I don’t care if all the inhabitants of a planet are legless, have a single blue eye, gills, and live in a tank where they are dependent on water, melons, and cress to live. Just don’t suddenly have their out-of-town cousin travel in on the next train walking on three legs, smoking a cigar, and using four eyes to watch me out of the back of their head. It doesn’t fit the world you built.
Writing romance? I know, love at first sight. But meeting a mysterious stranger, marrying them on the same page and going off to live in Saigon when you’re a celibate rocket scientist in the midst of a critical development is not going to work. That scientist, upon the entrance of the stranger, would more logically say, “Get out of my lab, I’m busy. Security!” If that romance is going to happen, it won’t be the way the writer wrote it the first time.
Time travel; it’s tricky. There are various types of time travel, and you have to decide what rules yours is going to follow. Does the traveler control the travel? Do they remember their own time? Can they get back? And the all-important: will anything they do in the past affect the future they left behind? Whatever rules you choose, you have to work consistently within them or readers will call foul. I certainly will.
Just as bad—not playing fair with the reader in a mystery. Mystery lovers want to solve the mystery along with the detective. Not letting them have the same clues the detective does isn’t fair. It’s fine if the detective doesn’t reveal what they’ve concluded from the clues—after all, you want that big reveal at the end. But you can’t hide the actual clues from the reader. (Although you can make them obscure.)
I’ve probably driven writers crazy harping on this, but it bears repeating.
No matter how unique, exotic, bizarre the world a writer creates becomes, it needs to maintain an internal consistency. Even if that world is based on being random and illogical. Then it must be consistently inconsistent.
Sometimes maintaining order in our fictional worlds is all we can maintain. Do so.
When I started this blog, my intent was to share knowledge about the noveling process with my readers. I work on multiple projects at a time, so progress in any one can seem to plod. The pandemic slowed me down, particularly as I had to devote much of my personal bandwidth to my part-time job. Towards the end of the pandemic, I was also preparing to leave said job, and I wanted to leave the office in good shape.
Add to that time spent worrying over family and working on our home, and I discovered that not only was I not making much progress on writing my novels, but I was also ignoring that facet of my blog. While I’ve kept up with sharing advice and good ideas, and I’ve continued to work in INKAS, advice specifically geared towards novel-writing has been missing. What has especially been missing are posts about finding my story.
This is partly due to a reluctance on my part to share too much of the book’s content publicly, but I think it is time to do a little of that. After all, I’ve been working on this novel for nearly 15 years!
To dive right in, let me show you the ‘cover’ I created for the work-in-progress. This is not a suggestion for the real cover, but a piece of inspiration and a cover for any hardcopy draft I might maintain.
I sometimes make up book covers as inspiration to keep me writing. When I am planning on self-publishing a book, the ‘inspiration piece’ contributes to the final cover design. Since in this case I am aiming for traditional publishing, this cover won’t make it to the bookstore, but it does keep me working.
When I write, I often have a title first. It may last, it may not; it depends on how they came about. For my MackenzieWilder/ClassicBoat mysteries, I’ve tended towards titles that have a rhythmic pattern and are reminiscent of existing songs. Something no knows is that Where the Bodies Lie Buried came to me in sing-song fashion, patterned after “Home on the Range”.
C’mon, sing it to yourself, just once…. “Where the Bodies Lie Buried all day”…..
I’ll let you figure out where Sweet Corn, Fields, Forever came from; Flying Purple People Seater is obvious.
Finding Shelley’s Shoes began life as “Who’s Gonna Die?”, a reference to a group exercise Shelley uses to block out the mysteries she writes. While a recurring scene, this title didn’t have a lot to do with the overall story. As my writing progressed, the subject of where Shelley leaves her shoes becomes a sort of running theme, symbolic of the problems she faces. So the story became “Finding *insert name here*’s Shoes”. My problem was that I couldn’t decide on her name! For reasons of the story, I was locked in on certain styles of names. I made list after list of qualifying candidates before I hit on Shelley. Hedy was one, and Vivian–although I called her Vivvie. There were several others.
All of these things may feel like window dressing, and to an extent, they are. However, titles and character names should be thought out carefully, just as carefully as baby names. A lot can be conveyed by the sound of a person’s name. You want to plant the right image in your reader’s mind so that–regardless of differences in our imagining of physical characteristics–they have a feel for the character you created. Names can affect that. While a Francis might resemble a Seymour, or a John might pinch hit for a Jim, you would likely never equate a Larry with a Benedict.
