Historical fiction

There is sci-fi and fantasy, but I say why build a new world? Historical fiction offers our world, but in a different time. All the writer has to do is a little research.

Okay. A lot of research.

Stories are about people. There is something I find fascinating about the lives or people in this world, yet of another time. The only problem is that the term itself - historical fiction - is often met with outstretched forefingers in the sign of the cross from wild-eyed agents and editors. 

I find the genre fascinating and don’t understand it’s adverse connotation. Story is story and if you people them with intriguing characters and you place them in perilous situations, what does it matter if they are in a time long ago? Just to get around the negativity, I have to dress my stories up with a modern day time traveler in order to sneak in historical settings.

A while back, Susan Sherman contributed a post for Writer’s Digest entitled “Tackling Historical Fiction.”

Sherman starts her research in the map room of libraries. This is to get a good working knowledge of the geography of the story. The Internet can help in this regard, but the local university may offer more if the city library can’t provide.

Then she researches the big history, the major events going on at the time. That seems obvious. But it is in what she calls the “tiny history” that details emerge that bring the story to life. She asks herself a thousand questions to discover the minutiae of everyday life. She imagines arriving at one of her characters’s house and wonders, how she got there, in a cab a carriage or on horseback, if the road paved with cobblestones or is is mired in mud, if the house is lighted and if so by candle light or gas, if the place is in a good neighborhood or a slum. All these questions provides details of the time and place that give the story a sense of immediacy and reality.

Sherman warns that we must be careful not to let the research show and turn the whole thing into a history lesson info dump. The writer can’t show off the amount of research they’ve done. The trick is to provide enough description to flesh out the character and give life to the world, without burdening the reader with unnecessary details.

The nature of historical fiction, its limits of an earlier time, does allow the writer some advantages. Authors are supposed to create difficulties for their characters. In addition to the conflicts, barriers, and misunderstandings characters in any novel can face, there were no cell phones or Google to provide the quick fixes our modern day characters may employ. Using a smart phone to locate a Starbucks in a foreign part of town is much easier than sailing to the Far East when an unchartered American continent gets in your way.

Whether as a reader or a writer, there is pleasure in seeing real people dealing with day-to-day living in times long ago. 

(This article also posted at http://writetimeluck.blogspot.com)

Finish your novel

Have you got a NaNoWriMo project mostly done and need a kick in the pants to complete it? Me, too. Brian A. Klems from the Writer’s Digest blog reposted an article that addresses that. Called “5 Things to Stop Doing (If You Really want to Finish Your Novel),” it hits on some of the things distressing me that may be affecting you.

The first is to quit with the excuses. Too busy, kids too demanding, the house needs cleaning, the muse is away, need to research more, Facebook is too accessible, don’t have ideas, too tired, my writing sucks, all the good stories have already been written, too stressed, not much money in it, I’ll write later, too distracted, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. Sure, life gets busy, at times more so than at others. But as Klems says, writing goals “don’t die on their own. We suffocate them.”

Stop trying. Just write. Sometimes we try too hard. The best thing to do is back off and don’t think about it so much.

Shut out the internal editor. Man, that thing can be demanding. I seem more able to keep him quiet during NaNoWriMo. For the other eleven months of the year, I’m stymied by the inner critic. Especially for a first draft, just slap it down and know that the self-editor, like a player on the sidelines saying, “Put me in, coach,” will be back in the game. 

Klems’ next tip is don’t overdose on caffeine. Maybe not a problem in Utah, so we’ll leave it at that. 

Lastly, stop thinking writing should be easier. It is what it is - sometimes a breeze, sometimes a gale. If you expect it to be work, then you’ll be delighted when it is not. 

So, go out and finish that novel.

(This article also posted at http://writetimeluck.blogspot.com)

Word count

Even though this is a writing blog, let’s do some math.

Fifty K words for the NaNo November works out to 1667 words a day, about 12,500 a week. The daily count means almost 7 pages of double-spaced text.

I’m in trouble. 

