Go Where the Pain Is...and Other Great Advice From Anne Rice

Today we have found an incredibly encouraging video posted by Anne Rice on September 18, 2012 which she made in response to the many writers who have asked her for writing advice.
Here are a few highlights to get your attention:

• Write what you want to be known for
• Be brave and reach for the fire from heaven
• her first book was accepted at a writers conference
• getting a book published is no harder now than it was 'back in the day'

 Get out your pad and pencil - you'll want to take notes.

Writer’s Workshop: Perfect Pitch Part 1

This is part one of Bonnie Grove’s shoot from the hip writer’s workshop on selling your work. Part two will run this Wednesday, August 26.

I open with this caveat: No one writer has the market of knowledge cornered when it comes to selling fiction works to agents/editors/publishers. I certainly don’t. What follows is simply observations from my years as a writer and writing mentor. Glean what works for you, what speaks to you, what stirs you, and disregard the rest.

The one line pitch: When a writer prepares material used in a typical pitch, she often begins with the one line, or elevator pitch. That snappy sentence meant to make publishing professionals swoon, gush, and produce a contract for you to sign on the spot. This is a terrible place to start. I’ve never met a writer who, upon completing a 100,000-word manuscript, had a clue what the thing was about. My advice? Don’t start here. You will spend hours futzing with words and come up short. Worse, you’ll start thinking you can’t do this, shove the manuscript in a draw only to be remembered fleetingly throughout the year always with a strong pinch to the heart. Who needs regrets like that? Not you. Don’t start with the one line pitch (we will return to the ins and outs of the elevator pitch in part 2.)

The One Sheet (CBA fiction writers): If you’re writing for the CBA (Christian Booksellers Association) market, there’s a chance you’ll use this marketing tool as part of a pitch to agents/editors. The ABA (American Booksellers Association) does not use them. A one sheet isn’t what most writers think it is: a slick, attractive sheet highlighting your story. It does contain those elements, but that’s not the primary purpose or use for a one sheet. If you’re tempted to begin your proposal writing with the one sheet, I say—again—don’t start here. You’ll miss the purpose of this tool if you try to begin here.

The synopsis: Finally, the place to begin your proposal writing. If you haven’t already constructed a chapter outline (something you could do as you write, revising the outline as you revise the manuscript), you’ll be starting from scratch, pulling together the main plot points and relaying them with dazzling clarity and punch. Easy right?

Over the years I’ve noticed a pattern of errors writers make when attempting to condense their novel down to two pages. (Oh, if you’ve wondering how long a synopsis should be: rule of thumb says two-three pages, never exceeding five. I say, except in rare cases, two pages is plenty long. I’ll explain why in a minute.)

The first error is that the synopsis does not contain the plot of the book. This is a large error, as you can imagine, and I bet it’s one you’ve made, too. Instead of plot, the writer waxes long on themes, adding editorial comments along the way, which serve to muddy the waters, drowning any chance of sparking interest or excitement in the project. 

Let’s break this down.

Themes: We love reading novels with rich, complex themes that linger long after we’ve finished the book. We work hard to ensure our novel incorporates, expounds, and defines important themes that bring the story to life, give it legs. When we attempt to condense our novel into two pages, we feel we’re shortchanging our work convening nothing but the plot. The plot, after all, is simply This happened, then this happened, then that happened, then this happened. How dull.

It’s not dull. It’s killer important that you convey the plot in detail in your synopsis. When an agent or editor reads they synopsis, they are looking for the plot. Why make them slog through theme to get the to the stuff they want to see?

Does that mean we save theme solely for the manuscript? Not at all. You impart theme in a synopsis the same way you do it in the manuscript, through careful word choice, stringing together nouns and verbs that, while spelling out the plot, infuse depth of meaning, feeling, setting, and themes to the synopsis.

An exercise: You can do this no matter where you are with the actual writing of you manuscript.

Use bullet points to write out the plot points in your story.

e.g.:      Mary finds a pickle on the street.
            Mary tries to eat the pickle, but the pickle speaks to Mary, begging for its life. It promises to grant Mary three wishes
            Mary takes the pickle home and hides it.  
            Mary goes out on a date with her boyfriend Harry and breaks up with him.
            Mary comes home from work one day to find all the furniture in her apartment has been rearranged.
            Mary is certain someone is watching her.
            Mary comes home and all her kitchen utensils are in the fridge.
            Mary confides in a friend, and they decide not to call the police.
            Mary makes her fist wish, and the pickle grants it: a handsome new boyfriend.
            Mary is followed home from work, but she doesn’t see who it is.
            Mary’s apartment is ransacked. Nothing is stolen, until Mary checks the hiding place and finds the pickle missing.

