Group Hug: Playing with Point of View

The Three and I played around with point of view for a couple of hours the other day. We wrote a huge amount—more I think than we ever have during group before—and we didn't get done with everything I had planned. It was a good thing (for us, at least) that the moms all got caught in traffic.

The Warm Up

Start by choosing a character name from a random name generator. (This took us a while. The random name generator kept generating dumb names. Finally, L suggested Maple, and we went with it.) Spend five minutes writing a brief bio of the character. You can write anything you want about the character, but the character must be contemporary (living in the here and now), and you must include what kind of music the person likes. 

These are not the yummy cookies
M made. We ate all those.

No sharing yet! When the five minutes is up, choose a second randomly generated name. Spend five minutes writing a brief bio of that character, with the same restrictions as before. 

Once both characters are done, share. (This is also when we ate cookies and drank cocoa or tea and chatted for a while about point of view, which I covered in the last post.)

Third Person Limited

Once you have your two characters, it's time to put them together. Here’s the scenario: Your characters are in a car together, driving down the road. They’re arguing about what kind of music to listen to. Who wins and gets to listen to the kind of music he or she likes?

He like jazz; she likes Nine Inch Nails.
But they're going to be even more
incompatible when he wrecks the car.

Write the scene in third person limited. That means pick one character and write from his or her perspective using the pronoun he or she. Remember that limited means you only know what that character knows, but you have some flexibility in terms of what you can describe in the world. (You can write about what that character looks like, for instance, without having her look at herself in a mirror.)

Spend 10 minutes writing. Don't share yet!

First Person

Now, go back and write the scene again—the same scene, part of the scene or a continuation of the scene—but this time from the first person perspective of the other character. Remember that you can get closer in this time: How does she feel about what’s happening? What does she think about the music? What is she going to do once she gets out of the car—and how does all this affect her relationship with the other character?

You have 10 minutes. Don't share yet!

Third Person Omniscient

Okay, I'll admit it: We shared after writing in first person. We had totally run out of time. If you're doing this on your own, though, or you have more time than we did, you'll write one more time.

He can't believe the woman inside the
car just said that about the guy's
taste in music. 

This time, write the scene from the perspective of someone outside the action, either as a god-like narrator or as someone who hasn't been seen or mentioned before and who the other two characters don’t know. Keep the focus on the two characters in the front seat, not the emotions of this uninvolved observer. Ten minutes.

POV Smackdown: I vs. We

You’ve got your characters and your basic plot, and you’re ready to start writing. Not so fast! First you have to decide which point of view you’re going to write from. You’ve got three basic choices: first person, third person limited and third person omniscient.

(Technically there’s a fourth: the you form, or second person, which we reserve mainly for self-help books, travel guides, experimental literature and Choose Your Own Adventure books.

The main difference between the three basic POVs is intimacy and scope.

Intimacy is a measure of internal knowledge. The closer you are to the narrator, the more intimate your understanding and the easier it is to forge a bond with the narrator. The further you are, the less you know about the narrator’s feelings.

Scope is a measure of external knowledge. It has an inverse relationship to intimacy: The closer you get to the narrator, the less you can know about what’s going on inside other characters and in places she’s not directly observing.

In our continuum, first person is the most intimate but has the least external knowledge, and third person omniscient is the least intimate but has the most external knowledge.

Seems simple, right? Oh, but you know things never are. So what’s tricksy about each of these?

I Ate the Taco: First Person

(Yummm…)

First person is most common in YA because YA novels are often focused on the particular, personal experience of one teen. You don’t see first person as much in adult novels.

First person: One eye, very close

First person is intimate; you experience the narrator’s thoughts and emotions with her. But want to know what someone else is thinking? Too bad. Need to know what’s happening behind the narrator’s back? Bummer. But just because you can’t get inside the other characters, you still need to make sure they’re fully developed. One of your challenges with first person is to do that within the very limited perspective of your narrator.

Another challenge is that you really have to nail the voice. After all, your narrator is telling her story directly to the reader. If anything is off, you’ll lose the reader. 

And that wonderful introspection you get with first person? Yeah, don’t overdo it. It’s easy to dwell too much on the internal when writing in the I. Focus on what’s happening, not what the narrator thinks about it.

She Ate the Taco: Third Person Limited

(Hey! That chick stole my taco!)

Third person limited is the Toyota Camry of POVs: common, dependable, affordable. Outside of YA, most novels are written in it.

Third person limited: A handful of eyes

In third person limited, we know what’s going on only from the perspective of one person or a very limited set of characters. Because of that switch in pronoun (I to she, he or even it), it’s less intimate than first person, but you’re still closely focused on one character at a time. That slight distance allows you to keep things from the reader. In first person, the reader is inside the narrator’s head every moment and knows everything that’s going on. In third limited, there can be a little mystery about exactly what the narrator is feeling or thinking. That’s good for tension.

What you lose in intimacy, you gain in scope because in third limited, you’re allowed to head jump. Want to know what someone else is thinking or what’s going on somewhere else? No worries. You can find out in the next scene when your focus moves to another main character.

Here’s the tricksy: Third limited is limited. The reader knows only what the POV characters know. Unless you’re George R.R. Martin, you can’t pick a billion different characters to inhabit. You get to pick two, maybe three. So make sure they’re good ones. Also, you don’t want to give your reader whiplash. Pick one perspective per scene or chapter. No changing mid-paragraph.

