The Very First Paragraph

The Very First Paragraph (c. 2021 by Alicia Rasley)

In my years of evaluating manuscripts, I noticed the most common big mistake in scene openings is a lack of focus that results in confusion. I’ve read a lot of first pages where I’m exhausted just from trying to keep track of the names of nine characters and make sense of the situation, the people, the setting, the action, and the thoughts. Look, the purpose of the first paragraph isn’t to tell everything needed to understand the book. It’s just to get us to read the second paragraph.

But we probably won’t read on if the first paragraph reads like this:

Aaron Cathcart ran his hand through his sweaty hair, gazed up at the Porter mansion on the hill, where it sat foreboding and grim against a dark sky, and began trudging up the gravel driveway towards the marble front steps. He remembered what it was like in high school, delivering flower arrangements to places like this. Along the way he passed a jasmine bush, and the pungent smell assaulted his nose. On either side of the door were footmen in the blue and purple Porter livery, and as he approached, they moved in unison to open the great oak doors so he could enter the hall.

Reading that, I’ve learned exactly one important thing—a character’s name. Sure, I know there’s a mansion, and it apparently belongs to the Porters, and they’re rich enough to afford footmen. But I don’t care, because I don’t know if they matter to Aaron or if he just wants to use the phone to call the auto club.

The Scary Porter Mansion

Two things to remember about your scene opening: First, think of the opening as posing a question somehow that will tempt the reader into reading more. For example, the opening to a scene of Shirley Jackson’s famous short story “The Lottery” poses the question, “What is this lottery they’re gathering for?”

 So the opening to Aaron’s scene could pose the question, “What’s he afraid he’ll find here?” or “Why is he entering the house of his enemy?” But the question has to be relevant to the story. Think about what question you want the reader to ask, and see if you can set that question up with the first few paragraphs.

Second, focus the opening. You simply can’t get everything in there, the setting, the characters, the situation, the backstory, and you end up leaving out important stuff like the conflict. Don’t even try to be comprehensive here, or you’ll just confuse. Think about one thing you want to introduce. But make it important. Think about starting with the character in some conflict. Aaron Cathcart stared up at the Porter mansion on the hill. That was the last place he wanted to go, and the Porters were the last people he wanted to ask for help. And if it wasn’t for the lady unconscious in his stalled car, he’d walk the two miles to the next town. But he had no choice, if he was going to save her life. - Conflict! --

Or maybe you want to start with character: Aaron Cathcart never asked for help. Nope, not now, not ever. He could take care of himself. That's what he had in place of religion, a stony self-sufficiency. And this afternoon, if he had any choice in the matter, he’d walk away, down the hill and away from his stalled car. But he didn’t have any choice, because he didn’t have the right to let the lady die for his principles. --

Or you could start with setting: The Porter mansion stood grim on a barren hill, the ugliest site in this pretty county. It had a sort of grotesque pride up there, surrounded by a gravel drive and a flat expanse of lawn, the gray tiles of the roof blank against the dark sky. No one could want to be there, and yet the Porter family had lived there for decades, when they could surely afford something else.

-- But focus on something. Don’t try to get everything into the first paragraph. After all, the whole point is to get the reader to read the second paragraph, where presumably will be other important information happening.

If you’re interested in learning more about how to build bolder scenes, I’m creating a great course! You can sign up to receive more information about the course when it’s ready for enrollment. (No obligation! This will just send an announcement to you.)

Click on the icon to for the sign-up form.

Passive Voice Is Used by Authors, Isn’t It? I Mean, Authors Use Passive Voice, Right?

Passive Voice Is Used by Authors, Isn’t It? I Mean, Authors Use Passive Voice, Right?

It’s finals week at my university, so I’m fielding lots of grammar and sentence questions from computer science and marketing students. And here’s one that is also relevant to fiction writers too—what constitutes passive voice?

Passive voice is a sentence construction  where the object of the action is in the subject position:

• Subject is usually what commits the action (Paul, the hitter).

• Verb or predicate is usually the action (hit).

• Object is usually what the action is committed on (the ball).

• (This is the usual construction for English sentences, as “SVO”—subject-verb-object.)

So an active order sentence is: Paul (subject) hit (verb) the ball (object).

Most of our sentences will be (or should be) in active voice, because most stories are about people like Paul DOING things like hitting the ball. Active voice reflects active characters doing action.

However, we might find ourselves using passive voice (and there are some ”legal” reasons to do this- more on that later).
Passive order is: The ball (object) was hit (verb) by Paul (subject).
Or just:
     The ball was hit over the fence.
Or:
     The ball would be found later in the ditch behind the park.
 
