Column: Cooking Our Bounty by Karen Albright Lin

(This is the second in a two-part post. Read Karen’s first post here.)

Photo taken in China by Karen

Last time I wrote about planting our literary seeds, weeding, and harvesting. Today I ponder tools, secrets, and tricks for turning our produce into an enjoyable meal.

Equipment is important. It’s almost impossible to cook or write without the proper tools. Cutting boards, knives, and woks are a few of the tools necessary to prepare vegetable stir-fries. For writers it’s not only about the laptop. It’s about collecting the skills essential to our craft. Taking classes, attending workshops, reading books on writing, finding a good writing coach or critique group.

It’s best if we weigh carefully the flavors we work with. Our choice of genres can be thought of as our garden’s herbs and spices. Mix too many genres and we’ve got confusing flavors. Hybrid genres are one thing. A post apocalyptic fantasy thriller that takes place in the Wild Wild West with SF and romantic elements will taste like some of the confusion foods that try to pass as fusion foods. Know what we are writing and write it boldly.

Just as gardeners and cooks approach produce differently, each writer has a unique style and brings to his work different strengths. Some focus on plot and some excel at developing characters. Some are all about the beauty of the sentence. Even thin or unwieldy plots can sell well if the writing is brilliant, just as one chef’s simple, local offerings can succeed as can the creations of another who focuses on complex and exotic ingredients.

Writing, like gardening, is all about hidden secrets. Seeds are the most obvious and miraculous secrets. But there are countless other garden secrets. Sure, a zucchini plant can net enough fruit to feed 100 armies, but if plucked at the just the right time, the blooms can be used to make one of the best appetizers in the world, stuffed squash blossoms. In a writing career and in each of our books (regardless of genre) there are hidden mysteries. The secret is to find and share them.

We grow veggies to eat them. It’s important, then, to do them justice, but not too much justice. Cooking them too long turns them into paste. Some of us writers cook our books so long we never consider our work finished. Sometimes we fear failure; sometimes we fear success; sometimes we hesitate to start a new project. If we are aware of our fears, we may be less likely to overcook our produce.

On the other hand, there are those of us who don’t let the sauces simmer long enough to meld the flavors. We whip through a draft or two then send our books off, false hope in the mail. Tomato sauce doesn’t belong on noodles unless it’s had a good long time to simmer the flavors to Italian perfection. We’re better off considering five drafts half simmered.

We could layer in discussion about our lives as the soil we start with, fertilizers that inspire our words, bad-habit weed barriers, and selling our produce in the farmer’s market. But metaphors are like truffle shavings, too much of a good thing overwhelms.

Words are food for thought. We grow them so we and others can enjoy them.

The clouds are cooperating. Inkpot wishes you good gardening and good eating! Bon Appetit!

(Originally posted at the Sisters of the Quill blog on June 18, 2011.) 

About the Writer:  Karen is an editor, ghostwriter, pitch coach, speaker and award-winning author of novels, cookbooks, and screenplays. She’s written over a dozen solo and collaborative scripts (with Janet Fogg, Christian Lyons and director Erich Toll); each has garnered international, national and regional recognition: Moondance Film Festival, BlueCat, All She Wrote, Lighthouse Writers, Boulder Asian Film Festival, SouthWest Writers Contest, and PPW Contest. Find out more at www.karenalbrightlin.com.

June Write Brain 6/19/2012: Practical Computer Security for Writers by J.T. Evans

Come and join us for the Pikes Peak Writers June Write Brain: Practical Computer Security for Writers by J.T. Evans.

When:  Tuesday, June 19th, 6:30 p.m. to 8:30 p.m.; doors open at 6:00 p.m.

Where:  Colorado Springs Fire Department Station 16 Community Room (in the Broadmoor Bluffs area).  The address is:

CSFD Fire Station 16
4980 Farthing Drive
Colorado Springs, CO 80906

The fire station is set back from the main road, behind Oak Meadows Park. 

Details:  This Write Brain will cover important aspects of computer security as it relates to writers. Learn how to protect your data, files, work, and (in some cases) livelihood from being lost to the great bit bucket in the sky. The session will also include information on how to write computer security in a plausible manner from the point of view of the defenders that protect data and the intruders who wish to steal or destroy data.

