What's So Great About A Writer Being Invisible?

You should think about being invisible when you write, really you should. 

 

Immediately I hear the distant wails," I don’t want to be invisible! I want to show my own distinctive style, I want to be a really GREAT WRITER and entertain my readers! I want the world to praise ME!"

Well you can go that route, no invisibility for you! But if you do take that course you may miss out on creating the really great story you intend while you’re obsessing with being a ‘great writer.’ The wise writer’s focus is more on clear, crisp sentences that creates pictures for your readers, phrases that evoke emotion, words that touch an empathetic place. So if you've thought about it a moment and have decided you want to try out this "be invisible" thing and have your work take center stage, gather your patience, thoughtfulness, empathy and direction and read on.

First, move your focus away from yourself and what you expect to accomplish, think about your reader and what he or she hopes to get out of your book. How do you get them to that place where they suspend their disbelief and dive head-first into your story, wrapped in the conflicts you’ve created, the worlds you’ve painted and the characters who inhabit them? How to get them to forget about you, become unaware of you until you are really no longer visible and your story and characters are all they perceive?

For starters think about what you learned in your English classes and your Composition classes, then recognize you have to unlearn a great deal of it. As a writer you don’t need to throw your impressive vocabulary in your reader’s faces. Keeping it simple and clear is better. Try not to use alliteration often. Don’t write long, complicated sentences. 19th Century novelists did it, it’s past, get over it. Your goal is not to fill up many pages to pile on long descriptive passages. All of this just serves to put the writer (you) center stage and that’s not really a good place to be.

Don’t stop your reader with a particularly long sentence, detailed phrase or a word they need to run to a dictionary to understand. Mark Twain would slap you, so would Hemingway, and unless I miss my guess, Stephen King as well. Use familiar words and make them count. Instead of vague phrases like “the librarian walked slowly down the aisle with a painful limp,” think more colorfully and concisely. How about, “the librarian hitched her way down the aisle, cane thumping in hollow rhythm.”? Don’t have a character of yours simply ‘eat’, when he or she can, ‘gulp, crunch, slurp or inhale’ the food. And learn to trust your gut instinct and depend on the context of your story. There are times when a more ‘fancy’ word is better. Just don’t constantly search your thesaurus for a replacement for that straight-forward word you began with.

Don’t jerk your reader out of our story with too many things like exclamation marks. This really does just point to the writer as being a bit too lazy to make the sentence exciting enough to get the reader’s attention without punctuation. Or perhaps the writer is just too inexperienced. Either way is not good. Use words to build that excitement, not marks on paper at the end of a sentence. Practice, you can do it.

Beware figures of speech. When you use one you momentarily pull your reader out of the story to consider what you’ve put forth. Forget old, boring ones you’ve heard forever like ‘a stitch in time…’ They don’t belong in your writing or mine at all. If you’re creative enough you may well come up with delightful ones on your own. If you need to, use an old, boring one as a place holder and highlight it in your writing, then come back later and replace it with something sparkling, and new. Something like “I felt like Van Gogh’s ear,” or “the water was cold, almost frozen, swimming through it was like dog-paddling cold oatmeal.” Plainly you can do better – so please do.

Lastly, for the moment, don’t make mistakes in your writing. Your readers pay attention and you’ll hear from them. If you use real places, spell the name correctly. Writing a western (I’ve written a number of them) remember a shotgun doesn’t shoot bullets, it shoots pellets. Chicago is not in Florida. Double-check and then check again. Don’t let this jerk your reader out of the reader’s trance you work so hard to create.

Always remember, it's not about you, it's about your reader.

Writers Websites Wednesday - Fantasy Name Generators

An assortment of fantasy name generators.  Visit The Forge and see what names you can create for your fantasy characters there. You have the choice from several generators, and what they come up with  can really be a hoot. Great ideas, great springboards.

Want to Avoid Things Editors & Agents Hate From the Very First Chapter?

Writing is tough, writing well is even tougher. And at the top of the tough list is writing, while you keep in mind things that might turn off an agent or perhaps an acquisition editor in that very first chapter. Things that could stop your hopes for that book dead in it's tracks.
Then you have to decide, while keeping these things in mind, if something is important enough to your story to go ahead and do it anyway, despite the added risk of rejection.

Convoluted?


Yes.

Reprint in large Print Ed

But what follows below is, in general, a list of ‘don’ts’ for when you’re trying to get past that first hurdle and have your work seriously considered by those who can give the green light to your project. Those things you might waytto know about before you decide to go ahead and do them anyway.


For starters if you're thinking about a prologue, you  might think about skipping it – in general agents hate them and usually they’re just a lazy way to give readers a whole lot of back story that could actually be handled better throughout the novel.  BUT, you may have an excellent reason for a Prologue that doesn't fit into these niches. If you do, have at it. Just remember that magical word "Prologue" may well send chill up the spine of the editor or agent reading it.


Okay, I think we all agree the first chapter has to move quickly and draw the reader in. In General avoid any discussion of the weather here, i.e. “it was a dark and stormy night’. Also avoid lengthy character descriptions such as, “her hair was a silken black, curly and dropped to well below her hips. The color was the perfect contrast to her crystalline, sky blue eyes, large in a heart-shaped face with flawless alabaster skin. Her clothes clung to every voluptuous curve, caressing a hip here, cupping a full breast there, lace accenting the décolletage of her designer dress.” Somebody's head will be spinning after reading all that, unless he or she has fallen asleep.  My advice? Drop it in in small bits and pieces throughout the story instead. Give a tease and a taste, don't bombard your reader. 


In general the opening ‘my name is____’ is a real turn-off. Rarely it works. If you have some compelling reason to do it, hey, it's your book, go ahead. But, be aware, it sends up red flags.


