Friday, August 29, 2008

More about books

From Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller: a list that all readers will understand—of books that call to you in a bookstore:

Eluding these assaults, you come up beneath the towers of the fortress, where other troops are holding out:
the Books You've Been Planning To Read For Ages,
the Books You've Been Hunting For Years Without Success,
the Books Dealing With Something You're Working On At The Moment,
the Books You Want To Own So They'll Be Handy Just In Case,
the Books You Could Put Aside Maybe To Read This Summer,
the Books You Need To Go With Other Books On Your Shelves,
the Books That Fill You With Sudden, Inexplicable Curiosity, Not Easily Justified,
Now you have been able to reduce the countless embattled troops to an array that is, to be sure, very large but still calculable in a finite number; but this relative relief is then undermined by the ambush of the Books Read Long Ago Which It's Now Time To Reread and the Books You've Always Pretended To Have Read And Now It's Time To Sit Down And Really Read Them.


Alicia

Moving them around

Jwhit said: "At the beginning of your post you mention that moving a person around is needed, but I've received crits that suggest those stage directions aren't necessary and slow down the story pace. Thoughts?"

I guess I say... you need as much as you need. :) The reader needs to know when movement has taken place, when there's been some change in position. It is disconcerting to be inside and suddenly outside. (Of course, in a deepish POV, that can be fun.
(Long introspective passage, then--) Sarah glanced about and realized she was outside. When did that happen?

But unless the action is important (like in a fight scene), you don't have to choreograph every step. That's why I say to go for "inclusive" terms, usually in the predicate, which are describing progressive action(She crossed the street) and adverbs like "as" or "while" that indicate continuing minor action while something more major (like thinking or talking) is taking place (As he scrubbed the pot, he remembered restoring the Sistine Chapel...).

I dread to say this, but it's all in the context. :) That is, the purpose of the passage and what else is going on will determine the depth of detail about minor action. But the reader does need SOMETHING, especially since every single reader you have will have grown up on film and tv and needs some visual verbal marker of setting and elapsed time and the character IN the setting. I recently critiqued a manuscript that was dialogue and introspection, almost nothing else, and I was so alienated -- I couldn't believe these characters were anything more than words on paper, because they obviously didn't exist anywhere else. You don't want that. They need to touch base with the environment. And I think if you can get INTO their bodies and minds as you write, you'll feel more where that base-touching needs to be. Then if critiquers say it's too much, cut back on the in-between details and use the more inclusive terminology, and heck, describe it in the POV character's way. If he is determined to get to the front of the crowd, but people keep stopping him, the obstruction would be uppermost in his mind. He wouldn't be able to think about existential matters as he shouldered through the crowd-- he'd have to pay attention to his surroundings and his movement therein. So the narrative should probably follow that at least enough to give the reader a flavor of it, and then use a narrative bridge (if you get bored with shoulder, intrusive person, more shoulder), like "It was another five minutes of cordial intrusions before he finally got to the stage." That shows the passage of time AND the passage through space without too much detail.

What experience should the reader have? If you want it to feel like the character's, try to replicate the character's experience of this moment or series of moments. But we all zone out on our experiences, we all remember the highlights and not the boring stuff, we all summarize when we're retelling. So you can do that... as long as the reader doesn't get jarred, or gets jarred only as much as the character.
He looked around and noticed that he was in California. How'd that happen? Last thing he remembered, he was leaving Vegas, and he'd just put on the White Album CD. He'd forgotten how long that album was. Catchy tunes too. He wondered how fast he'd been driving.
Show the journey the way the character experiences it, I guess? Try that. When the character is concentrating on every step, concentrate. If the character is moving automatically, show that too. But show it somehow-- don't just not narrate the change in time and place. That's disconcerting.
And always be ready to cut back in edit. You'll be a lot more into the process of the scene when you read it over, and have more of a sense of what the reader needs. Just focus on cutting away the extraneous, the pedantic, the picky (unless that's important somehow, like you need to be picky here to bury some clue in all the detail).
Alicia

Thursday, August 28, 2008

Sentence sequencing

Okay, finally have a moment to post. You know it's almost Labor Day? Where did the summer go? This is not just a rhetorical question in the North. In a few months, it'll be cold and I'll be thinking, why did I waste the last days of warmth sitting inside writing a blog post?
Anyway, I wanted to discuss a bit about sequencing sentences and paragraphs. As the commenters pointed out, this can actually reflect character. That is, you might have an impulsive character who usually speaks before she thinks, and showing that:
"What an ugly baby!" Molly cried, and then, realizing she'd spoken aloud, clapped her hand over her mouth.
That shows her impulsivity in a subtle way. If you're planning on changing that—for example, having her start out impulsive and then, as the plot events transpire, get more judicious and careful—you can demonstrate this gradual change in a similar way in the latter part of the book:
"Your painting is—" Molly caught herself, and finished, "Very interesting. So much red!"
So... the sequence of action/reaction, thought/speech, and so on can reveal something about character, and that's great. That's something the reader will probably pick up subliminally and apply to the mental collage that reflects what you have told of the character.

However, as usual, I'm going to say-- difference is only noticeable if we usually get the convention. The fragmentation of a sentence has no meaning if most of our sentences are incomplete. It's like cussing. If you generally turn the air blue with your profanities, any single f-word is not likely to register. If, however, you are like my mother, whose most fervent curse is "Oh, Lordy!" then a single cuss word is going to have an outsized effect. (I have yet to hear my mother utter the f-word, but I assure you, when she does, the world will end.)
So an unconventional sequence is only going to resonate if you generally, with other characters, go with a standard, logical sequence. So let's deal with some examples—please provide some in comments!—and maybe that'll help establish the convention. That's what makes sense to readers, so that when the order is messed up, the reader will intuit the reason as something other than "this author is always so hard to follow."

I call it "sequence," because we are dealing with two dimensions here, words being displayed in a linear way. "Order" or "organization" works better, maybe, as what we're actually trying to do in a sentence is show the logic of the experience, or at least show the experience in a way that makes sense to the reader.
I hasten to add that none of this is a "rule," that context is all, that sentence order can and should be varied for reasons that have little to do with logic (rhythm, emphasis, and such). And two supple wordsmiths could very likely create different organizations with the same sentence elements... because they have different purposes, different voices, different contexts. An author aiming for a comic effect will structure a sentence differently than an author who is trying to explain a concept. So what I want to explore here is how an ordinary sentence might be structured in a conventional way, so that we can make variances for greater meaning.
Now of course, every sentence should be as meaningful as you need it to be. But there are a lot of sentences, perhaps the majority, that have a single big purpose— giving the reader the most appropriate experience of whatever is going on at that moment. That is, if your character is crossing the street, the reader experiences the crossing of the street, knows it's happening, doesn't think that the character is still there on the sidewalk. (For some reason, many writers have trouble with blocking out simple character movement like that—maybe because we're always preoccupied with our stories and characters as we ourselves move, and we don't actually know how we got across that street. :) Or maybe this sentence is meant to give the reader a visual understanding of why the heroine can't easily escape from this room. In other words, many sentences have rather prosaic purposes, and those sentences will probably benefit from following a logical order of words and elements.

