Looking for something else to do during the week? Boy have we got the opportunity for you!

So first, some bad news:

Ms. Stephanie Thornton and Mr. Bane of Anubis have elected to step down from their regular weekly contributions to the Archives. While we are sad to see them go, Mr. Delman and I are pushing forward and continuing the blog because we think we have something special here to share with you.

And now, the good news:

What this means is that we need two more regular weekly contributors! If you think you might be interested, email us at alliteratiarchives@gmail.com with why you think you'd be a good fit.

And as usual, if you want to do a guest post on a Friday, let us know!

Thanks for sticking around Alliteratus. Stick with us during this period of turmoil-- we promise there are neat things in store!

Slash and Burn, Blood and Gore

Okay, I've got more from you from Stephen Markley's Publish This Book. This one's all about editing, something I should be working on for Book #2, but my brain feels like overcooked oatmeal lately, so I'm taking a break.

Here's Markley's take on the process:

For two days, I tear through my work, silent, efficient, and blood-and-gore deadly. With my trusty red pen, I slash and burn prose, annihilate paragraphs, relocate whole sections, rebuild entire vanquished chapters from the ground up, only to machine-gun to death individual words and punctuation.

Editing may be my favorite part of writing. When you write the first draft, you spew, but when editing, you craft. It's the difference between walking up to a pretty girl in a bar and running your game and actually convincing the girl that you're interesting.


Markley sums it up quite nicely. Good luck with the slash and burn!

Publish This Book- Why Writers Are F'd Up

In case you're wondering if you're seeing double, I also posted this at my blog. I like the quote that much.



I just finished reading Stephen Markley's Publish This Book. Let's just say it's like Jon Stewart and the creators of South Park got together to write a book on publishing a book. And did drugs while they were at it.

Here's an excerpt (the first of a few):

And you wonder why writers become so fucked up- why they drink and shoot heroin and abuse their families and walk into rivers with rocks in their clothes. You can really only spend so much time with your own thoughts. You reach a point where you wonder if anything you have written is of any value at all to anyone other than yourself...

It's fairly simple math when you break it down, and this is true for anyone in the "arts": you, the artist, want people to like your shit. Sure, it's cool if a few people don't like your shit. Such is the way of things. But you need at least a few people to like it. Even Michael Bay has people who like his shit. You need someone other than yourself to give your piece of art a once-over, kick the tires, check under the hood and say, "All right. This has value. This deserves to exist."

Yep. What he said.

Live to Write

“I lived to write, and wrote to live.” -Samuel Rogers


I write every day. Now, by writing I mean anything that has to do with stringing a paragraph together or revising something I've already written. After all, we writers know that it's not the first draft that truly makes us a writer, but the 13th. (I say that because I just finished Draft #13 yesterday. I need a gold star or a brownie button as a reward. Or a parade. I like parades.)

When I don't write, life seems a little less colorful. This could be because I'm probably sick or so stressed about a project at work that I can't possibly take time to smell the roses. But there is a secret little thrill of finding inspiration in the mundane to include in one of my novels. It could just be a line of dialogue or a character sketch from someone at the McDonald's drive-through (true story!), but I feel like being a writer makes me notice the details in life I might have otherwise missed.

What about you? Does being a writer make your life more colorful? Do you live to write and write to live?

A Necessary Evil

I love editing.

Many of you know how much I detest first drafts, but I truly adore editing. Going over my own work with a red pen gives me a secret little thrill, coming up with a new sub-plot, or even better- finding just the right word to turn a phrase into a gem on the page. That's when I feel like a writer.

So with that said, I will now admit that I am not a fan of the first edit.

Ernest Hemingway once said, "The first draft of anything is shit." The man was right.

It's pretty painful to go through a first draft of anything and realize how far it needs to come before anyone is allowed to read it. A necessary evil.

So, where are you in the writing process? Slogging through the first draft of your first book? Putting the final spit polish on the manuscript before you query? Somewhere in between?

Who I Really Love

I'm in Greece right now (yay!) so you'll have to forgive the brief post. I've been thinking about protagonists a fair bit lately- most of the books I've put down in the last year have been set aside because I simply didn't care for the main character.

Several of these books are bestsellers so I know I'm probably in a lonely boat, but it makes me wonder which protagonists people really like. (Or don't.)

