Flogging the Quill

Ideas for creating distance to achieve better self-editing

To self-edit with any success at all, I need distance from my work, to somehow separate what I read there from intimate knowledge of my vision so that it’s the words that do the work, not my resident imaginings. With distance, it falls on the writing to evoke scenes no longer fresh in my mind. Not so amazingly, distance reveals holes in the pictures. And flat writing becomes visible for the first time, those lazy word choices or adverbs that got me through the task of getting the story down but don’t do diddly-squat to create the reader experience I need to provoke.

Once done with a draft, I try not to go back to a book for at least a month, though six weeks is better. However, unless I have other projects interesting enough to distract me, I find that very difficult to do. A few days go by and then, like a scab that needs picking because it keeps itching, I open the file and pick. Compulsive, I know, but I don’t see how anyone could write an entire novel without a healthy dose of compulsive behavior to keep giving the wheel a turn on tough days.

So I needed to find other ways to get around the fact that I refused to allow my book adequate time to chill. Here are some that might work for you.

You could do as George Carlin one talked of doing in the last stages of polishing his material--smoke a little pot. Failing that, what?

If you’ve been working exclusively onscreen, create a printout and go through a hard copy. That’s a must. But it’s the least you can do to gain a little psychological distance.

Read it aloud to yourself. For me, this ALWAYS reveals clumsy structure, or unwanted repetitions and echoes, or missing information, or too much information, or other flaws. I don’t do this often enough, probably because I simply forget about it.

Another technique that works for me is to reformat the narrative to look more like that in a book. Here’s how to do it using Microsoft Word (this is doable in WordPerfect as well).

1. Change the font. If you’re using Courier, it’ll never look like a book. If you’re using Times New Roman, it’s closer in appearance to a book’s text, but it’s a narrow newspaper font seldom used in a book. And it would be better to eye a different font anyway.

Author M.J. Rose, The Halo Effect, prints her manuscript out in a different font and then takes it somewhere else to read--2 or 3 hours a day at a library, or on a train from Connecticut to Boston and back all in one day.  I like that idea--your words have to overcome unaccustomed distractions. 

To change the font, type Ctrl+a (or Apple+a with a Mac). This should select all the text. Then go to the font window in your toolbar and change it to one of the book-style fonts: Garamond or Palatino or Georgia, if you have them. If you don’t, Times New Roman will do. Font size: 12.

2. While you’ve still got everything selected (or do Ctrl+a again to select all), change the spacing to be more book-like as well. Click Format>Paragraph. In the Line spacing box, use the drop-down menu to select Multiple. Then, in the “At:” box next to it, type 1.1 or 1.2 and click OK. Adjust to taste. This will give you a book-like spacing. But you’re not done yet.

3. Change the margins to create a bookish column of text on the page with about 10-15 words in a line. The margins I’ve found helpful are: top, 1”; bottom 1”; left and right, 1.7”. This will give you a very different look.

4. It’s fun to really go all the way and see how it would look book-style by doing this:

a. Change the page size. Click File>Page setup and go to the Paper size tab. Change the paper size to: Custom size and type in 5.5” for width and 8.5” for height. Or 6” by 9”.

b. Now change the margins to top: .66”, bottom, left and right to .6”.

c. Change the font and spacing as noted above. Might try a smaller font size, 11.5 or 11, depending on the font.

d. Justify the margins. Select all the text (Ctrl+a). Click Format>Paragraph. On the Indents and Spacing tab, go to the Alignment box, click the arrow to show the menu, and choose Justified. Then click OK.

I think you’ll find that the re-formatted narrative reads differently, either onscreen or in a printout. I’ve even printed out a book on 5.5” by 8.5” paper, using both sides of the paper and formatting just like a book (headers, page numbers, justified margins, font, spacing, etc.), and had it tape-bound at Kinko’s, which yielded something very much like a perfect-bound trade paperback. Now, that’s fun to hold in your hands—your book as a real book! It’s educational, too.

If you’ve found other ways to put a little distance between yourself and your words, please let me know and I’ll pass them on.

Let me hear from you. If I can help you with a question about your writing, email me and I’ll apply a beady eye to it. Tell me if I can share it in a post or if you want a “private consultation.”

All contents © Ray Rhamey 2004.

Have a dandy holiday.

Talk about suspense... conflict... tension.

In the dark. Knowing something deadly lurks nearby. Unable to see what's coming.

The perfect story, the perfect reader.

Blog you Monday after the holiday.

RR

Don’t trip over your imaginings: stagecraft in novels

In previous posts I’ve advocated slipping into a character’s skin and looking around to help you set a scene. There’s another benefit from doing this—avoiding impossible “staging.” Staging is how action unfolds, or how a character interacts with the setting. Often a writer is so focused on the result he/she wants she/he unwittingly bends possibility until it breaks.

Bad staging creates at least two problems that become especially damning if the reader is an agent or acquisition editor:

1. You lose credibility with the reader and/or

2. You confuse the reader, which can mean that she has to break out of the story to figure out what’s going on, or might just stop reading altogether.

Here are some examples I’ve adapted from edits I’ve done. Details have been changed to conceal origins. First I’ll give you the excerpt, and then the comment I gave in the edit.

An elderly man shuffled toward them. He wore a hospital johnnie that dangled open in the back.

Comment: If he’s coming toward the point-of-view character, the pov guy can’t see that it dangles open in the back—you need to either cut this or fix the staging so that it can be seen. For me, the detail is not needed.

Looking over at him , she could not remember if she had ever made love in the afternoon, in a room with the shades up. A time when it did not matter if the sun had set, or the blinds were drawn, or the door locked to ward off children. But now, watching the leaves come down, she could not remember such a time.

Comment: At this moment you have her looking at him, not at the leaves. Suggest you have her turn her gaze back to the leaves before her concluding thought.

(For this excerpt, the character cannot see and is in a place she has never been)

As the man who had been holding her walked away, she could hear his feet echoing down the hall.

Comment: You had written it as if she could know he went down a hall, but it has to be a question because she can’t see. (I edited the line to read this way: As the man who had been holding her walked away, she could hear his feet echoing--down a hall?)

(The character has picked up a basket that contains a baby from his front porch and taken it inside. Then this happens…)

Holding the basket in my lap, I pulled the blanket aside.

Comment: Is he sitting somewhere? The living room? Kitchen? You need to set the scene a little so the reader can picture the character in action. Also, readers need “staging” to show action. Another thought: a basket large enough to hold a baby would be pretty big to put in your lap. Suggest he either set it on the floor or on the kitchen table.

The Chevy glided over the bumps in the rutted road. Darkness had fallen as he slowed on the unfamiliar road looking for her house.

Comment: There’s something wacky about the sense of this staging of darkness coming and slowing the car. It means that darkness came in/during the time it took him to slow down. Either darkness falls far more quickly where he lives than it does on my part of the planet, or he took an awful long time to slow down. You need to adjust the “reality” of this darkening.

Once safely inside her flat on the fourth floor, she went to open her bedroom window. She recoiled behind the curtain when she saw a long shadow on the pavement below recede into darkness. She recognized him.

Comment: She saw only a shadow and yet she recognized him? Doesn’t seem possible, especially if she is four stories up and it is dark outside. Need to rethink what the staging is here if you want her to see the guy.

Moral of post: inhabit characters so you don’t trip over the scenery.

Second moral of post: find sharp “other eyes” to help spot goofs you can’t see.

Please let me hear from you. If I can help you with a question about your writing, email me and I’ll apply a beady eye to it. Tell me if I can share it in a post or if you want a “private consultation.”

All contents © Ray Rhamey 2004.

A writer critiques how I open my novel. Did I practice my preaching?

Last post, I illustrated a point about rewriting with the following opening from my novel in progress:

I was there. I was more than there. If only I had…if only I had not…the if-onlys pillory me. It is said that pain diminishes with time, but I can testify that the ache of guilt does not. It grows until it eats your life.

Today it gets its last bite of mine.

The timepiece on my wrist informs me that it is four o’clock in the afternoon, marking another anniversary of the hour my life began to end. Despite the trudge of a year of days, the death of Graeme, the man I expected to love for the rest of my time on this sorry earth, pierces me even more than the moment I lost him, the random victim of a homeless man crazed by an insane culture.

No, not random. If only…

A sharp-eyed blogee noticed that, after all my harping on giving pictures and setting the scene, my opening gave no more than the time of day. He sent this comment:

“Enjoy your posts. I'm wondering, however, about your novel in progress. You seem to be contradicting the very point you just made in your prior post, ‘Writing for Effect--setting the critical first scene.’

“’I was there.’ That's a pretty sparse, isn't it? And the rest of the paragraph doesn't add much. I don't think it should be used for the opening paragraph of a novel.

“I'd also be careful about switching from present to past tense, especially so early on. Maybe changing tense after the first paragraph makes sense in the broader context of the whole story, but with only seeing the first few lines it tends be distracting at best, confusing at worse.”

Great food for thought. Good question, too…do my bloggy pontifications and personal writing agree? My response went something like this:

You raise a good point although, at the end of that post, I advocated involving the reader in "the opening scene of the story and/or the mind of the character."

My thinking is that the opening immerses you quickly into the character’s mind. As for setting the scene, I’ll share what follows. I’m going for a distinctive mood and tone as well as a sense of “where.”

The wind whips my long coat in a fierce, futile attack. Named the Hawk by the people of this city, it thrusts icy talons under my skirt, greedy for my warmth. Perhaps it wishes it were a summer breeze instead of a harbinger of death. But it takes nothing from me, for I do not face January in Chicago truself. In the manner of my Celtic ancestress, I use lledrith, the energy of life, to warm my body. Frustrated, the wind swirls away in search of a defenseless target.

I let my gaze drift for a last look and take in the artless eighty floors of the nearby Amoco Building, one of the glass-and-steel blights that mar the skyline around me, gigantic buildings erected by the lessi for their myriad, scurrying purposes. Where I stand once opened a meadow cloaked with pure white snow, its future a summer of green grass and golden flowers. Now it is an asphalt street and a massive pile of stone called the Chicago Art Institute, shrouded with snow the color of ashes, its future void of life or spirit. Through that meadow, I have walked a deer path through a wood to a lake that seemed as vast as an ocean. The lake is there still, but it now lashes at concrete revetments instead of spilling onto a sandy shore, its waters no longer crystalline blue, but the color of metal.

You’re right about being careful with tense changes… but only the first two sentences in the first paragraph of the opening are past tense—the third goes to present tense (pillory) and the narrator stays there. I think the net effect is that she is in the present but referring to a past event.

At least that's the way I see it today. This is a work in progress, though, and I hugely appreciate your providing "other eyes." Here's my philosophy on this: I MUST reconsider what I’ve done when considered under the fresh illumination of a criticism, whether at first blush I agree with it or not. And so I will do with your thoughts.

Quickly, you’ve learned that a woman suffers from something she’s done and may be suicidal, it’s a cold January afternoon in modern-day Chicago, she has some kind of power we don’t have, and she was in Chicago before it was a city. I’m hoping by this time you’re thinking, “What’s up with that?”

Compelling? You be the judge. After all, you’re the reader.

I gotta tell you, getting feedback from you out there is great! Thank you, and please keep it coming. A dialogue is much more entertaining than a monologue.

If I can help you with a question about your writing, email me and I’ll apply a beady eye to it. Tell me if I can share it in a post or if you want a “private consultation.”

All contents © Ray Rhamey 2004.

By way of a thank-you to my Other Eyes

My novel-in-progress once opened this way:

The timepiece on my wrist informs me that it is four o’clock in the afternoon, marking another anniversary of the hour my life began to end. Despite the trudge of a year of days, the death of Graeme, the man I expected to love for the rest of my time on this sorry earth, pierces me even more than the moment I lost him, the random victim of a homeless man crazed by an insane society.

No, not random. I was there. I was more than there. If only I had…if only I had not…the if-onlys pillory me. It is said that pain diminishes with time, but I can testify that the ache of guilt does not. It grows until it eats your life.

Today it gets its last bite of mine.

I labored over that opening. Critique group members read the first two chapters and said they were hooked. I figured I had it nailed. Then Bharti added that she thought the second sentence in the second paragraph might be a better opening. Oh, yeah? Hmmm…  And then Leslie pointed out that the "Despite the trudge"  sentence threw her--too much. So I rethought the opening and came to this...

Despite the trudge of a year of days, the death of my Graeme pierces me even more than the moment he died, the random victim of a homeless man crazed by an insane culture.

No, not random. I was there. I was more than there.

If only I had…if only I had not…if-onlys torment me. It is said that pain diminishes with time, but I can testify that the ache of guilt does not. It grows until it eats your life.

Today it gets its last bite of mine.

If only…

I think it’s more intriguing this way. What do you think? I think I’m going to go with it.

Further up the river of my writing, a critique group member caused me to ditch the first chapters in a coming-of-age novel titled The Summer Boys*, set in 1958. The original started out this way (apologies in advance for all the “telling”—apparently I hadn’t quite got the hang of it back then):

The girl didn't look like a cause of death, although she was giving Jesse Carver heart palpitations. He figured her for fifteen, but she was already one of those girls a boy instantly undresses with his eyes. Jesse had a year on her, but he would have been stumped for what to do with her once undressed. He was willing to imagine, though, so he did.