She Ate the Taco Redux: Third Person Omniscient

(This is getting ridiculous. You people better leave my tacos alone.)

Third person omniscient is also called the god’s view because the narrator knows and sees everything. It pops up a lot in 19^th century literature, like Pride and Prejudice. An omniscient narrator tends to be a lot more removed from the action and may even address the reader directly.

Third person omniscient: All-seeing
and pretty creepy

What’s cool is that you can tell your reader anything you want to about what’s going on in a character’s head or what’s happening on the other side of the world, unbeknownst to any of your characters. On the other hand, seeing everything can be a super fast way of destroying tension. And an omniscient narrator can seem like a pretty stiff know-it-all.

I said earlier that third omniscient is the least intimate POV. You may be wondering how that’s true, when an omniscient narrator knows everything. An omniscient narrator may know exactly how someone feels, but her distance from the characters makes it harder for the reader to bond.

Who Else Can Eat the Taco?

There are lots of variations on these three basic POV: multiple viewpoints, the epistolary (letter) novel, the unreliable narrator, first person plural (we instead of I). The weirder it is (first person plural and second person fall in this category), the more careful you have to be. But strong voice is the key to all POVs. Heck, strong voice is really the key to pretty much everything. Like the strong voice I use when someone steals my taco. 

From Cranky Rah's Cave: The Rules for Writing a Novel

Cranky Rah has been kept cranky and in the depths of her cave for the past two weeks by a non-creative editing project. Cranky Rah is now very behind on everything in life except for said non-creative editing project, which is almost (!) finished.

Yesterday, The Further Four came to visit the cave, but Cranky Rah has had no time to draft an astonishingly inspiring blog (or even an astonishingly uninspiring blog) about it because of—all together now!—the aforementioned non-creative editing project.

(Cranky Rah should point out, in case anyone associated with the non-creative editing project reads this, that the non-creative editing is for a Very Good Cause and that Cranky Rah enjoys editing projects very much. Even if her boss on the project, the Perilous P, disagrees with her on comma placement.)

Anyway, lest anyone fear that I have become lost in the beautiful dark depths of my cave, let me post the Three Rules for Writing a Novel, by W. Somerset Maugham. Here they are:

I love this quote. I gave it to The Further Four yesterday and told them this truth: There are millions of writers in the world, and lots of them enjoy telling other writers how to write. But there are millions of ways to write well and what's important is to find the ways that work for you and to not be bogged down by something someone else tells you. All twelve-year-old girls should take this to heart in many, many ways.

So go. Be free. Write.

Love is Like a Cliche

S recently shared a piece she had written called The Meaning of Love. It was about (oddly enough) love, and it came with this note: This is the terribleness that happens when I try to force myself to write.

When I asked her why she thought it was terrible, she responded: I think it's terrible because it's full of sappy love, which I hate with the soul that I don't have.

Love is like a book of matches.

Was she being harsh, both about her writing and her soul? Probably. But it's a real concern, right? How do you write about something writers have been writing about since there were words? How do you find something new or fresh to say about love (or hate or truth or beauty)?

I suggested to S that she start by making a list of what she wanted to say about love, without any flowery language. It might look like this:

Love is painful.
Love is amazing.
Love is something you regret.
Love is vulnerable.
Love is irresistible.

This is a lot to cover, and as you delve deeper, you may discover that it's more effective to focus on just part of this list.

Once you have your list, what do you do with it?

Go with a cliché, but turn it on its head. 

Instead of comparing love to a rose with thorns, how is love like a Venus flytrap? Instead of love being innocent like a child, how is love like a temperamental two year old?

One of my favorite poems is T.R. Hummer's Where You Go When She Sleeps, in which Hummer takes the cliché image of being filled with love and drowning in love and turns it on its head by comparing love to drowning in a silo full of grain.

Pull those clichés apart and find new ways to express what is true about them. 

Love is like Big Brother.

We like the image of love being like a rose because it's both beautiful and painful. What else is contradictory like that? How about love being like a bulldozer? It plows down anything in its way and denudes the land—but it also can clear away the dead and useless, creating a place where new things can grow. 

How about love being like a spy who lies her sultry way into your life, intending to betray you, only to betray herself and her country by turning double agent.

Focus on what love isn't or how it isn't like those clichés.

A famous example of this is Shakespeare's sonnet Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? Shakes spends his 14 lines explaining how his love ain't nothing like a summer's day.

Pay attention to how other writers do it.

Somehow, singers, poets and other writers continue to find ways to talk about love (and hate and truth and beauty). They do it over and over again, and while they aren't all geniuses about it, there are plenty of great examples of someone finding that fresh approach, those new lines that resonate with us.

Take Sting, for example. The guy's been writing about love since, like, the last Ice Age (or at least since before he lived in a castle), and he keeps bringing it home. Give a listen to these four songs, all different takes on the same topic:

• Every Breath You Take. From the Police years, this song is played at a lot of weddings, but Sting meant it to be about obsession. It takes something that seems so sweet at first ("He loves me so much he pays attention to my every breath!") and turns it pretty creepy.
• Fortress Around Your Heart. Sting takes this fairly common metaphor of someone walling themselves off after being hurt by love but uses concrete details to turn the metaphor into a story.
• Fill Her Up. This song is about what love can make you do and how maybe you should think twice before you do it.
• Love is Strong Than Justice. This song is also about what love can make you do, but it's unapologetic in the end.

