Let me start this post by saying that, most of the time, I’m sharing things as I learn them, which is my roundabout way of saying that I haven’t always taken my own advice. Yet. But enough about cutting cheese from my diet…

I love dialogue. LOVE IT. I wrote the first draft of my most recent novel entirely in dialogue. Yes, I went back later to add some actions and feelings & crap like that (because I now know that is the secret to the breakout novel. Dialogue + actions + feelings & crap like that = winner!) I digress. Already. And I haven’t even had any cheese today. *sigh*

When I first started writing, I thought dialogue should go something like this:

“Do you have a pen?” I asked.

“Yes, I do,” replied Bob.

Sometime after I used book 1 for kindling, a crit partner told me to kill all of my dialogue tags (italics above) and use action instead. So, in book 2, I ended up with something more like this:

I turned to Bob. “Do you have a pen?”

He opened his backpack and removed a blue Bic. “Yes, I do.”

Better? Yes. The problem is that, by book 3, I discovered I was giving TOO MANY actions (see earlier post on Stage Directions). So, in book 4, I tried to use a mix of half tags, half actions, and got something like this:

“Do you have a pen?” I asked.

Bob opened his backpack and removed a blue Bic. “Yes, I do.”

Well, then my fabulous crit partner pointed out a BIG problem. My characters were too flat and robotic. I had the dialogue, I had the actions, but I was missing the F&CLT (feelings & crap like that).  So now, I am revising books 3 & 4 so the dialogue looks more like this:

“Do you have a pen?” My voice was apologetic. It’s not that I didn’t know I needed a pen before class. Of course I knew. Why else would I be begging for a Bic, five seconds before our History quiz was about to start.

Bob handed me one of the seventeen pens from his ink-stained pocket. His face said, “I’m never going to see this again, am I?”

I wrapped my fingers around the plastic shaft. My forced smile said it all. No, Bob. That you are not.

I’ll be back when I’m done making these revisions. Should be around, say, 2043?

We’ve all heard the expression, Show, Don’t Tell.  If you’re new to writing or have been living under a rock, this means that you should show a character’s actions and emotions, rather than tell them. For example, this is telling:

Bob looked embarrassed.

And this is showing:

Bob’s cheeks went red as he cast his glance on his dusty shoes.

The problem with this rule is that, sometimes, you have to break it. For example, if you’re writing in first person, you can’t say:

My face went red.

Why? Because unless you have a mirror, you have no idea that your face is red. You can know it feels hot, but you can’t know it’s red.

Having said that, sometimes, you can’t just show a character’s emotions in first person. Why? Because when you’re in someone’s head, you have to think like them and they would not think, “Wow, my face feels hot,” unless they are daft and don’t know what embarrassment feels like. They would think, “Holy crap. This is more embarrassing than the time I walked into the glass window pane of a nice restaurant in Hawaii.” Not that I’ve ever done that. Well, not since the 80′s…

So how do you know when to show and when to tell? Put yourself in the character’s shoes. Pretend whatever is happening just happened to you. For example, you’re out for a nice dinner with a friend. You walk up to the front of a restaurant, which looks like it’s completely open. But as you cross the threshold of the entrance, your face smashes into the glass. Every single person stares at you, except for your best friend who has fallen on the sidewalk in a fit of laughter.

What is the first thing that goes through you mind?

a) Man, my face looks red.
b) Man, my face feels hot.
c) How quickly can I get to the airport?

For me, it was C. Or, it would have been if I had ever walked into the window pane of a restaurant in Hawaii. Which I haven’t. Recently.

I like to plan. I’m a planner. When I finally got the 8-foot cork board for my writing room, I decided I would do a scene outline. To do this, I wrote a snippet of every scene in my book, with the date and time listed on the top. For example:

May 19, 3:00 pm
Bob meets Doug at store.
Discovers Doug has lost his dog.

I pinned chapters numbers horizontally across the board then put each scene in the chapter where it occurs. Good. But not good enough. I decided I would do a calendar as well. In the past, I’ve used a separate Word document to organize the chapters by date. For example:

Chapter 1 – May 19
Chapter 2 – May 20

The problem with the Word document is that I can’t look at it at the same time as I am writing, plus I often forget to update it. I figured a calendar would be perfect. It would give me a quick visual cue of where I am in the book. So, if I’m writing something in chapter 4 and I need to refer to something in chapter 10, I know that’s a week away. In the case of my current book, I photocopied May and June from an empty 2010 calendar and filled in the scenes from there. So in the May 19 square it says Chapter 1 and if you look at the cork board under Chapter 1, you will see scenes A and B.

Sounds good right? Yeah, until I filled in the entire calendar and realized I was AN ENTIRE WEEK off! Yep. Lost a week. I thought the book ended on day X and it actually ends a week before day X.

So what have I learned? I’ve learned that I’m never writing again unless I have a visual calendar.

A couple of weeks ago, I received a line edit from my agent Joanna Volpe. Here is one of the sentences from my novel before the line edit:

Mom opened her door and dug her three-inch heel into the gravel…Insert some witty dialogue…She stepped out of the car and slammed the door.

