the discussion forum at writersdigest.com/forum to read

other writers’ techniques and methods for whipping a project into shape, and to share your own.


5-MINUTE MEMOIR Tales From the Writing Life

Getting the Words Right BY CANDY SCHULMAN

After countless revisions, I tweak and weed, searching for synonyms, dreaming up metaphors. Am I obsessive-compulsive? In love with my words? Oscar Wilde brought his journal on the train so he’d have something interesting to read. But I’m not the only writer who composes three drafts before finalizing a birthday card. My marriage has endured because I refrain from editing my husband’s birthday cards. I know when to edit and when not to. I’m not fun at parties. I am impatient with lawyers who say, “I could write a book—if I had the time.” “And I’d go to law school if I had the time,” I may someday have the courage to respond. In the meantime, I am entangled in the Command+P mode. How many drafts before my printer runs out of ink and I run out of energy? I fling words, blurt out, babble and turn sentences around. Until I get the words right. Candy Schulman’s work has appeared in publications including The New York Times, The Chicago Tribune, Parents, Travel & Leisure, Brain Child and several anthologies. She teaches writing at The New School in New York City.

CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS: Submit your own 600-word essay reflection on the writing life by emailing it to [email protected]

with “5-Minute Memoir” in the subject line.


RECYCLING AND CARDS PHOTO © ISTOCK.COM; CATS CRADLE PHOTO © FOTOLIA.COM

“W

riting is not just cut-and-paste,” I tell my students. Tweeters and Snapchatters stare back dubiously. They’ve written papers with Apple commands X, C and V. Writing is painstaking revision, I emphasize. Flaubert didn’t write Madame Bovary by moving paragraphs with the click of a mouse. Giggles ensue when I confess to revising emails before clicking Send. I share my personal revision process: I compose a paragraph. Maybe two. I’ll craft 1,000 words of an essay or article. Rubbish. I peruse the hard copy, scratching out editorial marks. I retype all five pages into a new document—not unlike the way the Bard rewrote dialogue with his quill pen. Repeat. Revise. Repeat. Erase. Retype. Revise. “A waste of paper!” the eco-friendly scribes doth protest. I remind them about recycling bins. Quote Peter de Vries: “I love being a writer. What I can’t stand is the paperwork.” Emphasize how fortunate we are because we can revise. Brain surgeons cannot. We have the luxury of making mistakes—and getting better for our errors. Nora Ephron used up to 400 sheets of paper per essay in this type-and-retyping process, claiming this method catapulted her from one section to the next, “sometimes on each retyping moving not even a sentence farther from the spot I had reached the last time through.” Cut and paste alone can never produce this type of polishing, allowing a writer to see repetitions, creating the seamless thread that connects an essay from beginning to end. “You can’t tell whether a sentence needs work until it rises up in revolt against your fingers as you retype it,” Ephron wrote. When John McPhee’s daughter worried that she couldn’t “get things right the first time” in a high school paper, he responded in The New Yorker: “The way to do a piece of writing is three or four times over, never once.” “In a nervous frenzy, I fling words as if flinging mud at a wall,” claims McPhee. “Blurt out, heave out, babble out something—anything—as a first draft.” Revising is the sculpting part of the creative process. Dorothy Parker liked having written far better than writing. For every five words Parker wrote, she changed seven. Hemingway rewrote the ending of A Farewell to Arms 39 times. When The Paris Review asked if he had technical problems or was stumped, he said he was “getting the words right.”

Grammar Booster: Special Prepositions Certain verbs, nouns and adjectives require special prepositions. Sometimes they are important simply because to use the wrong preposition is erroneous, but other times, the use of a different preposition can actually change the meaning of the word that precedes it. This handy guide will help you with the trickiest combinations.

Abhorrence for Absolve from Accord with Acquit of Adapted for (by nature) Adapted to (intentionally) Affinity between Agree to (a proposal) Agree with (a person or idea) Bestow upon Change for (a thing) Change with (a person) Comply with Confer on (means “give to”) Confer with (means “talk with”) Confide in (means “trust in”) Confide to (means “entrust to”) Conform to In conformity with Convenient for (a purpose) Convenient to (a person) Conversant with Correspond to (a thing) Correspond with (a person) Dependent on

Differ from (an opinion) Differ with (a person) Different from* Disappointed by, in or with (someone or something) Disappointed of (what we cannot have) Dissent from Exception from (a rule) Exception to (a statement) Glad at (a piece of news) Glad of (a possession) Independent of Involve in Martyr for (a cause) Martyr of (a disease) Need of or for Part from (a person) Part with (a thing) Profit by Reconcile to (a person) Reconcile with (a statement) Taste for (art) Taste of (food) Thirst for or after (knowledge)

*“Different” is a special case. “Different from” is always right and correct. “Different to,” often used in England, is always wrong. “Different than” is common in America and defended by some grammarians in special cases, such as “This book is different than I expected,” which eliminates the awkwardness of the otherwise correct sentence, “This book is different from that which I expected.” —Excerpted from Gwynne’s Grammar: The Ultimate Introduction to Grammar and The Writing of Good English © 2014 by N. M. Gwynne, with permission from Alfred A. Knopf.

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No matter what you write, a bit of poetic license can be a valuable asset to any writer’s arsenal. BY ROBERT LEE BREWER

P O ET IC F OR M: MADRI GA L

The madrigal originated as an Italian form, actually as a pastoral song. The Italian madrigal offers a lot of variability—so much variability that we’ll be focusing primarily on the English madrigal for this column. The English madrigal, developed by Geoffrey Chaucer, offers more defined rules, including refrains, preferred meter and structure. The English madrigal is comprised of three stanzas written in iambic pentameter: a tercet (or three-line stanza), quatrain (or four-line stanza) and sestet (or six-line stanza). The poem follows the rhyme scheme noted beside each line with A1, B1, and B2 acting as the refrains. This example is from Poetic Asides reader Bruce Niedt:

PO ETIC PR O M PT

“Senior Discount” Apparently I’ve reached a certain age

A B A1 B1

The movies, the museum and the stage

A B B A1 B1 B2

Nobody checks ID, they simply gauge

where I’m forgiven at least ten percent. (1) I wonder how and when my youth was spent.

The opening tercet sets the stage for the refrains that will be used in the second and third stanzas.

Tap into low points you’ve

all offer handsome discounts for this gent. (2) Apparently I’ve reached a certain age where I’m forgiven at least ten percent.

hit in life and write a poem

The A-B rhyme scheme of the madrigal often creates a musical effect.

me by my face and how my spine is bent.

where I’m forgiven at least ten percent. I wonder how and when my youth was spent.

that exposes those wounds. Whether your spouse left you, your dog ran away from home or you can’t find any matching socks,

Free coffee doesn’t ease my discontent. (3) Apparently I’ve reached a certain age

Write a blues poem.

While the structure and rhyme scheme are set, there are no restrictions on subject matter or tone.

How variable is the Italian madrigal? · Line length. The Italian madrigal can be written with lines of seven or 11 syllables. · Tercets. It can also be written with two or three tercets. · Couplets. The tercets are followed by one or two rhyming couplets. · Rhymes. Even the rhyme scheme varies.

we’ve all had our moments.

SHARE YOUR POETIC VOICE: If you’d like to see

your own poem in print in the pages of Writer’s Digest, check out the Poetic Asides blog (writersdigest.com/ editor-blogs/poetic-asides) to enter the most recent WD Poetic Form Challenge.

Robert Lee Brewer is a published poet, as well as the editor of Poetic Asides (blog.writersdigest.com/poeticasides), Poet’s Market and Writer’s Market.


ILLUSTRATION © TONY CAPURRO; PHOTO © ISTOCK.COM

A1 B1 B2

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“The pages are still blank, but there is a miraculous feeling of the words being there, written in invisible ink and clamoring to become visible.” —Vladimir Nabokov


A Few Minutes a Day These multi-format techniques, adapted from the methods of one of America’s most prolific playwrights, will help you sharpen your creativity— and kick your writing pace into high gear.

a fun house. Like Wilt Chamberlain scoring 100 points in an NBA game, Joe accomplishes feats that seem impossible. As you would imagine, it makes him a very inspiring teacher. I consider myself a pretty prolific writer, but sometimes I need a little help getting over the hump. To that end, I’ve developed a method I call the Mini-Joe: the act of devoting myself to smaller, more manageable versions of Joe’s ambitious acts of composition. For example, I might do Joe’s sketch-a-day method, but only for a week. I never seem to write as many humor pieces as I would like, so I sometimes do a Mini-Joe, shooting for 10 humor pieces over a month. There are hundreds of forms the Mini-Joe exercise can take. Here are a few to get you going. GET IN CHARACTER. Go to a busy coffee shop or bar. Look at the people around you. Pick one who looks intriguing. Write a short monologue for this person as you imagine him to be. Do this every day for a week, and you’ll have seven new characters, complete with personality quirks, physical descriptions, wants and needs. BREAK THE LAW (FICTITIOUSLY,

BY MARK PETERS

If you like writing crime or police stories, try a Mini-Joe crime spree. Go to a different location each day to write, taking in the specifics of the setting. Imagine how the place could be robbed. How might such a heist succeed or fail? Read up on real-life bandits to find details you could borrow or mix in. TEST NEW ANGLES. If you have a draft of something large, such as a novel or screenplay, select a manageable chunk and repeatedly rewrite it from a different angle. One day you might focus on a secondary character. Another day could be used to fine-tune the setting, or change

W

e’ve all frozen up when faced with a deadline. We each have a dream project we never quite get around to finishing (or even starting). Although we know writing more often would make us more prolific and polished, we all procrastinate. Well, maybe not all of us. When I was going through the writing program at Second City in Chicago, I met the writer’s equivalent of a superhero, complete with an alliterative name: Joe Janes, the patron saint of overcoming writer’s block.


Joe—a writer, performer, director and producer of comedy and other theater in Chicago—has made a name for himself as an extreme writer. He wrote 365 Plays, which collects every sketch he wrote over the course of a year—one a day. After that, he wrote 50 Plays; each was produced with a different director. He’s done Seven Deadly Plays, in which he wrote seven short plays over the course of a week, working each day from an unusual location that would not seem to be conducive to writing, such as a speedboat, a cemetery and

PHOTO © FOTOLIA.COM

OF COURSE).

GET up the themes, language choices or POV. The goal is to freshen up your work and expand your options by forcing yourself to reimagine your story in new ways.

Asides blog at writersdigest.com/ editor-blogs/poetic-asides.)

DIGITALLY!

WRITE DOWN AN IDEA A DAY.

What if you came up with just one idea a day? It wouldn’t take more

Take these ideas and adapt, alter, twist or subvert them. ... The only wrong way is to not write at all. EXPERIMENT WITH POETRY.

Because poems tend to be short, they are a natural fit for the Mini-Joe. When I was writing experimental poetry in graduate school, I was influenced by the work of John Cage and Jackson Mac Low, who loved using found materials and chance operations. A Mini-Joe along those lines could involve picking a different book every day to use as source material for a poem. To give the project shape, you could use the same technique on different sources. For example, you could do something like A Humament, in which Tom Phillips paints over pages of a Victorian novel, creating new poems from the words that are left. Or choose a technique from the Oulipo, Mac Low’s Collected Works or Charles Bernstein’s Experiments list (tinyurl.com/2m6ykv) to borrow or adapt. TEST YOUR TRADITIONAL

A Mini-Joe can work for more traditional poetry, as well. You could write a poem a day in a different location, voice or form— or vary your pen, notebook or font. You could meditate upon a different object each day, or a different person from your life—it could be interesting to pick people you’re no longer in touch with to explore what memories have stuck with you. (EDITOR’S NOTE: Find new prompts regularly on Robert Lee Brewer’s Poetic POETRY CHOPS.

than a few moments at a time, and after just a few weeks, you’d have a heck of a list. This challenge could be used by any type of writer: novelist, short story writer, freelance journalist, comic book writer, playwright, etc. Although you need not thoroughly develop the ideas up front, do take enough time to make each one specific enough to stick. For example, in your “sci-fi horror story,” who would the lead character be? What would be the setting and themes? MURDER YOUR DARLINGS. A Mini-Joe can also be a useful editing tool. If you work with manageable sections, say 10–20 pages per day, you could copy edit an entire novel in less than a month, or a short story in a day or two. MAKE IT SOCIAL. Why not make a Mini-Joe for tweets or posts? You could tweet five times a day for a month, or challenge yourself to respond to five tweets a day from others to broaden your network. Joe Janes provides the inspiration, but you can make whatever rules help you crank out the words. Take these ideas and adapt, alter, twist or subvert them. Come up with your own Mini-Joes. Remember: The only wrong way is to not write at all. Mark Peters is a freelance writer, writing teacher and humorist. He writes for Visual Thesaurus, Salon and McSweeney’s. His own humor can be found in the Twitter accounts @wordlust and @CNNyourmom.


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MEET THEAGENT BY KARA GEBHART UHL

Adriann Ranta WOLF LITERARY SERVICES

A

San Francisco native, Adriann Ranta is a third-generation agent: Her grandmother is literary agent Barbara Kouts, her great-

step-uncle founded Philip G. Spitzer Literary Agency, and her mother

was a book editor who also did some agenting. “I actually spent most of my childhood not understanding what all these book people did, but I benefited from always being surrounded by books,” she says.

Annamarie Tendler, The Daily Face

Ranta landed her first publishing job at The Editorial Department,

Joe Nelms, Formerly Fingerman

a firm of freelance editors based in Tucson, Ariz. On New Year’s Eve 2007, she relocated to New York City and took a job assisting Kathleen Anderson at Anderson Literary, then in 2009 joined Wolf Literary, where she’s now senior agent and vice president.

REPRESENTS

Lee Kelly, City of Savages

Find her complete submission guidelines online at wolflit.com and connect with her on Twitter at @AdriannRanta.

SEEKING • Modern feminism

“The ‘Cookbook Pitch’: A sprinkle of romance, a dash of intrigue …”

• “Voice-y” fiction • Refreshing nonfiction • All stripes of young adult • “Soulful” middle-grade

QUERY PET PEEVES “Obvious form letters.”

PITCH TIPS Quote: “Sleep is good. Books are better.” —George R.R. Martin

“Know what your book is and what makes it unique— don’t pitch the synopsis.” “Recognize the parts of your pitch that get people excited and cobble those parts together. Practice and adapt.” “Make it fun and exciting to talk about your book—relax!”

ROLE MODELS “I try to check myself against the other book agents in my family, Barbara Kouts and Philip Spitzer, who are always generous and kind with their advice and time regardless of their massive success. I’m endlessly inspired by them.”

DREAM PROJECT & CLIENT “My dream project would be some clever literary fiction filtered through [the website for women] The Hairpin. My dream client is one whose writing blows my mind wide open, but who is still humble enough to listen to suggestions.”

Drink: Coffee with 2 percent milk

MOST PROUD OF “I’m proud of everything my authors do, but when Stephenie Meyer announced [in 2013] that she was optioning my client Kendare Blake’s Anna Dressed in Blood at the Sundance Film Festival, I’ve never pride-cried so hard in my life. I was at the hair salon.”

Place: Dionis Beach, Nantucket, Mass. FAVORITE

Living author: Caitlin Moran

Website: Jezebel.com

Poem: Dead author: “September 1, 1939” Norman Maclean by W.H. Auden

Kara Gebhart Uhl (pleiadesbee.com) writes and edits from Fort Thomas, Ky.


ADRIANN RANTA © JOHN ZURHELLEN; COOKING UTENSILS © FOTOLIA.COM; DIONIS BEACH PHOTO © FLICKR.COM/INDABELLE

“Pitches that try to sell a book’s theme or moral purpose before the story.”

BREAKINGIN Debut authors: How they did it, what they learned, and why you can do it, too.

BY CHUCK SAMBUCHINO

Brooke Davis Lost & Found Dutton Adult, January) “A 7-year-

old girl named Millie is abandoned by her mother, so two octogenarian friends follow Millie on a road trip across the Australian desert to help find her mom.”

Perth, Australia. I had some short stories and nonfiction pieces published in Australia, but this is my first novel. I did attempt a novel when I was 10. It was basically just a rip-off of The Baby-Sitters Club, and luckily— because it was abominable!—I gave up about 20 pages in. TIME FRAME: I wrote it over five years as part of a Ph.D. in Creative Writing at Curtin University in Western Australia. ENTER THE PUBLISHER: I work as a bookseller in Australia, and the account managers from the publishers were always asking me about the book I was writing. When I finished, one of them read it, and liked it, and took it to the head office of Hachette Australia. They ended up publishing my book. So being involved in the industry was really helpful for me. ENTER THE AGENT: I was put in touch WRITES FROM: PRE-LOST:


with my Australian agent—Benython Oldfield from Zeitgeist Media Group Agency—through a friend in Australia. I sent Benython a copy of my manuscript the day after I’d been made an offer from [Hachette]. ADVICE FOR WRITERS: Work hard, be patient and become part of a writing community. Get involved in the industry in some capacity—even as a volunteer—to gain a better understanding of how it all works. WEBSITE: milliebird.com. NEXT UP: As soon as I get some time, I’ll start writing the second book! I’ll never have a first book out again, so, for now, I’m just enjoying the feeling of completing that goal.

Jessica Lidh The Number 7 (young adult, Merit Press, December 2014) “When 16-year-old Louisa receives a haunting phone call that unearths a buried family secret, she has to choose between revealing the truth or keeping it hidden forever.”

WRITES FROM: Rockville, Md. PRE-7: I was working as a part-time manager of a Swedish antique shop while applying to graduate programs. Now I’m a high school English teacher with an M.Ed., a book I’m proud of and a house full of Swedish antiques. TIME FRAME: For 10 months, I wrote in the mornings before work. While at work, I also took advantage of Swedish customers who wandered in. I sat the older ones down and asked them to tell me what they remembered about Sweden in the ’40s. ENTER THE AGENT: I found Dee Mura Literary in the Guide to Literary Agents [WD Books]. Kimiko Nakamura is my agent. I was so lucky to find her. The GLA was the best $30 investment I ever made. WHAT I LEARNED: I now approach books I’m reading as case studies. What’s working? What’s not? How can I learn from other people’s stories and techniques? PLATFORM: I have a website with a blog, a Twitter account, a Facebook author page and a Goodreads author account. WEBSITE: jessicalidh.com. NEXT UP: I’m halfway through writing my second YA novel.

BROOKE DAVIS PHOTO © AILSA BOWYER

(literary fiction,

Angelina Mirabella The Sweetheart (historical fiction, Simon & Schuster, January) “17-year-old Leonie

Putzkammer leaves her home to train at Joe Pospisil’s School for Lady Grappling in the Florida panhandle and begins a brief but life-altering career as a professional wrestler.”

