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.