Don’t create a first chapter in which nothing happens. People wandering around, streets getting described, people eating breakfast.  Nothing is worse than just laying background for a first whole chapter. SOMETHING needs to HAPPEN! Physical, emotional - something!


As a general tip, don’t have a lot of adventure and action throughout the first chapter turn out to be a dream. As a reader I find it terribly annoying and there are lots of agents who’ll tell you they hate it too.


Give your heroes and heroines some flaws.  Don’t make them too perfect. Boring. Hey, Indiana Jones was afraid of snakes. Odd Thomas in Dean Koontz's novels has plenty of problems.  They're just more interesting if they have flaws and find ways to overcome them as well as 'suffering' from them.


Don’t get yourself stuck in the ‘information dump’, the feeling that you need to cram in to the first few pages all the information you think the reader needs to know to understand the story. You’ve spent time getting to know your characters, do the reader the courtesy of allowing them to get to know them over time (the course of the book). Let their personalities evolve and be revealed. We don’t need a crash course - and besides, the end of the book is too late anyway.  I've probably stopped reading before then if I can't see the story and backstory unfolding as I go.  Same applies to agents and editors.


Mostly it's just common sense, but sharpening your attention to be focused in on it. Whatever bugs you as the reader will also bug the editor or potential agent. If you're overwhelmed by description, if you feel like you're being spoon-fed information and not discovering it on your own, if nothing is happening and the characters are just going round in circles, you don't want to go down that road as a writer yourself.


Now, all that said, sometimes you need to write with speed and go back and look for these flaws - they aren't always easy to avoid as you write.  That's why so many writers emphasize the rewrite stage as the most important.  You may want to do some of what I've brought to your attention  above. If you do, well, go ahead, I'm not the ultimate authority, no one is.  Sometimes you can make it work, but it is always a very difficult sell.

Writers Websites Wednesday - Author Tech Tips

Okay writers - today I pass along a site with hints for the techno-challenged author. Author Tech Tips. Helps the author wrestle with techie questions and get some good ideas to  help.

Want to Develop Some Character?

A lot of us writers, when faced with a new story, or a sagging middle think I know, I'll enter a new character.  I'll give him a tatoo or a scar, or a lisp.  Or I'll have her twist her hair, purse her lips like a blow-fish or dress in dominatrix garb. Oh, Oh, I know, it'll be some short phrase the character utters at moments of extreme tension that is always the same!

Well, actually, all that is what character is not. Oh, you can give your character any of those traits and more, that's not the problem.  If that's ALL you give them, that IS the problem.

Let's consider here.  What is character really?  Think about yourself. The character you create for a book is basically the same as you. It's what's inside. What you're like when there's nobody around. "Character" isn't what happens when life is all sunshine, lollipops and rainbows, it's more about what happens when things go wrong, when life throws unexpected bombs our way. So the same thing applies to your characters in your story.

How would your character react when confronted with real temptation, money, sex, whatever?  How would he or she deal with hardship? When challenged or attacked or hunted, how would that character move forward? What is your character willing to do to get what he or she wants? Those are elements of character and your fictional people need to possess them as much as do you.

Depend on your own experiences in life. Everyone has had moments of challenge.  Everyone has had times of temptation, managed to resist, or fell victim to it.  As a result we've felt bad or we've felt good about ourselves. The characters you create should have those moments as well. Present them with moments when that character may have been strong or weak, stalwartly honest or somewhat sleezy. A time when he or she did the right thing in spite of risk, cost or pain or did the wrong thing and felt regret or rejoiced in it.

And remember, it's not just the good guys who have these moments, these feelings, you need to give them to your bad guys as well. Obviously your bad guys have made more of the wrong choices and that's what makes up their character. The 'bad' guy pretty much acts more out of self interest than the 'good' guys.

So how do you get inside your characters' heads and dig deep to find out what their 'character' is all about?

One great way is to ask your character a lot of questions.  What does he need?  The basics, food, water, rest, safety from pain and more.  Think about it.  Work your way through and higher.  Once basics are met what else does he need/want? You might check out Maslow's Hierarchy of Need  for some ideas on how us humans operate and what we all need.  Beginning from the bottom up it's an interesting angle when working with character.

And keep it firmly in mind - if you want to create fleshed-out characters for your story, don't make any of them perfect.  Perfect can be terribly boring.





 

New Writer Discovery

This isn't a how to on writing. 

I just had to write about a new writer I've discovered, Ben Jones. At least new to me though he's been writing a while!

Benjamin Jones was born in Greeneville, TN but currently resides in Little Elm, TX with his wife, two daughters, two dogs, and one cat. Ben's been writing for close to 15 years while working various 9-5 jobs but, all the while, finding time to keep the writing the main priority and always  honing his craft.  A writer of many genres, his H.U.B. series of books, Volume 1 and 2 on sale now at www.whatishub.net with Volume 3 coming out fall 2011, takes place in a world where vampires and humans co-exist though a rogue faction is pushing both sides to the brink of war. Benjamin also has a romance novel coming out early 2011 called Head Above Water and is also working on a collaborative effort with Tiffanie Minnis, author of ~D.I.V.A.~ - Domestically Involved in Violent Affairs.

 

Ben's a busy writer and like many writers juggles writing with a 'day job' and turns out really great stuff.  Visit his site, check out his H.U.B. series, download as a PDF and enjoy the read.

Writers Websites Wednesday - The Big Bad Book Blog

The Big Bad Book Blog offers something to every writer.  From the beginner who's trying to get published for the first time to the pro who wants to do more promotion. There are posts and blogs on almost every subject and additional resources as well.