Logical patterns
There are two major logical patterns that affect order of elements within a sentences and sentences in paragraphs: Time and cause/effect. Most other order patterns follow the example of one or the other of these.

Let's start with chronology—time order. First things first. This doesn't mean that a sentence should always proceed in time order—first she did this, then she did that, and she finished up by doing this. But that's a good way to start crafting the sentence. Make the time sequence make sense, and then innovate. The more complicated the process of the action, the more chronological order helps the reader understand what's going on. This can make all the difference with action scenes, and also within the sentences of action, when you want the reader to experience what's happening. Block your action. Act it out, maybe, or close your eyes and visualize it. Decide what needs to be narrated and what doesn't. There are inclusive actions—actions that include other actions—and those can be very helpful in trimming and clarifying action.
She crossed the street.
rather than...
She put one foot off the curb and felt for the street with her toe. Finding the road surface, she set down her heel and transferred her weight to that foot, then swung the other foot from the sidewalk to the road. Once balanced there on the road, she moved her right foot forward and then her left, and repeated the motion, and repeated it again, and....
That second "crossing" could be used if she's very drunk and has to remind herself how to walk. Otherwise, it's probably more than a bit too detailed. The more words you expend on something, the more important the reader is going to assume it is.
Just watch out for constructions like:
She sat down on the bench after she crossed the street.
The reader is visualizing the action as he reads, so he sees her on the initial side of the street, sitting down on a bench. But when he gets to the end of that sentence, he's going to have to regroup mentally and visualize what happened FIRST—she crossed the street, then after that, she sat down on a bench. You don't want to frustrate your reader with the wrong sequence of action. So watch the "before" and "after" clauses and make sure that you aren't using those to present a paradoxical sequence—the before introducing what really happens after, and vice versa. ("Before she crossed the street.... after she crossed the street.") Try putting the actions in the right sequence: After she crossed the street, she sat down on the bench.
Watch out for those smaller elements, the dependent clauses, the participial and prepositional phrases, when they give some time indication. Experiment with placement. Often these elements can be moved around, but that doesn't mean each placement is equally effective. Try this one for an example:
History teacher John Caruso returned to the high school as the new principal where his teaching career began fifteen years earlier.
Now you probably immediately identified that "where" clause as a dangling or misplaced modifier because it's placed as if it modifies "principal" when of course it doesn't. But there's another coherence problem relating to time: "Fifteen years earlier" is at the end of that sentence though it's actually the first thing that happened. How would you fix this? If I were editing it, I'd probably opt for two sentences—you don't have to jam everything into one sentence, after all. Maybe:
Fifteen years ago, John Caruso started his career as a history teacher at the high school. Now he has returned to that high school-- as the new principal.

Another common problem I see is reaction before action:
Ginny gasped. A puppy dashed out into the street, just in front of her cab.
Ginny presumably is reacting to seeing the puppy. So the puppy running out happens first, then the gasp. This, by the way, is also a point of view issue. If you show Ginny's gasp first, you are distancing the reader from the experience—the reader is watching Ginny, not being Ginny. So reaction first can work if you are in another POV, or an omniscient POV, and the first signal that something is happening is Ginny's reaction. But show it then:
Ginny gasped. Hand on her heart, she pointed as a puppy dashed across the street, just in front of her cab.
Notice that you might have to narrate a bit farther along in the event to make the time passage clear—that is, the puppy is no longer dashing OUT INTO the street, but ACROSS the street, which can be (across is inclusive) happening a bit later, after the gasp.

Action/reaction is both time and cause/effect (the action causes the reaction). In this sentence, reaction comes before action, and effect before cause:
Chas sniffed his disapproval. Paige’s motel room smelled like two weeks of fast food dinners.
Again, that can work if you're in the point of view of someone else, maybe someone following Chas, who hears his sniff and only after that gets to the motel room door and gets a whiff of the smell. But in that case, BE in that POV character. There's a different cause/effect happening from that perspective, like:
Chas sniffed his disapproval. When I pushed him aside and entered, I understood why. Paige’s motel room smelled like two weeks of fast food dinners.

Okay, on this historic evening, I probably should be watching the speeches more closely, especially since the Obamas live in my neighborhood in Chicago and Michelle works for my university there and Barack used to teach in the law school. I really had a lot more to say about sequence, but I can't remember what all that was. :)

So how about some examples of sentences where you have confronted sequencing issues, and explain how you fixed them? And also if you can, provide sentences where you diverged from the conventional sequence to change the meaning.

I actually meant to deal with action, speech, introspection, paragraph-level stuff. Don't know how I got diverted! Oh, I do know. Sentences always divert me.
Alicia

Tuesday, August 26, 2008

First Thoughts About Don and Sex

Several of you have commented behind the scenes that you don't think that Don Draper is an antihero. So I want to revisit this topic a little, maybe explore it a little more in depth, and share with you some of the analysis that led me to conclude he's an antihero. Not everyone will agree with this, of course, and that's okay. This kind of analysis is always subject to interpretation.

Spoiler Alert

Before we proceed I want to make it very clear that this post will be full of spoilers. If you don't want to know the plot twists, don't keep reading.

Protagonists and Their Spouses

One of the strongest pieces of evidence that Don is an antihero can be found in his relationship with his wife. He cheats on her, and then when he's done cheating on her, he cheats some more. Speaking in generalities, how do different protagonist types handle the issue of marital fidelity? Do they cheat?

Romance Hero -- "I see only one woman, a woman so beautiful and infuriating that she claims every bit of my attention. I may have had sex with other women in the past, but any attempt to do so now, if I were even foolish enough to try it, will only result in my humiliation when I can't perform."

Tragic Hero -- "I want to be a good and faithful husband. Events conspired against me, and I cheated on my wife with my mother/sister/daughter/a nun. And now I will die."

Tragic Hero, Part 2 -- "I want to be a good and faithful husband. I made a mistake, and I cheated on my wife. Now my wife left me, I lost my job, someone dinged the left fender of my Buick, and my dog is dead. And it's all my fault."

Action Adventure Hero -- "I'm a lone wolf. I may have loved in the past, but it ended badly, and now I keep to myself. I might have a new lover in every book. But I'm not married, and probably never will be."

Women's Fiction Hero -- "I loved my wife. She died. Will you be my new wife? I know your first husband left you for a 22-year-old aerobics instructor, but I'm not like him. I'm a nice guy. I'll even wait for you while you have a rebound fling with that totally inappropriate guy."

