Write with Fire

As those of you who read this blog with any regularity know, I belong to a great writers group called the Wordsmiths that’s been meeting at a local bookstore every Monday night for more than eight years (well, except for those memorable months in late 2005-06 when we met in my gutted house!). One of the Wordsmiths is fantasy and horror writer Charles Gramlich, who has just released a new book called Write with Fire. A professor of psychology by day, Charles has published everything from poetry and short stories to a stand-alone novel and a trilogy. Vampire stories, sword & sorcery, sword & planet, adventure, westerns, children’s tales, humor, and nonfiction—you name it, he’s probably written it (with a few significant exceptions!).

He’s been at this writer thing for more than twenty years, during which he’s spent a lot of time thinking about writing, talking about writing, and writing about writing. And now he’s gathered all his insightful thoughts together in Write With Fire: Thoughts on the Craft of Writing. As Charles himself says, “The first part [of the book] is mainly about the practical mechanics of writing. How do you shepherd ideas through the writing and editing process and into the final form needed for publication? It talks more about fiction than nonfiction but a lot of the articles are really about communicating with your writing, which applies to any genre. The second part deals more with theory and philosophy in writing. What kind of characteristics are common to writers? What makes and breaks a “page-turner?” The last and much shorter section consists of articles that are more personal to my life as a writer, such as my experiences after Hurricane Katrina.”

My own copy of Write with Fire hasn’t arrived yet. But after spending eight years talking about writing with this guy, I don’t have any hesitation promoting his work sight-unseen. It’d be hard to imagine a more honest, down-to-earth, practical, and savvy guy with whom to sit down and talk craft.

You can read more about Charles and his book here.

A Learning Process

Well, the last scene of The Deadlight Connection is written, which would be cause for celebration if I weren't so frantically combing through the manuscript, looking for errors and little turns of phrases that just don't quite sound right while keeping a nervous eye on the calendar. It doesn't help that I compressed the action into seven days, rather than eight, which means I'm also doing some date juggling. But the important point in all this is that the #@$% thing will be finished by its official deadline, even if it is six months late by my own deadline.

I've realized I write books in one of three ways: 1) I make reasonable revisions as I write, then finish the first draft and go back for a more substantive overhaul and cosmetic corrections;. 2) I write the first draft in a white heat, barely looking at what I've written until I reach the end; and 3) I make a series of massive, bloody overhauls long before I finish the manuscript, as well as less drastic but still substantive revisions, so that by the time I write the last chapter, all I need is to go back and do the final cleanup.

After having written upwards of fifteen books, you'd think I'd have an established work pattern, but I don't. Of the three approaches, I personally prefer #2, but that only seems to work when the book is working. I simply can't keep going when I realize there's a hideous problem (or two or three) in what I've already written.

Now that I'm (almost) finished with it, I find I'm surprisingly happy with this book. I think it's a fun read. The only thing that startles me is that it's LONG--which is one of the reasons (but only one of them) it took so long to write. You'd think after having written all these books I'd be better at judging a story's length.

All of which reminds me that while I know a great deal about this book-writing business, there is still much that I am learning.

Rewriting, Again

I’m rewriting The Deadlight Connection once again. How many serious reworkings does this make? I’ve lost count.

So what drove this particular rehashing? The realization that I didn’t have enough conflict between my two protagonists. In the first book of the series, The Archangel Project, Jax and Tobie spar back and forth constantly. In Deadlight, they were getting along way to well. The sizzle was gone. It was…boring.

So I’ve rethought Tobie’s motivations and goals, gone back to her roots, and started rewriting. In the process, I’ve recaptured the characters I loved in Archangel and given this new book a much needed spark. Maybe, just maybe I can finally say, "By George, I think I've got it." About six months late, but better late than never.

How did I go wrong? Distraction, I suspect. This has been a sucky year. But my mom’s in our house now, things are beginning to settle into a pattern, and while I find my writing hours reduced, I also find that in my non-writing hours I’ve started doing something I haven’t done in a long time: I’m thinking about my book.

Which is how I realized I’d lost the conflict between Jax and Tobie, and how important that was for making the book a fun, fast read.

Now, if I could just finish the #@%& thing!

