Writing Place in Fiction: CWC Session II

Author Highlight: Christine Sneed

Creating an authentic feeling of place in a story is not as easy as it sounds. In this session, author Christine Sneed took us through some of her favorite descriptions of setting by some seriously pro authors, like Mavis Gallant and Andre Debus III. Here are my personal takeaways:

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DETAILS DETAILS DETAILS. The truest sense of setting comes from the combination of small observations. Take this, for example:

A black balcony stood over the entrance to the mansion.

Does that feel like any other entrance you’ve ever seen or imagined? Hardly. So think about the details. What sort of black is it – is it shiny like a Chinese box, or dull and gritty like igneous rock? Is the balcony spindly or does it have bars as thick as a prison cell’s? Does it jut, leer, or loom? Is it sloped with age or newly built? I could go on and on.

Now, for a few ways to get the most out of your details:

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1. Be Precise. Do not waste anything – every verb, adjective, and chosen noun image should add to the setting’s emotional or physical feel. Pare your sentences down to only necessary and evocative words.
2. Evoke Emotion or Aura. Settings aren’t just images – they’re indications of feeling. A home housing two about-to-be-divorced people isn’t going to have green walls – it’s going to have walls “green as the one plant he managed to keep alive all these years, using a steady supply of poured-out beer.” Or, if they are newly married and happy, the green could be described as verdant or lush.
3. Add a Sense of Movement. As you lay out a description, consider the transitions you are using between your images. Try going according to size (e.g. desk > room > house > town); try nesting images within one another (e.g. the color of late-to-bud roses, like those left behind the neighbors’ old house when they left for the winter); and when you are making a list, consider how one item leads to the next (e.g. a list of color associations moving from light colors to dark). Your description of setting should have a sense of progression or conversation; it shouldn’t feel like an awkward dinner party where everyone sits together but no one is talking.
4. Actions Performed. To further that feeling of action and movement, consider what your setting does. Verbs can keep a setting from going stale. A balcony oversees; a wall forbids; a hearth welcomes. These are just general; see how creative you can get!
5. Paragraph Size. When your paragraphs become heavily laden with description, consider using paragraph breaks to speed up the feel of the text. This can prevent the reader from getting bored, and give a stronger sense that the setting is causing action.

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The next two posts will go over my favorite session – Branding Yourself – The Role of the Author in the Marketplace by Laurie Scheer.

Session I Missed: To see that session, I had to miss the Meet the Publishers session. If you went to that session, consider doing a simultaneous or guest blog to correspond with my CWC Recap!

YA (Or Any!) Structure – CWC 2015 Session I (2)

Author Highlight:

• Michelle Falkoff
• Natalie Tilghman
• Stefanie Lyons

Now that we have gone over how to choose a structure, it’s time to think about what to do once we’ve settled on one. After you have chosen a structure,try to:

1. Use Details to Strengthen Structure. Everything can help strengthen your structure – even details as small as the names chosen for characters. Try not to let details go to waste by doing little more than describing the physical nature of characters or settings. For example, if your structure centers around songs like Michelle’s does, it can’t hurt to have your characters have the same first names of the artists that wrote some of your feature songs – especially for side characters, or for when you can’t find names that “just fit.”
2. Form Chapters that Stand (Moderately) Alone. Some structures do not allow for a chapter format, but if yours does, consider forming chapters that “make sense in isolation.” If a chapter reads beginning-to-end like a miniature story, than you are breaking your book up into pieces that will fit together tightly. This in turn will make your structure stronger.
3. Finalize Your Prologue Last. Your tale should always be tellable without a prologue; if you add one, it should add something to the story, but not be required for the story to make sense. Because of this non-necessity, a prologue can exist outside your normal structure, or even help to set it up. A way to maximize the structural potential of your prologue is to add or reevaluate it after the rest of your draft is done. It took me three years to figure out my prologue for IWTYT – but it does ten times the work of anything else I’d come up with before, in part because I added it last.
4. Align Your Emotional & Event Arcs. During the course of the story, there are both event and emotional story arcs – and they should basically run parallel to one another. After all, they often form a cause and effect relationship. If you already have an event planned in your outline, pencil in what emotion will follow, and vice versa. This will allow for natural progression.
5. Maximize Your Scene Order Potential. If your plot structure or progression doesn’t feel right, try putting all your events onto note cards and penciling in the reasons why each scene is important. You could find a better order for them, and cut out scenes that don’t pull their weight.

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Session I Missed:

The next post will be about the Writing Place in Fiction session with Christine Sneed. To see this session, I had to miss the #SoMe: Why Social Media Really Isn’t About You session by Nora Brathol. If you went to that session, consider doing a simultaneous or guest blog to correspond with my CWC Recap!

YA (Or Any!) Structure – CWC 2015 Session I

Author Highlight:

• Michelle Falkoff
• Natalie Tilghman
• Stefanie Lyons

This CWC session was set up like a conversation between the above three authors and a moderator. As an author of a book that couldn’t traditionally be called YA (it’s too long… sigh), I was surprised to learn as much as I did from this session. It’s enough to fill two whole blog posts, with even more on top of that. I hope you can make use of the advice of these lovely authors!