Here are some of my faves:

1. Scarlett O'Hara & Rhett Butler, Gone With the Wind
2. Katniss Everdeen, The Hunger Games
3. Percy Jackson, The Lightening Thief Series
4. Sayuri, Memoirs of a Geisha
5. Jamie Fraser, Outlander

Which main characters are your favorites?


And BTW, if you haven't entered my contest for a Barnes & Noble gift card and some fabulous Greek swag, you need to!

To Prologue or Not to Prologue

Since most of this week at the Secret Archives has been devoted to ranting, I thought I'd continue the trend. (I'm kind of a like a lemming sometimes.)

I like to follow the rules of writing most of the time. But I really enjoy breaking the rules on occasion. Like with fragments. I love a good fragment.

But the one rule it really hurt to follow was when I nixed my prologue. I know agents don't like prologues and I understand why (voice changes, story relevance, etc.), but I enjoy reading prologues. And I liked the prologue I chopped. A lot.

So now I'm curious. Have any of you chopped your prologues? Do you mind reading prologues in published novels?

Dishing on Non-Fiction

It's time for an informal poll.

We talk about fiction a lot, but rarely discuss non-fiction. So I want to know- how much non-fiction do you read? Memoir, self-help, history, current events, whatever.

Here's my non-fiction list so far this year:

1. Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert (Loved this- read it in two days!)
2. Judgement of the Pharaoh: Crime and Punishment in Ancient Egypt by Joyce Tyldesley (Read this in two days as well- needed it for both WIP's.)
3. John Adams by David McCullough (Hefty, but well-worth it! And yes, this is the book HBO based their series on.)
4. Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America by Douglas Brinkley (Been at this one a while now- it's good, but 1000+ pages.)

So you tell me: how often do you crack open non-fiction? Any you'd recommend?

Revising Scenes or Attack of the Alpacas

Today's lesson from Jack Bickham's Scene and Structure is on revising scenes for maximum effect. Essentially, everything you do when you revise must keep the story on track and serve to move the story forward.

1. The goal of each scene must clearly relate to the story question in some way. (I must see the relevance of introducing these angry, spitting alpacas.)

2. The conflict must be about the goal. (That's right, we were trying to trek to Machu Picchu when we realized these alpacas weren't the friendly variety.)

3. The conflict must be with another person or persons, not internally, with oneself. (If I spend ten pages inside the guide's head worrying about whether he'll get fired for not securing cute, fuzzy llamas ahead of time my reader will end up snoring.)

4. Once a viewpoint has been established and that viewpoint character's problem and goal have been stated, it's wise to remain with that same single viewpoint through the disaster. (In other words, don't switch from the guide's POV to the alpaca's. That would just be silly.)

5. Disaster works (moves the story forward) by seeming to move the central figure further back from his goal, leaving him in worse trouble than he was before the scene started. (Yes, the alpacas allowed everyone to mount, but then took off running in the wrong direction after leaving the supplies behind.)

6. Readers will put up with a lot if your scenes only keep making things worse! (First the alpacas spit in the adventurers' faces, but then they dropped one of the men down a ravine. Then bandits appeared and demanded everyone's money. And bananas.)

7. You can seldom, if ever plan, write, or revise a scene in isolation of your other plans for the story, because the end of each scene dictates a lot about what can happen later. (If the conflict is whether the expedition will reach Machu Picchu and then there's a scene about saving a local village from an attack of killer clowns, you've lost your audience.)

Yeah, you know I had to put the clowns in there somewhere.

Are there any of these rules that you break? I'll admit that I've allowed my protagonists some down time to enjoy life, but that only serves to heighten the tension when I yank it all away from them. I've also jumped to another person's POV to finish a scene to show it from a different angle, but now I'm rethinking that one.

What about you?

Conflict & Doughnuts

There are a million things writers need to worry about when revising a manuscript. Scratch that. There are a GAZILLION things we have to stress about.

1. Plot
2. Characterization
3. Typos
4. Dialogue
5. Setting
6. Blah, blah, blah

So you've got what you think is a great novel. But maybe you only think it's great. Maybe it's a long slog that puts people to sleep and makes them wish they were reading a trigonometry textbook instead.

That's a problem.

