Hot Fun in the Summer Sun

We would like to welcome our new readers and encourage you all to check in and post a comment, even if it's just to say 'hello.' We'd love to hear from you!

There's a great opportunity to win two books from Moody Publishers going on right now on Twitter. Simply follow @Moodypublishers and post your all-time favorite summer read. Simple! One in fifty who follow will win both books, until supplies run out. Those are fabulous odds!

So imagine you are at your favorite vacation spot. You have a whole week to do (or not do) whatever you want. No pressure. Are you on the beach in Maui, with the breeze cooling your skin and the ocean surging and foaming just a few yards from your cabana? Are you on a deck chair overlooking the startling blue Atlantic cruising to some island in the Caribbean? Or perhaps you're sitting on the porch of a secluded mountain cabin, far from phones and wireless, with birds twittering and the tall pines sighing above you. Are you 'stay-cationing' this year, holed up at home in your favorite chair with the phone off the hook, sitting with your cats in your jammies (you're in your jammies, not your cats)? Now, reach into the bag beside you and pull out a book. It's dog-eared and easily falls open to pages with smudges and crimps in the corners. It's the one you've saved like a delicious reward to read again because it's your all-time favorite read, or it's one that always succeeds in transporting you to another place and/or time, even if you only read your favorite parts. What's the title? Who is the author? Do all her (his) books affect you this way, or are there other reasons that this one is so powerful?

Sometimes I reach for my copy of Cross Creek by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, just to read a few chapters of her life in Florida. "Cross Creek is a bend in a country road, by land, and the flowing of Lochloosa Lake into Orange Lake, by water." This account of her life is pungent with moss and marsh, and the culture of the creek and its people. She calls it "an enchanted land" and convinces me of it. When I close the book, I've had a very nice nini-vacation & a distraction from my to-do list. It's not fiction, but it's a look into the private life of an exceptional fiction author. I wonder what book she had by her side as she sat on her porch at the end of the day?

So, won't you tell us the title of the book in your get-away bag? And follow Moody Publishers on Twitter while you're at it for a chance to add to your stack of summer reads.

Similes are like Metaphors...

I've been thinking a lot lately about metaphors and similes. (That's what authors do when they're supposed to be paying close attention to what others are saying to them, and what earns us the reputation of not listening. We do listen, but sometimes not to the voices outside our heads.)

You may remember from your high school English classes that both similes and metaphors compare two concepts. A simile usually employs a word such as "like" or "as" (as in, "Her crochet hook dipped like a frantic, starving duck into the tangled lake of thread in her lap"); whereas a metaphor makes the comparison with the "like" or "as" not stated, but implied.

Apparently these literary devices are something God really likes, the way His mind works. His Holy Spirit inspired the writers of the Bible to use them often. Almost all the parables Jesus told were similes: The kingdom of God is like yeast, for instance.

But similes are more difficult for me. God is love. I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life.

Maybe the challenge of these literary devices is why they delight us so. Recently I read (actually listened to the audio of) a book called I Was Amelia Earhart by Jane Mendelsohn. Since most people know of Amelia Earhart and her mysterious and unsolved last flight, many expectations come along with her book. Is it an autobiography? If so, from what point of her life? Why the "was"?

So imagine the drama, the anticipation, when the first sentence of the book is, "The sky is flesh."

That compelling, jarring metaphor sets the tone for the rest of this well-written and provocative book.

How about you? What is the most memorable metaphor or simile you have read recently?

Saturday Night at the Movies

Welcome to the monthly feature here on Novel Matters: Saturday Night at the Movies. In celebration of the release of Talking to the Dead, we present, for your viewing pleasure, the book trailer to Talking to the Dead!
(Pssst, it's not a scary book - I promise!)

Pass the Locusts

You'll remember, a few weeks ago we announced that one reader who commented on a Novel Matters post in the month of June would win a copy of Bonnie Grove's new critically acclaimed novel, Talking To the Dead. We now have a winner, and that very lucky person is...

Jeannie Campbell! Jeannie, please email us, at novelmatters at gmail dot com, and let us know where to send your book.

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Those who believe they believe in God, but without passion in their heart, without anguish of mind, without uncertainty, without doubt, and even at times without despair, believe only in the idea of God, and not in God himself. ~Unamuno

That's the beasty hard thing about writing fiction. It's our job to make sure you believe in God himself. That goes for Stephen King, and for James Patterson, and for Anne Rice before and after she wrote Christ the Lord. A writer may never mention the name of God, may not even believe in God, but she has to make us feel God, or she hasn't written a story.

We've all become pale half-humans in order to get on in this world. If that seems an overstatement, imagine Isaiah in the grocery checkout, spouting off about materialism and gluttony and the poor. Think of Elijah at the office, whining that everything is hopeless, his life not worth living. Care to guess how John the Baptist might do in a job interview, picking insect legs from between his teeth?