Not exactly riveting reading-yet—but it is clear.  There’s a good chance you’ll need to rearrange the plot points from the way they appear in the novel in order to present a straight plotline. Often, in the writing of the novel, we play with plot points, hiding and revealing as needed. Go ahead and rearrange the plot points in the synopsis so that one action follows another.

Also, notice that above we have a novel about Mary and a magic pickle. Except the manuscript has a great sub-plot about Mary’s friend, Anna, and her dealings with an enchanted piece of toast. And what about all the nuance between the ex-boyfriend and the new, handsome boy friend? Oh, and there’s all this great stuff between the pickle and Mary’s dog, Bones. None of it goes into the synopsis. Only include the plot points from the MAIN story.

The next issue is editorializing. This is massively common because it’s so natural when trying to condense the story down. We include phrases such as: She was terrified. Everyone hated Billy. She felt desperate and alone.

Editorializing is anything that attempts to explain why a character acts the way he/she does in a scene, explains a character type (mean, angry, silly, careless), or otherwise injects the author’s point of view or intention into the plot outline.

It takes a great deal of control to write a simple plot outline that allows the plot to stand on its own without embellishments of theme and editorializing.

Know what else it does? Reveals holes in the plot, highlights spongy sections in the story that sag and bore readers, and lets you, the writer, take a clear-eyed look at the bare truth about the story you’ve written.

A good synopsis will very often lead to going back and editing the manuscript.

So, you have your plot points, you’ve edited the manuscript to fix holes and fill in bogs in the story. Next, you pull out your largest toolbox, your vocabulary, and begin building in theme, setting, and even the occasional editorial comment through word choice. Let’s revisit out plot outline above, infused, but still clear:

            Mary blusters out of the fifty-story office building where she works, and onto the crowded Chicago streets. She muscles her way to the bus stop to catch the 517 that get her home by 6:23. Something green and white catches her eye, and she kicks at it with the toe of her sensible shoe, while she ponders the date she has tonight with Harry, her boyfriend of six years.

Words like “blusters”, “muscles”, and the specificity of the bus number and the time she will arrive home all paint a fuller picture of the setting, Mary’s character, and set up some of the themes explored in the novel. This continues, solidifying our suspicions with words such as, “sensible shoes,” and “boyfriend of six years.” The picture is coming together quickly without bogging down the rapid-fire delivery of the plot. 

Try this exercise on your story. We’d love to hear the results!

Part two, on Wednesday, will look at the one line pitch, the one sheet (briefly), and the query letter.

Write on!

Writing Advice - Help or Hindrance?

On Monday, we were treated to a great interview with Julie Cantrell, author of the bestseller, Into the Free.  It's always fascinating to read about an author's road to success.  I was shocked and saddened, however, by her 12th grade English teacher's advice:

 “Whatever you do, don’t waste your scholarship to study writing. You’ll be lucky if you ever publish a greeting card.” 

My first thought was, "Who says that to a young person?" My next thought was to hope that her English teacher would see Julie's name in print and realize what poor advice she'd given. But when my indignation for Julie cooled, I suspected that there was something more behind her teacher's words.  Perhaps she truly thought she was giving Julie practical advice.  But it may have simply been wisdom distilled from her own struggles to see her work in print, culled from a dark place of disillusionment You never know.  For whatever reason, it's still just bad advice.

I once heard Debbie Macomber speak about her attempts to sell her first novel.  A heavy-handed editor sliced and diced her manuscript and told her to throw it away.  Debbie screwed up that place inside of her that knew better and sent it anyway.  Now a New York Times bestselling author, she encourages writers to follow their dreams as she did.  



We can't all be Julie Cantrells or Debbie Macombers. We won’t all be bestselling authors. Some of us won’t even see our books published through traditional means. Our stories will be different. We all get bad advice during our lifetimes.  How do we know the good from the bad?

Julie said it took ten years to get her teacher’s voice out of her head and to believe that she could write, only after remembering that a different teacher had said she had talent. We need to carefully choose those whom we allow to speak into our writing lives.