The problem with passive voice is that it obscures or minimizes the “subject” (the one that DOES). That’s a problem when who commits the action is important. Imagine a sportswriter summarizing the third inning of a World Series game: “Then the ball was hit over the fence.”
Well, every sports fan would ask, “WHO HIT THE BALL????”

However, in the last sentence:
          =The ball would be found later in the ditch behind the park.
… most sports fans wouldn’t be particularly interested in WHO FOUND THE BALL? What was important was that it was hit so far that it wouldn’t be found till later.

Point is—Usually it’s important who or what is responsible for doing something… but not always.

Well, you might be asking, “So then what’s wrong with The ball was hit by Paul? After all, that is passive, but it identifies the hitter.”  That’s true, but when we go passive with a sentence like that, we’re giving up the advantage of telling what’s important, and generally what’s important should go early in the sentence. Paul is important, the ball much less so.

Let’s go with a more interesting example than Paul and the ball!

As I was revising the McGuffin blog post, realized I’d used a passive sentence: The  feud is only mentioned a couple times. I instinctively “went passive” because I was referring to the story mentioning it, or the writers… no one specific. So the feud was more important, and I started with that.

Then I revised the sentence before to mention “the two guys” who are seeking the McGuffin that was the solution to the feud. Suddenly there were actual subjects who were doing the mentioning, so I revised it to: They mention the feud only a couple times.

Let’s try a couple examples that show some aspect of passive voice.

First: “WAS” doesn’t make it passive.
         - She was painting her nails blue.  THIS IS NOT PASSIVE!

Some writers have been trained to look for the word “was” and assume that makes the sentence passive. But as with so common words in English, “was” does double duty. It can indeed be part of a verb in a passive sentence: The document was probably forged, to judge by the carefully drawn signature.

But in the blue nails example, “was” is part of a past progressive word. “Was” signifies the action happened in the past, and the “-ing” is the progressive marker indicating that this painting was an ongoing action. Usually we use the progressive form of a verb when the action is interrupted, like:
She was painting her nails blue when the fire alarm rang.
She was painting her nails blue, but she ran out of polish halfway through and had to switch to green.

But these are all “active” sentences, because “she” is the subject, and she’s the one doing the painting. The passive construction would be:  The nails were painted blue by her. This is passive because the object (the nails) is put in that first position where the subject usually is.

Second, “was” isn’t the only way to make a verb passive. Almost any auxiliary verb (the helpers—must, might, can, could, would, should) can “passivate” a sentence. (Hey, if we can ‘activate’ a sentence, why can’t we passivate it?)
      Victory could be snatched from our grasp!
      Students cannot be drug-tested without cause.
 
Finally, I do want to stress that passive voice isn’t “illegal”. It’s often inappropriate, and often saps the energy out your prose and your story. But there are several circumstances where passive voice is inevitable and even appropriate—when for a good reason you want to put the emphasis on what was affected by this event or action.  Let’s look at a few examples of "good passive"-

Passive works when the "who" is unknown:
The bank was robbed this weekend. (We don't know who robbed it; we just know it was robbed and when.)

Or the "who" is irrelevant:
Mrs. Ralston was buried Thursday.  (We don't really care who dug the grave.)

Or you don’t want to “assign blame”:
This bill must have been forgotten for it hasn’t been paid. (I don’t want to accuse a good customer of stiffing me.)

Or this is a general trend and you don't want to focus on any one person or group:
Nature imagery in TV ads is associated with health and energy. (You might not want to say, "Real estate ads are using nature imagery in TV ads" if it's really more widespread than just real estate.)

So read over your sentences and look for instances of passive voice. Can you identify the “true subject”—the who or what that does the action? Experiment with putting that in front of the verb and the object after. Strive to make the sentence mean what you want, but also FEEL how you want, and that usually be active and vital. But sometimes you  will want to soften and hedge, and in that case, the passive construction is a good tool in your sentence toolbox.

I find this page does a good job with laying out the basic parts of speech and sentence construction.

Parts of Speech | Grammar | EnglishClub  https://www.englishclub.com › grammar › parts-of-speech

 If you come across some knotty sentence problem, feel free to ask me to try to untie it!

  Here’s an interesting review of the new Little Women film, where Jo’s writing of the book that becomes Little Women is the central metaphor. The review explains this “metafictional” plot structure and how it uses the motif of the book cover to “frame” the story:
Even more than the novel, Gerwig’s adaptation functions as a piece of metafiction—or, to be more precise, a poioumenon, the rhetorical term for a work of art that tells the story of its own making. The leather-bound edition of Little Women that serves as the movie’s opening title, its red leather cover stamped in gold with the name “L.M. Alcott,” reappears in identical form at the end—all except for the name, which has become “J.M. March.” https://slate.com/culture/2019/12/little-women-review-2019-movie-adaptation-greta-gerwig.html 

Here's a site that lists "Editors for First Fiction"-- editors who have recently bought first books.
http://www.bookmarket.com/newnovels.html
 
plotblueprint@gmail.com
 

Alicia

Norman Rockwell: Triple Self-Portrait
(a man painting himself painting himself)

Are you really sensitive about sentences?

