Writing

Someone mentioned that they’d like to see a post on endings. Endings are hard. You have to go back and look for all the loose ends. It’s like weaving a basket – all those spiky little sticks poking out need to be woven together into a coherent shape. Here’s three things I think about when working on an ending.

1. Circularity is a big help. It provides a sense that the reader has returned to the beginning, but now everything is changed. Here’s a cheat – take something that appears in your first three paragraphs and invoke it in your last three as well. It can be changed – the rose that initially trembled, dew-covered, as our heroine picked it is now lying withered and flat in the road. Or it is a new rose, being picked by another woman who is the replacement for the first?

For an example of this, I’m actually going to be obnoxious and point to my own story, Magnificent Pigs. Technically I cheat, because the object I used doesn’t appear until the fourth paragraph, the brass bed which creaks in protest as Aaron sits down. At the end it’s become the object of Jilly’s salvation, the vehicle that carries her away into the sky. There’s other reappearing things: pigs are mentioned right off the bat (in the title, even) and they’re crucial to the end. And the story begins and ends with the idea of death and (hopefully) changes your perception of it.

Most of the revision and rewriting stuff has to do with the novel I’m currently working on. Hopefully, though, this is of use to those writing short stories as well as novels. Please let me know which you liked best, and if there’s writing topics you’d like to see touched on in coming weeks!

Why Titles Matter
5 Things to Do In Your First 3 Paragraphs
Three Strategies For Snaring The Senses
Foreshadowing and Establishing Conflict
Active Verbs
Revising Through a Single Lens

I’ve been reading Donald Maass’s excellent, excellent book Writing the Breakout Novel (which is, unfortunately, not available on the Kindle so I actually had to do the archaic order and wait for a hardcopy thing) and it’s at a perfect time for me since I’m beginning the second pass at the current project.

As I’ve read, I’ve collected ideas to apply to rewrite. I’m making the heroine’s past considerably more complex, shoving the hero a bit more ruthlessly out of his depth, making some bad guys more ambiguous morally, killing my very favorite character, letting a villainess be much, much bitchier (and funnier), and raising the stakes repeatedly. I’ve wrestled with the first 33 pages so far, and they are SO MUCH better now, even though there’s a ton of comments that will need to be addressed, particularly moments of B-grade writing that need to get elevated to A-level.

I find it handy to do this sort of pass. Last time, when revising Phat Fairy, I used a list from Holly Lisle and went through scene by scene, checking for criteria like what got accomplished, were there any loose ends, what characters appeared, was there a sensory moment, was there character development for at least one character. I did something similar with The Moon’s Accomplice, which was the first novel that I completed. There is much to be said for making your revision process efficient and mechanical. While moments of inspiration are useful, it’s the elbow grease put into the scenes at this point that pays off.

So I’ve finished up the writing of the first draft of a current project, which ended up about 90k words. By first draft, I mean all of the scenes are at least 75% complete, with most of them completely roughed out. The next stage of the process will follow what I did with the previous two books, which worked fine. Because I am a writer, I am fascinated with process. We all constantly wonder if we’re Getting It Right, a state which I can neither confirm nor deny. Hence this post, which anyone is welcome to skip.

Active verbs slice to the heart of a sentence’s meaning, inject action, make prose dance with precise control. Active verbs cajole, captivate, charm, and compel. They lend the muscularity of manual labor, a scapel’s taxonomic precision, and the graceful sway and bob and glide and jump of a dance.

Seek out active verbs, make them your writerly quest. Enlist them in your cause and they’ll help explain a story’s nuances to a reader. Write them down on your shirt cuffs and use them to goad your sentences into performance, or suck on them in your sleep until each dream is a single verb: swim and replenish and grip.

Use verbs, but treat them kindly. Ride them hard but with the respect they deserve. You will find they reciprocate, and verbs will collect in your pockets like marvelous, multi-colored pebbles you can use to build your story.