My agent changed it this to:

Mom opened her door and dug her three-inch heel into the gravel…Insert some witty dialogue…She slammed the door.

In her comments she wrote:

You don’t need to tell us every single step the characters take…that actually becomes distracting.  Leave some for the imagination…telling us every step is what editors call “stage directions” and it completely slows the pacing of the books.

Like most of the comments I’ve received from my agent, I instantly thought, Uh duh. How did I NOT know this? We already knew the character was in the car from the beginning of the scene. We knew her door was open and her foot was out from the beginning of the paragraph. It’s pretty obvious she has stepped out of the car before she slams the door. 

So how do you identify the unnecessary stage directions in your story? My advice is this:

Too much: Helen went to the kitchen. She took a cup out of the cupboard then closed the cupboard door. She filled it with coffee and added some cream. She stirred then took a sip. Within moments, the caffeine entered her system and she felt awake.

Enough: Helen went to the kitchen and poured a cup of coffee. Within moments, the caffeine entered her system and she felt awake.

Not enough: Helen went to the kitchen. Within moments, the caffeine entered her system and she felt awake.

As you can see, the first one is boring and the last leaves us thinking, huh? But the middle one is good. It gives us enough information about the action to understand the reaction.

In my next post, I will discuss how I’ve learned that sleep is overrated. Okay, maybe not…

Eventually, I will stop going on and on about the things I learned from the Donald Maass writing workshop. But not yet…

If there is one thing you don’t want, it’s a flat plot. For example, imagine this was your plot:

Bob wants Eggos for breakfast tomorrow but the store closes in an hour. Drive to the store, pick up a box, walk to the cash, TRIP, buy the Eggos.

Why is this plot bad? Aside from being about as exciting as watching flowers wilt, both Bob’s goal and the obstacles in front of it remain unchanged for the entire plot. 

Maass’s idea for fixing this is to MAKE THINGS WORSE, either by upping the stakes or by extending the effects of failure to other characters. For example, to up the stakes in the story above, we could make Bob’s car run out of gas. We could make the store close early for a bizarre town ritual. We could make the store run out of Eggos. To extend the effects of failure in this story, we could say that Bob also has to feed his twelve, hungry children who refuse to eat anything but Eggos for breakfast. We could say that the store owner is overrun by Eggos and must sell them all that day or the store will go bankrupt.

The point is to create a plot that is constantly changing or “hooking” the reader. If you give them the highest stakes and the list of all possible obstacles on page one, they might as well just flip to the last page and read “The End.”

Now, I must go eat some Eggos.

Say what? Why would I want my antagonist to be likeable??? I mean, he’s the one the protagonist wants to defeat, right?

Yes and no. The antagonist is the character who is trying to stop the protagonist from reaching her goal, but that doesn’t mean he should be all bad. According to Donald Maass, the scariest antagonists are not the ones lurking in the corner, cackling Mwoo-ha-ha. No, the scariest antagonists are the ones that are smart, likeable, and right. Here are some of Maass’s tips for creating a three-dimensional antagonist:

1) Give the antagonist a goal of his own and make it one the protagonist could agree with on some level.

For example, the antagonist wants to steal the Mona Lisa. This is wrong. But make him want to steal it because he needs the money to pay for his mother’s cancer treatment and suddenly, the goal seems justified. The protagonist may not agree with the antagonist, but she will understand him and maybe even sympathize with him.

2) Find one way to make the antagonist’s “way of looking at things” right.

For example, despite being a hardened criminal, the antagonist might believe in universal health care. The protagonist will be able to agree with him on this point, making it harder to hate him full stop.

3) Right before the climax, get the protagonist to agree with the antagonist. 

Using the example above, maybe the protagonist is about to stop the antagonist from stealing the painting, but she sees his dying mother in the hospital and can’t do it, at least for a moment. Yes, the protagonist will eventually have a change of heart when she realizes that innocent people may die during the heist. But by making the decision difficult for the protagonist, you will create more tension in the pull.

This past Saturday, I attended a writing workshop run by Donald Maass (aka, The God of Writing). He spent the morning of this workshop on protagonists, the first task of which was to make them likeable.

According to Maass, there are three kinds of protagonists and each comes with specific challenges:

1) The ordinary person – This is the every day Joe. He is you or me or the guy next door. Nothing special. Nothing grand. But if you want to make readers care about Joe, you need to give him some kind of heroic quality. Maybe he’s a bit of a jerk but he loves his five-year-old daughter more than anything on Earth. Maybe he loves his dog. Maybe he gives all of his money to the blind. Whatever it is, Joe needs to do something in the first 5 pages to show us why we should care about him.

2) The hero – The hero spends every moment of his life helping people. He’s a fireman, a soldier, a cop. But readers won’t necessarily care about him just because he helps people. This type of character is too perfect. He needs a flaw that makes him a regular human to which readers can relate. Maybe he has an annoying neighbour who always steals his newspaper. Maybe his dog pees on his bath mat every freaking morning. Maybe his mother has cancer. Whatever it is, the hero needs to do something to show us he is just like us in the first 5 pages.