I am. I love to revise sentences. It's my favorite writing task, actually. So I want to kind of record the ways I revise, the issues I encounter. Warning, this category of the blog is going to be seriously word-nerdy. Let me know if you want something explained more. I tend to go into great depth, but if you stick with me, you'll see how an editor edits.

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Mistakes Amateurs Make when Submitting to Editors and Agents (don't do these).

Top Five Mistakes Authors Make in Proposals to Editors and Agents-  

Hard-earned advice from

Alicia Rasley (veteran of the submission wars)

Let me start off with a dirty little secret: When you submit a proposal to editors or agents, you can't assume they'll read past the first page—or read it at all before passing it on to an assistant. I know, I know. It's not fair, etc. But let’s get real. They're really busy, and they have dozens, perhaps hundreds, perhaps thousands (!) of submissions a year. And their primary task in sorting through that slushpile is to reject most of the submissions, so that they can go back to their real work (with the manuscripts they've already accepted).

Your job in submitting the proposal is to keep from giving them a reason to reject you quickly. You want the editor or agent to read through the whole proposal and ask for more, right?

(A proposal for fiction is usually:

Cover letter introducing yourself and the story,

short synopsis (story outline),

first three chapters of the story--

but it's actually whatever they ask for in their guidelines.)

So here are the Top Five Mistakes that you might want to avoid:

1.      Typos. (I know, boring… but true. Every typo you make, the editor will have to edit away.)

2.      Coming across as crazy or obsessed. (Seriously… editors and agents like to avoid crazy. I know you’re not crazy, so don’t hint at it in your proposal!)

3.      A confusing or boring synopsis (the story outline). The editor might not read your beautifully written chapters, if the synopsis is confusing.

4.      Unfocused “all over the block” opening paragraphs.

5.      Limping to a conclusion at the end of third chapter.

 Let’s get on with the amplification and explanation on those mistakes! And let me know if you have other ideas for “Marks of the Amateur” or “Manuscript Mistakes that Get Instant Rejections.”

1. Typos, especially in the cover or query letter, and mechanical errors in the first page of the synopsis and chapters. I can hear you groaning. You KNOW this, right? You don't need to be told, right? Then why, I ask you, have I seen so many submissions and contest entries with the sort of errors that make me cringe? I know, I know, those careless clueless submitters are not you. Agreed. But we don't know what we don't know, so if you're getting very quick rejections, you might go over your proposal word by word to make sure that you haven't got "Big Name Publishing Comporation" in the address heading of your coverpage, or "Napolean" seventeen times in your Napoleonic-era spy story. Typos jump right out and attack the eyes of editors and agents, and you don't want to cause that kind of anguish.

Typos aren't the only mechanical errors that make an editor or agent send a quick no. I've started keeping a list of what we call "the marks of the amateur," which clue editors in quickly to the "not ready for prime-timeness" of this submitter. That's mean, isn't it? But it's reality. So if you don't want to be typed as an amateur, it might help to find out what makes an editor brand a submission as from a newbie. For me, it's dialogue punctuation. I figure that if a writer has been reading for twenty or thirty years and have never noticed that there's a comma between the "she said" and the quotation mark, your editor might have to spend a lot of unpaid time teaching the basics.

For a friend of mine who has served her time as an agent's assistant (reading hundreds of manuscripts, 99.9% of which she was supposed to divert – read "reject"-- before they got to the agent), the primary "mark of an amateur" comes when the author uses the character name in every sentence. "There's a reason they invented pronouns!" she points out. Her boss is famous for her sensitive "ear" for the melody and rhythm of prose, and nothing is as discordant as a constant repetition of a name.

Probably all editors and agents have their own "marks", whether they share them or not. How do you find out what they are? Well, first I'd suggest asking the editor or agent. They might have a blog or posted podcasts or interviews. Send a question (anonymous if you think best) which says, "What mechanical error in a submission clues you in that this isn't an accomplished stylist?"

A few typos, even a couple grammar errors, will probably get by. But don't count on it. Just remember that an editor especially has to look forward to editing this book, and if there's a recurrent error in the first few pages, she's got to consider how much time it will take to fix every single dialogue passage, or switch out 90% of the hero's name checks with "he and him and his." You don't want the editor's dominant impression upon reading your proposal to be, "Life is too short."