She was an unexpected pleasure. Neither he nor best friend Dudley had seen love or peril on the horizon when they left Dallas five hours earlier for a summer job on the Box 8 ranch. They'd roared down the highway toward the hill country west of Kerrville in Dudley’s old ’53 Cadillac, radio bellowing rock and roll and no parents to yell "turn down that noise." The new Jamies song had said it all ...

"Well shut them books and throw 'em away

And say goodbye to dull school days

Look alive and change your ways

It's summertime summertime sum sum summertime

Summertime summertime sum sum summertime summertime

“It's time to head straight for them hills

It's time to live and have some thrills ... "

They had headed for hills but expected no thrills—not as junior ranch hands working for room and board. To a couple of suburban kids who dreamed of being ranchers, an invitation to work on a real ranch was like a pass through the Pearly Gates.

(Seems to go on and on, all that telling, doesn’t it? Baby steps.) When my critique group got to chapter 3, Richard said, “The story starts here. You should cut the first two chapters.” Was he kidding? All that material? All that exposition? The Summertime song? All that stuff the reader just had to know? No way.

But he was right. It took a few months to sink in, but finally I achieved enough distance to cut the first two chapters and weave in expositional info from them into the new beginning. Now the novel opens with…

The air was as still as it was hot; only the whir of a grasshopper’s flight disturbed the quiet. Jesse Carver felt like an overcooked chicken, his meat damn near ready to fall off his bones. Mouth so dry he didn’t have enough spit left to swallow, Jesse croaked, “That guy tryin’ to kill us?"

Dudley Miller’s answer took a while coming. “I’m beginning to wonder.”

Jesse and Dudley rested in the meager shade of a live oak tree in the south yearling pasture—wherever the hell that was. A half-dozen red-brown Hereford yearlings, broad white blazes down the centers of their empty faces, grazed on parched, yellow grass. Jesse had tried a friendly moo, but they had paid him no mind.

Jesse said, “Doesn’t seem a foreman would be leavin’ people stuck out here with no water.”

“He’s not much older than we are. Maybe Buddy ol’ buddy doesn’t know what he’s doing.”

“Oh, he knows. You hear him laugh when he drove away?”

Dudley said, “You mean right after he said, ‘You ain’t troubled by snakes, are you?’”

“Yep.” Jesse tossed a stone at a clump of prickly pear cactus the size of a bushel basket. From it came a dry rustle that faded away after a few seconds. “You hear that?”

“Yeah.“

“Think it’s a rattler? “

“Sounds like it.“

Better, right? I did the rewrite, but it took someone else to see the opportunity.

And then there’s Dan the agent, whose comments led me to come up with an overarching conflict to open my speculative thriller, We the Enemy* and thus hugely improve the story throughout.

So thank you Bharti and Leslie and Richard and Dan, and Laura, and Lynn, and Deb, and all the others who have helped me see better things in my own writing.

Moral of story: if you don’t have “Other Eyes” for your writing, find some.

Please let me hear from you. If I can help you with a question about your writing, email me and I’ll apply a beady eye to it. Tell me if I can share it in a post or if you want a “private consultation.”

* The Summer Boy and We the Enemy are represented by TriadaUS. All contents© Ray Rhamey 2004.

Writing for Effect--setting the critical first scene

I will tell you this about most of the manuscripts I receive from beginning novelists—one of the number one flaws (several tie for first place) is failure to set the scene effectively--or at all. (Acquisition editors and agents, what’s your experience?)

Some are more like radio scripts than novels. Others are simply underdone, probably because the writer puts down a sparse description that evokes the whole picture in his mind but fails to get it in on paper.

In the last post, I had a character named Jimmy traversing a “cluttered room.” My adjective did little to create a picture. At the very least, we should see what the room was cluttered with, i.e.

Jimmy crept across a room cluttered with shrunken heads.

Ooooo. Tell me more. What about the room? Is it dark? Any smells? Sounds? Is anyone else there? What about characterization? I put on Jimmy’s skin and…

He was glad for the dim light of his candle—all those tiny faces staring up at him was entirely too creepy. He set a foot down and winced at a crunch. He froze, listening for sounds of renewed pursuit. But only the scurrying of rats troubled the air, musty with the dust of the dead.

I invented Jimmy’s adventure to illustrate a point, but what about a real example? Here’s the opening paragraph from a narrative I received for a sample edit (thanks to Greg for permission to use this):

Layton and Jean McElvey hung next to each other in a desolate basement, chained and waiting like tormented animals. Heavy shackles dug into their ankles and wrists and the dry air of Colorado taunted and teased their thirst.

Dramatic and interesting--but no more than a vague sense of the place and the people, and this paragraph was the only scene setting done. I wrote the following comment in my edit:

“Desolate” is an abstract word, doesn’t really give an actual “picture.” Are they chained to a wall, or hung from the ceiling/rafters? Are their hands above their heads or not? Do they face the wall or away? Is it dark, or is there a light on? Are there windows that let light in if it’s not? Basically, this is “telling” versus showing. I’ll bet that if you stood in Layton’s shoes and looked out at that basement you could describe what “you” see and feel. I suggest you focus in on Layton’s point of view right from the start. (In hindsight, I wish I’d also mentioned that the adjective “tormented” was a do-nothing stand-in for something that needed to be shown.)

In the sample edit, my comment went on to include a thought-starter for improvement. Offering “a rough look at what I mean,” I wrote (it has been honed a little since then):

Steel manacles bit into Layton McElvey’s wrists as he and his wife Jean hung, chained like animals to the basement wall. Daylight had come again; paled by a single dirty window, it showed their captor’s footprints on the dirt floor. The dry Colorado air taunted Layton’s thirst. He tiptoed in an attempt relieve the torment from his upraised arms and aching shoulders. The only sounds were the clink of his chains and soft moans from Jean. Time crawled. He gazed at dense cobwebs that filled deep shadows between the rafters and wondered if he would ever see another sun set over the mountains.

In addition to enlivening the picture with visuals and sounds, I brought the point of view down from omniscient to close third person. My belief is that in the close pov you can give the same information and gain the benefit of involving readers with the protagonist. I think my suggested changes evoke instant sympathy for Layton McElvey.

A word about the suggestions I make in an edit: I do not tell a writer what to do. Comments like the above serve to exemplify what I think the writer needs to do. What I offer is his to heed or disregard, to adapt, use or lose.

Opening scenes are s-o-o-o-o critical. Sol Stein, in Stein on Writing, writes this of his observations in a bookstore:

“In the fiction section, the most common pattern was for the browser to read the front flap of the book’s jacket and then go to page one. No browser went beyond page three before either taking the book to the cashier or putting the book down and picking up another to sample.”

You must immediately involve the reader in the opening scene of the story and/or the mind of the character. A reader needs to co-experience what’s happening to the protagonist, and to do that the reader has to see the context in which the character is operating. Even in radio, there are sounds and word pictures to pull the listener into the scene.

To write for effect, wedge your head into the skull of your character, look around and set the scene with sights, sounds, smells, thoughts and emotions.

Please let me hear from you. If I can help you with a question about your writing, email me and I’ll apply a beady eye to it. Tell me if I can share it in a post or if you want a “private consultation.”

 “Writing for Effect” ™ Ray Rhamey All contents © Ray Rhamey 2004.

Writing for Effect: throw out the adverbage

Many beginning storytellers who contact me fall short of doing much more than putting information on the page with their narrative. In storytelling, you’re not writing to inform the reader—you deliver information, of course, but that’s not the purpose—you’re writing to affect the reader. To craft words that create an effect in the reader’s mind.

Maybe it’s the psychology major in me, but I can’t help but think of the stimulus/response paradigm. You, the writer, produce a stimulus. The reader provides the response. The nature of your stimulus determines the reader’s response. What could be more simple? It may not be simple, but it is the key to writing for effect, and that’s what opens the door to successful storytelling.

Here’s the effect I want your writing to have on me—I want it to trigger in me the sights and sounds and smells of what’s happening. I don’t want approximations, I want that reality. And I want it to be effortless—I should react without thought to the stimuli you put down on a piece of paper and get it. I want to experience the story, not just learn about what happens.

You begin a story with a single stimulus— a sentence formed with a string of words. Your sentences accrue and, with luck, congeal into a larger stimulus that affects your reader: the story. Drilling down, it begins with the word choices you make in each sentence—especially verbs and their hangers-on, adverbs. Have you chosen for effect?

Here’s a simple-minded example (and one of the reasons adverbs are the bane of writing for effect). This is fundamental stuff, and I don’t mean to insult you…I just want to contrast effect to info. A story starts with this:

Jimmy walked slowly across the cluttered room.

Simple information. I see, fuzzily, a guy walking. Not very fast (but I can’t really picture it). There’s stuff in the room (but who knows what).

The effect? Not much. No clear picture comes to mind. First thing to do: ditch the verb/adverb combo and choose a verb that evokes a picture, at the least, and at best characterizes the action. If, for example, your story is suspense, then how about…

Jimmy crept across the cluttered room.

Better. Here are other possibilities, depending on the nature of the story:

· In a fight scene, it might be “Jimmy lunged across the cluttered room.”

· If Jimmy is a dancer, then he “glided across the cluttered room.”

· Make Jimmy a burglar and he “skulked across the cluttered room.”

· If Jimmy is in no hurry, then he “ambled across the cluttered room.”

· If Jimmy is in a hurry, then he “dashed across the cluttered room.”

· If Jimmy has been over-served at a bar, then “Jimmy weaved across the cluttered room.” Or maybe he tottered, or staggered, or, my personal favorite, sloshed.

Each of those verbs evokes a picture of Jimmy’s body moving in specific ways. They are “visual” verbs that created a specific effect in your mind. Stimulus > response.

There’s a reason adverbs rob you of effect—they are abstractions of actions, pallid substitutes for the real thing. They can’t have much of an effect. For example, one of my clients wrote,

She grinned mischievously.

Now, the average reader would take that in, plug in some sort of vague image, keep on rolling and never realize she was cheated—but she was. There’s a much more lively and concrete picture to create in the reader’s mind. For example:

She grinned, mischief sparking in her eyes.

Or, hey, what about something like this…

She grinned like a fox that had just found the keys to the henhouse.

In the first example, because you have to interpret “mischievously” (what, exactly, is that?) the effect is to evoke an unsure image of a grin. In the second, you see a face in action: lips curve, you see a grin, you see eyes, you see playful activity behind those eyes. All that from three extra little words chosen for effect. The third example goes beyond word choice to tap into meanings beyond the simple visual.

Check out your current project. Go on an adverb hunt and replace them with the action they only hint at and you’ll be writing for effect.

Next post: what about that “cluttered” room? Coming soon: Scene-setting for Effect.

Please let me hear from you. If I can help you with a question about your writing, email me and I’ll apply a beady eye to it. Tell me if I can share it in a post or if you want a “private consultation.” (“Writing for Effect” ™ Ray Rhamey)

Computer tip: Make writing time more productive with bookmarks

First, keep the entire book manuscript in one electronic file. I know writers who use a separate file for each chapter of their novel on their computer. Each of my novels is in one file—the whole thing. It would drive me nuts to have to open up, let’s say, a file for chapter 9 in order to check on information I needed for chapter 22—for example, maybe I need to make sure where I stashed a clue that now needs to be discovered.

A file-per-chapter writer friend didn’t see how I could do it. The key is using bookmarks to navigate quickly and easily around a complete novel manuscript.

With the Microsoft Word and WordPerfect Bookmark tool, wherever you are in a manuscript you can insert a bookmark and easily come back to it from any other place in the manuscript. One obvious use is when you’re somewhere deep in your book, rewriting, and it’s time to hang up your brain for the night, your eyes having become loose in their sockets. Just insert a bookmark (I usually use the word “here”), save the file, and shut down. Next day, you’re at the exact spot you left off with a couple of keystrokes.

Here’s how to do it in Word: click Insert in your top toolbar; click Bookmark; type in a letter or word in the Bookmark name box, then click the Add button. For some reason, you can’t use words separated by spaces—which leads me to sometimes insert bookmarks such as “describebarn” or “describe-barn” so I’ll know what it’s about. In WordPerfect, you click Tools, then Bookmark, then Create, which lets you type in a name and say OK.

When you next open your document, to go to a bookmark you type control+g (PC) or, for MACs, apple+g, select Bookmark in the dialogue box that pops up, select the bookmark you want (there’s a little arrow button to show a list of all bookmarks), click okay and you’re there.

Other uses: you’re really struggling with a passage or maybe just chugging through the narrative, laying track, and you know it’ll need more thought. You can bookmark it and move on, knowing you can return with ease. Using bookmarks, I will revisit material that needs honing a number of times until I’m satisfied with it. With a bookmark, it’s easy to go back and keep at it; without a bookmark, I suspect it would get far fewer visits and less thought.

Here’s another one: deep into the umpteenth rewrite of a novel, it came to me that I needed to add a key visual and emotional element to a character’s scenes in several places in the story. When I did, I inserted bookmarks at each scene (Jake1, Jake2, Jake3, etc.). Later, I jumped easily from one spot to another to make sure I had kept things consistent yet varied and had done all I needed to make the new material blend with the old. Because my first drafts tend to be on the lean side, bookmarking those additional bits of narrative enabled me to visit them after they’d cooled a little to see if they needed more work.

Because you can give each bookmark a different handle, another handy use is the ability to check back to important passages. This is especially useful for continuity checks. Let’s say that early in the novel you created a detailed description of a room, and the things in that room are important to your story, and they come up again. Put a bookmark there (“the-murder” or “crimescene” or some such) and it’s easy to refer back and keep later references to that place accurate. This could be darned handy for clues in a mystery novel.

How about bookmarking the first page of each chapter to hop to one instantly? If you know you had Heather shoot the green bunny in chapter 4 but can’t quite remember the sequence of events when you’re referring to the shooting in chapter 16, it’s easy to check.

Marking a passage for later use or change is another bookmark use. In one of my novels, I planned to move the description I’d written for a character to an earlier chapter during the rewrite. I bookmarked that passage so that, when I got to the new description point in the rewrite, I could jump there, cut the description from its page, then jump back to where I was (because I inserted a “here” bookmark before I left that point) and paste it in. No hunting, no searching for keyword strings, etc.

I’m sure you’ll find, or already have, many creative uses for bookmarks. In fact, if you have some, how about sharing them—or other computer tips—with me. I’ll pass ‘em on. Later, I plan to do some posts on using Search to upgrade the quality of your narrative.

Inhabit characters to hook readers

When I story-tell well, a reader will come to inhabit a character, seeing and feeling as the character does—identifying. This is a good thing because, as discussed in a previous post, if a reader cares about what happens to a character, they are compelled to read more (as long as interesting things happen, of course). This includes agents and acquisition editors.

For this writer, to generate narrative that draws a reader into a character I have to go there first, although it’s not easy for me to do. During the first draft I tend to be a camera recording what happens. True, a great deal of character is revealed by action and dialogue—but that’s because action and dialogue derive from what’s happening inside the character (at least it does in the good stuff).

To get at that, I have to shoehorn myself into a character’s head to truly “see” so actions and reactions correspond to that reality. I first learned to apply this technique when I needed to introduce a new character and setting in my current novel-in-progress.

Going into that scene, all I knew was plot material: the character’s name and role as an antagonist, but not much more about him; and that he was inside a vehicle in which he traveled and lived. I knew the outside of the vehicle was wooden, and that he was in a forest preserve outside of Chicago in wintertime. That was about it.

When I inserted myself into my character’s head and looked around, the first thing that I discovered was that the vehicle interior was paneled with oak, and that Oriental rugs covered the floor. Why? Because that's the way this character would want his living space—rich and opulent. As I looked more closely, I saw that the oak paneling bore carved scenes from the history of the character's people. And that led me to how to describe the setting and character in ways that helped the reader feel something.

Drago slides a curtain aside and peers out his quarterdeck cabin porthole at barren trees and snow-covered forest floor. He would rather be far to the south, basking in the sun like two thirds of his clan, not skulking in a forest preserve on the outskirts of Chicago. But his task demands access to university research libraries, so there is little choice. It has been worth it, though; he is near a solution, he feels it. Perhaps this day.

Within view are the tall, curved hulls of three of his clan’s twelve galleons, those willing to stay with him rather than cruise south for the winter. Sixteenth-century Spanish ships gone badly astray, their glossy wooden flanks are a warm contrast to the dull, gray-brown bark of the trees that surround the snow-bound meadow. Like the legs of a daddy longlegs spider, long supports angle out from lower decks to hold them upright while their keels rest on the forest floor.

Drago shivers and closes the curtain against the draft. Warm light from kerosene lamps gives the impression of comfort but, despite woolen oriental carpets insulating the hardwood floor and the heavy oaken planks that panel the walls, the cabin is unpleasantly chilly.

He applies his palm to a wall panel to test its coldness. A master craftsman has carved each with a scene from elven history. Drago traces his favorite with his fingertips, a portrait of his direct ancestor, Merlin, deep in conversation with King Arthur. The artist portrayed Merlin as tall and lean, with a handsome beard that reaches his chest. Drago sometimes wishes he looked like that instead of sporting the short, balding, plump appearance he associates with a ruddy-cheeked butcher in a small-town grocery store. He suspects, though, that the real Merlin looked much like he does, and the majesty portrayed on the panel is no more than imagination at work.

The one thing he has in common with the carving is a full moustache, still dark brown, as is what remains of his hair. He strokes his moustache, wishing he had found his key to renewal before he had reached his thirties and his scalp had become a pink dome rising above a low hedge of hair, as barren as a mountain’s snowcap above its forests.

Drago shakes his head; Merlin’s was one of many brave but hopeless attempts to guide people to a rational civilization. Merlin’s blood runs true, though; Drago is close to creating his own cure for a sick world, if he can just breach the last barrier...a shiver again shakes him. He looks wistfully at the cast-iron stove in the corner. He longs for a fire, but a column of smoke couldn’t be hidden, and the danger of discovery is too great this deep into a city, all acrawl with people like maggots on a carcass.

