Lauren Delaney~writer

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Planning A Heart-Stopping Story

July 28, 2011

Here is part VII of the 8-Part BRING YOUR NOVEL TO LIFE Series by Holly Lisle. Enjoy!

Lauren

Love changes everything. tm

Masquerade by Lauren Delaney now available as an ebook at Amazon http://www.amazon.com/dp/B004V1282C

- and in multi-formats at Smashwords http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/51162

Planning A Heart-Stopping Story

Welcome to part VII of the 8-Part BRING YOUR NOVEL TO LIFE Series.

Planning A Heart-Stopping Story
by Holly Lisle

Over the last six lessons, you’ve figured out your theme, and you’ve worked out at least one and possibly several subthemes. You’ve learned how to use blended scenes, intercuts, and cliffhangers to work both themes and subthemes into your work. You have great conflict waiting to happen. What do you do next?

All of our discussion of themes and subthemes comes down to this. It’s time to figure out how your story is going to go.

After more than 17 years of writing novels as my full-time job, I’ve tried every method I could find for getting my stories into order without so overworking them during the outline process that I no longer wanted to write the book. This is the method I currently use, and am still refining. It’s simple, it’s quick, and it’s flexible—all three advantages which make writing more fun, and keep your work fresher for you. This is going to seem like the strangest imaginable way to get a passionate, compelling, suspenseful story on the page…but it completely blows away waiting for your Muse to inspire you in terms of effectiveness.

I am a heavy user of plot cards—3×5 index cards or the software equivalent–upon which I write one single sentence for each scene. That sentence outlines the characters and the conflict that will occur in that scene.

(Don’t understand scenes? The Scene Creation Workshop will help you get the hang of them. http://www.hollylisle.com/fm/Workshops/scene-workshop.html )

To write your novel, you’ll need to know:

• How many plot cards/ scenes you’ll need for your book,
• Which theme or subtheme (or blend) you’ll be dealing with for each scene,
• Which characters will be in each scene,
• Who the POV (Point Of View) character—the person through whose eyes the story is told—will be.

You’ll start with basic arithmetic plus your themes and subthemes to do this to figure out how many scenes you’ll need.
An average first novel in the current market is around 90,000 words long (if you’re writing for the adult, not children’s or YA markets).
• So we’ll start with 90,000 words as our target length.

For this example, we’re going to assume that you have one main theme and two subthemes that you’ve decided will each run the complete length of the book.

• Theme: HEROINE sets out to win a writing contest and prove to her dubious husband that her dream of being a writer is not a waste of time.

• Subtheme #1: HEROINE meets man at work who encourages her writing, and her pursuit of fulfillment, leading her to consider leaving her current relationship.

• Subtheme #2: HUSBAND watches his wife’s life change as she pursues her dreams, and he starts wondering what happened to his own dreams.

Let’s further say that you’ve decided your scenes will average a thousand words each, so you’ll need about ninety of them to get a full-length novel. (In real life, the math is rarely this easy–mine scenes generally average 1500 to 1750 words each, but every book and every scene is different.)

• Target Length of Book ÷ Average Length of Scene = Number Of Scenes

• 90,000 ÷ 1000 = 90 scenes for the book (PLEASE NOTE: This is an APPROXIMATION. Books are not so cut and dried that you’ll end up with exactly ninety scenes, nor will they each be a thousand words long.)

You want to give a lot of the story over to your main theme. We’ll figure 50% because it’s a nice, easy number, but it could just as easily be 60%. Or 73.8%, if you like to make things complicated. Let’s not go there, though.

• 50% for the heroine’s main story.

Then we’ll divvy up the other half of the book between Subtheme #1 and Subtheme #2. Say you decide that you want the heroine to dump her husband for the man at work. You’ll probably want to give #1 more time and space than #2. If you want her current relationship to grow stronger because her pursuit of her own dreams has inspired her husband to pursue his, then you’ll want to put more work into #2. And if you want to keep the reader in suspense about which way she’s going to jump, split them down the middle.

I think the suspense angle is interesting, so I’m going to give:
• Subtheme #1 25% of the book, and
• Subtheme #2 25% of the book.
Multiply 90 (Total Number Of Scenes) by .5 (50%–the percentage your main theme gets). You’ll get 45.

• 90 x .5 = 45 Main Theme Scenes

Now multiply 90 (Total Number Of Scenes) by .25% (the subtheme percentage).
• 90 x .25 = 22.5

You’ll get 22.5, which basically means you round up for one subtheme, and round down for the other one. Or write two short scenes. Or don’t worry about the remainder, because this is just a rough technique to give you a quick picture of how you’re going to break up your story.

I’ll give subtheme #1 22 scenes, and subtheme #2 23 scenes, just because I’ve decided the husband reawakening his own dreams is a better story than the dude at work hitting on someone else’s wife, and at the end of the suspense, I’m going to have the heroine stay with her husband.

• 22 Subtheme #1 Scenes
• 23 Subtheme #2 Scenes

Anyway, I now know I’ll need 90 3×5 index cards on which to write out plot cards, and I’ll have 45 of them for the heroine’s pursuit of her dreams, 22 for her entanglement with the man from work, and 23 for her relationship with her husband.

NOTICE that nowhere in here have I addressed POV (Point Of View)—that is, which scenes are shown through which character’s eyes. The theme and subthemes do not select POV for you. As you write out plot cards, you’ll have to select the best POV based on what is happening in each scene. Let’s do a few now, and I’ll show you what I mean.