2. The second mistake to avoid is coming across as crazy or obsessed, especially in the cover letter but also in the synopsis. While not every writer is crazy, I suspect just about every crazy person wants to be a writer, and their submissions slush up slushpiles. Most will get dinged because of mistake #1, but if they happen to be a very controlled obsessive, they might do everything right mechanically. Still the obsession will generally leak through in the cover letter, and if you're not actually crazy, you don't want to have the editor taking your impassioned and yet well-reasoned defense of the electoral college system as a signal that you are… a crank.

Just remember that your cover letter is about your story, and your story is about the characters and what happens to them. Whatever obsession you have might have fueled the writing, and that's good. But keep the focus on the story, not your pet project.

This is about the story. This isn't about your life or your passion or your obsession. Of course, what has made you you will come out in your voice, story choice, and characters, but let those do the talking for you.

Another “obsession” to avoid is fixating on the (very unlikely) prospect of the editor or agent stealing your work. (Submit only to reputable professionals, and you will reduce this possibility to near-zero.) Editors and agents don’t make a career of stealing work. They make their career by helping authors get their books out there for sale. And they’re understandably annoyed when an author warns them against “plagiarism” in the cover letter, or – this is the big tip-off—goes to the trouble of formally copyrighting the story.  Your work is your work, and copyrighted by common law, even if you never register the copyright. That is, as soon as you set your story down in ink or pixels, it’s yours, and no one can steal it legally. Here’s an article explaining informal and formal copyrighting.

A formal copyright is not only a mark of the dreaded “obsession”, but a real hassle, as a copyright once recorded with the US Copyright Office is difficult to change and update. The standard practice is that when a work is to be published, the publisher will register the work in the author’s name—with the copyright year set as the year of publication. No publisher wants to have to put an old copyright (with an earlier year) on the copyright page.

So—submit only to reputable professionals—publishers, editors, and agents. And don’t go to the trouble and expense of copyrighting an unpublished work you mean to submit.

You don’t want to start a relationship with an editor or agent with the implied threat of a future lawsuit!

3. Avoid the confusing and/or boring synopsis. Well, first, let me say that you don't know whether the editor or agent will read your synopsis first or your chapters first. There isn't any rule. I always tended to scan the synopsis quickly, just to make sure it's the sort of book my publisher would publish. If it's not, I'll send a quick rejection saying just that.

(Don't bother to send it if it's not the sort of thing this publisher publishes. The editor won't care if it's the second coming of Harry Potter—“If we don't publish children's books, we're not likely to change our whole business and marketing plan for your book. Or maybe we will, but trust me, I'm not the one you need to talk to if you want that. WAY above my pay-grade. Go over my head and submit right to the publisher.”)

Some editors, even if they aren’t impressed with the synopsis, will still read the chapters. Plenty of great book writers are bad synopsis writers. However, a bad synopsis could derail your proposal if this editor doesn't make it to your book. So don't assume that the editor or agent will set aside an incoherent synopsis and judge just on the chapters. Make the synopsis as good as you can, given the length requirements.

Oh, right, I was supposed to be talking about mistakes to avoid. Well, the mistake is thinking that the synopsis is a summary of the PLOT. It should in fact be a summary of the STORY. What's the difference? Well, what's the difference between this:

Sheet music for Ave Maria

and this:
Pavarotti singing Ave Maria

The story is more than what happens. It's the journey of the characters, the emotion they experience, the theme and voice. All that should show up in your synopsis in some way. If this is a funny story, the synopsis should have humor. If the characters go through psychological agony, the synopsis should explore a bit of that.

I am aware, having written many of these damned things, that a synopsis is hard to get right. But having read even more of these damned things, I can tell you this: You will NOT write a good synopsis if you start with plot. I can just about guarantee this. The simplest plot sounds convoluted and tedious when you tell event and then event and then event. And if you have a truly complex plot? Well, the editor or agent is going to get lost once you decide your job here is to give a detailed map of the labyrinth.

So you might be asking, what do you write about if not what happens? You write about the situation (the small southern town "invaded" by freedom-riders in 1963) and you write about the characters (the African-American girl who has to integrate the high school, the politely racist shop-owner who finds himself throwing rocks at her the first day of school, the college student from the North who joined the freedom-ride because he wanted to impress a liberal girlfriend).

You write about how things change, and yes, you'll probably talk some about the plot events because they show the changing. But if you start your writing with the plot events, you'll never get beyond that, and your synopsis will likely be as excruciating to read as it was to write. "This happened, then that happened"—that's the worst model for a synopsis, and yet most of them start there. Don't. Don't try to revise a bad synopsis. Start over, and this time, tell us about the characters and the situation and what is wrong and what changes and why.

The story is more than what happens. It's the journey of the characters, the emotion they experience, the theme and voice. All that should show up in your synopsis in some way. If this is a funny story, the synopsis should have humor. If the characters go through psychological agony, the synopsis should explore a bit of that.