Love is like concrete. Or a meltdown.

One thing you'll see about all these poems and songs is that they focus on one extended metaphor instead of a series of similes or metaphors. Pick one idea, and build it through your entire piece. (And don't be afraid to use humor, even on a serious topic.) Keep in mind that even though you started with a list of abstracts (Love is painful), you don't want it to stay abstract. You want specific details to make the abstract concept concrete and real for your reader; something they can see in their heads and hearts.

So What is Love Like?

Love is like a TARDIS. Tell me how.

Welcome, The Further Four

Dude, Buzz Aldrin is so cool.

Cranky Rah and the Poet-Accountant la-la the Space Race. We love the autobiographies of Jim Lovell (he of Apollo 13 and "Houston, we have a problem."), Scott Carpenter (For Spacious Skies) and Gene Cernan (The Last Man on the Moon). We think Chris Hadfield's book An Astronaut's Guide to Life on Earth is the bomb (and, yes, we do talk like that). We've even read Flight Director Gene Kranz's Failure is Not an Option (the Apollo 13 disaster may not have landed men on the moon, but it gave us some great quotes).

(Full Disclosure: Cranky Rah had to skim more of Gene Kranz's book than she would like to admit. He speaks engineering like poets speak love.)

We watch the movie Apollo 13 (again) (and again), and every time we watch it, we think, "Hey, maybe we should watch From the Earth to the Moon again, too." Cuz, hey, it's easy to fit 12 hours of an HBO miniseries into our crazy lives. Like, who needs sleep when you can watch a docudrama about astronauts? Not we.

This is why, when my daughter (hereafter known as R) protested at her new writing group being called The Wees (okay, it does sound a little like what you do when you drink a lot of tea), I turned to NASA nomenclature to help me come up with a new name. First, there was the Mercury Seven (John Glenn and company, the first Americans into space). Then the New Nine (or Next Nine or Nifty Nine—one name wasn't enough for those men who were going to walk on the moon). So welcome to The Further Four.

The Mercury 7 (not the Cranky
Rah 7), compliments of NASA

The Further Four (put their initials together, and you get something that sounds like a medical scan: ECRG) are 12-ish and, like The Three, they love to write. Unlike The Three, they're really at the very beginning of their writing journey, so when we got together for the first time on Monday, I wanted to start out simple.

Maybe you know about the Five Ws from journalism or school writing: Who, What, Where, When and Why. (There are those who throw in How, too. Which starts with an H, not a W. And which is kind of covered in the actual Ws, so I left it out.) Anyway, the Five Ws aren't just for steely-eyed, ambulance-chasing journalists. Every good story—fiction or non—should answer the Five Ws.

Who?

Who are the people your story is about? These are your characters.

What?

What happens to your characters? This is your plot.

Where?

Where do your characters live? Where do the Whats happen to your characters?

When?

When do the Whats happen to your characters? This isn't just the year or era your story takes place; it includes the time of year, time of day and the age of your characters. It covers the timeline of your story, too: Does it happen over one hour, one month or many years?

Why?

Why do the Whats happen? What leads from one What to another? And why do your characters behave the way they do? This is also called motive.

The Five Ws of Anger

Look at Ben. See? He hates
losing an hour, too.

Any good meeting of writers at Cranky Rah's cave must include playing around with whatever we're talking about. So to explore the Five Ws, The Further Four and I each created a character to write about, using the same Apples to Apples approach The Three and I used last week. (Cranky Rah might not like Ben Franklin when he steals an hour from her every spring, but she's a firm believer in "waste not, want not.") 

E got the adjective crunchy, which was awesome. It was a great chance to talk about how crunchy could be a physical trait or a character trait.

After we had each created and shared our character, we all wrote again, this time putting the character in a scene that answered the other four Ws. My one requirement was that the character had to be angry in the scene. 

We ended up with characters with crunchy hair who had had a very bad day, a nasty, thumb-sucking girl, and an angry pink shark who kind of regretted losing his temper and eating all his dolphin friends. So all in all, a productive writing day.

Talking the Talk: Dialogue

“Why should I bother with dialogue?” she raged.

Oxford University, home of
the Oxford comma.
Oxford also expelled the
poet Shelley. Boo, hiss.

This is a joke. How boring would a story be if no one ever spoke? Like setting, plot and foreshadowing, dialogue is part of any good story. 

Cranky Rah is desperate to go over the Rules of Punctuation for Dialogue. (Cranky Rah thinks punctuation is the bomb, but don’t get her started on the Oxford comma. She’s against it.) Fortunately for you, though, Cranky Rah doesn't have space in this post because there are too many other groovy points to hit on about dialogue. So consider yourself reprieved.

Okay, not really. There are two things I have to mention with regard to the technical aspects of dialogue: dialogue tags.

1. Please use said, mostly. As in "Father's dead," Nikki said. Nikki doesn't need to shriek it or mutter it or rage it. Okay, she can, occasionally. But usually, she should just say it. Show passion (or lack thereof) through the words a character says, not the dialogue tag.
2. And pretty, pretty please don't write "Father's dead," Nikki sneered. You can't sneer (or grimace or grin) words. You can sneer while speaking, but sneer is an expression, not a sound. Pretty, pretty please.

