…Revision, Revision (part 2)

More on Revision from TWC’s Associate Director, Michelle Cameron. If you missed Part 1, check it out here.

Once you are satisfied that the structure, character development, story arc and descriptions stand up to scrutiny, it’s time for…

STEP #3 – SEE THE TREES (and trim many of them)

Now it’s time to polish your work. You do this through judicious pruning, a careful eye for the details, and lots of attention to your fourth grade grammar teacher.

You might choose to take several sweeps of your manuscript to accomplish these tasks – though they’re certain to merge together as you revise:

• Trim the trees – you don’t really need all those words! A good rule of thumb is to look for where sentences are becoming wordy and revise them to be as simple and direct as you can. Realize that, while the reader loves your prose, less of it is generally more. Some things to keep in mind:
  • Are you using strong verbs rather than weak “there is…” constructions?
  • Do you need those adjectives and adverbs? Take them out of your sentence and surprise! You’ll find the sentence is generally stronger without them.
  • Check again – are you writing as directly and simply as you can? You don’t want to pull the reader out of your story to make sense of what you’re trying to say.
  • Wrong word choices – are the words you’ve chosen the right ones? Are there more appropriate choices available? Watch out for blindly substituting synonyms – words have nuances and what might work in one context won’t work in another. (The best way to know the difference, by the way, is to read widely – which, as a writer, you should be doing anyway!)
  • Dialogue – it’s through dialogue that we get to know the characters that people your manuscript. You need to make sure that it strikes a balance between too much and too little:
    • Do we know who’s talking at all times?
    • Have you overused strong dialogue tags such as “exclaimed, protested, shrieked”? Make sure you aren’t relying on the tags to carry the emotion – what’s being said should do that.
    • Can you trim some of those more basic dialogue tags – “he said, she said?” If we do know who is speaking, these tags will just clutter up your writing.
    • Is there enough context so that the reader is “grounded”? This refers back to description – make sure that just because your characters are speaking, that the reader is able to picture where they’re doing so, and what they’re doing as they talk to one another.
    • Grammar – yes, your fourth grade teacher was right all along. Your grammar needs to be pristine because nothing, I repeat, nothing, disturbs a reader more than an ungrammatical sentence. Make sure your sentence structure is parallel and your tenses (past, present, and future) line up throughout the manuscript. All other rules of grammar apply as well.
    • Spelling – the spellchecker is a good first step – but that’s all it is. It won’t catch the difference between right and write – a mistake I’ve made a number of times when righting this. One good technique is to print out a copy of your manuscript and read it backwards (a ruler can help by isolating individual lines of type).

STEP #4 – READ THE FOREST

When you complete all this, you’re still not done. Making changes always carries the risk of introducing new errors. And if you’ve taken my advice to “slash and burn” too much to heart, you may find you have excised some of the music out of your prose.

So it’s time to read the entire manuscript – aloud. If you can do it for an audience, that’s great. If not, head to a quiet room where you won’t be interrupted, supply yourself with plenty of fluids (I always resort to tea and honey for this stage of revision) and read.

You want to listen for any places where you struggle, where you aren’t reading what’s actually on the page. Your voice knows better than your eyes at this point. Trust it and make any further adjustments necessary.

By this point, your manuscript should be polished and ready for readers – whether they be agents, editors, or just family and friends. Could you continue to revise? Sure. But if you’ve gone through these four stages of revision, you should be feeling pretty good about the work. And that means it’s time to let it go, to start something new, and to fall in love with writing all over again.

Take Your Child to a Bookstore Day with Guest Blogger Jenny Milchman

“Magic is always pushing and drawing and making things out of nothing…It must be all around us. In this garden—in all the places. The magic is in me—in all of us.” —The Secret Garden

These famous words by Frances Hodgson Burnett adorn the walls of my local bookstore.

For me, bookstores are the magic. That’s why I began Take Your Child to a Bookstore Day.

