About ten years ago, I picked up a copy of Dr. Phil’s book, Self Matters (stop laughing…I was going on a long flight and bought it from the minuscule candy-slash-souvenir-slash-book store). This book asks you to go through three exercises. One of these is to identify the five pivotal moments in your life. The point of this exercise is to look at the times in your life where you were at a crossroads and made a decision that changed the path of your life forever.

While I’m sure you’re dying to hear about the time I _______, the point of this post is not to discuss my pivotal moments. Besides, I burned all the photos so you’ll never prove a thing! The point, my curious readers, is to discuss your characters’ pivotal moments. Why? Because, when you write a novel, your main character should have one during the climax. Note that this is not to be confused with their inciting moment which is the part that thrusts them into the conflict in the first place. Let’s look at an example:

While driving home from a party, Bill crashes his car and kills his best friend Ted (inciting moment). Bill turns to alcohol to drown his guilt and pain (conflict), but it’s not until he almost dies in a second car accident that Bob decides he must give up alcohol for good (pivotal moment).

As you can see, these moments are similar but they serve two different purposes. One starts the conflict of the novel and the other ends it.

So, what is your character’s pivotal moment?

If you were to search the Internet for rules regarding the use of dialogue tags, you’d find a broad spectrum of opinions. Some people will tell you that you should NEVER use anything other than said. Some will say that you can use the occasional replied, asked, and inquired. And some will even say that you can go hog wild on the quipped, growled, and hissed.

Note: If you ever use hissed for dialogue that isn’t soaking in “s” words, I’m calling your mother.

I fall a bit in the middle I suppose. My first aim is to use no dialogue tags if I can help it. If that is not possible, I use said for a regular sentence or possibly asked/replied when a question is involved. As much as I love the sound of tags like growled, I think there are two main issues with these:

1) Following the rules of show don’t tell, it is better to show a character’s emotion, rather than state it.

2) Any dialogue tag (or description for that matter) that implies a tone or feeling and comes AFTER the dialogue, forces the reader to rethink the sentence.

To illustrate, let’s look at three examples.

a) “I said I would be there later,” growled Robert.

b) Robert growled. “I said I would be there later.”

c) Robert’s eyes narrowed to two tiny slits. “I said I would be there later.'”

In the case of example a, we don’t know that Robert is angry until after we finish the sentence so we almost have to re-read it once we see the growled. This is improved in b, except we still have the problem of telling his anger rather than showing it. In c, we have shown his anger in a descriptive tag and then given the dialogue afterwards. In this case, the reader has a picture of an angry Robert in his or her head BEFORE hearing his words.

In an effort to improve my manuscript (and to give me something to do while it is out with agents) I decided to show it to a few freelancers.  In retrospect, I should have done this BEFORE I queried, but I honestly didn’t even know these people existed until a few weeks ago. Sigh. Anywho…I got one of these freelancer’s reviews back recently. Her letter outlined a list of things she liked as well as a list of questions she felt I left unanswered. At first, I found the list of questions surprising. I mean, I knew the answers to all of them! Ah hem… yeah, that was the problem. When you write a novel, you know the plot and the characters SO well, you don’t notice when you’ve left a hole. Your crit partners might catch some of these things, but the truth is that everyone reads differently. For example, I am a crit partner who is obsessed with detail. While I may not notice whether or not your first plot point comes at the right moment, I will notice if someone’s scarf was purple in the second chapter but green in the fifth. So if you have a problem with keeping your scarf colours straight, give me a call!

Back to my holes. I decided I needed to start my plot from scratch so I could see if there really were holes in it. So this is what I did:

1) My book has several plots and sub-plots, but I decided to concentrate on the two main ones. I drew a line for each and then wrote every point from the plot along the line, in the order in which it occurs. While I was doing this, I made sure to keep asking myself why one plot point led to the next.

For example, A finds out that B lied to her->A confronts B->B knows it’s true but denies it because of a promise she made to C->A stops speaking to B->B blames C

In this example, if you leave out the “because of a promise she made to C”, the final plot point is a leap in reasoning. And I thought first year Philosophy was useless…

For the parts where the freelancer said she didn’t understand why something happened, I took extra care to make sure there were no leaps in plot points. By doing so, I found that I had indeed made some. This prompted me to add some missing plot points and to change some others.

2) When I was done each of the plot lines, I read them through again and made sure they made sense. Then I wrote each point on a little yellow sticky. Using the above example, this means one sticky for “A finds out that B lied to her”, one for “A confronts B” and so on.

Note: These stickies are basically like the plot cards I use to plan my novel. I tried to use my original plot cards for this exercise, but the book has changed so much since I first planned it that they were basically useless.

3) I got a HUGE piece of paper and drew 16 squares on it (1 for each chapter). Without looking at my book, I put the yellow stickies in the blocks they belonged.

4) I scanned my book to see what was missing. There were a few points from subplots that affected the major plots so I added them.