• Jenna, cleaning the attic on a rainy Saturday afternoon, discovers one of her journals from her teenage years in which she promised herself that she’d be a famous novelist by the time she was 25, and something stirs in her at the sudden, sharp memory of that dream. [POV-Jenna] (Main Theme)

• Kevin Hobart hears Jenna talking to a co-worker about her crazy desire to write a novel, and does a good job of faking casual as he invites her to a meeting of a writers’ group to which he belongs. [POV-Kevin] (Subtheme #1)

• Mac watches Jenna reading through piles of books about writing, taking notes and writing things down, and tells her she’s going to get her feelings hurt when she does all that work and no one wants what she’s done. [POV could be either Mac or Jenna] (Subtheme #2)

• Jenna meets Kevin at her first meeting, and even though she brought something she wrote to read, is intimidated by the process and refuses to read when her turn comes around. [POV could be either Jenna or Kevin] (Blend of Main Theme and Subtheme #1)

You may not get all 90 scenes when you first start outlining. That’s okay. You may not, in fact, get much beyond the first third of the book. That’s fine, too.

You have a plan, and you can build and change things as you go. The greatest advantage of figuring out and using plot cards is that when you discover a better direction for your story, you can toss a 3×5 index card or two, and replace them with better, rather than tossing several thousand or more already-written words.

I realize it’s unnerving to look at the mechanical processes behind creating edge-of-the-seat fiction. It’s more romantic to imagine typing like a wild thing, writing without a plan, tossing balled-up pages in the wastebasket from across the room…and dressing all in black, and drinking espresso in a coffee house while lamenting being blocked, too. Passion is in what you put on the page, though, not in how artsy you look while you’re doing it.

In the final installment of BRING YOUR NOVEL TO LIFE, “Life, Passion…Deadline,” you’ll learn how to hold on to your story and its heart while working to a deadline.

cheers, Lauren

Love changes everything. tm

Masquerade by Lauren Delaney now available as an ebook at Amazon http://www.amazon.com/dp/B004V1282C

- and in multi-formats at Smashwords http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/51162

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Interweaving Your Novel’s Themes And Subthemes

July 12, 2011

Interweaving Your Novel’s Themes And Subthemes

Here is part VI of the 8-Part BRING YOUR NOVEL TO LIFE Series by Holly Lisle. Enjoy!

Lauren

Love changes everything. tm

Masquerade by Lauren Delaney now available as an ebook at Amazon http://www.amazon.com/dp/B004V1282C

- and in multi-formats at Smashwords http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/51162

Interweaving Your Novel’s Themes And Subthemes
by Holly Lisle

When you’re writing a book, you want every page to drag the reader to the next one, even if she’s late for work, even if it’s two o’clock in the morning and he needs to be up at six, even if the plane has landed and your weary traveller really must get bags in hand and get off the plane. You want what you’re writing to be compelling. Enthralling. Un-put-down-able.

And that’s where the themes and subthemes we’ve been working on come together.

First we’ll put together an example where our main theme of rage against misused power, by now well disguised, becomes the story of a heroine who has been wrongfully accused of murder and must prove her innocence. We’ll have a subtheme of unhappy divorce, wherein the heroine’s two children are being told by her ex what a horrible person she is.

We could do an enormous number of things with these two storylines, and I know dozens of ways to meld themes and subthemes together and use them to play off of each other, but I’ll give you my three favorite techniques here.

THE BLENDED SCENE

Start with the heroine discovering the body of a stranger in her basement. Since she and her husband split up, there hasn’t been anyone down there but her and the two kids, who are five and eight years old. She carries a load of laundry down the stairs, trips over the the body, scatters laundry everywhere, and goes racing up the steps to call the police, just as her ex arrives to pick up the kids for the weekend. She’s frantic, her husband first thinks she’s joking, then thinks she’s hysterical, and finally goes into the basement and comes out as she’s calling the cops. He’s not sympathetic—he wonders what’s going on in that house since he left, what sort of atmosphere she’s raising his kids in, and when the cops arrive, he gives a statement, then hustles the kids out of there fast, wondering aloud if she’s had men in the place while his children were there.

• Locate the characters—other than the main character—who are involved in the theme and those involved in the subtheme. In this case, those characters are the police (theme), and the ex-husband and kids (subtheme).

• Decide how to create ties between theme and subtheme–in this case, the husband ties the police into his vision of his ex-wife as a bad mother by suggesting she’s been entertaining strangers in the house with his kids present. The police, meanwhile, will tie the husband into the story as another suspect.

• Get elements of both theme and subtheme into one scene.

THE INTERCUT

Now we’re going to play with time and space. We’ll write four alternating scenes, two from the point of view (POV) of our heroine, and two from the POV of her ex. In each scene, we’ll work either the theme or the subtheme, but not both.

First, we have the heroine being questioned at the kitchen table, denying any knowledge of the man in the basement or how he got there, honestly describing over and over how she found the body, and then we have a forensics guy telling the cop in the background that the man had a note in his pocket signed by someone with the same name as the woman, and they’re going to need pre-existing handwriting samples.

Next, to the father driving the kids home, who’s asking his kids who comes over to the house when they’re there with mommy, and the kids saying no one, and the father asking if mommy told them to say that.

Third, back to the heroine, who is asked to go to the police station, and who is seated in an interrogation room, where, as soon as she’s left alone, she gets up and starts pacing, trying to work through where the man could have gotten a note from her, who he might have been, how he ended up in her basement, why he was dead, and who was responsible for his death.

