Flogging the Quill

Round 2 of you help me

Your assignment, should you choose to accept, is to give  me your critique of Chapter 2 from We the Enemy, a novel of mine that I categorize as "speculative suspense."  Reader comments were extremely helpful in tightening Chapter 1. I believe this chapter is more polished, but you be the judge.

The chapter, a short one, is below. If you have not read Chapter 1, or wish to refresh yourself, you can read it here.

Truly, I appreciate your insights and comments. It's good to learn what works for readers, and what does not. Next week I'll be critiquing some new samples sent in, but I hope this will be interesting until then. Here goes...

Chapter 2

“Yet another vicious Road Tag tragedy strikes the streets of Illinois.” The words from the television gain a hollow echo as they bounce off the naked walls of Jake Black’s studio apartment.

His picture window, blinded by the night, portrays a black void where Lake Michigan sloshes far below. Nearby high rises and ant trails of car lights on Lake Shore Drive add random glitter. The view costs extra, but it’s a waste; nothing much touches him these days.

Clothes litter the floor; they’ll stay there until he runs out of clean stuff, then he’ll bundle them into a pillowcase and take them to the laundry room in the basement. Tidying for guests isn’t a problem because he never has them. No place to sit, for one thing. He keeps things lean: one phone, one TV, one TV tray, one lamp, one table, one chair, one computer, one dresser, one nightstand, one bed.

On his bed, sprawled on his back stripped down to t-shirt and shorts, head propped up on pillows, he drains his wine glass and reaches for the bottle on the nightstand. On the TV at the foot of his bed, the Channel Five prime-time newsie—an unctuous specimen named Bruce Ball—continues his report against a backdrop of a body being lifted onto a gurney. The newsie says to the camera, “Even children are not safe from the deadly game of Road Tag.”

Cut—the picture changes to a shot of the victim, a pimple-faced boy, his unblinking eyes staring, his life spilled from a deep gash on his forehead. A paramedic glares at the camera and yanks a sheet up to cover the dead face.

The newsie’s voice continues, “This victim is just fourteen.”

Jake tips the wine bottle over his glass. One lousy drop dribbles out. Too numb to care, he lets the bottle slide from his hand to thud on the floor as he gazes at the television.

Cut—an amateur videotape replaces the ambulance scene. It shows a Chevy sedan stopped at a red light. An old woman with a cane, her frizzy white hair escaping from a knit hat, hobbles across the crosswalk. The newsie’s voiceover says, “This home vid, confiscated by police when they caught the notorious Lombard tagger, catches the game in action.”

The traffic signal goes to green and, like a dragster coming off the line, the car charges and clips the woman, knocks her cane high in the air, and sends her spinning.

Jake mutters, “Sick bastard.”

The newsie’s voice drones, “Road Tag started in Peoria, but has now spread through the Midwest, and tagger reports are on the increase in the East.”

On the screen, the old woman tumbles to a stop against the curb and lies on her back, her arms and legs flailing like a belly-up turtle. The newsie says, “There are rules in this macabre game, though. You can’t go until the light turns green, and no score if you kill your target.”

Cut—the newsie turns to watch paramedics slide the gurney into an ambulance and close the doors. He says, “Tonight it’s tagger zero, pedestrian zero.” He turns back to the camera, broadcasting just a hint of a smirk that says aren’t I clever?

Jake mutters, “Another sick bastard.” He clicks the remote and banishes Bruce Ball to nothingness, where he belongs. Drowsy and anesthetized from his wine—hey, you don’t feel, you can’t hurt—Jake drifts…

As though he rides a magic carpet, Jake floats down a sidewalk toward an elegant old brownstone in Chicago’s Near North side, where Yuppie money has transformed old working-class neighborhoods into laps of luxury. Afternoon sun dapples its front with the shade of trees lining the street. The building appeals to him. The front door opens magically, and he sails in.

A muffled, high-pitched noise comes from upstairs. It sounds like a child. He likes children, so he orders his magic carpet to carry him up.

On a second-floor landing, the sound comes again from a doorway to his left. He drifts through it and enters a bedroom.

