What I did on My Summer Staycation

Even after shifting to an online version of teaching to finish the spring semester, I still had big plans for summer travel. Then, week after week, I kept putting off hitting the road. Until the summer had waned and I was back to the same ol' same ol'. So, instead of driving to parts unknown, I stayed home. 

Staying home is not a great hardship for me. It's what I do whenever I do anything. I can easily occupy myself with the usual writing and editing, along with reading and some movies on DVD. At first, I thought I would start a new novel, something apocalyptic - obviously. I got a good start but the idea ran dry. I started reading other apocalyptic books to get inspiration. Good books, but it didn't work.

Next I thought I should use my time to finish some unfinished manuscripts. I settled on a sci-fi story I had started in a National Novel Writing Month competition a few years past. I even made a tentative book cover for it. As expected, I "won" by hitting the 50,000-word threshold, then I got distracted with other projects and left it unfinished. I always intended to finish it but I left it at a crucial point where I realized how off track I had gotten. But first, before I returned to the novel I had titled THE MASTERS' RIDDLE, I told myself I should work on one more revision of my already finished manuscript of an action-adventure magical realism novel titled YEAR OF THE TIGER, which will be coming out this fall.

All right, done. I completely revised, edited, and formatted that ancient manuscript and polished it to within an inch of its life. It is now ready to go.

So...back to the sci-fi book about the little alien who is captured by mean invaders and just wants to go home....

I always liked the idea but writing it was taking too much of my soul. The protagonist was, after all, a non-human character, forcing me to think way outside of boxes. That was a fun aspect of writing the story, of course, but challenging. As a professional linguist, I love playing with languages and alternate ways of thinking. And world building? Don't get me started! But by the time NaNoWriMo ended, my alien had slowly shifted into a regular human. Sure, I was hurrying to finish the competition; I knew I could revise it later, but the way that portion turned out left me puzzled about how to shift it all back on track.

So there I was with a whole summer and nothing to do, nowhere to go. I did try to work on it more than a year before. I had gotten a great new idea and just started in with a whole new scene. That was interesting and it worked. I would make the two storylines dovetail. But I got distracted again by other projects. So now, in 2020, I thought I might as well work on it. So I picked it up where I had left off with the new section from a year ago - where my protagonist is back to being a little alien. (I knew I would work on the original "left off" section and make it fit the new section later.)

With a rough outline from previous planning - which is odd, because I don't usually plan and I don't usually outline, at least not more than what happens in the next scene, or this section will go from here to there - I headed on from what would be the exact middle of the story. It was like going to see a play and in the middle of Act II, the whole cast changes costumes and starts forgetting their lines, and the director just stops and tells the audience to come back next year and it will all be fixed. You return and pick up the play in Act III and everything seems fine for Act III but you wonder what happened in Act II the year before. Anyway, I was willing to proceed with Act III and write it all out to the end. Then I would go back and fix the section where my alien hero slipped into being a human.

So I did it. Just finished it. The ending that happened turned out to be a very satisfying conclusion although not the one I had originally planned. How we get to that conclusion also had some twists I had not imagined originally. Happy little coincidences. But all the more powerful - I mean visceral. I think it is a "happy" ending in some ways but raises disturbing questions, too. I like those kind of stories.

Anyhoo...our alien hero struggles to get home, but how do you get home when home is another planet far, far away? Even if you get help from other kinds of creatures that have escaped... Even if you form an army to fight against your captors... Even if you find and capture the machine that enables your captors to go through an interdimensional portal to other worlds and kidnap creatures for slave labor or experiments... how do you get home? And what will you find when (or if) you do get home? Totally depressing possibilities make for a great story.

At least you have the cast of other alien beings from several different worlds, speaking different languages, having different cultures. Could there be any story with more diversity? So I got to invent different species, each with its own way of doing things in their normal lives on their home worlds, with different languages, and so on. World building! That was fun. Easy enough to describe beings from tropical worlds, desert worlds, frozen worlds, watery worlds, and so on. How they are mostly "upright" and mostly "intelligent" is solely because those are the kind of creatures the invaders choose to bring back as captives.

Languages and how they communicate was both the most frustrating aspect and had the most clever solution. IMHO. They speak (verbal utterance) in their own language, of course, but some have telepathic ability. Others are intelligent enough to convert the symbol patterns of one language into the patterns of their own language and thus understand. Some creatures pass pure ideas to other creatures without the idea needing to be coded into a language system. And so on. The hardest part was deciding how to show each different kind of communication on the page.

All right, enough teaser! I will save the big twists for another blog post sometime in my fallcation. In the meantime, look for my action-adventure novel of manly daring-do where a man-eating tiger with vengeance on its mind takes on a crazy cadre of inept hunters (warning: not a comedy) in YEAR OF THE TIGER.

[Note: This is my first blog post using the new design of Blogger. It is what it is.]

