Watching the Clock: Keeping track of the third 'W' in your writing.

I was recently re-reading an old manuscript when I stumbled across the following passage...

    "Jordan paused before turning the corner, wondering what she was going to say to the old man that would make any difference. She toyed with her lighter, but couldn’t bring herself to light it. MacLeod had done nothing to earn her disrespect; his house, his rules.

     She could smell the old man’s cigar smoke on the late-afternoon breeze and wondered what she’d have to do to earn the latitude Pastor Kipfer seemed to enjoy. Maybe he'd share his stogie, turn it into an ersatz peace pipe. 

     The rattle of gravel echoed off the garage wall as a car pulled up out front and she hesitated. She didn’t want to do this in front of an audience. She stalled for time, stowing the lighter back in her pocket and hoping it was just a deliveryman.

     A gruff male voice yelled “You Ashleigh MacLeod?"

   “Maybe, who’s asking?” growled the voice of the pastor. 

     A sound like twin thunderclaps shattered the afternoon silence. Light flared, casting harsh shadows against the garage wall, freezing the moment like a camera's flash. The moment of inrushing horror seemed to stretch to infinity the moments before Jordan screamed..."

Did you catch it?  

The muzzle flashes of the shooting we're witnessing through the main character's eyes are bright enough that she sees them from around the corner. Moments after noting that it was mid-afternoon.  

If you've ever been around guns much, you know that's just silly -- it's a gunshot, not a lightning flash.

I know exactly what happened. The first time I wrote the scene, the two characters (Jordan and Pastor Kipfer) had just risen from the supper table and dusk had fallen.  During a rewrite, I removed a bunch of material and shifted the preceding scene from dinner to lunch.

End result: The sun was still in the sky, but the way I was describing the scene still assumed it was dark.

Who, What, When, Why, Where, and How?  Sometimes the third W seems obvious, and sometimes it bites you in the butt.


Incidentally, I checked my notes from the beta readers and one of them even mentions that this scene has timing issues. I remember going through looking for things like this and still I missed this one. More than once.


It goes to show the value of close-reading during revisions.

There are many ways to keep track of this. I've known some authors to keep an account of every scene with a minute-by-minute timestamp. I'm convinced that the trend in thriller novels to include a timestamp at the top of each chapter started with an author's attempt to keep track of what was happening when and then forgetting to erase it.

Instead of military-style timestamps, I've started using an Afterthought Outline (patent pending).

It's not a new idea. In high school and college, instructors would require me to turn in an outline for a paper. Because I didn't see the value in them then and still don't, I would write the paper and then generate a fake outline after the fact. They're fine for those they help, but an unnecessary chore for those they do not.

Good thing I'm not teaching high school English, I suppose.

These days (since long after I wrote the passage above) I've started using the afterthought outline as an editing tool.

Instead of writing from an outline, I have a short precis of the story and some notes about how the main characters will interact. Sometimes I have character sheets for the characters detailing their descriptions and mannerisms, sometimes I don't. Sometimes, I just pin all of my cocktail napkins and bits of paper to a cork board in approximately the order in which they will unfold. Then I start writing and let things happen organically. It's not until the second or third draft that I start seriously jot noting how the story finally settled down and start flagging pages with Post-it notes to indicate where certain events begin and end.  This helps me sort out the flow of events and ideally, notice discrepancies like the one I mentioned above.

To avoid the kind of mistake I detailed above, I often note the date and time at the top of each scene either in the manuscript or in the attached outline: This happens and then this happens. And it's ___ o'clock. And in that location at that time and date, the sun would be ____.

So it goes that even an organic writer (so-called) finds it necessary to outline at least a little. Because if they don't watch the clock, at the very least they're going to have lighting issues.

Submissions :: The Genre Jungle

New York Times bestselling author Joe Finder tells the story of his first attempt at selling a thriller.  He sent it to an agent (back in the hardcopy days of yore) and received it back with a paperclip on page forty.  Joe is the ornery sort and did what you're not supposed to do: he called the agent and said "What's with the paperclip?"  After berating him for being cheeky, the agent finally told him that the paperclip marked where he stopped reading.  He then told him not to bother ever submitting a story to that agency again and hung up.