“Dialogue is so rocking!” she gushed.

The gushing joy Rah feels about
dialogue (and punctuation).

Cranky Rah has been known to disregard her own advice. In this case, she must gush because dialogue is so awesome.

Dialogue shows the personality of our characters.

You know what your character looks like, what kind of clothes she wears, who she loves and who she hates, how much education she has, where she's from. All those aspects, physical and psychological, make her different from everyone else in the world and in your story. What she says and how she says it should, too.

Dialogue shows the relationship between characters.

The way people speak to each other reveals a lot about how they feel about each other. What does it sound like when you disagree with your best friend versus someone you don’t know? How would you confront someone when you’re in a crowd? What about if the two of you were alone?

Yeah, we've seen them
before, but what a public
scene it is.

Dialogue shows conflict.

You see how that word show keeps popping up? A good writer looks for ways to show her characters through action and dialogue. Instead of writing After he left her all alone to deal with her overbearing father, Nikki hated the pool boy, have Nikki scream at the pool boy when she unexpectedly runs into him years later. After all, there’s nothing better than a public scene. 

“Yeah, so what does dialogue stink at?” she demanded.

Reflecting real-world conversation.

Alfred Hitchcock once described drama as “life with the dull bits cut out.” This goes for dialogue, too. The real world is full of people having conversations like this:

                “Hey, Nikki,” the pool boy said.
                “Oh, hey. I haven’t seen you in a while.”
                “Yeah, I’ve been keeping busy. Um, been at the pool a lot. We’ve had, um, some great weather this summer. What have you been, like, up to?”

Seriously, no one wants to read a book where people talk like that. Who cares that the pool boy’s been to the pool (duh) or what the weather’s been like? We just want to know how Nikki’s overbearing dad died and whether she’s going to start screaming at the pool boy or just stew.

On the other hand, you do want your dialogue to sound like real-world conversation in some ways. Unless they’re uber-serious or historical, most people talk in contractions. They also often speak in phrases instead of whole sentences. Just don’t bludgeon your reader with too many dialogue quirks; unlike with garlic, a little goes a long way. (You can never have enough garlic.)

Explaining what’s going on in a story (aka exposition).

Don’t use dialogue as exposition, like in soap operas:

“As you remember, Nikki, Jessica took up with your dad, Dr. Howell, after he botched Matilda’s emergency lip surgery, just before the aliens abducted your pool boy.”

‘Nuf said.

“But what else?” she pleaded. “I need more tips!”

Okay, okay. Simmer down. Here are a few more tips for making your dialogue rock.

Flavor it with action.

When the pool boy gets fed up with Nikki blaming him, don’t just write Frustrated at how Nikki wouldn’t see his side, the pool boy exploded, “What is wrong with you?” Instead, try:

“What's wrong with you?” The pool boy flung his lapboard down so hard, the lifeguard tweeted her whistle at him. “I can’t believe you think this is all my fault!”

Situate your speakers.

Where are your characters? The sun’s beating down, stoking the pool boy’s frustration. Nikki’s best friend is eavesdropping by the diving board. Some brat cannonballs in right next to Nikki and splashes her. Include sounds, smells, textures and the other people around your characters.

Don’t forget silence.

Sometimes the answer to a question is silence. Maybe when Nikki screams at him, the pool boy is sullen and won’t talk to her. Maybe he struggles to find the words to say he’s sorry he left her. 

Also, think about what your characters wouldn’t say. We’re not always honest, especially in emotional situations. Maybe Nikki’s never going to get over the pool boy’s abandonment, but she’s made a scene and now she’s embarrassed and just wants to get out of there. When he asks for her number so they can keep in touch, maybe work this out, she gives it to him, but she is never ever going to answer the phone when he calls. Does she tell him that? Nope.

                “I’m sorry, Nik,” the pool boy said, running a hand through his chlorine-stiff hair. “I didn’t know it was going to be so bad for you. Can I make it up to you?”
                “Sure,” she said brightly. “Why don’t you buy me a Coke, and we’ll call it even.”

Read aloud.

When you’ve done everything else you can do to make your dialogue pitch-perfect, read it aloud to hear how it sounds. Hopefully you won’t, as Cranky Rah once did (many, many years ago), decide that your characters are the lamest creatures on the face of the earth. Luckily, she has gone on to write things much better than The Pool Boy. (She swears.)

Group Hug: Building Characters From Apples

It was a long, dark summer without The Three (mainly because Cranky Rah's life kept getting in the way of us meeting up), but we had a lovely afternoon together yesterday. I bang my head on the floor in delight over L's pie cookies. Pie. Cookies. Two great things that go great together. And they were lemony, just like Cranky Rah.

We played with dialogue yesterday, which was great good fun. Before you play with dialogue, you need some characters. Otherwise, it's just you and the voices in your head—and while they might have some interesting things to say, it's probably best that you get away from them every once in a while.

So, first you need some characters. It's easiest to do this exercise (adapted from a newsletter on writing tips by Brave Writer) if you have the game Apples to Apples, but if you don't, you can just make a stack of cards with one adjective written on each.

Here's how it works: Each person takes three of the green Apples to Apples cards and uses the adjectives on them to write a brief character sketch of a person with all three traits. (You can up the crazy factor by drawing five cards instead of three.) 

