I've mentioned before that I have the great luck to count noted science fiction writer Steve Perry (not to be confused with either of the rock stars of the same name) among my friends. When I mentioned that I was at a waypoint with writing my novel, he offered to read it and provide feedback. Resisting the urge to squee, and somewhat fearing what he might say, I sent along a copy and today he provided me this [reprinted with his permission, transliterated from FB Messenger]: J.D. — Bear in mind, this is my opinion, which, with a dime, will get you ten pennies, if somebody wants to bother to make change … The story is there, and so far, it’s fine, insofar as how you address the unexpected time-travel. Set-up is good, I like your characters, the potential is laid-in. But: The problems I see with it, as it stands, go mostly to pacing, and that you are telling instead of showing, with language that is more passive than active. There’s a .jpg attached. The story connected to it comes from Harlan Ellison. He got a job working as a staff writer for a TV series. The guy in the cubical next to his was an old pro, so at one point, Harlan stepped over and asked him to take a look at the draft he had, to see if it would play. The old pro flipped through the first couple pages in about three seconds, said, “It won’t play.” Ellison was taken aback. How can you say that? You couldn’t have read any of it! So the guy took a pencil and drew lines on a page. (If you can see the image, the top section was Harlan’s script. “This is what you did,” he said. He drew a second set of lines under the first. “And this is what you should have done.”) Harlan saw it immediately. What The Old Pro meant was, the pacing of Harlan’s script was wrong, too slow, and too even. In order for the script to move, it needed to be broken up, sans long shot-descriptions and dialog, and of different lengths. The ms you did is like the top diagram. It is homogenized, long paragraphs, about the same number per page, with the chapters all being close to equal in length. You don’t want a stately ride in a horse-draw carriage, you want a roller coaster. Slow rise, fast drop, uneven rises and falls to a final drop at the end. Generally — generally — in a book of eighty to a hundred thousand words? Any scene that lasts more than four pages is probably too long. Paragraphs should be long, short, medium, mixed up, and chapters likewise. Twelve pages here, six there, nine, fourteen, two. You want the reader to get engaged and move along, not knowing what will happen next. So that’s the first thing. The second thing is that much of the action takes place offstage, and you TELL us about it rather than SHOW it. You tell us there was a bar fight. Ho, hum. Show it to us. Make us hear, smell, taste, feel the action. Any time you can get specific and detailed with sensory stuff? Consider it. If you only use your eyes, the picture is flat. Work a couple senses into any scene. You don’t have to use them all, but one isn’t enough for long. Several times, you say something like: They ate, it tasted good. What tasted good? Geez, you are a chef [I'm not]! What is on the menu? An example: Tell: “Hungry from a long day at sea, they happily consumed what Lagorio’s cook provided as the two couples visited in the parlor and caught up on their respective adventures in the few weeks since Celeste and Agata had exchanged letters.” (And this is a fat sentence, by the way, too much stuffed into it.) Show: “Marco’s empty belly growled. Logorio’s cook brought them fresh, still-warm brown bread, yeasty, with a chewy crust, and a ball of hard, salty, goat cheese, sharp, but much better than it smelled. “The red table wine was young, simple, but good enough to wash down the meal.” Specifics play. “They happily consumed?” No. Spices? No pepper, so how do they season food? What does it taste like? There is a lot of this, and if you want your story to grab people, better that you address it. They made love and it was great. Really? How? You don’t have to get pornographic, but this is a chance to show them laughing, having fun, getting excited, flesh-on-flesh. Are they worried about pregnancy? They sailed. They slept. They walked. You tell us these things, but I want to see the choppy water, smell the salt and seaweed, feel the sun burning my nose, the blisters on my hands from the lines, on my feet from walking. What does the boat look like? How rocky is the path? What is the bed made from? Are there lice in it? Fleas? Bedbugs? Does the rain wash out the roads? Is the drinking water clean? What diseases are