writer at play
January reads:
What did you read this January?
I love how writer Megan Payne turns failed short stories into a learning experience. I wish I were that analytical–maybe my short story success rate would be higher. *grin*
Debut Analysis for Aspiring Writers: After two and a half years of reviewing debuts, Tia Nevitt shares her thoughts on writing to fit trends, complete with marine metaphors. What I have found (as a reader and follower of agent blogs) is that high-concept, original twists and fresh ideas really work. The standard fantasy fare, however well-written, is just too same ol’ same ol’ to jaded readers (of which I am one, I’m afraid).
JA Konrath always has such an interesting take on ebooks, especially in light of lessons learned watching the movie and music industries deal with piracy. Will books go the Google way, with free content and paid advertising? And here’s his followup, Selling Paper, on why the publishing industry is approaching e-books from the wrong angle.
Snow is…
feather-flakes spiraling through the air
mashed, broken, crumpled, crushed, miraculously whole flakes on my black gloves
a soft silent assault on the sleeping world
wet clumps falling–plop!–on my windshield as I drive under trees
a white coverlet under which roofs slumber
windblown powder on cheeks and in eyes
scrunch-squish-scrunch under my boots
crusty, ugly, dirty piles around the driveway
I love the changeablity of snow. How it appears in so many aspects, how it can be soft and hard, beautiful and ugly, many-textured, many-formed. How it transforms the world.
There are so many things that have variations, moods, shades and nuances. A tree changes through the seasons of the year. The sun changes as it climbs the sky and descends again. The moon waxes and wanes. The sea is changing and moody. And a person–well, a person can be delightful and exasperating and patient and frustrated and still and exuberant, all wrapped up in the same package.
What do you love and find inspiring, in all its variations?
1. Read winter poetry (like this lovely illustrated version of Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening) and paint winter landscapes.
2. Catch snowflakes on your mittens. Read books about snowflakes. Cut, draw, or make some of your own.
3. Go outside and make snow angels, snowmen (or snow dinosaurs) and ice sculptures. Have fun! My older two shoveled trails and went on trips in the front yard. Also made mini snowpeople and snowstones.
4. Winter is a good time to go to art and science museums. Journal, draw or make up stories inspired by what you saw.
5. Have a tea party. Bake scones, get out the lace tablecloth, decorate with tissuepaper flowers and name cards, serve on nice china. You can pretend to have teatime with the Queen (Sir I. and Miss M. loved this one–they even made a crown and throne for the Queen).
6. Do science experiments. My preschooler and k’er never get tired of melting snow and freezing water. We’ve been studying polar animals and today we made “blubber gloves” using shortening and tried them out in ice water. Sir I. wishes he were a walrus so he could have a blubber layer and go live in the Arctic!
Why do some ideas go viral while others disappear with nary a ripple? Why do urban legends and conspiracy theories make it halfway around the world before more worthy messages can even get their boots on? In this offering, brothers Chip and Dan Heath unpack what makes some ideas memorable, or “sticky”.
The authors found that messages that tend to stick around share many of six principles. These messages are Simple Unexpected Concrete Credentialed Emotional Stories, or SUCCESs.
This book attracted me as a writer, blogger, mom and homeschooler. I compete heavily in the marketplace of ideas. In order to reach other people, my ideas have to be memorable. I want my children to remember the lessons I teach, from values to the capital of France to the water cycle. Someday I hope to persuade people to buy my stories. I need to show them that my work is worth their time.
So, as I ponder what I’ve read, I’m going to apply these ideas to a pitch for Quartz, my revision project.
Let’s get into the six principles.
#1 Simple
Simple doesn’t mean simplistic, it means focusing on the core of your idea, the Commander’s Intent, the one mission-critical part of your message. The authors emphasize that if you say three things, you’re saying nothing.
Simple also means compact, in the way a proverb is compact. To be compact, you piggyback off of people’s existing schema. For example, the high-concept pitch for the movie Alien was Jaws on a spaceship. A title like Pride and Prejudice and Zombies is a pitch in and of itself. I once had a story pop into my head that billed itself as “King Arthur in Gotham City” and then vanished into a back corner with a Batman-like swoop. Someday, once I get all my current projects done, I will got hunt that story down…
Back to Quartz. Ignoring all its subplots (avoiding “feature creep”), I zero in on the heart of the story:
An ex-military diplomat and a free-agent demon-slayer join forces to find a natural vein of light-producing rock before their enemies do.