We did this twice—and I did not, by the way, tell The Three what we were going to do with these characters when they were creating them. We did this first half of the exercise at the beginning of our afternoon, as a warm-up, and it wasn't until we were reading our character sketches to each other that I mentioned, oh-so innocently, that their characters would later be talking to each other.

Poor Matilda. It wasn't her fault.
Sometimes genetics are just
against a girl.

A note on this in practice: After I drew the adjectives long, furry and unhappy for my first character, I went through and took out all the adjectives that could only be used for physical traits so that when we drew a second set of adjectives, they would all be personality traits. But I'll be honest, at the end of the day, the fact that my first character, Matilda, was furry had a huge impact on her relationship with the difficult Francesca, so maybe it was a mistake to take out the physical traits. If Matilda hadn't been furry, she wouldn't have been carrying that duct tape around with her (for emergency hair removal, you know), and the vengeance she wreaked on Francesca would have taken a different path, perhaps one that left Francesca's perfect eyebrows intact.

So after we warmed up by creating characters, we talked a while about dialogue (more about dialogue in then next post). And then we went back to our characters, to have them talk to each other. There were three rules:

1. Each character's dialogue must reflect his or her personality.
2. You can use said or asked but no other dialogue tags. You have to express each character's attitude through the words they speak.
3. You can use some action narrative to keep things going, but limit it. The focus here is on dialogue.

The conversation between the two characters could be about anything, but the dominant emotion in the scene had to be anger. (This is technically not a fourth rule; it's really just the set-up. If we had had more time, we would've done different versions of this, wherein the dominant emotion was confusion, joy, etc.).

As you might expect, hilarity ensued. 

Seriously. Anyone else want to know
what these three are talking about?

Once you've built your characters, there are a lot of other dialogue exercises you can put them through. One idea I really liked (but that we also didn't get to; in 90 minutes there are, well, only 90 minutes) was to have those two characters talk to each other about one of them being really late for an appointment. The first time, the characters are dating each other (this would've been a problem with M's characters, one of whom was six). The second time, they're meeting for the first time, and one of them is more powerful than the other. 

All these exercises are about playing around with how a character's personality is reflected in how he or she speaks and how the way characters speak to each other shows their relationship, two of the most important roles of dialogue in a story.

What else does dialogue rock out? Find out in my next post. Right now, I have to go crawl around the couch and see if anyone dropped any pie cookie crumbs.

In the Beginning, There Was Herb Gathering

Cranky Rah does not like crowds. (This is an Understatement.) So it was with some...trepidation that I went to the James River Writers annual conference this past weekend.

People.
People all weekend.
People all weekend asking about what I write.

It could have been Bad.

And I'm not saying I wasn't uber happy to be back in my cave at the end of it. Or that I didn't spend the better part of the evening in soothing, enveloping darkness (while watching Joss Whedon's weird and wonderful modern take on Much Ado About Nothing).

But, honestly, it pretty much rocked. I had a wonderful chat with Connie LaPallo, author of Dark Enough to See the Stars in a Jamestown Sky and When the Moon Has No More Silver, historical fiction about the woman and children in the colony of Jamestown. (That would be Jamestown, Virginia, the first English settlement in America).

I hung out with some old JRW friends and made some new ones (a special shout out to my new YA-writing friend, Cool J). And I spent a bunch of time with the super brave AW (altogether now: awwwwww...) who walked into that conference, all by herself, at seventeen years old. That's lone Highlander staring down the English army across a cold moor brave—not, Rah hastens to add, that any of the JRW conference attendees are likely to burn down AW's house and destroy her crops. I haven't heard of a single instance of that happening in the entire 12 years of the conference's history.

My delicate forelock whispers
in the breeze as a I gaze solemnly,
tranquilly, moo-vingly into my
limpid almond-shaped eyes...

One of the sessions I went to on Saturday was a panel of agents and editors talking about Top Mistakes that Get Fiction Manuscripts Rejected and How to Avoid Them. Turns out that writers, bless our hearts, make the same mistakes over and over (and over and over). We love to use italics while our characters (who inevitably have almond-shaped eyes) gaze into reflective surfaces and describe themselves.

Where we get into the most trouble, though, is in the first pages and especially the first lines of our story. The first words a reader (and an agent) see should seriously rock. Because if they don't, your reader (who might be your potential agent) will just put your story down. It doesn't matter how fantabulous page two might have been.

At some level, writing is alchemy, and no one can tell you how to transform the words and thoughts in your brain into an awesome beginning that no one else has ever written. But the people who see un-awesome beginnings over and over can give us an idea of what doesn't work.

So here are the beginnings they see over and over (and over and over):

• The hero/heroine wakes up. (This is both a cliché beginning and ending, as when the hero or heroine wakes up at the end because the whole story was a dream.)
• It's the hero/heroine's birthday. (Very popular in Middle Grade manuscripts.)
• It's the hero/heroine's first day of high school. (Very popular in Young Adult manuscripts.)
• The heroine (usually) is gathering herbs. (Very popular in fantasy manuscripts.)
• There's too little action—or too much. (A lot of times, writers trying to avoid the nothing-happening beginning go kind of crazy and throw the reader into a hugely chaotic first scene that doesn't have all that much to do with the rest of the story.)
• There's way way too much world-building.