The method I’ve been regular with is a daily timed writing session, with no regard to word count. If I had to guess, I couldn’t. I’ll write on the story, then type notes to myself or scribble them in a notebook. I’m sure it wouldn’t be near a thousand, probably less than 500.

With NaNoWriMo looming, there have been some articles floating around on how to ramp up word count. Then I Googled for other ideas.

Jessica Strawser, in a recent Writer’s Digest article, initiated this query. Juggling work and toddlers, she says it is about finding ways to write in between the times she actually sits uninterrupted at her laptop. One thing she does is use a voice recording app on her smart phone to record ideas that randomly floats into her head.  Scene snippets, dialog, plot ideas, etc., can even be recorded with a hands free device on the drive home from work. Sometime during the day, she emails herself notes about the next scene so she doesn’t go into it cold when she sits to write.

Other articles list things like establishing a writing routine and never vary from that schedule. Some swear by writing in the morning, others must wait until the kiddies fall asleep at night. 

There is the Pomodoro Technique (Google it) in which you set a timer for 25 minutes and work interruption free, then take a 5 minute break, the repeat.

Most writing on the subject confirm Stawser’s idea of having a notion of what you will write about before you sit to type. Rachel Aaron devotes the first 5 minutes to jotting down a quick description of the scene she’s going to write. Aaron claims she has gone from two to ten thousand words a day with her three-tier approach. The first and most important is the knowledge phase. She always spends 5 minutes, never less, sometimes more, writing a stripped down version of the scene; no details, she simply notes what she will write when the time comes to actually write it. This step alone increased her daily 5K. 

Aaron took two other steps to increase her writing. She noted the time and places she was most efficient and built her writing time around those periods. Lastly, she says enthusiasm ups word count. The fun scenes fly by faster than the boring scenes that work up to it. Which leads to, if it’s dull for you to write, what expectations do you have of your reader? 

I am not doing the Rachel Aaron justice with this quick recap. The whole article can be reached following the link below and is pretentiously titled “How I Went From 2,000 Words a Day To 10,000 Words A Day.” 

I’m not sure I’m ready to jump in at that pace. I’d settle for 1667 words. 

(This article also posted at http://writetimeluck.blogspot.com)

Let it go

As if my writing needs any more diversions, Writer’s Digest lights up my inbox. Daily. Three or four times, daily. Being the distractible type, I click on it, especially when the writing is fighting me. Though a lot of it is stuff they’re trying to sell, they regularly put out informative articles on craft. One such, by Jack Heffron, is titled, “How to Destroy Your Initial Idea (& Make Your Story Better)”

Heffron starts with a Pablo Picasso quote: “Every act of creation is first an act of destruction.” He readily admits he has no clue what Picasso means, but applies the quote to writing. “The generative idea for a piece,” Heffron says, “is more an avenue to richer ideas than an end in itself. At those times, we must be willing to let go of our initial premise.” We sometimes need to destroy our initial writing idea for the good of the story. 

He cites an example from his own writing to illustrate. He had written a piece and put a lot of time and effort into it. For the first 24 pages, two women converse in a doughnut shop until two men enter, have a brief encounter with them, and all four leave on page 25. Readers looked at it and told him the story starts on page 24. Heffron was frustrated. He had labored for hours perfecting the dialogue, developing each woman character and produced a ton of good lines. Was such an effort to be a mere prelude to the real story?

Sometimes the answer is yes.

He shelved the story for a while and when he came back to it, he realized they were right. (That little writer’s group - there’s a reason we keep them around.) He revised and brought the two men in by page 2 and had the four of them leave by page 7 and his story was better. Yet the weeks he invested initially was not a waste. Heffron spent the time intimately getting to know his characters. His rounded understanding of them allowed the story to surprising turns, twists he wouldn’t have imagined if he didn’t know the characters so well. He says he wouldn’t have achieved the real start of the story if he hadn’t written what came before. His initial premise led him to literary gold, even though it was eventually discarded.

How liberating, yet how unnerving. We’ve all been there before. We’ve put in time and effort honing and crafting paragraphs or pages. Then our finger hovers over the delete key as that inner writer’s voice tells us to let it go.