4. And then in the opening of the first chapter, the most common big mistake is a lack of focus that results in confusion. I've read a lot of first pages where I'm exhausted just from trying to keep track of the names of nine characters and make sense of the situation, the people, the setting, the action, and the thoughts.

Look, the purpose of the first paragraph isn't to tell everything needed to understand the book. It's just to get us to read the second paragraph. :) But we probably won't read on if the first paragraph reads like this:

Aaron Cathcart ran his hand through his sweaty hair, gazed up at the mansion on the hill, where it sat foreboding and grim against a dark sky, and began trudging up the gravel driveway towards the marble front steps. Along the way he passed a jasmine bush, and the pungent smell assaulted his nose. On either side of the door were footmen in the blue and purple Porter livery, and as he approached, they moved in unison to open the great oak doors so he could enter the hall.

Reading that, I've learned exactly one important thing—a character's name. Sure, I know there's a mansion, and it apparently belongs to the Porters, and they're rich enough to afford footmen. But I don't care, because I don't know if they matter to Aaron or if he just wants to use the phone to call the auto club.

Two things to remember about your opening: First, think of the opening as posing a question somehow that will tempt the reader into reading more. For example, the opening to Shirley Jackson's famous short story "The Lottery" poses the question, "What is this lottery they're gathering for?"

So the opening to Aaron's story could pose the question, "What's he afraid he'll find here?" or "Why is he entering the house of his enemy?"

But the question has to be relevant to the story. Think about what question you want the reader to ask, and see if you can set that question up with the first few paragraphs.

Second, focus the opening paragraph. You simply can't get everything in there, the setting, the characters, the situation, the backstory, and you end up leaving out important stuff like the conflict. Don't even try to be comprehensive here, or you'll just confuse. Think about one thing you want to introduce. But make it important. Think about starting with the character in some conflict.

Aaron Cathcart stared up at the Porter mansion on the hill. That was the last place he wanted to go, and the Porters were the last people he wanted to ask for help. And if it wasn't for the lady unconscious in his stalled car, he'd walk the two miles to the next town. But he had no choice, if he was going to save her life.

Conflict!

Or maybe you want to start with character:

Aaron Cathcart never asked for help. Nope, not now, not ever. He could take care of himself. That's what he had in place of religion, a stony self-sufficiency. And this afternoon, if he had any choice in the matter, he'd walk away, down the hill and away from his stalled car. But he didn't have any choice, because he didn't have the right to let the lady die for his principles.

Or you could start with setting:

The Porter mansion stood grim on a barren hill, the ugliest site in this pretty county. It had a sort of grotesque pride up there, surrounded by a gravel drive and a flat expanse of lawn, the gray tiles of the roof blank against the dark sky. No one could want to be there, and yet the Porter family had lived there for decades, when they could surely afford something else.

But focus on something. Don't try to get everything into the first paragraph. After all, the whole point is to get the reader to read the second paragraph, where presumably will be other important information happening.

5. Don’t go limping to a conclusion. Usually in a proposal you send the first three chapters of the book. Agents especially are known to vary this—they might ask for the first chapter or the first fifty pages. At any rate, too many submitters are sending in proposals where the very last sentence or word does nothing to inspire the agent to ask for more. You don’t want your proposal to limp to a conclusion!

Again, think about your purpose in submitting this proposal—it’s to get the agent or editor to ask to see the whole book. So that last bit they read is your last chance to make them want more. They probably won’t want more if you:
•    End in the middle of a line just because that’s the end of the fifty pages.

•    End on a boring note, like “She took a shower and went to bed.”

•    End on a resolution, like “He smiled, realizing that he’d finally won.”

First trick is—they might determine what a proposal is, but you’re the one who determines what that is FOR YOU. If she says she wants three chapters, you don’t actually have to stop exactly at the point before “Chapter Four.” You can manipulate a bit here. Let’s say that the first two chapters are long and action-packed, and the third is more clean-up and transition to the turning point in Chapter Four. Well, you can take those two chapters and make them three! Just divide them differently. For most of us, chapter divisions are fairly arbitrary—a chapter might be three scenes, might be two—and you can divide them differently to make more or fewer chapters.

Second trick—if you’re given a page limit, you can make tiny changes to get more into that 50 pages (or fewer). If you generally use Courier 12, try Times New Roman 12, which is about 15% smaller but is still 12 point--don’t ask me why. So that will give you 3-4 more pages to work with. Yes, all the agents know this, but unless they specifically say “no TNR,” go for it.