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(C) Copyright 2010-2020 by Stephen M. Swartz. All Rights Reserved. No part of this blog, whether text or image, may be used without me giving you written permission, except for brief excerpts that are accompanied by a link to this entire blog. Violators shall be written into novels as characters who are killed off. Serious violators shall be identified and dealt with according to the laws of the United States of America.

The Solitude, part 8

As you all must be tired of reading, last summer I was driving through Canada thinking about what my actual process was for writing a novel - and then I did write a novel, ironically. So I wrote out my process and have been sharing it step by step this year during my stay-at-home solitude. In the previous post here, we covered the agonizing revision and editing steps. Now comes the most difficult steps of all, which I must share before I can go on my summer staycation.

Step 9

A lot of people think it's finished now. A lot of people think it's finished when the first draft is complete (haha), but then the revision and editing begins (mwah-haha). So even now, there is still much to do. The most difficult thing to do is write a blurb. That short copy is often more daunting than the 100,000-word book it's about. 

The blurb is a short description of the story intended for the back cover of the book but also may be used for advertising purposes. The trick is to suggest the main points without giving away the story. If this is for an agent or publisher, the blurb would be expanded into something longer often called a synopsis, which does include everything, spoilers and all, because the people you work with need to know the complete story.

The blurb, however, is only about 200 words. In submitting a book manuscript to a contest, for one purpose, there is often a limit on the word count for the blurb. For the back cover, you must be aware of the space which the text takes up.

For EXCHANGE, my JFW (just-finished-work, as opposed to WIP, work-in-progress), I dabbled with the blurb well before I even reached the middle of the writing. There is a basic template which helps sometimes, hinders at other times: Introduce main character and situation/setting; mention chief problem faced; discuss why it will be difficult to solve problem or what the ramifications will be if problem is not solved; end with a question, something like "But will he succeed?"

Here is what I've been working on for EXCHANGE and continue to tweak:

Bill Masters has a good life as a high school teacher in suburbia. But that life is shattered when his wife and daughter are killed in a mass shooting. Prepared to wallow in depression and drink himself into numbness, Bill must pull himself together when their foreign exchange student arrives not knowing what has happened. Forced to try to be a good host father, Bill finds Wendy Wang from China to be both a hindrance to his recovery and a boost to his will to go on. As Bill struggles through the stages of grief, however, he must battle on-going crimes and threats to his peace, giving him a second chance with Wendy. He will protect her. This time he will not fail - no matter what it takes.

That may look like a lot of text yet it is only 129 words. In it, I have who the story is about, what the situation is, the main obstacle(s), and a suggestion of possible love-interest or foil, and the direction the story will take. As it is, it's rather clunky. Tweaking continues. 

[Note: Because the book is finished and has been published, the tweaking has stopped and a much tighter blurb made it to the back of the book cover. See image below.]

Step 10

In the indie publishing world, we hire someone to make a cover for the book. If it's an ebook such as for Kindle we only need a front cover. If it will be a paperback, we need the full front, spine, and back.

Looking at recent covers of literary fiction in my local Barnes & Noble, I see the trend to have a single image which suggests the main character, the plot, or the setting. The title and author's name is enlarged to cover much of the image. Not my favorite style but it seems the trend today, so I'm following it.

Science fiction and fantasy are known for their elaborate and evocative cover art. Romance covers usually feature a couple. Crime fiction features some prop that suggests the crime. You get the idea. But literary fiction can be about anything as long as it is contemporary.

So, following the latest "rules", I have a front cover for my newest literary novel, EXCHANGE. The image is of one  character in a provocative pose. Actually, there is nothing particularly provocative about it, but readers may find it provocative because of the way other elements of the cover come together.

Breaking the title into three lines adds drama and symbolism. The letters could be seen as prison bars, which may add a mysterious tone. For colors, I went with gray to emphasize the nature of the gun debate: there are no black or white solutions. My designer made sure her eyes were not obstructed by the letters because eyes on a face are primary attention-grabbers for potential buyers. The required phrase "a novel" lets you know this is a work of fiction and not a book of essays on gun control. My author name gets a good location. A couple previous titles being mentioned can add to my Christmas bonus; I chose two from my shelf that are in the same genre (i.e., literary and cross-cultural romance). 

For the back cover, I like how the front cover image continues, but a different cover might have different art. Be aware that the back cover will have small text on it (the blurb) so the art should not be too complex to obscure the readability of that text. Note the "Gun Free Zone" tattoo on her shoulder. Glowing quotes from readers, serious author picture, publisher logo (in gray) are other elements of the back cover - plus the bar code, which has not been applied yet to this image (it goes in the white space below the publisher logo). Always check for the readability of the blurb (contrast, size, font). Then wait for things to happen. Meantime, start at Step 1 on a new project.

This concludes the Process posts. We hope also that the Solitude comes to an end, as well. Too much idle time makes Jack a dull boy, as they say.

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(C) Copyright 2010-2020 by Stephen M. Swartz. All Rights Reserved. No part of this blog, whether text or image, may be used without me giving you written permission, except for brief excerpts that are accompanied by a link to this entire blog. Violators shall be written into novels as characters who are killed off. Serious violators shall be identified and dealt with according to the laws of the United States of America.