# 2 Unexpected
You use the unexpected to grab people’s attention. You cause their guessing mechanisms to fail. This failure causes people to pay attention. The authors warn against failing into gimmickry, though. You want to bring out the unexpected in your message, not bombard people with unconnected randomness. The unexpected must be “postdictable”–a surprise, but you shoulda seen it coming.
That’s what we writers call a twist. 
So, here’s me twisting my pitch:
In a sunless world, an ex-military diplomat and a free agent demon slayer join forces to find a natural vein of light-producing rock before their enemies do.
That’s a bit better. I’ve provided context for the importance of the light-producing rock, which is also the twist: this is a sunless world, so your regular photosynthesizing plants can only be grown under artificial light. All of a sudden that light rock looks pretty important, doesn’t it?
#3 Concrete
The writers use the Aesop fable about the fox and the grapes as an example of concrete imagery that makes the abstract principle behind it easier to grasp and remember. In fact, when we think of it, so many ideas are encoded in concrete images that have made it into our common language. “Sour grapes” is one, and so is our household favorite, “don’t be a dog in a manger” (it cracks me up to hear Sir I. use it, because he doesn’t quite get it). Our speech is peppered with red herrings, green-eyed monsters, and other idioms.
Abstraction is the curse of expertise; concreteness is craved by the layperson. Concrete ideas are more memorable, and they provide a common turf between people.
In my pitch, enemies is too vague and generic, so instead I use:
In a sunless world, an ex-military diplomat and a free agent demon slayer join forces to find a natural vein of light-producing rock before it falls into the hands of an oppressive power-hungry regime.
#4 Credible
Messages can be made credible if they are supported by authorities (experts or aspirational figures). Additionally, details and statistics help messages be internally credible.
My pitch would be more credible if I had published a previous novel that you liked, had won some awards, or received an endorsement from another writer. Or even if your best friend had read my work, loved it, and raved about it to you.
I don’t have any of those, and I don’t know your best friend’s name, so the only thing I have going for me is some internal credibility–the detail that in a sunless world, other sources of light are vitally important.
#5 Emotional
In order to make people act on messages, they have to care. Messages can appeal to self-interest (the writers discuss Maslow’s Pyramid of Needs) or group identity (what would I person like me do?). My only goal is to entertain you, to make it worth your time to be in my imaginary world for a few hours. To do that I have to make my characters and their situation matter to you. If I bring out the high stakes a bit more, I get:
In a sunless world on the edge of famine, an ex-military diplomat and a free agent demon slayer join forces to find their world’s greatest resource—a natural vein of light-producing rock–before it falls into the hands of an oppressive, power-hungry regime.
#6 Story
Stories are powerful (as a writer and reader, I already knew that *grin*). The authors go into more detail into why stories are such powerful vehicles for messages, but I was more interested in the three basic story templates the writers elaborate on:
The Challenge Plot, in which the protagonist succeeds against formidable odds (David and Goliath)
The Connection Plot, in which people form a relationship that bridges a divide (Romeo and Juliet)
The Creativity Plot, in which someone solves some kind of mental puzzle (I imagine many murder mysteries fall into this category).
My story is primarily a Challenge Plot, with a Connection subplot.
***
So, what do you think? Did I apply those principles to their best advantage in this pitch? Where could I improve, based on the SUCCES model?
Further Reading: The Simple Dollar reviews Made to Stick and uses the principles in a series of blogposts.
The Blogging Edition
Do you have blogger’s block? Been a couple weeks since you last posted? Feel like you’ve said it all before? Check out Paperback Writer’s Blog Blocked post to jumpstart your blog.
And for those trying to stand out of the pack, Darren Rowse offers up a list of ways to make your blog unique.
The Simple Dollar has a whole series of posts on building a better blog.