Joe didn't get any less ornery, but he did learn a lot about where to begin his story.  He cut the first forty pages and sold the book to a different agent, going on to a mostly successful career on best seller lists and so forth.

One of the reasons I began this blog was to chart my path from the slush pile to the bookshelf. This includes some rejections (and more than a little Chinese food) but more often it means listening to crickets chirruping in the form rejections that most of us receive back.  A sterile rejection letter tells you nothing at all.  Agents and publishers fire them off for a whole host of reasons including the fact that they just don't have room on their docket for another (insert genre here) novel or the market isn't right to try to sell (insert genre here) just at this moment.  In all my submissions, I've received only three personal notes and only the last one included anything I could use to really examine whay the book kept coming back to me.
 
Like every other writer (or so I hope), I have a cheering section rooting me on -- family and friends who believe in my ability to fight my way free of the slush pile.  I've been gratified by their response to the aforementioned agent's brutally honest assessment and I thank my dear friends for rising to my defense.  But their love for me doesn't make them right any more than his ambivalence makes him wrong.  The trouble with brutal honesty is that while it is brutal, it is also honest.  And honesty should never be ignored.

The crux of that agent's comment was the same as the feedback Joe Finder got (except that I didn't have to alienate an entire literary agency to get it): I started in the wrong place and he felt no desire to keep reading or ask for more pages.  He likes the way I write but he didn't care for the way I handled the story.  In essence, I failed to meet his expectation for a "Thriller".

So now I can do one of three things...

1. Ignore him and carry on.
2. Re-cut the manuscript to meet genre expectations.
3. Pitch the book for a different genre.

Honestly, my takeaway from all this is that I failed to impart to him what I was attempting to do in The Palimpsest.  Either that or I should have pitched it as a mystery or suspense novel (which it isn't really either). 

For the record, I think that genre conventions are complete and utter horse-puckey (thank you Colonel Potter).  I sold books for a decade and understand as well as anyone can why they exist (to help readers find books similar to ones they already like).  I still think they're artificial constructs and that they do more harm than good.  In a physical bookstore, it was about where to shelve a book and where a customer will go to find it.  Online bookselling has thankfully begun to erode these distinctions and I think that we will eventually be largely free of them even if the publishing industry isn't quite ready to let go yet.

My feelings about genre distinctions aren't the reality.  So I have to decide how to move forward and how to categorize my work within the framework that exists.

I always knew that The Palimpsest was going to be hard to sell.  While I'm a fan of writers like Finder, the writers who set the bar are the likes of Ken Follett, Iain Pears, Amitav Ghosh, Arturo Pérez-Reverte and Carlos Ruiz Zafon.  All of these guys write books that could be described as 'thrillers' but manage to bridge the genre distinctions, creating smart, literate and exciting tales that meet or exceed their categorization.

All of which means that there's a market for a book like mine.  Smart, literate thrillers and mysteries, "Nerd Adventures" if you will.  To pretend that's not what I'm trying to sell would be a lie.  And no one is served by me re-crafting a sales pitch that lies about what the book is (or isn't).  If I cut it and cut it and cut it until it fit inside the cookie cutter, it would no longer be something excite me or my readers and that's a problem for me.

This may sound arrogant, but I don't really care: I did not come here to meet expectations, by God I came here to exceed them.

Dialogue Coach :: Speaking of Revisions

Spotting your own bad writing is an important skill; spotting your own bad dialogue habits is crucial.  I have been told that I write dialogue well, especially scenes with large numbers of people talking.  I love doing it because it allows me to put ideas on the table that would not occur to my main characters and deal with some expository business without writing any monologues or extended omniscient narration (Both of which I hate).

I can think of five things that will absolutely kill a dialogue scene.