rampant? What do people look like with bad teeth, pox scars, ill-mended bones? What does the privy smell like? Upon what do they sit in said privy? What happen in this society during menstruation? Religion? Got to be a big thing. If they aren’t spending time in church, tongues will wag. Then, some of the construction needs attention. Trim the fat from sentences that don’t really give us anything. Here you said: “He stared at her for a few moments and nodded with understanding.” Why not just: “He understood.” Or the gerund form, which always needs to be used sparingly. This sentence feels awkward: “She looked at him questioningly.” Why not something like: “She raised her eyebrows.” Or just a question mark when she asks about what she is wondering about. A lot of description can be done in short dialog to give the same information. If you don’t already have a copy of Strunk & White’s book, The Elements of Style, get it. If you do, read it — I re-read my copy every couple of years. You want your prose to be muscular, and this little book goes a long way to telling you how to do that. Finally, you have to be willing to write a lot of stuff that won’t shine to get to the point where you can offer bright prose. It’s time in grade, and it might take a book or three to get there. Doesn’t have to be a million words, but the more through your fingers, the better you can get. He went on to provide some other advice, such as "the more you write, the better you get" (paraphrased), and to avoid trying to publish too early. He's also co-authoring a work that involves time travel, which, um, makes this bit of mine timely. Anyway, I'm going to work to integrate some, if not all of this advice. I need to balance his advice with that of others and what I perceive as "good writing". I love a lot of Steve's work, but there's some that I've stopped reading after the first chapter or two because I was bored with the presentation. It's all down to taste. The image he mentioned is below. View attachment 23012
The calendar tells me it’s my birthday. Truth be told, I’d noticed it was coming, having read the calendar a few days ago, and still retaining enough of my wits to count. Truth be told, I’m probably closer to my death date than the date of my birth, though I’m from long-lived stock and new medical science keep suggesting that I may have more years ahead of me than expected. So which way the bubble tips is in question, though it’s a question I don’t spend a lot of time contemplating. I plan to spend the day with my wife, doing things I want. So far, however, things aren’t exactly working out as the ringing of the telephone dashed any hopes for sleeping in. One cup of coffee and a lox bagel later, I’m headed toward full consciousness. We’ll see how the rest of the day goes.
Part One of my novel is is, for certain values of the word, finished. By this I mean that I've written all the scenes necessary to get from the beginning of the story to the end. From here, it will take several weeks' effort to troll through it and tighten up the sentences, fix issues, fluff up things that need it... you know, editing. I have it in the hands of one beta reader right now, and am open to hearing from others if they're interested in slogging through 48,637 words of my blather. I have it in Google Doc form, with comments enabled for reviewers. Thank you to everyone who helped me with the parts you did, in particular @Hammer, @ChickenFreak, who invited me to join this forum in the first place (yeah, blame her!), @Harmonices, @The Piper, @GrahamLewis, @Iain Aschendale... oh, crap, this list is getting long. Well, all of you, thank you for your support. I may post fragments of the story as beta readers call them out, asking for input on them, but I won't bore you with continuation of the serialization that I have been posting. Once I'm finished with this, it's on to Part Two, which I expect to be short, and Part Three, which I expect to be longer than Part One. Wish me luck. Thank you all again. JD
I just discovered that Scrivener, at least on my Mac, has the ability to read passages aloud. It's the computer's voice, so sounds like Stephen Hawking, but it's something. I'm going to use this to work on difficult sentences.
A couple weeks ago I reported being stuck in my writing. I got myself unstuck and wrote the scene in question. Now I've got one more scene in the outline to write before Part One is finished. I know how it's supposed to end, but am not sure how to start. So maybe I'm stuck again, though I'm not sure; I haven't studied on the problem enough to know.