The Solitude, part 7

Those of you who follow this blog may be surprised that it continues. That fact is only due to the unfinished discussion of my writing process. This time last year, for example, I decided one morning that I didn't need to blog, that I could call my absence a summer vacation. Unfortunately or not, that vacation from blogging lasted deep into the winter holidays. This year, however, every week is summer vacation. 

Besides, those of you who have finished your first complete draft of something novel-like will need instruction on what to do next. So, in the interest of time, I shall post 2 steps here!

Part 7

Once I have come to the end of the story and can call the manuscript complete, it is time for revision. Getting the whole story out is fine and dandy but now the work begins. I like to describe this as a sculptor throwing a clump of wet clay on a wheel (the basic first draft) and then crafting it into something beautiful (the finished manuscript).

The first step for me is to go back to any scenes where I already know I need to do more tweaking. I usually edit previous sections during the process of composing new text, so I don't expect a major editing pass - but I still do it. After this spot checking, I'll return to the first page and read straight through to the end.

My goal in the first read-through is to fill out scenes, make them more complete by adding description, writing more and/or better dialog, clarifying any information, and sometimes cutting out material that is no longer relevant based on how the story actually finished. Not all seeds I plant come to fruition and must be weeded out. So, generally, the word count will expand during this stage.

In the second pass from start to finish, I focus on scenes as individual stories, making sure the arc is effective and the other elements fit the purpose of the scene - which should be to move the plot along, develop characters, or emphasize a point or theme which is important to the story (rarely done). Occasionally, I'll have a scene that is purely for fun, which may also serve to develop a character. I seldom "kill my darlings" but some do get a firm wrist slap.

Presently [sometime in October 2019], I'm in the third full pass of my current just-finished novel, titled EXCHANGE, and this stage involves trimming words from sentences and cutting whole sentences from paragraphs which don't seem to be needed. I may also cut entire paragraphs but because I revise as I compose, I usually don't have a lot of that - unless I decide an entire scene is no longer needed.

I don't care about reaching a particular word count, although I'm still cognizant of desired counts for various genre. Because epic fantasy readers expect a fat book, I let my EPIC FANTASY *WITH DRAGONS go to 233,000 (after editing and revision down from 255,000). But some stories have their own inherent length, like my contemporary adventure novel A GIRL CALLED WOLF, which hit 86,000. Making it longer, usually by adding scenes, would have lessened the story's effect.

Part 8

So I have gone through the whole manuscript a few times, working on the arcs, the pacing, weeding out unnecessary words, sentences, and some paragraphs, and punching up the dialog. I've stood back and looked at the story from a wider perspective to make sure it all fits together and works as a drama. I'm satisfied with what I've got.

Now I do the little dirty work: proofreading. I run spell checker constantly as I write and revise day by day. However, errors still make it through. I know a few of my pet errors, the kind of typos that a spell checker won't catch. For example, I seldom write the word "form" in a story but I do use "from" a lot, but I tend to type "form" instead of "from" so I will run a special find-and-replace for that thorn in my side (and a few others).

Other funny typos are where I've made a correction of a perfectly good word during revision so the correct word is now incorrect. I found a typo in one of my books where what showed was "he" but the correct word should've been "the".  Yes, that was so funny (not); try finding that needle in a haystack. Sometimes I write "by ear" so I'll find an error I've spelled as "won" which should be "one". It is maddening.

I have a short list of words I specifically check because I know I overuse them: all, now, then, that, almost...and so on. A lot of typos that survive scrutiny and remain in the finished book are the result of the proofreading itself: the imperfect cutting or inserting of text, where something is left behind. That includes punctuation. Cut a phrase from a sentence and put a period where the comma used to be? Done. Or maybe not. Maybe the period is next to the comma that didn't get deleted! Aaargh!

One thing I'll admit to is when the page is laid out "justified" (the text goes evenly from margin to margin like printed books have it), I get a little OCD if there is too much spread, the gaps between words are too wide - also if the line of text is too compressed. I will often rewrite the sentence to reduce the gaps or the crowding in the line as it lays on the page just to improve the "look" of the page.

Then I will give the manuscript one final read after putting it away for a bit, trying to be a typical reader, avoiding the urge to change anything - other than a lingering typo. My finished manuscripts average 1 typo per 10,000 words, which for an old full-time English teacher with fading eyesight, is rather good. Don't misunderstand: The work done in Parts 7 and 8 is a long process requiring many reads, a lot of searches, plenty of word wrangling. It is not a one and done step.

NEXT: The hard part (writing a blurb)



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(C) Copyright 2010-2020 by Stephen M. Swartz. All Rights Reserved. No part of this blog, whether text or image, may be used without me giving you written permission, except for brief excerpts that are accompanied by a link to this entire blog. Violators shall be written into novels as characters who are killed off. Serious violators shall be identified and dealt with according to the laws of the United States of America.