Choices, and Gone Baby Gone

One of the realities of life in our family that has long driven my girls crazy is the way my sister—the novelist Penelope Williamson—and I tend to talk about writing for hours and hours and hours whenever we get together or chat on the phone. I remember one time Penny said, “The more I write, the more I become aware of the choices I make every time I sit down to write a scene.” Ever since that conversation, I’ve been far more aware of the choices I make, and how the number of choices I have to make seems to expand the more experienced I become.

I think this is true for most writers. As beginners, we tend to rush into each scene with lots of enthusiasm and little sense of conscious choice. But as we gain experience, we become aware of those choices and begin to make more deliberate decisions. Where to start a scene. Where to set a scene. Whose point of view to use. When and how to end a scene. And on and on.

So what does this have to do with Gone Baby Gone? Steve and I watched this movie Saturday night. And then, last night, we watched the Bonus Features, including the “Audio Commentary by Writer/Director Ben Affleck and Writer Aaron Stockard.” When I first saw it listed as a selection, I said, You’ve got to be kidding. The entire movie with a soundtrack of the director and writers talking about the movie? Sounds boring, right? Maybe for most people, yes. But for those of you out there who are writers, fascinating. Because most of what they talk about is the choices they made—some good, some bad, and the compromises they had to make. I also found it fascinating to realize, by watching the movie through their “eyes”, just how many subtle little things I’d missed. Whatever you might think of Affleck as an actor, there’s no doubt he understands storytelling, and has studied and learned from the masters.

A few weeks ago, Steve Malley ran a post on the wisdom to be gained from watching the bonus features on DVDs. If you want to take his advice, Gone Baby Gone would be a great place to start.

Punch It Up

We all know the “rule”—that the last sentence of every scene, like the last sentence of a chapter and the last sentence of a book—needs to be powerful. This is a concept my writers group has been kicking around for a while, and we’ve realized the same thing is also true of paragraphs. The more wallop packed by the last sentence of every paragraph, the more effective the writing.

And then we noticed something else—the last WORD in each paragraph needs to carry a punch. We looked at a poem written by Charles (which happened to be handy at the time we were discussing this). The last words in his stanzas were evocative words like misery, peril, aura. Then we looked at a poem by another writer. The last words in his stanzas were pedestrian words like it, them, then. The difference was startling. It might be more noticeable in poetry, but the same principle applies to prose.

Yes, there are times the humdrum word choice can’t be avoided, or when the flow and cadence require the invisible “said.” But glance through a few novels, just looking at the final words in the paragraphs, and you’ll quickly notice the difference. I pull SUNSET LIMITED by James Lee Burke from my shelves and I see paragraphs ending with words like fingers, skin, heat, stars, breathe, glow, porch, bone, scrawl. I look at a bestselling thriller written by a former romance writer and see sentences ending with words like him, it, is, to, out, up, out, here, well, that, on, down, had.

This is something the best writers do instinctively. But it doesn’t hurt to be aware of this concept. It’s one more tool that can be brought into play at the revision stage, when you know a passage doesn’t “feel” quite right or lacks the necessary punch. Look at the last words in your paragraphs.

On Pacing

If you’d asked me a couple of days ago how to make a book fast-paced, I’d have said, Keep it moving and up the stakes. It’s the typical advice. In his Techniques of the Selling Writer, Dwight Swain tells us to increase pace by expanding scenes and cutting sequels—in other words, more action, less thinking and feeling.

But I was reading something by David Griffith last night, and he says the way to keep up a fast pace is to set and answer questions, doing this continuously from scene to scene and from sequence to sequence, thus keeping your reader in a state of anticipation and expectation until the end. As soon as you answer one question, you immediately raise another. That way, we enter each scene with a question hanging over us from the previous scene, and we immediately get out of that scene as soon as a new question is raised. According to Griffith, it’s when a writer fails to keep raising these questions that a book or movie becomes slow and the audience loses interest.

Intriguing stuff. I know I deliberately do this in my mysteries—Sebastian learns something to make him think Suspect A is the killer; he chases down this new information, only to discover there is an innocent explanation. But before I swerve away from that scene, he learns SOMETHING that raises a new question in his head and sends him off after Suspect B, and so on. From the very beginning I have made a conscious effort to make the series fast-paced, and editors and reviewers alike constantly comment on how fast the pacing in this series is. Yet I never connected the pacing with the question/new question technique I was using. And it never occurred to me to apply it to other genres.

A fascinating idea. I’m going to take a look at the plot for my next thriller, and make sure I keep those questions coming.