Watercolors of delicate flowers grace a room furnished with oak and lace. Toys and stuffed animals clutter the carpet in playful disarray. Blocks and dolls and picture books suggest a child of five or six. But no one is there.

He drifts to an open window and discovers a fire escape. Anxiety shadows his mood. The bright day dims. He thinks himself through the window.

A dizzying look down finds nothing below. The roof is one flight up. He rises.

On the roof he discovers a beautiful young woman and a lovely little girl. Like the young woman, the little girl has big brown eyes, long brown hair, and olive skin.

Jake loves the young woman and the little girl.

But the little girl’s eyes are wide with terror. Her mouth opens, and the muffled noise comes out. Her face tells him it’s a scream. She screams because the woman holds her out over the low parapet around the roof.

The woman laughs and swings the child back and forth, her laughter as muted as the little girl’s scream.

Words come from Jake, but he can’t make them out because they are muddled and slow, as though made of molasses.

The woman frowns at him. She pulls the child in and says slow-moving words that he can’t understand. Her face is angry. Wild.

His hands rise before him; they grip a pistol. He aims at the woman.

She swings the child high into the air, laughs, and turns toward the parapet.

He pulls the trigger.

The bullet strikes the woman below her ribs. Its force staggers her.

Her eyes train on him. With great deliberation, she throws the screaming child over the roof’s edge.

He pulls the trigger a second time.

Again she staggers. Then she dives after the child, her muffled laughter falling away.

He hears a strident buzzing. The blue of sky dissolves into the beige of his walls, and his alarm clock yells at him.

Jake gropes and turns off the alarm, then realizes that he holds his breath, his jaws clenched and aching. Bright sunlight glares through his window. He sighs and lies still for a long moment, confused and hurt, but he doesn’t know why.

His gaze drifts to a small photo in a plain black frame on his nightstand—his daughter Amy in her favorite, flowery party dress. He reaches and touches a tiny silver crucifix hanging on its chain from a corner of the picture frame. Amy wears it in the picture, forever five years old. The crucifix glitters, and then he can’t look at it any more.

God, his head hurts. It’s a struggle to get up and shuffle into the bathroom. Red, puffy eyes stare at him from the medicine-cabinet mirror. He wonders about the moisture beneath his eyes. He touches it with a fingertip, then tastes. Salty. More and more, he finds it there when he wakes.

Then he pours a few ibuprofen tablets into his palm and turns to readying himself for his appointment with the Attorney General of the United States. As he lathers his face, he debates whether to wear a suit or not. Wearing a suit sucks—but he’s meeting Marion Smith-Taylor in a luxury hotel…

Thanks in advance for your help.

RR

Free edit in exchange for posting permission. You send a sample that you have questions about and of which you'd like an edit. I won't post it without your permission.

Donations: visitors have asked for a way to compensate me for my advice, a generous and cool thing to do. Click here.

© 2005 Ray Rhamey

Computer tip: Make writing time more productive with bookmarks

This is a repeat of a post from the beginnings of Flogging the Quill, back in November. I thought it might be helpful to folks who weren't dropping by at the time, and I've gottem emails from writers who like this a lot. I use this technique all the time.

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.

For what it's worth,

RR

Free edit in exchange for posting permission. You send a sample that you have questions about and of which you'd like an edit. I won't post it without your permission.

Donations: visitors have asked for a way to compensate me for my advice. It all helps. Click here.

© 2005 Ray Rhamey

 

Haunt your major characters for stronger storytelling

I'm swamped, don't know when the next post will go up. Meanwhile, VERY interesting article on the subject of editorial rejection by a Tor/Forge editor, Anna Genoese. Go here. Talk about a reality check. Now for ghosts...

When I was in Hollywood working at breaking into screenwriting, I took courses. One was Robert McKee's excellent workshop. Another was from a different screenwriting guru,  John Truby. McKee's was all about structure (as is his highly recommended book, Story). But Truby got into other aspects of storytelling, including characterization.

The idea from his course that has stuck with me and proved most useful is his notion that characters should have a "ghost." We're not talking about a haunt from Casper the Friendly Ghost, but a powerful, transformative event in a character's past that, whether consciously or not, affects his current behavior.

A now-clichéd example is childhood abuse suffered by a serial killer. How many times have you seen that? It's a true-to-life ghost but is almost a stock characteristic nowadays. Authors work to make their character's abuse more unique and horrific than competing killers, but it remains a standard serial-killer ingredient. It is used to motivate the behavior of other troubled characters, and rightfully so -- abuse is a powerful "ghost." I wonder if the pedophile Catholic priests revealed (and yet undiscovered) don't have abuse buried in their psyches.

A violent ghost such as abuse is a good motivator for an antagonist, but I look for other things to trouble my characters. I'm most concerned with finding ghosts for my protagonists. I seek to write about flawed characters, and for me a ghost is one of the best ways to create a weak spot in a character.

My character ghosts are usually deep-seated and not necessarily conscious. The primary requirement is that it -- the past event -- still influences behavior. I don't necessarily make my readers aware of the ghost, certainly not early on. But, to have credible motivation, aspects of the haunt need to be revealed along the way. If conquering the ghost is part of the character's final epiphany, then it will be revealed.

One of the things writing instruction tells us is that characters need to have a DESIRE. And it is the frustration of achieving said desire that creates conflict and tension, and thus powers the story. Dealing with a ghost is an excellent desire for motivating a character and causing tension.

Here's a tragic ghost for the primary protagonist in the novel some of you helped me with recently, We the Enemy. I don't think I'm giving away too much to reveal this, as his ghost first appears in a dream sequence in the introduction of the character. I tried to write it in such a way that the reader doesn't know for sure what the actual event is -- after all, dreams distort the reality they deal with.

My character, Jake, shot and killed his wife. He deeply loved his wife, and this event was so traumatic that, when the novel opens, he has no conscious memory of it. The reason he shot his wife was an unsuccessful attempt to save the life of his five-year-old daughter who his wife, in the grip of psychosis, kills. He knows the facts -- it was in the police report -- but he cannot recall what happened. It is, however, the content of a recurring nightmare.

More than that, this ghost has caused a kind of fugue in Jake -- his emotions have shut down entirely, this to prevent further emotional injury. If you don't love someone, they can't hurt you.

As you can anticipate, this ghost in Jake's past affects everything in his day-to-day life: his relationships with other people, especially women; how he reacts to small children; and how he lives his professional life. He is an ex CIA agent turned mercenary, able to kill without conscious remorse or hesitation. Note that I said "conscious," his ghost affects even his reaction to killing, and leaves him feeling sickened by the act.

Jake has an unconscious desire to break the thrall of his fugue and to conquer his ghost. But he can't do that consciously. When cracks begin to appear as a result of what happens to him in the course of the novel, he is eventually drawn to widening them and, finally, taking a gigantically risky route to conquering his ghost. When it is at last exorcised, his behavior changes, and that affects the climax of the story.

In my coming-of-age story, The Summer Boy, the sixteen-year-old hero is haunted by the death of his father. It is more conscious in this story, but still an event that affects his thinking and motivates behavior, especially during the climactic conflict.

In a period mystery novel, my hero is troubled by guilt for an affair he had with his twin brother's wife. Guilt is a terrific ghost. Another primary character in the novel is haunted by being "lost" in a poker game by her husband on her honeymoon, being raped, and then sold into sex slavery. As you would guess, this has a powerful effect on her behavior and motivations -- especially when she at last opens herself to love and then is rejected (as she perceives it) by the hero. His "rejection" is caused by his ghost and, between the two, the ghosts cause actions that lead to a tragic result. Without these ghosts, my characters would not have done the things that drive the action and lead to an exciting climax.

In my work in progress, the two main characters have their ghosts. One, a conscious one, is the death of a mate. For another, the ghost is a deep feeling of isolation from all other people caused by a singular childhood event when the effect of a psychic talent on "ordinary" people is revealed.

The primary things I start with when characterizing are the ghost and the character's name -- I can't really write for them unless I know the name, though I can plot in a general sense. After those two come physical characteristics, occupation, and other stuff, but name and ghost are primary.

I urge you to find a ghost for your most important "unhaunted" characters, even if you're already into your project. You may be surprised at how it can change your character's reaction to the events and barriers you've thrown into her path along the way.

For what it's worth,

RR

Free edit in exchange for posting permission. You send a sample that you have questions about and of which you'd like an edit. I won't post it without your permission.

Donations: visitors have asked for a way to compensate me for my advice. It all helps. Click here.

© 2005 Ray Rhamey

The joys of reconstruction

I haven't blogged in a while because I was swept up in a rush of rewriting. Reconstruction, actually, of the novel-in-progress.

This burst of intense focus was caused by an observation from a writer's best friend -- a sharp pair of other eyes. My e-critique group was dealing with a rather long (for me) chapter -- 19 pages (I average around 10) in which I introduced a new character and a big new facet of my novel's world. The character had been mentioned earlier, but little else.

Critiquer Leslie enjoyed the chapter and offered insightful line edits, as she usually does. But then came the big insight -- she thought the chapter should come much earlier. Not only because she thought the story element should be introduced sooner, but that it would build suspense if it was.

I'll confess that it had always nagged at me that this new element came in at chapter 11. Yeah, 11. But I never thought of moving it earlier in the narrative -- I was too focused on developing other story elements and characters in the front end of the book.

Once she opened my eyes, I couldn't wait to look at it, and I did so with a real sense of excitement. She had nailed it. She'd even suggested a place for it to go, and she was right there, too. She had a good eye and I a blind one. The curse of the author.

But her intuition was just the beginning. My blinders gone, I saw a way to split the long chapter into three parts and blend them in over the span of several chapters. It was very cool. Thanks to those other eyes I think the story now has greater suspense and a more involving storyline.

You'd think I'd be able to switch to the editing side of my brain and do that for myself by now. I'm also a writer who also scrapped the first 2 chapters of his coming-of-age novel after a critique group member said, upon coming to chapter 3, "Your story begins here."

I'm gettin' better at it -- at least now I can quickly assess the merits of what a fresh eye shows me. I have no trouble moving stuff or cutting it once I've seen the inadequacy of my ways or the opportunities of a different route.

I have no difficulty  seeing structural problems and opportunities in others' writing. Dislocated narrative stands out like broken bones on an X-ray to me. Because I hold the whole story in my mind, I see where things work best to support and move the story. But it's not so easy with my own stuff.

I'm thinking this has to do with differences between an organic writer and one who outlines a plot. I'm the organic kind, who has a broad sense of direction (I know the ending) and grows the story along the way. So my authorial nose snuffles along the ground, following the scent, too focused on the moment to see the wide view. But an outliner soars above the terrain, able to see the journey as a whole. I don't think I'd be as susceptible to my mild cases of structure myopia if I were an outliner.

It's not that I can't do the outline thing. In developing my screenwriting skills, I followed the method of one guru and thoroughly outlined a screenplay, a romantic-fantasy-adventure-comedy called Once Upon a Wimp. I think I wrote the actual screenplay in a week.

But then I still had to do a bunch of rewriting. Why? Because my understanding of the characters had deepened and evolved, and the storyline didn't fit them as well as it should. Which leads me to another thing: developing characters.

For me, my characters develop in the same way the story does -- I discover them as I discover the story. Oh, I begin with a name, an occupation, a physical description and a desire, but not much more. I do spend time up front to try to think of a "ghost" for a character. "Ghost" is what screenwriting teacher John Truby calls an event in a character's past that haunts him and influences his behavior, a storytelling technique that I've found extremely valuable. I'll do a post on it one of these days. But I've never had the patience to develop the detailed character sketches and bios recommended by some writing gurus.

But I don't think it would help me to do that up front. Character is defined by action and reaction, by what a character does. A bio doesn't involve those key elements. In the current work in progress, I only just now discovered the key, vital character element in one of the two primary protagonists that will motivate him to do some fairly unseemly stuff before his character arc turns around. It was his "ghost." I needed it, he needed it, but his character's deepest need didn't come to me until after 30,000 words of the story had been told and over a year of thinking on the story had passed (due to other projects, this novel has been start-and-stop).