When I was a child, two places besides my home offered respite, bookstores and libraries. (And I promise: as soon as Take Your Child to a Bookstore Day is firmly entrenched, Take Your Child to a Library Day will be next!)

There were four independent bookstores in my not-large town when I was growing up. Four. Each had a unique identity of its own. One had books you couldn’t find anywhere else. Another had everything that was popular with my classmates. The other tended toward big books with color photos, its children’s section hidden.

I watched as the wares began to tend more and more toward cards and gifts. I watched as one morphed into a toy store. Another closed and a restaurant came to inhabit the space.

We have two bookstores left in town, and I realize that makes us lucky.

When my children were born, I began taking them to story hour at the bookstore long before they could sit up for it. I held them in my arms so we could all listen. I would get a cup of coffee—and often a book. The bookstore was a place of respite for me again.

How many children, I wondered, knew the pleasures of time spent in a bookstore?

I floated the idea for Take Your Child to a Bookstore Day in late November 2010. If it were celebrated on the first Saturday of December, maybe it would encourage people out of the big box stores and into bookstores for holiday shopping. The Day could support local businesses as it enriched children’s lives.

Bloggers took the idea for the Day viral, the publishing industry e zine, Shelf Awareness, and the American Booksellers Association’s magazine picked up the story, and within two weeks, eighty bookstores were celebrating.

In the intervening year, I decided to visit some of the participating bookstores, and so we took our family on the road. We drove from New Jersey to Oregon, stopping at sixty bookstores along the way. My kids were not just going to story hour now—they were getting a roadside view of our country, seen through the prism of a bookstore.

And what a country it is. Bookstores are hubs of the community. Book clubs meet there, and writers groups; churches hold socials, and home-schooling families congregate. One bookstore we stopped at has an amphibian room decorated with the skeletons of animals, which the son’s owner collected for science class.

The cross-country trip helped Take Your Child to a Bookstore Day grow to over 250 stores participating in almost every state. As the second annual Day approaches on December 3rd bookstores have hung posters, distributed bookmarks, planned author events, baked cookies, and blown up balloons.

I have goals for the third annual Day next year. For one thing, I would like to establish grants for children who are unable to visit bookstores on their own. The grants would provide transportation for the child and a parent or caregiver, plus offer a gift card from the bookstore.

Maybe the biggest goal I have for the Day is what it can say about the world we’re creating, each and every one of us, every day. A place where we value uniqueness and the slower pleasures of interacting with people who know our likes and dislikes. A place where we stop in and say hello instead of just clicking a button. A place filled with treasures we can see and touch and smell.

I want my children to grow up in a world like that.

I want them to be surrounded by magic.

Jenny Milchman is a suspense writer from New Jersey. Her short story ‘The Very Old Man’ has been an Amazon bestseller, and another short piece will appear in the anthology ADIRONDACK MYSTERIES II in fall 2012. Jenny is the founder of Take Your Child to a Bookstore Day, and the Made It Moments forum on her blog. Her debut novel, COVER OF SNOW, will be published by Ballantine in early 2013.

Revision, Revision… (part 1)

There’s nothing like the excitement of starting a new work or the infatuation you might have with having written it. But professional writers are really made by the serious way they approach the revision process.

It’s important to take time with your revisions and not to rush through them just because you want to be done. Most professional writers would not dream of submitting a manuscript until it had gone through four comprehensive revisions – and sometimes more.

STEP #1 – STEP BACK

It’s good to gain some objectivity for your writing by stepping away from the work for a time – a month if you can manage it, a week if you can’t. Letting the work lie fallow for a bit will help you see its flaws more clearly.