Today I was reading Scene and Structure by Jack Bickham. (Yes, again.) One of the very first chapters talks about conflict. We all know we need conflict in our stories, but have you ever gone back to each scene to see if you're increasing conflict?

You should.

Bickham says each scene must have the following:

1. A goal. Stephanie needs to go to Egypt to research Hatshepsut's temple.
2. Introduction or development of conflict. Stephanie is a starving college student (thank goodness I'm not anymore) and can't afford to pay for the trip.
3. A tactical DISASTER, a failure to reach the goal. Stephanie starts panhandling on the street, but people only give her doughnuts and EgyptAir won't accept doughnuts as currency, no matter how much chocolate they have slathered on them.

DUN DUH DUH!

Your protagonist should end each scene worse off than where he/she started. Otherwise, you've decreased conflict and now your reader doesn't care about the story anymore.

Now, Bickham cautions against making the goals too small or too large, but that's a post for another time. If you're revising, have you checked to make sure each of your scenes contains the necessary ingredients?

Oh My Gosh! My Scene Is RUINED!

So I'm loving Jack Bickham's Scene and Structure. I'm not reading it cover to cover, but instead using the open-a-random-page-and-learn-something-new method. Today I opened to Chapter 10: Common Errors in Scenes & How to Fix Them.

Here's Bickham's list of all the things that could potentially go wrong in your scenes. (Note: It kind of reminds me of all the things that can happen to humans to kill or maim us. It's really surprising any of us make it to adulthood. Or that any novels are error-free.)

1. Too many people in the scene. (Mary, Margaret, Madge, Marge, Bob, Bill, Will, and Lakwanjala the Killer Clown all went into the costume store.)
2. Cicularity of argument. (Did not! Did so! Did not! Did so! Yawn.)
3. Unwanted interruptions. (The phone rang. So? It makes it more like real life, but I'm reading a book. I don't want real life.)
4. Getting off the track. (Oops. I just wrote four pages that has nothing to do with the conflict of the killer clowns. But I know you wanted to know the exact layout of the costume store.)
5. Inadvertent summary. (And then Jeff thought to himself, "This really sucks that the clown costume isn't at the store. Poor Billy will be so sad. In fact, the tantrum he's throwing now shows how sad he is.")
6. Loss of viewpoint. (Whose head am I in now?)
7. Forgotten scene goal. (Why am I here again?)
8. Unmotivated opposition. (The killer clown is being nasty just to be nasty. It's easier this way.)
9. Illogical disagreement. (You don't want Billy to be a clown for Halloween because you don't like cucumbers?)
10. Unfair odds. (The killer clowns have knifes, revolvers, exploding nose grenades AND will tickle me to death? ACK!)
11. Overblown internalizations. (I am going to think to myself just how awful these clowns are until the reader can't take it anymore.)
12. Not enough at stake. (Tell me why I care. I don't.)
13. Inadvertent red herrings. (It wasn't the clowns- it was the butler! Follow the butler with the bloody knife!)
14. Phony, contrived disasters. (Ack! Killer clowns attacked just as an earthquake hit and a place crashed too!)


Whew! Okay, so Bickham says we rarely make more than one of these mistakes per scene. Have you ever made any of these mistakes? (Maybe not with killer clowns.) Or read a book with one that made you groan out loud?

Summer, How I Love Thee

Today I sat outside, enjoying a BBQ in the sunshine. I love summer. There's nothing better than lazy days in my garden or fresh tomatoes from the greenhouse.

I also love summer because I'm out of school. That translates to more writing time. The rest of the year I'm typically exhausted and in the long, dark days of winter I really just want to hibernate and eat cookies. I have to force myself to write and keep my daily writing goals low: 250-500 words a day. I envy those of you who NaNoWriMo. I just don't have it in me that time of year.

But summer means I can stay up until midnight and it's still light out (I'm in Alaska). I don't get tired until it gets dark and have oodles of extra time to think about plots and research the nitty-gritty stuff I need to weave into my WIP. Suffice to say, I can get a lot done.

So I'm curious. Is this just a weird Alaska phenomenon? Or perhaps it's a teacher thing? You tell me: do you feel more productive in the summer? Or is there another time of year you get more writing done?