The Solitude, part 6

Yes, there's good news and some bad news. As always. The good news is that life is returning to the normal we consider normal in our daily lives. The bad news is that it's not happening everywhere and it's not quite the same for everyone. For that matter, some people don't want that same kind of same. But that is a whole other blog post. When life becomes unfathomable, I dive into a good book and swim about at my leisure.

For writers there's always a good news / bad news dichotomy, too. Oh my God! I finished! I finally finished this thing! (Good news.) But now I have to revise, and edit, and proofread.... (Bad news.) After writing several novels I've developed a process which seems to fit my lifestyle and my inane sense of story, which I use to guide me through The Process. Having just launched my latest novel, a crime drama, I can easily look back and see how I went through the process of writing the book.

First, we have to finish the manuscript. And there's no better way than having a climax. That, too, has a good news, bad news convention. If all has gone well thus far, we are at the top of that dramatic arc and ready to pull the trigger on that gun we mentioned in the first act lay upon the mantlepiece. If we have set up this moment effectively, it's a crowning achievement we can smile about for a long time. That's good news. If we have wandered about, we may still stumble upon the idea that it's about time to do something else...which would be the bad news. Ultimately, we should have planned this sooner, at least by the two-thirds mark in the story - if we even know where that is when we are at the starting point.

Note: Almost a year ago, while driving around the country, I figured out my own writing process and made it into a lecture, something I might share with young writers, my students, and anyone who asks.

Part 6

I have an innate sense of pacing when writing a novel. I keep everything in my head with very few notes, seldom more than a few Post-Its. Other writers I know create an elaborate outline with every detail in its place, but that's not for me. I write, as they say, "by the seat of my pants".  (See previous post for apologies and explanations.) So as I arrive at the two-thirds point in a book, I must survey all my subplots and see how to resolve them (if I hadn't known previously, and I often don't). As I look at my shelf of books, I know I have usually resolved the subplots just before the main plot ends.

Here is where pacing is so important. The chapters tend to get shorter, the descriptions briefer, as action takes over the story. The pace quickens. Chases, fights, desperation time. However, even as the reader feels the quickening pace, I slow down writing it. I often go to slow-mo. I think like a movie camera and a film director. I choreograph action scenes in my head, then try to describe the action. One minute of action in the manuscript may take two days to write and fourteen days to rewrite.

When I get to the climax of the book, the big scene where all is revealed to reader and protagonist, I like to gently hammer home the theme. Not in a preachy manner but still clear enough it is not missed. The theme is not a message; it is a stylistic mantra that has been woven through the foundation of the story. Theme can often be stated in a single word; I seem to write a lot about Redemption and use that as the theme in so many of my stories: people going through hell to find themselves or their passion or their reason for being or why the dragons exist at all. My protagonist carries that theme in his/her final decisions and actions. A lot depends on whether the protagonist will survive or not - which would be a spoiler. (In only two of my novels does the protagonist not make it out alive.)

I know when I've arrived at the end. I've been feeling the downhill momentum for several scenes - despite the rising dramatic arc, ironically. Some stories will have the great confrontation between protagonist and antagonist: a swordfight or a fistfight or a well-stated argument that crushes a soul or the revelation of who he/she really is! The last scene is hard to write - hard to get it right, to make it perfect. The final few lines are important. It has to end with the perfect description, line of dialog, thought or feeling. I work on the last page a lot. And by last, I do not mean the exact final page. because there is always the denouement (my favorite French word after croissant), the "wrapping up". For a TV show, it's the two minute scene following the last commercial break, a summarizing of what has transpired and perhaps, if a sequel is on the horizon, a glimpse of what may come.

Then I go back to the beginning and read through the whole manuscript. I edit as I go, of course, but I do not yet enter the revision stage. Eventually, I know I must accept the bad news and force myself to switch hats from writer to editor. I often feel silly with the different hats, but they do keep my hair from blowing into a mess, and for that I am grateful.

NEXT: The actual revision tips. 

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(C) Copyright 2010-2020 by Stephen M. Swartz. All Rights Reserved. No part of this blog, whether text or image, may be used without me giving you written permission, except for brief excerpts that are accompanied by a link to this entire blog. Violators shall be written into novels as characters who are killed off. Serious violators shall be identified and dealt with according to the laws of the United States of America.

The Solitude

So here we are with little to do, safely ensconced in our homey paradise. I'm passing the time by still teaching - moved online starting this week, a method of lesson delivery I've successfully put off until . . . well, now. I've also spent time writing and editing. Editing the proof copy of a novel whose launch has been delayed because of the pandemic crisis. Seems it's a poor time to get everyone excited about reading a new book - unless it's a post-apocalyptic plague novel, of course. On that note, the novel I've just started is a post-apocalyptic plague novel. Checking the social media. Also, longer naps. Counting each day how many meals' worth of food I have left. And generally mulling over life.