Ithaca, N.Y. PREI completed a master’s degree in English with an emphasis on creative writing at Florida State and wrote a short-story collection for my thesis. I published three of the stories in literary journals before beginning work on The WRITES FROM:

SWEETHEART:

Sweetheart. TIME FRAME: I started the novel in the spring of 2006 and sold it in 2012. ENTER THE AGENT: In 2007, I attended the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, where I had the good fortune to be in a workshop that was led by a writer I have long admired, Tony Earley, who liked [my novel] well enough to share it with Regal Literary founder Joe Regal. Thankfully, Joe liked it, too. My agent is Markus Hoffmann at Regal. WHAT I LEARNED: I learned to be patient and listen to my doubts. Relatedly, one of the nicest surprises was how much help I got from my agent and my editor in the revision process. Luckily for me, I found people who saw the book’s potential and were willing to help me make it better.

MAKE YOUR TIME WORK Find tips for making more hours to write at writersdigest.com/editorblogs/guide-to-literary-agents.

Have one person in your life who can read and care about your work while you are working in the dark. It is hard to put one foot in front of the other unless there is at least one person who is cheering you on. WEBSITE: facebook. com/angelina.mirabella.3. NEXT UP: I plan to spend the year working on a new novel. Fingers crossed. WD ADVICE FOR WRITERS:

Chuck Sambuchino is the editor of Guide to Literary Agents and Children’s Writer’s & Illustrator’s Market. His WD Books include Create Your Writer Platform, and his latest, Get an Agent.

Become a Screenwriter in just one year. Your creativity and command of storytelling can make your script the cornerstone of the project. Make sure you know your craft: • • • •

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Characters, Scene by Scene Ȅ ǤǯȋȌ ϐǤ BY DAVID CORBETT


2015

I

n The Art of Dramatic Writing, Lajo Egri encourages writers to craft detailed biographies of their characters focusing on three principle areas: physical, psychological and sociological. I obediently employed this method for my first two novels, only to find it lacking. Inevitably, I’d end up with a static laundry list of information that helped me describe the characters but offered little guidance in dramatizing how they might behave. Ultimately I discovered the truth to what many writers had told me (but I hadn’t quite believed)—that once the writing started, the characters took on “lives of their own,” taking me in directions I hadn’t anticipated. Now that’s all well and good as long as the characters take you somewhere interesting. But even interesting characters can’t rescue a meandering narrative (the proverbial “Beginning, Muddle and an End” that Philip Larkin famously bemoaned). So: How to get in all the critical information the “laundry list” biographical method attempts to accumulate (and dismiss with the irrelevant information it obliges), and also gain the living, breathing vividness of characters with minds of their own? The key, I discovered, is scene.

How Action Reveals Character The fact that scenes can open up a character in a unique and powerful way exposes a simple, fundamental truth: Characters reveal themselves more vividly in what they do and say than in what they think and feel. Words and actions involve choice. They show the character making decisions and dealing with the consequences in an immediate way, revealing values (the preference for one option over another) and character (the resilience to see a choice through). Scenes test character. And we reveal ourselves most unequivocally when we’re tested. It often matters little how we feel or what we think—thoughts and feelings can be changed, replaced by other thoughts and feelings. Our actions, on the other hand, occur in the world, and cannot be taken back. Our inner lives matter in exact proportion to how much they motivate what we do.

What to Explore, What to Ignore What I’m about to discuss is most critical when creating your protagonist, though it also can be valuable when developing your opponent (so that you make sure the conflict between these two main characters is meaningful and


interesting, not just a clash of wills or personalities) and key secondary characters (those who have a profound emotional impact on the main characters). Just don’t get bogged down in creating backstory for characters who don’t really need it; that’s nothing but an industrious form of writer’s block. To the greatest extent possible, focus on envisioning scenes that serve a purpose in your story-in-progress, or that reflect meaningfully on the character. That said, dreaming up emotionally revealing scenes that you may ultimately discard is no waste of time; it’s an inevitable part of the writing process. Whether or not they have a place in your final story, it’s important to delve into key moments of real emotional impact—scenes of helplessness—that in some way changed the character’s life, her understanding of herself, her standing among others. There’s no need to craft these backstory/ biographical scenes into final form. Mere sketches will do, enough to give you a vivid impression of the character. Before you begin, try to have a basic understanding of your story, especially the three basic elements that will make it dramatic: f THE PROBLEM: What the main characters want, both consciously and unconsciously, and what stands in their way, both internally and externally. (Often, what stands in the way is each other. Their wants are irreconcilable.) f THE INSIGHT: The crucial revelation the character gains about himself and/or his world in his struggle (and failure) to solve the Problem. (This is most true, and often only true, of the protagonist.) f THE DECISION : The life-changing choice prompted by the Insight, allowing the character one last chance to solve the Problem. (Again, this is primarily applicable to the protagonist, though it sometimes can be interesting for the opponent to make a similar, opposite choice.) Once you have a decent understanding of those elements of your story, you’ll have a ballpark idea of what biographical information from a character’s past is most valuable to pursue. You’ll also have a reasonably good idea of what secondary characters need to be in the story, what roles they’ll play and how deeply you need to understand them. For example, if the character’s Problem involves falling in love, then issues of commitment and self-worth will often be part of her Problem. So you’ll want to explore past moments of pride and success as well as shame and

rejection to flesh out how she’s come to feel the way she does about herself, and how she behaves toward people she’s attracted to. Her Insight will require understanding how these past incidents have shaped and limited her. Her Decision will involve a determination to somehow overcome them. If the character’s Problem instead involves facing some terrifying ordeal, such as combat or tracking down a killer, you’ll want to explore past moments of panic and courage, and key interactions with figures such as parents, teachers, coaches, siblings, teammates—moments in which the character’s notions of strength, loyalty and worth were defined, shaping how he would grow to respond to challenge, danger and authority. Again, it may turn out you explore areas of the past that never appear in the final text. But through seeing the character in these life-defining moments, she becomes palpably more real to you. And that translates into a fuller, more engaging portrayal on the page.

It often matters little how we feel or what we think—thoughts and feelings can be changed, replaced by other thoughts and feelings. Our actions, on the other hand, occur in the world, and cannot be taken back.

How to Add Dimension Using Drama As noted earlier, the three main areas of characterization that most writing instruction focuses on are: f Physical (sex, race, age, attractiveness, health) f Psychological (love, hate, fear, pride, shame, guilt, success, failure) f Sociological (class, education, work, family, friends, home) These remain our key areas of concern, but instead of just accumulating information, ask: How does my character’s physical, psychological and sociological makeup affect his interactions with others? This forces you to picture the character in scenes, in which this or that element of his personality or past affects how he interacts with the other

characters in the story. You do not have to explore all or even most of the following areas for any particular character. Rather, pick two or five or 10 areas you find particularly interesting or productive, or which speak to the needs of the particular character given the Problem, Insight and Decision at hand. If you need more, the story will let you know.

Conflict engenders fear, because something is at stake, and the prospect of losing is always there. What moment of profound terror or dread changed your character’s life, her confidence, her sense of safety and control?

The Character’s Physical Nature This goes beyond what your character looks like. The focus should be: f How does my character’s appearance make her feel? f How does it make others feel about her? f How do these feelings translate into behavior? Imagine a few crucial scenes where appearance had a decisive effect at a key moment in her life. RACE: The fact that your character is Caucasian or African American or Latino or Asian is meaningful primarily in the way it’s shaped how he understands and navigates the world. Don’t be general: Imagine one or more pivotal scenes in his life when his race played a critical factor in whether or not he got what he wanted. AGE: How does your character’s age affect how she engages with others? § Is she a partying 20-something? A buckle-down 30-something? A disillusioned 40-something? § Is she young but wise, having already suffered but survived some terrible loss? (What was it?) § Is she old and sheltered? (Who has protected her?) HEALTH: Just because your character appears in your mind’s eye as in the pink doesn’t mean he hasn’t at some point battled death. When in his life was he most ill? Who, if anyone, took care of him? How has this affected his understanding of his physical vulnerability? Considering


2015

that scenario alone can often open up a character in a fascinating way. ATTIRE: It’s not just how the character dresses that’s important, it’s important to know how she prepares herself to be seen by others: § Who does she most want to impress—or hide from— with how she dresses? Her friends? A lover? A rival? § How much time does she spend getting dressed? Imagine it. Watch her. Allow it to unfold. SEXUAL ATTRACTIVENESS: Our sex lives define us in perhaps the most intimate—and thus vulnerable—ways. Imagine: § A time when the most beautiful woman in the room found him attractive. § A date when someone felt disgusted or turned off by the way he looked—and the moment when this became painfully clear. How deep and long-lasting is that wound?

It’s important to delve into key moments of real emotional impact— scenes of helplessness—that in some way changed the character’s life, her understanding of herself, her standing among others.

The Character’s Psychological Nature Areas to explore: FEAR: Conflict engenders fear, because something is at stake, and the prospect of losing is always there. What moment of profound terror or dread changed your character’s life, her confidence, her sense of safety and control? COURAGE: Your story may well concern how your character learns to master or control a debilitating fear. What moment of courage provided your character with confidence that he could take care of himself if facing danger? LOVE: Who and what your character loves defines what is most valuable to her, and what she feels most compelled to defend. § Who does your character love? Is he in her life? If not, what happened (scene!)?


§ When did she first realize what it means to love and be loved? HATE: Even good people have hatred in their hearts. Imagine a scene where your character gave in to an overwhelming feeling of hatred for someone else. SHAME: Humiliation is invaluable for characterization because it involves status among others. When was your character most ashamed? What did he do, and who else was present? What form did the humiliation take? Disgust, abandonment, pity, ridicule? GUILT: Something morally wrong—an act of cruelty, a theft, a murder, a lie—inspires guilt. What’s the worst thing your character has ever done? Who was hurt by it? FORGIVENESS: Mercy is a rare state of grace, given the human heart’s propensity for clinging to grievances. § Was your character ever forgiven for the worst thing she did? § Has she ever forgiven someone else? For what? FAILURE: How your character responds to failure is a cornerstone of who he is. § The job he lost, the marriage that fell apart, the friend he couldn’t save: Has he bounced back? Become wiser? Or has he let that failure define him, limit him, embitter him? § When else did your character fail terribly? How profoundly did it affect his confidence? SUCCESS/PRIDE: You need to know when your character has set out to do something and achieved it, and felt that swell of pride in her own heart. Looking back on her life, what would she consider her greatest triumph? Was she allowed to enjoy it? FOOD: It may seem curious to include food as an aspect of a character’s psychology, but it’s often a stand-in for gratifications the character can’t find elsewhere. Food is solace and ritual. Its preparation is almost as enjoyable as the eating. It conjures two of the senses hardest to get right on the page: smell and taste. Food mitigates hardship and rewards patience. It’s generosity. It’s love. If you’re having difficulty picturing your character, sit her down at a table and serve her what she’s hungry for, or show her dishing it up for someone else. DEATH: Every hero must suffer a fundamental confrontation with mortality for his story to be meaningful. The death may be metaphorical: the destruction of one’s reputation, the loss of one’s family or livelihood. Or it may be secondhand: the demise of a cherished love, a devoted friend, a trusted comrade. But the experience must be life-changing. Picture your character’s first experience

with death, his most disturbing experience with death, his most shattering loss other than death. How did each change forever his understanding of life?

The Character’s Sociological Nature Where psychology tracks with the character’s inner life, sociology defines how he navigates the outer world. FAMILY: This is the crucible in which much of psychological life is forged. Many of one’s fears, wants, humiliations, etc., trace back to some episode with a family member. (This means some of the scenes that help you flesh out your character’s family background will almost certainly “double up” as scenes that help flesh out her psychological nature.) § Picture a crucial scene between your character and her father that shaped her view of authority, responsibility, integrity. Or pick a scene when she learned once and for all if her father respected her, or when she discovered she was stronger or smarter than the old man. § Imagine a scene when your character needed comfort, support or understanding from his mother—did he get it? Why or why not? § Did your character’s grandparents actively engage with her, perhaps offering wisdom? Did they poison the atmosphere by finding blame with one or both of the parents? Again, think in scenes. § Which brother(s) and/or sister(s) did the character see as an ally, an enemy or competitor—for a parent’s love, or respect at school or in the neighborhood? Picture the moment that sealed the alliance or antagonism. FRIENDS: Friendship is chosen freely, sustained only through mutual consent, and unadulterated by family obligation or sexual desire. Who is your character’s closest friend? When was the friendship most severely tested? Did it survive? How? Why? CLASS: How does your character interact with people of lower or higher social/economic standing? Is she comfortable? Resentful? Is she invited in or kept out? WORK: What was your character’s best day on the job? Worst day? What happened at work recently—today—that tested his resolve to stay? What was the most life-changing interaction with a superior or a subordinate or a customer? RELIGION/SPIRITUALITY: Whether your character is a believer or not, you need to know what forces shape her conscience and her sense of purpose in life. § What values inform the way of life she hopes to live, the kind of person she hopes to be?

§ What sins does she regularly commit? § What sin has she never committed but might if the circumstances were right? § What sin would she never commit? EDUCATION/INTELLIGENCE: Your character has to interact with people he considers his intellectual peers, his betters, his inferiors. § How does his education level affect the people he talks to at work, the TV shows he likes, the jokes he tells? § Did he have a teacher who made a difference in his life? Imagine the moment(s) when that occurred. HOME: Where does your character feel she belongs? Picture a crucial scene that conjures for your character the sense of belonging she identifies with home. Does she live there? If home is elsewhere, does she long to go back? Or has something happened—a scandal, a tragedy, a loss—that bars her return forever? “TRIBE”: Consider the group of individuals—the “tribe”— with whom your character identifies: his office mates, congregation, fellow volunteers, neighbors. Who is his closest ally in the tribe? His staunchest enemy? Imagine a scene that tests his allegiance, or where he betrays, defies or even leaves the tribe. In conclusion, compare this: Avery McNaughton is 22 years old, 5-foot-6, smart and a little overweight, with chestnut hair and green eyes. She was born in Boston but now lives in Houston, working as a lawyer. She dresses sensibly, lives in a two-bedroom apartment overlooking the ship channel, seldom socializes and reads voraciously.

with this: Avery McNaughton almost died from pneumonia when she was 6 after an ice-skating accident. Her older brother Mark read to her when she was bedridden. That’s when her love of literature began. Mark died in a car accident at age 22, and Avery’s terror at “falling through the ice” returned. She’s never felt safe in the world since. She moved from Boston to Houston to escape her memories—and winter. She has no friends, wants none and dresses as though trying to be invisible.

Which one gives you a better start on a story? WD David Corbett is the award-winning author of five novels, the story collection Killing Yourself to Survive and the nonfiction work, The Art of Character. Find him online at davidcorbett.com.


2015

How to Craft Flawless Dialogue Ȅ ϐǡ Ǥ͹ ǯǤ

A

mong the many folktales I absorbed in my spongelike childhood, a particularly disturbing one stands out. A morality fable called “Toads and Diamonds,” it concerned a nasty widow who lived in a backwoods hut with her two daughters—one good, one awful just like her mother. The mother favored the one like her, and forced the sweet one to haul water every day from a faraway spring. One day while the girl was drawing water, a bent old crone appeared and asked for a drink. The girl kindly gave it, whereupon the crone revealed herself to be a magical pixie who bestowed a charm: Whenever the good sister spoke, flowers and precious gems would fall from her lips. The girl ran home to share the news, spewing beauty with every word. The greedy mother wanted the same gift for her other daughter, and nagged her to hike to the spring to offer a drink to the old hag.


When the awful daughter got there, a beautiful lady dressed in finery happened by. She asked for water and the girl answered rudely, observing that the lady could easily help herself. Whereupon the shape-shifting pixie leveled a curse that caused snakes and toads to fall from the nasty one’s mouth when she spoke. I’ve never heard any story that more literally captures the essential nature of dialogue. Everybody uses terms such as “a gem of an expression” and “pearls of wisdom.” Book reviewers frequently praise “sparkling” or “crystal clear” dialogue. We all intuitively know that great character conversations, like fine gems, are spare, transparent and polished. And while they reflect light and truth, they also have hidden depths. Good writers know that dialogue should always serve more than one purpose. It can help establish and develop


BY ELIZABETH SIMS

virtually every other essential element of fine fiction, including plot, theme, style, mood, your voice as an author, your characters’ voices, backstory, setting (both place/ region and time period), pace, tension, conflict and subtext. Great writers dig even deeper, mining for opportunities to use dialogue to advance the story specifics of their genre. Instead of info-dumping via a narrator, use speech to: f Drop clues, plant red herrings, raise questions (mystery/thriller) f Explain the realities of the world you’re building (sci-fi/fantasy/paranormal) f Gain trust, betray it, create poetry (romance) f Explore philosophical questions (literary) f Give warnings and ignore them (horror) f Establish the limits of law and lawlessness (Western). Let’s see how to create and serve up your own box of jewels (while keeping the toads at bay).

1.

Begin, of course, by mining for gems.

One way to get good at writing dialogue is to make a point of noticing real dialogue. (Keep a notebook or smartphone app handy to capture memorable snippets.) Think back to an argument or intense discussion you had in the recent past. Write it out as best you remember. I’m thinking about the guy I confronted at the carwash for deliberately cutting ahead of me in line. As we watched our cars go through, we had this exchange: Me (with a smile): You know you cut in front of me, don’t you? He (after pause of incredulity): I don’t know what you’re talking about! Me (nicely, quietly): Well, I was over there, waiting for Jerry to signal— He (louder): I don’t know what you’re talking about! Me: Well, see— He: I didn’t come here to be ACCOSTED! I didn’t come here to be ACCOSTED!

There’s no way I would have come up with that line; it sounds real because it was real—and well worth capturing. By the way, all caps (used sparingly) can signify volume; italics (ditto) can signify emphasis.

Another way to get some terrific dialogue literally under your fingers is to copy a passage from a great novel or play. Just head to your bookshelf, grab a book you love, find a scene of dialogue, and write or type it word for word, punctuation mark by punctuation mark. I guarantee you’ll learn at least one key thing to apply to your own work.

2.

Know that for dialogue to dazzle, your characters must wear it well.

The basic protocol for dazzling dialogue development starts with getting your cast together. Determine the minimum number of characters you need for the scene at hand. Then: f See it. Taking time to first visualize the scene in your mind’s eye will make the writing go more smoothly. f Hear them talk. f Give them all the words they need. f Edit later. A simple, effective way to characterize through dialogue is to individuate your players with vocal markers. Such distinctive markers are shamefully easy to cook up and drop into dialogue. Dashiell Hammett made the character of Casper Gutman in The Maltese Falcon memorable by endowing the cold, calculating fellow with elaborately mannered speech: “Oh come, come, my boy …”. You can invent endless possibilities for this kind of thing: f An insecure character might end sentences with “… I think,” or begin them with, “Well, lemme see …” f A character who has served in the military might call men “sir” and women “ma’am.” f Current or period slang can also individuate well: “That kills me.” “Check those gams.” “Yeah, he gave his full drunkalogue at the first meeting.”

Dialogue is not only a vehicle for adding life to your characters, but also for revealing who they really are. Let your characters’ words betray their opinions. “You expect to get all the way to Cheyenne in two days, hitching?”