Of course, that’s only useful if those 3-4 extra pages are going to be a nice come-on. That’s the third trick. Whatever you need to do to make this work, end the proposal on something intriguing, something that captures the reader’s attention. A cliffhanger works here for high-action books, but a quieter book might need a mere suggestion of conflict or irresolution, something that makes the editor look around for the next page, and, not finding it, send you a request for the complete manuscript. Often this requires another sentence or paragraph at the end of a seeming resolution.

Like take that one above:
He smiled, realizing that he’d finally won. But as he was leaving the room, he looked back at Mary. Wait a minute. If he’d been the one to win, why was she the one laughing triumphantly?

So don’t limp to a conclusion of your proposal. Make sure the end of the chapters is an invitation to read on. A hint of conflict, an irresolution, will help encourage the editor or agent to ask for the rest.

Any other great “marks of the amateur”? “Proposal mistakes to avoid?” A commenter just posted: “Avoid the purple—too many adjectives on the first page!” What else?

Keep writing!

Alicia

Article about the real "Downton Abbey Downstairs" experience

What was life like as a 19th-century servant?

6–7am

It’s an early start for all. At 6 o’clock in the morning,the scullery man opens up the kitchen, cleans and lights the fires, fills the coal buckets and prepares the spit and dripping pan. He cleans the kitchen, the chef’s private room, pantry and larders, and scours the dressers, tables and cutting boards. At least twice a week, he will also scrub the floor with sand.

Sympathy Through Struggle and an Infinite Number of Leather Jackets by James Rasley

 

Making a character sympathetic to your readers or audience is a common goal and stumbling point for writers. What draws the reader or audience to certain characters and pushes them away from others? What is it that intrigues us about characters like Odysseus or is less interesting like Achilles? I think one of the reasons is struggle. If we see a character struggle, we instinctively sympathize with that character because we have struggled ourselves.

            For example, in 2018's “God of War,” Kratos struggles to be a father to his young son after the death of his wife. We see him try to comfort his son Atreus, but hesitate and ultimately fail to do that. If we do not see that failing, then he is just an angry guy who is not a very good father. But when we see him try to connect with his son, fail, and hurt as a result, we instinctually begin to sympathize for this grieving father.

            Motivation matters to in making a character sympathetic, Joel from the game “The Last of Us” commits many acts that are, shall we say, questionable morally, but he does so not only to protect Ellie, but also because he has already lost a daughter and cannot go through that again. Since we have seen him hurt and struggle through the loss of his daughter and the twenty years of grief after, his actions may not become any more or less moral, but the audience can understand and sympathize with his pain and actions.

            Sometimes an initially unsympathetic character becomes sympathetic through how she acts and is treated. Britta from the TV show “Community” is an extremely contradictory character. She is cool, as she lived in New York, and she is an activist that is not active. Perhaps most importantly for sympathy, she is the target of most of the show's jokes. At first she was cool personified, so the audience's reaction was predominantly, “I will decide what is cool.” As the show progressed, however, Britta is shown in a more awkward way-- she made fun of, gets caught cheating, and among other things throws a cadaver onto the schoo'ls lawn in a practical joke gone about as wrong as humanly possible. Through this she becomes a character that we can sympathize with along the way. Without this struggle, without this hardship, she would remain a character that is trying to tell you what is cool. Intstead she is now being the lovable goof trying and failing to “pwn” high school kids with her discman and infinite number of leather jackets.

            Characters need flaws, or they are unrealistic and superficial. Characters need to struggle internally and externally, or your story is not very interesting. But we need to see this struggle. We need to see them try and fail and get beaten up by the world or the villain. It has to show in the story. If Odysseus spends ten years off-screen trying to get back to Ithaca, then who cares. If Roland in Stephen King's Dark Tower series doesn't grieve his sacrifice, then he is just a jerk junkie addicted to a tower at the center of the universe. It is these flawed characters who draw us in and intrigue us and motivate us to write meta blog posts about struggle in fiction.

The Problem with Omniscience

The Problem with Omniscience

Here's an article (SPOILERS!) about the plotting problems created in Game of Thrones and other stories by an omniscient (all-knowing) character.  I'm going to read it through again, but what I got from this was that it's just too tempting to the writer-- having this character who can see everything and know everything without ever having to work for it.

There are plot benefits to characters having to struggle to discover, learn, figure things out. The shortcut of using an omniscient character can cut short that process, and make almost automatic what ought to be earned by the characters.

It is tempting, however! 

I would suggest that if we use omniscient or telepathic characters, we can make it more interesting by:

1) Creating a cost for the knowledge (like she gets terrible headaches or he loses a month of his life for each vision)

2) Making the knowledge less than obvious so the characters have to interpret it, and might interpret it wrongly.

Struggle is interesting! 

Family Motto: Another Characterization Question

Let's try a thought experiment: Family motto!

