Writing

Tuxedoed Writing

Will Rogers, Jr. once advised a fellow actor, “Don’t ever take a dramatic lesson. They will try to put your voice in a dinner jacket, and people like their hominy and grits in everyday clothes.” The actor – Dale Robertson – followed Rogers’s advice and became a highly successful television star.

This golden advice is similar for writers: don’t let writing classes, editors, or well-meaning critique groups dress your writing up so much that it’s no longer yours. Separate good advice that will benefit your story from advice that would change your voice, tone, or direction.

Without a doubt, writing classes and seminars can be beneficial, as can the opinions of friends and fellow writers. But opinions are just that – opinions. They’re not black and white formulas for writing success, they’re someone else’s personal ideas and preferences, and those may not necessarily be right for the story you had in mind.pen tux

Sometimes we writers tend to forget that helpful, well-meaning suggestions aren’t solid answers for writing a best seller, and we take them as hard facts rather than suggestions. I have a friend who belongs to an informal writing group that critiques each other’s works. She finds going to the monthly meetings helpful in keeping her on track with her writing commitment, which is great. But because there are a couple of published authors in the group, she takes their critiques as etched-in-stone fixes for her work, which they’re not. In fact, even though some of their suggestions are excellent, others were derailing her plot and changing her main character so much that she didn’t even recognize him anymore. She kept hitting walls and found that she couldn’t write about this new “stranger” in her novel. Had she tried to force her story out, it would have suffered and lost its authenticity. All those well-meant critiques would have turned her novel into everyone else’s novel. She finally realized that she had to back away from certain suggestions in order to move the story forward and keep it hers.

So weigh those well-intended suggestions and critiques objectively and see if they actually improve your story or if they’re just putting a dinner jacket on your words. Readers want authenticity – they can see right through the fake bow tie and tux; what they want is your style of everyday clothes.

The Joys of Language Evolution

No one likes change. Or so they say.

The English language is in a constant state of evolution. Some people think it’s a bad thing and mourn the idea of static language. I think it’s a good thing – even an exciting thing – especially for writers.

Why is this a good thing for writers? Because we’re continually being given new ways to express ourselves, ways that may define our characters and their actions with even more clarity while giving them a contemporary edge.

It’s true that some very good words and phrases are falling by the wayside, but that doesn’t mean they can’t be used. It’s always better to get your point across clearly than to avoid using a term just because it’s less popular. And you may find a new word or phrase that works just as well or even better.wordle

Contemporary terms are being influenced by many different things, from hip-hop to the tech world. Some nouns are doubling as verbs, portmanteaus (blended words) are multiplying at the speed of sound, and old words are taking on multiple new meanings. (Just check out the word “bodied” in the Urban Dictionary…)

People have always shuddered at the “corruption of English” when new blended words – or “frankenwords” – were created, but most of those words are regular parts of our language now, including “brunch”, “guesstimate”, and “smog”. Even “motel” is a portmanteau, combining “motor” and “hotel”.

We don’t raise an eyebrow at terms like those anymore.  Yet the more recent explosion of word blends like “infotainment”, “bromance”, and “irregardless” still meet with resistance by some language purists. Give them another decade and no one will so much as wince at those words. After all, by that time, they’ll have a whole new crop of portmanteaus to set their teeth on edge.

If you look back through the centuries, you’ll see that language has never been static. It just seems to be evolving differently and (arguably) maybe a bit faster. Take a look through the Urban Dictionary – you may think you’re reading a different language.

There’s nothing wrong with taking advantage of language evolution and contemporary phrasing in your writing, as long as they express your ideas clearly and reflect your characters properly. Just don’t use so many so frequently that your readers have no idea what you’re talking about!

What Makes Good YA (Young Adult) Fiction?

Every genre has its own characteristics, and characters in novels each have their own personalities, accents, speech patterns, etc. It’s what distinguishes them from each other and makes each character unique, turning them into believable people.

YA writing goes a bit further. It’s not enough just to make your lead character – and other supporting characters – tweens or teens with particular accents and personalities; those characters need to sound, react, and think like tweens or teens. It’s all about believability.

Sometimes as adult writers, we tend to forget the painful and thrilling intricacies of youthful behavior. We need to get in touch with our younger selves and draw on all of the chaos we survived in our youth, then update it to contemporary norms.YA reader

Think back to those middle school and high school years, or think about your children’s experiences at that age. There’s drama, and lots of it. Major drama, minor drama, unnecessary drama, tearful drama, exciting drama, angry drama. Dating drama, crush drama, you-stole-my-best-friend drama. Secrets, gossip, broken hearts, lies and half-truths. Add to that all the modern drama created by social media, texting, sexting, and “unauthorized” online photos with scandalous implications, and you have a tween/teen life. Makes you wonder how anyone gets through it all!