About J.T. Evans:  J.T. may as well have grown up with a computer embedded in his brain. He started programming in 1980 at the tender age of seven, and by the time the early 1990s rolled around he was already on the fledgling networks which would become synonymous with the thing we call the Internet. J.T. very quickly learned that, like in dim alleyways, there are some very malicious people out there. He started delving into the world of computer security at this time and has gone on to earn his master's degree in information assurance and has been a Certified Ethical Hacker since 2009. He's worked for a variety of tech companies in a security role, and his primary focus in day-to-day life is web security. J.T. is a also a fantasy writer and is the president of the Colorado Springs Fiction Writers Group.

If you have any questions, contact Ellis Harvey.

Lr_harvey@yahoo.com

Home:  598-6828

Cell:  322-4826

Jeffery Deaver’s Rules for Writing by Cathy Dilts

If you need how-to-write advice, who better to listen to than a wildly successful author?  Jeffery Deaver is “a master of ticking-bomb suspense,” according to People Magazine. Not merely a New York Times best-selling author, Deaver’s award-winning novels appear on international best-seller lists as well. The Bone Collector, first in his popular Lincoln Rhyme series, was adapted to the movie screen in 1999. When Deaver spoke at the Pikes Peak Writers Conference 2012, I was naturally anxious to learn his Rules for Writing.

Deaver made it clear that his rules apply to commercial genre fiction. He also cautioned the audience that “there’s nothing more subjective than writing. If it works for you, it works.”

Deaver’s Rules for Writing:

1)    It’s a business. You’re not an artist. You meet your deadlines. You produce a product.

I’ll admit that I found this pronouncement shocking. Remember, though, that we are talking about commercial fiction. I am finding the truth in Deaver’s words as I bounce against genre-specific expectations with my own writing. Is one of your writing goals to make money? In that case, you have to treat writing as a business.

2)    We need a business model. We can choose the mint-flavored toothpaste model, or the liver-flavored toothpaste model. Mint is obviously a flavor preferable to liver for most consumers. He compared commercial fiction to mint-flavored toothpaste, and literary fiction to liver-flavored. While the liver-flavored toothpaste may clean the teeth as well as the mint, the simple fact is that more people will buy the mint-flavored. If you want to sell a lot of books, you’ll choose to produce mint.

Deaver explained that his business model is based on writing to please his readers. At a conference dinner, I told him that his novels scare the bejeebers out of his readers. Deaver was quite pleased. That is his goal – giving readers what they want. Mint, not liver.

Even literary authors know their audience, Deaver said. They may be writing to a smaller audience than the commercial writer, but they are aware of the unique tastes of their readers.

3)   Using this business model, what makes a pleasing book? How are we going to make mint-flavored toothpaste for our customers? Here are the ingredients:

PACING:

According to Deaver, the story has to move like lightening. The first paragraph has to grab the reader with compelling emotional engagement.

The story needs deadlines and plot reversals. Readers do not like coincidence or digression. Deaver called these “give me a break moments.” Never let the word “lame” pop into your reader’s head.

PLOT RESOLUTION:

Resolve all subplots. Story lines cannot just fade away. The story ending should not be ambiguous.

CHARACTER:         

Readers like real characters, not superficial or one-dimensional ones. We want good guys with flaws and bad guys with good points. And every character must have resolution.

DIALOGUE:

Deaver recommended that writers pay a lot of attention to dialogue.

CRAFT:

Know the mechanics of writing. Know your craft. Deaver recommended Woe Is I: The Grammarphobe's Guide to Better English in Plain English by Patricia T. O’Conner, and Eats, Shoots, & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation by Lynne Truss.

 

4)    “You need an idea, but the idea is not as important as the story.” I found this statement amazing, considering that Deaver spends eight months researching his novels. His work is rich with detailed settings, cutting-edge forensics science, and themes torn from the front pages. When I thought about his novels, I had to agree that he does manage to keep all this information incidental to the story.

5)    I have wondered, when reading Deaver’s amazingly complex stories full of subplots, red herrings, plot reversals, and subtle clues, how he manages to keep track of everything. “Outline,” he said. “Do the work up front.”

Deaver writes 100 – 150 page outlines, including every character and every clue. “If you have an outline, you will not get writer’s block.” You know where you’re going. He outlines based on scenes, and does not break the novel into chapters until the very end. Deaver noted that the convention for chapter length has changed. His earlier novels had longer chapters, but now they tend to be quite short. The novels are the same length – they just have more chapters.  

6)    Editing is the final rule. “First drafts are always too long,” Deaver said, “and they are bad.” Paraphrasing Hemingway, Deaver told the audience that there are no good writers – there are only good re-writers.