So what did I find? First of all, I found that I need to add/change a few plot points that I discovered in step 1. Second, I discovered that I have an empty square (which means I have an entire chapter where NOTHING MAJOR HAPPENS…Yikes!)

Up next…another round of revision.

I’ve seen this advice in many places: write what you know. This doesn’t mean we should all go out and pen memoirs about our lives, because frankly, most of us are as dull as the notches on Betty White’s bedpost. What it means is that we should use our personal experience to frame our stories.

But here’s the problem: what if your most exciting personal experience was the time your best friend almost sat next to Steven Tyler on a plane? Does this mean you should give up writing and concentrate on macrame instead?

In my opinion, no. Of course, I’m the one whose best friend almost sat next to Steven Tyler on a plane… Back to you. If you think you have no interesting personal experiences, maybe you need to dig a little deeper. For example:

1) Where are you from? What is the most unique thing about this place?
2) What do you do best? What is your greatest talent/skill/interest?
3) What is the most interesting thing about your family?
4) What is the most tragic thing about your family?
5) If you met someone new, what is the first thing you would tell them about yourself? What is the last?

One–if not all–of your answers is interesting. The question now is: do you have the guts to write about it, because maybe what you are thinking is not that you don’t have any interesting personal experiences; it’s that you don’t have any interesting personal experiences that YOU WANT TO SHARE. Is this wrong? Of course not. Is it a crutch? Only you can decide.

Every main character needs to have both outer and inner conflicts. Outer conflicts are the people, places or things that the main character struggles with, while inner conflicts are the personality traits that the main character struggles with. For example, a main character might hate the guy who sits in the next cubicle (outer) and he may also hate that he has never been successful enough to work in a real office (inner).

In his Writing the Breakout Novel Workbook, Maass has a three step exercise intended to help create stronger inner conflicts. For the first step, he suggests you define your main character’s goal. For example, in one of the Princess Diaries books, Mia wants to go to the prom with her boyfriend Micheal. This is her inner goal for the novel. The second step is to write down the opposite of the goal. In the case above, this is Mia not going to the prom. The third step is to create a scenario where the main character wants both the goal and the opposite of the goal. Using the same example, this means that we need to see Mia both wanting to go to the prom and not wanting to go. Meg Cabot (the awesome writer of this series) accomplishes this by giving Mia a boyfriend who detests the prom. Mia wants her boyfriend to like her so she ends up both wanting to go and wanting to please her boyfriend (which means, not wanting to go).

I’ve simplified this exercise a little, but the point is that, if you make it a struggle for your main character to achieve their goal, they will have more depth and thus be more interesting.

The first chapter of a novel is supposed to establish the following:

1) Character: who is the story about?

2) Setting: where does it take place?

3) Goal: what does the main character want?

4) Conflict: who or what is going to stop them from getting #3?

5) Stakes: what will they lose if they don’t get #3?

I used to think the order in which these appeared was irrelevant, so when I wrote the first chapter of my latest novel, I started with character, then established the conflict and setting, and then ended with the goal and the stakes. Presto bingo, I thought I was done. But then the feedback starting coming in. One reviewer said she completely missed the stakes. I left them where they were but added more emphasis. Done again. But then some other reviewers told me that my main character wasn’t likeable and I was honestly shocked.  To me, the stakes justified her attitude and thus I couldn’t understand why anyone would think this.

That’s when a brilliant freelance editor pointed out my problem: my stakes were too late. According to her, I should have established character first, setting second, goal and stakes next, and conflict last. Why? I will try to explain by example.

Sarah works at an investment firm in Boston. She walks to work every day. She wakes up one morning and sees that it is pouring rain. She realizes that she forgot her umbrella at work. She has an important meeting that day and can’t show up looking wet.

What is wrong with the scenario? The stakes (important meeting) come too late. In order for the “she forgot her umbrella at work” to make you say “oh crap,” you need to know about the meeting first. Otherwise, the “oh crap” is coming as a flashback after the goal/stakes and thus has less effect. This is less obvious when the two are literally next to each other, but imagine that you have several pages in between. You read pages and pages about the rain and Sarah’s job and you’re just thinking, “Just get a damn umbrella woman!” You may not even finish the chapter because you think Sarah is a twit and the new episode of Glee is on. If you do finish it, by the time you get to the forgotten umbrella, you are probably thinking, “Well, you should have told me that FIRST!” In the reverse, if you knew about the missing umbrella before the rain or the important meeting, you might actually care how Sarah is going to make it to work without getting wet. And that would be your hook.

I love the Thesaurus but it is a dangerous weapon. For example, if you look up alternatives for the verb look, you will get gaze, stare, glance, glare, glimpse, peep, peek, and ogle. While all of these words are reasonable alternatives for look, they don’t mean the same thing. Some refer to a quick look while others refer to a long or continuous look. Some are just an action while others imply a meaning or attitude with the action.

