Tuesday, January 26, 2016

How to Integrate More Detail and Imagery In Your Scenes

I used to be so good at including strong imagery and detail in my scenes. Perhaps as I age, I take these aspects in a scene for granted, just as I know the smell of my quilt at night or the sweat of a faux leather couch in summer. It just seems common place.

However, it's these common place elements that create concrete settings for your readers.

Today, I'll share with you a little technique I've started using so I make sure not to forget to add these all important details.

It's actually quite simple:

For every new scene, write down these five things:

What can my character see?

What can my character hear?

What can my character touch?

What can my character taste?

What can my character smell?

It's so rudimentary, it's almost like the worksheets they used to give us in first grade when we were still learning how to identify our own feelings. But I promise you that if you take the time for each new place and setting to write down a few things for each category, you'll feel more confident as a writer, and you'll have a better sense where your characters are standing.

Let's say you have a conversation between a father and his daughter's new boyfriend taking place in the garage. Now, this scene could probably go down with little information and be just fine. Let's say the only thing your reader knows of the space is that the floor is cement and the family car is parked inside.

Can the scene be written well with this little detail?

Of course. But if you want to add layers of depth to your writing and make your reader feel immersed, consider the advantage of concrete detail.

For example:

Your characters can see an old neon Budweiser sign flashing on and off in glowing red light.

They can hear the father lighting his pipe with a suction sound.

They can touch the unfinished walls and the metal tools that are cool due to the fall weather.

They can taste the tobacco and the crispness of fall leaves coming through the open garage door.

They can smell used oil and the citrus scent of the father's grease cutting hand soap at the sink.

Now, it's important I point out here that you don't need to use all five of the senses to achieve a realistic and immersive scene. In fact, it's better that you don't overwhelm your reader with a million little comments about the setting and take away from the dialogue and stage action.

You may choose to include the sensory elements that best characterize the father in this situation or that are most glaringly obvious to the boyfriend.

So, the boyfriend will probably hear and make note of the father's pipe and the suction sound it makes while he lights it because it causes an uncomfortable lull in conversation. He'll probably also notice the Budweiser sign flashing like a warning light in a sinking submarine. He may even smell the citrus soap under the reek of tobacco.

He will most likely not include the taste sense, and if he does include touch, it will be subtler than the other elements already presented.

Remember too as you write that these details should be splattered through the text as the scene progresses rather than as an "info dump" or "exposition" at the very beginning when the duo enters the garage.

All it takes is a little detail to ratchet your scene up another notch. Try it in your next piece of writing and see how much you learn about the place and characters within it just from the senses they experience.

Wednesday, January 20, 2016

Market: Ekphrastic Challenge - Rattle Magazine

Many of you know I am an artist as well as a writer. In fact, many pieces of writing inspire me to create art and many pieces of art inspire me to write a short story or poem.

If you find yourself in the same boat, may I suggest a relatively new market from Rattle, a poetry magazine.

If you go here you can read the guidelines for their monthly Ekphrastic Challenge.

Basically, each month they post a new image of photography or artwork and ask poets to craft poems that are inspired by them. The artist picks their favorite and it is published, and an editor also picks their favorite and it is published.

It's also a fantastic writing prompt to get your muse going on a sluggish creative day.

So, head over to Rattle poetry and see if this month's image inspires your writer brain. If you happen to get a poem out of it, why not submit?

Wednesday, January 13, 2016

Mastering the Slight of Hand

Writers often have to be many different people when they're in writing mode. There's your creator hat, your editor hat, your researcher hat...the list goes on and on.

Today, I am going to ask you to don yet one more personality. The Magician.

Being a magician when you write is very important for one essential aspect of a good story: the slight of hand.

With this method, you introduce important plot information in one hand, but as the magician, you distract the reader's attention with your other hand. It's the good old, "look what's happening here and don't be distracted by the curtain to my right."

When the slight of hand is played correctly, it plants the seed of information in your reader's mind without causing them to focus on it and figure out the plot way before your protagonist does. It keeps the story from become too linear, predictable, and boring.

What's great about slight of hand is it doesn't only need to be utilized while giving giant clues into the major plot of the novel. Slight of hand can also give great depth to characterization of both major and minor characters. It can also be used to describe setting and time period.

Let's look at an example:

Plutonimus, your main character, is a banking man at Crooney Credit by day and a Slim City drag queen by night. However, the reader doesn't know the drag queen character in the book is Plutonimus until later in the narrative. To plant the seed of information in your reader's mind, slight of hand will be a great ally.