We probably all have one: The family motto. By this I mean the secret or open aphorism that expresses the family's attitude towards the world, the family worldview.

I'll give you some examples. My family's motto (secret) was "You can't trust anyone but family." No, we are not members of the Mafia, but you aren't wrong to think we would fit right into those Godfather movies (except for all the crime stuff).

My husband's family motto: You can never be too careful.  One of my preoccupations is the permutations of class, and that is the "middle-middle class" family motto. Stay safe. Don't lose what we've attained. You're just one firing or accident away from losing our security. You can never be too careful!
Others I've gathered:

(From a working-class family): Don't get above yourself.

An immigrant family: Where there's a will, there's a way... so if you fail, it's your own lack of will.

A rich friend: You owe it to the family name. ("It" being whatever she didn't want to do-- marry her father's choice, work in the family firm, ride horses rather than snowboard.)

A friend from a family with many secrets: Can you keep a secret?

Sam, whose family was successful and competitive: You have to fight for what you want.

Emily, whose parents were hippies: Live and let live.

The friend who discovered as an adult that his father had another secret family: What you don't know can't hurt you.

The glamorous friend whose mother was so elegant: Don't wear white after Labor Day.

--

Okay! So if you have/had a family motto, or one of your characters does-- what is it?  

What effect might that have on how and what you write? Just remind yourself of your own motto, your family's motto-- whether or not you believe in it, it shaped you, and might be very different from your character's. You might create characters in reaction to your own family's motto-- that is, if you were raised with "don't hang out the family's dirty linen," you might create a character whose motto is "let it all hang out," but in both, there would be a preoccupation with "discretion vs. honesty" that would be something important in your life.

Your characters are not, of course, you, but their "family motto" will be there in who they are and what they value-- and what they rebel against-- what causes conflict.

So what's your family motto, and what was your character's family motto? And what can you do with it?

Example of "motto effect."  I was just reading a book that I thought illustrated something about how the "motto" helps create conflict and keep the character and plot together-- coherence.

The Tenth Justice is a legal thriller by Brad Meltzer, who is pretty successful (but not like John Grisham). His stories aren't amazingly plotted, and his prose is no more than it needs to be, but I read everything he writes. Why? I think one reason is because his work is so "coherent". Everything works together to reflect what I'm getting is his sort of central belief, which has to do with, well, disillusionment. "Things are never what you expect." Or—Expect the unexpected. This motto runs through all of his work that I've read, but it's especially clear in this book, and it's reflected in all aspects. The first line is: "Ben Addison was sweating like a pig, and it wasn't supposed to be this way." Right from the start, the book reflects that idea that our illusions-- "what is supposed to be"-- will always prove to be less (less good, less bad) than the reality.

So the brilliant young men come to DC to conquer the world... and they find that the world doesn't care. They have to settle for low-level jobs that don't recognize their abilities.  The one young man, Ben, who gets the fancy job (Supreme Court justice law clerk), quickly exposes another illusion vs. reality. We all think of course that the decisions of the court come from the wise, experienced old justices... but Ben learns what he didn't expect-- that the clerks-- kids just out of law school-- have way too much influence on which side wins.

The theme of "illusion v. reality" is carried through in the characters. Ben is fooled by someone pretending to be his friend... but that's possible because Ben is pretending to be experienced and knowledgeable when he's new at his job and knows nothing.  

Meltzer is a smart author. He sees the value in exploiting the juxtaposition in his motto: illusion vs. reality. By identifying and embracing that, he's setting up a great pace, because there is always a twist coming up-- whatever is expected... well, that won't happen.  (Notice that this is a different motto/theme than "Things aren't what they SEEM." Things aren't what you expect gets YOU in there, the creator of the futile illusion.)

His "voice," then, embraces that preoccupation with "disillusion" which is so much a part of his worldview. (Yeah, it's kind of pessimistic... but he also, I think, understands that as a necessary part of growing up.) So he has paragraphs where he sets up what he expected (say, that the judges are wise and powerful), and then undercuts the expectation with the reality (that the silly young law clerks actually are the ones who make and justify decisions).

The "reality bites" meme influences everything from story choice (a legal thriller is all about the disillusioning effect of getting close to the justice system :) to word choice-- often I notice he chooses an unexpected word or image. He likes to play with that unattractive and unwanted "sweat" (from the first line), especially in this opening.

Just an example. As you read books by an author, and they seem remarkably unified, see if you can identify the author's or character's motto as a controlling concept. Any examples?   

"The family that swims together... stays together."

9 Effective Ways to Cut Lotsa Words When Your Story Is Too Long: Scalpel vs. Broadsword

I was just asked for a few tips on cutting big bunches of words. You know, you were aiming for a nice 75K novel, only this ended up at 95K words.  And from your perspective, it works! But it's too long for the line or the editor or the type of story, right? So how can you trim words without deleting meaning? 