2015

“Don’t underestimate me. I killed seven men in Venezuela, all in the same night.”

Show your characters clawing for their deepest desires by making them talk around the point. Norah, noticing Ted’s stained jacket and pants, steered him into the kitchen. She offered tea. “Well, I’m homeless again!” he declared joyfully. “You don’t say.” She poured a large mugful for him. “Looks like I might have to—you know, sleep rough for a while.” “What happened? You just got settled into that nice—” “If you’re going to grill me like a criminal, I won’t stand for it. But, hey, is that back bedroom still open?” He never said your back bedroom. “No. I’m using it as my music studio. I give lessons there.”

This is an example of subtext. If you read between the lines, it’s obvious that Ted wants Norah to offer to take him in, and it’s equally obvious that Norah doesn’t want to, but their sparring makes the interchange more interesting— and real—than if either of them were up front about it.

agency might ask the nervous interviewee how the cross town traffic was, before inquiring about his experience as a CIA operative in Syria. It’s of no consequence, just something to disarm the person. But in fiction, unless there’s significance to the job-seeker’s experience on the crosstown bus, it goes away. You might write: After a minute of terse small talk, Bonner got to the point: “I want somebody who can tell me who ran the village of Al-Masrab from 1986 to ‘91.”

Half of Elmore Leonard’s reputation was built on dialogue, which itself made up half of his books. He had a superb ear for lingo, and he was economical as heck. From Road Dogs: “I didn’t cut the man up, I shot him in the head.” “After you robbed him?” “The man dissed me.”

Herman Wouk kept the pace moving in The Caine Mutiny by having his characters interrupt one another rapid-fire, changing course as they went: “Well, I like Mozart,” Willie said dubiously, “but—” “She’s cheap,” said Mr. Dennis. “Cheap?”

Dialogue is not only a vehicle for adding life to your characters, but also for revealing who they really are.

3.

Remember that jewels need a setting.

Bring the talk (and your setting) to life by putting in a detail of your characters’ surroundings, or a bit of physical business. This can be a part of the dialogue, or an aside that breaks up an exchange: “Is this snow ever going to stop? It’s obliterating our tracks!” Jordan fiddled with his tie clip as he listened.

4.

Cut away the extraneous.

We’ve all bumped into someone who was wearing too much bling. Jewelry is supposed to complement a person’s inherent beauty or handsomeness, not overpower it. The watchword here is economy. In real life, people often exchange pleasantries before getting down to brass tacks. A recruiter for a new government


Even the briefest dialogue, if done well, can quickly establish character and motivation. It’s especially appropriate when one of the speakers is a child. Consider the quickness of mind and limited vocabulary of the young. This from Stephen King’s The Shining (note that the first thing spoken is two sentences, and the rest are each only one): “He’s nice, but he’s also a grown-up. And he’s very careful not to say things like that in front of people who wouldn’t understand.” “You mean like Uncle Al?” “Yes, that’s right.” “Can I say it when I’m a grown-up?” “I suppose you will whether I like it or not.” “How old?”

You can do the same. Compare the following examples. Which is stronger? “Did you set the parking brake?” “No! Isn’t that obvious?” “You forgot?” “I was only gone a minute!” “Screw it, let’s get out of here.”

versus: “You forgot to set the parking brake?” “I was only gone a—” “Screw it, let’s get out of here.”

5.

Apply pressure to improve the grade.

Tension escalates when one character is reluctant to tell something and another wheedles it out. A good way to do this is to have a character posit something false, thus goading another to spill the truth. (In real life, you can learn this technique from passive-aggressive personality types.) “So I guess Zoltan gets off scot-free, right?” “It’s none of your business.” “Everybody says you didn’t hold him accountable.” “Well, that’s just not so!”

It’s OK for a character to simply blurt something, indicating that the internal pressure has become just too great. This is fun to do with children or childlike characters:

DIAMONDS IN THE ROUGH Looking for a simple method for skimming over rough dialogue in your first draft, then making it dazzle later? Learn how Sims does it, step by step: writersdigest.com/jan-15.

“How’d you know the pteranodon was even there?” “Saw it out of the corner of my eye.”

It’s also OK to (sparingly) use more crudely phonetic passages to characterize a voice: “Don’t be so ump-patient!”

Avoid giving narrative explanations of dialogue: “Get out of my face!” he yelled. Sometimes he just got sick of her, and this was one of those times.

The second sentence is unnecessary. Consider most adverbs and unusual dialogue tags your Kryptonite, and above all avoid the dreaded combo: “I win,” he uttered sneeringly. “Not again,” she groaned loudly.

“I know you’re not allowed to say, so don’t worry about it.”

“It’s true,” he proclaimed in a whisper.

“Dammit! Dammit! Josephine and Estelle are having an affair! There! Are you happy now?”

It works, it’s funny and it unquestionably moves the story forward. An abrupt shift also can work wonders: “The Thames is pretty down here by Greenwich, isn’t it?” “To be sure.” “You and Esther enjoyed many a happy hour together on that very bank, didn’t you?” “Yes, we did, picnicking. I miss her terribly.” “Well, when you murder someone, it’s easy to start missing her, isn’t it?”

On a more subtle note: “I hope you fellows have found the car by now.” “We did. Looks like someone stripped and dumped it on the east side.” “The east side?”

6.

Appreciate raw beauty.

Often aspiring dialogue writers fall prey to TermPaper Grammar Syndrome, in which everybody speaks in complete sentences, with correct punctuation. Steer clear by dropping words once in a while and letting characters relax into their speech:

7.

Don’t over- (or under-) do it.

Economy is great, but how do you really know when you have too much dialogue, or not enough? When you get to the polishing stage: f Break up mega-paragraphs, whether narrative or dialogue. That is, let neither your narrator nor your characters get long-winded. f Opt for dialogue over narration when possible. If it needs to be said, can dialogue do it? f Be as sparing with dialogue as with description. f If you feel your characters are flat, ask yourself if they’re talking enough. f Trust your beta readers. If your reliable writing group, agent or editor says there’s too much dialogue or not enough, consider tinkering. If you follow even a few of these guidelines, you’ll be surprised at how much livelier your fiction will feel. You’ll enjoy your writing and revising time, your readers will be delighted, and perhaps one day you’ll be stumbling over piles of pearls, rubies and rave reviews. WD

Elizabeth Sims (elizabethsims.com) is a mystery novelist, WD contributing editor and the author of You’ve Got a Book in You: A Stress-Free Guide to Writing the Book of Your Dreams (WD Books).


2015

Tension & Release ǡ Ȅ Ǧǡ ǡ Ǥǯ͹Ǥ

Y

ou’re stuck. Your story has a great hook, a killer opening, and an unforgettable climax, but you can already tell that the pace of the journey from beginning to end is too slow. No. That’s not going to work. So you decide to build in a climactic sequence right there in the middle. However, then you face a new problem: How do you keep readers flipping pages past the resolution of the midbook climax and through to the even-more-climactic final climax in the last act?


Is there a way to balance all this out? Is there a way to keep readers enthralled through the buildup and resolution of multiple plot points as they move on to the finale? Can you really continue to escalate a story even after you’ve closed up some of its threads? The answer is yes. And it all has to do with the interplay of subplots, narrative promises, structure, pace and reader expectations. Here’s how to pull it off.


BY STEVEN JAMES

1.

Understand the dynamics of reader engagement.

Readers want to wonder, worry, anticipate and hope. They’ll set a book down if they (1) don’t know what’s going on, (2) don’t understand why it’s going on or (3) don’t care that it’s going on. So give them what they want: an excuse to keep turning pages. First, keep them oriented to the central struggles of the story. Nothing is as confusing as action without intention. Readers need to know why a character is doing what she is doing. So give her a goal rather than simply an activity. Don’t let her just go through the motions. Make it clear why your characters are acting in specific ways, make the stakes high enough for readers to care, and always keep the action believable. Second, remember that there is nothing as boring as relentless action. What? Action can be boring? Yes. Unwavering, sustained conflict ends up having the same effect as no conflict at all—it wears readers out and causes them to lose interest. That’s why stories that draw readers in and strike them as honest about life have moments between the action sequences—just as real life does. At the climax of each of your escalating acts, there’ll be a moment of calm as the characters process what just happened and make decisions that lead to the next scene. The greater the buildup to the climax, the more important that interlude is. But during those interludes you can lose readers. Too many stories stall out and languish in the mire of reorientation after exciting sequences. So when you look again to your story, don’t just add more problems. Add more promises. Keep readers guessing, caring and worrying. How? f Keep them guessing through twists, plot turns, mysteries, secrets and revelations. f Keep them caring by creating characters worthy of their attention, emotion and time. f Keep them worrying by having danger crouch in the background or hover on the horizon. f And even more important, keep readers longing for things to be different. To create longing you’ll need to induce both empathy with and concern for your characters. In real life when we care about someone who’s in a crisis, we long for things to

be resolved, for the situation to be different. This is just as true of our relationship to fictional characters. Strive to do more than convince readers to care about your characters. Take it deeper. Skewer readers on the longing they have for those characters to achieve their unmet desires. Let that lead them through the story.

2.

Reevaluate the structure of your story.

3.

Overlap promises that matter.

If you take a textbook approach to structure, the number of acts you’re trying to use might be counterintuitive to the type of story you’re trying to tell. Some stories work well in three acts. Others need two. Or four. Or more. Stories move from origination into tension, then through escalating cycles of conflict until they reach a satisfying conclusion. Don’t get trapped into thinking that this has to happen in a certain number of acts. In the traditional three-act paradigm, stories often falter in the long second act. Even those who teach this approach talk about the story sagging in the middle. If you find that’s the case with your story, consider (1) moving the second act’s climax forward, (2) breaking the story up into four (or more) acts rather than three, or (3) adding subplots to enrich your story and to provide staggered moments of resolution. Every story is unique, and the pace of your story’s movement toward the climax needs to be unique as well. Be wary of anyone who suggests you fix your narrative by recasting it so that it fits into his formula—whatever that might be. Instead, look carefully at the pace of your story based on how it reads rather than how well it meshes with a certain predetermined theoretical framework. Trust your instinct over your outline. Start thinking beyond the conventions of two-, threeor four-act structure and instead view your story as a dynamic whole with interlaced promises that build and pulse and inform each other on the way to the climax.

Stories have rhythms, beats. They pause and regroup; they rocket forward into unforgettable sequences of action and resolution. This naturally happens as the ever-escalating heartbeat of tension/release takes readers on a journey deeper into emotion, deeper into themselves. Stories are about more than just what’s happening on the page at any given moment. They’re about promises, anticipation, fulfillment and satisfaction.


2015

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Promises come in two forms: overt and implied. Overt promises often originate from the characters themselves: “I’ll meet you at five o’clock for our meeting. Don’t be late.” “I’m not going to rest until I catch Ben’s killer.” “He’s got a twist waiting for you at the end that you would never expect.”

These promises tell readers straight-out what’s coming and create either anticipation or apprehension, depending on the specific promise being made. Implied promises, on the other hand, come from subtext, backstory or from readers’ implicit understanding of story. For example, if the killer is caught on page 250 of a 500-page novel, readers are thinking, OK, he’s either going to escape or get set free on some sort of technicality. They know this not because you told them it was going to happen, but because they already instinctively understand narrative principles. Note that foreshadowing differs from promise-making. Foreshadowing is used to eliminate coincidences. Promises are made to elicit interest. Dead spots in a story line happen when a promise isn’t being made or kept—but a story that’s rich in promises is a story that’s hard to put down. So, layer in, overlap and intertwine the overt and implied narrative promises, and you’ll move readers up to and then past moments of resolution in your story.

4.

Stagger the resolution of plot threads.

Closure is the enemy of tension, but tension is the lifeblood of your story. So if you include too much resolution


too early you’ll undermine your reader’s engagement with the story. What about a mid-book climax, then? Well, we sustain tension when we have different levels of struggles relating to the protagonist’s journey. These struggles revolve around how your character deals with himself, with others, and with the world around him. So, your detective might be struggling with depression (inner turmoil), trying to catch the killer (external quest) and also attempting to salvage her marriage after her husband’s affair (interpersonal crisis). Make the most of the interplay of these three facets of your plot. The tension will increase as she faces setbacks in each area—and if closure occurs on one level (for example, she reconciles with her husband), there’s still underlying tension to keep readers engaged. Bring that to the forefront of their attention. And remember that these struggles might originate, escalate and resolve at different times. As you stagger the moments of resolution, remember to keep readers oriented to the characters’ intentions and the stakes. Use reversals, in which the things that appear to be good are actually devastatingly bad. Keep questions alive—not necessarily if a character will find closure, but how. And sustain the narrative momentum as the strands of the story escalate in tension.

5.

Use mystery and suspense to your advantage.

In a mystery, the crime has occurred and must be solved. In suspense, it’s going to occur and must be stopped. Unanswered questions (mysteries) keep readers flipping pages because of curiosity, whereas impending peril (suspense) keeps them reading because of concern. And the event in question doesn’t have to be a crime. Any event in the character’s past (or backstory) could have deeply impacted him. You can provide a slow reveal that also keeps readers on the edge of their seats as they look forward to (or fear) the consequences of the secret coming to light. Curiosity appeals to intellect and creates intrigue: Readers wonder what will happen or why it has. Concern appeals to emotion and creates apprehension: Readers worry about what will happen and what the consequences will be when it does. Use the interplay of curiosity and concern to keep readers engaged. Alternate between letting them desire what’s coming (closure, a happy ending, etc.) and dreading that it will (pain, suffering, dramatic plunges, etc.). And here’s the secret: Always keep either curiosity or concern alive until the final climax of your story. For

example, if you resolve suspense in one area (the crime is thwarted) keep the mystery alive in another (they still don’t know who the perpetrator is). Conversely, if a mystery is solved (they discover the villain’s identity), keep the suspense alive (they must now stop him before he strikes again). At the end of every act, accentuate the mystery or suspense that has become primary at that point in the story.

Use the interplay of curiosity and concern to keep readers engaged. Alternate between letting them desire what’s coming (closure, a happy ending, etc.) and dreading that it will (pain, suffering, dramatic plunges, etc.).

6.

Capitalize on multiple plotlines.

Every relationship your protagonist has will provide you with an opportunity for a subplot. This doesn’t mean you’ll pursue all of these potential story threads, but it does mean that you can capitalize on the most important ones to keep readers engaged. Think of subplots as layers of unmet desire that intertwine with, rather than simply parallel, the main plot. If a subplot has nothing to do with the main character’s journey toward her unmet desire (or object of desire), then it can probably be cut. Effective subplots do more than add texture to stories; they provide opportunities for you to spread out mini climaxes and resolutions throughout the novel. In my novels featuring FBI criminologist Patrick Bowers, I often give him two apparently unrelated cases to solve. Readers rightly expect that the two plotlines will eventually intertwine. Making it seem as if there are parallel plots can be a way of drawing readers in as they wonder, “What do these story lines possibly have to do with each other?” Multifaceted plots like this provide a strong underlying layer of conflict: Even as Agent Bowers moves forward with one case, the other one is there in the background. While one of the story lines might rise to the forefront at any given moment, both are essentially facets of the same plot rather than either one being subordinate to the other. In multifaceted plots, there needs to be more than just a coincidental or tangential connection between the story

lines. The more central the connection is in retrospect late in the story—and the more invisible it is at first—the more satisfying it’ll be when it’s revealed. Using multifaceted story lines broadens the story’s appeal, helps it span genres, deepens readers’ engagement and ratchets up the tension.

7.

Remind readers of the riptides.

An ocean might appear calm, but there are always undercurrents lurking just beneath the surface. And even when the waves you can see are flowing in one direction, undertows might be flowing in an entirely different direction. As it is in the ocean, so it is in your story. When things start to appear calm, you need to catch your readers in the riptides and draw them deeper into the currents of tension running through the sea of your story. How? f Point out the overt promises, mysteries and unanswered questions. f Slowly reveal clues that uncover a long-hidden skeleton in the closet or explain a unique character trait that has been present throughout the story. f Emphasize the time crunches or introduce a countdown to the climax. f Use multiple point-of-view characters to layer in conflict, accentuate story lines or build subplots. f Have characters discuss the difficulty of the quest (or the task at hand) or the devastating consequences of failure. f Pivot the narrative so the central struggles of the story are at the forefront by calling back to mind what the protagonist wants, or the dueling desires that are vying for her attention or allegiance. As you escalate the middle of your story, or keep things rolling after a mid-book climax, remind readers of the promises, the plans and the stakes. Work to make sure there’s always escalating tension and unresolved conflict, as well as unanswered questions, overlapping subplots, underlying promises or unrevealed secrets. The resolution will come in the final act, but until then, entice readers to fly through the book toward that satisfying climax where you’ve saved the best revelations, secrets and twists for last. WD

Steven James is a contributing editor to WD. He is the critically acclaimed, bestselling author of 10 novels as well as the craft book Story Trumps Structure (WD Books). When he’s not writing, trail running or watching science-fiction movies, he teaches creative storytelling around the world.


2015

Why So Many Writers Give Up Mid-Novel (& How Not to Be One of Them) Ȅͻ ǲǤǳ


BY TRACEY BARNES PRIESTLEY


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would be willing to wager that most writers have made New Year’s resolutions regarding their writing practices. I know I have. Curious about this, I canvassed a few of my writer friends. Sure enough, many of them had frequently participated in this annual tradition that dates all the way back to the Babylonians. Each writer had faced January with a deep commitment and heartfelt enthusiasm for those resolutions. One promised herself she’d “finish the first draft” of her novel. Another told me she had written on her dry-erase board, in big, bold letters, “I will clean up the dialogue mess that’s drowning this book.” The least experienced of them, an as yet unpublished young man full of enthusiasm for his craft, swore he would “silence my inner critic and keep writing, no matter what.” I followed up by asking them how successful they had been in keeping those resolutions. Unfortunately, all had experienced the same thing: disappointment. No matter how hard they tried, they had ultimately been unable to make good on what they had resolved to do. I knew exactly what they were talking about. I gave up creating New Year’s resolutions about my writing years ago when I found myself at the end of yet another cold January, with nothing more to show for all of my efforts than an exercise in futility. I was left feeling a range of emotions, from guilty to downright silly. It’s actually quite comical just how few of us keep our New Year’s resolutions. It’s estimated only 45 percent of the population even tries to resolve making changes in the New Year. Of these brave souls, a mere 8 percent are successful. Yet I’ve wondered if writers might be even more inclined than the general public to approach the New Year with a list of things we want to change, accomplish or do differently. We seem ripe for this kind of experience. As creative thinkers, we face a unique set of circumstances when it comes to producing our work. Alone in whatever space we can manage for our writing, we pound away at the keyboard, with our thoughts, our characters, our struggles and the never-ending reality that we aspire to a tough, highly competitive profession. Why wouldn’t we try to capitalize on the fresh start, the clean slate that January offers us? Magical thinking is right up our alley!