By the same token, War and Peace is not the equivalent of Please Don’t Eat the Daisies, nor is it The Hunger Games. [ I’ll be posting a more focused column on creating titles in “Do You Know Where YOUR Story Is?” Please stop by and check it out.]
Writing Finding Shelley’s Shoes was well underway when I attended a workshop that featured Larry Brooks, author of Story Engineering (Writer’s Digest Books, 2011). One of the items he brought up in his presentation that day was: “What is your book’s premise?”
I was flummoxed. I needed a premise? I thought I just had to write the danged thing!
Larry explained how the premise targets what the book is about in a succinct sentence or two. Its purpose is to help you pitch and discuss your manuscript in a meaningful way with other writers and publishing professionals. It also keeps your writing focused.
I devised a tentative premise and with great trepidation shared it with the group. So, here’s my first Sally Fields moment–Brooks liked it; he really liked it! Furthermore, it really worked to serve both the purposes mentioned above.
Premise for “Finding Shelley’s Shoes“
Five sisters set out on what may be their last road trip; one of them shares that she may have a serious disease, and the resultant furor unleashes a lifetime of secrets and emotion that could upend their relationships.
As my story and my characters evolved, I’ve had to struggle with keeping it all under control. Even five fictional sisters can be hard to handle at times. My critique group has caught me out at being over-descriptive, over-enthusiastic about sharing backstories, and completely confused over the proper use of en-dashes, em-dashes, and the occasional hyphen. Like everyone else, I’m learning.
At this juncture, Finding Shelley’s Shoes has been done once, then undone, and is now being redone. I have finally solved my biggest plot problem and am incorporating new scenes into the old and handling the repercussions. There is now a deadline for completion.
In future posts, I will deal with individual problems I encountered while writing this novel, and how I handled them. I’ll also post about the grant I received and how it enabled me to recreate the road trip the sisters took. The trip was an eye-opener, and it greatly affected the writing of Finding Shelley’s Shoes.
The headline gives the best clue to INKA #6. SPORTSWRITING is all about writing the news of the sports world. It can be anything from a coverage of elementary school field day to the SuperBowl. The activity and venues change, but not the reporting.
Sports reporting captures the essence of a sport; it puts the fans in the seats and gives them all the latest info on the game, the players, and how the team is doing. It may not be the next best thing to being there, but it provides essential information to the “other members of the team”–the fans.
Sportswriting–which includes narrative stories–may be about the sport itself, and may be written as an essay, an editorial, or even a piece of fiction. The important thing is that a sport or sports is at the center of the story, and it is still geared towards–the fans.
The broadness of this category makes it seem hard to find the common thread in writing for it.
What does “Days of Thunder” have to do with the news report of the high school football scores? Or the high school golf team?
For that matter, what does the high school golf team story actually have to do with a story on Tiger Woods?
The first commonality is the obvious one: the focus is a sport and its players.
The next is the fact that, although the medium differs (“Days of Thunder” is a film, as is “Friday Night Lights”; “Dirt” is a documentary; The 1997 Masters: My Story is Tiger Woods’s autobiographical reflection on that tournament), sports stories help relate a sport to its fans by providing insight into the game, how it is played, and what its athletes experience.
While some readers may look on the information simply as the facts of their team, many others will vicariously experience a sport through the story, or perhaps relive their own sport highs and lows. There is an invisible thread–or even rope–that connects a sport and its fans, binding them together and creating a self-sustaining culture vital to the their lives in terms of physical, philosophical, and emotional well-being. Entire industries are built around sports and their venues and events. The support the industry receives is indicative of how important sports are to fans. This makes for a ready audience of readers for written material and viewers for video.
It’s about the sport and the fans; and there’s a reason the word ‘fan’ stems from fanatic.
Sportswriters must understand their sport, either through personal experience or research. That research must include attending sporting events, experiencing the crowd, and even trying their hand at the sport (no matter how silly they might feel about it). Interviews with players, coaches, trainers, and even physicians and phys ed teachers are essential to understanding what you are writing. Talking with fans or statisticians and the kids who tend the balls and bats is also effective. Because essentially writing about sports is still writing about people. People and their passion for an activity. It’s about the sport and the fans; and there’s a reason the word ‘fan’ stems from fanatic.
Finding Robin's Story 