Ideas come to me at the oddest moments. I was passing a truck on the highway about a week ago, did the quick sidelong glance at the monster beside me, and my brain flashed “turtle!”.
Maybe it was something about the angle, the curve of the headlights, the positioning of all the parts you find on the front of a semi, but it reminded me of nothing more than a snorting, determined, slightly mad turtle.
Of course, me being me, I came up with a turtle-truck hybrid to put in a far future world I’ve been putting together from fragments of inspiration for several months. Farscape has introduced the term biomechanoid into my vocabulary, a concept that fits very well into this world. Cargo-carrying,wheeled, snapping, red-eyed, repitilian, with high-domed shells–I think these will make it into the background of the story very nicely.
I enjoy an original twist on common everyday things, like transportation. I’ve read about Liveships and Brainships. In Paula Volsky’s The Grand Ellipse (sorta like Around the World in 80 Days meets World War 2 in a fantasy world), the characters get around in a number of a different ways–two-man bicycles, golems, boats pulled by water buffalo-like creatures, horses, trains, ships, and of course, their own two feet. Cables and trams and trains play big roles in my more steampunk stories. And I just get a kick out of airships.
Have you read any books with a memorable twist on transportation? Or come up with one of your own?
Blog reader Megs introduced me to the blog Procrastinating Writers, which is full of tips to help overcome that particular demon. It’s a smart idea to blog on this topic–there’s quite an audience for it–but it makes me a laugh a little, too. And think.
Why am I (and presumably hundreds of other writers) so prone to procrastination? Why is it that even though I want to write, I fail to, you know, actually do it? Why is it that when I sit down with my MS (after hours of anticipation), I would rather scrub the shower or organize my socks by color?
What is it about writing that makes it so easy to push on to the back burner?
Lack of deadlines. There are people who make a living from writing.
I’m not one of them.
Luckily for my family, we do not relying on my writing to pay the heating bill or buy groceries. Unluckily for my works-in-progress, it’s easier to goof off when not facing subzero temps inside my house or days of beans and rice.
Solution? Join writing groups and challenges (like NaNoWriMo) to help keep you on track. Get a good writing buddy to prod you every now and again. Get your spouse to block you from the Internet in the evenings–and refuse to give you that $#@!! password.
Lack of warmups. Sometimes, I’m writing along (lalalala) and all is well.
Then I hit a wall (shoulda seen that one coming!). A massive concrete monstrosity with barbed wire at the top and crude graffiti sneering at me. Unclimbable. Undrillable. Laughs at the stick of dynamite I’m waving at it
I’m stuck, the story is going nowhere. Every time I think about writing, I think about that wall. Why, yes, I’d rather play 87 games of Solitaire tonight, thanks.
Writing–as I do it–doesn’t have much in the way of warmups. When I have a difficult piece of music to work through, I usually don’t jump right into it. I’ll do scales for a while, work on easier songs, go back to the pieces I played a few months ago. After building up my confidence, I’m able to tackle the harder piece.
Solution? Begin writing sessions with ten minutes of freewriting. Create a novel journal for writing down all your anxieties and issues with the story. All story-related angsting goes here. Use this journal to brainstorm, cluster and talk your way out of story problems.
Lack of step-by-step instructions. When you knit, you follow a pattern (mostly). When you play music, you follow the music (mostly). When you act, you have a script.
Writing a novel doesn’t come with an instruction manual. Nobody tells you where you should start, when you bring in new characters, where those twists should go. It’s both liberating and paralyzing. There is nothing to gauge your work against. Nothing but that slowly sinking feeling in your stomach when something goes wrong.
Solution? This will be different for different people. Maybe planners need to ditch their outlines. Maybe pansters need to step back and work out one. I find that I need to have a strong premise, a sense of the ending and a handful of beginning scenes before I sit down to write a new novel.
Not tactile, not physical. Writing is a mostly a cerebral activity. Yes, there is the physical act of typing or writing longhand, but that is a very small component of a novelist’s skillset. And because writing mostly goes on in my head, it can be harder to make the leap to writing things down. With many other activities–you just do. Making up stories? That seems like a mystical process, one that cannot be corralled or controlled. One that does not produce something tangible or functional, unlike crocheting a warm blanket or harvesting lettuce for lunch.