And back to the father, who gets the kids to admit that, once they’re in bed, they don’t know if anyone comes over, and yes, mommy does have music on sometimes, and maybe someone could have been there, and while they’re at school, they don’t know what she does. Except for laundry. They’re very firm that she does lots of laundry.

• With intercuts, you want to show facets of who each character is, and how they’re acting toward their own ends, whether those are good or bad.

• You have to create change, but you are only creating change toward the specific theme you’re working on (at least visibly). The police don’t ask the heroine about her ex, they don’t visibly pursue interest in the ex. They want to know about her. Meanwhile, the father doesn’t mention or worry about the police. His focus is on his kids, and on finding out what’s going on over at their mother’s house.

THE CLIFFHANGER

Finally, we’re going to bring both of these themes into play again, as we have a scene involving the forensics folks. They’ve found a picture of both kids and the mother in the dead man’s pocket, and the picture is signed on the back, “Love, Lisa” (the heroine’s name). The signature matches the one on the note that was in his pocket. It’s not proof she was involved with him, but it certainly doesn’t look good for her. They call the police out of the interrogation room and let them know what they’ve found. The police go back into the room and ask her why the dead man had a picture of her and her kids in his pocket, signed by her, and she panics and starts crying, and can’t—or won’t—answer the question.

And that’s where you leave that scene. The reader is forced to consider the possibility that the heroine might have been lying, that she might know the dead man, that she might even have killed him. The reader could also suspect the husband, who could have had possession of notes and pictures signed the way these have been. But if the scene closes with the heroine in deep trouble, panicked, and not talking, the reader will have a strong incentive to keep reading to find out what happens next.

• Use elements of both theme and subtheme in your cliffhanger (the mother and her connection to the dead man, and HIS possible connection to her and her kids)

• Leave either the most important character of the theme OR the subtheme in desperate straits (in this case, the main character of the theme is in trouble…you can save trouble for the ex in a later part of the story).

• Pick up the next scene with a character from one of your subthemes, and gradually work your way back to the character who was dangling over the cliff.
By carefully using blended scenes, intercuts, and cliffhangers, you can weave your theme and subthemes together in ways so exciting and compelling your reader will stay up late, miss his stop, be late for work. Cruel, yes, but it’s the sort of cruelty readers will thank you for.

Next time, in BRING YOUR NOVEL TO LIFE, Part VII, Planning A Heart-Stopping Story, you’ll learn how to outline the bones of your story using theme and subthemes to keep things moving.
Full-time novelist Holly Lisle has published more than thirty novels with major publishers. Article published At: www.Isnare.com

cheers, Lauren

Love changes everything. tm

Masquerade by Lauren Delaney now available as an ebook at Amazon http://www.amazon.com/dp/B004V1282C

- and in multi-formats at Smashwords http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/51162

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Dig Deeper With Your Novel’s Subthemes

Dig Deeper With Your Novel’s Subthemes

June 14, 2011

Here is part V of the terrific 8-Part BRING YOUR NOVEL TO LIFE Series by Holly Lisle.
Hope you are enjoying it as much as I am.

Lauren

Love changes everything. tm

Masquerade by Lauren Delaney now available as an ebook at Amazon http://www.amazon.com/dp/B004V1282C

- and in multi-formats at Smashwords http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/51162

Dig Deeper With Your Novel’s Subthemes
by Holly Lisle

By now, you have a solid grasp of the importance of having a theme for your story, of keeping it personal and hidden (to avoid writing the dreaded Message Book), and of hanging on to the courage of your convictions in writing it the way you need to, knowing that you cannot ever please everyone, nor should you try.
That’s a good, solid foundation for writing a book that people will read, and then re-read, and then recommend to friends, and finally buy as presents for people they really like. Which is, after all, the writer’s ultimate goal—to write a story readers love so much they’ll share it with other people who will love it, too.
But you can still go deeper, and make the work richer and more compelling, by layering in subthemes.

[Brakes screech, and someone mutters, "Wait a minute. You finally sold me on themes. But SUBthemes? C'mon, already."]

Subthemes are one of the best friends novelists have. (They’re far less useful for folks who write short stories, simply because subthemes add to the length and complexity of the story.)

Subthemes do three massively useful things for the writer crafting a novel—things a single theme alone cannot do.

1) They force the world of the story into three dimensions. If the book is focused on one theme—no matter how fascinating and wonderful that theme—and all the characters are focused on that one issue, and all the action revolves around that one issue, then, no matter how skilled the writer may be, the book will feel thin. Step beyond the borders of the main action, and no character has anything to do, or say, or think, or any reason to exist. Their lives are bordered by the main theme. By adding subthemes, you fill out your characters’ lives with needs and events that are important to them outside of and separate from the main story’s focus.

2) Subthemes add length and complexity. (I mentioned this above in the negative sense, but that which is the bane of the short story writer is in this case the boon of the novelist.) I receive the following question at least once a week from beginning and intermediate writers—”How do I make my story longer without padding it (and without trying to figure out more plot, because I’m out of ideas)?”

Subthemes by their very nature give you something extra to work into your plot—the unexpected pregnancy of the heroine adding complications while she is running for her life; the villain who in the midst of working mayhem discovers the mother he truly loves is dying; the harassment of the main character by the practical joker at work whose stupid jokes later become mixed up in the life or death issues already besieging the hero.

