I don’t often think of historical novels as being written in verse since verse novels are so spare and historical fiction tends to rely on a good amount of description to convey the time period and setting. But in May B, Caroline managed to put us right into May’s world in just a few telling and active details. Here’s an example:

I stop when home is nothing more

than a mound on the windswept plain.

Like a prairie hen I settle down

until I can’t be seen,

breathing comfort from grass and soil.

I listen for silence,

but there’s no room for it.

My mind’s too full.

Ma and Pa want me to leave

and live with strangers.

I love how much we get in this short passage. We have a sense of the landscape, including how it smells, and we also see May’s emotional state and the reason behind it. Talk about packing a punch! This book was a wonderful reminder for me about being concise and using each detail to its fullest potential.

Have you read May B yet? Are there other books that impressed you with their conciseness?

[By the way, if you're interested in winning a copy of May B, there's an ARC up for grabs on First Page Panda.]

A while back I blogged about Unearthly by Cynthia Hand and how it completely sucked me in. Now, thanks to NetGalley, I’m reading the sequel, Hallowed, and it’s just as engaging as the first book. Whenever I read a good book, I have to analyze why it works, so this is what I came up with.

Mystery

In both Unearthly and Hallowed, the story starts with the main character having a vision. The vision is vague and mysterious; the character then spends the rest of the book trying to figure out the meaning of what she saw. This works really well because it sets up a mystery right from the start, and readers try to figure out what it means along with the main character. And, of course, there are some twists and turns along the way.

Emotional Conflict

Cynthia Hand does a fantastic job of creating characters that feel completely real. The main character’s emotions feel genuine, and I think a big part of that is how conflicted she is throughout the story. She’s torn between following her destiny and doing what’s personally important to her. She also has to hide her true identity from almost everyone around her, though she hates lying to people. And, to top it off, she’s torn between two guys who are good for her in different ways. Normally, I’m not a big love-triangle fan, but in this case I think the emotions feels genuine enough that I believe it.

So what lessons should we take away from this series? Giving the character a mystery to solve, clues to put together, etc. can help to keep pushing the story forward. And the more conflicted your character feels, the more we’ll relate to her. It all comes back to Donald Maass’s mantra: Tension comes from conflicting emotions.

I’m currently reading Tess Hilmo’s upcoming book, With a Name Like Love, which comes out this September. (I feel very special to be

able to read it before it’s actually out!) The thing that grabbed me right away about this book was the mood, so I wanted to take a closer look at it.

Now mood is one of those nebulous terms that’s often lumped in with tone, voice, etc. I won’t go into tiring definitions, but for me, things like mood and voice go beyond just what you say. They’re also about how you say it, the exact words you choose, and the attitude you the author (or the character) bring to the telling.

Here’s an excerpt from the first page of Tess’s book:

It may have been only nine o’clock in the morning, but the summer sun was already high in the sky and sweating up the land. Fields of soft green barely laid themselves out across the earth in perfect rows–as if God had reached down and combed them just so. Ollie noticed a carved-up plank of wood that someone long ago had shoved into the dark Southern soil. It read: BINDER, ARKANSAS.

Can’t you just see this place? This passage does so many things at once. It gives us a sense of place. It hints at the religious aspect of the story that’s really important. And the word choice helps convey the voice of the main character (even though it’s in third person) and the tone of the story. Phrases like “sweating up the land” help ground us in a certain time and place, and (at least for me) make the story feel hot and dusty.

Here’s another one:

Billows of dusty earth swirled out from the tired like smoke trailing off a campfire.

Doesn’t that create such a great image? Comparing the earth to smoke is a great metaphor, but words like “billows” and “swirled” also help convey the mood. This is an example of why it’s so important to make every word count. As you revise, remember that every word can help better serve the story and create a distinct mood that draws the reader in.

Have you come across great examples of mood? How much do you focus on word choice as you’re writing/revising?

Frequently classified as “literary” or “lyrical,” beautifully-worded novels might not have action-packed plots or big-screen potential, but they stay with you in a different way.

For me, it’s the zingers: when I sense an image the author has written more clearly than if I’d seen, felt, or tasted it myself. It’s when I say to myself (or sometimes out loud), “Oooooh, beautiful.”

The best way to get a feel for a good zinger is to have a look at some examples. These ones struck me in some of my recent reads. I’m guessing anyone who’s read any of these novels will be able to pick out where they came from just from the single line. The answer key follows below in case you need to add any of them to your to-be-read pile.

1. “The frowning shops that fronted the square seemed to sigh and spread their shoulders.”

2. “The bowl of icing was right there on the counter, ready to go, and cakes are best when just out of the oven, and I really couldn’t possibly wait, so I reached to the side of the cake pan, to the least obvious spot, and pulled off a warm spongy chunk of deep gold.”

3. “Ice-bitten and hunger-eyed, Einar Andersson stood on the beach, very near the creek that had started the whole damn thing, and wept.”

Amazing, right? Can’t you see those shops sighing on the square? Can’t you taste that golden cake? And can’t you just feel the freezing cold and despair? Wow. I will not soon forget any of these three books. What I will remember about them–more than anything else–is the beauty of the writing.

So this is all great, but what can aspiring authors learn from great zingers like these? (Other than repeating over and over, “I’m not worthy.”)

One of the best pieces of advice I ever got about writing came from the brilliant Markus Zusak, author of THE BOOK THIEF and THE MESSENGER. At a small SCBWI conference in Munich, Germany, he told the crowd: “Try to have a gem on every page.”

A zinger on every page. But won’t that exhaust the reader?

Yes and no. There’s a fine line between writing beautiful phrases and keeping things simple. No one likes overwriting, and trying too hard can exhaust, frustrate, or even alienate the reader.

So maybe not every page. But often. We must strive for more in our writing, stepping past the cliché and into our own unique strings of words.

We must strive to make our readers say, “Oooooh, beautiful.”

Great zingers, unmasked:

1. PLAIN KATE by Erin Bow
2. THE PARTICULAR SADNESS OF LEMON CAKE by Aimee Bender
3. REVOLVER by Marcus Sedgewick

Kip Wilson Rechea has a Ph.D. in German Literature and a great love of books, languages, travel, and yoga. She lives in Boston with her husband and young twin girls, and is currently hard at work on a Young Adult novel set in India. Check out her blog or follow her on twitter.

Now that my brain has started to regenerate, I thought I’d share some things I learned and/or noticed during my time in the revision cave.

Revising on a Deadline

This was the first time I’d had an actual deadline that wasn’t self-imposed. I realized I had to be economical with my time: focus on the major issues, then on the minor ones, and then polish as much as I could in the time I had left. I didn’t have a chance to let things percolate like I usually do, but my brain seemed to go into creativity overdrive for the occasion, so that was nice.

The Process

When I first got the revision letter, I let the suggestions sit for a couple of days before tackling them. Once I’d revised as much as I possibly could, I gave the manuscript to my husband and he went through and pointed out issues (mostly tiny ones). I then went back and reworked it some more. Finally, since I didn’t have time to let the manuscript sit in order to gain some perspective on it, I read the entire manuscript aloud. This got me to really focus on it again, instead of just skimming over what I’d read a hundred times before, and notice things that still needed work.

Adding Words

One of the main suggestions from my editor was to fill in more details. It’s funny because my writing used to be overly wordy and detailed, but over the years, I’ve tried to make it more economical. I think in this case, I almost went too much in that direction, so there was definitely room for some elaboration.

I started at 30,000 words, but by the time I was finished revising, it was right around 35,000. This included two totally rewritten and expanded chapters at the end, and some more details throughout the manuscript.

Taking Words Away

While I added a lot of words, I also trimmed down excess throughout the manuscript. I found that my dialogue, especially, was often a tad repetitive. I went through and combined a line here and there, cut out repetition, etc. So even though the word count says I added 5,000 new words, I think the number of new words is actually higher since I also went through and cut out a lot of the old.

A Satisfying Resolution

As I mentioned above, I pretty much rewrote the ending of the book. My editor suggested that I make the character’s struggle at the end even more difficult, and she was totally right. Originally, my character went into the “final battle” with a plan, but in revisions, I took that plan away and sent her into the situation totally unprepared. I think that made the ending more satisfying, and hopefully more fun to read!

More Laughs!

From the minute I first began to write this story four years ago, I wanted it to be funny. It was a break from the serious manuscript I was working on, and it was meant for my own amusement. When I went back this time, I tried to really embrace that humor and up it as much as I could. That’s what drew me to the project in the first place, and that’s what I wanted readers to take away from it. I hope I succeeded!

That’s it for now. I might do a follow-up post about more specific things that came up in revision, if anyone’s interested. Happy revising!

]]> http://www.annastan.com/2011/04/lessons-from-the-revision-cave/feed/ 8 http://www.annastan.com/2011/03/the-first-page-test/ http://www.annastan.com/2011/03/the-first-page-test/#comments Wed, 09 Mar 2011 13:26:38 +0000 annastan http://www.annastan.com/?p=3677 When Alisa Libby and I started First Page Panda a while back, our goal was to spread the word about new books. We didn’t anticipate it would have an effect on our writing, but it has: it’s made us a little paranoid about our own first pages!

Both Alisa and I have found ourselves rewriting the first pages of our WIPs over and over, imagining what it would be like if they were up on the website. The thing I’ve been struggling with the most is getting across my character’s personality and sense of humor right from the start. I think I’m getting closer, but I’m still not sure my opening passes the “first page test.”

Doing this kind of test is good practice, I think, even if it can make you a little paranoid. After all, a first page needs to “sell” your story. That doesn’t mean that huge things need to happen in it, but something about it needs to entice your reader to keep going: voice, character, subject matter, etc.

How much do you focus on first pages when you’re reading or writing? Are there first pages that have sucked you right in?

The old Anna would just plunge in and start writing without any idea of where the story was going. But the slightly wiser Anna is a little more hesitant. I’m not an outliner, so I don’t mean that I need to have everything planned out. I’m all about exploring the story and seeing where it takes me, but I’ve found that I need to have some sort of focus to keep me on track.

In Emotional Structure, Peter Dunne says you don’t need to know how the story will end plot-wise before you start (i.e. you don’t need to know the events that will happen) but you need to know how it will end story-wise (i.e. how your character will grow or change).

When I think about it, the manuscripts that I’ve been the most successful with have worked this way: I knew going into it where I wanted my character to wind up. Since I don’t know that yet with this new idea, I think I’ll have to do a bit more brainstorming before I dive into writing the actual story.

How much do you need to know before you start writing?

As my husband and I finished dealing with the leaks, I turned to him and said: “Well, the good news is that now I have something to blog about today.” I think he had to work very hard not to roll his eyes. So how do snowstorms and leaks relate to writing?

It’s about the frequency of events and their relentless pace. Just when you think one storm is over, another rolls in. Just when one leak seems fixed, another one sprouts up. You can’t let your character relax for long; something new needs to trip him up. Because if you don’t push him to his limits, he’ll never change enough to find a way to solve his problem.

Of course, the “storms” I’m talking about don’t have to be physical events. The character could simply have a realization or make a discovery, one that changes his perspective even if it doesn’t affect his physical well-being. When the events and realizations and discoveries begin to pile up, your character has no choice but to change.

One thing to keep in mind is that even though the events need to escalate throughout the story, they can’t seem random or simply thrown in for excitement. The snowstorms and leaks need to be related, preferably to the major conflicts in the story, and they need to  collectively push your character so far out of his comfort zone that he’ll never be the same.