Im getting better at it. I have a need to save those little nuggets of writing gold in an idea file, but once they are removed, the story is cleaner. 

There are times, in mid-story, I’ll stop and write a note to myself that will get dumped. I do this often with characters, especially when they act in a way contrary to how they should. I’ve written a multi-page backstory on a character, expelling why they would do such and such. It is not germane to the story, but it is vital to me. I need to deeply understand these people. 

Back to Heffron’s premise. Sometimes an initial idea takes off in an unintended direction and it must be discarded. He ends by comparing breaking up with an idea to that in a relationship. You’ve tried different strategies. You’ve sought counseling. But, says Jack Heffron, “at some point, we need to tell the piece to sit down. We need to summon the courage to say, “Honey, we need to talk.”

(This article also posted at http://writetimeluck.blogspot.com)

Antagonists

The next project is a rescue. This flat story that has sat in writer purgatory for a few years, waiting for motivation to do something about it, longing for the inspiration to remedy it.

I’m there ready to take it on, its finding the cure that is the problem. Thus, it is back to basics. Characters, stories are about characters. Check. Plot, protagonist wants something, antagonist keeps him from it. Wait, that could be it. I don’t have an antagonist, at least not in the traditional sense. 

John Truby (The Anatomy of Story: 22 to Becoming a Master Storyteller) is my go-to guy at a time like this. He says the hero, of course, is important. So, too, is the opponent along with the rest of the cast. Truby focuses not on the main character in isolation, but looks at all the characters as part of an interconnected web. Writer’s Digest this week had a quote by mystery writer Elmore Leonard who says “the main thing I set out to do is tell the point of view of the antagonist as much as the good guy.”

Hmm. Good points, but I still don’t have a traditional antagonist. There is no detective and no criminal to pursue, my Harry Potter has no Voldemort. My protagonist has only his own shortcomings to trip over. Truby doesn’t directly address such a thing. He does illustrate his points with story examples from movies. The likes of A Streetcar Named Desire, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, andTootsie, don’t have traditional antagonists. 

Another valuable resource, KM Weiland, discusses an “antagonistic force” and says, “nowhere is it written that your story has to have a bad guy (or girl, as the case may be).” She says there are several non-human antagonists. They include:

-Animal - King Kong and Jaws comes to mind

-Self - the age old existential quandary of man as his own worst enemy in which the MC must overcome his own problems before he can deal with the external one

-Setting - survival stories in which the hero goes up against nature. Cast Away is a good example. Weather related tales are an offshoot of this.

-Society - dystopia is the extreme example here, but simpler themes in which the protagonist faces poverty or inequalities of some sort

-Supernatural forces - The Curious Case of Benjamin Button would be of this sort.

-Technology - a lot of sci-fi uses overarching technological forces as antagonists.

Non-human antagonists can be anything that throws obstacles in the way or the hero getting what he or she wants. They could be a thing, an idea, or any inanimate object that the protagonist must overcome to reach the end goal of the story. As long as you have conflict (to have a story is a must) you have an antagonist.

Weiland says one mustn’t limit themselves to just one antagonist and most stories will use a combination of several.

Think Sharknado.

(This article also posted at http://writetimeluck.blogspot.com)

MG or YA?

My “next” project that I’ve been working on forever has been giving me fits. One of the dilemmas is what age to make the characters, and therefore, who the target audience will.

I’m an MG kind of a guy. I’ve spent a career teaching fifth and sixth graders. I know how they operate, what shenanigans they think they can get away with, and the cocky attitudes they employ to pull it off. And I’m smart enough to realize they probably got away with a few things I wasn’t aware of. They’re as capable as teenagers of scheming wild ideas, just not as aware of when the silly notion won’t work.

Earlier this week, Julie Daines said to listen to your gut, our writer’s intuition that is our friend should we choose to listen. I think my friend is telling me to take it MG. But the first time I did that, I overshot my audience. What to do, what to do?

Then a timely article arrived this month from Writer’s Digest.  In “The Key Differences Between Middle Grade Vs. Young Adult,” agent Marie Lamba of The Jennifer De Chiara Literary Agency helps clarify the two. She sees a lot of queries of manuscripts with “an MG/YA identity crisis.” She rejects many of these simply because the writer did not know the basics of the age group they thought they were writing for.