But it does make fertile ground for novel writing. Because even though some of these same situations overlap in the adult world, reactions can be far more extreme in tweens and teens than in more logical-thinking adults. They cope and reason differently. And because they’re dealing with some of these situations for the first time, they lack the life experience that gives adults better coping and reasoning skills. They’re also working with immature thought processes, which tend to make a minor drama turn into something worthy of Rhett Butler and Scarlett O’Hara.

However, you may have to tone down the language a bit. We know that kids use plenty of foul language in their everyday speech, but it’s been shown that their parents aren’t fond of tweens reading books with heavy language. Too much of it or the use of certain words considered more offensive has been shown to cause a backlash from parents, and let’s face it, that’s where tween and teen buying power comes from. In fact, many librarians refuse to stock such books. So even though it’s realistic, it’s not always appreciated by the Those Who Hold The Purse Strings.

The best way to overcome challenges like offensive language and to get a feel for what the YA crowd is looking for is to read lots of different types of Young Adult fiction. From highly successful series to quietly successful indie books, you’ll see what’s hot and what’s not in the ever-changing world of youth.

Falling In Love Can Be Dangerous

As writers, we love what we do. Let’s face it – if we weren’t passionate about it, would we pour our hearts and souls onto page after page, into book after book, not knowing if anyone else will share our passion? Of course not.heart (2)

We also tend to fall in love with our prose. Our phrasing, word choice, settings, and characters mean something to us and can weave their way into our hearts. While that’s a good thing in one way (after all, if we don’t love our work, who will?), it can be a drawback if an agent or editor recommends necessary modifications that our hearts aren’t willing to make.

I witnessed this first-hand a couple of years ago.

A fellow writer friend submitted her manuscript to an editor who had good connections to some promising agents. This editor had her finger firmly on the pulse of the publishing industry, so her input was extremely valuable, especially to a previously unpublished author. Her expertise and ability to connect writers with agents were reflected in her rates – she didn’t come cheap.

This writer decided that if she seriously wanted to get published “the old fashioned way” instead of indie publishing, it would be worth the editor’s fee. She submitted her manuscript and waited anxiously for its return so she could make her revisions and get her work between a couple of hard covers.

When the manuscript came back, she found more corrections, modifications, and recommendations for changes than she expected. Way more. She flew into a rage as she read through her edited work, accusing the editor of being “too nitpicky” and of trying to change her voice.

It wasn’t true. The editor was just doing her job, and she was doing it well. Those changes, suggestions, and recommendations were critical to the improvement of her book, but the writer didn’t want to hear it. She had fallen in love with her words to the point where she just couldn’t break up with them – she kept reading passages aloud and arguing that they couldn’t be changed without destroying the tone of her story.

In the end, her book never got published. She submitted it over and over to various agents and then directly to publishing houses with no success. While most sent generic rejection letters, a few agents took the time to give her basic reasons why the book wasn’t salable, and all of those reasons coincided with the editor’s edits.

Sometimes we writers have to face the emotionally difficult task of doing some tough surgical edits to improve our manuscripts. That writer’s beloved novel now sits in a bottom drawer collecting dust, whereas if she’d accepted a little “tough love”, she could already have been a household name.

The Absence of Writing

Dennis Quaid said, “Good film is the absence of acting.” What a great point. If you notice the acting, you’re removed from the depth ofbook (2) the film itself. Actors need to be natural and to fit their roles, not to deliver a series of choreographed lines and moves that distract you from the story.

That got me thinking that the same can be said for books: A good novel is the absence of writing. If the writing is so flowery, so filled with adjectives, or so contrived, it pulls the reader out of the story. Take this passage, for example:

Amy wandered aimlessly, her blue-black hair shining in the hot, bright sun. As her flowing red dress blew in the warm summer breeze, her freckled face reddened with the frightening realization that she may never find her beloved childhood friend in the thick, dense crowds of the noisy city.

Yikes.

I don’t know about you, but I got lost in all those descriptives. Because of that, there is no momentum leading to the nerve-wracking point of the paragraph – and by the time I got there, I didn’t care. The “writing” in this passage is glaring, the message is not. The writing overshadowed the message with all of its heavy adjectives; the passage is weighty with unnecessary verbiage.

I compare adjectives to accessories in a room: if you over-accessorize the room, you have nothing more than clutter, no matter how expensive those accessories might be. Their individual beauty is lost; only a general impression of messiness remains. When I edit manuscripts, I look for “over-accessorized” passages and suggest cleaner, more succinct ways of getting the author’s thoughts across.

Don’t let readers walk away with an impression of messy, cluttered pages. Make every sentence count, and keep those sentences lean and mean. Your story will shine.

Art Inspiring Art

We all go through those times when the writer in us yearns to come out, but our brains just won’t cooperate. It’s frustrating, to say the least.