Why Our Writing Can Stall In my work as a life coach, I’ve come to believe that our writing can be derailed because of two fundamental processes. The first, naturally, is the very nature of our craft, the writing process itself—think plotting, character development, etc. Unfortunately, this intrinsic set of challenges dwells right alongside our individual writing processes— complete with procrastination, destructive thought patterns, negative experiences, ambiguous motivation, unrealistic expectations, etc. And we wonder why we can’t keep our writing resolutions. By now you’re probably ready to chuck your computer out the window. Don’t! Think of these two processes as valuable tools. Once you understand how they may be driving your inability to meet your writing resolutions, you will be poised to utilize effective strategies that support you and your writing every step of the way.

What’s Holding You Back? Let’s begin by identifying the warning signs that your writing may be about to stall out. Consider current or previous writing resolutions you failed to keep. Ask yourself if you have experienced any of the following: lack of initiative; inability to prioritize writing tasks; frequent distraction; failure to establish a consistent writing pace/ routine; inner dialogue that is one negative message after another; finding yourself simply “too busy” to get anything done. This is hardly an exhaustive list. Reasons writers stall can be varied and unique. Your task is to be as exact—and as honest with yourself—as you can in identifying what gets in the way of your ability to make progress on your projects. Make a list. Next, evaluate this list from the perspective of the work-in-progress itself. As an example, let’s use my writer friend’s resolution to finish her first draft. Every time she sat down at her computer, this writer felt lost about where the story should go next, and unclear about the relationship between her two main characters. She found herself thinking, This is useless, and, It’s not a strong enough idea for an entire book—maybe I should ditch the entire thing.


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First, she tried to address the problems in the work itself. She sought craft and technique help with her plot and eventually resolved some backstory problems that had delayed the action and confused things between her characters. But the problems with her own lack of clarity persisted. Now she was fairly certain that the problem was within her writing process.

It’s estimated only 45 percent of the population even tries to resolve making changes in the New Year. Of these brave souls, a mere 8 percent are successful.

That meant facing off with her inner critic, which is always the most efficient place to begin. She looked her frustration in the eye and began to unravel the negative messages ricocheting around inside her head. Why exactly was this project “useless”? After some contemplation, she surprised herself with her answer: “Because I don’t have the patience for anything but short stories— certainly not a full-length novel.” This statement got her wheels turning in a new direction. She rethought her word choice (she is, after all, a writer) and decided it wasn’t really a lack of patience—this gifted writer was actually lacking confidence. She found herself wondering: I’ve had some success with short stories, so why am I risking my time and energy on something I don’t know much about? She realized she’d been rationalizing away the entire project, even though writing a novel really was something she wanted to try. Once you are able to identify what is really preventing you from pushing ahead, you’ll be freed up to construct writing goals that will actually yield productive results. For my friend, this meant not just correcting her selfdefeating thoughts, but lifting the expectations she was unconsciously placing on her unwritten manuscript. It didn’t have to be a “success,” as her published short stories had been, to be worth her while—or at least, she needed to redefine what success meant to her. Once you


decide that writing something you want to write is never a waste of time, regardless of whether or not it’s published in the end, you might just find that those negative voices quiet down on their own. Let’s consider another example, the young writer who swore he would “silence my inner critic and keep writing, no matter what.” When he viewed his writing from the perspective of each of these two processes, he discovered some distinct problems. He admitted to himself that he felt foolish in the eyes of others for turning his back on the profession he had trained for—engineering—and that he felt like a fraud because he had not been formally trained to be a writer. Those were demons he had to face if he ever wanted to get past Chapter 1. Next, from the perspective of the writing process, he realized that while writing a novel was on his bucket list, he had not really worked out enough of a story idea to be able to take action on the page. If you’re intimidated by the prospect of writing an entire novel (and who isn’t?), why not set a goal of writing, say, three chapters? By the time you meet that smaller, more achievable goal, you might just find you have an idea for Chapter 4. When it comes to writing, the laws of momentum apply—it’s infinitely easier to move toward something when you’re already in motion than it is to start from a dead stop.

How to Avoid Stalling Now that you’ve seen how fundamentals that have very little to do with actual words on a page can derail a writer’s progress, let’s take a look at what else we can to do make sure we keep moving.

1.

DITCH THE WORD RESOLUTION ENTIRELY. It’s

a setup, one that has been riding on the backs of people for thousands of years. Instead, set a goal, objective or even intention.

2.

UNDERSTAND WHAT TRULY MOTIVATES YOU. For some writers, identifying a positive out-

come and working toward it is the most effective form of motivation. Conversely, other writers are spurred on by a degree of unrest, even fear. Write down exactly what is motivating you to meet your writing goal. Is it a good fit? Does it ring true? If not, identify a more appropriate motivation. When finished, post it where you can see it when you are writing.

If you’re intimidated by the prospect of writing an entire novel (and who isn’t?), why not set a goal of writing, say, three chapters? By the time you meet that smaller, more achievable goal, you might just find you have an idea for Chapter 4.

3.

BREAK IT DOWN. It can be quite worthwhile,

exciting even, to set large goal. “Yes, I will finish my novel this year!” But make sure it’s specific—which usually means breaking it down into smaller goals you can cross off along the way. Remember my friend’s resolution, “I will clean up the dialogue mess that’s drowning this book”? It would have been more attainable to separate this vague notion into three separate goals: (1) When I hear myself saying negative things like “I’m drowning this book,” I will stop, write the negative message down, put it into my complaint box and get back to work (a good practice for anyone working toward any goal, by the way); (2) Over the next two weeks I will identify the dialogue passages that are giving me grief; and (3) By the end of January, I will have rewritten at least one scene that includes dialogue. Note that the goals are not just well defined, but action oriented, and that the second and third goals include a targeted time frame. Most of us will be more successful if we give ourselves reasonable deadlines.

4.

BE REALISTIC. Changing behaviors, attitudes

and habits is a process. Rarely does change occur because of one event or a date on the calendar. (Curious to know more about why this is? Do some research on the neuroscience of change—you will be astounded by what is required for our poor brains to shift into a new mode.)

5.

IF YOU FEEL FRUSTRATED, PICK A SINGLE TASK—THE SMALLER THE BETTER. It should be

related to your work-in-progress, but it doesn’t have to be what chronologically comes next in your manuscript’s

progression. It does, however, need to be so simple you can’t possibly fail. For example, it may seem like rewriting one page should be easy enough to accomplish, but if you’re not succeeding, the task is too big. Instead, aim to rewrite one paragraph or even just one sentence. When you are finished, move onto the next small task. This approach fights frustrations with success, and builds forward progress into your writing practice.

6.

PAIR UP. Ask another writer to join you in working toward your individual goals in the months ahead. You’ll both benefit from being accountable to one another, and the mutual support will motivate you to follow through.

7.

WHEN ALL ELSE FAILS, TAKE A BREAK. It can

be as simple as getting up from your computer and walking around the house, or as significant as putting your project on hold for a month. Stepping away from the source of our frustration can give us a fresh perspective and renewed momentum. But be sure to designate an end point to this refueling period to ensure that it is in fact a break—and not an excuse not to get up from that chair and never sit back down.

8.

REALIZE THAT SETBACKS ARE PART OF THE PROCESS. Every writer’s road is full of tight

curves, jarring potholes and unexpected bumps. Accept this inevitability, and you won’t be as surprised when you slam into something that brings you to a screeching halt. By eliminating the element of surprise, you minimize disappointment, which will help you to recover and get moving again.

9.

ABOVE ALL, BE PATIENT! Meeting your writing

goals takes time and effort. When you throw out that laundry list of resolutions and focus your attention on just one or two well-crafted objectives, you’re already one step ahead of where you were last year. Remember that 12 months is plenty of time to accomplish your writing goals if you approach them with understanding, clarity and objectivity. Here’s wishing you every success in 2015. Happy New Year! WD

Tracey Barnes Priestley is a columnist, blogger and novelist. She is also a life coach who teaches writers organization, communication and stress management skills useful for today’s publishing world. Contact her at [email protected].


2015

Installment Plans ǫ ϐǤ BY ADRIENNE CREZO

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he idea of writing a series is tempting. After all, it seems as though half the bestsellers on today’s bookshelves are new installments in popular series—books that are all but guaranteed a readership before they’re even released. But how do you know whether or not your idea has series potential? Or if the work of sustaining a series is something you would even want to devote your career to? We brought together Joel Goldman, Heather Graham, Brenda Novak and Ian Rankin—four of today’s most successful series novelists across a variety of genres—to discuss the secrets of writing multi-book characters, the perks and drawbacks of unwinding a story thread over the course of many years, and what they might have done differently if they could go back to Book One.


GOLDMAN PHOTO © JUDY WILLIAMS; NOVAK PHOTO © MICAH KANDROS; RANKIN PHOTO © TIM DUNCAN

MEET THE ROUNDTABLE

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HEATHER GRAHAM

BRENDA NOVAK

IAN RANKIN

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TO GET STARTED, CAN YOU EACH GIVE A BRIEF OVERVIEW OF THE SERIES YOU WRITE? NOVAK: There’s Whiskey Creek, which takes place in a small town; the sixth book released in [March], and I just signed for another six, so it’s long-running. [And] I’ve just finished the first book of a suspense series that’s about a psychiatrist who studies psychopaths— the worst of the worst have been shipped up there for her to study in this new, sort of breaking-ground mental-health-facility-slash-prison. I [previously] did the Bulletproof Trilogy, and Department 6, which is about private police—hired guns. RANKIN: I’ve got a series of police procedurals. The main character is John Rebus. He was invented in 1985 when I was at university, and I didn’t know he’d still be going all this time later, but he just refuses to go away. The books are set in Edinburgh, in Scotland, where I live.

They usually begin with a true story—something I’ve read in the newspaper, something to do with the economy, something to do with politics, something to do with social issues. It gets me thinking. And I just use Rebus as a way of exploring that. GOLDMAN: I have three different series, all set in Kansas City, [Mo.], my hometown. The first features a trial lawyer named Lou Mason. I was a trial lawyer for 28 years and Lou was born as a result of a partner of mine, in 1992, coming into my office to complain about another partner. I said, ‘Let’s just write a murder mystery. We’ll kill the son of a bitch off in the first chapter and spend the rest of the book figuring out who did it.” And that’s what I did. That’s how all that got started. And then I started a second series featuring a former FBI special agent around my age at the time. At the time I was in my early to mid-50s, I developed a movement disorder that causes shaking and spasming, and I gave


2015

it to him. As you say, Ian, you like to explore the issues through your character, I was exploring the change in my life from the development of this movement disorder through the character. That was a great experience through three novels. The current series features a woman named Alex Stone, who is a public defender. GRAHAM: The first series I did was [historical fiction] on the Viking founding of Dublin. That was in the early 1980s, and there were several books in which the Vikings established the city. Then I did one on Americana, the historical taking of Jamestown through the pirate age and the [American] Revolution and into the Civil War. And then I did one in Florida because someone told me once that Florida had no history, so I did a six-book series. I have a vampire series called [The Alliance Vampires], and more recently I’m doing two things. One is Cafferty and Quinn, [an antiques shop owner and private eye who solve cases together]. They’re established in New Orleans, and [the books] always have something to do with an object that creates problems for everyone all around them. And the other is the Krewe of Hunters. You’re always asked for the one-sentence [logline] and I say [Krewe of Hunters] is “Criminal Minds” meets “Supernatural.” They’re FBI agents, they’ve been through the academy, they have all the right skills, but they’re a separate unit because everyone in the unit has the capability of speaking to the dead.

DO YOU HAVE A DIFFERENT PROCESS FOR DEVELOPING A SERIES CHARACTER AS OPPOSED TO A LEAD FOR A STANDALONE NOVEL? GOLDMAN: There’s not a different process for me initially in creating the character from the outset. I look forward to the evolution of the character. … How do these experiences impact the characters as they grow? A series gives you a greater opportunity to do that over time. With a stand-alone, whatever you want to do with that character, however different you want that character to be at the end than from the beginning, you have limited parameters to accomplish that—one book. NOVAK: It depends on the kind of series. So in romance, you could connect the series through a town, like I’ve done with Whiskey Creek, with a different hero and heroine in each book who connect with each other through living in the same place. … But if it’s going to be like my suspense series where Evelyn is going to carry the show through each of the books, you have to have somebody who’s going to have a lot of depth. … I think a [series]


character needs to be really smart because people like to [follow] someone who has a special skill or someone who is really a good adversary for the villain. RANKIN: Rebus was created to be a stand-alone. … This was me attempting to write a book about Edinburgh. In the first draft of the first novel, Rebus is shot and killed. And for some reason, I brought him back to life in a second draft. And a few books down the line, after I’d written different kinds of books, my editor said, “Whatever happened to that Rebus guy? I liked him.” And so I thought “Oh, did you? Then I’ll bring him back again.” I was living in London, which I hated, so I figured if I brought Rebus back he could live in London and hate it, as well. And then I had three books and it was a series, but I never meant to write a series from the beginning.

“You want a satisfying ending, but you also want them to come back and read the next book. Keeping that tension alive and interesting, keeping up the suspense, is enormously challenging.” —Novak

Every time you’re creating a character, he’s an individual. He’s going to have things that he’s afraid of, things he does and doesn’t like. I don’t think it matters so much if it’s going to be one book or a series, although with a series you have to be careful with things that might happen in the future. I think we’re all always trying to put the elements into someone who isn’t all black, isn’t all white, so that you’re creating a real, fleshed-out human being. GRAHAM:

WHAT ARE THE BENEFITS TO WRITING SERIES, VERSUS STAND-ALONE NOVELS? There are benefits to both, but in this current climate I think there are more perks to series. The reason, I think, is that every new book you pick up you have to put some work into it, to get into it and learn the characters and the stories. It’s like [going to] a party—a big party where there are a ton of people, and when you have all these people come up to meet you at once it’s overwhelming. But if you know a couple of people, it’s more comfortNOVAK:

able, and you can start with those few people and branch out until you know everyone in the room. It’s the same way with a series. You go back into a familiar environment, or you have familiar people who are like friends because you’ve known them through all these books. GOLDMAN: One thing I prefer about series is that I’m really interested as a writer in how we evolve over time, how we change, how we adapt. We can’t choose so many of the things that happen to us, but we can choose how we react or how we deal with those things. My protagonists make bad choices in one book, and then eventually they have to answer to that in another book. So there’s not just accountability for the bad guys. There has to be accountability for the good guys because life has consequences. And I like being able to explore that in characters and take them along that journey over multiple books. RANKIN: When I started writing the books I wanted to explore Edinburgh. I was going to explore the city, its history, the darkness at the edge of time, as it were, and Rebus was going to have access to all that because he’s a cop. And he was going to be a perfect means to explore the society, the culture, the commerce and everything. It’s an organic process, because (a) I still haven’t learned everything there is to learn about the city, (b) It’s a useful microcosm for things that are happening everywhere, and (c) Rebus keeps changing with the city. He gets older, and slower. … But there are pros and cons. [When] I was maybe six or seven books in, I remember my editor saying, “Would you do a stand-alone? Because we’re really struggling to sell your books.” And you can see why! If you’re a reader who’s new to a writer and it’s book No. 7 in a series, you go, “Well, I can’t read this without reading the first six. And I’m not going to invest all that time and effort and money to get to know these characters and this author before I get to the new book.” Or you’re just going to take a chance on it. Whereas, when you’re presented with a stand-alone, you go, “OK, I’ve heard of this author, I’ll give it a go.” GRAHAM: I think our digital age is helping out [with that] a lot. For example, you’ll hear about a show, it’s a wonderful show, on TV. And it’s like, “It’s been out for a while. I’m not going to know what’s going on.” But [now the earlier seasons are] on Netflix. It’s the same thing. Because of our digital age, it’s, “I found this character, and I absolutely love him, and here are all his books.” Whereas bookstores before couldn’t possibly carry every book in every series, now people can go back and start at the beginning because they’re more accessible.

“I have friends who are readers, and they’ll ask me to ask other authors to please come out with new characters. ‘Can you tell Harlan [Coben] he must? He must add new characters.’ And no, I will not. But I can do that in my own books; I do it quite often.” —Graham

WHAT CHALLENGES DOES A LONGERRUNNING SERIES POSE? It’s challenging. That’s the drawback. You have so much material that you can’t screw up because your readers will not miss anything. They will let you know if you’ve changed somebody’s name or age, or they’ll tell you, “This person couldn’t have been doing that because you said he was doing something else,” so continuity becomes important. I have a bible. My assistant writes down every name, every age, so that I can go back and have her double-check for me. I can say, “How old is he now?” and she can flip to it and tell me, “He was 32 in the last book and this much time has passed.” So we have at least some way to integrate this massive amount of information. I do it for the town, too, for Whiskey Creek. The [bible] tells us what the stores look like so I don’t describe them differently from book to book. And keeping tension is a huge challenge for a series like the one I’m doing with the suspense novels, where you want people to see [the protagonist] overcome her past, but at the same time if you make it too happily ever after in the first book, that whole story line is shot. You want a satisfying ending, but you also want them to come back and read the next book. Keeping that tension alive and interesting, keeping up the suspense, is enormously challenging. NOVAK:

WOULD YOU CHANGE ANYTHING IF YOU COULD GO BACK TO THE FIRST BOOKS IN YOUR SERIES? RANKIN: There’s a lot of stuff in there I would change if I’d thought it was [going to become] a series from the start. I mean, I made him too old. He’s in his 40s in the first book, which meant in a successful series that takes place in real time he was going to end up retiring before


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I did. And also I gave him the name Rebus, which means “picture puzzle.” I then spent years explaining it to people because it’s not a name that people have. And I gave him this very convoluted backstory, which I then had to bear in mind for everything that happened afterward. For example, he has a fear of flying because he trained in a secret military unit and they tortured him, and I have to keep all that in my head. So I would have done him differently if I had thought of him from the get-go as a series character.

“There are pros and cons [for series writers]. … If you’re a reader who’s new to a writer and it’s book No. 7 in a series, you go, ‘Well, I can’t read this without reading the first six.’” —Rankin

NOVAK: It’s like Ian said about how he started his character when he was too old. I made that mistake, too. I should have started my Whiskey Creek series with the characters a little bit younger, because now as the years go by with all these people, they’re starting to get a little older than I think my readership would prefer. And that’s a little bit restrictive, I think, in romance.