3) Subthemes allow you an extra opportunity to…um, for lack of a better word…vent. And get something good out of the bad things that have happened in your life. This is admittedly a strange side benefit, but just about every writer I know has SOME issue that repeatedly makes its way into his (or her) novels. The trick, always, is to keep YOUR issue out of the book, and make the issue really and truly related to the character, with different events and a different resolution.

So where do you find your subthemes?

1) Pick a subtheme that is distantly related to the issue driving your novel. If your theme is “Why do bad things happen to good people?”, and your story is about a father who comes to terms with the lingering death of his oldest kid after the boy contracts some terrible disease, a related theme would be how the father finds ways to bring happiness to the kid’s life (and his own) for whatever time they have left. Or how the kid makes a friend in the middle of his personal tragedy, or learns to do something he’s always wanted to do. Or how the father makes one thing his son has always wanted come true for him.(Man, this would be a grim book.)

2) Pick an unrelated issue, and give it, in disguised form, to primary or secondary characters. Using the example above, an unrelated issue that could become a theme would be how the father hangs on to a job when he’s both the sole provider (say the kid’s mother died, or just left) and his kid’s sole source of care and support; or how the kid sets out to win the science fair before he dies, and wins the respect of a teacher he previously hated.

3) Pick some train wreck in your personal life, THOROUGHLY disguise it, give it to people totally unlike the people who were involved in YOUR train wreck, change names, locales, and events… And then work though it the way you should have, or wish you could have, the first time. Using this method, the father could be going through your horrible divorce, but HE could find the good ending you didn’t get. Or he could give up his fantastic career as a professional poker player to be with his son, and could find something good from that loss, rather than the constant regret you have from a similar situation.

In every case, your priorities in using subthemes are to:

* give yourself more story than what you’d get if you only focused on your theme,
* give your reader something extra, and different, to take away from the book.

You and your story will benefit in more ways than you can imagine.
In BRING YOUR NOVEL TO LIFE, Part VI, Interweaving Your Novel’s Themes And Subthemes, you’ll learn three of my favorite techniques for balancing themes and subthemes while writing your novel.

Published At: www.Isnare.com

cheers, Lauren

Love changes everything. tm

Masquerade by Lauren Delaney now available as an ebook at Amazon http://www.amazon.com/dp/B004V1282C

- and in multi-formats at Smashwords http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/51162

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25 Funniest Analogies

June 9, 2011

25 Funniest Analogies

This list of funny analogies came in an e-mail forwarded from a co-worker, who received it from their sister – so my apologies if you have recently read it too.

The e-mail says the analogies were taken from actual high school essays and collected by English teachers across the country for their own amusement.

I’m not sure if every one of the following analogies was actually written by a high school student as the note said, but they made me smile and I hope that they will make you smile too.

Lauren

Love changes everything. tm

Masquerade by Lauren Delaney now available as an ebook at Amazon http://www.amazon.com/dp/B004V1282C

- and in multi-formats at Smashwords http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/51162

The 25 Funniest Analogies

1. Her face was a perfect oval, like a circle that had its two sides gently compressed by a ThighMaster.

2. His thoughts tumbled in his head, making and breaking alliances like underpants in a dryer without Cling Free.

3. He spoke with the wisdom that can only come from experience, like a guy who went blind because he looked at a solar eclipse without one of those boxes with a pinhole in it and now goes around the country speaking at high schools about the dangers of looking at a solar eclipse without one of those boxes with a pinhole in it.

4. She grew on him like she was a colony of E. Coli, and he was room-temperature Canadian beef.

5. She had a deep, throaty, genuine laugh, like that sound a dog makes just before it throws up.

6. Her vocabulary was as bad as, like, whatever.

7. He was as tall as a six-foot, three-inch tree.

8. The revelation that his marriage of 30 years had disintegrated because of his wife’s infidelity came as a rude shock, like a surcharge at a formerly surcharge-free ATM machine.

9. The little boat gently drifted across the pond exactly the way a bowling ball wouldn’t.

10. McBride fell 12 stories, hitting the pavement like a Hefty bag filled with vegetable soup.

11. From the attic came an unearthly howl. The whole scene had an eerie, surreal quality, like when you’re on vacation in another city and Jeopardy comes on at 7:00 p.m. instead of 7:30.

12. Her hair glistened in the rain like a nose hair after a sneeze.

13. The hailstones leaped from the pavement, just like maggots when you fry them in hot grease.

14. Long separated by cruel fate, the star-crossed lovers raced across the grassy field toward each other like two freight trains, one having left Cleveland at 6:36 p.m. traveling at 55 mph, the other from Topeka at 4:19 p.m. at a speed of 35 mph.

15. They lived in a typical suburban neighborhood with picket fences that resembled Nancy Kerrigan’s teeth.

16. John and Mary had never met. They were like two hummingbirds who had also never met.

17. He fell for her like his heart was a mob informant, and she was the East River.

18. Even in his last years, Granddad had a mind like a steel trap, only one that had been left out so long it had rusted shut.

19. Shots rang out, as shots are wont to do.

20. The plan was simple, like my brother-in-law Phil. But unlike Phil, this plan just might work.

21. The young fighter had a hungry look, the kind you get from not eating for a while.

22. He was as lame as a duck. Not the metaphorical lame duck, either, but a real duck that was actually lame, maybe from stepping on a land mine or something.