1. Point of View problems. (Head-hopping)
   Be clear about your POV character(s) and stay out of the heads of the other speakers. This is called "head-hopping")  If your POV character doesn't know it, don't show it.
2. Who said that? (Unclear pronoun antecedents.)
   If you have more than one character of a gender, you must be very careful with or not use gender pronouns to tag dialogue.
3. Author ventriloquism.
   Your characters must talk like themselves, not like you.  Each character must have a unique voice, mannerisms, and linguistic fingerprint.  A longshoreman won't speak the same way an author speaks or a professor.  Trust me, I know some professors and longshoremen.
4. Adverbs. (Adverbs present dialogue badly.)
   Adverbs are vampires, sucking the life out of dialogue.  Type "ly" into the search function of your word processor and delete almost every word it finds with that suffix.  Your writing will be better for it. 
   
5. Bad dialogue tags.
   Said, asked or typed (because we live in a text-rich world, sometimes dialogue takes place on a keypad)

The most prevalent problem I see is the last one.  So, let's talk a bit about dialogue tags

When was the last time you simpered?  Really?  How about the last time you exulted?  Personally, I can't remember the last time I hissed, sighed or grumbled a conversation.  (Okay, I'll admit to the occasional grumbling, but it's worth noting that when I grumble something, my wife usually asks me to repeat it because when someone grumbles, it's usually hard to hear them.)

These things are called "dialogue tags" and for the most part, they're a sign of lazy writing.  Rule number three in Elmore Leonard's fabled "10 Rules" is "Never use a verb other than ''said'' to carry dialogue."  The ladies at Editorrent included "Bad Dialogue Tagging" on their list of things that mark an amateur.  Blogging agent Nathan Bransford has led many a spirited debate over why, when and if dialogue tags like "Exulted" should be stricken from the written record.  . .  If I listed all the debates raging across the internet on this topic, we'd be here all day.

I'm a big fan of saying that the only concrete rules of writing are "Butt goes in chair and words go on page", but that's a definition of writer that falls short on the subject of craft.  It's not enough to vomit words onto a page if no one will reads them.  And if they're not enjoying it, they'll stop. Your job is to keep them from stopping.

I attended a workshop at the PNWA conference when someone (I'm sorry, there were so many, I think it might've been Bob Mayer) said that any word other than "said" might make a reader pause.  Again, your job is to keep the reader reading.  If they stop, you're dead.

There are exceptions to any rule and one reason why the debate still rages is that there are a goodly number of best-selling examples of bad dialogue.  One of the few complaints I have about JK Rowling, in fact is that she tends to play fast and loose with words like "exulted" and "ejaculated" to describe dialogue.

My default position on this is that anything sparking this much debate should be used advisedly if at all.  And by 'advisedly' I mean that you need to know that there will be people burning you in effigy if you think you can get away with it.  I'm not here to satisfy grammarians, but I am in the business of keeping readers reading.

I honestly believe that the most common reason we use these things isn't because we don't trust our readers to infer emotion or delivery.  I've heard that said a thousand times and I just don't believe that it's true.  I think it's because writers love words and said and asked get boring after awhile. The method I use to get around this is the action lead-in or breakout.  That's to say that I preface or end dialogue describing a bit of action which stages the dialogue.  This is discussed quite ably in this article so I won't bother to reinvent the wheel.   

When I am revising a story, I type the following words into the "Search" box and eradicate almost every one that I find:  hissed, sighed, grumbled, yelled, screamed, complained, whined, temporized, exclaimed, worried, blurted, confessed, intoned, simpered.

That's not a complete list, but those are the ones I find myself using if I drop my guard.  You'll have your own list (and yes, you really should be keeping one) of words you overuse.  At the end of the revision, I'm not perfect, but I am better for having done it.

Good luck!

What Time Is It? :: Revisions

Time will make fools of us all... or so I am told.  Over the weekend, I went to a 1940's theme party at a friend's and served as a suspect in a murder mystery*. In the course of the murder mystery (one of the ones that comes in a box) we noticed that our characters seemed almost preternaturally aware of the exact time that everything happened.

The dialogue provided was chock full of so many timestamps I was beginning to wonder if Tom Clancy** wrote it:  "At 5:40, I glanced down the corridor and watched the British Spy sneak into the club car. At 5:45, I heard a glass break and at 5:50 the Gendarme arrived..."