DO YOU TAKE READER FEEDBACK INTO ACCOUNT AS YOU PROGRESS YOUR SERIES? GOLDMAN: I honestly don’t. I thank them, but I can’t listen to those voices. I need to pay attention to the story, and if I try to please everybody, I’m not going to please anybody. The stories do end up in a difference place than I think they’re going to when I start, so it’s a hard thing to take [reader suggestions] into account for me. RANKIN: In one of the early Rebus novels, Rebus accidentally kills a cat. That got me into a lot of trouble. You can kill as many people as you like, but never the pet. Well, I didn’t know that. All that happened was he got pissed off at this cat, so he locks the cat flaps so it couldn’t get in. And then the cat was eaten by a fox. I got into a lot of trouble. So, yeah, the negative feedback, you take that in. I’ve not harmed any animals since. … And


sometimes, someone will say something like, “All the cars in your books are red.” And as soon as someone tells you that, you never do it again. I’m never going to have a red car again. … Or kill a cat. GRAHAM: I think we get a lot of good feedback from readers, not just on the characters but also on the mistakes we make. … I had a character dive in the Great Lakes and he died and was found with saltwater in his lungs. And what killed me was I didn’t catch it, my editor didn’t catch it, the copy editor didn’t catch it—nobody caught it, until it went to audio and the people who listened caught it. I have to say, I honestly get nice mail most of the time, but people will write me and very nicely say that they understand that I’m a Southerner, but someone really should have told me that the Great Lakes were freshwater. ... I had another mistake like that, too. I had written a [trilogy] called the Flynn Brother series, and it was beginning, middle and end, three books. And then I had the Krewe [of Hunters series] set in Key West, and I knew these [two series] weren’t that far apart in time, maybe six or seven years. So I had the Krewe end up working with the [private eye from the Flynn trilogy]. And the [Flynns] were brothers in the first books, but then cousins in the second appearance. NOVAK: I’m such a pleaser; I’m always looking for that “A” like when I was in school. I would do whatever it took to get that “A.” People’s approval is important to me—too much so. Readers kept telling me, “Oh we love Cheyenne and Dylan! We want them to get more page time!” And so in order to give them more, I decided to give them a challenge that’s interesting and won’t threaten their lives or their marriage (which are two untouchables in a romance once they’re together). So she tells a lie—for his sake, out of love. And the mail was all the same: “You do not lie, regardless of the reason or the intent.” And they were very, very angry, but for Dylan to leave a woman he’s madly in love with because she did something out of love for him, to me that’s no kind of hero. It’s a very small-minded point of view to say, “I don’t care why you lied, you’re out of my life forever, even though I still love you and you still love me.” That’s so flat and unrealistic. So I was as frustrated with the readers as they were with me. People either loved it or they hated it. It’s part of this issue—it’s a series, people are invested, they have expectations, and they were angry at that plot twist because it didn’t meet with those expectations.

HOW DO YOU KEEP YOUR CHARACTERS FRESH BOOK AFTER BOOK? ANY TRICKS FOR AVOIDING GETTING STALE? RANKIN: [In] a series you can see occasionally where the writer has run out of steam or lost interest in the characters and [is] only really doing it because the public demands more books with this character. That hasn’t happened yet. I haven’t fallen out of love with Rebus. There’s still a lot about him that I don’t know, and to find out more I have to keep writing the books. And he keeps being a really useful tool, a really useful way for me to look at events or issues that I want to look at.

“I’m really interested as a writer in how we evolve over time, how we change, how we adapt. … My protagonists make bad choices in one book, and then eventually they have to answer to that in another book.” —Goldman

GOLDMAN: You can tell, I think, when a series has lasted for a really long time and you read the latest book and you think, Well, OK, he mailed it in. The series gets kind of tired. And as a writer, I wanted to stay away from that—I didn’t want to end up saying, “Well, what am I going to do with these people now?” So Lou Mason, I took him through an arc, and in the final book of that series, he ends up being disbarred as a consequence of choices he made. And I got a lot of email saying, “Oh my God, is he done? Is it over? What happens to him now?” And the second series, the FBI agent, I took him through a three-book arc. At the end of the series, he’s getting on a plane to leave Kansas City and we never know if he’s coming back. But as an author, I felt like I had accomplished what I wanted—what I wanted for me with that series. So I like writing series, but multiple series so that I can maintain that kind of freshness, I hope. GRAHAM: I do think that people fall in love with series characters. But it helps, I think, to change things up. It’s fun to write people you know and have worked with a lot, but it’s fun too to change things. I have friends who are readers, and they’ll ask me to ask other authors to please

SET YOUR SERIES SOMEWHERE SPECIAL When it comes to writing a series, a setting can be just as important as any living, breathing character. Read the roundtable’s advice and techniques for personifying place at writersdigest.com/jan-2015.

come out with new characters. “Can you tell Harlan [Coben] he must? He must add new characters.” And no, I will not. But I can do that in my own books; I do it quite often. NOVAK: You don’t want to hammer anything in. You can’t beat the reader to death with the same story every time. It’s like, how many times can we mow the same grass already? You have to avoid reader fatigue and one way to do that is to let the characters grow and breathe.

HAVE YOU THOUGHT ABOUT HOW TO WRAP THINGS UP AT THE END? NOVAK: I have purposely done some open-ended series so that I could do as many books as I want. The Last Stand series, I can add to it, same with my Department 6 series. That’s private police work, they take on jobs that they’re hired to do. That one I could continue at any time. But one that I couldn’t continue is the Stillwater Trilogy. The story is so tightly woven together and the mystery is solved. I’ve had people ask me for the fourth Stillwater story, and I’m like, “There is no story. We all know why the dead preacher is buried in the backyard. Where are we going to go?” GOLDMAN: What I’ve done in my third series, the Alex Stone series, is Alex gets herself into trouble and she’s accused of murder. She’s defended by Lou Mason’s aunt, Claire Mason, who is a criminal defense lawyer, and Lou is her paralegal because he’s disbarred. So these series characters make an appearance in another series and it’s a way for readers who wonder whatever happened to him to see what he’s up to. GRAHAM: I don’t always know. For me it would be like having my name on my tombstone before I die. … My characters [also] sometimes meet characters from other series, and I have a lot of fun with that and it’s a way to bring them back for readers, even if it’s only briefly. RANKIN: Nope. The only thing I thought when [Rebus had to retire] was, “Well, I could kill him.” … I found a different job for him instead. WD

Adrienne Crezo is the managing editor of Writer’s Digest.


Rachel Renée Russell DORK IS THE NEW COOL Rachel Renée Russell stopped practicing law soon after her first middle-grade novel charted The New York Times bestsellers list. Ten books and a film option later, it looks as if she made the right choice.

PHOTO © SUNA LEE

BY TIFFANY LUCKEY


M

iddle-grade author Rachel Renée Russell may be a self-described dork, but it must be pretty cool to be uncool: Since its debut in 2009, her Dork Diaries series has sold more than 15 million copies, spent more than 230 weeks on The New York Times bestsellers list and been translated into almost 30 languages. To top that off, Lionsgate recently acquired the movie rights to the series, with a film set to release in 2016. If it seems unbelievable that this type of success would burgeon in just over five years, that’s because it didn’t. Russell’s journey to becoming a bestselling author began around the age of 12. Sometime in middle school in Saint Joseph, Mich., Russell decided to craft her first book for kids. She kept writing through college at Northwestern University. But after receiving harsh criticism from a creative writing professor there, her confidence to pursue the craft as a career waned, and she opted to go into law instead. Russell knew, though, that the career she settled for was not the career she was meant for. In the late 2000s, after spending 20-plus years as a bankruptcy lawyer, raising two children and going through a divorce, Russell returned to her first love: writing. The Dork Diaries are the humorous journals of Nikki Maxwell (named after Russell’s younger daughter), a socially awkward 14-year-old who’s adapting to life in a new city and a new school. Each book recounts one month of Nikki’s misadventures in the form of illustrated journal entries, which detail everything from her run-ins with resident snob MacKenzie to her desperate attempts to get her mom to buy her an iPhone—you know, typical middle-grade crises. “The reason why I was motivated to write Dork Diaries was because of my own daughters,” Russell says. “I was in an upper-middle-class neighborhood with an uppermiddle-class public school, and my kids just were weird. Actually, they weren’t weird—they were smart, they did their homework, they were really good kids. But for some reason, both of them got bullied.” In addition to the regular series, Russell has written two companion books—Dork Diaries 3½: How to Dork

Your Diary and Dork Diaries: OMG! All About Me Diary!— which encourage kids to express themselves through journaling. Russell’s daughters, now adults, have become directly involved with creating the Dork Diaries: Erin contributes to the writing, while Nikki has taken over the illustrating. The eighth book, Dork Diaries: Tales From a Not-SoHappily Ever After, hit shelves in September, and Book 9 is scheduled for a spring 2015 release. Here, the soft-spoken 54-year-old Russell talks with WD from her home in Virginia about the challenges of writing for a young audience, future plans for her writing, and showing the publishing industry that it’s actually cool to be dorky. You were a bankruptcy lawyer before the Dork Diaries series took off. When did you stop practicing law?

After the first book [Dork Diaries: Tales From a Not-SoFabulous Life] hit The New York Times bestsellers list, I phased out my practice. The book was released in June of 2009, and we hit the bestsellers list probably in the first week. At that point it became obvious to me that I could actually make a living as a children’s author. I thought, Well, I won’t take any new clients, and I’ll finish up the cases I have. And within a year or so I was an author full time. What made you want to write?

It was something I always wanted to do. The first book I really remember writing was about my [twin] brothers. It was their birthday, and as a gift I made a book called The Ronnie and Donnie Book. It was a picture book of maybe 10 or 15 pages about the fact that they liked Frosted Flakes and they liked playing cowboys. It was a really cute, badly written book that they really enjoyed. [Laughs.] I probably did a book a year all the way to adulthood. For my daughters, I made a book for each of them maybe every couple of years. It was something I enjoyed doing. But around the time my kids got to high school, I stopped doing those little hobby books and was basically working my butt off trying to get them through college.



“There’s always the fear that [a book with] an African-American character is not going to sell as well. … I can understand that, but I think some of it is created by the publishing industry.” During the time they were in college, I was alone at home and had a lot of spare time. That’s when I started to seriously think about writing again, and I joined an online book club—an African-American children’s writers group—[in 2008]. To help support each other, we would do manuscript swaps. I didn’t have a [complete] manuscript, but I would swap chapters. And when I did, I would get such positive reinforcement from the group. They would say, “Oh, this is so funny, I cried,” or, “I was laughing at work,” or, “I was laughing on the bus,” or, “I let my daughter read this and she thought it was really good.” I got such very, very positive feedback that I thought, Hmm. Maybe I can actually get something published. In the series, you capture the voice of kids in middle school, especially girls, so well. Do you have to do much research?

In the beginning, not a whole lot. [My daughters] were both “drama queens” [as kids]. When I was just starting to get into this, I thought, This is what I’ve been living for many years. Now that they’re grown up and on their own, I do have to work a little bit harder to stay current. Even with the slang, I have to run it by my daughters. But now that they’re older, I usually talk to my nieces, who are now tweens. And I watch a lot of Disney. [Laughs.] How difficult is it to write for that audience?

To me, it’s easy. I found that being a mom, middle-grade is really comfortable for me because I don’t have to get into the things that young adults start to experiment with. And, of course, middle-grade is Disney and Nickelodeon, and it’s good and clean and still really sweet. I’m most comfortable in that environment. What’s the pace of publishing the Dork Diaries?

We’re publishing two books a year, but that means we’re actually writing three books a year. I don’t know how it comes out like that! But that’s what’s been happening for the last five or six years. We have a book that comes out in June and another that comes out around October every year. It’s very intense. But I enjoy writing. It’s worth the headache and worth the grueling schedule.


What are some challenges of writing a series?

The most challenging is the grueling schedule. [And] the deadlines. We’ll have a deadline for a first draft, a deadline for a second draft, and a deadline for edits. It’s physically draining. Sometimes I’ll work a 12-hour day. Sometimes, people who write series will say that they have a hard time keeping up with characters, or keeping up with what’s happened. But that’s not really a problem with me. Of course, [writing a children’s series] is not as complicated as if you were writing, say, a fantasy. You started out illustrating the Dork Diaries, but now your younger daughter, Nikki, has taken over the illustration. What’s it like working with her?

It’s really nice. I actually love working with [my daughters]. It’s exciting, and I think they like working with me, too. And your older daughter, Erin, helps out, too?

Yes. Erin is an assistant writer. She helps me directly. [But] I work more closely with Nikki. I’ll tell her what chapters we’re writing, and I’ll send her art instructions [for what] I want her to create. Generally, anything that she draws is because Erin and I tell her [what’s] happening. So the writing comes first.

Pretty much. Then, once we get the illustrations back, we’ll sit back down with the manuscript and go through and edit it. But we probably only go about a chapter at a time. [In the beginning], my editors and I sat down and tried to figure out the most efficient way to get the first draft of a manuscript done, and they suggested to write the whole thing [and] then go back and put the illustrations in. That does not work. [Laughs.] I’ve tried it a couple of times. If I had to write a Dork Diary without the illustrations, I would never finish it. I think it’s just seeing the artwork that inspires more writing. … I don’t get more than maybe a chapter ahead of Nikki. I don’t know if it’s a crutch. I’ve even said that maybe Nikki is my muse, or her artwork is my muse. I don’t know. We’ve tried over and over again to get the manuscripts done and put the illustrations in later, but Dork Diaries cannot be created in that manner.

Have you ever considered writing and publishing in another genre?

I have! I probably could very easily go to easy readers next, something between middle-grade and picture books. … I might seriously try young adult at some point, but I’m a little nervous about young adult because I think the older teenagers are going to read it and figure, Oh, this is silly. But with the Dork Diaries, you do touch on some serious issues that cross over to the YA audience.

Thank you for telling me that! I’ll have to remember that. Of course, when I look at the bestsellers list and there’s Divergent and Twilight and Harry Potter, I’m like, Am I ready to dive into that? I don’t think so. [Laughs.] Harry Potter started off as middle-grade, but, of course, as he aged, [the series] became more young adult. But when I look at Divergent, or even The Fault in Our Stars—there was the bedroom scene—I’m like, Ahh! I’m a mom! Even though my oldest daughter is married now, you’d think I could get over it, but, still. [Laughs.] So when I look at the content and the pacing and the romance in the young adult category, I get a little nervous. But it’s something that I would like to do at some point—or at least try. You’ve talked before about how the Dork Diaries protagonist, Nikki Maxwell, is white, but you’re African American. Do you feel that authors should step outside of their comfort zones and craft characters of races and ethnic backgrounds that differ from their own?

They have to do what they’re comfortable with. Authors of any race and gender should write—number one—what their heart and brain are leading them to write, and—number two—what they’re passionate about. When Nikki Maxwell popped into my head, she was a white girl. I don’t know why, but she just was. I could’ve said, “No, I’m going to make her black because I’m black and my daughters are black.” But I thought, Well, I’ll write her and see what her voice is like. Then I started writing, and it was really comfortable and I enjoyed it. … Authors of any race should be able to write other races. We see [white] authors writing people of color [all the time], so, to be fair, people of color should be able to write other races [as well]. It shouldn’t be a rule that if you’re black, you should only write black characters, but if you’re white, you can write Native American, or African American, or Asian or Latino. That’s why it irritates me a little bit when people make a big deal out of it. [Laughs.] I don’t mind getting asked the question, but then I’ll have people say, “But why are you doing

TALES FROM A MIDDLE-GRADE AUTHOR In our bonus outtakes, Russell talks about finding an agent, why it’s important to engage with readers, and more at writersdigest.com/january-15.

that?” and I’m like, “Wait a minute. Why is it that as a black author I have to be limited, but other authors are not?” Do you feel that minorities as a whole are underserved by the publishing industry?

Oh, most definitely! There’s always the fear that [a book with] an African-American character is not going to sell as well, or is not going to be as well-received by readers or the book-buying population. I can understand that, but I think some of it is created by the publishing industry. There was a bookstore—I think it was Borders—that would file all of the African-American books together in one section. If the books were nonfiction, I can see where it would make sense, because you do have AfricanAmerican history. But [they] put all of the AfricanAmerican books in the same section for fiction—which would not be such a problem for an adult author. But if you’re a children’s author, more than likely, the kids are going to be hanging out in the children’s section [where your books aren’t shelved]. … Then you had to worry about publishers thinking that your book is not going to sell to anybody but black people—and of course you want to sell to everybody. You want your book to be embraced by everybody in the world. As an African-American author, there are challenges. What are your future plans for the Dork Diaries series?

We have a movie coming out. It goes into development in 2015 and it will be released in 2016. Book 9 is the last book in the current contract we’re in, so hopefully we’ll be getting a new contract from Simon & Schuster. What other advice can you offer writers?

Write what you are comfortable with, write what you’re interested in and what makes you happy. Because if you are enjoying the writing experience, you’re probably going to be more successful with it. And finish it! Even on my [current] book, I have to remain disciplined and get the things done. So write a book you personally enjoy writing, and remain disciplined to get the manuscript completed. WD Tiffany Luckey is the associate editor of Writer’s Digest.


FUNNY YOU SHOULDASK A literary agent’s mostly serious answers to your mostly serious questions.

Dear FYSA, How are queries received by agents for young adult fiction? Is there a taint? Or do they get the same consideration as other genres? Sincerely, Untainted Love

submission. Even if a query is a little wobbly on the dismount but has a grain of something that rings a bell with me, I will dip into the writing to see what’s there, and that’s where all decisions begin and end.

Dear Untainted, Are you referring to rumored misconceptions that young adult is somehow easier to write, or that YA authors are in any way less capable than adult authors? Quite the contrary! YA is a robust and varied market, and if anything the readers are more voracious and loyal than in other areas of the bookstore. Think about a readership hopped up on hormones and angst, still willing to believe in magic and very able to call out heroes and posers on vast social media forums. That’s a stadium for some truly spectacular storytellers to show their best moves. YA authors, like those in any other genre, need to put blood, sweat and tears into every word. But this would be obvious to everyone writing in the genre as they are also aggressively reading in the genre … right? And not just focusing on the bestsellers, but taking the time to read titles of lesser fame, to ask librarians (those brilliant Book Buddhas, those gorgeous Genre Gurus) for recommendations. So rest assured that submissions from all desired genres get the same consideration in the inbox—the writing is the only thing that can “taint” a

Dear FYSA, In your response in the October 2014 issue to Non-Vanity Writer, you stated that “the publisher hires editors to edit your manuscript.” This causes me no little trepidation. As a rather strict grammarian, I am explicit in my use of language, the placement of modifiers in particular. (Speaking French, German and Latin tends to do that to one.) I’ve been horrified by the painfully low level of English language standards displayed in books published over the past 20 or so years. This trend has resulted in prose that is painfully dull, illogically [dis-]organized and flat-footedly pedestrian. Is there a way of making it plain to the publisher’s editors that grammatical and syntactical issues are areas of my own expertise and specific style? Is there a way of imparting that I will not abide anyone’s slaughtering my adverbs with pitifully ungrammatical, and illogical, misplacement? Sincerely, Grammatically Precise Dear Precise, Ugh. Drunken grammar. Sloppy syntax. Participles dangling like the corpses of so many broken piñatas.