In my erstwhile day job, I teach college students how to write, mostly for academic purposes but I also encourage creativity. Indeed, a lot of my effort is to encourage young writers that they can write and that what they write is worth writing. My favorite saying (which I though I coined although I've seen similar statements attributed to Hemingway and Benjamin Franklin) is this: "If it's not worth writing about, it's not worth doing." To that end, I often talk about my books, especially how I get the ideas and develop them into a full novel. Sure, a 500-word essay comparing high school with college is tough. But try inventing an intriguing adventure tale in a made-up universe featuring a cast of 20 characters, each with their own motivations and agendas, that goes to 233,000 words. Sorry, boasting again.

So as I lay about at the end of the summer, I pondered a little weak, a little weary, what exactly was my process. I was well into a new novel (the one that's been delayed) so I could examine how and what and why I did this and that. I matched events and ideas in the story with real things happening at that time and found several uncomfortable comparisons. It was (still is) what I would call a "crime thriller", or as close to one as I'm ever likely to write, and I knew how it began. One day a what-if question popped into my head. I'm not sure what caused that pop-in, but shortly after there were two mass shootings in Texas, about a week apart, which caught me viscerally. That was the idea I had for my just-started novel, so I was shocked and almost put away my writing effort.

Looking back more recently, I found the file where I just typed out a short "blurb" - enough to remember the idea for when I could have time to write it out and see where it went. From that "note to self" I knew the idea probably formed when I was planning for a friend to visit me from overseas, someone I had met and worked with in China the summer before. We met two summers before that when I was teaching a class at a university in Beijing. (You can scroll back through these many blog posts and find the details, if you're interested.) So the note went a little like this:

Foreign student scheduled to stay in US arrives just after wife & daughter die in drunk driver crash, so only the husband/father is host.

That premise seemed intriguing to me at the time, in the initial stages. The situation seemed awkward and rife with possibilities for exploration of many issues. At first, I imagined the wife and daughter being killed in a car wreck. Then the shootings happened. I changed the plot to have them killed in a mass shooting. Sorry. If you're a fellow writer, you understand; there's nothing personal in the decision, no attempt to exploit real events, no making coin off someone else's tragedy. In fact, those questions eventually are raised in the novel. 

Back to the process - the Writing Process (trumpets blare!). In class we spend a lot of time understanding where ideas come from. I give lots of examples from my own writing, academic papers included. Even a grocery shopping list starts from some idea, maybe what you need most urgently. Then you expand on that item. I didn't have enough corn chips to finish the guacamole, so chips is what goes on the list first. With stories, as Wordsworth (poetry comes from "the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility" - Lyrical Ballads, 1805) and T.S. Eliot (e.g., the analogy of the catalyst from "Tradition and the Individual Talent", 1922) have declared, it is a strange and unpredictable cross-pollination of disparate items that in the writer's mind become melded together as something entirely new. Half the time, this is how I get an idea for a novel. The other half of the time, I am told or directed to a particular idea and I work from that.

Last semester, I composed a set of steps in my personal writing process. Here is step 1:

An idea comes to me from somewhere, seems like an idea worth developing, so I think about it, maybe start some "test writing" and see where it goes. When I know it can be a good book-length story, I set up a file and think of the opening scene, type it out. I rarely outline or plan the whole story out, but I do think ahead chapter by chapter. After reading a lot and writing other books, I find I have a feel for the pace of a novel, the arcs of characters, and the place for certain things to happen. Usually before each day's fresh writing, I edit the previous chapter, then go straight into the fresh text.

Yes, it often seems that one-third of the entire effort is coming up with the right premise, the log-line of a fiction work, asking the best question which the novel when written will answer. I like to raise questions and take 100,000 words to answer them through a grand illustration.

More on The Process next time.


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(C) Copyright 2010-2020 by Stephen M. Swartz. All Rights Reserved. No part of this blog, whether text or image, may be used without me giving you written permission, except for brief excerpts that are accompanied by a link to this entire blog. Violators shall be written into novels as characters who are killed off. Serious violators shall be identified and dealt with according to the laws of the United States of America.

BETA Readers - Love'em or Loath'em?

This is actually Part 4 of The Mother of all Writing Processes series. 

We began with getting ideas and planning and organizing them. Then we discussed Drafting, followed by Revision. 

By revision, I meant what you would do on your own, before anyone else sees it. The second phase of revision is essentially to get someone else’s eyes on your writing. In the academic classroom we usually call this phase of the Writing Process the Peer Review. In the real world of fiction writers, we call this “sending my manuscript off to my beta readers” or similar declaration – typically with either a tone of delight and triumph or with a tone of derision for the necessary evil to which an author must submit.

Peer Review

In the composition classroom, I consider Peer Review one of the most useful activities beginning writers can do to learn how to improve their writing. My students, however, do not see it that way. Although they begrudgingly participate, most of them work with minimal effort through the process despite my detailed explanation of what they should do. No amount of exhortation seems able to convince them of the benefits of doing peer review. 