STEP #2 – SEE THE FOREST

Read the entire manuscript for sense. Your manuscript needs to be a comprehensive whole before you can start honing in on the details. Look for the following issues, remembering that the reader isn’t in your head and doesn’t necessarily know what you know:

• Are there any gaps in the plot? As you reread your story, is there any place where your reader might grow confused regarding how you got from point A to point B?
• Are there any holes in context? You’ve invented an entire world with your manuscript, and it needs to live and die by your internal rules. And often also by the rules of the world around you. I once read a story that had a man on the West Coast calling a woman on the East Coast to wish her a Happy New Year, and magically, bells were tolling on both coasts simultaneously. Such minor holes in context can hurt your credibility and interrupt our acceptance of the world you’re trying to immerse us in.
• Are there any major character flaws that you need to address? Your characters need to grow, of course, but they must do so within reasonable bounds for the character you’ve worked so hard to develop. A timid character will leap into the lion’s den because her much loved child is in danger – but not because she suddenly has an unexplained burst of bravery.
• Do you need more or less description? Have you given your reader enough to be “grounded” but not so much that it is drowning the story? There is nothing like evocative description to give your reader a sense of “being there” – but it can’t overwhelm the plot. There’s a delicate balance that you need to achieve.

This stage of revision can be a challenge for writers who generally can’t see the forest for the trees at this point. You may need to cultivate an “early reader” or two, who has an eye for the arc of a story and its characters, who will tell you honestly where you are going wrong – and who will praise you when you deserve it!

Next up – Steps 3 and 4 of revision!

What We’re Up Against – Truth & Consequences for Writers, from “The Simpsons”

OK, this is totally out of character for me, but it’s also totally brilliant, so I just had to share. This episode of The Simpsons came to me through very reliable channels. Anyone who is even contemplating authorship will be equally terrified and amused. Click below to launch the video, and laugh while you weep:

Lit-wisdom from "The Simpsons"?

Three Memoir Misconceptions from author/literary agent Paula Balzer

We’re very excited to welcome author and literary agent Paula Balzer to The Writers Circle. Here she shares some wise words about writing memoir. Be sure to check out her upcoming workshop, “Writing & Selling Your Memoir” on Wednesday evenings starting December 1 at our South Orange location!

One of the biggest reasons I love memoir is that I find people interesting.  I happen to be writing this in a coffee shop in my town, and I’m sure there are a few people in here right now with fantastic stories to tell.  If working with memoir writers has taught me anything, it’s that people are full of surprises.  You never know who might end up being the next Elizabeth Gilbert, or who has survived a childhood worthy of Frank McCourt.  I’ve also learned that most people have some serious misconceptions about the genre. . . and it’s these ideas that can keep someone from getting an agent, getting published or simply sitting down and getting their story down on paper.  What are they?

Misconception #1: Memoir vs. Autobiography

Memoir and autobiography are not the same thing.  This is one of the biggest mistakes people make when starting to write their story.  Memoir is about a specific period in your life. . . an autobiography covers your entire life!  Unless you are Princess Diana or Bill Clinton, no one really cares about what happened on the very day you were born.  This actually makes your job easier. . . memoir writers get to start with the good part.

Misconception #2: You Need to Tell Your Story Just as it Happened

Of course your story needs to be true, but more often than not a straight chronological telling of your story is going to fall short.  There are many creative ways to structure memoirs.  I love thinking about why certain memoirs worked so well. . yes, it’s about the writing, but it’s also about they way the writer chose to tell their story.  There are countless ways to tell a story about divorce, a trip to Italy, etc.  How can you make your story your own?

Misconception #3: You Don’t Have Enough Time

I know, writing a memoir sounds like an insurmountable task.  However, if you’re organized, and approach your material carefully, you can avoid hitting some of the more challenging obstacles throughout the writing process.  I’m a big fan of editing your material (i.e. your memories!) before you start writing.  While writing a memoir is never easy, I can certainly show you how to avoid common pitfalls and maximize the time you do have to write.

Paula will also be teaching a one-time workshop on memoir on March 4 from 2-4PM in Madison, NJ, as part of TWC’s Speaker Series. Check out this and all our upcoming events at www.writerscircleworkshops.com.