23. The ballerina rose gracefully en Pointe and extended one slender leg behind her, like a dog at a fire hydrant.

24. It was an American tradition, like fathers chasing kids around with power tools.

25. He was deeply in love. When she spoke, he thought he heard bells, as if she were a garbage truck backing up.

Some of these teens were born to be writers.
Lauren :-)

Love changes everything. tm

Masquerade by Lauren Delaney now available as an ebook at Amazon http://www.amazon.com/dp/B004V1282C

- and in multi-formats at Smashwords http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/51162

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Playing Chicken With Your Story

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Funny Analogies

Playing Chicken With Your Story

May 25, 2011

Welcome to part IV of the 8-Part BRING YOUR NOVEL TO LIFE Series. Wonderful food for thought here. Thanks Holly!

Lauren

Love changes everything. tm

Masquerade by Lauren Delaney now available as an ebook at Amazon http://www.amazon.com/dp/B004V1282C

- and in multi-formats at Smashwords http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/51162

Playing Chicken With Your Story
by Holly Lisle

And now we come to the hard bit. You’ve got your theme, and you’ve figured out how to bury it so that it’s there for you, and SOMETHING meaningful is there for your reader. You’ve let go of the temptation to write a message book—always difficult—and have embraced telling your story for the sake of the story.

So you start to write. And you find yourself pulling back every time you get close to putting something on the page that might be controversial, that might offend someone, that might tick off a reader.

You’re trying to write for everyone, and in doing this, you’re going to end up writing for no one. You’re killing the passion you feel for the story, the life it might have, the resonance you could bring to it, out of your fear. You are systematically ripping out the soul of your book.

Here are three things I’ve learned and that you’ll need to make a part of your writing if you’re going to keep your story alive.

1) You cannot write for everyone, and you must not try to.

It is impossible to have the whole world as your audience, and it is impossible to have everyone love you. In fact, on about a one-to-one ratio, the more people you have who passionately love your work, the more people there will be who passionately hate it. Some of these readers—on both ends of the spectrum—will then go on to transfer their feelings about your work to you.

This is part of the gig.

You can, therefore, either strive to write the books that will stir the passions of readers, and give some of them stories that will move them and change them and bring wonder and joy and hope to their lives…or you can gut your work of all feeling, all life, all rage and fury and glory, in the hopes that the pitiful rag you’re left with will gain the admiration of the PC people, who live to have their feelings hurt.

Of the two, I’d rather have my audience among the people who are not offended by strong opinions and who are not afraid to have their own. So I’ll shoot for writing books people can love, accepting that this means I’ll have plenty of detractors, too.

2) If you do not have an opinion, you do not have a story.

Here’s one for you. “All men are potential rapists.” Have you ever heard anyone say that? Here’s a secret. Every person who has ever said that is an idiot. A small percentage of men, and a small percentage of women, are potential rapists, and a smaller percentage of each are actual rapists, and the rest are people who have morals and ethics and who would not, under any circumstances, rape anyone.

That’s an opinion, and you could write a good, powerful story by burying that opinion as a theme or a subtheme in your novel. It will give you heroes and villains, forward momentum, great conflict, struggles to prove innocence or guilt, moments of defeat and moments of triumph. It will give you something to care about, a reason to keep writing, and a reason for your reader to keep reading. The outcome will matter, because one side is right, and one side is wrong.

If you do not have an opinion, though, you do not have a story. The ‘no opinion’ stance means your hero will be no better (and no worse) than your villain—in fact, you’ll have to slide to the weaker position of having a protagonist and an antagonist, and even then, neither you nor your reader can really like one better than the other. Nobody is good, nobody is evil, everyone is just misunderstood.

‘No opinion’ means that it doesn’t matter whether someone wins in your story, or someone loses, because neither option is right, and neither option is wrong. You’re stuck with the ultimately boring, helpless stance of having Fate decree one outcome over another, and having the reader not really care anyway. If you do not have an opinion that can carry the story forward, all you’ll have is a long, tedious vignette in which nothing that matters happens, simply because nothing matters.

3) Every once in a while, people need to be offended.

Yes. I said it. Being offended can be good for the mind and the soul. It forces you to think. People who are easily offended are people who do not want to think, who do not have the courage of their convictions, who want to be fed pablum and sheltered from the hot spices of real life and real opinion and outcomes that matter. ‘Don’t offend me’ is the whine of the coward who does not want to have to judge issues on their merits (what, you want me to pick sides? Why can’t everybody be right?) and does not want anyone else to, either.

Well, everybody can’t be right. Some people, some issues, some positions, are just flat-out wrong. Pretending otherwise does not change that truth.

This is life. Issues have real merits. Thought is necessary for survival. If you fight your way through to opinions that you have earned by judging issues on their merits, you will be able to write stories with real kick. And even though you’re going to be burying those opinions in metaphor, the strength of your passion and the richness of your story’s stakes will be able to wake up a few sleepers who have been following along through life, not challenging themselves, because no one ever challenged them first.

Dare to have the courage of your convictions. Dare to think hard, to earn your opinions, and then to write them into your work. Dare to write stories worth telling. Dare to pick sides, dare to write your truth. Dare to be meaningful.

The book you save will be your own.

In BRING YOUR NOVEL TO LIFE, Part V, Dig Deeper With Your Novel’s Subthemes, you’ll find out three ways to bring in more of your passions and fears, and use them to make your story richer, and add layers of surprise and meaning.

Published At: www.Isnare.com

Cheers, Lauren

Love changes everything. tm

Masquerade by Lauren Delaney now available as an ebook at Amazon http://www.amazon.com/dp/B004V1282C

- and in multi-formats at Smashwords http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/51162

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Character Description: Working With Your Reader

May 12, 2011

Character Description: Working With Your Reader

I hope the spring weather is fine where you are today!