3) The dark protagonist – The dark protagonist is usually not human. He’s a vampire, a werewolf, a fallen angel. If you want readers to care about this type of protagonist, you need to show one way that he wants to be a normal or happy being. Maybe he’s a vampire who just wants to die. Maybe he’s a fallen angel living in Hell who just wants to repent. Whatever it is, the dark protagonist needs to do something to show us that he wants to not be dark, in the first 5 pages.

The key message here is that you must give the reader a reason to care in the first 5 pages.

On a side note, if you get the chance the attend one of Maass’s writing workshops, I’d highly recommend it. He will open your mind to things you never thought about before (and he’ll probably make you laugh your ass off too!)

I’m a big fan of the Myers-Briggs personality test. Part of this is because I’m the type of person who likes to categorize people I meet. Are they an only child? A youngest child? Did they go to school X? Did they grow up in that part of town?

Yesterday, after reading this post  about writing a character’s feelings, I realized that the comments Lynne received resonated with ones I had received as well. That’s when I remembered my Myers-Briggs rating. On the Thinking/Feeling scale, I am a strong T (thinker). For those of you unfamiliar with the T/F scale, it means the following:

“Those who prefer thinking tend to decide things from a more detached standpoint, measuring the decision by what seems reasonable, logical, causal, consistent and matching a given set of rules. Those who prefer feeling tend to come to decisions by associating or empathizing with the situation, looking at it ‘from the inside’ and weighing the situation to achieve, on balance, the greatest harmony, consensus and fit, considering the needs of the people involved.” (Wikipedia)

The moment I re-read this, I realized this is the biggest problem in my writing. My characters are constantly thinking. They are opinionated about everything, but they don’t express enough feelings. For example, if my character heard about another character’s dead dog, she might say:

Bob’s story reminded me of the time I lost Winkie when I was twelve. It was a Tuesday.

This is thinking. Feeling, on the other hand, would be this:

The moment Bob finished his story, a lump grew in my throat. I hadn’t thought about Winkie since I’d cried myself to sleep when I was twelve.

There are times when your character needs to think, but there are also times when they need to feel. Knowing which is which is part of the challenge.

My advice is this: if you haven’t taken Myers-Briggs, take it. Once you have your rating, read the definitions and use them to identify your strengths and weaknesses as a person. You will probably find these same strengths and weaknesses in your writing.

According to Snyder’s book, Save the Cat, the third act of a story should have the following:

1. Break Into Three: At the end of Act Two, everything went wrong for the main character. In this section, everything needs to turn. The main character needs to have that “ah-ha” moment where he (or another character) discovers the way to reach the goal. Once he has figured it out, he needs to act on it.
2. Finale: The main character has met his goal. This is where you wrap up all of the plot lines. Does the boy get the girl? Do they live happily ever after? If you put “the six things that need fixing” in the setup, this is where you show them fixed.
3. Final Scene: This beat probably makes more sense on screen, but the idea is that you give one final image of the main character. In Snyder’s opinion, this should be the opposite of the opening image.

This brings us to the end of the posts on the 15 story beats, according to Blake Snyder. Keep in mind that this is only one chapter out of his book Save the Cat. The book has a ton of other great tips, such as Save the Cat, Pope in the Pool… BUY IT! And that, my friends, brings us to the end of this infomercial.

In my next post, I’ll discuss scene writing.

According to Snyder’s book, Save the Cat, the second part of Act Two should contain the following sections or “beats”:

1. Bad Guys Close In – This is when everything goes wrong for the main character. The antagonist “closes in” on getting his own goal which means the main character sees that his hope from the beginning of Act Two was false. This one was a real eye-opener for me. I knew that things were supposed to go wrong for the main character (leading up to the Black Moment) but I’d honestly never considered that it should all happen at once. But now that I have implemented this, it makes a lot of sense. One other thing I learned (which has nothing to do with Snyder) is what I will call The Bad Guy Waterfall. This means that, if you have 3 plot lines, you need to make them turn in the correct order. Take this as an example:

Bob goes to his car to find it has no gas. Bob calls the store and finds out they close in 5 minutes. Bob needs milk.

All three of these things are problems for Bob, but when written in the above order, they don’t create an “All is Lost” feeling. Let’s try to switch them using the waterfall method:

Bob needs milk. Bob calls the store and finds out they close in 5 minutes. Bob goes to his car to find it has no gas.

Now, we have the feeling that all is lost for Bob. Keep this in mind when you write your Bad Guys Close In chapters. They will only lead to #2 if done in the right order.

2. All is Lost – This is the moment when the main character thinks it’s over. He can’t see any possible way to reach his goal. Others often refer to this as “The Black Moment”.

3. Dark Night of the Soul – I’d never heard of this one before (or I’d heard of it but it was included as part of #2). To Snyder, this is an extra final insight into the main character’s despair. Snyder likes to use a technique he calls “the whiff of death” here.

These three sections bring an end to Act Two. In my next post, I will discuss Act Three. I will also remind you to BUY THIS BOOK. Am I annoying you yet? No? I will try harder.