Welcome to the New Writers Circle Blog

Welcome to the new location of The Writers Circle blog. I hope everyone who was following judithlindbergh.wordpress.com has found us here and will start following, subscribing, contributing and more.

You can “follow us”, subscribe by email or click on the RSS feeds to the right on the new sidebar.

The old blog will continue, but probably not until something significant is happening in my personal publishing life. Meanwhile, it’s all about The Writers Circle now!

We are here to support and nurture our community, to share our thoughts and move together through the fascinating struggles to represent our world – or some other world! – in words.

Join us! Subscribe, comment, “like”, tweet, and even send us a post once in a while. The Writers Circle is a community and we love to highlight our many wise and talented voices.

The Authentic Illusion

Everything is illusion, the Buddhists tell us – our lives and loves, our fears and troubles, the very earth and air and we ourselves. None of this is real. This concept is intended to help us let go of our attachment to longing, hunger, desire. But to fiction writers, it is almost a validation of our work. If everything is illusion, then the fictional world has as much significance as any.

Think of the word “fiction” – something feigned, invented, a made up tale. And yet, in fiction we often discover and express the most profound human truths.

Fiction functions to create its own reality and, through it, to reflect on mankind’s foibles and trials, and to touch the human heart. There is power in this experience for both writer and reader. There is also freedom, sometimes learning, and often pleasure. Some novels are entertainments – escapes. We enjoy stepping out of one illusion into another, and for those brief, shining hours, we exist within them completely.

What does this say about the nature of reality, so easily created, so easily left behind? If anything, fiction serves to confirm the illusion of maya, as it’s called – as insubstantial and yet convincing as life itself.

In a recent conversation between Jeffrey Eugenides and Colm Toibin published in The New York Times, Jeffrey Eugenides said, “There is something about reality, and especially about human consciousness, that can be accurately described and the novel is the best way to do it.” Toibin added to the discussion, “The essential impulse [to write] is to rehaunt your own house, or to allow what haunts you to have a voice, to chart what is deeply private and etched on the soul, and find form and structure for it.”

In the illusion that is life (“real” life), there is rarely form or structure. Life comes to us randomly and it is up to us to make sense of it in whatever way we can. Only in the distilled, premeditated fabrication we call the novel can we cut away the tangles, straighten life’s many nubbly threads and look at our illusion from a tenuous (and somewhat safer) distance.

That distance doesn’t promise perfect clarity. It offers the same challenge as middle-aged eyes. If we hold the paper a little far, a little close, somewhere in between, we will see and understand what was there all along, that we couldn’t quite make out before.

This is one of the the great challenges of fiction – both reading and, more importantly, writing it. Well-wrought fiction should not be wooden, predictable or definite, even though we’ve learned to trust that good fiction should, in the end, make sense, more or less. As writers, it is our obligation to give the reader that sense of inevitability, as we emphasize themes and craft motivations for our characters, consistencies of purpose that in “reality” are rare, but in novel writing are inherent and essential.

We wish our own lives could seem this way. On our deathbeds, perhaps we imagine that it will all make sense. Or perhaps this is clinging too much to samsara, the Buddhist term for the eternal state of suffering. In good fiction, we treasure ambiguity, complexity and a sense of “chance” that the story may not go the way we expect or the way we want it to. This reflection of “reality” makes fiction all the more believable, and therefore relate-able – all the more authentically approximating the uncertainties of life itself.

Whether we are creating it or experiencing it, our fiction becomes our reality. Any writer will tell you that, when we are deep within our work, real life and real time completely fade. We are operating on a different plane, literally smelling, tasting and feeling our created world. Our characters become living, breathing people. They wake us up at night with something they just have to tell us. And yet, they only exist in our minds.