Where naughty, rule-breaking
writers don't go.

Don't freak out and think I'm telling you you can't start your story on the first day of school or with herb-gathering. You can. You're a writer; you can break all the rules you want to. (We'll talk more about breaking rules when I post about the And then I died ending.)

But if you're going to break the rules, do so purposefully. Play devil's advocate and convince your inner skeptic that this is the very best way to open your story. Use the cliché in a surprising way that makes it fresh, engaging and not a cliché. Write and rewrite and rewrite until your voice is so strong and your opening lines so compelling that your reader absolutely must turn the page.

Speaking of rewriting, I'm dying to write about world-building now. I'll work on that. Right now, let me just say that I think having too much world-building, especially in those first pages, isn't a writing error as much as an editing error.

I Wrote What?

Cranky Rah keeps a cute little blue-jeweled frame on her desk to remind her that no matter how badly she may have written today, it can't be as bad as her best writing used to be. The frame holds four lines of dialogue exchanged between two characters in a story, written a long, long time ago, that I swear was called The Pool Boy. That should tell you all you need to know about how bad it was. But in case you need convincing, here it is:

Ouch, right? I'd like to repeat that this was a long, long time ago. See how the date is smudged? That's because it was a really really long, long time ago. Like before there were people.

Anyway, it can be good to hold onto your old stories. (Cranky Rah's are deep inside her cave in a box labeled Bad Bad Old Old Stories—Burn Upon Death.) You do this not just to make yourself feel good on those days you feel like you stink (you don't), but also to make yourself a better writer.

M was perusing some of her old writing a couple of weeks back, and she shared with The Three and me a story she wrote when she was 9 or 10. With her gracious permission, I share it here:

It was another one of those days. I went downstairs to get breakfast. Honey buns and tea again. I ate my breakfast, then turned the sign on my door to "open". I glanced at the clock. Only 5:50. I still have 50 minutes before Marisolia comes. I picked up the necklace that I was working on. It was Gold/Sapphire. I started shaping the blue gem into a square. "I just need to attach the gem to the metal part, and then I'm done!" I thought. Just then: ding! My bell rung. I checked the clock. 6:00. I went to the door. "Hi!" "Hi!" "Guess what? There's a mission-meeting going on! The troll cave!" "Cool! Are you going?" "Yes! Do you want to go?" "Sure!"

Now, this story has some good things going for it, especially coming from a 9 or 10 year old. Still, M has grown since then, of course, and so has her writing. When she read it, she remembered this story and even where it was going and thought it'd be fun to revisit it.

She started with those 127 words and a list of things she thought was wrong with them. I la-la this list (especially the sarcasm in the fourth bullet):

• No setting description at all

• No sensory inputs, not even visual descriptions

• No description (not even gender) of any characters

• Fabulous technical terms there ("the blue gem," "the metal part")

• 50 minutes passed in 4 sentences??

• I think I was trying to make there be 100 minutes in an hour and 10 hours in a day...

• You can only assume that the person who the main character started talking to was Marisolia

• The tense switches from past to present and back

• Pretty much everything but the general concept of this is bad, now that I look at it...

I think M's being kind of harsh on her nine-year-old self with that last point, but the rest are well taken. When she rewrote and expanded the story, she kept those points in mind and ended up with 1,486 words of the beginning of a story with a great setting, strong appeals to the senses, and well-developed characters (who even have genders now). She's also written some fantastic dialogue between the scene's two main characters (unattributed in her original).

Here's just a smackerel:

"You know I love diamonds," [Marisolia] replied, unabashed. "Anyway, are you going to volunteer or not?"

I grinned. "You know me," I said, picking up the sander and hanging it back on the wall. "Of course I'm going."

"Good, because I already told Trevan that we'll both be going to the meeting," Marisolia replied.

"Wait—both? You're going, too?" I asked, surprised. She raised an eyebrow.

"What, you think I'll be fine with staying home while my best friend goes off on a mission outside the kingdom? I think not."

"But—it's...it's...outside the kingdom," I finished lamely.

"That's the whole point," she said, rolling her eyes. "Adventure. Heroics. Excitement."

M's done a great job of capturing the very different personalities of Marisolia and the narrator through rhythm and word choice. The dialogue also shows the relationship between the two: close, casual and trusting. And just in this very short sample of her longer piece, you can see how she's addressed almost all of the items on her list.

The point is that editing doesn't just make bad (or unformed, in the case of your nine-year-old self) writing better. It makes good writing better and great writing better. It's awesome if you have a writing group and beta readers who can give you feedback, but you can give yourself feedback, too—and you should.

Ask yourself, like M did, what your weaknesses are, either in general or in one specific piece of writing. Look at the way you describe (or fail to) the landscape your characters inhabit (M's first two bullets). Look at how you build character through dialogue and actions (M's third bullet). Think about vocabulary (bullet four) and pacing (bullets five and six).

A cutie, but not exactly the kind
of pool boy I meant.

And more, don't be afraid of your old writing. Sure, it's bound to be worse than what you're writing now. That's good. It means you're growing as a writer. But our bad bad old old stories don't just tell us about our writing. They tell us about ourselves. The Pool Boy is awful, but I still go back and read it sometimes, in all of its glorious awfulness. Because I can see why I wrote it, and I can remember why I cared about those characters (even though one of them clearly didn't care about her dead father). And if you care about your characters and where they're going, the rest is just editing.