Thriller Hero -- "Wife? Who's got time for a wife? I have to find the killer, stop the bad guy, avoid the cops, find a relic, escape from a collapsed tunnel, and learn how to fly a Cessna, all in the space of 24 hours. And I have no one to help me except this incredibly beautiful and incredibly intelligent young woman. Hey! Where did she come from? Maybe I should have sex with her."

Thriller Hero, Part 2 -- "Of course I'm married. Too bad for you. You may know things about me that I will keep secret from my wife until my dying day, but I am far too noble and magnificent to break my word."

Don Draper -- "Of course I'm married. It's all part of the master plan to make people think I'm normal. But I treat my wife like an accessory, I disappear for days at a time, and I sleep with anyone who catches my fancy. When I get caught cheating, I promise to be a better husband, but I am miserable and occasionally impotent. Obviously I'm better off sleeping around, even with a woman I despise."

As you see, a character's sexual behavior can be used to demonstrate something about the nature of that character. While we recognize that a character can still be heroic whether married or single, and while we recognize that heroic characters may go through different stages in their sexual lives, in general we expect married heroic characters to honor their marriage vows. And if they don't, we expect there to be consequences -- ranging from broken homes to broken fenders.

So let's take a look at Don Draper. Actually, before we do that, let's remind ourselves that the author of Mad Men is also the author of the Sopranos. Despite my perverse and abiding love of Mafia stories, I never watched the Sopranos, but my understanding is that people felt a lot of sympathy for the main character. He did bad things. He got away with them. We felt sorry for him.

A similar effect is being created with Don Draper and his marital infidelities. I think we can all agree that cheating on a spouse is a bad thing, just as murder and robbery are bad things. (Ignore for a moment the issue of motivation. We're talking about the act itself, not the reasons behind it.) So first Don Draper sleeps with Midge, and then he has that brutal affair with Rachel Menkin, and then in season two, despite apparent promises to his wife, and despite not even liking the woman, he has an affair with Bobbi Barrett.

Don Draper does a bad thing when he cheats on his wife. He gets away with it right up until the last moments of the last episode of season one. In season 2, Don starts out faithful. He's also miserable. He comes home every night, but he isn't happy to be there. His misery begins to manifest in high blood pressure and even on occasion impotence. So what are the consequences for his infidelity? Well, his wife is ticked off at them, but she doesn't throw him out. She just demands that he live up to his vows, which is not an unreasonable demand.

But the consequences of fidelity, the consequences of being a family man who comes home after work every night -- those are perilous. They cut right to the heart of his manhood and threaten his health.

If in usual circumstances a hero will not cheat on his wife, and if a hero who does cheat on his wife is exposed to negative consequences, then what we have here is a reversal of audience expectations. What other type of protagonist undercuts audience expectations? The antihero. Antiheroes fail to act when action is required. They wallow in angst. They do things that they shouldn't do, even though they know they shouldn't do them. They ignore consequences, they dodge consequences, or they accept consequences with a churlish shrug of the shoulders. Those of you who have been watching Mad Men can probably see how Don does exactly that, over and over.

Someone privately suggested to me that it was okay for Don Draper to cheat on his wife because the entire atmosphere at Sterling Cooper is so highly sexualized. We'll talk more about that next time.

Theresa

Sunday, August 24, 2008

Kinsley on writers vs. editors

This article is amusing.

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1729711,00.html

Thursday, August 21, 2008

What comes first?

I'll develop this in greater depth when I get that ms edited for that stern taskmaster Theresa....
But I want to explore and ask you how you determine what comes first in a sequence of experience for the character.

Like action before reaction, okay, usually. But what about perception and then realization (that is, 1) My face burned. 2) I realized I'd been insulted.

What about thought and speech?

More later-- just jotting this down so I'll remember. But if you happen to have a handy paragraph that has action, reaction, perception, thought, emotion, etc., maybe post in comments so we'll have a sample or two. That is, a paragraph that has several -things- in there, like speech and action and emotion and thought and all that good stuff.

Not that there's any rule (though I've heard rules), but rather let's look at a couple of sequences and see how the order might be affected by context.

(T, I vaguely remembering one of our infrequent disagreements -- pre semicolon-- was about whether dialogue paragraphs should end -- in the main-- on the speech or the action.)

Tuesday, August 19, 2008

Book meme

I think we need a way to distinguish "books I know I've read but have no memory of".


Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi : a novel 2x
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick

Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey

Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
The Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveler’s Wife
The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assassin

The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations
American Gods
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books
Memoirs of a Geisha

Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
The Canterbury Tales
The Historian : a novel
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New World* for school
The Fountainhead
Foucault’s Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath

The Poisonwood Bible : a novel
1984
Angels & Demons
The Inferno (and Purgatory and Paradise)
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
Gulliver’s Travels
Les Misérables
The Corrections
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Dune (started about 8 times)
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
Angela’s Ashes : a memoir
The God of Small Things
A People’s History of the United States : 1492-present Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake : a novel
Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics : a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance : an inquiry into values
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit
In Cold Blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers

Well, as you can see, I'm much more likely to start a book and then drop it if I'm not into it (or if I find another book). There are other books I read for school (English major) but I enjoyed so I don't remember that I read those for school.

Monday, August 18, 2008

An Interesting Meme, Just for Kicks

I don't usually go in for memes, but this one caught my eye.

Here are the top 106 books most often marked as "unread" by LibraryThing’s users. As in, they sit on the shelf to make you look smart or well-rounded. Bold the ones you've read, underline the ones you read for school*, italicize the ones you started but didn't finish.

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi : a novel 2x
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
The Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveler’s Wife
The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assassin

The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations
American Gods
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books
Memoirs of a Geisha

Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
The Canterbury Tales
The Historian : a novel
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New World
The Fountainhead
Foucault’s Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath

The Poisonwood Bible : a novel
1984
Angels & Demons
The Inferno (and Purgatory and Paradise)
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
Gulliver’s Travels
Les Misérables
The Corrections
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Dune
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
Angela’s Ashes : a memoir
The God of Small Things
A People’s History of the United States : 1492-present Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake : a novel
Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics : a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance : an inquiry into values
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit
In Cold Blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers

I flatter myself that I'm well-read, but I just cleared half this list. Some of them, I will never read and I know I will never read -- In Cold Blood, for example, holds zero appeal for me, as does Freakonomics, though I'm sure they're both wonderful books. And, having suffered through The Brothers Karamazov, it's unlikely that I'll ever subject myself to another of Dostoevsky's novels.

Joyce's Ulysses holds the distinction of being one of the very few books I started without finishing -- Bridges of Madison County being one of the few others. Usually, if I stop reading a book, I come back and finish it later, as I'm doing now with Ha Jin's The Crazed. I know Bridges and Ulysses will never again be opened before my eyes, though. Not unless I'm forced to it at the point of a knife.