I will continue soon with Holly Lisle’s fine series of articles on how to ‘Bring Your Novel to Life’ but I thought that today you might enjoy this fun article by Susan J. Letham that provides a different take on characterization.

It can also be found on Jennifer Stewart’s Write101 site.

Cheers, Lauren

Love changes everything. tm

Masquerade by Lauren Delaney now available as an ebook at Amazon http://www.amazon.com/dp/B004V1282C

- and in multi-formats at Smashwords http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/51162

Character Description: Working With Your Reader

by Susan J. Letham

One hallmark of great writing is that it creates an intimate relationship between writer and reader. Your aim isn’t just to tell the reader a story, but to share it with her, draw her in, allow her to use her own imagination as well as yours.
By helping your reader co-create her experience you hook her and keep her turning pages. So, how do you go about getting your reader to work with you this way?
You do it by mapping main points and leaving space for the reader to fill in the blanks, by drawing the outline and handing your reader a box of crayons. The easiest way to start putting this into practice is in connection with characterization.

Co-creation and Characterization

Stories are first and foremost about people. More precisely, stories deal with people who interact in certain ways with other people and situations.

Let’s look to life to see what this means for your writing. Maybe you have a new writer in your circle, or your kid has a new teacher, or your partner a new boss.

Once you’ve got past the names, what do you want to know about these people?
You probably want to know what they are like–not just what they look like, but the kind of people they are. You want orientation so you know what to expect. You want to be able to predict their actions, so you can tailor your responses to fit.

That’s the way your reader feels when she first walks into your story. She’s looking for orientation so she can understand the events about to unfold. She wants to know what the characters are like so she can predict how they’ll react in the story situations before you affirm her guesses by telling her. By giving your reader the information she wants, you make it easy for her to relax and enjoy the ride.
What does your reader need to know if she’s to co-create your characters? Let’s look and see how you can draw that outline for your reader to color in.

Focus on Qualities

Writers often introduce story characters through physical description. That’s helpful if appearance is a central theme but, as in real life, looks seldom mean much in connection with personality. An approach that describes traits is more helpful. Instead of first describing what your character looks like, answer the “What’s she like?” or the “What kind of person is she?” question instead.

The best way to learn this strategy is to try it out. Here are some examples to start you off. Choose a description that appeals to you and make notes about the character that comes to mind:

S/he’s the kind of person who’d…:
- keep piranhas.
- take walks in a graveyard.
- read Rilke.
- marry a senator.
- wear a pocket protector.
- buy photo wallpaper.
- picket “Victoria’s Secret.”
- love to be in “Big Brother.”
- make Machiavelli quake.

Note that the statements illustrate a ‘type’ and don’t mean that the character actually does the things mentioned, only that she might.

Describe the character’s appearance, what she does for a living, her home, her idea of a good night out. Write a scene that illustrates how your character lives the characteristic. How does a woman who’d make Machiavelli quake act in the office? What kind of office? What kind of character would she need as a lover, partner, business associate, adversary, friend? How did you do? Did you see images in your mind? I’d be extremely surprised if you didn’t see vivid images in response to the activity. The point is that your reader, too, will start to color in the outline you give her. Your reader will work with you and save you the trouble of telling her absolutely everything.

Once you’ve established that “Sarah is the kind of woman who’d buy photo wallpaper,” your reader won’t bat an eyelid when Sarah also buys a baby pink stretch mini-skirt to wear to the church dance.

A good way to practice this skill is to characterize your family and friends. If you had to describe the personalities of people you know well to a stranger, how would you make them sound intriguing by using vivid images?

Try it out:

- My partner is the kind of person who’d…
- My daughter is the kind of person who’d…
- My son is the kind of person who’d…
- My boss is the kind of person who’d…
- My teacher is the kind of person who’d…
- My neighbor is the kind of person who’d…

Character Creation Technique

Work this approach into your stories. Hook your readers by introducing characteristics before you mention outward appearance. Readers will want to read on and learn what you mean by your enigmatic character statement.

Compare these examples:

“Think we got ourselves a cult or something?”
A cult? I looked at Bruce. He must be kidding, I thought, but the look on his face didn’t seem to say so. He stood there, all five-eight and 200-pounds of him, running a hand over his blond crewcut, clearly waiting for me to give him an answer.

Does it matter what Bruce looks like at this point? Does it add to our image and understanding of the kind of person he is? Does it tell us about the relationship between the POV character and Bruce?

“Think we got ourselves a cult or something?”
A cult? I gave Bruce a ‘don’t be stupid’ glare. The only man I knew who openly read supermarket tabloids, he’d been spouting aliens and government conspiracies since the day I took office. (Kate Gerard)

By telling us about Bruce’s reading habits and the effects they have, the author of this second example paints a clear picture of his character and attitude. The example shows how the characters relate to each other.

Conclusion

Take some of your writing and practice this technique by rewriting the character introductions. Exactly how you word things will depend on the POV you’re using. If you’re using third person, you can have the narrator make the statement.If you’re using a limited POV, you can put the statement into the limited character’s thoughts. You can use dialogue to have a character make the statement out loud. Experiment until you feel you have something that works in each case.Your readers will love it!