It's a trope that goes back to Agatha Christie and we had a lot of fun with it, inserting reasons into our dialogue as to why we happened to know the exact time.  "Well I happened to be glancing at my watch just as I noticed..."

Anyway, it brought to mind some things I'd been thinking about lately regarding telling time and telling stories.

Last week, a friend sent me an interesting link to a Physics Professor's blog trying to use applied mathematics to analyze a scene from Lord of the Rings.  He expended some very pretty math trying to decide how fast Middle Earth's DEW*** beacons could spread the word via mountaintop bonfires from Gondor to Rohan.  Because I'm a geek, I read it and had an opinion about it on several levels. The math is pretty, even if his ignorance of military discipline and Middle Earth geography are aggravating for anyone...  if... you happen... to... um... never mind.  Anyway, you can read his post here if you like that sort of thing.

What I really take away from Professor Allain's examination of the opening scenes of Return of the King isn't really my geeky fit of pique, but the importance of clarity in how much time is passing in a story.  Professor Allain's problem stems from the film's time-compression.  That is to say, it's unclear how long it took for the line of bonfires to carry a message from one kingdom to the next. 

For some reason, a visual medium like film can get away with this sort of thing.  The sun rises and sets in the course of the scene and I take it Peter Jackson wants you to understand that in the compressed "movie time" that it took all night to get the message from Pippin to Aragorn.  This is harder in a book.  I'll even go so far as to say that it's literary suicide for a writer to make a reader stop and wonder how long something took or what the sequence of events was.  This is what makes flashbacks, dream sequences and time travel such dicey story telling tools.

Even though I detest writing from an outline, I think that keeping track of what day it is, what time of day it is, and how much time has passed in the course of your narrative is the strongest argument I can think of for doing so.  I'm pretty good at keeping things linear as I write the first draft.  But when I start revising and events find new homes, it's annoyingly easy to get mixed up. 

As I read a printed manuscript, I use Post-it notes to flag everytime a day passes.  From this I create a timeline (which I wouldn't have to do if I wrote from an outline to begin with, but that's another post) and then go through and correct any time travel issues.

I firmly believe that a story well told doesn't need a Tom Clancy time stamp at the top of every chapter.  And it shouldn't inspire a physics professor to create mathematical formulae to figure out what just happened.  Somewhere between the two, there has to be a happy medium.  Just don't have characters glancing at their watches all the time.

---

*Apropos of nothing, these parties are one of the reasons I have some of the strange photos you periodically see here.  The "Disco" era pictures are probably best left to the imagination, though...
** Tom and his peers really like to tell us the setting and hour at the top of every scene change: "Bob's Apartment, Washington DC, 0800 GMT" It works for him, but I think it's ultimately a bit of a cheat.
*** DEW "Distant Early Warning" - A string of radar installations and listening posts installed during the Cold War across Alaska and Canada to watch for early signs of attack from the Soviet Union.

Russian Gun Control

Wow.  I must be the only blogger on the internet this week talking about Russians and gun control.

(Pause for uncomfortable laughter)

Spies and guns: the low-hanging fruit of the American blogger, and not at all what I'm going to talk about today.  The second amendment to the US constitution doesn't go where we're going and when you're writing, regardless of your nationality or politics, the one gun you must control belongs to a Russian guy named Chekhov.

"One must not put a loaded rifle on the stage if no one is thinking of firing it." 
- Anton Chekhov

Put another way: don't create expectations and then fail to live up to them.

I tend to write very quickly.  In the throes of inspiration, I can throw eight thousand words on a page without stopping to eat as long as the waitress keeps refilling my mug.  In that kind of literary melee it's relatively easy to drop a thread or mention an object and then leave it dangling.  When I'm revising a manuscript (as I am now) the first thing I check for is gun problems.

The most common culprit of this is the tendency to put unnecessary detail into a scene.  It's amazingly easy to get so into your own head that you create a scene populated by minutiae that doesn't serve the plot.  I'm guilty of this myself and revising for me is often about going back and trying to decide which detail and how much will set the scene without drowning the scene.  The danger being that some little bit of detail that you thought was cool at the time will stand out for the reader and take them out of the scene.