What drove this man to climb up here? What are his thoughts? (Image via Wikipedia; artwork by Caspar David Friedrich)

What drove this man to climb up here? What are his thoughts? (Image via Wikipedia; artwork by Caspar David Friedrich)

At those times, you can help break through the creative Wall of Silence by letting someone else’s art inspire your art. No, I’m not talking about plagiarism; I’m talking about letting a piece of art speak to you, then just writing down what it says.

It could be anything from an old master’s oil painting to a contemporary glass sculpture. What do you see in the piece? If it’s a painting, what’s in the minds of the people? What were they doing just before or after the artist captured the scene? If it’s a landscape, what has that land experienced throughout the millennia or in its more recent history? How did those random flowers come to be there – are they the only remnants of a lover’s bouquet that took root or a happy homestead now completely erased from the earth?

Image via Wikipedia; artwork by Cezanne.

Image via Wikipedia; artwork by Cezanne.

I know of a woman who was actually inspired to write a short story by a still life painting. For some reason, the fruit came to life in her mind. They developed lives of their own and formed relationships, starting with their “infancy” in the growing stage, then being plucked from their branches or stems in their “adolescence” and taking a crated trip to a foreign country, and finally winding up with their thoughts and interactions in “maturity” while sitting in a bowl on someone’s kitchen table. One of the oranges even tried to make a break for it when he saw his fellow bowl-buddy getting peeled and eaten!

Even if you don’t write a full story, just engaging in the writing process can help you break through that barrier. But you never know – you may just stumble upon a story gem you didn’t even know was lurking in the depths of your creative mind!

Be Careful How You Flash Those Descriptives…

I was reading a take-out restaurant menu when I came across this description – look at the orange word on the first line:

homely vegeterian food menu 2

“Homely” vegetarian food? In America, that would insinuate “plain, unattractive” food. I’m sure that’s not what they were inferring!

But in British English, that would mean “homey” food, like the kind of good home cookin’ grandma would make. In fact, “homely” does have a second, almost opposing American definition in Merriam Webster as “being something familiar with which one is at home”, but that’s a bit of a stretch for a menu listing.

You can see from this example how using a word that’s not quite right could stop readers in their tracks while they try to figure out what you’re saying. And that stops the flow of your story and can – if it happens frequently enough – stop them from reading your work altogether.

While “homely vegetables” might just cause a pause, a snicker, and a raised eyebrow, “homely” used in other less-than-ideal ways would lead to completely wrong impressions:

“She was thrilled with the homely gift he’d given her.” Any red-blooded American woman reading this would wonder why she didn’t kick him out the door!

“His hug gave her that homely feeling, and she knew she could spend the rest of her life with him.” Because “homely” is more commonly used in American language to mean unpleasant or unattractive, an American reader would wonder why an ugly feeling would make her want him at all.

So even though your word choice may be technically correct, it’s always best to think about how your readers will interpret your words. Then your concept and their interpretation will be in sync.

National Day Of… (Go Ahead, Fill In The Blank)

As a writer, it’s fun to include some unusual facts in your books or short stories – things that make your readers say “I didn’t know that!”, “That’s SO cool!”, or just make them smile with new knowledge. And if you’re writing a series, they’ll come to expect – dare I say, even anticipate – these types of surprises with each new novel.

There’s one area that’s rarely thought of in fiction writing, and it can serve as a little comic relief or become one of those eccentricities of an offbeat but lovable character. It can even be the quirk that leaves just the right odd clue pointing directly to the murderer. What is this thing, you ask?

Even I have my own day! (In case you didn't know, it's November 14!)

Even I have my own day!
(In case you didn’t know, National Pickle Day is November 14!)

Awareness days.

Oh sure, we all know about observances like Mother’s Day, Labor Day, and even Bring Your Child To Work Day. But how about those obscure little nuggets like Cellophane Tape Day on May 27, Hug Your Boss Day on August 24 (imagine the situations that could create in your novel!), or National Chocolate Covered Anything Day on December 16? (That last one is something I can really get into!)

Of course, there are more serious observances that you can also use to give a character a sense of purpose or to show that s/he has a soft heart, even if s/he does pull wings off flies for fun. Observances of any kind can be seamlessly woven into almost any story, adding a new gem of information, a chuckle, or raising readers’ awareness in your own way.

While some readers will just enjoy learning something new or discovering that a character has yet another facet to him or her, others will undoubtedly run to their computers to find out more about this strange new bit of knowledge they just learned from you. It might even give them a funny topic to bring up over the dinner table or the next time they meet friends for coffee….and when asked, they’ll say they read it in your book. Win-win!

So maybe the next time friends visit me on May 29, they’ll find a pillow on top of my fridge. After all, May 29 is Put a Pillow on Your Fridge Day in both Europe and the US, and I wouldn’t want to miss any opportunity to coax a little good luck my way…. 😉

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