Some of my forever-favorite books are on this list. Anything Dumas, Mrs. Dalloway, Persuasion, Oryx & Crake, Vanity Fair, and -- OMG, should be required reading for everyone -- Eats, Shoots & Leaves.

Some of these books I admired but didn't enjoy, such as Confederacy of Dunces, which was a brilliantly written slog, and On the Road, which seems geared toward adolescent males. But I read them in their entirety and could appreciate them, even if not love them.

So what about all of you? Spot any favorites on this list? Books that are particularly meaningful to you? Books that you think deserve to go unread?

Theresa

*I didn't distinguish between books I read on my own and books I read for school. Alas, I was one of those dreadful students who ignored my reading list unless the books appealed to me.

Sunday, August 17, 2008

Scene Charts

A novel can be a big, complicated document. Keeping the details straight and avoiding plot holes can be a daunting task. Some authors use scene charts to help with this process. Over the years, I've collected sample scene charts from several different authors and have distilled a method that seems to work best for me. Your mileage may vary, of course, and any technique you use should always be tailored to fit your own needs, but here are some strategies I've found useful.

Each scene goes on its own sheet of paper. I use real paper for this. Not a computer screen. It may be useful to start the process in a word processing document or in a spreadsheet or some other computer program, but eventually, you're going to reach the point where you will want to see multiple pages at once. And this means paper. (And usually, in my case, it means paper all over my living room floor.)

The Basics

At the top of each chart, I writes in identifying information: the scene number, its chapter, and its page numbers in the current draft. The scene number is nothing more than a simple sequential number identifying where in the manuscript the scene falls. As you read the manuscript from start to finish, you number the scenes 1, 2, 3, and so on. These mapping details help in case I drop my sheaf of papers and they go flying everywhere, or in case I decide to start rearranging things but then later change my mind. No matter how many times I goof up or reconsider, I can always restore the original order because of this identifying information at the top. Sometimes I also include a scene title ("Ed gets a new bike)" to give me a quick headline-style reminder of the scene's contents.

Timeline

Next, sometimes I also include a tag called "Time." This is especially useful in stories where there are multiple threads overlapping each other and you have to keep track of the timelines for all these different threats. But sometimes, even in a simple story, it can help to make notes about time. It can save you from many a blunder. My time notes are usually something along the lines of, "Day four, Tuesday, morning, after the hospital is evacuated." This way, in editing the scene, if I stumble across a reference to the moonlight, I will know it is misplaced.

Settings

Now we'll start to get a little more complicated. The next tag I use is for the settings. I start with a label such as Ed's apartment. Then I jot down every setting detail that crops up in the course of the scene. His squeaky front door, the white bedsheet that doubles as curtains, the supersized plasma TV in the living room. Do you turn left or right to get to Ed's bedroom? Jot it down here. If you make these notes for every setting, it will be very easy to cross-check them all and make sure that Ed's apartment doesn't suddenly sprout yellow gingham curtains.

After you have charts filled out for every scene, you can use this portion to make sure that you're doing a good job with the setting. Do you have precious few details about setting in your chart? Might want to go back and beef that up. Does every battle scene take place next to a waterfall? Interesting. Might want to move one to a sand dune. Do you have three scenes in a row taking place on your heroine's front porch? Might want to consider moving one.

This is also the place to contemplate whether you are fully leveraging your settings. If your battle takes place next to waterfall, but nobody gets wet, what's the purpose of the waterfall? Now would be the time to think about how you can make better use of your settings.

Point of View

Usually, I just jot a note here indicating whose point of view we’re in. Interesting trends can sometimes be spotted this way. Check whether certain types of scenes are always taking place from a particular character's point of view: sex scenes through the heroine's eyes, car scenes through the hero's eyes, chase scenes through the dog's eyes, and so on. If you're making smart and careful choices about point of view all along, you won't need to use this part of the chart for anything more than a little checkpoint.

Plot Points

Here I simply write down what happens in one big section of the page. I always start with one line that summarizes the overall point of the scene. Then I follow it up with a short summary of the sequence of events in this scene. Sometimes it helps to map it all out like this because it can show you any breaches in your action-reaction dynamics. Also, when you're checking details in later scenes, and you can't remember whether Ed told his carpool buddies not to wait for him that night, it's easy enough to look back to this scene chart and make sure this plot point was covered.

Emotion Points

I use this section of the chart in several ways. First, I use it to track a character's emotional arc over the novel's journey. So I might jot down things like, "Ed is jubilant when Jerry crashes his car, which sets up guilty feelings later."

But I will also use it to jot down the governing emotional state of each character in the scene. "Ed -- jubilant; Jerry -- embarrassed and relieved that no one was hurt; Mike -- peeved that he has to take the train home." I can later flip through all of the seen charts and check character by character to make sure that they're behaving like real people. For example, if it turns out that Mike is consistently peevish, I might want to think about whether the characters should notice and respond. Or I might want to think about giving him a different emotion once in a while.

First Line and Last Line

I always write down the very first sentence in the very last sentence of the scene. Believe me, if you force yourself to do this, you will be paying a lot more attention to whether your first sentence and last sentence are good ones. If these sentences can stand alone and still have impact, they're probably good.

Theme and Symbolism

These may not be apparent to you while you're writing your first draft, but when you're at the stage where you want to use scene notes to try to wrestle your first draft into shape, it's probably time to start thinking about theme and symbolism. What is your central theme, and how is it being expressed in this scene? How is it being tested or challenged? What is the symbolic relevance of particular items that appear in the scene? Jot it down here. If you do this scene by scene, it will be a lot easier to determine whether you are exploring your theme to its fullest extent over the course of the book. You'll be able to spot contradictory symbolism, and you'll be able to notice trends.

Thread Notes

This is my all-purpose, catch-all section. Primarily, I use it to make sure I don't leave any hanging threads, which is why I call it Thread Notes. If in the fourth scene the hero has a conversation with a recurring character, and if the hero suspects that character of lying, then this means I had set up for a later scene where the hero must either discover the truth or discover the lie. In other words, any idea that is opened in a particular scene gets jotted down here. I can use these notes to make sure I've closed all these ideas in subsequent scenes.

But I also use it to jot down any ideas, questions, notes, and other random things that come to me as I am rereading the scene. If I intended to research the type of bullet used in a particular gun, and never did, I would note that here. I don't have to stop the process of evaluating the manuscript in order to answer the bullet question. I can just make a note of it now and answer it later.


There are plenty of other things that you might want to include in the scene charts. Eye color, hair color, height, clothing, unique gestures, backstory details, goals, obstacles -- the list is about as long as you care to make it. But because I generally want to fit each scene on a single page, I try to confine my charts to the areas I've already listed. It might be useful to also make a separate chart for each character's physical characteristics and the like, or a separate chart for each setting, like a master list of physical details that you can consult whenever you can't remember if the sand dune was 20 feet tall or 30.