© 2002, Susan J. Letham
Susan J. Letham is a British writer, multimedia author, andCreative Writing lecturer. Visit Inspired2Write and sign upfor quality writing classes and competent 1-on-1 coaching.
This article can be found at the Jennifer Stewart Write101.com site. http://www.write101.com/index.html

Cheers, Lauren

Love changes everything. tm

Masquerade by Lauren Delaney now available as an ebook at Amazon http://www.amazon.com/dp/B004V1282C

- and in multi-formats at Smashwords http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/51162

Category:

Burying Your Novel’s Message

May 3, 2011

Here is part III of the 8-Part BRING YOUR NOVEL TO LIFE Series by Holly Lisle – Burying Your Novel’s Message.

Cheers, Lauren

Love changes everything. tm

Masquerade by Lauren Delaney now available as an ebook at Amazon http://www.amazon.com/dp/B004V1282C

- and in multi-formats at Smashwords http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/51162
Burying Your Novel’s Message
by Holly Lisle

In the first two articles, we’ve explored how essential it is to have a theme to give your novel direction, and how to find those themes that will resonate with you.
You’d think that once you have a theme, you could just sit down and write your book about that, and you’d bring powerful emotions and passionate storytelling and compelling, page-turning action to your tale—but it just ain’t so.

If you just write your theme, what you’ll have is a harangue. A message book. Something that will have the readers who agree with your precise point of view nodding along—whether it be “Global warming is going to destroy the planet” or “Global warming is a pile of cow-flops”—and readers who hold any other point of view bouncing your book of the nearest wall and never buying anything else by you, ever.

Bad.

So now you bury your theme. You write about something utterly unlike the theme you fought so hard to come up with in the first place.
One of you just went, “Waaaaaait a minute! If I write about something besides my theme, how are people going to get my message? How are they going to know that global warming is evil/ irrelevant/ actually the dawning of a new ice age? How will I convince them that I’m right?”

They won’t know, and you won’t convince them. It’s as simple as that.

The theme is there for YOU. Your job as a novelist is to tell a story that entertains your reader, that makes him think, that haunts him long after he finishes the last page—maybe even that STILL haunts him long after he’s read the whole thing for the fourth or tenth or twentieth time. I get letters and emails from readers who have done that, and it’s great. They frequently tell me what they got out of the book, too, what hidden meanings they found, what they took away from the story.

Funny thing is, they never find what I put in there. That’s okay. They found something that mattered to THEM, that changed the world for THEM. So I did my job.

If you want to send a message, buy an ad.

If you want to create resonance, you work your theme in. If you want to have people love your book and treasure it for what it meant to them, you bury that theme so deeply only you will ever know what it was.

Here’s how.
1) Figure out the key elements of your theme.
I wrote one book the theme of which was “if the Democrats and Republicans don’t recognize each other isn’t the enemy and start working together toward a common cause, real enemies are going to destroy the country while those morons are bickering over pork and entitlements.”
The key elements of that theme were:
* People who had more in common than they knew fighting over trivialities* Enemies disguised as friends bearing gifts

2) Plan your hiding place.
That book was not set in this time, in the US, or even in this world. It was a high fantasy novel set in another world, on an island nation about the size of England and about the location of Australia with the climate of Alaska through the Pacific Northwest of Canada and the US. The cultures were Iron Age plus highly developed magic, with levels of sophistication ranging from 18th-Century France to the nomadic hunter-gatherer-herdsmen of the Mongol Horde.

So figure out YOUR disguise. Your most meaningful themes are always going to be drawn from the here and now, from the events in your life that trouble you and frighten you and elate you—but those themes go into Westerns and SF and fantasy and mysteries and romances and hard-boiled detective tales and mainstream novels set in every possible time and place.

3) Create your metaphors.
In that novel, the Democrats became one nation, the Republicans the other. I made a point of locating the good and the bad in both parties, and giving the two nations those good and bad characteristics. I created the real villains from current events, too, (though not from obvious current events), and worked out a complex metaphor for them, too, creating their culture from elements of a handful of different cultures. My two protagonists were from warring nations, magic was the physics of the world, and the villain was disguised as a good guy for the first half of the novel.

4) Never even hint at what you’re talking about underneath it all.
I didn’t then write a story about how the politics of the warring nations and the outside world clashed. I didn’t give a little nudge, nudge, wink, wink and call my nations Demos and Republis. I spent time developing deep cultures built not around my particular axe to grind, but around the needs of the story. And then I built three characters, one from each of the three cultures.

And the story I wrote was a love story set against the backdrop of war and peace.

I wrote about the characters, I didn’t confine them to my metaphors, I didn’t try to push any points or convince anyone of anything. I let my folks become who they were, good points and bad, and I told the story of their lives in that world, that place, and that time—and because I knew what underlay it, it meant a lot to me. And because SOMETHING underlay it, it meant a lot to a whole lot of readers.

With the possible exception of its sequel, it was the best book I’ve ever written.

That story remains a favorite for my readers, too—even though what they take from it is sometimes the exact opposite of what I put into it. They have found their own meaning in it, have felt the resonance of it being about something bigger than the story on the surface, and have taken it to heart.
And if you’re a novelist, that is what you want them to do. (If you’re still hung up on requiring that they get YOUR meaning from your book, you’re in the wrong line of work.)

In BRING YOUR NOVEL TO LIFE, Part IV, Playing Chicken With Your Story, you’ll learn how to take the personal risks in writing that will keep your readers glued to their seats turning pages.

Published At: www.Isnare.com

Cheers, Lauren

Love changes everything. tm

Masquerade by Lauren Delaney now available as an ebook at Amazon http://www.amazon.com/dp/B004V1282C

- and in multi-formats at Smashwords http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/51162

Category:

What European City Do You Belong In?