There is much technical advice for writers, and not even these rules apply 100% of the time.  ‘Show don’t tell,’ and ‘don’t use adverbs’ would be two.  There are times when both telling and the use of adverbs are appropriate for the story.  But the advice about whether or not to write or what to write has to come from a place inside of us. I don’t think anyone else can give you advice for this.  I could be wrong. 

Have you received advice – good or bad – which helped or hindered you in your writing?  We’d love to hear. 

Show Me Don't Tell Me How To Show Not Tell

Happy birthday to Debbie Fuller Thomas! She's 39 again and we wish her every happiness today!

~

I've seen explanations like this: 

"The difference between showing and telling in writing is simple! 

Telling: Becky was sick. 

Showing: Becky sniffled into a tissue, then vomited.

 Voila!"

Hmmm. Not so much.

Perhaps we need to take the discussion of Show vs Tell and throw it in the same place as Becky's crumpled tissue. Writers need to stop talking as if Showing is some easy literary device. Something you can choose to employ or un-employ at whim.

It is, instead, the preferred method of storytelling. Method - not device. It is part of the theory of the modern novel. It is the discussion of intent, not meaning. It is the unveiling of the human condition, not the opening of a toolbox.

Didn't know there was a theory of the literature? There are several. But that is for another blog.

If Showing were simply about writing long and detailed explanations of the chain of action-reflection-reaction-action, no one would ever get a book written - moreover, no one would care to read the thing anyway. Who wants to read an encyclopedia of people in motion? 

This explanation doesn't give insight into why some of our most beloved novels have wide swaths - pages and pages - of narrative summary. These often pop up in fascinating tangents where a character has experiences something, and then ponders the nature of the experience at length. Is that "showing"? The answer is: Yes, in part.

Something much more interesting is going on when we speak of Showing. An author who shows the story is an author with a light touch - one who respects her character's choices, who balks at easy answers, and stares messy incompleteness in the face. A writer who shows is a writer able to capture the subtleties and nuance of human hearts in motion. 

Showing isn't really about an explanation of the action occurring in a novel - it is an exploration of the people themselves. It is taking the characters, laying them flat and rolling, like a scroll, their essence. Recognizing the inadequacy of our efforts, we, the writers, pull out what it is to experience the story we are telling. We examine a facet here, an angle there, all the while weeping for the parts we cannot tell within the limitations of the medium.

Showing is to cause the reader to be awash in the experience of your characters. It begins with word one, and ends as the last page is turned. It is the author's ability to step aside, and let the characters experience the story. It has nothing - I repeat - nothing to do with how many words you use to help the reader picture the turning of a door knob.

Sometimes you just need to get the door open and who cares how it got that way - if I explained the tedious gripping of a handle, the turning of a wrist, the click of tumblers, it would slow the story down - bog it down, actually. Instead the door is opened. Ah! A greenish Becky enters, crumpled tissue in hand. Oh good!

So what do we call it when the author pushes aside the doldrums of "Becky was sick" in favor of "Becky sniffled into a tissue and vomited"? I would call it being precise.

Naturally Beautiful Novels

We have the distinct pleasure of having acclaimed author Athol Dickson as our guest today. This post originally appeared on Novel Journey on June 16. We enjoyed it very much and thought you would too. Our special thanks to Athol and Novel Journey for allowing us to republish it.

IT'S EASIER TO WRITE ABOUT BEAUTY than it is to write beautifully, because the difference between good craftsmanship and beautiful writing is something like the difference between goodness and morality.

Consider C.S. Lewis on that topic:

"Morality is a mountain which we cannot climb by our own efforts; and if we could we should only perish in the ice and unbreathable air of the summit, lacking those wings with which the rest of the journey has to be accomplished. For it is from there that the real ascent begins. The ropes and axes are 'done away' and the rest is a matter of flying" ("Man or Rabbit?" God in the Dock, p. 113, Eerdman's, 1970).

Beauty is goodness, and like the ability to be good, the ability to write beautifully is a gift which can't be earned, or learned. Some authors are able to take off from the summit of good craftsmanship and fly; it's as simple and mysterious as that.

But although there is an aspect to beautiful writing which we cannot teach, all beautiful novels share certain common qualities which are worth examination.
Following are seven characteristics of a beautiful novel:

Hope

Beautiful novels often take us deep into the darkest corners of the human condition, but in the end, they usually leave us with a sense of hope. This is only natural, because hope is one of the primary purposes of beauty.