I get this question a lot, at least in the Workshop. The answer is yes, I am. Quite technical, at least professionally. Somewhat so in my personal life, if "technical" means that I break things down into their component parts, examine them, alter things that aren't working, and put them back together. I use this method to approach life problems, everything from how to brush my teeth every night to managing our household budget. I suppose this shows in my writing, which often (though not always) methodically goes from function to function, each step supporting the next, and supported by the last. For me, a story is a series of events lashed together with an overarching theme, hopefully with some sort of payoff at the end. Characters are the mechanisms that move the story from one scene to the next; those that take the steps; those that experience the payoff on behalf of the reader. The feedback I'm getting in the Workshop, at least some of it, indicates that my writing is received as 'flat'; that my descriptions of my characters' motivations lack a brightness, like an entree that needs a squeeze of lemon or a spoonful of capers to offset its salty, fatty nature. I try to find resources, books that I can read that let me savor well-balanced spoonfuls of award-winning delicacies. A decade ago, Abraham Verghesse won critical acclaim for his novel "Cutting for Stone". I've read the first two pages, and found myself exhausted by the descriptions. I start to wonder if I have some defect that disallows me to consume literary greatness. Elsewhere, I have the honor to be among a small group of people proofreading a serialized novel by Daniel Keys Moran. Our little group gets a chapter a few hours before it hits Patreon, and we comb through it for issues. It's good for the author, and it's good for our group. In a small way, we get to participate in his worldbuilding and novel writing. And I'm learning about writing there as well as here. One thing I've learned is that my writing is similar to that of Moran in many ways. This is no surprise to me, as I started reading his novels thirty years ago, and his work has informed mine in a number of ways. I have learned at his knee, as it were, even if I don't consciously care to mimic him. Oh, there are a great number of things about Dan as a person that I aspire to or envy, but he is he and I am I, and that's that. But style is something we learn from the world around us, and adapt it to fit ourselves. It seems as though I've adapted somewhat more from his style than I previously realized. This is not to say that I believe Dan's work has the same imbalance that people find in mine. Or maybe it does, I don't know. What I can say is that I find more similitude between my work and the work of some categories of authors than others. In short, I think I write like a science fiction author rather than a literary one. And maybe that's OK. I don't say all this as an excuse to stop taking feedback or to stop improving my writing. I want desperately to improve, and if that means injecting some unfamiliar phraseology or passages, or using techniques that feel entirely alien to me, then so be it. I will, however, keep an eye on my own style, however I acquired it, and grow it rather than replace it.
The piece I'm working on, Lives in Time, starts in the future and travels to the past. In preparation to make the story internally consistent, I created a timeline of events. Here's a snippet of the events of the future, references to which I'm peppering throughout the work. 2048 -- The United Democratic Nations is formed. The EU, Australia, New Zealand, Japan are founding members. 2064-2071 -- Significant medical breakthroughs dramatically extend the lives and improve the health of those who can afford it. 2075 -- Canada joins the UDN 2090 -- Global population crosses 10 billion people. 2102 -- California, Oregon, and Washington form a bloc, break from the USA and join the UDN. 2105 -- Global famine strikes. Nearly one billion people die from hunger. 2122 -- Global population crosses 10 billion people (again). 2130 -- New York State and the States of New England, form “The United Democratic States of America”, break from the USA and join the UDN. 2160-2173 -- The Last War, ended by the Treaty of Amman. 100 million people die, mostly in nuclear assaults. 2175 -- The Plague virus is first identified, affecting those with artificial long-life genes. 2178 -- The Plague virus kills the UDN Prime Minister. 2200 -- The Plague virus kills its millionth victim. 2213 -- Karlo Horvat is born 2220 -- Adrijana Horvat is born 2225 -- Deaths by The Plague cross five million. 2231 -- A serum is created that is 98% effective against The Plague. October 7, 2265 -- Celestine Maria Foscari is born in Trieste, Italy. February 16, 2266 -- Marko Horvat is born in Rovinj, Croatia. May, 2285 -- Celeste and Marko meet at a party held at the estate. September, 2285 -- Celeste and Marko travel back in time to 1381 on the island of Brijuni while exploring the Bronze Age ruins at Gradina.
A few weeks ago I was beebling around the site and found a flash fiction contest. The prompt was "Cheese in a Can" and the word limit was 500. The voting just ended, and the winner, who wasn't me, was announced. The story that won came in two words less than mine, and received five votes. If I hadn't been busy voting for myself (is that cheesy?), I would have voted for it too, as it was a good one. Poignant, even. At any rate, if you're interested to see what I did, it's here: https://www.writingforums.org/threads/flash-fiction-contest-63-theme-cheese-in-a-can.160808/#post-1743427 Not too bad, I think, for fifteen minutes of work. One person besides me voted for it, so that's something. I'll keep my eye on other contests. This was fun.
