Make-A-Story™ - Monday's Writing Prompt


Writing to spec – you’ve heard the term. It means writing what the publisher wants. Can you do it? In our new feature - Make-A-Story™, we ask you to create a story with these elements. The story can be set in any time frame, any length, must adhere to our guidelines and have our standard Christian world view. 

A waiting room
Triplets
A broken vending machine

Tactical Tuesday: Advice for Self-Editing

Great beginnings are not written by accident. Authors give much thought before crafting that all-important first scene. Some spend hours on the first line.

A novel doesn’t have to start with an Indiana Jones type opener—you know, Indie in the jungle facing dangers in order to return with the artifact, being chased by a boulder and running into natives with spears, but a novel does need to use the Indiana Jones technique.

A great opener is one that causes the reader to ask, “Why?” “How?” and “What in the world?”

Certain scenarios have been said to be the kiss of death for authors. For instances, we’re told that an author should never open a story with weather. Well, if the opening is simply someone looking out the window at a cloudless day, the author would be smart to back away and think again.

Now, if the character lives on a farm in Kansas, and the opening scene involves a gathering of dark, malicious-looking clouds, and one of those clouds just happens to drop a funnel from the sky, and if that character stands in the window and watches the funnel cut a path through his corn field and toward the house, I think the author has started with a great scene.

Also, authors are told never to start a story with a dream. I pretty much agree with this rule. Why? Because a dream is like an internal thought. A dream has the reader in the psyche of a character the reader hasn’t met. Coming out of the dream will jar the reader.

Yet, if I were to write a story about a man who is dreaming about his life and who awakens to find himself the savior of a future world...Oops, already been done, but I have to wonder if any editor ever picked up that story and said, “Oh, no, another novel starting with a dream” before the work got into the hands of an astute editor.

The next scenario is one that every author should note as something to avoid. Never, ever, ever open the story with back story. If the information contained in the back story is so important that it cannot be layered into the plot in small quantities and in a way that the reader will not recognize it as back story, it is possible that the story has been started in the wrong place.

Likewise, information dumps must be avoided at all costs. They’re easy to spot. They start out by telling the reader everything they need to know about the character, their location, their background, etc. The emphasis is on “telling.” Information should unfold in such a way that the reader does not feel “dumped upon.”

Readers should not have to meander through pleasantries about the weather, a dream that means nothing to them, or through back story and information that does nothing but stop the story cold.

There is a reason that the Adventures of Indiana Jones all start with Indiana in a precarious situation, and it demonstrates a very valuable technique when it comes to opening scenes. All novels should start in a place called “in media res.” This means no matter the genre being written, when readers open up to the first page of a novel, they should find themselves in the middle of the action.


Happy editing.

Make-A-Story™ - Monday's Writing Prompt


Writing to spec – you’ve heard the term. It means writing what the publisher wants. Can you do it? In our new feature - Make-A-Story™, we ask you to create a story with these elements. The story can be set in any time frame, any length, must adhere to our guidelines and have our standard Christian world view. 

A bowl of apples
A shooting star
An urgent request

Tactical Tuesday: Advice for Self-Editing

Self-editing for plot holes might be the most difficult task an author undertakes. Why? Because in an author’s mind, the story is all laid out. The characters are in place. Their relationships are cemented, and the plot is solid in the author’s mind. In other words, author’s get so firmly entrenched in their plot that the holes don’t show up.

What I thought I would do this week is to share with you examples of some of the plot holes and other mistakes I’ve made in my works in progress.

Identity Errors: I recently found a plot hole large enough to drive a tractor trailer through in a work of mine that I have labored on for thirty-five years—yes, thirty-five years (I thought it was twenty-five, but apparently I’m ten years older than I feel). When I stumbled across it, I marveled at how it had gotten past critique partners and me for so long. The problem was in the identity of one of my major characters. Others were not supposed to suspect who she was, but she had the same unusual last name as another character who was related to her. Oops.

Another type of identity error I faced in the past was using a woman’s married name before she was married. This is easy to do because we know the past, present, and future of our characters.

Does the System Really Work Like That? Recently, my editor caught an error with a prison scene in one of my works in progress. She asked me if the system really worked liked that in the state in which my villain was in prison. My only reply to that was, “Great catch.” I was working on what I knew of a local jail system and not a state run prison system. A little research told me I was wrong, and a change in a couple of sentences resolved the problem.

This was a great reminder to me to never take procedure for granted. Some things can be done differently. Research might reveal choices, or it might indicate that there is only one procedure. Authors should not risk the ire of an informed reader by making up their own process.

Realistic Character Arcs: The same editor mentioned above also called me on the arc of a pretty belligerent character who seemed to become angelic overnight. When I reviewed the manuscript, I found that she had a right to question the character’s arc. Tweaking one scene made that change more realistic. Manuscripts should be reviewed with an eye toward locating and remedying any implausible character changes.

Timeline Issues: Only in daytime soap operas where children are born one week and turn twenty-one the next are timelines not an issue. I’ve run across this problem a few times in my works in progress. A good practice is to keep track of timelines as the story develops. Back track and make sure that a logical timeframe has been followed. Check your character’s birth dates. Do they match up with such things as technology? For example: were cell phones in use when the character was a certain age depicted in the book? This is important in contemporary and historical novels.

Even the smallest of plot holes can derail a plot. The identity error I mentioned above is a major problem for my novel, but I’ve been able to fix it with a minor tweak. The other instances mentioned seem like smaller details, but to a reader, they might make or break the plot.

The best practice for seeking out and plugging that hole in your manuscript is to set the story aside for a while. Letting the story cool for a while, stepping back from what you know, and letting a little of that knowledge seep away, and then coming back to it, helps to pinpoint a lot of the problems.

Better yet, put your work into the hands of a beta reader, an editor, or a critique partner who will look at the story as a whole, and ask them to look for any major areas where the plot doesn’t come quite together.


Happy editing.