That’s how I would describe my own writing. Further, I’m always in such a hurry that I sometimes forget to do a little thing called proofread. I’ve been known to fire off emails that include such spectacular phrases as, “Can you poop over those net figures to me by end of day?” and “Sorry! You are correct, I had this under the wrong labia in my e-files.” Thus, I sit on this side of the table, and leave the heavy lifting to the professionals. And so do many writers. I can tell you that by and large my clients are satisfied with the edits and revisions suggested; the rare occasion when we need to throw down is rarely about a misappropriated semicolon. Frankly, unless your last name is The Chicago Manual of Style, I would initially give the editor the benefit and courtesy of assuming they have your same skill level of deploying the English language. At the time that you sign with an agent, however, you might want to share with him your concerns so that at point of sale he might mention, “Oh, and this author is basically the love child of Lynne Truss and Billy Strunk, so make sure you are Johnny-on-the-Spot with the mechanics of the edits.” Then they’ll have fair warning if you decide to load a T-shirt gun with “stet” and blast away when you receive your copy edits. Because

ASK FUNNY YOU SHOULD ASK! Submit your own questions on the writing life, publishing or anything in between to writersdigest@

fwmedia.com with “Funny You Should Ask” in the subject line. Select questions (which may be edited for space or clarity) will be answered in future columns, and may appear on WritersDigest.com and in other WD publications.


PHOTO © TRAVIS POELLE

BY BARBARA POELLE

Even if a query is a little wobbly on the dismount but has a grain of something that rings a bell with me, I will dip into the writing to see what’s there.

rest assured that, as with the content of your work, the grammatical edits being made are suggestions to improve the writing, and you and your agent will have ample opportunity to review and address them before publication.

Dear FYSA, I am writing a nonfiction book proposal. But all literary agencies seem to have different guidelines and requirements for what the proposal should contain. It makes my head spin. If I slip up by not following one of the minor requirements, will that guarantee a rejection? Sincerely, Proposal Puzzled Dear Puzzled, Not from me. At first glance, I care about the overall appeal of the subject matter, the qualifying factors of the author that enable her to speak with authority on said subject matter, and the market need for a book (or yet another book) on this subject matter. If I can make a case for all three of those factors, I can easily

work with an author on shaping up a proposal to fit industry standards. A proposal has basic requirements that are fairly common across the board, and while some agencies may want to see different elements, I think working from an established resource [Michael Larsen’s How to Write a Book Proposal (WD Books) and Jeff Herman’s Write the Perfect Book Proposal are two I recommend] should keep you covered. In the end, what goes on your table of contents is going to mean a whole lot more than where you put the TOC in the proposal. WD

Barbara Poelle is vice president at Irene Goodman Literary Agency (irenegoodman. com), where she specializes in adult and young adult fiction.


YOURSTORY

CONTEST #59

First Things First Write the opening sentence to a story based on the photo prompt below.

THE CHALLENGE:

Agent Starr embraced the brunette, certain of two things: She was a good kisser, and she would try to kill him within the hour. —Jim Weaver

No one would ever believe it was me in that picture, but I will never forget those 45 seconds 25 years ago. —Clark Johnson

Nothing surprised Alicia more than Cassandra hiring her for the engagement photo shoot; nothing delighted Alicia more than ruining it. —Judine Brey

It all started as kind of a deal: She offered to fix his broken heart and he, in return, her secondhand tripod.

The last time I saw my sister alive she was kissing my husband. —Cliff Young

There were strict rules about time traveling, and kissing your deceased wife was breaking every one of them.

—Rafal Lato

Jenny was a recovering kiss-aholic, three years clean, when a nice stroll through Stoney Creek Park sent her rather absurdly into relapse. —Sloan Lofton

—Joanna Tegoli

Words failed me as a man I’d never seen before embraced me like a lover and said, “Play along or we’re both dead by midnight.” —Teri Edwards


He eased me in closer and closer, and just as our lips met, it remained very clear to me: I did not remember this man. —Sarah Sarver

Jaya hid her panic as she smiled up at Sam’s unsuspecting face and positioned her body out of the line of fire. —Lana O’Neill

PHOTO © ISTOCKPHOTO.COM/KNAPE

Out of more than 1,100 entries, Writer’s Digest editors and forum members selected the following 10 story openers.

ENTERYOURSTORY WRITE A SHORT STORY of 750 words or fewer based on the photo below. You can be funny, poignant, witty, etc.; it is, after all, your story. TO ENTER: Send your story via the online

CONTEST #63

63

submission form at writersdigest.com/ your-story-competition or via email to [email protected] (entries must be pasted directly into the body of the email; attachments will not be opened). NOTE: WD editors select the top entries and post them on our website (writersdigest.com/forum). Join us online in late January, when readers will vote for their favorite to help determine the winner(s)! (Simply register or log in to the free WD forum to participate.)

The winner(s) will be published in a future issue of Writer’s Digest. DON’T FORGET: Your name and mailing address. One entry per person. DEADLINE: January 14, 2015

GET


DIGITALLY!


W R I T EWRI R ’ STER’ S

EXERCISES AND TIPS FOR HONING SPECIFIC ASPECTS OF YOUR WRITING

Spi & C W

WRITING THE SPIRITUAL ESSAY B Y DI N TY W. M O O R E

I

f the essayist’s primary charge is to dive headlong into uncertainty, it is no wonder that writing about spiritual matters has always been front and center in the personal essay tradition. The Confessions of St. Augustine, written in the late fourth century by a Christian bishop and theologian, may indeed be the world’s first memoir, and all of these centuries later the book remains powerful and startling. Why? Because Augustine was honest. He didn’t claim that his Christian beliefs were uncomplicated or that he fully understood every difficult aspect of his faith. He went straight to the doubt and contradictions. The spiritual memoir may exist within a specific religious tradition—Judaic, Islamic, Sufic, Hindu, Christian, Zoroastrian—or it may be rooted entirely outside of organized religion. There are, in fact, spiritual writings from atheists and agnostics, from those who embrace New Age philosophies, and from those so uncertain of their basic beliefs that they have no idea where to place themselves. What unites the spiritual essay is the quest to explore life’s basic mysteries: Is there a God (or Higher Power, or unexplained force that knits the universe together)? How do we know? What should we do with our doubt or certainty about what this God or power expects of us? If we are to live our beliefs, what is the proper way to act? Philip Zaleski, editor of the discontinued Best American Spiritual Writing anthology, has defined the genre in a similar fashion, saying that spiritual writing “deals with the bedrock of human existence—why we are here, where we are going and how we can comport ourselves with dignity along the way.”


All you need to write a spiritual essay is honest curiosity about the questions that surround us. Faith, by definition, means we don’t know for sure. But perhaps some people do feel 100 percent certain. Well, then, let me say this: If you feel altogether sure that every question and mystery can be answered by following the teachings of a particular religious tradition, or, alternately, if you are steadfast and entirely secure in your atheism, then enjoy the benefits of your certainty, sleep well at night, use your confidence to do good in the world, and don’t bother tackling the spiritual essay. If you are conflicted, however … Ah, that essay is just waiting to be written. PUTTING SPIRITUAL CONFLICT ON THE PAGE Understand that the spiritual essay is not meant to be a forum to attack the beliefs of others. The conflict within a spiritual essay is not between different religious traditions, alternate interpretations of scripture or competing opinions on which faith is the one true faith. The conflict of the spiritual essay is internal. Most often, it has to do with our inability to be sure of what our spiritual convictions demand of us, or with our failure to live up to those expectations given our clearly imperfect human nature. I was raised Catholic and attended Catholic schools straight through to the end of high school, back in the old days when nuns wore black habits and the parish priest ran not only the school but the neighborhood as well. My second book, The Accidental Buddhist: Mindfulness, Enlightenment, and Sitting Still, American Style, was an extended spiritual essay examining how I eventually fell away from the teachings of the Catholic Church

Spi & C W

and found myself more attracted to Zen meditation and Buddhist mindfulness. Buddhism—more philosophy than religion—is about 2,500 years old, and much of what we know as Buddhism today is deeply intertwined with Asian cultures, so a good portion of the book explored the awkward fit between this different way of thinking and 20th-century America in the age of the cell phone, the Internet and instant gratification. The book focused as well, however, on my own efforts and failures attempting to live a mindful lifestyle and embrace the basic teachings of the philosophy. I didn’t have to disprove the tradition of Catholicism to make my point. In fact, many portions of the book explore my journey into my Catholic past, including time spent with a Jesuit priest who was also a Zen teacher. I ended up finding a great deal in common between the roots of my Catholic tradition and the basic tenets of Buddhism, and I hope that I succeeded in treating both belief systems with respect. Writing that book taught me much about writing, of course—every new piece of writing we create teaches us something about writing—but also about myself and how I want to act in the world. That’s the true power of spiritual writing. It is not just about reaching others, though giving comfort and inspiration to others can certainly be counted among the blessings. Writing the spiritual essay is about discovering parts of yourself.

G S Below, you’ll find a list of prompts that will get you started writing your spiritual essay. It’s important to note that these prompts are not strict guidelines or rigid maps. If one seems to direct you down a certain path, but your instincts suggest a different path, follow your instincts. The goal is to discover your spiritual questions, not mine. 1. How do you pray? Do you kneel down beside the

bed the way a child is taught to do it? Do you fold your hands? Do you even use words? Can action be prayer? What about meditation? 2. If you knew for sure that there was no Heaven or

Hell, would you act differently in your life? 3. What does sacred mean to you? 4. Write a brief essay titled “My First Sin.” You

needn’t define sin the way a priest or rabbi might define it. The definition is up to you. 5. Author Tobias Wolff suggests that writing the per-

sonal essay calls upon us to “surrender for a time our pose of unshakable rectitude, and to admit that we are, despite our best intentions, subject to all manner of doubt and weakness and foolish wanting.” Are you guilty of acting righteous and sure in your life when in truth you are probably less certain than you seem to others? 6. Rainer Maria Rilke offers this advice: “Be patient

THREE QUICK TIPS 1. START SMALL. Don’t attempt to answer all of the great religious mysteries in your first effort. How did we get here? What happens after we die? There are 1,000page books that explore those questions without ever reaching a firm resolution. Look for a smaller piece of the puzzle of life and start exploring there. 2. BE SPECIFIC. Stories from your past or examples from the lives of those you know well help to illustrate either your confusion or the tentative realizations you are exploring. These scenes and stories can be far more convincing than abstract explanations and are much more compelling on the page. 3. READ WIDELY. The genre has changed since St. Augustine wrote his weighty tomes. Great essays from myriad traditions can be found at Beliefnet (beliefnet.com).

toward all that is unsolved in your heart and … try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue.” What is unsolved in your heart? What questions have you locked away? 7. Write about your parents’ faith. Were they devout,

or did it sometimes seem as if they were just going through the motions? Did their faith or strongest beliefs change as they grew older? 8. You’ve heard the expression “charity begins at

home.” What does that mean to you? Is being charitable to others part of your spiritual beliefs? 9. Many religions have a tradition of sacred dance,

but why stop there? Do you believe there is such a thing as sacred gardening? Sacred walking? Sacred child rearing?

Excerpted from Crafting the Personal Essay © 2010 by Dinty W. Moore, with permission from Writer’s Digest Books.


CLICHÉS TO AVOID IN CHRISTIAN FICTION B Y JE FF GE R KE

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very genre has its set of pitfalls to avoid, and Christian fiction is no exception. If you are aware of the most common missteps before you start writing, you’ll be able to steer clear of them and focus on delivering a satisfying and realistic story. Here are three of the genre’s biggest offenders.

1. THE DEUS EX MACHINA In Greek theater, tragedies especially, the human characters made a royal mess of things. And then, when it looked like there was simply no solution, a god would appear and sort everything out. “You marry her; you apologize. You, you have to die—sorry.” Zap. This has come to be known as deus ex machina (literally “god from the machine,” because a mechanical crane was used to lower the actor who played the god who brought about a resolution to the story). Today we say a novel has a deus ex machina ending if someone or something comes in and magically fixes all of your characters’ problems. Such a literary device worked in ancient Greece, but I hope you can see how using it in modern fiction is a copout. It’s too convenient, and it doesn’t arise from the story. Christian novelists, who are used to dealing with supernatural elements, are especially prone to writing endings like this. Let’s say you’re writing an inspirational Western. The bad guys have surrounded the good guys and outnumber them a hundred to one. The pretty schoolmarm is in the clutches of the antagonist, and the stampede is coming. The hero is tied to the train tracks, and the locomotive is bearing down. There’s no good ending in sight for the good guys. But instead of letting the bad guys win or showing the hero’s ingenious escape to save the day, you bring in an angel. Suddenly a bright light appears, and the cattle stop in their tracks. The angel points, and a lightning bolt melts the locomotive’s engine, stopping it. She zaps the antagonist and levitates the schoolmarm into the hero’s (magically untied) arms. She sweeps her angelic wings, and all the villains are turned to dust. Huzzah. As readers, we’re certainly glad things worked out the way we wanted, but this ending doesn’t feel right—it feels like the writer cheated. The resolution we were hoping for happened, but no one in the story did anything to bring it about. If the angel was planning to fix everything, why


didn’t she just do it at the outset and save the characters from running around? The ending feels too convenient and random. Even if the bad guys had won, at least the story would have finished in a logical way. Your ending has to arise from your beginning. It has to make sense and grow organically from the story you’ve written. The best endings feel inevitable; they feel right. As a Christian novelist, you might be thinking, I write stories that include a spiritual component, so why not use that component at the climax of my story? Didn’t the characters pray? Don’t I want to tell readers that prayer works? What could illustrate that better than having God show up and do something miraculous at the climax? The problem is that this is a cheesy ending. It’s still God from the machine—an inorganic resolution to your story. It’s also not an accurate portrayal of the Christian life. You must figure out a way for your hero to pull off the victory, perhaps using divine guidance received earlier in the story. Don’t let God save the day by direct intervention. There are some exceptions. When your story is expressly about the power of God, then sometimes seeing that power displayed is the most organic resolution to your story. For instance, in my sixth novel, Operation: Firebrand— Deliverance, I tell a story about God’s intervention. One character is questioning God’s existence. He’s heard that God is working among a fiercely persecuted people (North Koreans), and he feels he needs to see something like that himself. Throughout the story, strange and possibly miraculous events are occurring. There have been reports of titanic warriors appearing and aiding the oppressed as they flee for safety. But our American characters have not witnessed this. During the climax of the novel, the character who is questioning God’s existence does something stupidly heroic, thinking he will die in the process—mainly because he has concluded that God won’t intervene. In that action sequence, mysterious warriors appear and help him escape. He thinks it’s his own team coming to bail him out, but when he gets away he encounters his own team at the rendezvous point. Who were those guys back there? It ends up being the answer to his question about faith. Even though he is unsuccessful in what he was trying

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to do, he realizes now that there is something to God’s supernatural power. I believe God sometimes meets us right where we are and gives us exactly what we need, even though most of the time it seems He wouldn’t do so. Technically, that story’s climax uses a deus ex machina. Something besides human intervention helped our hero escape. But because the point of the whole story had been about God’s power and intervention, I felt it was justified. Writers should be cautious about using such an ending. Almost always err on the side of not using divine intervention to bring your story to a close. HOW TO SIDESTEP IT

The way your story resolves must organically arise from how the story began. Here’s another way of saying it: Your ending must be built into your beginning. I can’t tell you how many unpublished novels I’ve read in which the ending has absolutely nothing to do with the beginning. For 200 pages we’ve been dealing with this guy’s decision of whether or not to euthanize his elderly mother who has been in a coma for 20 years, but the ending is about him foiling a bank robbery. Or for 300 pages we’ve been following this woman’s story to free a group of prisoners, but the ending is a courtroom drama in which the hero proves that a law about building codes should be illegal. You want to strive for something I call plant and payoff: You have to establish something before you can use it (the plant). Conversely, if you establish something you must do something with it (the payoff ). These principles apply to how you begin and end your story. How you begin your novel establishes what your story is going to be about. I know some novelists like to launch into a story with no clue about where it’s heading. That’s fine. Even writers who use detailed outlines sometimes make adjustments when they have a better idea while writing. So maybe you shouldn’t worry about the ending as you write. Maybe you should just write the story and see where you end up—as long as you go back and fix the beginning. Once you’ve found your story and discovered where it’s going, you can rewrite your earlier scenes so the reader will be able to see (in retrospect only, perhaps) that the seeds of the book’s resolution were perceptible from the start. Your story’s ending must grow organically from how it began and developed along the way. Ensure that it does, and you’re well on your way to making sure your reader is satisfied with your story.

2. THE STORY SERMON The second thing you want to avoid in Christian fiction is the book that hinges on a sermon (or a Bible study lesson, a Sunday school lesson and so on) that tells the hero what to do to fix the problem. I don’t know whether to call this a form of telling (rather than showing), a fiction cliché, an agenda-driven plot or just a personal pet peeve of mine. It’s clearly all of the above.

Your ending has to arise from your beginning. It has to make sense and grow organically from the story you’ve written. The best endings feel inevitable; they feel right. We’re reading this novel, and it’s fairly good so far. The protagonist has some pretty weighty matters he needs to think about; maybe he’s doing something he knows he shouldn’t, or maybe he’s seeking wisdom. At the height of his dilemma, he steps into a church or Bible study and listens to a sermon. Would you believe that what the pastor says is exactly what he needed to hear? The text of this message contains chapter and verse for what the hero ought to do. He leaves the church relieved that God has solved his dilemma for him. Well, doesn’t this happen in real life? Don’t we sometimes hear God’s voice as we’re listening to a sermon, even if what God tells us doesn’t have direct bearing on what the speaker is actually talking about? Of course. That’s one of the reasons we go to church, after all. So what’s the issue? The issue is that this makes for bad fiction—overly convenient fiction. Just because something happens in real life doesn’t mean it will work on the page. Or are you ready to describe your characters’ every trip to the bathroom? That happens in real life, too. Including a sermon in the middle of a novel is a bad idea because it stops the story and makes the reader listen directly to the author. There’s a reason kids squirm in church: It’s boring to them. Making a reader sit through a full sermon is the equivalent of asking a 5-year-old to stay interested in the adult pastor’s words. The typical reader won’t be able to do it and won’t try. It’s also a bad idea because the reader feels like the story is preaching to her. Your book is already in big


WRITER’S WORKBOOK

trouble if you are thinking, If people aren’t going to go to church to hear about my beliefs, then I’m going to bring the sermon to them, packaged in a story they’ll like. If the reader wants a lecture she’ll go to church, not to the bookstore. HOW TO SIDESTEP IT

Am I saying that fiction must be about funny or entertaining things, “lite” topics without any substance? Of course not. Good novels have a theme or a message or even a note of warning or challenge. With hope, your novel will have this, too. Two of my novels, Operation: Firebrand—Crusade and Operation: Firebrand—Deliverance, tackle serious humanitarian issues: modern slavery in Sudan and North Korean tyranny to its people, respectively. I wanted to make people aware of what’s going on in these regions. But in those novels, story was king, and characters reigned over message. There’s a difference between writing a novel to prove a point and writing a novel about a character and finding out later that you’ve made an interesting commentary on some theme that resonates with you and readers. Don’t come to fiction to prove a point or teach a lesson. Just tell your story and let the chips fall where they may. 3. THE BAD BOY FINDS SALVATION The final mistake we’ll look at is probably the oldest and worst cliché in Christian fiction. Usually it’s a story about a good church girl who falls in love with the local bad boy (who is inevitably named either Damien or Devlin). He’s rakishly handsome, of course, but forbidden because he’s a heathen. Throughout the book, the heroine reaches out to this lost soul with the Good News, to no avail. Meanwhile, our lusty heroine is fighting her own temptations to throw off all restraint while she simultaneously doubts God’s goodness. Just when it looks like our good girl is going to do the right thing and turn away from her heart’s desire so she can stay pure, God removes the scales from Damien/ Devlin’s eyes, and he is radically saved. Now he’s off the “Thou Shalt Not” list, and she can marry him. It’s not always a romance that commits this mistake. Sometimes a godly mother is praying for her prodigal son, a godly wife is praying for her straying husband or a wealthy but sad widower is praying for that cute young woman at Starbucks he wants to date.