But the main thing is to find a way to track your book in a way that makes sense for you. A scene chart, in any form and with any categories, is simply a tool to help you manage a big project.

For those of you who use scene charts, how do you use them? For those of you who don't use scene charts, do you use a different tool?

Theresa

Wednesday, August 13, 2008

Consistency: Not Just for Hobgoblins Any More

Theresa, what do you think?

I think that every time a writer says about punctuation, "but it's my voice," an angel dies. And not just any angel. A cute, pink, puffy-cheeked baby angel with those adorable fat rolls on its chubby little thighs. Now, do you really want to go through life with that on your conscience -- being the murderer of a wee baby angel?

Okay, maybe I'm overstating the case. Forgive me. I tend to get a bit wild-eyed when discussing punctuation.

So let me give you are a real answer, and I'll try to be rational.

There are two golden rules to keep in mind about punctuation in general. Rule Number One: the publishing house's style guide will control final decisions on punctuation in 99% of the cases. Rule Number Two: if you don't know the house style, then above all, be consistent.

I'm going to let you all in on a little secret. I wrote our house style guide. I didn't do it on my own; the editors, copy editors, publisher, and even the typesetter all provided input. And by "input," I mean "argued bitterly over the details." For months. On some of the details, the debate still rages. In fact, in the weeks leading up to our recent editorial retreat, our copy editor warned me repeatedly that she was going to take me on over the Oxford comma, and she did, but probably with less satisfaction than she had hoped for. And don't even get me started on the four-day argument over semicolons that started at the author dinner on Thursday, raged at intervals over the course of the day on Friday, carried us through the drive to Sonoma County, and provided endless conversational fodder for our three days in wine country. You know it's bad when an editor wakes up in the middle of the night and thinks, "Auden!" And the next night, another editor bolts wide awake and thinks, "Yes, but Dickinson!" And each one's slings her quoted poetry at the other, convinced of her righteousness.

So I could tell you that a lot of thought went into the style guide, but the truth is far more complex. Editors approach these matters with an obsessiveness usually reserved to misers counting pennies. That's what makes them good at what they do. If they’re not passionate about whether an ellipses can or can not serve as an end mark, then they probably won't give a damn about many of the other aspects of your story, either.

The house style guide represents a sort of neutral territory in the midst of these ongoing battles. Because the rules of English grammar are in constant flux, and because formal and casual English adopt different rules, there are multiple right answers to the same question. Can you use a semicolon? Answer: it depends on who you ask, when you ask, and the source material. (But the answer is no if you're writing light genre fiction. And now let's all wait to see how long it takes Alicia to respond to that comment.)

You know, we're just perverse enough as a breed to think that all this bickering is fun. We all obey the style guide, and we all know as a result of months of arguing fine points when we can safely ignore the style guide. We develop inside jokes from particular arguments -- just watch Alicia and I use the words "natural storyteller" and then giggle like schoolgirls. Through all of these evolving arguments, even when we may concede a point or agree to adopt a particular convention, we never accept defeat. Because deep in our hearts, every editor worthy of the job title is utterly convinced of the correctness of her personal beliefs. Never mind the evidence. We've thought deeply about it. We know.

Authors are not privy to any of this, though sometimes you witness parts of it. Sometimes you might even enter the fray momentarily, and kudos to those of you brave enough to do it. But here's the thing. When you send your editor an e-mail saying, “But I don't want to do my commas that way," what you're really doing is re-opening a behind-the-scenes battle -- dipping into the ocean's surf, if you will, and wading with those of us who live like dolphins.

So, with all that said, it takes us to the specific question. An author wants to adopt two separate sets of conventions for her punctuation in the same novel. One set will apply to the "voice" of a particular character. The other set will apply to the balance of the novel, which is presumably in the author's voice. Is this acceptable, or even a good idea? Answer: it depends on who you ask, when you ask, and the source material.

But the real answer is no.

There are dozens of reasons that the real answer is no, but they all point to two different concepts. First concept: the purpose of a house style guide is to create a consistent style in all documents released by a line or a house. What you're trying to do violates the very purpose of the house style. More than that, the first reader -- and indeed, all subsequent readers, if you're lucky enough to get to them -- will see your punctuation as inconsistent. It's unlikely that they will analyze it more deeply than that. If they notice it at all, they will probably find it puzzling or annoying. If they don’t notice it, they might still be subconsciously unsettled by the book’s inconsistencies. In either case, you risk breaking what John Gardner calls the fictive dream, that mental state a reader enters when they are captivated by a story. Unless the break is deliberate (and for some experimental or literary writers, such breaks are deliberate), this is not the effect you want.

Second concept: Even if your editor goes along with it -- and it's unlikely that she will -- the copy editor and proofreader are going to hate it. They will find it confusing (as, I suspect, will most of the readers), and they won’t want to be responsible for getting it correct. They're going to try to change everything to the house standards. It will lead to an editorial battle, which the managing editor will settle by saying, "Do what the style guide tells you to do." And then everyone will remember you as the author of the manuscript that led to those battles. That's not how you want to be remembered in-house.

If you are writing genre fiction, you should strive to make your punctuation as transparent as possible. Trust the words. Let the words tell the story. Let the words provide cadence and rhythm, meaning and context. Punctuation is not bling and you should not apply commas like a pointillist decorating a canvas. You don't want your end reader to notice your punctuation. You want them to notice your story.

Trust me on this. I've thought deeply about it. I know.

Theresa

Monday, August 11, 2008

This was in comments, but it's a great question, so let's discuss--

Ali said...

I have a question about comments and voice. One woman in my critique group keeps inserting commas in places in my manuscript where I would probably ordinarily use one, but my narrator/protagonist wouldn't. I wish I could find an example, but take my word for it that they aren't as blatant as the examples you gave. (Omit either of the commas in the two previous sentences and you'll get the idea).

To my mind, the missing commas are part of this young man's voice. I guess my question is, am I making a mistake by counting on an agent/editor to recognize that? (This doesn't mean he or she will necessarily like the voice, but there's a difference between not liking a voice and thinking "oh, look, this person can't write!") Should I make an extra effort, Alicia, when writing a query letter, to insert plenty of commas, to prove that I'm quite capable of using them properly?

Ali, good question!

I would suggest that in narrative, the standard rules of grammar should almost always apply if you're using standard sentence construction. In dialogue, maybe there's more flexibility. Theoretically, dialogue doesn't have to follow the rules of grammar, because spoken English is much more informal. However, punctuation itself is more a function of written English. You've pinpointed the danger, that the agent or editor will assume that you don't know grammar and punctuation if you generally don't use it properly in the narrative and dialogue. (Remember that the reader, not to mention the editor's boss, has no access to your query letter, and so can't judge your punctuationability by anything but the story itself.)