In this scene, Plutonimus is getting lunch with his coworker from Crooney.

"Why in the world would you approve that home loan?" Gregor asked, sliding his tray further down the line.

I selected a pink plastic fork from the rainbow colored cutlery bucket. "They seemed like they understood the repercussions of taking on such a large sum-"

"If I said I understood what it meant to jump off the Golden Gate Bridge, would you sign off on my suicide note?"

I shrugged, considering it. 

Gregor groaned. "Give me a pen."

I pulled a Slim Street Banking pen from my pocket and clicked it open. I extended it toward him, then pulled it back. "How were they supposed to know he was going to lose his job, huh? How do you plan for that?"

"You don't take on a loan you can't repay." Gregor snatched the pen from me. 

In this example, the reader is focused on the conversation between Plutonimus and his coworker. They're worried over what the consequences will be for the protagonist's mistakes. However, there are two slights of hand in this scene as well.

First, the pink fork. With an array of colored cutlery in his reach, Plutonimus selects what would be considered a strange color for a man in his profession to gravitate towards. Sure, he could have simply grabbed without looking, and that's what Gregor undoubtedly thinks, but our narrator makes a point of saying the fork was pink. So we know he chose the color consciously.

Then, though he works and banks at Crooney Credit, Plutonimus hands Gregor a pen from Slim Street Banking. Is this simply a pen a customer of his left behind on his desk? Of course not. This is where Plutonimus puts his drag queen earnings so he can keep his second job a secret from his daily life.

So, as you can see, slight of hand not only adds depth and interest to a scene, but it also allows you to reveal info early in the story without being so transparent and giving everything away.

It's a method employed in mystery and thriller novels for decades, but there's no reason YA, MG, inspirational, women's lit, and fantasy shouldn't have it either.

The next time you write, remember to bring your magician's hat along and create some slight of hand magic.

Tuesday, January 5, 2016

What To Do When You Hate Your Novel

This being my first post of the new year, I wanted to say something really positive. But I've heard from a lot of my writer friends lately that they've been in a funk. That novel they've been working on that seemed so promising and lovely...now they hate it.

Literally, hate it.

Like, think of it and groan. Look over a terrible paragraph or two and cry. Want to chuck your laptop out the window, kind of hate.

They think, why has this happened, it was going so well? Great, now I've wasted four months of my life on this thing that sucks.

I've been there. I've thought those same thoughts. The thing to remember is, this happens to all of us. As creative people, we doubt ourselves. This is beneficial because it stops us from doing something crazy - like quitting our careers and trying to write the next great American novel on a mountain in Tibet. It is also the driving force behind revision - because we want our work to be the best it can be, which means it needs to be better than the draft I wrote the first time around.

However, self-doubt can also be crushing. It can make you hate your work for really no reason whatsoever. Maybe your own voice annoys you. Maybe you can't riddle out the meaning of a scene. It's so frustrating that soon, you tell yourself you've never been an artist at all. You suck at writing and you should stop writing this novel right now.

What I'll tell you, faithful blog reader, is exactly what I tell my friends when they're in this funk. This is entirely normal behavior, but please, take a break.

First, you need to know that most every writer goes through this - especially with long materials like novels. Sooner or later, you will hate it - either from reading and rereading it too many times or out of frustration with your muse, but it will happen.

Now, it's important that you don't then delete the whole thing, burn your hard drive and spend all your savings on a new car you don't need. What you must do is set writing down for a moment and take a break. Go to the coffee shop for a few hours. Lock yourself in your room and reread Harry Potter. Go sky diving. Take a month or two and travel and meet new friends. Take a year and don't worry about writing.

If you're truly meant to write - if it's something you MUST do - you will always come back to it, and it will be waiting for you. Because, at this point, writing has chosen you as much as you have chosen it.

However, if writing truly does give you unneeded stress and torture, perhaps it hasn't chosen you after all. Perhaps you're not meant to be tortured by it.

For most of us who do the research on blogs and internet videos about the craft, and for those of us who've lost sleep pounding away at the keys in a fit of sheer elation, we're stuck in the writing life forever. Embrace it. But sometimes you can embrace it too strongly and smother the poor thing. This is when you need to take a break. Whether it's an hour or two years, do what you have to do to love writing again.

I promise it's worth it.

Just don't - whatever you do - delete your hard drive in a fit of rage.