“You’re alone in a room with the stuff that won’t go away,” said Eugenides. As writers, we experience that stuff – those memories of the past, those concepts and characters – like whispers in the dark. They are as real to us as the life we wake up to each morning, so powerful that we fixate on them until we become possessed, obsessed enough to finally sit down at our keyboard or with a pen and try to make this other level of illusion real.

The job of the fiction writer is to create a completely believable illusion. And, if we work hard enough, if we’re really lucky, someone else just might one day find our words and choose to enter our illusive world.

Going Places

Tips on starting with a bang, from TWC Associate Director Michelle Cameron:

Picture this scene:

A man lands at an airport. The plane taxis on the ground for nearly fifteen minutes, while all around him, people are talking on their cell phones, hoping to be picked up or explaining when they’ll arrive, or just letting the family at home know they’ve arrived safely.

The plane finally taxis to the gate. People take down their luggage and wait, impatiently, in the corridor of the aircraft. Finally, the line begins to inch forward. It picks up speed. Everyone moves out of the aircraft while the flight crew bids them farewell.

The man moves quickly through the terminal, exiting at the security gate. He goes downstairs to the luggage area, a cold, sterile place. He waits for his luggage to appear…

Are you bored yet? I am, and I haven’t even had my character retrieve his luggage, find a taxi, drive though the city, check in at the hotel…

Now, consider this:

A man lands at an airport. Two hours later, in his hotel room, he lies down on the king-sized bed and calls his mistress.

Bam. In two short sentences, we’ve moved the story forward – and haven’t bored the reader (or writer) to death.

It can be difficult for writers to know how many transitional details to add to a story or novel. Sometimes a writer feels obliged to include some of the day-to-day details that, frankly, have meaning in real life but not necessarily in a piece of fiction.

Generally, it’s good to recognize when you yourself are losing interest in just such a transition. That’s usually a great clue to examine why you’re writing such a scene. There are some times when you might want to include the transitional details. For instance, if they give some insight into the character or set a scene that is going to be important for your readers, then it’s worth it. But if they don’t serve the story in any way except to get your character from place to place, consider cutting them and getting right into the action.

How? A simple transitional phrase such as “two hours later” will usually be enough for the reader to fill in the gaps. We’ve all been to airports, we know the mindless details that have to occur as you go from place to place. We’re often happy not to have to revisit them in our fiction.

The best rule of thumb is always – does your transition serve the story? If not, as they say in the movies, “cut to the chase” and get moving.

Writing in 3D

We’ve all heard it before. “Your character’s flat. You need to make him three-dimensional.”

Sure, great. But what exactly does that mean?

We all know we live in a three dimensional world. We learn it in grade school: a line, a plane, a cube… But how do you make a character three dimensional? Do you make him really fat? Do you give him a limp so he wobbles when he walks, thereby taking up more space?

Believe it or not, I’ve tried both, and no, that’s not what it means. Three-dimensional means you have to dig deeper.

Take that character with the limp, for example. It’s fine to describe him walking, every struggle to get his footing, every attempt to hide his frailty and vulnerability. Ah! There’s the hint that I need… his vulnerability. There’s where I begin to ask: why is he vulnerable? How does he feel about his limp? And, even more pressing, how did he get the limp in the first place?

It was only when I start asking these questions that the concept of three-dimensionality begins to come clear.

For me, it often starts with the physical. I was a dancer, once upon a time, and an actress after that. I’m pretty sensitive to subtle inflections of voice and shifts of movement – how they can reveal what a character is feeling. I often get up and act out what my characters are doing in a particular scene. Still, the physical is just the start. It’s getting beyond the external to the why’s, the how’s; for my poor man with the limp, it’s the who-does-he-think-of-every-time-he-takes-a-step, the source of dread that haunts his soul every time he trips or stumbles. Answering those questions gives me a character, not with a flaw, but with a life.

But not everyone feels comfortable getting up and acting out their scenes. How can you develop a 3D character without feeling like an utter fool in the privacy of your writing room?