What European City Do You Belong In?

Here’s a quiz for a rainy day and just for fun.

You Belong in London

You belong in London, but you belong in many cities… Hong Kong, San Francisco, Sidney. You fit in almost anywhere.

And London is diverse and international enough to satisfy many of your tastes. From curry to Shakespeare, London (almost) has it all!

What European City Do You Belong In?

I could live in London. I think there are probably a lot of European cities that I could live in. Or at least visit for an extended period of time. Dublin, anyone?

Category:

How To Find Your Novel’s Pulse

April 27, 2011

How To Find Your Novel’s Pulse

Here is part 2 of the 8-part BRING YOUR NOVEL TO LIFE Series by Holly Lisle. Thanks Holly!
Enjoy!

Cheers, Lauren

Love changes everything. tm

Masquerade by Lauren Delaney now available as an ebook at Amazon http://www.amazon.com/dp/B004V1282C

– and in multi-formats at Smashwords http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/51162

How To Find Your Novel’s Pulse
by Holly Lisle

The best novels you’ve ever read—the ones that stuck in your mind and kept you going back to re-read them, that made you think, that made you feel, maybe that scared your socks off—were not about what they were about.

Sound cryptic? It is, sort of. Novels that change the way you look at the world were written by novelists who had things going on underneath that they were working through on paper. Angry divorces, fights at work, health problems, fears for their kids, rage at politics and injustice, fear of war, loss of loved ones—the whole gamut of human trials and tribulations.

Some of these novelists knew they were burying their struggles in their books, some didn’t. But while they were writing about running into elves in the deep woods or opening a door to find themselves looking down the barrel of a gun, they were telling two stories. The one you read, and the one they lived. While you were reading, you felt the second, hidden story. That’s why you keep going back to the book, and why you can’t get it out of your head. Your gut knows there’s more in that book than meets the eye.

Do you want to write books that keep readers reading, that keep them thinking, that let them look at the world through different eyes? Do you want to find the stories beneath the stories in your own work, and make sure you put them in there on purpose, instead of accidentally hitting one just right, and never again knowing how you got there?

This is doable. It’s not comfortable—few things worth doing ever are. But it is a repeatable process. And here’s where you start. Read each step below, and write down your answers.

STEP ONE:

Plato had it right when he said, “Know thyself.” You don’t get to have a starry-eyed vision of yourself as this nearly-perfect person if you’re going to write meaningful books. You have to dig deep.

* You have to figure out what YOU did wrong in every relationship that went south on you. (Innocent victimhood is worthless as a novel-writing perspective. You end up with passive main characters who do nothing, and books that bore readers to death. So accept the truth that you have been and done wrong in your life, and buy your characters some credibility.)

* You have to admit to moments when you lied, and not make excuses about why you did it.

* You have to recall the people you hurt.

* And admit the things you did that you should not have done.

* And face the things you did not do that you should have.

This is a no-excuses zone. You did what you did, you meant to do it, consequences resulted and those were your fault.

Is this process all negative? No. But you’ll already remember all your greatest moments; saving a life, sacrificing to help someone else, opening doors for old ladies, teaching Seeing Eye dogs for the blind. Those are great. And your readers will believe your characters do those things when, and only when, you have first proved that your characters are human. Humans are not perfect. We all know this about each other, even if we don’t like to admit it about ourselves. But we know a real character when we read one, and this is where you find real characters.

STEP TWO:

You’ve admitted who you are. Now discover who you need to be, what you need to have, and what you dread. Again, skip the Miss America “I want world peace and free healthcare and kittens and puppies for all the children in the world” routine. What do YOU want…for YOU? What do you NEED? Do you need to be loved and admired? Do you need to be rich, powerful, famous? Do you need to be safe? What drives you? What eats at you at night? What haunts your nightmares? When you look in the mirror and see something wrong, what is the first thing you fear? When you hear a bump in the attic, a scrap at the front door, what do you dread?

STEP THREE:

Who you are and what you need and fear are part of why you write. But writing fiction itself is a strange process that involves baring bits of you that you may not even realize you’re baring to complete strangers. It involves creating characters who are the best of what you have in you, and it involves, if you’re doing it right, creating characters who are the worst of what you have in you.

You are, while you’re writing, your characters. You have to believe in them for readers to believe in them, and you have to find it in yourself to make them do evil as well as good—to do the things you would do IF YOU WERE THEM—knowing that if you make your characters real enough, you’ll hit nerves, you’ll hear from the readers you’ve shocked or scared as well as from the ones you’ve moved to joy and tears. So, why do you want to do that? What’s in it for you?

When you’ve answered these questions, if you’ve answered them honestly, you have your themes. The things you had the hardest time admitting to, the hardest time writing down, the hardest time facing—those will be your best themes. Because if you can take characters built from your deepest flaws and your worst fears and bring them to transcendence, then, my friend, you will have written a book with a pulse—and a story that matters.

In BRING YOUR NOVEL TO LIFE Part III: Burying Your Novel’s Message, you’ll learn how to use the themes you’ve discovered without being preachy or obvious, and without writing a Message Book.

Published At: www.Isnare.com

Cheers, Lauren

Love changes everything. tm

Masquerade by Lauren Delaney now available as an ebook at Amazon http://www.amazon.com/dp/B004V1282C

– and in multi-formats at Smashwords http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/51162

Category: