Hey, it’s NaNoWriMo day #8 so let everything go to hell! We’ve all had those days when things keep going wrong–and wrong–and more damn wrong! The events might be big (getting fired from your job) or small (someone cutting in front of you when it’s your turn to order your latte). At some point we feel so cornered we explode and let loose our rant! Maybe we’re alone and maybe we’re not. Maybe we’re ranting in someone’s face. Hopefully we’re not threatening anyone with bodily harm. Confession: I’ve pulled over in my car so I could rant without censoring myself …
Author: Sarah Lovett
#NaNoWriMo2015–Get to the Heart of Your Story (writing tip #7)
When you’re writing fast, tapping out your shitty first draft, you need to have several markers on your imagination’s roadmap. You want an X on your starting point (this marks your hero’s life at your story’s opening and her “want”). You also need an X for the inciting incident that pulls your hero out of her ordinary life and changes or intensifies her “want” (and at this point that X will also mark your antagonist’s intentions, whether your antagonist is a middle school bully or a mafia assassin). It’s good to have an X in the general vicinity of your …
#NaNoWriMo2015–Get to the Heart of Your Story (writing tip #6)
Action is vital in fiction. But the action must fit the story. If you are writing a gentle love story you will probably not include car chases and IEDs. However you might include a hero who obsesses over a “potential” or “lost” love to the point of stalking. “Really, I was just picking up my dry-cleaning and can I help it if you work next door?” Details are also a vital part of bringing a fictional world and its inhabitants to life–however a wise writer chooses dynamic details, meaning those details that reveal something about the inner and outer life …
#NaNoWriMo2015–Get to the Heart of Your Story (writing tip #5)
It’s National Novel Writing Month and many writers around the world are in gear and cranking out pages! Yesterday, my tip was about writing in drafts–and the quick (and shitty) first draft aligns with getting your novel done in 30 days (although even when I’m fast, I’m not that fast!). Today my tip is for those moments when you feel you might be veering off track, stumbling into deep water, and all the other cliches that basically mean you feel lost and disconnected from your story. Don’t panic, this counts as a normal part of first-drafting. When you feel you …
#NaNoWriMo2015–Get to the Heart of Your Story (writing tip #4)
When I’m drafting my novels I think in threes: first draft is fast and lean and messy (remember Anne Lamott and shitty first drafts); second draft (aka revision) comes after I’ve had the chance to take a breather and then give my book a focused read so I can sense what needs expanding, cutting, honing, deepening, this time moving at a slower pace–remember that revision is seeing again with fresh eyes; if all goes well my third draft is about “housekeeping”–tidying up, freshening up, tossing out, and adding the final touches. When I speak with writers, some new to the …
#NaNoWriMo2015–Get to the Heart of Your Story (writing tip #3)
Make it easy on yourself–keep your characters in action and in relationship. Physical interaction and dialogue between two (or three) characters is one of the easiest ways to reveal deep traits. When we witness your hero counseling a 12-year-old runaway we will judge your hero’s level of compassion and concern, we will probably get a glimpse of her past and the wound that leaves her vulnerable, and depending upon the 12-year-old’s responses, we’ll know if she is street savvy or naive–in our eyes and in the eyes of the ‘tween. When you begin writing the scene, you will likely identify …
#NaNoWriMo2015 — Get to the Heart of Your Story (writing tip #2)
Don’t get stuck believing you must draft your novel by a) rigidly outlining OR b) driving your story through the dark blindly with no gas can and no sense of destination. Writing a novel is not an either/or process. Try creating a loose outline with some idea of beginning, middle, end–and fill in the major turning points as you write. Let your hero’s “want” drive the story. Ditto your antagonist’s “want”. Free-write scenes, be a voyeur and watch your protagonist interact with people who are most important in her life. Those moments are vital even if they do not end up …
#NaNoWriMo2015 — Get to the Heart of Your Story (writing tip #1)
Get to the heart of your story-it lives inside your hero: know what she wants, what drives her, and why. Give her a goal that matters. Know her deepest wound. Show us her fight to reach her goal and make sure that the forces of opposition might destroy her. Give her a friend who can make her laugh and let us readers catch our breath. Know that her fight is always a fight to the ‘death’-she will face a dilemma between what she wants and what she needs. She can’t have both. She must surrender her old view and be …
Pump Up the Faith Muscles
I just finished a phone conversation with a writer I know. He is new to writing and he’s eager to learn his craft—although he already understands how to write strong, entertaining scenes. I remind him of this often. Still, he worries a lot. I remind him, also, that his characters are strong and they have suffered and we care about them. Characters have the power to invite us into their book so we follow them eagerly across the most tumultuous narrative seas; characters also have the less-than-desirable power to shoo us away from reading because we don’t care about them …
Shadow and Light, Yin and Yang—Driving Your Story from the Dark Side into the Light
Around 1915, Danish psychologist Edgar Rubin developed his vase illusion (sometimes known as the figure-ground vase), an intentionally ambiguous visual tool for studying human figure-ground perception. It is known informally as the “Rubin vase” because the central image is a vase or goblet, in this case filling the white space. But if you focus on the black background around the vase, it usually takes very little time for that “background” to morph into two black faces in profile, their noses almost touching each other. One of our brain’s jobs is to interpret visual patterns in the eye created by …