In The Divine Conspiracy, Dallas Willard writes, ". . . roughly speaking, God relates to space as we do to our body. He occupies and overflows it but cannot be localized in it."
This means every beautiful sunset, every beautiful flower, every thing of beauty which exists is a manifestation of God's spirit in creation. As divine manifestation, natural beauty of every kind whispers the glorious truth, "We are not alone so be of good cheer; there is hope." And in one way or another, the most beautiful of novels all say it, too.

Symbolism

Our minds initially respond to beauty on a subliminal level. We sense the beauty of a sunset as a feeling before we become consciously aware of it as a fact. This is why beautiful novels always speak to us on levels deeper than our conscious thought.

The main way novels do this is through symbolism, because symbols are the language of the human mind. Everything processed by our brains is classified, memorized, and organized through symbols. Even the language that we use is composed of symbols (the words and letters I am writing now).

In beautiful novels, very little meaning is limited to the obvious. Characters stand for good or evil. Settings stand for peace or persecution. Events stand for destiny or chaos. When such things act, speak, or occur, or when the story passes through them, our subconscious attends to it with deep-seated emotions, which arise before we are aware of them as facts, exactly as we might respond to sunsets or any other manifestation of natural beauty.

Simplicity

Beauty demands our attention. How many times have you "missed" a beautiful sunset which was right there before your eyes, simply because you were distracted? This is why beautiful novels are inevitably simple.

I don't mean beautiful novels don't have complicated plots or complex characters. I mean the story is presented in a way the mind can follow without losing track of all the elements that make it beautiful.

Craftsmanship accounts for much of this simplicity. Extraneous adjectives and adverbs are shunned. Pointless repetition of ideas is avoided. Each new idea builds logically on what went before, and establishes a context for the ideas that follow in an unbroken chain which guides the mind effortlessly through the fictive dream.

Of course, there are dozens of other "rules" designed to simplify the reader's experience with good fiction. Beautiful novels are simple in the sense that they are easily read, but as every novelist knows, to write simply is anything but easy.

Rhythm

There is a rhythm to all that's beautiful in nature. Tides. Waves. Heartbeats. Seasons. Beautiful novels pay attention to the force of rhythm. They align themselves to it with cadenced syllables and words.

The novelist who writes beautifully is constantly aware of how her words will "sound" in her reader's mind. She reads her work aloud, and if it does not flow with poetic meter, she may insert a comma just to slow things down, even though the technical rules of craftsmanship might forbid it. She may select the longer of two synonyms just to add the extra syllable. She gives her mental "tongue" a moment's pause between her vowels by adding consonants or punctuation or a paragraph return.

Beautiful novels also align rhythms with ideas. If the action is dangerous or rapid, sentences are shorter. Often incomplete. Words are shorter. Syllables are shorter. Then the rhythm might be broken with something longer, just to put the reader off balance. No effort is given to similes.
Thus the reader senses urgency and haste. But if the time has come to slow the reader down and give a sense of peace, sentences and words and syllables may stretch out on and on with repetition, flowing one into another, each opening the way for what will follow like a river winding through the countryside. In these ways, a beautiful novel reflects the way rhythms speak to us in nature.

Intuition

As I mentioned earlier, natural beauty first approaches us subliminally, usually as a feeling of joy and delight. Only then do we think about a sunset rationally. And much as symbolism allows readers to tap into the subconscious nature of beauty without fully understanding what is happening, so authors who write beautiful novels make countless creative choices they cannot logically explain.

This is true on the macro level, with choices about characterization, plot direction, and so forth. It is equally true on the micro level, with particular word choices made to support a particular mood or atmosphere within the reader's imagination.

On what basis is one word chosen over another with the same meaning? Although logic often fails to explain the choices, the choices are effective. Consider for example the following synonyms:

Fecund versus fertile
Nude versus naked
Dank versus damp
Ruddy versus scarlet
Stout versus strong

A novelist capable of producing beauty will sense that the words listed on the left belong together in one group, and the ones listed on the right belong to another. The novelist knows this, but it is not a rational kind of knowing. That is why it cannot be taught. It is known tacitly, or intutitvely, and beauty in a novel comes in part from paying close attention to this intuition.

Variety

Everywhere we look in nature we see incredible diversity. No two snowflakes, stones or blades of grass are identical. This too is part of natural beauty, and this too is reflected in beautiful novels.
Tragedies have comic moments. Comedies have serious morals. Characters behave against type. Plots take minor detours. The noun precedes the verb in two sentences, followed with a verb before the noun in a third. A paragraph with three longish sentences is capped off tersely with one word. Paragraph and chapter lengths are unpredictable.