Too much life in all of them. Nowadays we've learned to tone it down.

But there is a price to pay. How often do you look at your own children and fail to see miracles? How often do you pray nice prayers while your truest questions ooze beneath the surface like a flood in the basement? (Those questions, the anguish, uncertainty and doubt are all very biblical, you know. Read the Psalms.)

We need our story-tellers. We have to get the truth back.

I think that's why great writers sometimes end up turning out contrived little stories about a god they understand - which is no God at all. They've rushed things. They've come toned-down to the work. They need to find their inner prophets, once again.

I'm open to disagreement, by the way. Do you agree with Unamuno's statement above, and with my thoughts, or do you see things differently? If you're a writer, please share your best method for finding your inner prophet.

Meanwhile...

Pass the locusts, please.

Is it me?

I'm nearly ill.

Honestly.

How could this happen?

She's been my favorite author for nearly 20 years. I buy her hardcover releases without flinching. Something delicious lies within, and I'm willing to see sparks fly from my credit card to partake.

I once drove 600 miles to attend a conference--dragging 2 friends along--where the author read from her latest book. I mouthed the words as she read.

I wrangled a picture with her. It stands with my collection of her complete works, even though I am smiling like an idiot in an incredibly ugly sweater I had no business wearing.

I aspire to be as authentic, as poetic, as tender with my reader as she is.

Was?

This is too sad.

I'm reading her latest. And no, I'm not telling who she is. She's earned the right to slip just this once. At least, I hope it's just this once.

What am I grousing about? Well, she's using italics like they ran a sale at the dollar store. And they don't make sense. She writes in present tense, which I find appealing, immediate, surprising. BUT she takes one small step forward in her story only to take five steps back in a flashback. Aack! I'm getting motion sickness with all the back and forth. Every chapter, several times each. And so much introspection. Pleeease. And get this, her main character is a writer who can't write after the death of her husband.

Hey howdy!

Or is it me? Am I so obsessive about the craft of writing that I can't enjoy a story that is structured differently or strays from the sacred cows of writing craft? Has being a writer ruined me as a reader?

Is that a price I'm willing to pay?

Am I alone? Do you find yourself editing published works as you read? Are we too hard on the writers out there? Do we criticize the speck in someone else's writing to ignore the plank in our own?

Help.

Audience-With-An-Agent Contest

We are so excited about our exclusive Audience-with-an Agent contest, found only here at Novel Matters. We are extremely grateful to our awesome agents, Janet Grant and Wendy Lawton of Books & Such Agency, for their willingness to review the winning manuscripts, and perhaps offer representation to the author. We hope you realize what an opportunity this is, and that you'll submit your entries on or before July 31.

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Books & Such Literary Agency is truly one of the premier agencies in the industry. The six of us are represented by either Janet or Wendy, and I know I can speak for all of us when I say how blessed we are to be a part of the B&S family. Representation is so important in this current, ever-changing world of publishing, but signing with an agent is almost as difficult as landing a publishing contract. Getting an agent to read your manuscript among the thousands of submissions they receive is a daunting task.

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That's why we're so thrilled to offer a leg up to the readers of this blog. We will carefully evaluate each submission, then pass on the winning entries to Wendy Lawton to review this fall. We will repeat this contest in the spring and pass on the winning entries to Janet Grant. This really is a remarkable opportunity. We hope you'll take advantage of it. Click on our Promotions tab, then carefully read and follow the contest guidelines. We look forward to reading your submissions.

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Literary agents are workhorses, and if you're going to plow your way into publishing, life is a lot easier with someone pulling the plow. That wasn't the most flattering metaphor for my lovely agent, Janet, but she is a wonder.

She took my first manuscript, Like a Watered Garden, to ICRS when I had no idea what an ICRS was. Out on the floor, it's a trade show for retail folks to purchase faith-based items for their stores. Behind the scenes, agents are meeting with editors on a t-i-g-h-t, tight schedule, promoting their clients' book projects.

Janet presented Like a Watered Garden to at least six publishing houses, ones she knew were looking for a project like mine. She didn't waste anyone's time knocking on doors that didn't want contemporary women's fiction. She didn't have to. She spends all year with her ear to the ground. She knows the biz a million times better than I ever will. And that's why you want to polish that manuscript up until it sparkles and send it into the contest. This kind of opportunity is rare indeed!

I wrote this novel, see, and then, when I was finished, I didn't have a clue what to do with it. I mean, don't these things just sprout legs and walk to their intended destination? Apparently not.

So, I sent out some feelers. A few months later there was some interest in the novel, then, there was more. Suddenly I had more interested publishers than I knew what to do with. A nice dilemma, but I didn't know what I was doing.