Where Do We Go From Here? The Hero's Journey, Part 2

When last we saw our hero, she was sitting grumpily around, waiting for us to get her on her journey. I don't know about you, but Cranky Rah's pretty sure we ought to hop to it. I mean, look at her:

The good thing is, our hero is kind of where she needs to be in the first place: at home or otherwise in a place she's always been.

If we're using the vocabulary of a journey (and we are because we're talking about the Hero's Journey), then the action of our story is about where our characters are going, what they do on their way and what they've gotten (or how they've changed) by the time they get there. We also call that plot.

Cranky Rah would like to repeat (because she can be tiresome that way) that our story doesn't have to be an actual journey. But even actual journeys include a metaphorical journey that leads to the hero learning and changing. The Wizard of Oz isn't, in the end, about Dorothy meeting some groovy friends, hanging out with a wizard and getting back home. It's about Dorothy learning a bigger truth: There's no place like home—even when it looks like Kansas.

All journeys start somewhere, usually at home. In the lexicon of the Hero's Journey, we call this the Ordinary World.

The Ordinary World

This is the hero's life at the beginning of the story. It shows readers who the hero is so they can appreciate how she changes. A lot of times, this part of the story gives us a hint that something's not right, that something's about to change.

What's the (Plot) Point?
This is your basic set-up. Show the hero interacting with her life. Is she satisfied or dissatisfied? What's important to her? 

In Cranky Rah's story, we might see her feeling a little itchy, a little uneasy, gazing longingly out of her cave and madly Googling airfare prices. That's just her at home, though. No one really wants to hang out there long, watching that. (And Cranky Rah certainly doesn't want the surveillance.)

So we have to get her the heck out of her cave. She has to experience The Call to Adventure.

The Call to Adventure

This is the action that thrusts the hero into her journey. There's a problem or mystery to be solved, a life to save, a wrong to right, a society to change. Whatever the action, it's upsetting. It's going to rock the hero's world and make her do something she doesn't want to do.

The Call to Adventure can be instigated by a lot of things: a death or injury; a kidnapping (either of someone the hero cares for or the hero herself); a need for revenge; a prophecy; a mysterious message; a move; a breakup—anything that forces the hero to act.

You know this bird, right?
You know where she's about to put her
head, if she can find some sand.

A lot of the time, the hero isn't all that into the idea of jumping in and saving the world (saving the world not exactly being a safe occupation). She might try to duck the Call and see if she can get away with just staying home, but that always leads to something bad—something that forces her to put her foot on that literal or figurative road.

What's the (Plot) Point?A lot of great scenes come out of the Call to Adventure. Show the event that makes the hero leave the Ordinary World. There's a lot of action here, and we learn how the hero behaves under pressure. 

Show the hero refusing to go, and then show us the bad thing that happens as a result. Fate is not going to leave that slacker hero alone. It wants her to get out there and get busy. Otherwise, we don't really have a story.

And Now What?

Now that she's been forced out of her comfort zone (The sun! The sun! It's so bright!), what happens to your hero? This is the meat of the journey, all those plot points that keep the story moving. Is this where you start ripping your hair out or gnashing your teeth because you can't figure out how to flesh out the plot? Don't. Your hair's already groovy, and your parents have spent a lot of money on those teeth. In our next and final post about the Hero's Journey, we'll talk about how to drive your hero forward.

Sheep? Heroes? It's all the same to Jack.

Words Rah Loves: Cabal

Cranky Rah has been using the word cabal a lot lately. Also, bifurcated.

(Don't ask why; when someone uses the words cabal and bifurcated a lot, it's safe to assume you should keep your distance from the mess that is that person's life at the moment.)

Anyway, cabal is a pretty cool word. A cabal is a group of individuals meeting secretly, usually for political purposes. One might use it like this:

The cabal summoned to Cranky Rah's cave during the new moon is scheming to take over the world.

(Please note: This is not a technically accurate usage of the word. If Cranky Rah was scheming to take over the world, she would not employ a cabal. She would just do it herself.)

Not this kind of madonna.

Anyway, cabal comes from the Medieval Latin cabbala from the even older Hebrew qabbalah. If one is of a certain age, one might equate the word with the Jewish mysticism tradition weirdly embraced in the 90s (that would be the 1990s) by the weird, multi-talented, once-upon-a-time-Catholic singer-actress Madonna.

The word qabbalah means, loosely, "something received," and the related mystic tradition is, like most mystic traditions...well, mystic and esoteric and kind of hard to pin down. In any event, some of the ideas of Jewish kabbalah-ism were embraced by a sect of occultist Christians during the Renaissance, and it seems to be at that point that the word took on its flavor of secrecy (occultism not really being mainstream in the world of Christianity).

The word retained a purely religious meaning until the 1660s and the reign of Charles II, he of, officially at least, England, Scotland and Ireland. Poor Charles Stuart had a rough time getting to the throne. When he was 19, his dad Charles I was beheaded, and II had to flee to France in order to retain his own gorgeous black tresses. (Those Stuarts had some good hair.) In 1660, after suffering the mind-numbingly boring rule of Oliver Cromwell (turned out that not only did Cromwell not have good hair, he was down on theater, sports and colorful clothing), the people of England asked Charles to pretty please come back and be king. Which he did, and on his 30th birthday no less.