In a nutshell, the differences boil down to a few areas:

Age of readers

Middle-grade does not mean middle school. MG is for readers ages 8-12 and 13-18 for YA. While there is no “tween” category, middle school libraries tend to have shelves for both. There are upper and lower MG as there is in YA.

Age of protagonists

Kids “read up” so your characters should be on the higher end of the age of the readers. Thus a 10-year old hero would be ideal for a lower MG, 12 or even 13 for upper MG, and 17 or 18 for YA. Your YA character can’t yet be in college.

Manuscript length

30,000-50,000 words is the norm for MG while YA starts at 50,000 and goes up to 75,000. These are not set in stone, but a good length to shoot for. Fantasy novels can exceed that due to the world-building necessary.

Voice

YA is usually written in first person while third person is common for MG.

Content

There is a difference in what is allowable in each. While there is no profanity, graphic violence, or sexuality in works for younger readers, they are acceptable for YA,  the exception being erotica. In a recent Writer’s Digest webinar, Jennifer Laughran of Andrea Brown Literary Agency says a few “Hells” and “damns” are okay for MG, but the harsher curses should be avoided. MG heroes can have romance, but it should be limited to a crush or first kiss. Generally, MG novels end on a hopeful note while that isn’t necessary of YA works. Marie Lamba says there are gatekeepers between you and your middle-grade audience - parents, teachers, librarians - who may discourage the book. That ultimately could affect a publishers’s choice to print it. This isn’t as much an issue for YA, though gratuitous sex, numerous F-bombs, and extensive violence could mean the book may sit in fewer schools.

Mind-set

This is a biggie, the one I missed when I originally wrote the book. MG focuses on friends, family, and the character’s immediate world and their relationship to it; character react to what happens to them, with minimal self-reflection. YA characters discover how they fit in the world beyond their friends and family; they reflect more on what happens and analyze the meaning of things. Jennifer Laughran says that MG kids test boundaries and have adventures “finding their place within a system” whereas YA teens do the same, while “busting out of the system” and find themselves.

There are, of course, exceptions to every rule. Once you have the writing chops of J.K. Rowling, you, too, can write a 200,000 word tale. But even Harry didn’t kiss Ginny until they were teenagers.

So I’m listening, gut, my quiet friend. I do wish you would speak louder sometimes.

(This article also posted at http://writetimeluck.blogspot.com)

Submitting

A year ago, I had an MS ready to start pushing to agents/editors when the wonderful Carol Lynch Williams offered to look it over. She found issues. Since then, my writer’s group has gone over the thing again, cleaning and tightening. This week I finished it, wrote a query and submitted to an editor. Then appears an article on submitting.

Okay, maybe it came out with it before. It’s been a busy month. The editor at WIFYR gave us until the end of July to get anything sent off to her. I’ve been cramming to get the story in a shape to send off, so emails have not been looked at.

The article, “Submission Tip Checklist: Double-Check These 16 Things Before Sending Your Book Out” was written by Chuck Sambuchino who is somehow associated with Writer’s Digest. I subscribe to his mailings and a link to the article was embedded in another piece.

Fortunately, I’ve managed to follow most of the suggestions Sambuchino offers. I failed with the that says to make a final check on Twitter or their site to make sure they are still open for submissions. Another embedded article caught my attention, “Query Letter Pet Peeves - Agents Speak,” also by Sambuchino.

He says its not just a matter of what to write in the query letter, but what not to write. Among the irritants of agents:

-Bridget Smith of Dunham Literary, Inc., does not like vagueness. If you can’t tell her enough about the novel in the query then she will reject it.

-Shira Hoffman of McIntosh & Otis, Inc., mirrors the same. Some authors spend too much time on their bios without presenting essential story details.

-Linda Epstein of Jennifer De Chiara Literary reminds us that agenting and publishing are businesses and the query should be a business letter that should be professional and taken seriously.