]]> http://www.annastan.com/2011/02/forcing-your-character-to-change/feed/ 8 http://www.annastan.com/2011/01/layering-conflict/ http://www.annastan.com/2011/01/layering-conflict/#comments Mon, 31 Jan 2011 13:09:33 +0000 annastan http://www.annastan.com/?p=3449 I’m currently reading Anna and the French Kiss by Stephanie Perkins and just loving it. Part of it is the great voice, but what hooked me right away were the conflicts that were introduced from the start. From the first page, we’re left asking questions and wondering what will happen next.

Conflict 1: The main character has been forced to attend a boarding school in France, where she doesn’t know anyone and doesn’t speak the language. Will she survive?

Conflict 2: She meets a charming guy she can’t help being interested in. Unfortunately, the guy is very unavailable. Will she get the guy?

These aren’t life or death conflicts, but they’re very important to the character, and because she’s in a situation we can almost all relate to (being in a strange place) we want things to work out for her. Since the two conflicts are closely connected–the guy helps her feel more comfortable in her new setting–they’re able to work together and push the story forward.

My writing class and I were talking about this approach of “layering conflict” the other day in regard to Tuck Everlasting. In that novel, there are multiple threads to the story, and in practically every chapter, a new aspect of one of the threads is revealed, thus upping the conflict. You can’t relax since you know the tension will go up at any moment, usually at the end of the chapter.

The trick, though, is that the conflicts should be related; otherwise, the story might feel disjointed and overwhelming. In Tuck, the various threads are all tightly interwoven. If they weren’t, the story wouldn’t feel cohesive or suspenseful.

What are your thoughts on layering conflict? Are there stories that you think do this particularly well?

ETA: I just saw a great post on Writer Unboxed about layering in fiction. It seems I’m not the only one with layers on my mind!

Like many screenwriting books, this one talks about three-act structure. Unlike other books, however, it focuses on the emotions of those acts rather than the events. I’ve never been great at structure, and I tend to think more about plot than the emotions carrying my characters forward. Which is why I often run into trouble.

When we talk about moving the story forward, we often focus on what the character wants and needs. But what Dunne underlines beyond those is what the character knows (or doesn’t know) and what she fears. Often what she fears is rooted in something that happened to her previously in her life.

[Your character] becomes teachable [through the course of the story] and what you must teach her at this point is her hidden history…that which caused her to build the walls in the first place…She must face it in order to free herself from the fear it created.

That is essentially the character’s journey, overcoming this fear. In creating the story, we must put her into situations where she’s pushed more and more out of her comfort zone, and closer to confronting whatever it is she’s afraid of (e.g. abandonment, pain, snakes).

According to Dunne, a character should start off the story acting in a certain way because of her innermost fears and desires. But when she’s pulled out of her comfort zone by the events of the story, all the self-preserving techniques she’s used in the past no longer work. The goal is to have the character learn new skills, ones that she might not know how to use at first, but ones that will ultimately help her in the end.

The real reason to set up the roadblocks and barriers on your protagonist’s journey is to make him face and overcome fears that will teach him the lessons he needs to learn…Not only that, but the lesson learned has to enable him to get to the next level on his quest.

All this thinking about characters’ fears really helped me with a WIP I’ve been revising. I’d been so focused on what the character wanted that I was having a hard time making the story feel cohesive. But thinking about the character’s fears helped me with the emotional arc of the story. I started asking questions like:

-When are the character’s fears challenged?

-When does she have no choice but to step out of her comfort zone?

-When does she finally learn to trust someone else?

Once I started thinking about what needed to happen emotionally, I had a much easier time figuring out what needed to happen plot-wise.

There was a lot of other wisdom in this book, but these were the things that helped me the most. I know focusing on a character’s fears isn’t an earth-shattering approach, but it was exactly what I needed to hear to help me gain some perspective on my story. I highly recommend checking out this handy little craft book.