Terrifying

I'm currently reading Traveling With Pomegranates by Sue Monk Kidd and Ann Kidd Taylor. The book is nonfiction- a mother/daughter account of writing and traveling. The first part of the book takes place before Kidd published Secret Life of Bees. I've only read a few pages, but already this passage jumped out at me:


I felt like my writing had gone to seed. A strange fallowness had set in. I could not seem to write in the same way. I felt I'd come to some conclusion in my creative life and something new wanted to break through. I had crazy intimations about writing a novel, about which I knew more or less nothing. Frankly, the whole thing terrified me.


I think most of us start off our novel writing knowing virtually nothing about the craft. And looking back, beginning the endeavor was terrifying. In fact, staring at the first blank page as I began my second book was also pretty petrifying. I'm sure I'll feel the same way when I start Book #3.

What about you? Was starting your novel terrifying? Or is another stage of the process scarier? Querying? Finally seeing your book on the shelf?

I've Heard This Before

There are no new stories.

Bad news for those of us who write novels, right? Sort of. There may not be any new stories, but there are always new ways to spin that story. Boy meets girl. Good triumphs over evil. Yadda, yadda, yadda.

Today I started a new book that distinctly reminded me of a book I beta-ed for someone. I've read blog posts written by authors bemoaning the fact that the newest YA release is the exact same plot they just finished. I've written a novel about Hatshepsut- Egypt's coolest Pharaoh- who, it turns out, there are two books already written about.

After millennia of human existence, there's just no new material out there. But that's fine and dandy because humans still want to hear those stories. We want to see the bad guy fall, experience true love's first kiss, and figure out who the murderer is. You just have to torque the plot a bit, toss in the unexpected on occasion, and tell it in a voice that makes the reader want to keep turning the pages.

If we work hard enough, I like to think we can all do that.

What's the story you're telling? What books (or maybe even movies) have the same kind of feel to yours?

Lists!

I like lists. I like checking boxes because it makes me feel like I've accomplished something. And I like how lists make everything nice and organized.

Chaos=Bad. Order=Good.

So here's a handy checklist from Jack M. Bickham's Scene and Structure regarding Planning and Revising Scenes for Maximum Effect. This is only part of his full list (there are 12 items in the book), but I thought they were helpful reminders for those of us who like lists.

1. Make sure the stated scene goal is clearly relevant to the story question. Spell it out.

2. Show clearly that the viewpoint character considers the scene as vitally important. Never allow a lead character to enter a scene with a lackadaisical (my all-time favorite word!) attitude.

3. Make sure you have provided enough background for the opposition character- or have him state enough motivation from the outset- to justify his opposition to the lead character in the scene. Don't just have someone be antagonistic on general principles!

And my favorite (which is actually #6 on the list):

In searching for you scene-ending disaster, don't always grab the first idea that comes to your mind. Your reader will be guessing along with you, and you don't want him to outguess you and anticipate the disaster before you give it to him. Chances are that if you made a list of six or eight possible disasters that would work, one of them well down the list from your first idea would be fresher, brighter, worse for the lead character- and not predicable by the reader. You always want the reader guessing!


That last one is my favorite because I recall reading something similar from Sue Monk Kidd (author of Secret Life of Bees). I'm paraphrasing, but she said that people are always told to go with their gut. But when you're writing you'll usually have better luck with your third (or so) idea for just the reason that Bickham pointed out above.

So what about you? Do you go with your first plot idea most of the time or do you go with an idea further down the list?

Presto, Change-O!

Life is fast. Super fast. So fast that no one wants to slow down to read a tome like War and Peace anymore. Poll your average high school student about their take on Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, or The Great Gatsby. Their response? Blecch. They'd rather read Twilight and Harry Potter.

There are some obvious reasons for this, but according to Jack Bickham in Scene and Structure, readers today want condensation, speed, and punch. And they want it yesterday.

Bickham states that writers need to pick a late starting point and an early ending point to keep readers interested in the story. Why?

1. Readers are fascinated and threatened by a significant change.
2. Readers want the story to start with a change.
3. Readers want to have a story question to worry about.
4. Readers want the story question answered in the story ending.
5. Readers will quickly lose patience with everything but the material that relates to the story question.


Essentially, there's a change and a question. Humans don't like change. In fact, most of us avoid it like a case of septicemic plague (bad stuff, trust me). That's why it's so intriguing to read about.