Whatever the case, the story ends happily once the targeted person gets the clue and comes to Christ. Don’t do that. Don’t let your happy ending be the lost person finding salvation. The fact that it’s a cliché ought to be reason enough to steer you away from using this device in your novel. But the main problem is that such a portrayal gives a false picture of Christianity. A lost character becoming a Christian in a Christian novel is as realistic as Cinderella getting married to the prince in the fairy tale. It makes for a nice, tidy story, but it doesn’t reflect reality. Marriage is hard, even in fiction. So is the Christian life. Sometimes Christian novelists, in their zeal to reach readers with the gospel, do those very readers a disservice. If we depict Christianity as the all-happy, end-all solution to life’s problems, what will happen if someone takes our advice and becomes a Christian based on our recommendation? When that person discovers the bills don’t get miraculously paid, the disease doesn’t magically disappear and Mr. or Mrs. Right doesn’t instantly come along, what will happen to that person’s faith? HOW TO SIDESTEP IT

It’s been my experience that a person becomes a Christian when his problems start—not when they’ve been solved. Suddenly he appears on the devil’s radar, and Big D sends a boatload of troubles his way to discourage him about this new Christianity thing. In my six novels I’ve had exactly two people get saved. In both trilogies it happened in book 3, after both the character and the reader have had a good long time to see what real Christianity looks like in the lives of other characters. And in both instances life doesn’t get instantly better for the person who’s just come to Christ. In the first one in particular, his life gets miserable pretty quickly after singing “I Surrender All.” It’s not wrong to show characters seeing the light and coming to Christ in your fiction. Just don’t depict it as an “and they lived happily ever after” ending. Walking with Christ is hard and lonely and doesn’t usually result in a miraculous change in the person’s life circumstances. There is, for the Christian, an ultimate happy ending, of course. Just don’t let coming to Christ be the happy ending in your Christian novel. Excerpted from The Art and Craft of Writing Christian Fiction © 2014 by Jeff Gerke, with permission from Writer’s Digest Books.

HANDLING CONTROVERSIAL LANGUAGE IN CHRISTIAN FICTION B Y JE FF GE R KE

“F

rankly, my dear, I don’t give a care.” Doesn’t quite work, does it? Give a rip? A flip? Frankly, my dear, I don’t care one way or the other? And yet in Christian fiction, profanity is verboten. Many readers who enjoy inspirational fiction want to do so without having to expose themselves to foul language. So how do we portray characters who use profanity if we’re not allowed to use it in our books? It’s one of the great dilemmas of writing Christian fiction. Many people come to Christian fiction to experience good stories but want to remain untouched by the vilest elements of the culture—and I’m one of them. Having to read profanity in something I’m reading spoils the experience for me. In my years in Christian publishing I have had a number of disagreements with fellow publishing professionals on this topic. Some feel—quite vehemently—that avoiding profanity is inherently dishonest, inauthentic. The way to reach the lost, they argue, is to show lost people doing lost things and talking the way lost people do, and then to show Christians living out their faith in the story. Others want to include a watered-down version of profanity in Christian fiction—a PG-rated vocabulary. The words they prefer usually have a one-to-one correlation with actual profanity. Still other folks want to eliminate cussing in Christian fiction entirely. I’m of that school of thought. That doesn’t help us with our dilemma, however. How do you create profane characters without resorting to profanity? Or should you darn the torpedoes and use whatever profanity that character would use?

UNDERSTANDING THE DEBATE To get a better sense of this debate, I surveyed some of my published Christian novelist friends to hear how they deal with this issue. Here are some of their proposed solutions. 1. USE ALL THE PROFANITY YOU WANT.

You can choose to let your foul characters talk the way they would really talk. Though it may pain you to do so, you can simply let it all hang out and hope your publisher will let it stay in the finished manuscript.

One problem with this is that your typical Christian fiction publisher will not let you get away with this. And it’s not because they’re prudes. It’s because they know all it takes to doom your book is one complaint from one reader. She posts one-star reviews on Amazon and Goodreads. She then marches to the Christian bookstore where she bought the book, complains to the manager and says she’ll never buy from that store again. A few more complaints later, your book is pulled from the shelves and sent back to the publisher, along with a nasty letter about how the bookstore owner will never trust that publishing company again. You obviously don’t want this to happen. Is using profanity indiscriminately worth the risk? That’s for you to decide, but keep in mind that there are realistic alternatives to having your characters curse every other page.

It is quite possible to create the feeling of profanity without the use of profanity. In fact, doing so is superior to using profanity in your fiction. It’s the better way, in my opinion. 2. USE WATERED-DOWN PROFANITY.

In this solution you come as close to the real four-letter words as you can, but you use alternate phrasing that isn’t considered as bad. In other words, you let your characters be as foul-mouthed as you can possibly get away with, while pushing the envelope. I’m a big believer in Ephesians 4:29, which says we should allow no unwholesome word to proceed from our mouths, but only those words that serve to build up or educate the hearer. So I don’t cuss. I think, however, that the latter phrase in that verse will allow me to tell you what I mean here, for purposes of education. In this proposed solution, you use words like crap, dang, heck and geez, all of which offend me personally but are in the daily vocabulary of many people who love


WRITER’S WORKBOOK

the Lord with all their hearts, so I won’t judge. To me, this solution makes your characters seem like B-level foul mouths. They’d like to cuss, but their moms won’t let them. It’s hard to make people seem depraved when they always exercise self-control over their tongues and hold back from actual profanity. In that sense, my opinion is that this solution actually works against what you’re trying to do: You want to create someone truly foul, but you end up creating a wimp.

DWAYNE

Little blond Barbie dolls. Cute. Dwayne moved through the house with the silence of a roach. He entered the girl’s playroom and crept inside. Must be nice to have a playroom and a big room of your own. He bent over the large dollhouse, where a blond plastic bimbo sat askew in her chair having a burger and fries with a redheaded plastic bimbo. Moonlight cast soft shadows on the toy cabinets and dress-up bin and pink beanbag chairs in the playroom.

3. USE EUPHEMISMS.

Typical. Delicious.

This is the most commonly employed solution to the profanity dilemma: Let characters be as foul-mouthed as you want them to be—but don’t spell it out.

molded smile with the tip of his hunting knife. The stiff

Dwayne picked up the blond doll and caressed its yellow hair fell across the edge of the blade. Hmm.

When Jerry learned of Mary’s affair, he let us all know exactly how he felt about her character, her physical attributes and choice aspects of her ancestry.

He snatched the locks in his thumb and fingers, slightly less dexterous because of the rubber gloves. He put his left hand over the doll’s face, held the knife to the scalp, and pulled the hair across the blade. The

Louise’s anger grew throughout the day. Finally, after

strands came away in his hand reluctantly, like pulling a

kicking her toe on a table leg, she let loose with a string

wing off a bird.

of profanity that left the ochre paint two shades paler.

He rotated the defiled doll before his eyes and felt the excitement rise in his neck. Pretty little thing.

This is the literary equivalent to how old movies used to handle sex scenes. The door shut and the screen faded to black. We knew what was going on, but it wasn’t demonstrated for us onstage. You can accomplish the same thing in your fiction. In Internet parlance, we speak of metadata. That refers to data about data. Metaknowledge is knowledge about knowledge. It’s a way of describing something by taking one step back to tell us what it is and what attributes it has. This solution to profanity could be called metaprofanity. It’s information about the profanity. We don’t see the swearing itself, but we see a description of the swearing. You have to be more creative (and use more humor) to write this way. Anybody can write a cuss word, but it takes real talent to give us the feeling of the cussing without literally spelling it out.

Dwayne dropped the doll to the carpet and stepped into Camille’s bedroom. The kindergartner lay sideways on her Powerpuff Girls sheets, blond hair arrayed over the pillow like a yellow skirt. Pretty little thing. LORRAINE

Lorraine gazed at the martini just down the bar from where she sat. She shut her eyes, almost tasting it. Her own glass rattled when she lifted it to her lips, the ice betraying the tremors in her hand. Water. All it did was chill her. But at least it kept the gravel out of her voice. “You really used to be a model?” the guy asked. Lorraine forced herself to look at him. He was bulbous and sweaty, with meaty fingers like a stack of Michelin tires. The thought of him touching her … “Yeah,” she said, “really. Magazines and catalogs and sh—” She censored herself. Maybe this guy was one of

FINDING A BETTER WAY We’ve looked at three proposed solutions for how Christian novelists can handle profanity in their fiction. Now let’s look at a better way. Because I value showing over telling, let me illustrate with a pair of examples. See if you can spot what’s missing from these two passages.


those pervs who didn’t mind adultery but couldn’t stand foul language. “Stuff.” His eyes widened and wandered somewhere south of her face. “That’s really something, huh?” “Yeah. So you sure you don’t need the Percocet anymore?” He’d said it was his wife’s painkiller, but there was no need to remind him that he was betraying her. It

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might blow the whole thing. Lorraine stamped down a shudder. She needed a smoke. His eyes came back north. “Huh? Oh, right. No, no,

working against you. Conversely, the absence of profanity in a book does not mean you cannot create hard-edged or profane characters, as I hope I’ve demonstrated above.

she doesn’t—I mean, it’ll be fine.” Lorraine stood up and pressed herself against his shoulder. “I don’t know about you, honey, but I’m ready to get somewhere private with you.” He almost fell getting off the barstool. “Yeah, sure. Definitely.” He dropped a twenty on the bar and headed to the door, gripping her hand on his arm as if he thought she might run away. She was going to run away, all right, but not just yet. She watched his jowls bounce as he walked and again thought of that face on hers. “Just … let’s go grab the Percocet first, okay?” “What? I can’t go home with—” She yanked her hand away and stopped. “You’re going to get it first, you hear me. Or you don’t get,” she said, pulling the hem of her shirt wide open for him to have a look, “what you want.” His eyes bugged. “Right. Right. Okay. Come on.” She smoothed her shirt and preceded him to the door. Perv.

Were the characters in those examples foul? Were they profane? Did you feel their depravity in the seat of your being? If I did my job right, you were horrified by Dwayne and disgusted by Lorraine. Surely these are the kind of people who would use profanity. Foulness pervaded their character. Even if you didn’t actually see or hear them using four-letter words, you felt a deep corruption oozing through their skin. Here’s the point: It is quite possible to create the feeling of profanity without the use of profanity. In fact, doing so is superior to using profanity in your fiction. It’s the better way, in my opinion. In his novel Rising Sun, Michael Crichton introduces a foul-mouthed detective character. He drops the F-bomb as commonly as the words the, or and and. He is truly the most disgusting, pathetic character I’ve ever seen on the pages of a novel. This reaction may not have been what Crichton was aiming for. He probably wanted this character to seem intimidating and street-smart, but I just thought he was a sad and empty wretch, consumed by self-loathing. In other words, the free and frequent use of profanity in a book does not necessarily create the hard-edged character you may be trying for. You may find the profanity

SHOWING INSTEAD OF TELLING You’re likely familiar with the writing advice “Show, don’t tell,” because it applies to so many aspects of writing craft—including the use of profanity in Christian fiction. Anybody can write, “She was angry because of how he’d treated her on the plane.” It takes a lot more skill to communicate that she was angry and that the cause of her anger was how he’d treated her on the plane—and to do so without saying it outright. Telling is cheating. It’s lazy storytelling. It reveals a low view of the reader’s intelligence and a lack of trust in the author’s own ability to convey information on paper. It stops the story cold, removes all mystery and bores the reader. It is, in short, a bad idea. Showing, on the other hand, is the land where the masters dwell. When it comes to communicating that a character is lost or profane, the frequent use of profanity in the manuscript is telling instead of showing. It takes more creativity and skill—not to mention more words— to communicate that the character is lost or profane without the use of profanity itself. In other words, it’s showing. Which is more effective: Crichton’s detective or Dwayne and Lorraine? Which method most perfectly conveys the dissoluteness of the character? Which method more insidiously reveals the person’s degraded inner state? Which method better shows profanity? Telling conveys head knowledge to the reader, and only faintly at that. Showing conveys heart knowledge. When you show something to your reader, she feels it at the center of her being. It enters her mind deeply. She remembers it well. That’s what you want to accomplish when you have a foul character. You want your reader to feel it in her toes. The next time you bring a debauched character onstage in your fiction, I challenge you to consider how you can reveal the character’s foulness through scene, action and thought instead of the direct use of profanity. WD

Excerpted from The Art and Craft of Writing Christian Fiction © 2014 by Jeff Gerke, with permission from Writer’s Digest Books. Visit writersdigestshop.com and enter the code “Workbook” for a 10 percent WD reader discount on this and other books to help you hone your craft.


STANDOUTMARKETS An exclusive look inside the markets that can help you make your mark.

BY CRIS FREESE

FOR YOUR BOOKS:

The Permanent Press THE INSIDE STORY FROM: MISSION: “ Our

Martin and Judith Shepard, publishers

goal has always been to choose and give voice to fine novelists,

most of whom are too good and unique to suit the Big Five conglomerates. Our satisfaction comes from earning more literary awards, per title, than any other publisher in America.”

WHAT STANDS OUT & WHY:

Publishers Martin and Judith Shepard have spent nearly four decades building a strong reputation in the publishing industry. The Permanent Press has been profiled in The New York Times and in 1998 was honored with the Literary Market Place’s LMP Award for Editorial Achievement. In recent years, Leonard Rosen’s All Cry Chaos won the Macavity Award for Best First Mystery Novel and was a finalist for the Edgar Award and the Chautauqua Prize in 2012, and Chris Knopf’s Dead Anyway won the 2013 Nero Award. —C F


FOUNDED: 1978. PUBLISHES: 16 new titles per year. FOCUS: What we are looking for is something artfully written: The way the story is told is as important as—if not more so than—the plot itself. ADVANCES: $1,000. SIZE OF PRINT RUNS: 800– 4,000. KEY TO SUCCESSFUL SUBMISSIONS: Something fresh that catches our attention within the first two or three pages. WHAT MAKES US UNIQUE: We receive no outside grants or funding, and have kept close to 95 percent of the books we’ve published in print here in our warehouse, on our own property (nearly 500 titles in all), believing if they were good enough to publish originally, why not keep them in print? WE MIGHT BE A GOOD FIT FOR YOU IF: You think your novel, be it a mystery or [mainstream] fiction, matches our interests. We receive roughly 5,000 submissions each year, and half our list consists of authors we’ve published before. HOW TO SUBMIT: Send us your first chapter(s) (12–24 pages maximum) by postal mail, including an SASE, to: Attn: Judith Shepard, The Permanent Press, 4170 Noyac Road, Sag Harbor, NY

11963. Include a cover letter with a short summary of your work, approximate page and word count, a brief author bio and contact information. No simultaneous submissions. DETAILED GUIDELINES: thepermanentpress.com/index.php/ submissions.html. WHAT MAKES A SUBMISSION STAND OUT? Being able to get involved with a story from the first page on (often from the first paragraph), making an early connection with the major character. [We look for] a story that we’ve not seen or read before.

WHAT TOPICS ARE YOU ACTIVELY SEEKING? Quality fiction and quality mysteries. Half our list is usually mysteries.

WHAT COMMON MISTAKES DO YOU

Bad cover letters in [poorly] constructed sentences, telling us that their book can be a bestseller or more than we need to know about their literary history. We want to read a submission in the same way a browser would open a book in a bookstore and see if [he] wants to go on. SEE?

FOR YOUR SHORT STORIES:

American Short Fiction MISSION:

“Issued triannually, American Short Fiction


Although it asks for a small

publishes work by emerging and established voices; stories

reading fee, American Short Fiction

that dive into the wreck, that stretch the reader between recognition and surprise, that conjure a particular world with

boasts a competitive pay rate and

delicate expertise—stories that take a different way home.”

a healthy balance of seasoned and novice writers. In addition to its print

1991. PUBLISHES: Three times per year. 2,500. PAYMENT: $250–500 per story. PAST NOTABLE WRITERS: Joyce Carol Oates, Dagoberto Gilb, Don Lee, Susan Steinberg, Ander Monson, Maud Casey, Chris Bachelder, Benjamin Percy. HOW TO SUBMIT: Send one story at a time (including a $3 reading fee) via the online submission manager at americanshortfiction. submittable.com/submit. DETAILED GUIDELINES: americanshortfiction.org/submityourwork. FOUNDED:

CIRCULATION:

version, the journal publishes additional stories of no more than 2,000 words online, giving submitting authors a second shot at being accepted for publication—not to mention worldwide exposure. American Short Fiction also offers a short fiction contest, which awards $1,000 and publication to the winner. Works first appearing in the journal have been selected for many highly respected anthologies, including Best American Short Stories, The O. Henry Prize Stories and The Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses. —C F

FOR YOUR FREELANCE WRITING:

The Progressive MISSION:

“The Progressive is a monthly magazine covering


politics, education, economics, culture and progressivism.

The Progressive is 75 percent

The magazine’s founder, Senator Robert La Follette, felt the

freelance written, offering no f

magazine should seek to defend the public interest against

sshortage of opportunities for writers

private greed. Current editor Ruth Conniff believes that this

tto land a byline. The magazine

goal is more important now than ever before.”

ccontinues to look for new and outstanding voices to acknowledge and comment on

FOUNDED: 1909. PUBLISHES: Monthly. CIRCULATION: 47,000. PAYMENT: $500–1,300 per article. PAST NOTABLE WRITERS: Jane Addams, Noam Chomsky, Clarence Darrow, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Jack London, George Orwell, Upton Sinclair. HOW TO SUBMIT: Queries or manuscripts, accompanied by an SASE, should be submitted to: Matthew Rothschild, Editor, The Progressive, 409 East Main St., Madison, WI 53703; or via email to editorial@ progressive.org. DETAILED GUIDELINES: progressive.org/ mag/guidelines.

current social and political issues. The Progressive and its editors have been recognized for their excellence, and were the recipients of the George Polk Award in 1996. The Progressive Media Project, an affiliate of The Progressive, provides another outlet for writers by distributing op-ed commentary from freelancers to many newspapers across the U.S. (progressivemediaproject. org/pages/submissions). —C F

Cris Freese is the associate editor of WD Books and the Writer’s Market series.