When he has completed that first draft, Deaver sometimes does a start-to-finish read through. Other times he searches each subplot for continuity. He suggested letting the book sit for as long as possible before revising.

Now that we’ve reached the end of our story, we return to the beginning. Open the novel with a concrete scene. The tension and conflict must be immediate, but does not have to be violent. The opening can be emotional.

I was encouraged to learn that Jeffery Deaver, a writer enjoying phenomenal success, works diligently on his complex novels. His results didn’t come about from dabbling or luck. He approaches his writing as a business, something we all can do. While most of us may never spend eight months researching our novels, we can certainly adopt Deaver’s Rules for Writing to tighten up our stories.

For more information about Jeffery Deaver and his writing, go to his official website at http://www.jefferydeaver.com/.

 

About the Writer:  Cathy Dilts is an environmental scientist, and assistant editor for the PPW blog. She recently sold a story to Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine. In addition to short stories, she also writes cozy murder mystery, environmentally-themed stories, and apocalyptic inspirational fiction. In her spare time, she enjoys raised bed gardening, which her husband claims look the perfect size for burying bodies, while reminding her that you can’t get rid of the bones.

Column: Five Craft Elements a Model Book Can Teach You by Deb McLeod

As a creative writing coach, I ask my clients to find a model book. Maybe even two.

A model book is one that:

• is typically in your genre
• is something you have either said “this is the book I wanted to write,” or “I could have written that book.”

Together, we pick it apart and identify craft elements that the model author used that could teach us something about what the client likes or identifies with in a story.

What worked?

I like to teach from a model book. Teaching from a book that’s a finished product and one that’s presumably been edited (though that’s all changing with e-books, isn’t it?) allows writers to judge what worked and what craft elements they might be able to use in their own book. It also begins to help identify just what it was about that book that resonated with them.

Something else happens too. When you use a model book, there’s a focus on the positive – what did work? Because you only want to emulate what did work, right?

Even if you’re identifying what didn’t work in the model book, you spin that to a positive because the next question, of course, is: What would you do differently in your book?

Different than critique group discussions

In my years of coaching I have found this kind of work to have an important distinction from critique groups. I have participated, led and attended many, many, many critique groups. I find that in analyzing work that’s not complete, the focus is generally on what doesn’t work – helping the writer fix it. There are points of discussion about what does work, but the bulk of the conversation is about how the writer might change what’s on the page so that it does work according to the writers in the group.

When you use a model book, there’s no changing it. It is what it is. There’s only what you can learn from it and adapt into your work.

I run a monthly Writers Book Club where we dissect books for craft elements. Often one of the first things I ask is: what would your critique group say about this book? Interesting to note that we usually concur that most of the books we read wouldn’t have made it through our critique group intact.

Here are five things we might be focusing on when we’re dissecting a model book:

1.  Opening hook: you might actually pick apart the opening hooks of several books in your genre to get the feel of what works for you as a reader.

2.  Structure: this is a great use of a model book. What kind of plot is it? Is it traditional, lyrical, juxtapositional? Or a combination? Can you map the structure? Does your structure match? Can you learn anything from the model book structure?

3.  Backstory: Here’s a big one: When you’re writing you’re often figuring out the story as you’re writing so backstory creep is common. In your model book, look at when, how and how much backstory is conveyed.

4.  Arc: If you pull apart the individual character arcs, can you see something about the pacing? About the rise in tension? Can you see how the characters drive the plot?

5.  Story world: Is the world different than ours – different country, different time period, different species? If so, how is that difference communicated? If not, how much of a role does the world of the characters contribute?

One of my clients is working on a three-part YA series. So far, we have found a few model books to work from. They are all post-apocalyptic and they deal with certain differences in world structure, as does her book. How does the author orient the reader into the new world? Where does the story start? Do we get any backstory that tells what happened? Or does the book follow what the character needs to know and not what we readers think we need to know? How is the world different and the same as the one we know? What’s the story question? How does that question play out? Who is the character at the opening of the book? How does the character change? What did she face along the way?

There are as many ways to pick apart a model book for craft as there are craft elements that you can identify.

If you get experienced at picking books apart for their craft elements, you will begin to see what has worked in the past. Then you can decide if you want to follow a map you’ve created for yourself from your model book or if you want to veer away and create something different than the models that are available.

About the Writer:  Deb McLeod, is a writer, creative writing coach, co-founder and executive director of The Writing School. She has both an MFA and a BA in creative writing. She has been teaching and coaching for over ten years. Deb has published short fiction in anthologies and journals. She has written articles and creative nonfiction. Deb has been a professional blogger, tech writer, graphic artist and Internet marketing specialist.