-Nicole Resciniti of Seymour Agency agrees. We should treat the query as a job interview. It should be professional and concise and the writer should know their craft and understand the market.

-Bree Ogden of D4EO Literary wants to easily know what the manuscript is about. “It shouldn’t be an Easter egg hunt for the pot line,” she says.

Not included in the above are things such as glaring grammatical or spelling errors, mass emailings sent to a dozen or so other agents, and misspelling of the agent’s name or agency. Those seem rather obvious. Most of the agents in the article mentioned statements that tell the agent the story is “the greatest,” or a blockbuster or masterpiece. 

At WIFYR, agent Amy Jameson of A + B Works shared some of the treasured queries she's received. They included the above mistake extolling the brilliance of their own writing. One simply included a picture of the writer. While stunningly handsome, there was no mention of his story specifics. Amy rejected it.

Dang it. And to think I just blew a bunch of cash on a studio photographer.

(This article also posted at http://writetimeluck.blogspot.com)

MG contest

I wanted to share with you a contest for MG fiction that Writer's Digest is running in conjunction with Chuck Sambuchino's Guide to Literary Agents blog. 

The contest is for middle grade works of contemporary fiction, set in our present world and time. The contest closes tomorrow so you need to act fast to enter.

More details can be seen at Chuck's site: http://www.writersdigest.com/editor-blogs/guide-to-literary-agents/14th-free-dear-lucky-agent-contest-contemporary-middle-grade-fiction?et_mid=664049&rid=239167764

Query letters

The WIFYR assistants have been at it already prepping for this summer’s conference. I am blessed that Carol Lynch Williams has asked me back again. 

Besides the numerous emails, coordinating with faculty, and planning, we have been critiquing each others’ work. WIFYR is a place for serious writers who hope to get published. Besides bringing manuscripts up to snuff, we’ve discussed query letters and synopses. 

A query is a one page letter to introduce yourself to an agent or editor and to try to get them interested in your work. It sometimes is confused with a cover letter which is similar, but attached to the complete manuscript. A query is more fleshed out and stands in place of your book, the hope being it will prompt a request for your manuscript. 

Writing your book is only part of the story. Selling the thing to an agent or editor is an undertaking of it’s own. A killer manuscript, needs a killer query letter to get them to take an interest in it. 

A query letter, according to AgentQuery.com, is meant to “elicit an invitation to send sample chapters or even the whole manuscript to the agent." It has a rather precise format that writers should not stray from. A query letter must stick to a single page in length with three concise paragraphs. The first is the hook, the second a mini-synopsis, the last your writer’s biography. The hook is a succinct, one sentence tagline for your book. Its obvious purpose is to peak interest and snare the editor/agent. The mini-synopsis is an expansion on that one sentence hook. It takes your 300 page novel and boils it down to 150 words or so. Your writer info is where you do your best to sound like a writer. List published works if you have them. As I have not, I would probably list my association with writing conferences such as WIFYR and time I’m involved with the local Salt Lake area SCBWI group. The only thing left for the query letter is a closing thanking them for their time and consideration.

This is a short summary. You should seek out the linked article for complete information.

Where as the synopsis reveals the ending and every plot point along the way, the query does not have to do that. Marissa Meyers, who loves the challenge of writing them, says a query should distill the novel down to its essence, providing just enough information to draw the editor, yet not so much that the story loses all sense of mystery and intrigue.

Brian Klems of The Writer’s Digest offers DO’s and DON'Ts for writing them, some of them reiterating what the AgentQuery people said. You should address the person by name rather than a mass blanketing of query letters. When pitching to an agent, research them and what kind of work they represent. Show how your’s fits and explain why you’ve chosen that specific agency. Klems also says to mention your platform if you have heavy blog or Twitter followings and to study other successful query letters. You should not include meaningless writing credits and  be sure to avoid arrogance by telling how fantastic you or your work are. Again, the complete article is found at the link.

No matter how good the manuscript, a good query is important or the novel won’t see the light of day. 

The AgentQuery folks sum it up best. They say to “write a professional, intelligent, concise, intriguing query and not only will you entice an agent to ask for more, but you’ll move yourself one step closer to a book sale.” 