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When choosing a structure for an upcoming project, consider the following:

1. Character and Setting as Starting Points. Building any structure happens in layers. The first layer of a story is generally the character in your head, and the second is the setting you want them to be in. This is mostly foundational, however, and the final layer, structure, decides how the story will form from then on. Find a structure that fits in line with your character and setting – or you’ll end up with a story that’s mismatched and crooked, like a house with an unreliable contractor.
2. Structure Pros and Cons. Think about what your structure can do for you – and what it can’t do. For example, Natalie’s book is written entirely in e-mails. This structure forced Natalie and her co-writer to reveal emotion and events second-hand and after the fact. In this way the story progresses naturally, but also takes work to unravel. You can therefore use structure to challenge and “corner” yourself, and thus add new effects to the project.
3. The Number of Voices. Stories can often benefit from having additional points of view. If you are short on word count or depth, consider finding a structure that allows you to fit new voices into your project. You can even use structure to do this in a neat way. For example, a book in verse, like Stefanie’s, can allow for new voices to be written in new types of verse structure.
4. “Why” Before “What.” Know what you are trying to get across with your chosen structure. If you already have a story, but are trying to fit it into a new structure, be willing to lose parts of the original story in order to make a better book. A good structure can change everything; let it.
5. Character Breathing Room. Your chosen setting is going to affect the way you display your characters. Events should change your character, but structure shouldn’t – after all, it’s (usually) an external constraint added by you, not an internal constraint decided by the characters. Make sure your structure lets your characters breathe; it should fit like a glove, not a corset.

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The next post, YA Structure Part Two, will go into some of the advice given on how to work with your structure once you have chosen it.

Session I Missed:

To see this session, I had to miss the How To Pitch session by Laurie Scheer. If you went to that session, consider doing a simultaneous or guest blog to correspond with my CWC Recap!

Blog Ennui and My New Chicago Writer’s Conference Series

Author Highlight: Laurie Scheer

I just returned from the Chicago Writer’s Conference rejuvenated and ready for action! I’ve sadly let my blog waste away for a while, but in honor of this incredible event, I’ve decided to start a weekly (biweekly if I’m industrious) series detailing each individual session I attended at the Conference and sharing my biggest takeaways!

Before I get started on that, though, I wanted to find other ways to combat blog ennui once this is over… and below is a compilation of useful links to that end.

• 101 Blog Topic Ideas by Molly Greene
• 101 HOT Blog Post Ideas by Mike Wallagher
• A Blog Topic Generator!!!

And last but not least, as learned from Laurie Scheer at CWC: make sure everything you do on social media revolves around the same base theme. Develop a brand for yourself, and stick to it. This will help you get recognized as an author and develop a significant readership.

Sorry this isn’t much for now – but check back soon for some conference lessons by a newly-branded author with a newly-anchored blog!

Why Fantasy Writers Should Not Get Creative Writing Master’s Degrees

Since I went to college for English but not teaching, everyone assumed I was going in for a Master’s, since you can’t really get a decent-paying job – read: more than $25,000 a year – with an English degree out of the gate (unless you had the time and monetary backing to be involved in, like, everything).

Yet, as a fantasy writer, I decided against a creative writing Master’s. Here’s why:

1. They don’t teach you to write novels. When I was working as an intern for Speilburg Literary, I remember one query letter in particular. It had been submitted by someone with a Master’s degree in creative writing, and the chapters were fewer than three paragraphs long. These itsy-bitsy chapters didn’t even end on cliffhangers – they ended like any old paragraph might. Even James Patterson can’t get away with that! The agent, Alice, told me this was common, because in Master’s programs they primarily teach the short story form, so that is how graduates primarily write.
2. They don’t teach you to write fantasy. I find a great deal of literary fiction to be pretentious and dissatisfying, mostly because I prefer fantasy. However, in fiction Master’s programs, they teach realistic fiction almost exclusively. For me it was always like writing in a box with nothing but some air holes poked in the side. Yes, learning to write plain fiction can improve your ability to write fantasy fiction, but as with learning only the short story form, the improvement will not be as focused. For example, in my 400-level Advanced Fiction class at MSU, I learned absolutely nothing that helped me improve my fantasy writing – a genre my professor forbade, dismissing it out of hand. Wow.
3. There’s nothing college can teach you about writing that you can’t learn for less. My time in the above-mentioned class could have been much better spent meeting with a writer’s group, taking online webinars, going to conferences, or writing. Most of these things are free, but even when they aren’t, they’re cheaper and less time-consuming than a $2,000 3-credit class.

With all of that said, going for a degree does give a person more drive. It’s a bit harder to find time to care about classes and groups when they aren’t moving you toward a tangible paper degree. All the same, I’ll only consider an MFA when they start taking genre seriously. Until then, I’m better served by editing my novels and paying off my loans – or by going in for a Master’s in mechanical engineering. God knows that would pay more.

The 3-Part Facebook Challenge

Recently I got drunk on my porch and came up with a Facebook challenge. Anyone who smokes cigars knows how much it sucks to smoke alone – the whole purpose of smoking a cigar is to ponder and pontificate – and, alone that day but for my characteristically uninterested cats, I told myself I had to make something out of my smoke break – something that had the potential to make the world a little better. Naturally, I then thought, as I often do, of the movie Pay It Forward, in which a young boy creates a simple formula that successfully makes the world a better place.

Here is the resultant challenge, which I myself completed after posting to my Facebook:

1. Send a message to someone who has made a difference in your life, who is likely not aware of it.
2. Tell a past crush that you liked them, and why, even if the ship has long sailed and you’ve no desire to board it now.
3. Send a message to someone not on your friends list, whom you don’t like. Make your peace, if not theirs.

The results? Not even a single Like, much less a comment. My challenge completely ignored. But what did I get back from it? For one, it felt damn good to do, and gave me peace. For another, I got two responses – the past crush thanking me for my kind words and passing along his goodwill, and the past enemy unexpectedly apologizing for their actions, which completely blew my mind and lifted a long-time weight from me.

I should smoke alone more often.