My wife wanted to read the entirety of what I've written so far on my novel, so I compiled the text into a Word document (the Scrivener trial, by the way, is going well) and opened it in Word to see how it looked. I'm right at 100 pages. I'm not sure how that relates to paperback novel pages, but it's a point of reference. The word count is at 44K, by far the longest thing I've ever written. I scrolled through the document to see how the formatting came out, and noticed that Word was calling out grammar errors. Most of them I can ignore, as the software doesn't understand dialogue (usually) or sentence styling. It does, however, understand commas (usually), and it found a lot of sentences that read like this: Alberti seemed to accept this explanation, and said no more about the subject. Word suggests I remove the comma, and after doing so, the sentence reads better. Unfortunately, Scrivener doesn't have such functionality. I'll go through the text in Scrivener with Word in a separate window and fix the issues. I'm thankful for the 28" monitor I splurged on last year.
I've got characters, a setting, a story... some of you have seen at least the initial bits, maybe 5K of the ~42K words. I'm down to needing to write two scenes to wrap up Part One of my novel, which I'm considering publishing as a novella. It's complete in itself, and has a "what happens next?" ending; a clear lead-in to a sequel. But here I am, stuck. Marko, depressed over the state of affairs and some events that occurred which were completely preventable if he'd been able to use his "special knowledge" to prevent them, has lost weight, is on the verge of alcoholism, and is retreating into himself. Celeste sees it, but doesn't know what to do. She's trying to put on a brave face, but is ready to confront him and try to pull him out of his pit of despair. I'm struggling to write the scene, and I don't know why. I have experience here. I didn't allow myself to fall into drinking, but when the restaurant we owned was in the throes of death, I lost forty pounds (about twenty percent of my body weight), and was down to about a meal and a half per day and a few hours of sleep per night. My wife saw it, tried to do what she could, but the critical problems were outside of her control and we both knew it. My memory of what changed to bring me out of it is cloudy, and maybe that's blocking me from being able to get into writing this scene. Maybe, subconsciously, I'm reticent to open the box that has the solution in it. Probably the best thing I can do is to stop thinking about it, to focus on things I can produce and wait for some inspiration to strike. Tough to do when the ending of this project is in sight. Grr.....
A few years ago, I had an idea for a novel. I wrote a page, then got distracted with other things. Last year I had some time on my hands, and went back to it. I put in some serious effort, and wrote around 42K words before I came to a hurdle in the story I didn't know how to overcome. I started editing what I had, asking for critiques (very helpful; thank you to everyone who's contributed), and generally polishing the story while waiting for inspiration. One issue I discovered (really I knew it, but was avoiding talking to myself about it) was the lack of organization for my research, character development notes, and other relevant material. I was working from one Google Doc that held the story so far, a spreadsheet to contain a timeline (it's a time travel story, so the timeline is very important and gets a bit confusing), and another Google Doc to contain notes. Then there's the set of bookmarks for commonly-referenced web pages that I usually just kept open as a set of tabs, swamping the memory on my computer. I am loathe to think of being a research-oriented writer before the age of the Internet. Since joining this forum, I've seen several references to people using Scrivener. I'd heard of it before, but hadn't previously had a need for it. Most of what I've written, by piece count, is short fiction, much of it "flash fiction". I can hold the entirety of a ~10K word story in my head while I write it down, and haven't previously needed organization tools to help. But a novel, with a multitude of robust characters, multiple locations, historical settings, and a wealth of details to keep track of as the story progresses across 100K or more words, well, that's a different story, as they say. So I researched Scrivener to see if it would help. Yesterday morning I installed the trial version on my computer and set down to work. By bedtime, I had separated all 42K words I've written on Lives in Time into little sections, given them each a title, and updated the formatting to use Scrivener's tagging (this last was challenging, as my text is peppered with foreign language that is italicized). Today I'll start working on building character sheets, setting sheets, and migrating my timeline into Notes. Already I've drug a few of the sections into a folder labeled "Junk" that, after hearing critiques here, I've realized don't support the story and are more me talking to myself about the characters. I feel confident that this tool is what I need to keep this story organized. It's not going to help me get over the hurdle that brought me to a stop, but it's probably true that without the hurdle, I wouldn't have stopped, and wouldn't have found the tool. I'll post more as I learn more about Scrivener and about my own writing. For now, I'm happy to be working at this again.