NEVER "insert plenty of commas" -- because using too many commas is just as much a marker of the amateur than using too few. Get to to know the rules. Use punctuation properly in the narration (non-dialogue) of your story, and of course in the query letter-- you should do that no matter what. :)

I have to point out, your voice should not depend on punctuation, and neither should the character's voice. A very occasional non-standard punctuation marker can probably help dialogue, but as Theresa said recently about ellipses, if that's absolutely essential to voice, the words themselves are lacking-- aren't perhaps chosen well-- and the sentence construction and paragraph construction should carry the rhythm, not the punctuation.

As I say about every non-standard feature-- less is more. (Except, apparently, with me and dashes. :) The more correctly you punctuate everything, the more likely the reader is to understand that the very occasional breaking of the rules is done for effect. If you frequently break the rules, the reader (and editor/agent) are likely to assume that you don't know the rules, and you don't want that.

So try first with standard punctuation, and do everything you can to make it "sound" right without breaking the rules. Then, if ONLY by breaking the comma rules (and I have to say, I break out in hives when I see one comma and not the other when they're supposed to be in pairs, but I'm clearly too sensitive :) can you achieve the "sound" you want... well, you know what I'd probably do. The copy I'd submit to begin with would be pristine, every comma in its proper place. Then, if/when the story is bought and paid for, the copy I'd turn in for editing might have the non-standard aspects (absolutely as few as I can stand), and I'd explain my reasoning to the editor. IF the editor says, "Sorry, no way, gotta do it right," I'd let it go. You're not the only one whose "voice" is involved here, to be frank. The last thing any reputable publisher (or editor) wants is to get a reputation for slack editing, and that is actually a likely result of publishing books which omit a lot of commas. The reader will not have access to your reasoning, remember. So think all the way through-- what is the effect on the reader? What will the reader understand of this? Don't be condescending here-- only the most sophisticated of readers probably are truly conversant with the rules, so only they would be even capable of noticing when you break the rules and have any real access to the effect you want to create. Does that effect-- if they get it, and get what you want them to get (that is, not another effect you didn't intend), compensate for the annoyance that sophisticated readers feel when punctuation is incorrect?

I don't know. I do know, however, that most publishing houses have a stylebook that editors are expected to follow in most cases. So the copy editor will probably "fix" any non-standardness anyway... very little non-standard is going to get past TWO good editors, alas or rather fortunately.


Anyway, I'd suggest that you wait till you've got the check before you get too innovative. That's what I'd do. Hey, that's what I -have- done. (And had it all changed to standard in the copy edit. Oh, well. I like to think my voice is plenty strong enough anyway. :)

I am altogether too fond of a new technique used by some writers to indicate staccato thought-- periods after each word in a short sentence or fragment. Not to get too political, this not being a political blog, but the first time I saw it was on a tote bag with a picture of He Whose Name Shall Not Be Mentioned Here and underneath: Worst. President. Ever.

Those periods really helped emphasize the decisiveness of that. Now I think once a book is enough for that-- anymore would diminish the impact-- but it's a good example of how non-standard punctuation can be used (but only when everything else is standard so the non stands out).
Doubt if this helps, but you might analyze the totality of the situation here. For example, if you're dealing with a house that actually employs real editors and copy editors and has a house stylebook, that's a very different situation than a house where they pretty much publish your copy without any editing (there are plenty of those out there). I'd also suggest that readers, especially the sophisticated ones who know the rules and are going to be sensitive enough to feel the effect of nonstandard punctuation, are going to be much more open to this in first-person narration and in dialogue, and in prose which is experimental in other ways throughout (cf. Ulysses).

Theresa, what do you think?
Alicia


Sunday, August 10, 2008

Commas-- a couple easy rules

If you already know this, ignore it. :) This is for those writers who are submitting manuscripts without absorbing the rules for the most common punctuation mark, the comma.

What's the comma for? It's to separate out units of meaning in a sentence, so the reader knows what words go with what words. So, for example, an appositive (which is just a phrase that modifies a noun, like "Jenny, an experienced skater, loves the winter") is a unit of meaning, and so goes together, and is separated from the noun and whatever follows in the sentence.

(I am NOT going to get into restrictive vs. nonrestrictive here, because it gives me a headache to explain, and anyway, it's been explained better by others:
Restrictive_and_Nonrestrictive
Another site for this
Check these out. :)

But with
Jenny, an experienced skater, loves the winter.
-- here's what it looks like without the commas setting off the appositive:
Jenny an experienced skater loves the winter. (*This is WRONG.)

Not only does the phrase an experienced skater just blend in without meaning, but the subject and verb (Jenny... loves) have no prominence-- just two more in a series of words.

Both commas are needed: The appositive is a UNIT of meaning and so should be treated as a unit-- comma before and after, not just one or the other comma.

The other most annoying comma mistake is to skip the comma after a direct address. Fiction uses a lot of dialogue, and so you'll have more direct address (using someone's name while speaking to him/her) than in non-fiction. The name, when the speaker is directly being addressed, is set off from the following sentence with a comma.
John, I don't know what you mean.
(If the name is in the middle of the sentence, then there's a comma before and a comma after:
I don't know, John, what you mean.)

That is, the name is a unit of meaning IN THIS SENTENCE. And the "sentence-proper," the main clause, is another unit of meaning.

What if the name is the subject of the sentence, or another part of the sentence? Then probably there's no comma, because it's part of the unit of meaning:
John didn't know what you meant.
You didn't know what John meant.

But here's what counts: If I get a manuscript and see on page 1 an elementary mistake like
Hello Jody what's going on?
I have to wonder how many other elementary mistakes there will be in the pages to come. Not only presumably has the author been exposed to the correct way in school (no, I don't want to hear that "no one teaches grammar anymore"-- I teach English, remember?), but also she's read books with the correct form since she was six or seven. (A good reason not to read unedited books is that they teach bad habits. ) So if this quite easy rule has escaped her, what else?

The editor has to fix every single one of those. Every one. And in some books, that might be an average of one a paragraph, three or four a page, and that's only ONE chronic error. And-- getting sick of me saying this yet?-- this is the writer's job. Making sentences meaningful to the reader (and that's the purpose of syntax and punctuation) is the writer's job.

Now most of you don't make elementary mistakes. (You probably only make the complicated mistakes that have us consulting handbooks and other editors and waking up in the middle of the night debating options. :) But be ruthless with yourself. Read the grammar handbooks. Study the examples. Compare those against your own manuscript passages. As you read edited books, notice not just how the author develops suspense, but how the author structures and punctuates sentences. Pay attention. Have a friend who is good at editing go over your manuscript-- even two or three pages would help!-- and point out your chronic errors. Don't let the friend fix these, because you won't learn unless you fix these yourself. Most important, challenge yourself to turn in clean manuscripts so that the editor can focus on the plot and characters and not the punctuation.