Seriously. Check out
that hair.

Charles II was a man who knew how to party. When he entered London, bells rang, fountains flowed with wine, and the nobles got decked out in all the cloth of silver and gold they hadn't been able to wear during Cromwell's days.

But had II's luck changed? Not really. In the first years of his reign, England was hit by a plague that killed somewhere between 70,000 and 100,000 people in London alone—the year before the Great Fire burned through 373 acres of the city. And II managed to get himself into a war with the Dutch.

It was in part because of that war with the Dutch (the second of four Anglo-Dutch wars) that one of II's closest counselors lost the king's faith and was replaced by a group of five ministers: Thomas Clifford, Lord Arlington, George Buckingham, Anthony Ashley and Lord Lauderdale. These men got together (more or less; they weren't so much of the "all for one" ilk as of the "more for me" persuasion) and arranged a secret treaty pulling France into the fray against the Dutch.

So check out the first letters of their last names: CABAL.

Isn't that cool? It's just a coincidence, but it did help popularize the word at the time, and it's carried carried sinister connotations ever since.

II, by the way, kept his head and his crown on top of it. But he didn't leave behind a legitimate heir, so his unlikeable younger brother James took the throne, a misfortune that led directly, 60 years later, to the massacre of Cranky Rah's peeps on a desolate Scottish moorland and to the vote for Scottish independence happening today.

So it just goes to show that good hair does not a good leader make.

Where Do We Go From Here? The Hero's Journey, Part 1

Cranky Rah loves to get out of her cave if it means going on a journey. The Great Ocean Road in Australia, the tiny walled town of Rothenburg, Germany. The Rocky Mountains, the Okefenokee Swamp. The Highlands of Scotland, of course.

Maybe this is why I dig the Hero's Journey so much—and why, as The Three know, I can go on about it. When I do go on about something with The Three, I usually ply them with cocoa and treats (okay, they bring the treats; I just give them excuse to bake something chocolate). Since it appears I can't deliver cocoa through cyberspace (is that why there's chocolate on the floor under my desk, or was that just the Poet-Accountant eating ice cream at 6 a.m. again?), I'll break this into three posts. Today, we'll just tackle the question What the heck is this thing, the Hero's Journey?

You can read entire books about the Hero's Journey (I particularly like The Writer's Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers by Christopher Vogler), but I broke it down a little for The Three. I also focused on the first half of the journey for them because the first thing The Three told me when we started getting together was that while they love making up characters and developing backstory, it's the plot that snags them—figuring out how to make the ideas they have happen in a way that makes sense, figuring out where those characters are going to go.

First, the backstory of the Hero's Journey: The mythologist Joseph Campbell studied myths from around the world and believed that the reason certain stories are repeated over and over in vastly different cultures is because they deal with universal questions: Who am I? Where did I come from? What is good and evil, and what should I do about it?

Not Godzilla,
but copyright free!

Most stories are, in essence, about a search: a girl searches for love or freedom or herself; a boy searches for the mother who abandoned him or to make a name for himself or to discover the antidote to a poison; a detective searches for a murderer; Japanese citizenry search for a way to escape Godzilla. This search is what we call the Hero's Journey, and you'll find it in The Odyssey, Shakespeare, Cinder, Agatha Christie, Shrek and The Hunger Games. Some books and movies are obvious journeys, like Star Wars, The Lightning Thief and The Lord of the Rings. Others don't involve a physical journey but are Hero's Journeys nonetheless, like Iron Man, Pride and Prejudice and Divergent. All very different stories, but all with similar characteristics.

Here's the Hero's Journey in a nutshell: A hero starts out in her ordinary world but soon ventures (or is dragged) into an unfamiliar world where she must accomplish a task. She encounters challenges and tests, and she confronts a villain or villains. In the end, she either succeeds at her task or doesn't, but she's grown, her outlook on the world has changed and life will never be the same again.

Don't be turned off by the words hero and villain. By hero, we mean the main character; the person the story's about; the person who has the most at stake and who will change the most by the end. There are lots of different types of heroes, including dark, troubled anti-heroes who are their own worst enemy and heroes who aren't particularly heroic. And by villain, we mean the character who's getting in the main character's face in some way; a villains doesn't always need to mean the main character harm.

Also, don't be turned off if you think this all sounds a lot like an adventure story. It's true that the Hero's Journey is easy to see in quests like Star Wars and The Wizard of Oz. If you read about the Hero's Journey a lot, you'll come across words like supernatural and fabulous forces and battle language like victory and power. But the Hero's Journey is just as relevant to stories that don't have a physical or mystical quest. The Hero's Journey is, at its root, a character's inner journey. Writers who are sitting around scratching our heads and wondering what's going to happen next can use the Hero's Journey as a guide for developing a strong plot and memorable characters.

Another kind of caveat,
the ungrammatical kind

Before we get into the ooey-gooey viscera of the Hero's Journey, there's one caveat (there's always a caveat): This is an art, not a science. The steps I'm going to outline are just pieces in a puzzle. Each one can be left out, twisted or put in a different order. It's up to you, after all: You're in charge. (Bwa-ha-ha!)

In the next post, we'll explore plot and how to get your character on her journey.