Writing exercise: Find three verbs concerned with a particular profession and use them in a sentence that never mentions that profession or its tools. Then think about how that sentence might become a title. Then pick your favorite verb and embroider it on your pillow. Okay, I’m kidding about that last. But think about verbs, let them steep tea-strong in your mind, like catfish in the shadows of a riverbank, capable of flicking their tail and vanishing, leaving only a dark trace.

In an earlier post I mentioned establishing the story’s conflict as something that is often best done in the story’s first three paragraphs. In order to expand on that, I’ve drawn examples from one of my favorite speculative fiction writers, James Tiptree Jr. aka Alice Sheldon, all of which are available in the collection Her Smoke Rose Up Forever.

One of Tiptree’s classic stories, “The Women Men Don’t See” may be one of her most celebrated, leading to responses from other writers like Karen Joy Fowler’s “What I Didn’t See” (Kindle version) and my own “Clockwork Fairies” (Kindle version). Tiptree uses her titles to maximum effect and you’ll notice that each of these beginnings interacts in a significant way with the title preceding it.

The art for Issue 21 of Orson Scott Card’s Intergalactic Medicine Show has appeared on the excellent blog Sideshow Freaks of its most excellent editor, Edmund R. Schubert. The story’s title was originally Starling’s Wing – for what reason I’m not sure other than it was a phrase that occurred to me and which I liked for its 19th century flavor. I managed to work the title into the story in a somewhat laborious and contrived fashion with this passage towards the end:

Engaging the senses, particularly the non-visual ones, is often key to creating a story that stands out from the mass crowding every editor’s inbox. It’s such a useful strategy that every writer should have it in their toolbox.

Here are some specifics of how to evoke the senses and entrap your reader (particularly within the first three paragraphs). You may mechanically apply these techniques at first, but if you persist, you’ll find including sensory details becoming second nature and helping you build the story’s world, mood, characters, and even conflict.

1. Engage the senses. You don’t have to hit every sensory stop – but it sure helps. Vivid visuals are great, but they are even better when backed up with visceral, precise taste or touch or sound.

2. Hint at the conflict. The majority of great stories provide the reader with some clue to the conflict driving the story within the first three paragraphs. Here, for example, is the first paragraph of Kelly Link’s marvelous “Travels with the Snow Queen”:

Right off the bat, let me point you at a piece of evidence more compelling than any argument I could muster: the list of short story Hugo winners on Wikipedia. Look at that first one, Eric Frank Russell’s winning “Allamagoosa” in 1955, starting us off with a quirky bang. It’s worth going through that list to see how consistent the quality of the titles is.

Arthur C. Clarke’s “The Star” (winner in 1956) actually violates what I tell my students. It’s the sort of name, an article and common noun, devoid of verb that I would circle on a paper. But it’s such a classic story of its time, shamelessly yanking out every emotional stop, and so it’s pretty easy to see why it was that year’s winner.

Past that, others bear out my thesis. Avram Davidson’s “Or All The Sea With Oysters” (winner in 1958) is a stylish killer of a title, carrying a whiff of Caroll-esque steampunk long before its time. Robert Bloch – “That Hellbound Train” (winner in 1959) (What train, the reader wonders, what is it like, who are its riders?); Anton Lee Baker – “They’ve Been Working On…” (nominee in 1959) (Who are they? What are they working on, and why does the author give us that trailing off, that textual pause of the …?); Alfred Bester – “The Men Who Murdered Mohammed” (nominee in 1959) (Murder’s a sinewy lump of a word that sometimes overpowers the rest of the title, but here it’s effective as can be.); Algis Budrys – “The Edge of the Sea” (nominee in 1959) ( plain language in a poetic construction, which manages to pull it off given that Bester is usually a guarantee of decent quality that will justify it); C.M. Kornbluth – “The Advent on Channel Twelve” and “Theory of Rocketry” (both nominees in 1959) (simple but powerful); and then Fritz Leiber’s audacious and (imo) funny as hell “Rump-Titty-Titty-Tum_Tah-Tee” (nominee in 1959).