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Paul Hereford does not feel like someone who is coming home. As he turns onto the two-lane road leading into his hometown, he has no idea he’s about to embark on a life-changing odyssey that will bring him both heartache and redemption. After decades of a political life and a literary career on the East Coast, Paul settles into his new haven to write one more book. He’s the author of numerous novels, but now he’s trying something new: serious nonfiction. As he seeks out former friends and new acquaintances, however, the writing becomes more difficult, the memories become clearer, and the characters become more familiar. Paul’s childhood best friend, his high school crush, and the little neighbor girl are just a few of the people that create the seasoned writer’s new world—and help him understand exactly what he needs. The Vampires of Eden shares one man’s evocative journey of atonement and the pursuit of peace as he discovers that the past is never really past.

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CONFERENCESCENE Events to advance your craft, connections and career.

BY LINDA FORMICHELLI

Inland Northwest Christian Writers Conference This friendly, inclusive two-day conference welcomes writers of Christian and secular work alike— and it won’t break the bank.

MAKES THE CONFERENCE UNIQUE:

This conference is faith-based but all-inclusive, covering all forms of writing and even offering a Teen Track ($40, including lunch) for writers ages 13–18. It’s also one of the lowest-priced regional conferences in the West. HOW MANY ATTEND: Around 150. FACULTY: The keynote speaker will be James L. Rubart, bestselling author of the Wellspring Trilogy. Other instructors/presenters include suspense novelist Brandilyn Collins (Gone to Ground), inspirational authors Kurt Bubna (Epic Grace: Chronicles of a Recovering Idiot) and Jeff Kennedy (Father, Son, and the Other One: Experiencing the Holy Spirit as a Transforming, Empowering Reality in Your Life), and writing coach


Mick Silva (YourWritersGroup.com). HIGHLIGHTS: Editors and agents will take pitches from writers in small group sessions and will offer 15minute critiques of writing samples— all included in the registration fee. In the Teen Track, young scribes will be challenged with writing exercises, skill games, contests and more. IF YOU GO: Check the website a couple of weeks before the conference; some workshop handouts will be available for download ahead of time. FOR MORE INFO: inlandnwchristianwriters. com/conference.

Women Writers’ Winter Retreat At this intimate getaway, women learn the craft of writing while enjoying accommodations at a cozy bed and breakfast just miles from the scenic Ohio coast of Lake Erie.

Feb. 28–March 2, 2015. WHERE: Homestead House Bed & Breakfast, Willoughby, Ohio. PRICE: Complete Weekend Package (includes all sessions, plus meals and lodging): $315 for single rooms; $235 for shared rooms. Weekend Commute (includes all sessions, lunches and dinners): $155. WHAT MAKES THE CONFERENCE UNIQUE: Writers work on their craft in a small, cozy setting perfect for those who want a chance to personally connect with instructors and fellow writers. WHO IT’S PERFECT FOR: Women writers of fiction, nonfiction and poetry, from novice to published. HOW MANY ATTEND: 24 maximum. FACULTY: Presenters include T.L. Champion, writing coach and author of EarthShattering [Story] Climaxes; Gail Bellamy, Ph.D., author, executive food editor of Restaurant Hospitality WHEN:

INLAND NORTHWEST CHRISTIAN WRITERS CONFERENCE PHOTO © MINDY PELTIER; WOMEN WRITERS’ WINTER RETREAT PHOTO © DEEANNA ADAMS; TURNAGE THEATER PHOTO © BEAUFORT COUNTY ARTS COUNCIL

WHEN: March 20–21, 2015. WHERE: Eastpoint Church, Spokane Valley, Wash. PRICE: Nov. 15–Feb. 1: $125. After Feb. 1: $135. Price includes lunch and dinner on Friday and lunch on Saturday. Special event rate on reserved rooms at the Comfort Inn & Suites on East Mission Avenue in Spokane Valley: $85–95. WHAT

A Celebration of Craft, Commerce & Community

SAN FRANCISCO WRITERS CONFERENCE magazine and former Cleveland Heights Poet Laureate; Deanna R. Adams, author, award-winning essayist and Women Writers’ Winter Retreat founder and coordinator; and Susan Petrone, whose first novel, A Body at Rest, won a bronze medal for regional fiction from the Independent Publisher Book Awards (IPPYs). HIGHLIGHTS: Workshops include “Food on the Page: Writing About Food;” “The Story Climax Formula,” where writers learn to layer in escalating conflict; and “Making Your Way Out of the Trenches,” about what to do when you’re stuck in your work-in-progress. Special events include a Friday night dinner and wine, a work-in-progress roundtable and an open mic. IF YOU GO: “There is a coffee shop right next door for those who like to write in that atmosphere, and a library across the street, which is handy for last-minute research or to grab a needed book. ... We urge attendees to come and go as they please. It’s their weekend away from reality!” Adams says. FOR MORE INFO: deannaadams.com.

Pamlico Writers Conference and Competition This event offers a money- and timesaving way to mingle with writers and experts, pitch publishers, learn the ins and outs of the industry, and even try your hand at a writing competition, all in a renovated theater on the Pamlico River.

March 20–21, 2015. WHERE: Turnage Theater, Washington, N.C. PRICE: Friday evening: $10; includes keynote speech and finger-food

reception. Saturday: $49; includes a full day of panel sessions, an awards ceremony for the writing competition, and hors d’oeuvres. WHAT MAKES THE CONFERENCE UNIQUE: For an additional $10 fee, attendees can submit a prose piece (fiction or nonfiction) or three poems for a chance to win recognition, and cash or a gift certificate. WHO IT’S PERFECT FOR: New and developing writers of any genre. HOW MANY ATTEND: About 150. FACULTY: Speakers include prolific multi-genre author Susan Sloate; Marnie Graff, author of the Nora Tierny mystery series; Horse and Buggy Press book designer Dave Wofford; poet and East Carolina University professor Amber Flora Thomas; historical romance novelist Katharine Ashe; and Jacar Press publisher and poet Richard Krawiec. HIGHLIGHTS: Panel topics include “How to Write About Sex Without Getting Arrested,” “Keeping Up With Characters,” “Movies to Books” and “Launching Today’s Writer.” Attendees can participate in sevenminute Pitch the Publisher sessions for an additional $10 each. IF YOU GO: Read up on the speakers you’re most interested in hearing; this might stimulate questions to ask at the end of the sessions. Also, “Bring cash or a checkbook, since some vendors may not have ability to sell through credit cards, and buy books,” Conference Director Doris Schneider says. FOR MORE INFO: pamlicowritersconference.org. WD

Featuring: • John Lescroart (The Keeper) •Yiyun Li (Kinder than Solitude) • Publisher Judith Curr (Atria/S&S) •Kirk Russell (Die-Off) •Michelle Richmond (Golden State) •Ellen Sussman (Wedding in Provence) •Vikram Chandra (Geek Sublime)

100+ well-known authors, editors, publishers & literary agents from New York, L.A. & S.F. Bay Area

February 12-15, 2015 at the InterContinental Mark Hopkins Hotel Early registration discounts & special room rates.

February 12 & 16 Single & half-day workshops Event details & online registration:

www.SFWriters.org

A 501(c)3 nonprofit organization

WHEN:

Linda Formichelli (therenegadewriter.com), co-author of The Renegade Writer, teaches an e-course on breaking into magazines and offers writers phone mentoring.


C ON F E RE NCEGU IDE

CONFERENCE GUIDE JANUARY 2015 • Keep in mind that there may be more than one workshop in each listing. • These workshops are listed alphabetically by state, country or continent. • Unless otherwise indicated, rates include tuition (T) only. Sometimes the rates also include airfare (AF), some or all meals (M), accommodations (AC), ground transportation (GT), materials (MT) or fees (F). • When you find workshops that interest you, be sure to call, email or check the website of the instructor or organization for additional information. • All listings are paid advertisements.

CALIFORNIA THE BIG STORY WRITERS CONFERENCE produced by West Coast Writers Conferences. February 20–22, 2015 at Los Angeles Valley College, CA. The Big Story Writers Conference is an educational and inspirational event focused on helping authors define the elements and improve the structure of virtually any story idea into a BIG STORY. You will learn how to master your skillset as a writer and develop a solid story structure that can be applied to any media. The curriculum includes novel writing, short story fiction, nonfiction, screenplays for movies and TV, plus poetry, blogs, book proposals, synopsis, query letters, and more. Writers of all levels and genres can benefit from this program. Topics will cover everything from how to structure and position your story for success, to how to write a solid book proposal that attracts the interest of publishers, and great query letters to agents. Guest speakers include veteran educators, industry experts, publishing professionals, noted writers and best-selling authors. Open to all levels and genres. Attendees may optionally enjoy a Keynote Address (with complimentary lunch), receive advanced submission ProCritiques™ of your MS by professional editors and literary agents, or meet with agents in search of new talent. Single Day and Full Weekend early registration discounts still available from $199. Contact: Tony or Lillian Todaro P.O. Box 2267 Redondo Beach, CA 90278 Ph: 310/379-2650 [email protected] www.wcwriters.com/bigstory

23–25, at Sam's Town Hotel and Gambling Hall. Join fellow writers, agents, publishers and marketing experts for a weekend of workshops on the publishing industry. Registration is limited to 150 attendees. Sign up now! www.lasvegaswritersconference.com

NEW YORK UNICORN WRITER’S CONFERENCE,

Saturday, March 14, 2015, 7:30 a.m.–7:30 p.m. at the Reid Castle, Manhattanville College, Purchase, NY. As valuable for published authors as it is for beginners! This conference covers the total story from craft to career. Meet industry shotcallers, get one-on-one feedback and learn little-known insider secrets to acing every department of a publishing company! Make connections and get feedback with dozens of opportunities for one-on-one face time with industry insiders, including: One-onone manuscript reading and feedback sessions with agents and editors. Networking breakfast, lunch and dinner. After-conference networking party, Perfect Your Craft with a choice of seven workshops to attend from over thirty different sessions offered. Get the insider’s edge with a vast selection of rare how-to tutorials from every department within a publishing company. Contact: Jan L. Kardys, Chairman, Unicorn Writers Conference, Inc. [email protected] www.unicornwritersconference.com

INTERNATIONAL MEXICO 2015 SAN MIGUEL WRITERS' CONFERENCE AND LITERARY FESTIVAL ,

YOU WROTE A BOOK NOW WHAT?

NEVADA THE 2015 LAS VEGAS WRITER'S CONFERENCE, hosted by Henderson Writers' Group, is scheduled for April


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“Jan L. Kardys and Jeanne E. Rogers write with a depth of understanding of the publishing business that few can match...” Laura Blake Peterson V.P., Literary Agent, Curtis Brown, Ltd. “Accessible and thorough, and of use to both the newbie and established author who want to review new options in the marketplace.” Rita Rosenkranz Rita Rosenkranz Literary Agency

2015 SAN FRANCISCO WRITERS CONFERENCE, February 12–16 at the

Mark Hopkins Hotel in San Francisco. Major names in publishing (authors, literary agents, editors and publishers) attend the SFWC and take personal interest in projects discovered there. The 100+ presenters will include John Lescroart, Yiyun Li, Michelle Richmond, Vikram Chandra, Tina Folsom, Kirk Russell, and Judith Curr (president Atria/S&S). Writer’s Digest is the ‘Speed Dating with Agents’ sponsor. All levels and genres. $795 (with early discounts available). Contact: Barbara Santos 1029 Jones St. San Francisco, CA 94109 Ph: 415/673-0939 [email protected] www.SFWriters.org

produced by San Miguel Literary Sala. February 11–15, 2015, in San Miguel de Allende (No. 1 City in the World, 2013 Conde Nast Traveler). 2015 Keynote Speakers: Alice Walker, Scott Turow, Tracy Chevalier, Richard Blanco, Gloria Steinem, Jane Urquhart, Angeles Mastretta. Plan now to attend the 10th annual SMWC, featuring distinguished authors and faculty from U.S., Canada, Mexico. Sunny, historic San Miguel de Allende is known worldwide as the Creative Crossroads of the Americas—a mecca for writers, artists, and musicians. The entire town is a UNESCO World Heritage Site ringed by mountains, filled with cobblestone streets and colorful 18th century buildings, and worlds away from border issues. Hotel rooms $75+. Fifty+ 90 minute classes in all genres, beginning/advanced (select seven); keynotes and panels; open mic; gala keynote author signing, optional consultations and agent pitches; spectacular Mexican Fiesta; excursions; receptions. Previous keynote speakers include: Yann Martel, Laura Esquivel, Calvin Trillin, Ellen Bass, Benjamin Alire Sáenz, Cheryl Strayed, Luis Alberto Urrea, Lawrence Hill, Margaret Atwood, ZZ Packer, Sandra Cisneros, Barbara Kingsolver. (T, M, MT, F, parties!) Contact: Susan Page San Miguel Literary Sala 220 N. Zapata Hwy. #11 Laredo, TX 78043 510/295-4097 [email protected] www.sanmiguelwritersconference.org

Jan L. Kardys

Jeanne E. Rogers

“...You Wrote A Book, Now What? can help hopeful authors by providing them with the information that is both knowledgeable and to the point.” Katharine Sands Sarah Jane Freymann Literary Agency

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by Paula Munier This one-of-a-kind plotting primer reveals the secrets of creating a story structure that works—no matter what your genre. It provides the strategies you need to build a scene-by-scene blueprint that will help elevate your fiction and earn the attention of agents and editors. Literary agent, editor and author Paula Munier will show you how to define your story in terms of its theme; layer, refine and polish your story line; organize your scenes for greatest impact; and more.

Story Trumps Structure by Steven James All too often, following the “rules” of writing can constrict rather than inspire you. With Story Trumps Structure, you can shed those rules to craft your most powerful, emotional and gripping stories. Award-winning novelist Steven James explains how to trust the narrative process to make your story believable, compelling and engaging, and debunks the common myths that hold writers back from creating their best work.

The Writer’s Idea Thesaurus by Fred White Need more ideas for your fiction? Look no further than The Writer’s Idea Thesaurus. You’ll find 2,000 unique and dynamic story ideas in this book, organized by subject, theme and situation categories, and listed alphabetically for easy reference. Author and award-winning instructor Fred White shows you how to build out and customize these ideas to create unique plots that reflect your personal storytelling sensibilities.

You’ve Got a Book in You by Elizabeth Sims Are you writing a book for the first time? Chances are you probably have (or have had a bout of) insecurity, fear of failure, or obsession about making it perfect. But you don’t have to let all of those feelings cripple your ability to write. You’ve Got a Book in You is filled with friendly, funny chapters that teach you how to relinquish your worries and write freely. The book features fun exercises such as “writing blasts,” brainstorming ideas and advice for tackling your book in small pieces—all geared toward helping you gain the skills and best practices needed to finish writing your book.

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*Sales prices listed were correct at the time of publication but may fluctuate slightly. Visit the WD Shop for current discount prices.

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Workshop Your Novel-in-Progress! Outlining Your Novel WORKSHOP LENGTH: 8 WEEKS TUITION:

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Writers often view outlines with fear and trembling. When properly understood and correctly used, however, the outline is one of the most powerful weapons in a writer’s arsenal. With expert instruction the and help of Outlining Your Novel: Map Your Way to Success by K.M. Weiland, you will learn how to write an outline, including what type of outline is right for you, brainstorm plot ideas, and discover your characters.

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In this writing workshop, you’ll tackle the steps to writing a novel, learn effective writing techniques along the way and, of course, write your first draft. You’ll learn invaluable tips on writing a novel and receive detailed instruction through weekly lessons and writing assignments. At the end of this workshop, you’ll have accomplished every writer’s goal: a first draft.

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This workshop is meant for novelists who are looking for book editing and specific feedback on their work. When you take this online workshop, you won’t have weekly reading assignments or lectures. Instead, you’ll focus solely on completing your novel. While it’s possible to write a novel in a month, in this workshop you’ll spend 15 weeks writing yours—all while gaining valuable feedback from an instructor and getting the encouragement you need in order to finish a first draft. By the end, you’ll have the tools and the know-how to write a great novel.

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Webster’s Dictionary by Noah Webster SPOOF-REJECTED BY ALISSA KNOP

Dear Mr. Webster,

January 4, 1805

Thank you for submitting your manuscript, A Compendious for Dictionary of the English Language. It was a lengthy read

her. For our team, and quite frankly, the story confused us altoget this time. this reason, we will not be able to publish your book at Our first concern was the sheer volume and size of the ng read work. At more than 1,600 pages, it seemed like a daunti gh we and we hadn’t even made it beyond the title page. Althou

the manmay not be publishing the book today, we thank you for we have uscript you have sent us. We will keep it nearby in case to take down a robber during a break-in. We can only assume the story is supposed to be about he never an aardvark, the first main character mentioned, but on of makes a second appearance. It’s more like a giant collecti the ely random words placed together haphazardly, and strang

O are entire collection is alphabetized. There’s a reason N and every next to each other in the alphabet. Should you alphabetize word in your novel? No.

the We also felt a little insulted that every single word in ion book was defined, as if the reader wouldn’t know the definit on of simple, everyday words of the English language. Then of. top of that, you include words that no one has even heard are these Hemidemisemiquaver? Tintinnabulation? We doubt e his actual words—perhaps a small child decided to practic letters in your draft.

We do see potential, however, so if you decide to send the for you. manuscript to any other publisher, we’ll put a word in

On second thought, it may not fit. Best regards, Lou Singbrayne-Sells Editor, Litt-Earl Story Seekers


L

et’s step once again into the role of the unconvinced, perhaps even curmudgeonly or fool-hearted editor: harsh rejection letters might What h ha the authors autth of some of our favorite hit books have h had to endure? CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS: If CA C you’d yyo like to be the one doing the rebuffin ng ng, channel the most clueless of editors b by humorously rejecting a hit in 300 words o or fewer. Then, submit your letter via emaill to ow [email protected] with “R “Reject ej a Hit” in the subject line.

Free Guide!

Don’t publish without it. :KHWKHU\RXȇUHZULWLQJ\RXUȴUVWH%RRN or you’re an old pro, The Quick Start Guide for WritersLVHVVHQWLDOUHDGLQJIRUDXWKRUV ORRNLQJWRVHOISXEOLVK 7KLVJXLGHJRHVEH\RQGWKHEDVLFVWR KHOS\RXFUHDWHDGLJLWDOPDVWHUSLHFHΖWȇV SDFNHGZLWKLQIRWKDWZLOOKHOS\RXZULWH SXEOLVKSURPRWHDQGVHOO\RXUERRN

TOPICS INCLUDE: ȏ3ULFLQJVWUDWHJLHVDQGWDFWLFV ȏ+RZWRFKRRVHWKHULJKWHGLWRU ȏ7KH'RVDQG'RQȇWVRIH%RRNFRQYHUVLRQ ȏ7LSVRQFRYHUGHVLJQ ȏ0HWDGDWDȂZK\LWȇVFUXFLDODQG KRZLWFDQLPSURYH\RXUVDOHV ȏ$QGPXFKPRUH

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Writer's Digest January 2015

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