“How to Grab Them on Page One” by James Scott Bell at The Kill Zone

“How to Layer Points of View” by Mary Kole at Kidlit.com

“Sagging Middles Part Deux: Pick Up the Pace” by Roni Griffin at Fiction Groupie

“The Best Writing Advice (According to Writers)” by Jane Friedman at There Are No Rules

And finally, here’s a little cuteness to get you through the weekend:

The part you must jettison is not only the best-written part; it is also, oddly, that part which was to have been the very point. It is the original passage, the passage on which the rest was to hang, and from which you yourself drew the courage to begin…So it is that a writer writes many books. In each book, he intended several urgent and vivid points, many of which he sacrificed as the book’s form hardened.

Since I cut the first twenty pages of my WIP a few weeks ago, this excerpt really struck a chord with me. Those pages had been there from the very beginning and, I thought, were essential to the story. They were rooted in storytelling, which was supposed to be a huge theme in the book. It turns out, however, that as the book’s “form hardened” that theme wasn’t nearly as important as I thought it was going to be.

Dillard is right; you need to be willing to cut the very things that seem the most important to you, all in the name of making the book what it needs to be.

How are your WIPs coming along? Have you needed to make any painful cuts?

]]> http://www.annastan.com/2010/04/wip-wednesday-cutting-the-important-things/feed/ 7 http://www.annastan.com/2010/03/people-read-to-worry/ http://www.annastan.com/2010/03/people-read-to-worry/#comments Fri, 19 Mar 2010 13:11:38 +0000 annastan http://www.annastan.com/?p=1962 I’m back to share some more wisdom from James Scott Bell’s fantastical little book, The Art of War for Writers. While Bell gives several helpful exercises to develop your writing, he also shares insight into the art of storytelling in general. Last night I read this gem:

They [people] read to worry. They read because they want to have their emotions wrenched by the plight of a character to whom they feel em0tionally connected. You do the connecting. You start connecting from paragraph one.

This statement isn’t necessary earth-shattering, but I think the word “worry” here is so interesting. Often people say they read for character or they read for story. I don’t think I’ve heard anyone say they read because they like to worry. But that is exactly what we do. If we put aside a book because we don’t care about the characters, it’s because we’re not invested enough to worry about them.

The fact that writers need to start making a connection with readers in the very beginning is so important. Not only must you hook readers, you must also make them care:

Remember, speed in the opening is a matter of disturbance, not high levels of action…The faster we worry about a character, the quicker the bond. And the greater our desire to turn the page.

I just saw a perfect example of what Bell is describing here. In Devil’s Kiss by Sarwat Chadda the opening scene introduces a teenage girl who’s struggling with the fact that she must kill a six-year-old boy. He’s not actually a boy; he’s a demon. But he still looks and acts like a child, which heightens Billi’s emotional struggle. The fact that she must do something so terrible, and the fact that she feels so conflicted about it, automatically make her sympathetic. We also wonder who this girl is and why it’s her job to kill demons.  We want to know more, and we want to see if she’ll actually do it. That’s what makes us turn the page.

]]> http://www.annastan.com/2010/03/people-read-to-worry/feed/ 10 http://www.annastan.com/2010/03/the-company-of-writers/ http://www.annastan.com/2010/03/the-company-of-writers/#comments Wed, 17 Mar 2010 13:38:44 +0000 annastan http://www.annastan.com/?p=1956 First off, agent Mary Kole just started an interesting series on her blog where she’s critiquing submission excerpts line-by-line. It’s a great glimpse into how agents evaluate manuscripts.

Now, I think I’ve mentioned before how lonely writing can be. Luckily, I have a writing date scheduled with my friend Alisa Libby today. Then we’re going to be meeting yet another writer friend for lunch. Having the chance to spend time with other writers is something I really value. Not only are you among people who understand your struggles, but they can give you advice and they can talk books with you all day long. The conversation would probably be boring to anyone else, but to us it’s heavenly.

And now in the spirit of St. Patrick’s Day (or, possibly, animal cruelty), I give you this poor little guy:

Two helpful craft posts from The Plot Whisperer for Readers and Writers:

5 Reasons Writers Get Stuck

Definition of Plot for Writers

And a really interesting video (via Pub Rants) that shows how a book cover is designed:

Have a great weekend!

Spend an awful lot of time on this sentence. In fact, more effort should be expended on your story’s first sentence than on any other line in your entire story. No kidding. The first sentence is the first thing the readers will see when they open the door of your manuscript or story. Make sure it’s a good ’un! One that will create a strong impression. My own favorite is one I used in my short story “The Bad Part of Town,” which begins: He was so mean that wherever he was standing became the bad part of town.