Solution? Doing something physical–walking, washing dishes, gardening–often gives my brain a chance to tease out my story without my active interference. Seeking out new experiences, or just stopping to fully enjoy the ones I do have, store up a wealth of sensory detail for me to draw on when I am writing a story.
And, last of all, writing is hard work! We have so many leisure options available to us: movies, TV, Internet, video games, books, (let others do all the work), watching paint dry (just kidding!). After a long tiring day, all my brain and I want is to be entertained, not be entertaining.
What about you? If you’re a procrastinating writer, what makes it hard for you to get started?
Recent highlights from our homeschool:
* We read an illustrated version of Robert Frost’s Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening, and painted snowy trees afterward. This was the kids’ first introduction to spattering paint on purpose.
* After reading several books featuring knights, the kids designed their own coats-of-arms and put them on posterboard shields. Sir I. was the Blue Cross Green Tiger Knight and Miss M. was the Snowstorm Knight.
* We’ve been studying England and today we had an English tea party. The kids were ridiculously excited to receive their invitations to have tea with the Queen. They made crowns and thrones, while I worked on cucumber sandwiches and scones. It was a lovely spread.
* Sir I. and Miss M. have been digging trails in the yard. Today we got more snow, and D. and the older kids made a snowman (or was it a snow dinosaur? I received conflicting reports).
It is so much fun to see their eyes light up when something catches their interest.
The tagline of this blog is “writer at play”, but my attitude towards my literary endeavors is more akin to steely-eyed clenched-teeth fortitude these days. I was eyeball-deep in one set of revisions for a couple months; I have since waded into yet another novel revision. While revisions do have their moments of mountain-high elation, I’ve missed just being playful with the writing and storytelling process.
So, to rectify this, I propose to post some kind of fun (playful!) creative exercise every week or so, if only to get my own juices flowing. This week’s exercise is a new magical system, inspired by Miss M.
Miss M., like other three year old girls, loves to dress up. Her base outfit may look something like this: a pink and brown striped and dotted dress (she LOVES dresses), tights with large polka dots (orange being the dominant color), and over that, bright green pants with a large floral pattern. She proceeds to embellish this outfit with any or all of the following: pink socks, ballet slippers, a fairy princess costume, a hat from Africa, mittens, apron, chef’s hat, tiara, plastic rings, beaded necklace, jingle bell bracelet, assorted pieces of winter gear. She isn’t above snitching her father’s comfy slippers, either.
One day, while watching Miss M dance around completely oblivious to the fashion horror sight she presented, I was struck by an idea for a new magical system. What if, said Right Brain, there existed a society in which magical spells were woven into articles of clothing? And the only way to utilize those spells would be to actually wear them? (Or is it the other way around? You could only use spells that were in contact with your skin, so that’s why you put them into clothes in the first place).
First and furious, other ideas and implications came pouring in:
The spells are closely tied to the physical aspect of the clothing. Type of fabric, dye, pattern, cut, embroidery–all played a big part. In order to modify a spell, you can add embroidery, put on a button, take off an inch of hem.
In order to maximize the number of spells available to you, you would try to wear as many clothes as you could. This society would have to live in a cold climate. Otherwise, it might be too hot and uncomfortable to be a magic-user!
Spelled clothing would be passed down through many generations–the bodice of Great-Grandma’s wedding dress could end up in Romilda’s coming-out gown, or as part of Uncle Abernathy’s vest. Magical items would be concentrated in the hands of families, rather than individuals.
Every magic-user (male or female) would strive to be a very good tailor!
The rich would have an advantage in being able to afford better quality materials.
Ballrooms would become the battlegrounds. Armor would be fans, jewelry, vests, shoes.
Imagine, the Underthings of Invincibilty. Ha!
And, best of all, people would match their clothing, not in terms of color or style, but with an eye to complementing magical power. So, why not wear a chef’s hat on top of a tiara, or mismatched mittens?
Your turn! Have you read or come up with any unusual magic systems (allomancy in Brandon Sanderson’s Mistborn springs instantly to mind)?