I never really thought about this until I found too many occurrences of the word glance in my novel. As I was searching for alternatives, I noticed that I had occasionally used glanced where I should have used looked, gazed or stared. So I decided to look up the definitions for all of these alternatives in that wonderful thing they call Google and this is what I found:

look – directing your eyes toward something and perceiving it visually
glance – a quick look
glimpse – a brief or incomplete view
peep – look with quiet, caution and secrecy
peek – a secret look
ogle – look at with amorous intentions
gaze – a long fixed look
stare – fixate one’s eyes
glare – an angry stare

As you can see, glance and glimpse are probably interchangeable, as are peek and peep, or gaze and stare, but despite what Microsoft may tell you, you cannot replace look with just any one of these words.

What’s next? Now I need to search for each of these words and make sure I am using the correct choice.

I love Donald Maass. I don’t mean that in a romantic way. I’ve never even met the man. Then again, I also haven’t met Chace Crawford…

Okay, I’m done thinking about Chace. The way I write changed dramatically after I read Donald Maass’s books, The Fire in Fiction and Writing the Breakout Novel. One of the things I loved most about the latter were the specific exercises. I thought it would be fun (as in compared to gauging out eyeballs with bendy straw, not as in compared to looking at Chace Crawford…)

Where was I? Oh yeah. I thought it would be fun to try some of Maass’s exercises on my blog. The first is the “Who are your heroes” question. The idea is that you name one, write out the qualities that make him/her a hero, and then assign some of these qualities to your protagonist. So here we go:

1) Name of hero: Mother of friend I’ll call Mrs. G

2) Qualities that make me look up to her: she will do anything for the people she loves. If someone is in the hospital, she is at their bedside all day and spends the night cooking their family meals. If someone needs a place to stay, she practically sleeps on her own sofa so they will be comfortable. I once threw a party for her daughter and, not only did she take care of the guest list, invitations, chairs, tables, liquor and food, she also brought over her own potted flowers so my walkway would be pretty.

3) Qualities of hers I gave to my protagonist:  When I created Blythe (the protagonist for my current book and its sequel) I wanted her to be the kind of girl who would do anything for her friends, to the point of hurting herself.

How about you? What heroic qualities have you given your protagonist and why?

I’m an “edit as you go” kind of writer. And an “edit later” writer. And a “send out manuscript but keep editing anyway” kind of writer. I can’t stop. It’s like the way some people are when they open a bag of chips. They start with a few, but before they know it, they realize they’ve eaten half the bag and figure they might as well finish it. Except in my case, the bag keeps refilling. Just when I think I’ve perfected every single thing I can, I see a post like this one and realize I have more to do.

One of the most recent “ah-has” in my editing was identifying my overused words. Initally, these words were “just” and “that”. Then a crit partner pointed out that (oops) I used “was” too much so I went through and eliminated 1/3 of those uses as well.

Tip: If you want to know how often you use a word, run a Find & Replace in Word where both the find and replace are the same word. This will give you a count of the number of times you’ve used it.

Back to me, because seriously, isn’t blogging all about me???

After the “was” debacle, I thought I was done. Then I read an article about overusing “smirked” and this made me search for similar words such as smiled, frowned, glared, nodded… Well, holy crap! It was like the characters in my novel just stood around making facial gestures all day. I fixed this by first eliminating the ones that weren’t necessary. Then I made a list of my characters and gave them more interesting quirks. For example, one of my characters didn’t smile–she “flashed her dentures”. Another didn’t frown, she “crinkled her nose”.

After the frowning-smiling-sighing incident, I figured I was REALLY done. That’s when I discovered another reviewer who told me I had too many adverbs (a no-no in writing). I was surprised until I searched for “ly” words and discovered I had 100’s! It was as if every single verb was done slowly, carefully or gently. I think I even found one that said, “She quietly tiptoed up the stairs.” I mean, can you tiptoe ANY other way? No, I think not.

So now, I REALLY REALLY am done. Well, as long as I never look at the Internet again. So how about you? Can you walk away from your manuscript and call it done or do you edit it into the ground?

Let me start by saying that this is not an anti-agent rant. It’s also not an agent suck-up rant, but that’s only because I know those don’t work. If they did, I’d write an entire blog called, “100 Reasons to Love Kristen Nelson.” But then she’d probably get a restraining order against me and, well, my lawyer is sick of dealing with those. Ha ha. I digress.

When I woke up this morning, I found a “Thanks, but this isn’t what I’m looking for right now” rejection in my Inbox. I scrunched up my forehead (see how I did the showing not telling right there?). I didn’t recognize the agent’s name as one I had queried for my latest novel. So, I scrolled down and read the original query. It was from the last book I wrote. The one I queried in August of 2008 (no, that’s not a typo….I mean 2008!)

This made me think: shouldn’t there be a Best Before Date on queries? I realize that agents are really busy and I’m thinking that we can all agree that, if they don’t respond in say 12 weeks, they should just delete the query. That way, we would know not to keep waiting. We would know that it’s time to walk away from our email. We would know that it’s time to get dressed. And maybe shower.

So, what do you think? Would you like an expiration date on your queries or would you rather wait, even if it takes 18 months?