The opening line is SO important because it has the power to pull you right into the story. It shouldn’t feel gimmicky, but it should make your audience want to keep reading. That’s a lot of pressure for a single sentence, but doing it right can really pay off.

Here are a few great opening lines I found while going through the books on my shelf:

-The first thing you find out when yer dog learns to talk is that dogs don’t got nothing much to say.

The Knife of Never Letting Go by Patrick Ness

-”If I was going to kill the Prophet,” I say, not even keeping my voice low, “I’d do it in Africa.”

The Chosen One by Carol Lynch Williams

-The end of the world started when a pegasus landed on the hood of my car.

The Last Olympian by Rick Riordan

-It can hardly be a coincidence that no language on earth has ever produced the expression “As pretty as an airport.”

The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul by Douglas Adams

-We went to the moon to have fun, but the moon turned out to completely suck.

Feed by MT Anderson

What are some of your favorite opening lines?

I’ll be back tomorrow for a WIP Update.

Andrea Vlahakis continued yesterday’s POV discussion with some great thoughts on first person narration.

And Kiersten White posted a funny and smart look at well-rounded characters in YA (or the lack thereof).

First Person

The story is told directly by a character (I) who is one of its central figures, someone who is present in all the key scenes. We experience the story as the narrator experiences (or experienced) it, and are privy to the narrator’s intimate thoughts. We are limited, however, by what the narrator knows or doesn’t know. If there is information the narrator has but doesn’t share with us, there’s a good chance we’ll feel betrayed.

I looked at the elephant, wondering why it was so tiny.

Second Person

The story is told by a voice that appears to be speaking to another character or to the reader (you). While the viewpoint can function much like first person, it is more difficult to convey the narrator’s thoughts and feelings, especially if they’re nothing like the reader’s thoughts and feelings. Unlike first person, second person can make you feel distanced from a narrator (which can be both a pro and a con). When used sparingly, this can be a surprising and effect POV.

You looked at the elephant, wondering why it was so tiny.

Third Person Limited

The story is told in third person (she or he) and features a character whose thoughts are known to us.  Overall, this is  the least intrusive viewpoint because it can be nearly invisible to the reader. Like first person, third person limited can show us a character’s intimate thoughts, but it also keeps us within the bounds of what the main character knows. Generally, a third person limited narrator can withhold information more easily than a first person narrator.

Sara looked at the elephant, wondering why it was so tiny.” OR “Sara looked at the elephant. Why is it so tiny, she wondered.

Third Person Omniscient Involved

The story is told from a viewpoint that may shift throughout the story. The narrator may show us the internal thoughts of any of the characters as well as his/her own. Often, the narrator’s voice is stronger than that of any of the characters, and we get the sense that the narrator is leading us through the story, showing us what we need to know. This viewpoint often keeps us at a distance from the characters, but it can be an effective way of underlining the themes and ideas of a story.

Sara looked at the elephant, wondering why it was so tiny. The elephant looked at the girl, wondering why she was so big. Neither saw the lion, eyeing them both hungrily.

Third Person Omniscient Detached

The story is told from a viewpoint that is uninvolved in the story. We see only the actions of the characters but are never privy to their internal thoughts. We observe the events of the story and are forced to guess at the characters’ motivations . As in fairy tales, characters are defined by their actions. There is no psychology and we must draw our own conclusions about the story.

Sara looked at the tiny elephant.

Ultimately, in choosing POV, the writer needs to decide how much the reader should know about the characters, about the story, and about the narrator. It’s also important to find the best POV for your type of story. For example, putting a story in first person but giving us none of the character’s internal thoughts most likely won’t work; the story would probably be more effectively told in third person.

For more detailed information on POV (including some not outlined here), I recommend Ursula Le Guin’s Steering the Craft or Orson Scott Card’s Characters and Viewpoint.

In unrelated news, make sure to check out this great interview with Kristin Cashore on The Enchanted Inkpot!

]]> http://www.annastan.com/2010/01/choosing-a-point-of-view/feed/ 8 http://www.annastan.com/2009/12/get-better-search-results-for-my-author-site/ http://www.annastan.com/2009/12/get-better-search-results-for-my-author-site/#comments Mon, 28 Dec 2009 14:55:27 +0000 briercan http://www.annastan.com/?p=1174

Hey everyone, this is Anna’s husband, Ray, and I’m doing a guest post on how to get better search engine results for your author website. These tips will help you set up your website so that it will get better search results.

1. Think like your visitors

The first thing you have to do when you are optimizing your website for search engines is to put yourself in the shoes of a potential visitor. Think about who your visitor is. If you’re a published author, you’re going to want people to visit who will potentially buy your book. If you write children’s books like Anna, that could mean the actual reader, or a parent/aunt/uncle etc who would be buying the book for the reader.

Google Search Results

Try to think of what the visitor would type into a search engine (besides the name of the book or author) in order to find your book. Notice the title of this post. I could have chosen something like “Search engine optimization”, but “Get better search results for my author site” is something that an author might type into Google to find this article. If you’re writing a(nother) book about vampires, one search term might be “books like Twilight”, or “book for my twelve year old daughter who likes vampires.” Try to come up with a bunch of search phrases for your author site. For example you could have a description of your book which uses keywords like “vampire”, “young adult romance”, or “sparkly vampire.”

2. Think like a computer

The next thing you have to do is look at your website like a search engine would. Most search engines use programs called crawlers, which look at the code which makes up your website. The crawlers read all of the text they see and count words to see what your site is all about. Crawlers can’t read images, however, so if you have any text in an image, the crawler won’t be able to see the image. A good trick to see your website how a web crawler would see it is to turn images off in your web browser and load up your website. A crawler should be able to see anything that’s left on the screen.

3. Putting it all together

There are way too many tricks to optimize your author site for search engines to go over in this article, but I’ll go over the ones that’ll get you the most bang for your buck.

• Web page title
  When a crawler visits your site, one of the first and most important things it sees is the title of your webpage. You can see the title if you look at the top bar in your browser window. The one for this page should say “Get better search results for your author site.” This text comes from the <title> tag in the html code for your website. You should try to fit the important keywords or phrases into the title, but you don’t want to overdo it. Above everything else, you want to make it readable for visitors, and not just a bunch of keywords strung together.

• Content
  Search engine crawlers love to visit new web pages, and they really love new content. So one way to keep crawlers coming back to your site is to have content that is updated frequently. Blogs are a great way to do this, but only if you update the blog frequently.

• Link text
  When you make a link, try to describe where the link is going in the text of the link. For example instead of this: To see a hamster with an enormous carrot, click here!
  You should write this: Look! A hamster with an enormous carrot!

• Other html tricks
  This might only apply to those who make their own websites, so you might need to know a little HTML to understand this, but there are some tricks you can use to feature important keywords on your site. <h1> and <h2> tags will tell the crawler that whatever is in the tag is important, so if you put keywords into these tags, they’ll carry more weight than if they were in a <p> tag. All <img> tags should have an alt attribute, so that a crawler can know what the image is. Ex <img src=”/images/awesomesaurus.jpg” alt=”picture of an awesomesaurus” />

4. Don’t overdo it!

This is pretty important. Search engines like to see keywords which pertain to whatever the website is about, but if they see too many, they’ll call shenanigans, and in some cases they can ban your website. This is called keyword stuffing, and it’s no good. How many keywords should you use on your page? No one knows. That’s because search engines are constantly changing the way they index websites. Just go with what sounds natural when you read the content.

These tips should help you get indexed by the search engines and get placed in the search results for a particular keyword. Keep in mind, search engines can be slow to index websites, so even if you make these changes, you might not see any difference for a few months. I’ll be back in a week or two to give you some more tips on how to get placed higher on the search results screen.

Here’s what our backyard looked like. The snow was the light, powdery kind, but it still managed to weigh down the branches so they were sprawled out on the ground:

And here’s a picture of my car. I put the wipers up the night before – don’t they look like antennae on some kind of weird snow bug?

And finally, here’s a picture of our street after they’d only come by and plowed once (I guess they figured no one had anywhere to go). Luckily, there was some actual plowing later on in the day (at which point there were literally three plows driving by in a row).

That night, after the snow stopped, there was an amazing red sunset and I managed to snap a picture. Sadly, though, my camera seems to have eaten that photo because I can’t find it anywhere. I’ll try to put it up later if I manage to track it down.

Adding to the snow fun, here’s an adorable video I saw yesterday of a dog that does NOT like snow:

Dog hates snow, walks on hands – Watch more Funny Videos

And finally, you might have already seen this elsewhere, but if you haven’t I highly recommend checking out this great article on the physics of space battles. It’s interesting stuff, especially for anyone who reads, writes, or watches science fiction.

See you tomorrow when I’ll post a WIP update, most likely my last post for the week. Happy Tuesday!