From the Editor: Growing Through Change

Writers have one thing in common: a first manuscript. A work that once made us proud, but now lives in a dark and dusty drawer, or languishes on an old floppy disk, never again to see the light of day.

Some writers destroy their early works. After all, no one wants to be embarrassed by clumsy sentences, plotless plots, or dialogue so cheesy you could top a pizza with it. Yet many of us hang on to those terrible, horrible, no-good pages.

Why is that?

I believe that we keep our first manuscripts to remind us how far we’ve come on the writing path, and how much we’ve grown and improved as writers. The more we write, and the longer we write, the better we become. Some improvements are subtle; others are as obvious as flashing neon lights. But they are changes nonetheless. Change is what helps us to grow.

One of the changes happening here at Writing from the Peak is the addition of some new columnists. Writer and creative writing coach Deb McLeod will be joining us as a regular columnist, as will author DeAnna Knippling, whom many of you already know. All of our columnists have interesting things to say about writing and the writing life, so be sure to stop by. Learn, change, grow.

Happy writing!

Robin Widmar

Managing Editor, Writing from the Peak

Sweet Success! Donnell Ann Bell

Donnell Ann Bell's romantic suspense novel, The Past Came Hunting (ISBN 978-1-61194-048-0, 277 pages, softcover/digital), is receiving numerous awards, including nominations in the 2012 Gayle Wilson Award of Excellence and the 2012 Greater Detroit Romance Writers of America Bookseller’s Best Award for Romantic Suspense and for Best First Book. The book is available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, BelleBooks, Books a Million, independent bookstores and wherever books are sold; it will be coming out as an audiobook at a date TBD. The author's website is at www.donnellannbell.com.

Melanie Daniels thought accepting a ride with a sweet-talking stranger was the biggest mistake of her life.  Fifteen years later, when she moves next door to the cop who arrested her, she reserves the right to change her mind. 

As an unpublished author, Donnell Ann Bell was a multi-award winning unpublished author, including two-time Golden Heart finalist.  As a published author, The Past Came Hunting is already receiving accolades, including nominations in the 2012 Gayle Wilson Award of Excellence and 2012 RWA’s Greater Detroit Bookseller’s Best in Romantic Suspense & Best First Book.

Donald Maass: Listening to Your Gut and Other Postscripts to the 2012 Conference by Laura E. Reeve

Donald Maass is the founder of the Donald Maass Literary Agency, an agency for professional novelists. His pioneering work and writing about the development of fiction careers has made DMLA a leading agency for fiction writers. Together, the DMLA agents represent more than 150 novelists and sell more than 100 novels every year to leading publishers in the U.S. and overseas. Donald is the author of The Career Novelist, Writing the Breakout Novel, Writing the Breakout Novel Workbook, and The Fire in Fiction. He is a past president of the Association of Authors' Representatives, Inc. (AAR).

Your theme this conference has been about fiction in the 21st century and how, in order to stand out in today's abundance of entertainment, we must write 'page-turners.' In that vein, can you summarize the main issues you see with submissions?

Two problems are universal and they're not genre-specific. I see these problems from beginning writers as well as published authors. First, there's no reason to particularly care about the protagonist when we meet them. Second, there's a lack of line-by-line micro-tension.

When you start reading a manuscript with these problems, you can say the opening is slow or there's too much backstory or it's starting in the wrong place. You can tell the writer to tighten it up or cut material, which can be useful advice. But there are plenty of books that start slow, start with backstory, start with "arriving in town," and they work. Why? What's the difference? Well, it's because there's tension.

You use the term 'micro-tension' to describe line-by-line tension within a manuscript. What is micro-tension and how can it be built?

Micro-tension is the unease that you create in the mind of the reader. You build a mild state of anxiety and the only way the reader can relieve this feeling is to read the next line on the page. So think of a manuscript as a chain of tension followed by tension...

"Tension" sounds drastic, but it can be simmering under the surface, it can be questions raised or false confidence, it can be so many different things. The Fire in Fiction contains an entire discussion (Chapter 8) on building tension and how it works--how a writer can make a riveting passage when absolutely nothing is happening.