I e-mailed a friend and asked "What would you do if you were me?" Her response was, "Girl, you need an agent. Now!" She offered to send a letter of introduction to an agent she knew well and I picked one I had heard many good things about. Later that same day, the phone rang. It was the agent. She had read chapter one on my website (You can read chapter one of Talking to the Dead there under the "fiction" tab if you like), and asked for the full ms. I sent it.

She called me the next day and said she would be happy to represent this book.

And Wow, that's when things started to move fast (well, fast is a relative term in publishing). She jumped on and starting pitching the book right away. Zip Zap Kapow! I was amazed. She knew things

I didn't even know enough to know I didn't know. Within weeks she had a firm offer on the table.

Listen, I don't know much. I'm so new. I only know what happened to me (is happening). But from my story, I think you can see that I am pro agent. I've heard writer's ask "Should I get an agent?" My answer is, "I don't know. But I know that it has made all the difference for me. I'm a writer, not a business person. I don't have the ins agents have. I don't know the industry the way an agent does. If you do, then you might not need one, but think about this: Every huge, big name author you can think of - go ahead think of one. Yep. He has an agent. Yeah, her too. That huge name author, oh ya, she has an agent too. All of them do. Why is that? Because agents can do the job the writer can't do for herself. And with an agent you have an expert in your corner - a team member

working WITH you and FOR you.

You would think that someone who had published books with major Christian publishing companies wouldn't need an agent for, say, her fourteenth book, right? I mean, I had done all right, apparently, on my own.

But I changed genres. With one exception, all my books had been non-fiction. True, they had become increasingly more "literary" in terms of technique (more narration as opposed to previous straight exposition; more analogies, playing with words, etc.) But writing a novel is a whole 'nother country. It was like starting over. Maybe even worse than starting over because other writers agree with me that it's hard to switch from the structure and strictures of non-fiction to the net-less high wire of storytelling. And marketing a fiction book -- though I had some connections, I didn't want to take time away from the actual writing process (and my life) to do the research and legwork.

If someone had told me about a contest such as NovelMatters offers, I'd be mentally camped out on its doorstep, polishing my proposal till it shone and submitting it early enough so it didn't get lost in the last-minute shuffle.


The moment I sold my first Novel, I turned around and started looking for an agent.

Why did I want one? Because I am a writer, not... well, not an agent. I'm not in close contact with all of the editors of all of the houses, I don't know all the changes that have taken place this week that affect my career. I certainly don't know how to read and negotiate a contract. And you know? I don't want to spend my time learning this stuff. I'm a writer, remember? It makes so much more sense to find a professional like Janet Grant to do this stuff for me.

That's why I'm so proud that we're offering this audience with our big shot agents to you. We're really offering a hand up in your career.


We're waiting for your manuscript! We won't bite and we won't tell you your 'baby' is ugly. As writers, we all start at 'Go' and work our way around the industry board, but we move along faster with the help of a good agent.

Agents know things. They know which house is looking for your type of manuscript and whether it's a good match. Often they know about changes at publishing houses before talk has even begun around the water cooler. They keep us from making big mistakes, sometimes potentially career-ending ones. They are the professionals that make us look good.

Your book may be calling you from the drawer or file cabinet where you've stashed it. So polish it up, and if it fits into the guidelines of our contest, send it in! If it doesn't, I encourage you to find out which agents represent other authors who write in your genre. Visit the agency websites, check them out in Sally Stuart's Christian Writer's Market Guide, follow their submission guidelines, and follow through today.

Guest Blogger Jeff Gerke: Cardboard Characters a Problem?

Welcome back, Jeff! Here's part II of Jeff's blog about plotting and character development. Last time, he helped writers with soundly developed characters find their story. Today, for those of you who are story-firsters, Jeff offers pointers on rounding out your characters. It seems Jeff understands your dilemma from a personal experience.
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For those who missed Jeff last Friday, you really must scroll down and read his post. He knows what he's talking about. He has experience as an editor for the biggest houses in CBA, writes fiction, & heads a publishing house. All that & a new papa too!



Character Creation for the Plot-First Novelist arose out of a crisis in my own fiction writing.

I had this sinking feeling that I didn't really know what I was doing with my characters. I felt that my characters ought to be more...something...than how they were coming out in my stories. But I didn't know what to do about it so I just let them be.

Guess what the #1 critical comment was on those early stories? Somewhat shallow characters. The reviewers were actually nicer than I thought I deserved. I thought I'd used stereotypes and cardboard cutouts.

So began my quest to figure out how to create richer, more realistic characters for my novels. I hit the bookstore and tried multiple books on character creation. They were all very hard for me--like the calculus I mentioned last time--and I never felt like I'd figured anything out about my story cast, even after all that work.

When it came time to decide what my next fiction trilogy should be, I decided to set a challenge before myself: Could I write a character-driven series with an ensemble cast?