First of all, it's more than just proofreading a classmate's paper. I understand that they may lack confidence in what they have written and don’t want a classmate to see how poorly they write. I get that sometimes they write personal stuff and don't want anyone to read it. I know the classmate who reads their paper is “untrained” and no better at writing than the author is. Or, for others, there is the paper from the internet which would be discovered if it were shown during peer review.

I’ve found several ways to do Peer Review and I try to offer more than two ways during a semester, depending on what seems to work best for the group in the classroom.

• The simple exchange of papers between two students; they read each other’s papers.

• The small group round robin exchange, usually with 3 to 5 students; each author can get multiple feedback comments.

• The full class round robin; everyone passes to the right and passes again after 15 minutes or so.

• In my MFA program in fiction, we passed out our papers (short stories or novel chapters) in advance of the review session and classmates wrote detailed critiques to be given to the author, as well as having a full class discussion of the work; usually enough time for two or three works to be discussed in one class session.

The success of any method depends on how vested the participants are in their own success, success being measured by the amount of useful feedback a paper receives. In the MFA program, I’m sure sometimes a classmate or two felt less interested in giving the full effort. The same lack of effort comes in all the other methods. To first-year students, just “gettin’ ‘er done” is the goal and a quick skim and “I like it” seems to be enough to pass. It is not, of course. In some cases, I’ve provided a checklist or a list of questions to be answered as a way to force better reading and thinking about the papers they are reading.

Beta Readers

Those who have taken the pledge to write fiction to the best of their abilities and for the better part of their “free” time, do not usually share their work in a group unless it is through membership in a writer’s circle or similar club. Instead, they share their work with a special person known as a “beta reader.” I’ve always thought the term odd: Am I, the author, the alpha? or is the paying reader the alpha? I’ve joked about preferring Delta readers to Beta readers – or even a Gamma reader who could see right through my head to know exactly what I should have written in place of what I actually wrote. Either way, the test reader serves a primary and crucial function in a writer’s life.

Having stated the above as something like a fact, I must now confess hypocrisy. I do not send my manuscript to a beta reader. There are two reasons (not “excuses”!) for this, and by declaring my way of doing things I do not intend to discourage others from using a beta reader. I believe in their effectiveness given the right circumstances.

For me, the first reason is far more nefarious. As a young man in junior high school, I enjoyed writing science fiction stories, usually based on ideas I got from reading science fiction stories. In one class, we were encouraged to write every day, whatever we wanted to write. I started a serial called “The Adventures of Micro Man”: about a superhero who could shrink himself to get out of tight jams. The teacher liked my stories so much that I was asked to read them in front of the class. That was highly nerve-wracking. Even though everyone in class seemed to like this weekly “story hour” by me, as a budding introvert, it scared me to death. Furthermore, I was under pressure to write something exciting each week or my entire identity and reputation would be destroyed!

An even worse example, and perhaps the single most devastating criticism I have ever received – what finally caused me to clam up and never share my writing with anyone – came when I proudly shared my latest science fiction story with my father, a high school social studies teacher. After reading it, he gave the story pages back to me all marked up in red ink. He pointed out everything that was wrong with it. Nothing good was said about my story. Granted, I was a teenager and a beginning writer but I did my best and was proud of what I produced, willing to acknowledge I still needed to work on it, but . . . . Later, I came to understand his reading mantra, which I quoted when transforming him into a character in one of my novels: "There's no reason to read fiction because it's not true; why waste your time reading something that's not true?"

So there are my reasons for not using a beta reader. The other, current reason is a combination of two more factors. First, I’m rather timid when it comes to asking someone to read something I’ve created. I know it is imperfect – hence the request to test-read it – so it takes a special kind of friend, colleague, or fellow writer to accept the task. Finding someone who is both willing to read an imperfect text and who is also knowledgeable enough (writing conventions, spelling and grammar, etc.) is a challenge. Once found, a writer may rely on that sole beta reader forever. Nothing wrong with that, so long as the beta reader can be both objective and constructive – and not hold back the tough remarks.

One of many checklists on the internet. Or make your own.

Commitment. What the writer asks of the beta reader can impact the quality of the feedback. Is the beta reader merely reading as a surrogate “paying” reader just to see how the story flows, if it is engaging, if it hits the points the author wishes to make, or if it is even interesting? Or is the beta reader expected (assumed?) to be checking the sort of issues an editor would focus on? A beta reader may catch some typos or awkward sentences and point them out to the author, thereby acting partly as an editor. But if the text is not so interesting, has too many problems, perhaps the beta reader will not put as much effort into a good, solid reading as if the story were truly compelling. Friendship may require a friendly reading, too; one wishes to remain friends after the reading. It also takes a significant commitment of time to read and comment on a manuscript, especially if it is a novel of 100,000 words. Is money involved? or would that pollute the reading and commenting experience? That’s a lot to consider when arranging for a beta reading project.

As I stated above, I generally have not used a beta reader. There may be slaps on the wrist coming my way, but asking someone, even a friend (a friend may be the worst “test” reader!), to read something and tell me what he/she thinks of it is something from a list of worst ways to torture someone like me. However, due to the nature of the project, there have been manuscripts that received a reading prior to my final submission for publication.