There are obvious exceptions to Chekhov's rule.  A policeman (at least an American policeman) or soldier will be carrying a gun and you would have to spend valuable time explaining why he isn't.  Putting a gun in a scene where they're expected isn't violating Chekhov's rule.  Putting one in a drawing room or library and then failing to use it is.  Your audience is left waiting for Godot to walk in and shoot someone and they will resist when you try to pull them into a new scene without first resolving that gun on the table.

Of course, this isn't me telling you that you cannot lay false trails, float red herrings, or make the butler look guilty when it was really the cook.  All of those instances of false foreshadowing are paid-off when you reveal why the butler didn't do it as you must do in the course of revealing that the cook is lying fink.  The payoff is the important part.

Chekhov's "gun" doesn't have to be a firearm.  A character leaving bloody fingerprints on the pages of a book was a neat bit of realism for me because he cut himself in an earlier scene, but my beta readers spent the rest of the book wondering when his bloody fingerprints were going to become important. They weren't important, it was just me shooting my story in the foot with Chekhov's gun.

Any character, artifact or plot element that by its very nature, creates an expectation in the mind of the reader will destroy their suspension of disbelief if it doesn't pan out.

I began this post with a sort red herring about guns and Russians and then pivoted away from the current political hot-button issues to a discussion of dramatic elements.  No one got past the Chekov quote still expecting me to express an opinion about Russian espionage or the Second Amendment.  It might've been a little lame, but it wasn't Chekhov's gun.

Don't annoy your readers or they'll stop reading.  And if they stop reading... you might as well stop writing.  I hope you didn't stop reading. 

As a reward, here's a video I found that brilliantly satirizes the whole concept, and yet manages to effectively illustrate it at the same time (the mark of good satire, in my opinion).

The perils of prophecy...

I've talked before about finding a way to write and a place to do it no matter what.  I've written on trains and airplanes, in many a waiting room, cafe, bookstore, library, pub, restaurant and classroom.  Anywhere with a writing implement and a moment of quiet solitude has been given the rhythm of my keyboard or pen... but I think that this week has been my first experience writing in a hospital bed.  With a morphine drip and one eye swollen shut.  

Yes, the universe has a funny funny sense of humor...

Well, I'm working on revisions to my latest manuscript, actually, and I think any writer will agree that... well... if there's a special ring of hell reserved for us, it will be comprised of stacks of lovingly-crafted manuscripts that are 20,000 lovingly-crafted words too long for their proposed market.

So, quite frankly, the morphine isn't helping one bit.

Don't worry about me, I'm getting amazing care from a very House-like doctor who looked me straight my swollen eye sockets and said "I find your case... interesting."  He said 'interesting' with an inflection I'm not sure I've ever heard in real life and as he then rattled off the list of tests and drugs he was going to try, I suddenly I knew that the man would get me better and that everything I thought was fake about television medicine was actually true.

Eye-opening.  At least I hope so.

Ten More Things...

These have been a bit shorter than usually lately and for that I apologize.  I've been preparing a manuscript for submission to an agent and my attention didn't want to be split this week. 

On the bright side, this is also showing me the things that I know, but don't practice, and the things I practice without thinking about. (As an act of self-protection, I'm not going to differentiate between the two) I've been jotting them down as they occur to me and not that I have ten of them (that didn't take long), here's an incomplete list of things to keep in mind as you are editing your manuscript...

1. Adverbs are vampires that suck the life out of verbs.  Delete them.
2. Not every word in your vocabulary was meant to be used.
3. Street people and college professors should not sound the same in dialogue.
4. Don't let your POV character wander offscreen and leave the 'camera' on a non-pov character.
5. "I love this" is not a good enough reason to keep anything.
6. Violence should be succinct and brutal and death should be final.
7. "Well, (insert name of famous author here)  got away with it, so I can too" is the top of a very slippery slope.
8. You are not your characters and your characters are not you. (It's also helpful to remind your family and friends of this from time to time.)
9. Daydreaming about Dan Brown-like success will not get you any closer to Dan Brown-like success.
10. When you get too tired to concentrate, stop.