The foundation to creating tension is the point-of-view character, whether writing in 1st-person or 3rd-person narrative. The reader experiences a scene through the point-of-view character's senses, mind, and heart. To build tension, the writer works with the conflicting and contrasting emotions within this character. Whether writing action, exposition, interior monologue, or dialogue, you create discord, unbalance, or uncertainty within that character. In dialogue, you build friction or struggle--something between characters. When you do all of this consistently, line by line, you get a page-turner. You get a book that people can't stop reading.

You gave us a great exercise for increasing the micro-tension in our manuscripts during "Writing 21st Century Fiction."

Once you understand the principles of micro-tension, toss up your manuscript page by page and let it fall about. Get those pages mixed up. After your manuscript is in random order, go through and find a way to add micro-tension on each page, at least once.

What I forgot to mention during the workshop was the reason you can't read your pages in order. You'll get into the flow of your story, you'll start enjoying the rich conflict and tension that's in your mind but, unfortunately, not on the page. It's important to look at each page outside of its context and concentrate upon it in isolation.

Once you understand micro-tension and start to practice it, it'll get easier. You'll find that you're putting it into your first drafts. You'll feel dissatisfied when there's not enough tension in your writing.

I saw dismayed faces, particularly when you gave us extensive exercises for our manuscripts. This leads to the next subject: time, which isn't on any novelist's side. Today's blatant message is that the successful writer is a fast writer. Self-publishing proponents say the more titles you put out there, the better, and traditional publishers want faster deliveries from their authors. But is there a tradeoff between speed and quality?

There are boot camps that teach writers how to get out of their own way. And, if you do get out of your own way, you can write at amazing speeds and it can be liberating. NaNoWriMo (National Novel-writing Month) can prove you can get a lot of words out--not necessarily good words in the best order--but that's good to know. Particularly when you're starting out; you need to learn that your writing doesn't have to be slow, painful, or laborious. That said, first drafts are rarely the best draft.

Most writers find their own rhythm and speed. Commercial writers are under pressure to produce at a book-a-year pace. But it's hard to produce a high impact, multi-layered, thematically rich, beautifully-written novel every year like clockwork, considering you've got other things to do like proof your last book, attend signings, and have a life of some kind.

So I do believe there are tradeoffs between speed and quality. I think, on balance, most writers don't take enough time with their fiction, particularly early on in their careers. I would recommend that most writers, even those who are further along and published, spend more time in revision. 

Another theme in your workshops is don't submit your manuscript too early. Are there ways to avoid this pitfall?

If you're a first-time novelist, you are going to submit your manuscript too early. That is a guarantee. You'll learn the hard way, like everyone else, that your manuscript is not ready yet. I think I've given up trying to talk people out of that...

At this point, Donald looks pensive. He picks up the thread again:

What's seems more dangerous and damaging... If the period of time grows too long, if the frustration grows too great, the option becomes self-publishing. We used to call it "vanity publishing." Now it's called self-publishing, but it's the same thing. It means seeing the work in book form, which is validating in a way. "I made a book" is a nice feeling to have. But did I make a good book? Did I make this book the best it could be? Almost always, the answer is no.

But how do you know when your manuscript is really ready?

Most writers have a gut instinct they're not listening to. Professional authors who have been at it for a while learn to trust their gut. Even when they can't articulate what's at issue with their manuscript, they know when something's wrong and they're willing to tear out whole sections.

George R. R. Martin did that when writing one of his novels for the A Song of Ice and Fire series. He was five years between books, his fans were screaming, his editor was tearing her hair out, he was 180 pages into his manuscript and realized he'd made a wrong turn. And, even though this was a bestselling series and he was under tremendous pressure to produce a manuscript, he threw it all out and started over. That was a gutsy and hard thing to do.

He threw out the whole thing?

Yes, he started over. So it's said and I believe it. That's a professional attitude. That's listening to your gut and knowing when you have to do better.

Donald emphasizes his next sentence:

If you aim to be published, you're going to submit too soon. If you aim to be great, you're going to start listening to your gut.

I couldn't have asked for a better conclusion. I think I speak for all the Pikes Peak Writers in thanking Donald for his 2012 presentations--they were both illuminating and instructive. We hope to see him at many more PPW Conferences.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I've got a manuscript to edit.

About the Writer:  Laura E. Reeve is the author of the Major Ariane Kedros Novels from Roc. In the interest of full disclosure: Laura's agent, Jennifer Jackson, is Vice President of DMLA. Even so, Laura was still intimidated by the prospect of her first interview, ever, being with Donald Maass. Luckily for her, Donald's personable and easy to interview. Laura's web site can be found at AncestralStars.com.