Most recently, my novel A GIRL CALLED WOLF which was based on the life of a real person required me to share what I was writing with that person. I definitely needed her feedback to make sure I was telling her story the way it should be told. In this case, the beta reader was also the heroine of the story. (I blogged about that process here.)

Another novel of mine, A DRY PATCH OF SKIN, my so-called vampire story, was also based upon my real experiences and so I “let” the person read it who I had transformed into a major character in the book. I had to change a few things because of that “test” reading. In another case, A BEAUTIFUL CHILL was based partly on some real experiences and the real person who became one of the dual protagonists, so naturally I allowed her to read it. Neither readers of these two books were true beta readers; they were not expected to critique or edit anything, merely to have the chance to vent and rant about how they were portrayed in the novels.

Recently, a colleague of mine at Edgewise Words Inn asked me to “beta read” a short story. I thought to myself “Sure, I can do that” and immediately took a look at how long it was! No offense intended, but when time to write is limited, especially when you’ve invited the muses to visit and you’re sitting by your keyboard waiting for them to arrive, taking some of that time to read and critique a different work seems counterproductive. However, as a friend and colleague, I felt obligated to do my best. Fortunately, as I read it the story caught my interest. That made the process go more smoothly. In fact, reading this story and thinking how to make it better, marking it and writing comments to that effect, actually helped to call the muses to my own project. Reading . . . writing . . . two sides of the same coin!

Lastly, I must again confess something. I went to university to study English, Literature, Composition Theory, Linguistics, and Creative Writing. My day job is Professor of English. I teach students how to write . . . to a greater or lesser degree; every semester, every class group is a different ballgame, but I digress! Therefore, I’m supposedly trained in use of the English language. I write in different styles as fits the subject of the story. I know how to spell and use grammar correctly – correctly for the characters in the story. So it seems as though I should not need a beta reader. For technical matters, perhaps that’s true. However, every writer can use a different set of eyes on a manuscript. We become jaded and our eyes trick us, glossing over the error that sits on the page in plain sight. So I believe in the beta reader . . . but I have my reasons for not subjecting anyone to being one of mine.

Best of luck to you finding, nurturing, and keeping your lucky beta reader!

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(C) Copyright 2010-2016 by Stephen M. Swartz. All Rights Reserved. No part of this blog, whether text or image, may be used without me giving you written permission, except for brief excerpts that are accompanied by a link to this entire blog. Violators shall be written into novels as characters who are killed off. Serious violators shall be identified and dealt with according to the laws of the United States of America.

The Mother of All Writing Processes, Part 2

Remember that Writing Process thing from last week? 

First you get an idea, then you write it. Simple, isn't it? 

If you're writing an essay for a class, just follow the basic pattern that was outlined in ancient days by one cool Greek dude named Aristotle. That's right: he was so cool he only needed one name. His brilliant idea was that every speech (writing wasn't too cool back then but everyone liked speeches) had three parts: Beginning, Middle, and End. It's hard to believe now that nobody had thought of that until Aristotle did. Today we call those three parts: Introduction, Body, and Conclusion. Got it?


The reason there are three parts is because each part has a particular function. The Introduction introduces the subject of the essay or speech and sets up your audience to want to read (or listen, if it's a speech). The Body is where you present examples or other information that develops, explains, or illustrates the subject you are writing about (or speaking about). The Conclusion is the last part; it's where you summarize your idea, maybe ask people to do something, and wrap it up so your audience feels good.


The same is not true of fiction writing, however. The rules are made to be broken - which is the reason we teach the rules first (see above). Either way, the writing of the first ever text that comes out of your head is called the Draft. Sometimes people number them: first draft, second draft, and so on, just to make it seem as though they are working very hard!



Drafting

Above, I briefly described the kind of writing process that I push on students. To some extent it holds true for any writing task. Even for fiction. However, fiction is more delicate, more fragile, and the idea of a story is subject to so many more mini-steps than an academic essay. I would need to address "my" personal writing process in light of each book I've written in order to cover all of the situations, but that would require about a year's worth of blogging. I've described the "getting ideas" step previously. The next step, drafting, usually requires me to craft scenes. Rather than think of the entire story, I focus on one section at a time. I began using this approach while writing A BEAUTIFUL CHILL and I have employed the strategy ever since.

The one great thing I learned in my MFA Creative Writing program came from the visiting writer-in-residence he had one semester. David Huddle, who I'd never heard of prior to his arrival, taught the formula which I've come to call the Aria - Recitativo structure. I forget what he called it, but we read many examples of this two-pronged attack strategy. Rather than get bogged down thinking of the whole story, which could be overwhelming, we just focus on one scene. Then the next scene.

A scene is a moment in time, written and read in real time, moment by moment. Action happens in about the same time it takes to read it. Characters act, speak, live - which moves the story along. Between the scenes is what is called exposition. It is a compression of time and events, because they are not so interesting in themselves and they are of little consequence. It's the information we need to get to the next scene. We tell something to bridge the gap. We could say that the scene is the "showing" while the exposition is the "telling" part of the story.