None of this detail and cognition existed before I started to write the scene from within the character’s head (some has been added in subsequent polishing, but the meat of this is what came to me then). This character has become very human, with strong desires and a wistful wish that he still had his hair.

I believe that, from this point on, the reader will want to know more about what happens to Drago. I plan to create within the reader empathy for him even though he does nasty things. A tough task, but I think it’s possible if I can get the reader to inhabit Drago and view the world as he does.

Inhabit your characters so I can too.

For what it’s worth.

Why, why, oh why did they reject it!?

As a writer, I think the most irksome aspect of submission is rejection with no feedback.

For agents, it has to be dealing with floods of unprofessional or inappropriate manuscripts. But even well-written manuscripts are rejected. Here’s a lament I recently received:

“I've been shopping a novel for a year now, and quite a few agents have expressed interest, but when they read the first three chapters, they all say the same thing--it's engaging, the characters are wonderful, but this is a midlist book and they don't think I can sell it. They all sign off with the fondest wish that someone else will take on the project.

“Now, I thoroughly enjoy getting long, handwritten rejections (if you have to get rejected, that's the way to go,) but ‘This book is midlist, and I don't think I can sell it in this market’ leaves me wondering: is there something I can do to make it less midlist? If the critiques were more specific--the story doesn't start soon enough, the prose is too purple, the chapters are too long--something, anything! then I could revise it, but what do you do with a book that everybody likes but nobody thinks they can sell?”

My response to her went something like this: My feeling about the agents who responded that they couldn't sell a midlist book seems disingenuous to me. There are clearly many midlist books being sold. They could be saying they only want to invest their time and effort on potential big sellers. On reflection, if an agent thought she could sell a manuscript, do you really think she’d give a fig that it was midlist?

With so many manuscripts swarming to an agent, they can skim the cream. Seems to me the two paths to representation are that the agent either 1) strongly believes that they can sell a manuscript, whether they like it or not, or 2) passionately likes a manuscript that they hope they can sell. My guess, this writer’s manuscript fell somewhere in between 1 and 2 with those agents.

She wrote back:

“I didn't want to believe that the agents were lying to me; so many of them said the same thing, that I just assumed it was a fact: the fiction market is too tight to try to sell a midlist book. Personally, I like your version better, and it gives me hope that I'm not wasting my time or my postage in continuing to try to shop it. It's actually with an agent right now after she requested it; I'm really crossing my figures.

“I know a lot of people would be horrified, but I'd really like a critique list to be honest. ‘I don't like your main character because...’ or ‘There's nothing wrong with the writing, I just don't like your story,’ or even, ‘You need to go back and study grammar and punctuation before submitting again.’ Those in addition to concrete, revisionable suggestions like, ‘This story doesn't start until X chapter, revise until X chapter makes sense as the first,’ or ‘This book meanders and Y subplot doesn't help it. Cut that subplot and 5000 words for a tighter story.’ Totally wishful thinking on my part, I know; it would just be nice to know exactly how something failed, even if it's just a ‘failure’ of taste, you know?”

(I offered this writer a free critique of her opening chapters, and she took me up on it. My reaction: good characters and professional writing but, for me, not enough tension in the story. I doubted the agents found the compelling storytelling they need to make a sale. She’s thinking it over.)

Getting agents or editors to draft specific suggestions or criticisms for the bulk of manuscripts they receive isn’t going to happen…but why can’t they give feedback if we provide a checklist? They already know what they think and why they’re rejecting a submission, so it should take less than thirty seconds to zip through a checklist.

How can it benefit each of us? Dedicated writers, those capable of learning and improving, can glean insights from knowledgeable agents and editors to improve their work—those oh-so-valuable “other eyes.” That can make their next submission closer to the mark, if not on it. And that’s good for the agent/editor.

CALL FOR CHECKLIST ITEMS

Writers, let’s see if we can get some answers. Please email me with your idea of checklist items that would be helpful to you—they would apply to submission of actual narrative, not to a query letter. Feedback items should be general enough to apply to any novel (much will also apply to non-fiction, but I want to tackle fiction first).

Agents, send me the top ten problems that turn you off.

When we’ve developed a good list, I’ll make it available to everyone free of charge.

C’MON, GET INVOLVED!

Please let me hear from you. Even better, email me with an example, published or unpublished, of something that peeves you or you have a question about, and I’ll level a beady eye at it. If it’s from your own work, tell me if I can post it or if you want a “private reading.”