(This article also posted at http://writetimeluck.blogspot.com)

Story structure

Again, Writer’s Digest keeps pumping out excellent blog posts. One such recent article was titled “How to Structure a Killer Novel Ending.” The ending is one of four parts of story structure and can only be as good as the story itself. Larry Brooks, author of Story Physics: Harnessing the Underlying Forces of Storytelling, wrote the article.

Brooks says the other story parts are two major plot points and a mid-point. These things go by different names: hero’s need, plot twists, hero’s quest, or other obstacles that block the hero’s path. Before you utter The End, you must have a solid story. Brooks says writers can’t invent a new story structure. They can vary the details, but are bound by our current accepted format.

A writer can’t dismiss acceptable structure as formulaic and therefore reject it. Fiction is not a process of random exploration in which characters wander here or there without direction. The writer guides, planning out where the characters are going. Solid story architecture gives them direction.

There is no blueprint for a story ending. The only rule is that if something happens in the final act, it must have been foreshadowed, or referenced, or already in play. Brooks offers guidelines. One is that the hero can’t be passive or merely narrate the ending. They must step up and take the lead, the catalyst for the ending. Also, the hero must conquer his inner demons by book’s end. He grows internally. The hero must use courage, creativity, and brilliance set the cogs in motion that lead to resolution of the story.

Again, if you’ve done the rest of the story right, the ending will fall in place. If you plotted well, created a compelling and empathetic hero’s quest and evolving story arc, you’ll know where the story needs to end. Brooks says if you strategize and plot your main story points ahead of time, even if you’re not sure of the ending, then the final act will crystalize on its own, as part of the process.

Sound story structure – you’ve got to have it.

(This article also posted at http://writetimeluck.blogspot.com )

Butt in chair

Much has been said about what it takes to write a book. There are opinions on character and storyline, protagonists and antagonists, internal conflict, emotional and concrete goals, and on and on. But it doesn't mean a thing unless you sit down and actually write.

Writing can be hard and sometimes it doesn't work. That is what email and the Internet and Words With Friends are for: to give the brain a break when the writing isn't happening. It’s an easy distraction to fall into.

There's always your other life, the one without the imaginary friends. Demands takes precedence over writing sometimes. And/or too many things pop up that need attending to. You'd think a school teacher on summer vacation would have two hours a day to dedicate to writing. Not so.

There’s writing related tasks that get in the way of sitting at a keyboard. Sometimes you need authenticity so you check things out on Wikipedia. Or your writer’s group has something due.

Still, it comes down to sitting down and writing. That means priorities must be established, sacrifices made, schedules rearranged. And it comes down to dedicating yourself to the story.

Writer's Digest had a recent Peter Stenson article on this, called The 90-Day Novel: 5 Simple Steps to a First Draft. The first thing is to establish a habit, to make daily writing part of your routine. Stenson says it best: "Make a deal with yourself and your long-dead writing heroes: I’ll write 90 days in a row, no matter what, even with seven presentations at work and kids crying and a resentful spouse alone in bed. Give yourself the three-month gift of an hour or two of daily writing. Be alone. Sit down and lock the door. Disable your internet connection. Write one word after another. Every day. For 90 days straight."

Easier said than done, but the logic is good.

Stenson discussed the nature of a rough draft and expectations to have for it. He ended with advice on how to give yourself over to a novel. Quoting again, he says to “allow yourself to space out at work. Allow yourself to toss and turn in the middle of the night. Allow yourself to become selfish with your mental obsessions. Forty-minute showers as you walk through imaginary towns in the year 2050? Yes. Forgetting to respond when somebody asks you a question because you’re unsure if your lead character’s mother actually dies when she falls off her horse? Bingo. Allow yourself to think like your characters. To talk like them. To imagine them riding shotgun in your Civic while they pick the dirt from underneath their nails. Just don’t fight the natural result of intense immersion into your writing world.”

But mostly to get a novel written, you need to plant your butt in a chair and write.

(This article also posted at http://writetimeluck.blogspot.com )