So we have two parts of a story: the scenes and the exposition. In operatic terms, these are the Aria and the Recitativo. The Aria is a set-piece where the actors/singers stop the story and sing a song about how they feel or what the problem is or anything else that reveals something of the central issues of the story - separate from the story line itself. Then we move into Recitativo ("recitation"), which is simply the information we need to move us on to the next Aria. People don't go to an opera for the recitativo, nor do readers buy a book for the exposition passages. But the exposition parts are necessary for tying aria to aria and scene to scene.

Granted, this is a simplification of both the structure of an opera and the structure of a novel, but if you examine contemporary novels, you are likely to see this structure. I've also heard it said that this writing style, this system in particular, has come about in parallel with the film industry. Younger writers write prose as though they are seeing the action in a movie, which tends to be composed in scenes or set-pieces, much like in an opera. By the same token, readers, experienced with the shorter, more succinct and set narrative patterns of television and film, seem to prefer this structure, as well.

So that is the basic process of drafting for me. I seldom create a full outline but, rather, rough it ahead a few chapters or scenes at a time. For example, I need a scene to show X happening or a scene where Protagonist realizes Y or decides Z. Often I begin in the middle of a scene (that's the cool term known as "medias res"). I fill in what-happened-before as I go on with the scene. I try to avoid starting a scene with a setting description, at least not a long one. Knowing I have a tendency to wax poetic with wonderfully adroit metaphors, I try to keep the writing as lean as I can. Once in a while, especially where a character's emotions are revealed, I allow myself a worthwhile indulgence of verbosity. Editors hate me for that, of course.

At each writing session (when I have no particular schedule that would limit my effort), I begin by reading what I previously wrote and editing as appropriate. (That is actually part of the next step: revision.) That reading/editing activity gets me up to speed in the story and when I have arrived at the point where I stopped previously, I am ready to charge ahead into new scenes. Occasionally, I may awaken with a new scene already in my head and I will write it out before determining where it should go in the story. Sometimes, I awake and write the scene that is in my head without editing the previous section first. Sometimes, I just stare at the computer screen waiting for the muse to whisper into my ear. While waiting, I drink a lot of coffee.

I also like to play music which helps to set the mood of the scene or for the story in general. For example, as I wrote my vampire book, A DRY PATCH OF SKIN, I dared play music from the films of Twilight, although it did not cause me to borrow anything else. The music must be without English lyrics because the words in my ear distracts me from the words in my head. While I wrote Book III of THE DREAM LAND trilogy, I listened to a fine collection of "Epic" music, typical of video games and sci-fi films - selecting one or another which I believed fit the scene I was writing. (See a sample here.) 

For my latest book, A GIRL CALLED WOLF, which is set in the arctic, I searched for music which evoked the cold, windswept ice cap and rough mountain terrain. I found a selection on the album Miracles by popular music group Two Steps from Hell. This track ("Color the Sky") would open the movie of this story: soaring over the ice-filled sea, the bare crags of mountains, the thick ice cap, both beauty and starkness combined. Or, listen to this track  ("Northern Pastures") and imagine racing over through the snow on a dog sled, the green aurora waving over your head, icy wind blowing into your face, and you are a 12 year old orphan girl living alone, half fun and half fearful. A couple tracks actually changed the story a little because they conjured different scenes than what I originally had planned - just so I could play the song that went with the scene over and over. Not every track of the album fit the story, of course, but I drew from several sources to compile my own "soundtrack" playlist.

I tend to have two writing sessions: first thing in the morning and last thing at night. Mornings are good for editing or cobbling out a fresh scene straight from my dreams. It's also good for building on whatever I wrote previously. Night is best for fresh composition - providing I can get motivated. The irony is that I am usually exhausted physically and mentally before the words can come easily. Mornings, I tend to trudge zombie-like to the computer and start typing without too much "waking up" even as the coffee is being made. I'm really surprised how correct my typing is at that early hour; the more I awaken, the worse it gets. I think in both cases my filters are down and that allows unobstructed creation.  Darn Muses, always playing games with my head!

I write novels a lot more than anything else. I have written plenty of essays (or the upscale equivalent known as scholarly articles) and they tax my patience. The story, or the bundle of scenes in a novel, allow me much more free rein, which is what I enjoy. I pity my students writing essays about whatever interests them but the curriculum is set and I alone cannot change it much. If only they were writing stories of mystery and mayhem on misty moors....


NEXT WEEK: The Rules of Revision (or what to do after you are finished)


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(C) Copyright 2010-2016 by Stephen M. Swartz. All Rights Reserved. No part of this blog, whether text or image, may be used without me giving you written permission, except for brief excerpts that are accompanied by a link to this entire blog. Violators shall be written into novels as characters who are killed off. Serious violators shall be identified and dealt with according to the laws of the United States of America.