In order to do that, I knew I needed to radically improve my character-creation abilities. But that was kind of the whole point. I wanted to make myself learn it, so I committed to doing this series. Since the writing books didn't help me, I decided I'd better create a system of my own.

In the absence of an innate understanding of characters and personalities, I turned to psychology books. I eventually discovered Please Understand Me II by David Keirsey. Keirsey is a proponent of the Myers-Briggs teachings on temperaments.

The premise is that there are only 16 main personality types on the earth. In his book he identifies them very well, in terms of what they're like, how they talk, what jobs they gravitate toward, how they are as spouses and parents, what temperament they tend to marry, etc.

It's the kind of hard facts that a plot guy like me could wrap his brain around.

But it instantly occurred to me that characters have to be more than just their temperament. Otherwise I would be a clone to the other 375 million people who shared my temperament, and I knew that wasn't true. So, what accounts for the differences in people beyond their core temperament?

I began thinking about the obvious: gender, age, physical appearance, ethnicity, educational background, intelligence, etc. Then the not so obvious: birth order, love language, spiritual gift, major life events, disabilities, and more.

By the time I was through, I'd created a system that began with a core temperament but then added layer after layer of specificity that further defined the character and made him or her different from every other person--even those with the same temperament.

The centerpiece of the system was the formation of the character's inner journey, or character arc. The best fiction, in my opinion, is that in which someone changes. Indeed, you might say that fiction is about change. I also liked the inner journey part of character creation because it felt a bit like plot creation. Familiar terrain.

The system culminates in a monologue scene in which the person is presented in the penultimate setting for that character, doing and saying things that reveal who this character is--and done and said in this character's characteristic way. Writing that monologue is like graduation. When it's done, the character is fully baked. And the monologue scene itself is actually something you can adapt to introduce the character the first time you bring him onstage.

After using that system for the new trilogy of novels--and no longer hearing from critics that my characters were flat (I heard the opposite, actually)--I realized I was onto something. Something that might help other writers who are character-challenged.

Character Creation for the Plot-First Novelist is exactly the system I use to create my own characters. It's a system of questions that you answer in the form provided. Then you summarize each section and synthesize the character as he or she exists so far.

At the end of taking a character through the system, you will utterly know this person, love (or love to despise) this person, and be champing at the bit to bring this person onstage.

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Changing gears now, let's look at how I created How To Find Your Story and what it entails.

Plot creation comes easily to me, as I've said. But I'm a teacher, which means I enjoy explaining to eager learners anything I happen to know about. I also realize that at least half the novelists out there (and I suspect it's more like two-thirds) are character-first novelists. They create amazing characters but have little for these interesting people to do.

If I could create a system that allowed character-first novelists to create gripping plots that featured their terrific characters, I might stand to help a lot of people.

So I sat down to design what I was originally calling Plot-Creation for the Character-First Novelist, but which eventually became How To Find Your Story.

The key discovery I made was that the best way to build a plot was to grow it out of character.

I mentioned earlier that the creation of a solid inner journey for a character feels like plot work. I realized that, in truth, a main character's inner journey actually is 75% of a good plot for a novel. When I realized I could do this plot creation system from a starting point of character, I knew I was onto something that all those character-firsters could understand.

So the main character's inner journey becomes the first major component of plot in How To Find Your Story. The major movements of this character arc constitute the internal plot, if you will. What was left was to form an external structure that amplified this inner journey and gave it a stage upon which to play.

How To Find Your Story includes interactive discussions of genre, era, theme, backdrop, antagonist, and more. But the major pieces are the inner journey and the outer journey, which I talk about in terms of three act structure.

I have been so gratified to hear comments like Jeannie Campbell's on last week's blog: "I'm character-driven...no doubt. Jeff's books are amazing... I had a plot developed out of my character's intrinsic goals before I even knew what I was looking at!"

That's what I'm after: plot developing out of character. With that kind of system, character-first novelists are on familiar ground from the word Go, and they come up with page-turning, character-driven plots that satisfy the reader, feature the characters beautifully, and are certain to achieve what the author wanted to do with the story.

Both How To Find Your Story and Character Creation for the Plot-First Novelist consist of two main files: instructions and template. The template is a Word document that is a color-coded table. On the left are questions and on the right are blanks for your answers. This is the key piece of each system, and you go through it once for each story or character you want to develop. The other piece is a PDF document that expounds upon what to think about as you fill out the template.

When I teach the continuing fiction track at writers' conferences, I now use this system. First I have the class go through an abbreviated version of Character Creation for the Plot-First Novelist--right there in class--and then we take that character and build a plot around her using a scaled-down version of How To Find Your Story. It's been very helpful for many novelists, both those who are still aspiring and those who are multiply published.


To purchase Jeff's ebooks go here: http://marcherlordpress.com/Store_Stand-In.htm