Make yourself absorb the rules and apply them. Grammar and punctuation are much, much easier to learn than plotting!

Alicia

Friday, August 8, 2008

Batman, an Antihero

Before we were interrupted by RWA Nationals, we were having a nice chat about antiheroes. Remember that? The topic of Batman came up, and Alicia and I agreed that Ian Healy seemed to have a much better handle on this than we did. So we asked him to share his thoughts about Batman as antihero, and here is what he had to say:

Say there’s this guy. He has a strong conviction about what is right and what is wrong, and his convictions don’t necessarily match up with those of his society. He decides to act on those convictions and operate as a vigilante – performing the task of judge and jury with his own cognizance and punishing those he deems are wrong in his eyes. To protect his identity, he wears a mask. And in this guise, he metes out his own form of justice, regardless of the actual law.

Sound familiar? Are you thinking of Batman by any chance? It certainly describes him and his crusade against crime well enough. But let’s say he’s not our friend Bruce Wayne, and he’s not targeting criminals, but African Americans. Whoa! He’s a KKK guy!

Think about that for a minute. We think of Batman as a hero because of his quest for justice, but is he really? Or is he an anti-hero?

An anti-hero is defined as “a persona characterized by a lack of ‘traditional’ heroic qualities.” What exactly are those qualities? Webster’s says a hero is “A being of great strength and courage celebrated for bold exploits; often the offspring of a mortal and a god.” Well, Batman certainly has great strength and courage and has bold exploits, so why do I postulate that he is in fact an anti-hero?

First and foremost, Batman is driven not by a quest for justice, but by a desire for revenge. His entire life and persona is devoted toward punishing the criminal community for his parents’ deaths at the hands of a common mugger. Revenge isn’t a particularly noble cause, and many of Batman’s actions in pursuit of it are not only anti-heroic, but downright criminal. By choosing to act as a vigilante, ignoring the law in favor of his own sensibilities, he has become the very thing he seeks to eradicate: a criminal. How many laws does Batman break? Let’s start with his habit of ignoring peoples’ civil rights to administer brutal beatings. Yanking someone several stories into the air and then nearly dropping them back to the ground just to obtain information is torture, plain and simple. Batman has always claimed he will not kill in pursuit of his so-called justice, but time and time again he has allowed people to die, either as a direct result of his actions or his inaction at a crucial moment. Think of the moment at the climax of Batman Begins, when Ra’s Al-Ghul tells him “You’ll have to kill me,” and Batman replied “I don’t have to kill you, but I don’t have to save you either.”

He assaults, he kills, he breaks-and-enters, trespasses, and blows things up. He tears through the city causing great damage and putting countless lives at risk. He doesn’t follow the established system of justice, put in place just to prevent the kind of knee-jerk reactionary vigilantism that he espouses. Are these really the qualities of a heroic character? I submit to you they are not.

--------

This makes a lot of sense. But it brings up another question. Is a protagonist antiheroic because of his actions, his motivations, or some combination of both?

Theresa

Thursday, August 7, 2008

Prepositions, ending with

Alicia here-
Notice that Theresa writes all that great info about the conference, and I'm fixated on single words. I have always thought of myself as a "big picture" type person, but I'm re-imaging my self-image. I'm beginning to think I'm, horrors, a pedant. Or as Lynn Truss (Eats, Shoots, and Leaves-- fabulous book if you love punctuation -- actually, Theresa gave it to me!) would term it, I am a stickler.
Just a quick stickler note because I came across this issue lately --

The "rule" that you should never end a sentence with a preposition is really incompatible with the English language. English has a lot of predicates which are verb+preposition (just look at "look": look at, look over, look towards, look away from, look up, look down...) and so often when you end a sentence on one of these predicates (perfectly correct), you end up with a preposition as the last word of the sentence:

He glanced over.
She looked up.
He didn't know what this was about. (Was about is actually the full predicate there, I think.)
A preposition? Well, that's what the sentence ended with.

"Fixing" this often ends up with a sentence like Churchill's classic: "That is an impertinence up with which I will not put."

All due respect to Churchill, who knew exactly what to do with the English language... he's right. Fixing often makes for even more awkward sentences. But, well, if you can, rewrite it. Why? Because a preposition really not a great way to end a sentence. The last word of a sentence, like the first, should ideally have some power, and a preposition is always going to be a bit lame, because it's a "position" word, not a noun or verb (which carry, respectively, concreteness and vitality). Also, you're bound to run into a reader (or an editor) who knows the rule but not the exceptions, and so thinks you're wrong even if you're not. (I don't do that much, but I recklessly use "hopefully" as a sentence adverb-- Hopefully, the picnic won't be rained out-- and always when I'm with my father-in-law, who regards "hopefully" as a barbarism akin to cannibalism and hence looks upon me with suspicion now, especially when I ask him to pass the mustard.)

Anyway, whenever you break a "rule," stop and see if you can recast the sentence to avoid it. (If the "wrong" way is the best way, you'll learn that by trying and failing to recast it.) Just experiment. The original sentence won't fly away if you try a few others. It'll wait patiently for you to come abjectly back and beg forgiveness. :)

Here's the sentence, very simple, that started me on this (context so it will make more sense-- this is about a young woman on her 4th marriage, and the dilemma is, should the heroine attend the wedding and give yet another present to the oft-bride, and I'm modifying the original to make the point while disguising it, so I apologize for the clumsiness-- it wasn't so awkward to start with):
She might have fewer weddings if she didn't think of them as fun parties she got lots of presents at.

Easy to fix, once you decide that you're going to get rid of that awkward ending prep:
She might have fewer weddings if she didn't think of them as fun parties where she got lots of presents.

Not that prepositions can NEVER end sentences (as I ranted during that semicolon argument I mean debate, never say never). But while I will fight to the death for your right to do that when it works, usually there's a better way to cast the sentence.
Alicia

Wednesday, August 6, 2008

Post-Conference Coma

Well, I'm back. Back in the physical sense, that is. My brain is still sleeping on the plane 35,000 feet over Nebraska.

This might just have been our best conference ever. I arrived early to give myself time to do a little sightseeing with friends. So Tuesday afternoon on Wednesday morning were spent wandering, shopping, viewing landmarks, and getting caught up with friends. I was thrilled to see the City Lights bookstore, the one owned by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, the one where Allen Ginsberg gave the public reading of his poem Howl that gave rise to new obscenity standards. As both an editor and an attorney, that's the kind of landmark that makes my heart go pitter-pat.