But it was with another rush that it came to me. Now I can see further ahead and follow what the character does with more confidence. I've gone back and planted the appropriate seeds and now look forward to writing sections that I had once dreaded.

I've read that Elmore Leonard creates characters and then starts writing, and that his story sometimes doesn't emerge until after 100 pages have been written. And that sometimes the character he thought the story was about is cast aside when another character emerges and takes over. I've had that experience, too. I guess that if grow-it-as-you-go works for someone like Leonard, it can't be all bad.

So what's your modus operandi? Have you tried more than one before finding your best route?

For what it's worth.

RR

Free edit in exchange for posting permission. You send a sample that you have questions about and of which you'd like an edit. I won't post it without your permission.

Tip Jar: visitors have asked for a way to compensate me for my advice. It all helps. Click here.

© 2005 Ray Rhamey

Rerun: start your novel with kitty-cats in action

Is this a blog first? A rerun? I'm enervated with travel and various family emergencies and don't want to do a weak post. So here's a repeat of a fun one.

This comes from imagining an editor needing to clear his/her desk of stacks of accumulated manuscripts. I  picture the editor zooming through a stack of manuscripts on his/her desk.The editor casts a weary glance at a manuscript's first page.  Not gripped by the first quick, expert examination, the  harassed editor moved on.

I believe that it is often the very FIRST page that determines whether or not a busy agent or editor reads more. I think your opening page has to be COMPELLING. To the right is a typical agent/editor, terminally weary of openings that fail and dreaming of finding just one that grabs her by her furry little ears.

There are straightforward techniques for reaching out to a harried mind and provoking a moment’s attention. One is to open your story in the midst of something happening. Opening in the middle of action (versus placidly setting the scene) is a key to engaging a reader.

Hairball raced across the clover, leaping honeybees, never taking his gaze from Barfie, praying her grip would hold.

This opening raises immediate story questions that a reader will want to know the answers to—why is Hairball racing? Who is Barfie? What is Barfie? What do they have to do with each other? What’s Barfie's scary-sounding problem?

Unusual circumstances added to the action intensify interest. You’ve heard of “fish out of water” stories…how about “cat in water?”

Up to his dewclaws in the cold wetness of the stream, Hairball wanted to yowl his discomfort, but he had to choke back all sound and keep his eyes on his prey.

Opening with action that depicts a significant challenge to a character will keep a reader moving down the page, too.

Hairball eyed the tree trunk's towering height. It was an impossible climb. He was too small, too weak. But if he didn’t climb, Barfie would fall to her death.

Plenty of story questions raised there. But we can do better. Now let’s open with action combined with jeopardy for increased tension.

Barfie dug her claws into the branch, struggling to keep her balance. She dared not look down; her last glance at the dizzying height had almost sent her tumbling. Her ears caught a cracking sound…the branch was tearing away from the trunk.

Yeeks! Now to really create opening tension by combining  action and jeopardy with conflict.

Hairball arched his back and hissed at the beast. It was easily three times his size, an alien species that had been stalking him and now crouched, poised to spring. There was no place to run. He extended his claws…

Don’t get me wrong. Not all openings have to begin with physical action…but they MUST begin to raise story questions immediately. Remember that thoughts are action, too.

Hairball wondered if Barfie’s soul now rested on one of the puffy pillows in the sky, freed from her broken body. How would he face her mother after he’d sworn they would be safe?

The point of all this is that your opening page narrative has to first be vivid enough to catch the reader's thoughts and then compel reading on by raising story questions. I’ll tell you something else—I think that, for a new novelist to break in, every chapter ought to do the same thing.

Seems like a story about kitty-cats ought to have a happy ending, so here’s Hairball and Barfie after their adventures are done. You supply the narrative…hey, email yours to me. If I receive enough, I’ll post them for an entertaining and, perhaps, instructional episode in Flogging the Quill.

RR

Free edit in exchange for posting permission. You send a sample that you have questions about and of which you'd like an edit. I won't post it without your permission.

© 2005 Ray Rhamey