And if there's no question, there's no book. The girl's already got the guy? Boring. We already know how the body got in the trunk? Yawn.


What about your MS? Do you have a question? Is there change at the beginning of your story?

Cause & Effect

I'm on to a new writing book this week, one recommended by Gary Corby. Scene and Structure by Jack Bickham is full of all sorts of writerly advice and since I'm a teacher and firm believer that we don't remember much unless we less teach it, I've got a little lesson for you today on Cause and Effect.

According to Bickham, fiction must make more sense than real life. If it doesn't, the reader isn't going to buy into it. How many times have you read a book and thought, "Oh yeah, isn't it a nice coincidence that the vampire hunter just happened to bump into the evil vampire henchman at the grocery store so he could chop off his head?"

Okay, maybe that's a bad example.

Point is, you can't use the easy way out when you write. I distinctly recall a YA novel I read a while back where the heroine and her boyfriend went to fight the bad guy at the end. The boyfriend went into the school and told her to stay in the car. After a while, the girl went in after him, found the bad guy, and beat him. The boyfriend had just disappeared for half an hour in an easy ploy to let the heroine kick the protagonist's eternal tush.

I was not impressed.

The example Bickman uses is having a character fall ill. While this could happen suddenly and without reason in real life, it will feel like a cheap trick if it happens in a novel. The writer needs to give cues that this character is ill before he kicks the bucket.

Truth is stranger than fiction. Heck, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams both died on the 50th Anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. But that doesn't mean a reader would have bought that if they were reading a novel about the Revolution.

Unplugging- Does It Work?

Right now I'm making my first attempt to unplug from my own blog, just for a few days. The only other time I've been away from my blog is when I was on vacation, and then I had pre-set posts.

Why attempt such madness?

As discussed here at the Archives all week, social networking has a lot of benefits, but it also takes a fair bit of time. When real life gets hectic, something has to give. And I'd rather give up a few days of blogging than forget to feed my daughter or dissolve into a puddle of quivering goo from too much stress. I'd also like to get some work done on my WIP.



I know some of you unplug a certain week every month, or maintain a not-every-weekday blog schedule. So now I'm asking you- do you think it helps? Do you actually get more writing done or do you find other ways to procrastinate?

The End

Today we're going to talk about endings.

I'm currently writing Book #2 and it was totally inspired by its ending. I have some leeway in how exactly I want the end to turn out, but Herodotus supplied me with a pretty killer finish that was pretty hard to pass up. So I didn't.

According to James Scott Bell, author of Plot and Structure, and ending should do the following:

1. Tie up all loose ends.

There's almost nothing worse than an ending where you're still left wondering what happened to the smoking gun or the body of the chainsmoking transexual. I once read a quote that said roughly, "If there's a smoking gun in a book, it better go off."

2. Give a feeling of resonance.

The best endings have me thinking for a long time after I close the book. Life of Pi, The Time Traveler's Wife, and Jude the Obscure all have endings that I'll never forget. The story should mean something in the larger sense. Maybe you don't know what that is when you first set out to write, but by the time the book hits the shelves there's hopefully something for the reader to take with them.


So, which endings in books have hit home for you? How do endings fit into your writing?

Marathon Middles

Okay, last week we talked about beginnings. So now we're going to talk about bananas.

Ha ha! Just kidding! On to MIDDLES!.

I'm currently slogging through the middle of the middle of Book #2 right now. It's like the scene in the swamp on The Princess Bride, except without the killer rats. Because that would be super cool. (Except that they didn't have killer rats in ancient Egypt.)



According to James Bell Scott, author of Plot and Structure, the middle of a novel is the confrontation. He says the middle should:

1. Deepen character relationships.
2. Keep us caring about what happens.
3. Set up the final battle that will wrap things up in the end.

This can be done by weaving together subplots and setting up battles between the protagonist and antagonist. I think my problem with middles is that I always know the beginning and end of the story, but I'm not sure how to connect those dots. So the middles of my first draft drag. I'm talking like I-Just-Ran-Two-Marathons-And-Now-You-Want-Me-To-Go-Hike-Up-A-Mountain Drag. (Not that I've ever experienced that, but whatever.)

So, what do you do to keep your middles snappy? Do you have to edit your middles a lot or are they the least of your troubles?