These choices are not practical. They don't improve the quality of communication. They save no time. They are done for one reason only: beauty demands variety.

Echoes

Humankind's first experience with natural beauty was in a garden. We were banished from that garden, and humanity's history is the story of our longing to return. These facts are imprinted in everyone's imagination, believer and unbeliever alike. The proof is in the way the pattern of returning reappears in every novel we call beautiful. (It's also found in all great music, but that's another story.)

We see this echo in the repetition of certain words throughout beautiful novels. We see it in the way some events are brought back to the surface through characters' memories or flashbacks. It is in the way symbols reappear over and over, and in the way the same descriptions are applied first to one thing, and then to another.

A question asked in the first scene is asked again three hundred pages later in the final paragraph. An image seen when we first met a character is seen again when that same character departs the stage forever. Words spoken in one situation are repeated verbatim in another, with the double power of a new meaning in the second situation, and the harkening back to what they meant before.

By echoing the beginning in the end, a novel can awaken memories of primordial beauty with a whisper to our subconscious mind, "Turn back. Turn back. Turn back to the garden."

Athol Dickson is a novelist, teacher, and publisher of the DailyCristo website. His novels transcend description with a literary style that blends magical realism, suspense, and a strong sense of spirituality. Critics have favorably compared his work to such diverse authors as Octavia Butler (Publisher's Weekly) and Flannery O'Connor (The New York Times). One of his novels is an Audie Award winner and three have won Christy Awards including his most recent novel, Lost Mission. His next story, The Opposite of Art is about pride, passion, and death as a spiritual pursuit. Look for it in September, 2011. Athol lives with his wife in southern California.

Bad Advice, Writing, and Aimlessness

In the end, none of really knows when we started writing or why or what it was we first hoped to accomplish. We know it was a long time ago, and we never stopped, never saw a reason to. And we keep writing. Reading too. Maybe if we knew all the answers it would take the fun out of everything.

But it isn’t until we take up the mantle of writer (maybe even author) that the question of what we are writing (and reading) and why begins to be asked. By then it’s too late. We’ve already forgotten. Didn’t know it would be on the test. Happily, we’re storytellers, so we’re never left in wont of an answer.

Marilynne Robinson has been over-asked about the origins of her shattering debut (1980) Housekeeping. She answers, "I was interested in writing extended metaphors. And so I kept writing these little things and just putting them in a drawer." And in time: "I took out this stack of things and they cohered. I could see what they implied, I could see where the voice was."

A wonderful answer that is hardly an answer at all. Is Ms. Robinson merely cagy? I doubt it. If she’s anything like me (and I have no reason to think she might be), she may simply be hedging because the idea of needing to explain the genesis and metamorphosis of idea into story is beside the point. Really a question of marketing more than art.

Latayne asked us to consider what we read and write and what we hope to gain from these stories—our aim in writing them. The only answer I could come up with is: completeness. It’s a terrible answer, but it holds a universe of meaning to me. It means the novel has heft and breath.

Recently, I was in conversation with a writer friend who shared a piece of advice she’d been given by another writer friend, “Write the story that costs you the most emotionally.” I think this is bad advice. Surprised? Here’s why: Emotion is a symptom of effective storytelling, not the cause. Yes, we connect emotionally with a story we love, but we don’t connect with it because it’s emotionally stirring, we connect with it because we are brought face to face with the human condition and THAT brings emotion to the surface.

So what is completeness in story for me? It’s the story that promises to change me. Not tickle me under the chin, not make me sigh over someone else’s romance, or contemplate the sinful nature of other people. The complete story, the ones I’m drawn to as a reader and the ones I aspire to write, are the stories that promise to leave a mark. The ones that say, Warning: This story is a compass to the culture, speaks to the individual, and will make you accountable for the knowledge contained herein.

I suppose there is a fear that this idea may come off as lofty, unrealistic, or, from a publisher’s point of view, unsellable. But if I were to come up with the most honest answer about why I started writing and what I hoped to achieve, I would have to say I started writing because I didn’t understand anything, and I wanted to, and story seemed the best way for me to do this. And I keep writing because there is so much I don’t understand about the world, and story is the best way I have of asking questions I don’t have answers for.

What piece of writing advice have you received that seemed like bad advice?
Do you like novels that promise to change you? Am I utterly delusional?