The answer came to me about a month ago when Michelle Cameron and I were teaching a workshop on Creating Character. I had come armed with a few simple physical exercises for the writers at hand, but sensed in their awkward giggles that I wouldn’t get much beyond giving them some key details and letting them walk around in a circle for a couple of minutes “in someone else’s skin”. It worked well enough. But I realized I had to break it down.

I was jotting notes while Michelle asked the group, “What makes a character three-dimensional?”

“They’re quirky…. Idiosyncratic…. They have a heart…. A sense of humor…. A purpose for being…. They’re relatable…. Unpredictable…. They have room to grow.”

All the while, I’d been thinking about time – how time forms us and forces us to take actions, sometimes ones we never would have planned, that change the course of everything. And about how time slowly nips away at us until the “I” who once was is unrecognizable to the “I” that is now.

“To make a character three-dimensional,” I popped up, “is simple. All they need is a past, present and future.”

I’d drawn a little diagram, nothing special, but it illustrated the point.

“We are formed by our past. Everything we are comes from those first experiences, those memories: the hug we never got, or the helicopter mom, the fire we escaped, or the first love that cannot be matched or compared. And we all have a future – our wants, our needs, our expectations, our plans. Everything we do today – we as people and as characters – is propelled toward our future but shaped by our past, so that the choices we make are rooted in a complete and authentic reality and the desires we attempt to achieve are bolstered or thwarted by everything we drag behind. It’s simple!”

OK, it’s not simple. And I doubt I said it as articulately at the time, but I saw it in my head. It was an epiphany formed instantaneously there in that class. And suddenly I knew that all those years I’d spent in acting classes, sitting in the back of the theater jotting down pages of character notes – their background, parents, old relationships, losses and loves – I was doing what we all need to be doing every day as we get to know our characters.

And, just like in those acting days, we should do it “off-page”. Not in the context of the beautiful words you are drafting for your elegantly crafted scenes, but messy, in a notebook or a bullet-pointed list, so you don’t have to worry if it sounds right or makes any sense at all to anyone but you.

You only have to explore, imagine, and decide, “Yes, he fell out of a tree when he was five. He broke his leg in three places. But he was in the woods. Too far to be heard. Crying… Crying and no one heard him. Finally in the dark, they came with flashlights and shadowed scowls. But the skin was cut. Infection had set in. The bones never set quite right, and since then, all the running, climbing, exploring. No more. And then in school…”

And suddenly the character has gained the inherent mass of a loss, fear, struggle and sadness. Limping forward, all he wants in all the world is to climb and run again.

Pitchapalooza coming to Words Maplewood

As an addendum to my last post, I just heard from Words Bookstore in Maplewood that Pitchapalooza is coming on October 27. You can get all the details at Pitchapalooza’s site, but here’s a brief intro to what they do. I hear from friends that their events are well worth a visit.

“Five years ago, we created an event that has drawn thousands of people into bookstores, writing conferences and book festivals all over the country. It’s called Pitchapalooza, the American Idol for books (only without Simon) and it works like this: Anyone with an idea for a book has the chance to pitch it to a panel of judges. But they get only one minute. Eckstut and Sterry team up with two guest industry insiders to form the judging panel. The Judges critique everything from idea to style to potential in the marketplace and much, much more. Whether potential authors pitch themselves, or simply listen to trained professionals critique each presentation, Pitchapaloozas are educational and entertaining for one and all. All attendees come away with concrete advice on how to improve their pitch as well as a greater understanding of the ins and outs of the publishing industry.

“At the end of each Pitchapalooza, the judges come together to pick a winner. The winner receives a half hour consultation with Eckstut and Sterry. From Miami to Portland, from LA to NYC, and many stops along the way, Pitchapaloozas have consistently drawn standing-room-only crowds, press and blog coverage, and the kind of bookstore buzz reserved for celebrity authors.”