Judging a Book by its Cover

As a writer, few things cause me as much angst as my books’ covers. Why? Because a book’s cover is constantly cited as one of the most important factors influencing a reader’s decision to pick it up. Yet ironically it’s the one aspect of a book in which writers have the least input.

Titles are also important, and in some genres a writer has almost no influence there either. I wrote seven romance novels and NOT ONE went to press with my original title or even one of my first half dozen alternate suggestions. I seem to have better luck with my mystery and thriller titles. So far all my Sebastian St. Cyr books have gone to press with their original titles intact. My thriller title stuck as well.

But it’s now cover conference time for THE ARCHANGEL PROJECT, which means I’m starting to fret. The decisions being made in that anonymous room up in New York could very well make a difference between this book’s success and oblivion. Sometimes art departments turn in stunning results—WHY MERMAIDS SING, for instance. And then there are the dogs. The cover of WHEN GODS DIE was a severe disappointment. But since ARCHANGEL is my first thriller, I don’t know what to expect.

We actually started down this road a few months ago, then Harper Collins bailed because they hadn’t decided yet whether they wanted to bring ARCHANGEL out in hardcover or as a paperback original (and that makes a difference, it seems, in the cover). Steve and I did “thriller cover research” and were amused to realize that thriller covers are as stereotypic as romance covers. A thriller or suspense novel typically has either a woman in a dress and heels or a man in a suit running down a shadowy street. Sometimes the man is walking, but if so, then he must be in a trench coat. If the book doesn’t take place in a city, then we have a stark, scary scene of rural menace.

There are a few book covers that break this mold, but they are rare. Why? Because publishers think readers are stupid. The woman in heels running down a dark street tells readers This Is A THRILLER, just as a shadowy historical street scene tells readers This Is a Historical Mystery. The fear is that if publishers stick a different cover on a book, readers looking for a thriller or historical mystery won’t recognize it.

Yet the Da Vinci Code had a great, different cover and I’ve no doubt it contributed much to the book’s success (that and the largest marketing push in publishing history). A recent informal survey of mystery readers revealed that most historical mystery readers actually don’t even know that dark historical street scene covers are a clue they should be looking for. Of course, everyone in the world knows that a “clinch” cover is shorthand for romance. Romance writers complained about those covers for years, but publishers clung to them because they were convinced they’d lose readers if they tried something different. Then they tried something different and, lo and behold, books with innovative covers sold better. Who’d have thunk?

The funny thing is, even though I know better, I find I still judge a book by its cover, at least initially. An eye-catching cover and an intriguing title will lure me to pick up a book. I’ll then read the blurb and, if I think it sounds interesting, I’ll read the first few pages to get a feel for a writer’s style. If that appeals to me, I’ll buy the book. But that first step—reaching out and taking the book in my hand—is provoked by the title and the cover. And that’s a scary thought.

Jack Sprat and His Wife

Are you an Underwriter or an Overwriter?

I’m beginning to realize that authors usually fall into one category or the other. Overwriters tend to, well, over-write their books. They pile on unneeded description, write scenes that add nothing to the story, ramble on and on with dialogue that goes nowhere. Their revision process consists of trimming all that fat.

Pat Conroy is an Overwriter. I understand he writes massive tomes, hundreds and hundreds of pages of sparkling prose that frequently wanders all over the place. His editors trim and condense the still-thick books that go to print. Laura Joh Rowland is also an Overwriter. I’ve heard her say her first draft can be as much as a hundred pages longer than her final copy. In the course of her revisions she’ll slash not just scenes, but entire chapters she realizes are unnecessary.

Other authors are Underwriters. Their first drafts are lean, sparse things. Their revision process consists of adding scenes they realize they missed, plus going into existing scenes to lengthen dialogue and enrich description.

I’m an Underwriter. Sometimes I will cut bits and pieces when I'm revising, but rarely. Many writing books tell beginning writers to cut off the first three chapters of their manuscript and start the story there, since so many people begin their books too soon. Not me. I’ve frequently needed to ADD two or three scenes on to the beginning of my manuscripts because I later realize I’ve started the story too late. My romance editor was always making me write epilogues because she said my books ended too abruptly. And even after my own revision process, when I’ve added multiple scenes I realized were missing, my editors always come back asking me to write a few more scenes. I can’t remember ever being asked to delete a scene.

Neither way is right, of course. We each work in our own unique way. But I suspect it helps to know which category you belong to. So, what are you? An Underwriter or an Overwriter?