Flogging the Quill

Word count: what’s ideal, and tips on trimming

AutoCrit, folks who produce editing software, offer information and suggestions regarding word count. First, here’s a list of what works for publishers:

• Short Story – 1,500 to 20,000 words
• Novella – 30,000 to 50,000 words
• Novel – 55,000 – 125,000 words

They say that the ideal average for a first-time novelist is between 80,000 and 100,000 words. One exception to the 100,000 limit is fantasy and science fiction. Even then, if they can be longer, maybe they shouldn’t be.

So here are AutoCrit’s tips on trimming—these are things I commonly do with my editing clients (I’m currently working on a 150,000-word fantasy novel):

• Look to shortening your sentences and dialogue, and removing unnecessary exposition.
• Are there any scenes that solely exist to highlight a certain part of a character’s personality or motivation, without actually moving the plot forward? If so, how could you inject this character beat into a different, existing scene?
• Are you running away with too many subplots that don’t have meaningful impact on the main story or characters? You might want to nix some.
• Be completely honest with yourself – if something isn’t crucial to keeping your story moving, chop it. It can be easy to trim 30,000 words from a manuscript when you’re ruthless about efficiency.

That last one is one of the best rules and the easiest to deal with—just use the delete key.

Ray

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© 2017 Ray Rhamey

My books. You can read sample chapters and learn more about the books here.

Writing Craft Mastering the Craft of Compelling Storytelling

Fantasy (satire) The Vampire Kitty-cat Chronicles

Mystery (coming of age) The Summer Boy

Science Fiction Hiding Magic

Science Fiction Gundown Free ebooks.

Are you utilizing the 5 essential story ingredients?

While the focus here at FtQ is on the first page, my focus as an editor and an author is on the whole thing—the story. One of my favorite “coaches,” Steven James, lays out the 5 essential story ingredients in a Writer’s Digest article, and I encourage you to take a look. Here are the ingredients and a little taste:

At its heart, a story is about a person dealing with tension, and tension is created by unfulfilled desire. Without forces of antagonism, without setbacks, without a crisis event that initiates the action, you have no story. The secret, then, to writing a story that draws readers in and keeps them turning pages is not to make more and more things happen to a character, and especially not to follow some preordained plot formula or novel-writing template. Instead, the key to writing better stories is to focus on creating more and more tension as your story unfolds.

Ingredient #1: Orientation

For example, if you introduce us to your main character, Frank, the happily married man next door, readers instinctively know that Frank’s idyllic life is about to be turned upside down—most likely by the death of either his spouse or his marriage. Something will soon rock the boat and he will be altered forever. Because when we read about harmony at the start of a story, it’s a promise that discord is about to come. Readers expect this.

Ingredient#2: Crisis

Typically, your protagonist will have the harmony of both his external world and his internal world upset by the crisis that initiates the story. One of these two imbalances might have happened before the beginning of the story, but usually at least one will occur on the page for your readers to experience with your protagonist, and the interplay of these two dynamics will drive the story forward.

Ingredient #3: Escalation

If you take a pebble and throw it against a wall, it’ll bounce off the wall unchanged. But if you throw a ball of putty against a wall hard enough, it will change shape.

Always in a story, your main character needs to be a putty person.

When you throw him into the crisis of the story, he is forever changed, and he will take whatever steps he can to try and solve his struggle—that is, to get back to his original shape (life before the crisis).

But he will fail.

Ingredient #4: Discovery

In one of the paradoxes of storytelling, the reader wants to predict how the story will end (or how it will get to the end), but he wants to be wrong. So, the resolution of the story will be most satisfying when it ends in a way that is both inevitable and unexpected.

Ingredient #5: Change

Think of a caterpillar entering a cocoon. Once he does so, one of two things will happen: He will either transform into a butterfly, or he will die. But no matter what else happens, he will never climb out of the cocoon as a caterpillar.

So it is with your protagonist.

I have Steven’s craft book, Story Trumps Structure, and think it has valuable insights, especially for “organic” or pantser writers like me. Visit the article and see if you gain any insights.

For what it’s worth.

Ray

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© 2017 Ray Rhamey

My books. You can read sample chapters and learn more about the books here.

Writing Craft Mastering the Craft of Compelling Storytelling

Fantasy (satire) The Vampire Kitty-cat Chronicles

Mystery (coming of age) The Summer Boy

Science Fiction Hiding Magic

Science Fiction Gundown Free ebooks.

Crank up the tension by adding opposition by a supporting character

I’ve been struggling with a character in my current WIP because he is just too damn admiring of the main protagonist. Oh, I intend a romantic element between them in the story, but not at the start. But, so far, no matter how I try, this character generates very little story heat, no conflict to create tension.

I’ve been inching my way to ways to change him/his motivations to increase that conflict and tension, but was having trouble in picturing it, in making it make sense to my sense of the story.

And then I came across a post at Writer Unboxed that has broken the shackles that were binding my imagination. Its title: “The Importance of the Adversarial Ally.”

I’d never even thought of an “adversarial ally,” but, especially after reading about the examples in Jeanne Cavelos’s post, it makes perfect sense to me. After reading the article, an example popped into my mind that helps me with the concept: Jiminy Cricket in the Disney Pinocchio story. He’s clearly on Pinocchio’s side, but there’s plenty of conflict when Jiminy opposes what Pinocchio wants to do, and for good reason. Here are some of Jeanne’s thoughts:

Writers provide characters who will help and support their protagonist. The loyal friend who will stand up when the hero needs an ally. The love interest who will bandage the protagonist’s wounds. The mentor who will provide important information.

That was where I was with my ally character. But then there’s this . . .

But if this ally is only helping, you are missing a great opportunity to introduce conflict and emotion into your story.

“Only helping.” Exactly. Only helping. Only loving. Only adoring. A bit one-sided, isn’t it? She defines an adversarial ally this way:

An adversarial ally is a character who, underneath it all, is an ally to your protagonist. The “adversarial” part comes in because this character won’t just agree with everything the protagonist says and does. He won’t automatically help the protagonist with anything the protagonist wants to do. He wants what is best for the protagonist, but has his own strong options about what that is and thinks he knows better than the protagonist. He sees the protagonist as flawed or failing in some way and calls her on it. He’s not going to let the protagonist make mistakes or indulge her weaknesses.

The examples she gives include Dr. McCoy from Star Trek, Mickey the trainer in the Rocky films, and Alfred in the Batman Dark Knight series.

I urge you to visit the post. It sure helped me.

For what it’s worth.

Ray

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© 2017 Ray Rhamey

My books. You can read sample chapters and learn more about the books here.

Writing Craft Mastering the Craft of Compelling Storytelling

Fantasy (satire) The Vampire Kitty-cat Chronicles

Mystery (coming of age) The Summer Boy

Science Fiction Hiding Magic

Science Fiction Gundown Free ebooks.

Insights into writing POV and avoiding “head-hopping”

There’s a good post on Writer Unboxed titled “Perception and How to Identify POV Leaps.” In particular, I recommend it to anyone who struggles with maintaining a consistent POV (point of view) in their narrative, but it’s definitely worth a read for any student of craft.

The key clues, says writer Jordan Rosenfeld, lie in what he calls “perceptual words,” which are “signifiers that tell us who is having the experience, thus, whose POV we are in . . .”

“Whenever you offer up observations, perceptions, beliefs, feelings, sensations or thoughts of any character, you have dropped into their POV . . .”

Here’s a valuable tip for determining the POV of a passage:

“I always recommend if you’re struggling with POV to ask: Am I inside the character looking out, or am I outside the character, looking in?”

Whether you craft POV easily or not, this post is worth a read for a fresh way to look at what signals POV to a reader.

For what it’s worth,

Ray

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© 2017 Ray Rhamey

How to start a story

I received a link to an article titled “How to Start a Story: 9 Tips from Our Editors” from Reedsy. Naturally, I was interested, and I think it’s worth a visit.

Their 9 tips are:

1. Start with the unexpected—good examples, and a good idea. Avoiding the ordinary helps you clear an agent hurdle.
2. Start with an image—I’ll buy this one, too. It can be a character or setting, and it can ground us in “seeing” the story right away. Avoids the musing problem, too.
3. Start with action—you’ve heard this from me more than once.
4. Start with brevity—yep. I edit to make a narrative crisper, and brevity helps avoid the curse of overwriting.
5. Start with a question—how many times have you read here to start with a story question?
6. Start by appealing to curiosity—seems to me that this is the same as starting with a question, and their examples show that. Should have been part of number 5.
7. Start with an understanding of your fictional world—an opening can indeed give you a sense of what I’ll call the reality of a story’s world.
8. Start with something new—their example shows how to twist the ordinary into something fresh, and reminds you of the clichés to avoid.
9. Start with intensity—and they don’t mean just heavy action, there are other ways to create intensity.

Were I you, I’d give it a read. Might spark some thoughts in you. Note: the image is from the Reedsy article.

For what it’s worth,

Ray

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© 2017 Ray Rhamey

My books. You can read sample chapters and learn more about the books here.

Writing Craft Mastering the Craft of Compelling Storytelling

Fantasy (satire) The Vampire Kitty-cat Chronicles

Mystery (coming of age) The Summer Boy

Science Fiction Hiding Magic

Science Fiction Gundown Free ebooks.

Is there a new fiction genre coming to town?

Now that marijuana is legal in a number of states and, I believe, destined to become legal in many more, I hereby foresee a new fiction genre arising in our writerly futures.

Stoner Fiction

To illustrate:

A creative use of marijuana for writers

Okay, I don’t really see a new dope genre coming, but I do know of a use for marijuana in writing. I hope you’ll comment on this notion: getting a little bit stoned can be helpful in reading through and polishing your work.

I’ve read that George Carlin, that amazing comedian and writer whose stoner predilections were well known, never smoked dope when he wrote his material. However, once that was done, he did smoke grass and go through it again.

I live in one of those states that has progressed to embrace grass as a part of life, Oregon, and I’ve done what George did. My experience has been that the use of a little marijuana creates a sense of distance, or separation, from the work, enough to enable a set of “fresh eyes” in my mind.

While within the influence, I have made notes and edits on a narrative. Upon reviewing them a day or so later when completely sober, most of the time I find that the changes improved the language and sense of the narrative. Writing became crisper, word choices more interesting and evocative of what needed to be evoked.

What about you? Do you have any experience with this? Share your experience in comments.

For what it’s worth.

Ray

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© 2017 Ray Rhamey

My books. You can read sample chapters and learn more about the books here.

Writing Craft Mastering the Craft of Compelling Storytelling

Fantasy (satire) The Vampire Kitty-cat Chronicles

Mystery (coming of age) The Summer Boy

Science Fiction Hiding Magic

Science Fiction Gundown Free ebooks.

Editors make the case for not outlining your novel

I found an article titled “Planning to Outline Your Novel? Don’t.” As a pantser, an organic writer who dreams up most of the stories I write organically, on the fly, I was glad to hear a word of encouragement.

The writer says that

“. . . planning your novel ahead of time increases its chances of being dead on arrival”

Well, no one wants that to happen. The article suggests that outlining and character sketches changes to job of writing into “translating” instead of creating. They suggest that outlining is “micromanagement of the reader experience,” an interesting way to look at it. What does that mean? That it reduces room for readers' interpretation sparked by the narrative. Another way to see that is that it can reduce the participation by the reader in the experience of the story.

Other points made:

• The best writing happens when the writer is discovering what happens as he or she is creating.
• Engaging in the act of discovery allows us to uncover questions.
• Your only task is to create. The less you know before you start, the more you stand to uncover as you write.

You may find this worth a read.

Wishing you a happy new year of writing!

Ray

Immersion learning on FtQ

I’m preparing a book proposal for a new craft book with the working title of Red Ink: How to Craft a Killer First Page. The book is based on the Killer First Page workshop I teach at writers conferences and what goes on here at FtQ.

While here on the blog you see first pages one at a time, a few days apart, the in-person workshops immerse writers in a rapid succession of first pages submitted by the workshoppers themselves. After reading several in a row, along with discussion of why they voted to turn the page or not, workshoppers begin to develop a feel for what works and what doesn’t. More importantly, they see how to apply those insights to their own work.

After the workshop at the Mendocino Coast Writer's Conference, a writer came up afterwards and told me, “When we got to mine, I voted against it.” And he was a very good writer, with smooth, accomplished prose.

Stephen King expresses the reason the immersion technique, both in workshops and here on FtQ, works to improve our writing.

In On Writing, King says,

“We need to experience the mediocre and the outright rotten; such experience helps us to recognize those things when they begin to creep into our own work, and to steer clear of them.”

Exactly right. So submit your WIP for a critique and learn.

While none of the submissions I’ve gotten here are rotten, they are often on the mediocre side in terms of how well they do in the storytelling department—that’s why so many pages get No votes.

While I understand that it’s the holidays and we’re focused elsewhere, I encourage you to get busy on your WIP after the new year and glean the insights you’ll get if you sent your prologue or chapter for a look by the fresh eyes of FtQ. Here's how:

Submitting to the Flogometer:

Email the following in an attachment (.doc, .docx, or .rtf preferred, no PDFs):

1. your title and genre
2. your complete 1st chapter or prologue plus 1st chapter
3. Please include in your email permission to post it on FtQ.
Note: I’m adding a copyright notice for the writer at the end of the post. I’ll use just the first name unless I’m told I can use the full name.
4. Also, please tell me if it’s okay to post the rest of the chapter so people can turn the page.
5. And, optionally, include your permission to use it as an example in a book on writing craft if that's okay.

For what it’s worth,

Ray

Does your prose show your age?

I came across an article titled “How Our Vocabulary Gives Away Our Age” by Delfin Carbonell, and it reminded me of an aspect of fiction narrative that I frequently have to address in editing a novel.

For example, the article says:

We know that older people often command a larger vocabulary, speak better English, sound English, and are more precise in its usage. Younger folks are sometimes sloppier in their communication skills, and some may take a devil-may-care attitude toward language in general.

So true. I’ll add that at times writing by older authors who submit to FtQ has a formal quality in its structure and phrasing that sometimes works in opposition to their story. The story is “dated” from the start, and the impact of the narrative is muted.

Dr. Carbonell, a Ph. D. in Philology, cites examples that include:

Groovy, with the meaning of excellent, charming, nice, was popularized in the 1960s and out of currency by 1980.

Yeah, I miss that one.

Broad has been an unhappy slang term for woman since 1911. In the fifties and sixties all women were referred to as broads. Aside from the fact that it is a very insulting, low-class term, it tells the man’s age and cultural background.

I don’t miss that one at all—but it could be relevant to communicating the age of a character, right? Having a male or female character who was an adult during that period use that term helps to characterize them.

Do your words age your story? I suggest you read the article, it’s brief. Dr. Carbonell has a piece of advice that applies to you and me:

Check your vocabulary and weed out musty, mothball-smelling terms and replace them with standard, sound-English words, especially Saxon words. And keep all the good vocabulary that time has allowed you to accumulate to better express your ideas to the young, and set an example of good English practice to the new generations.

For what it’s worth.

Ray

More on the importance of your first page

 

Here’s an article titled “Why Editors Focus on Page One” by Darcy Pattison and featured on Jane editor/author Friedman’s blog. I was happy to see so much agreement to my approach here on FtQ.

BTW, why aren’t you guys submitting chapters for flogging? It’s a free critique and fresh eyes to help you make your opening stronger. Send chapters/prologues as attachments for a “flogging” today.

Darcy offers this lovely metaphor about your first pages:

"The first pages of a novel encapsulate much of the story and are extremely important in establishing setting, character, pace, audience, tone, and voice. First pages give readers a door knob to turn, an opening to the whole story."

She goes into three reasons why editors can tell within a couple of pages if a manuscript will be acceptable.

1. Too little information. This is akin to my notion of scene-setting and engaging the reader with a character.
2. Too much information. You’re familiar with my guidelines of no backstory and exposition. Same here.
3. No opening scene. Yep, in my list it’s called “something is happening.”

I suggest you read the article for her notions on these critical issues of an opening page and on striking the right balance. She gives an example of an opening from a memoir that strikes that balance.

After questioning the excerpt as to clarity (one of my big issues), info dumping, and characters, she includes this:

"The final question is subjective: would you read on?"

Exactly.

Send your first chapter/prologue soon to see if you're on track to a page-turn.

Ray

Note: page image borrowed from Jane’s post.