It's hard. It can be done. I had to cut 35K from one of my books once, and it was hard, but I don't think afterwards the reader could tell what was missing. (Okay, okay. Theresa did most of the cutting. I did most of the whining and whimpering.)

While the plan here is not to go back, it can really help to think that nothing you're doing is permanent, that if you realize you cut something important, you can restore it. So be sure to save the original version first, then save the version-to-be-cut under another filename. Just in case you want to UNcut later!

So here are some tips if you want to cut 20K words:

1) The first option is to cut a whole scene. That's a broadsword rather than a scalpel approach, but let's say you wrote this book in a white heat during Nanowrimo. There are probably scenes you wrote or started to write which ended up as unimportant or irrelevant, or you later did a better version and both versions are still in there. 

A whole scene might well be 5,000 words. That's a pretty good cut! And cutting it might make for a stronger, tighter plot. Then again, you might accidentally cut out something essential like a clue, or an important step on your character's journey, or the satisfying "reunion" scene the reader has been waiting for. 

To do this, however, you have to look at scenes not as groups of words but as part of the action of the plot. So try this: Outline the book as you have it. Yep, a scene outline. List -- in order they occur, every chapter, and every scene or scenelet or passage (complete or not) within each chapter. 

Then you can evaluate if there are scenes that can be deleted without causing plot/emotion problems.  

2) Look also for adjacent scenes that can be combined.  That will let you delete some of the set up and transition between scenes. Be watching for "single-purpose" scenes, especially several in a row-- a scene where he argues with his brother, and then a scene were he discovers a clue to the mystery, and then a scene where he travels to where the robbery took place. You could combine those into one scene where he argues with his brother, leaves and discovers the clue, and ends with him deciding to go to the robbery site. Really, once you start looking at what happens from scene to scene, you might find several which can be combined.

3)  If you can't cut a whole scene, look for passages (especially at the beginning) which are mostly set-up. That's where I found the most opportunities to trim, at the start of scenes, where I might have spent a couple pages describing the setting and establishing what the characters are doing there. 

Here are some other "cutting" options:

4) Look for mini-scenes (I call them "scenelets"-- 1-2 page bridges usually from one important event to the next) that don't much matter. Often these involve a main character interacting with a minor character or a "walk-ons" like a waiter who will never be seen again in the book. An example might be a cab ride to the convention hotel. There might be good character interplay with the cabdriver and give a good sense of the main character's mood, but if you want to cut, that's an example of a good 'non-essential' scenelet. Usually these aren't full scenes but intros to more important scene passages. You can always argue how this bit is important or clever or enlightening, but you know, you have to trim something, and a scene without an event to change the plot is usually trimmable.

5) Try the Jane Austen tactic-- in dialogue, if there's no conflict, do narrative summary. (They reminisced for a few minutes, then she remembered, and said insultingly, " ". :) There are going to be parts of scenes the reader needs that might have no conflict (like a moment of grace where two characters share a cigarette), but those are best kept fairly short and fairly rare. 

6) Look for those passages where there's nothing-dialogue-- often when there's some movement from one setting to another. ("Let's go into the den and watch TV/What do you want to watch?/ I thought this season of The Voice was starting. Did you record that?/No, the last one was so annoying, I didn't bother. But we can probably get it on-demand." :) No, I never actually wrote that passage, but that's the sort of "transition conversation" that's usually easy to cut away.

7) Also look for long passages of introspection where a character is thinking. Sometimes these are important, and the way they think is important to show, but the deeper we get into the story, the less long introspection is needed. (The reader knows more about the character by the middle of the book, and probably just needs a hint of what they're thinking, or only introspection when something unexpected is felt and needs explanation.)

8) Try my ruthless technique: Decide on a page goal, like "cut 50 words out of this page". This takes awhile, but it's usually easy to find at least 20 words to cut. Or "cut one sentence or sentence part out of each paragraph". Or "trim two sentences and combine them into one shorter sentence". This is actually my favorite thing. :)

9) Even more ruthless: If you know there are words you over-use (for me, it's "then" and "just"), do a "find" for them and for each one, decide whether it's needed. Delete if not. A friend of mine cut two pages out just by getting rid of justs. :)

Because all this is so "voice-centric," it's probably best to do it yourself first and see how much you can cut. That way you'll still have control of the scenes and the interactions between characters and how that's presented. 

Then again, an outsider might be able to be more objective, as Theresa was with my over-long book.

I can tell you from experience, trimming is hard to get started, and painful, but after awhile, it's easier to see where something can be discarded, or  how scenes or sentences can be combined.

Broadsword/scalpel experiences you can share? 

Alicia