My boss arrived early Wednesday afternoon, and no sooner had she checked into her room than we dashed off together for a meeting with a book buyer. This was the first of a series of business meetings, all of which were remarkably fruitful. After we finished those, we made a quick lap through the room for the literacy signing, dropping "Red Sage Secret Society" buttons at all our authors’ signing stations. This was the first stage in a planned giveaway which we kept more or less under wraps before the conference. The idea was that our authors would be doing random stops of people wearing our buttons to give away free books. You had to have a button to get a book. We gave away several hundred buttons, and almost as many books.

After doing the lap through the literacy signing room, my boss and I headed off to dinner at Wolfgang Puck's restaurant, Postrio. The meal was fabulous, and our waiter was adorable. I wanted to put him in my pocketbook and take him home. If you happen to be in San Francisco and are looking for a really superior meal, that would be a great place to go.

The next day, Thursday, was a whirlwind of author meetings and pitches. We took a record number of pitches this year, and for the most part, they were all terrific. Authors were well-prepared and understood what we were looking for. Of course, you can always count on an RWA conference to generate good pitches. That's one of the reasons we attend.

Pitches and meetings ran from about nine in the morning until almost four in the afternoon, at which time our coffee social started. What a rush! I still can't believe how many people came out for that! The room was so crowded that people couldn't even get back to the coffee and cupcake table. I want to thank everybody who attended -- you made it so much fun -- and I did try my best to at least say hello to everybody. I failed. I know I failed. But I did try.

From there, we went to the Passionate Ink reception, where we were delighted to see Angela Knight honored by having an award named after her. We love Angela. She's such a wonderful ambassador for the genre. Congratulations to her and to the winner of the award. I paid close attention to the names that were called during the awards ceremony -- but then, I always do. It's interesting to hear which authors are deemed best by their peers. I think that writers are often the most difficult-to-please readers, and an award like this is particularly meaningful. Congratulations to all the winners in all categories.

One rather strange thing happened at that reception, and I'm going to mention it here even though I've debated whether to do so. At one point, I was working the room a little bit, and I walked up to a table of about six writers. They were talking amongst themselves, and all of them glanced at me as I approached the table, but not one of them said hello. I wasn't sure if I might be interrupting, but it quickly became apparent that their conversation was not particularly animated. Some of them were talking to each other, and so I turned to the other three, intending to say hello and introduce myself.

To say that they froze me out would be a great understatement. In fact, I haven't seen behavior like that since the high school cafeteria. I'm not sure what caused it -- I don't know if I may have rejected one of their friends, or even one of them, or maybe they write for one of our competitors -- but after thinking about it, I've decided I don't care what the reason was. The simple truth is that at a business networking event, people should expect to be approached and should be prepared to say hello. They don't have to like me or my company. They don't have to submit manuscripts to my company. But even if they outright hated me or my company, the polite and professional thing to do would have been to say hello, make a brief connection, and then move on. As it happened, I walked away from that table without saying a single word to any one of those five authors.

It's rare that something like that happens at a writing conference. Usually, writers are pretty happy to meet new people at these events -- or at least, that's been my experience. So that's why I debated saying anything here. This particular event, the Passionate Ink reception, is usually a wonderful venue for networking. I don't want to sound like I'm criticizing the event or the event coordinators or the chapter as a whole. They do a great job. I just hate to see their event marred by behavior like that.

In any event, moving on. From there we went to our author dinner. This is always a fun and lively event, and this year was no exception. I think the funniest moment came after dinner. Our submissions coordinator, Barb, was celebrating her birthday that day. Several of the authors got together and ordered a naughty cake for her. I knew something was up when the waiter carried it in, and the look on his face made it plain that something wicked this way came. Then he set down the cake, and we all got a good look at the picture on top -- two bunnies having sex. Maybe you have to know Barb to understand how truly funny that is, because she is definitely a woman who understands the benefit of going at it like rabbits, but regardless, this is one of the funniest cakes I've ever seen. Kudos to the authors who came up with that one.

One other noteworthy moment from the dinner erupted at the end of the table where Alicia and our copy editor were sitting. This was the first volley in what has come to be known as the Great Semicolon Skirmish of ‘08. Trust me when I tell you this was a complicated battle that covered much territory and involved the use of much precise ammunition. I did enter the fray briefly, but backed away slowly when I realized I would have a hard time getting a word in edgewise. And that's saying something. It's not often that someone can outshout me on the topic of punctuation. I will leave the disclosure of further details to Alicia and Lynn.

The next day, Friday, we had several more meetings, meetings, meetings, with a brief break in the afternoon for some much-needed downtime. I was starting to hit my wall. I hid in my room for a bit, and an hour and a half later, I rose refreshed and wandered off for a dinner meeting. This one was at a place called Kuleto's, and it was fabulous. Every meal we had in every restaurant we visited was fabulous. I just can't say enough good about restaurants in San Francisco. We lingered over dinner and drinks, and it was pretty late at night by the time this one wrapped up. I hated to say goodbye to my boss -- she was leaving early the next morning, not joining us on our editing retreat, but if we do this again next year, I really want her there. I just adore this woman. I feel very lucky to be working for her.

So that takes us to Saturday morning, at which time we left for our editing retreat. I won't go into that now. I'd rather stay focused on the conference itself for a little while. This seemed like a very upbeat conference this year, remarkably upbeat. I didn't hear much doom and gloom, and very little dire prognosticating. There wasn't much industry gossip, and what little I did hear, I would agree with. People were talking about paranormal starting to get saturated, and I would say there's truth in that. Readers are still snapping up these books, but I think that the trend is at its peak. Not that it's falling off, but that it's reached maximum density.

I confess, I don't pay a lot of attention to the chatter about other publishers. I did hear are a few tidbits -- I heard something about a new Harlequin contract, though I can't for the life of me remember what it was, and I heard something about Kensington not being as open to new authors, though I can't remember why. If anyone wants to shed light on these rumors, please correct my imprecise information in the comments. Or if anyone heard any other good industry information, feel free to post it in the comments, or if you prefer to remain anonymous, send it to edittorrent@gmail.com and I’ll preserve your anonymity and share your information.

I will tell you about our editing retreat, but to do that, I want to post pictures, and my camera cable is in my suitcase traveling all around the country. Good old American Airlines. They charge fifteen bucks to check a bag, and then they can’t even get it to its destination. But that's a whole other story which we’ll save for another time.

Theresa

Tuesday, August 5, 2008

Back from the conference....

Finally back! Theresa and I met with lots of writers (and she met with lots of industry sorts) and... well, I don't remember much else. Lots of arguments about semicolons in fiction (that's just the sort I hang out with, alas). I'm sure more will occur to me once I get some sleep and file my final grades in my summer classes.

Theresa, there was something I said would make a good blog post-- oh, yeah, about how pauses in dialogue should be in the narrative, not in punctuation. Remember?

Alicia