SiWC 2011 Day One, Part Three: The Psychology of Plotting, Michael Slade

From my notes:

What is the worst thing that ever happened to you and how are you using that to power your fiction? You don't have to use this event in your plot, but this has such a high emotional sentiment that it can supercharge your writing.

When you draw from a traumatic event in your life you are INSIDE your characters psychology, not trying to figure it out. This will show in your writing.

You've heard that you need to draw on universal themes in your story. What do people want? What do people fear? These things are universal, but for your story to be interesting it has to be unique. How can you do this? How can you write about universal themes and yet make your story unique? Here's the secret: Infusing your story with your experience will make it unique and it will lend it verisimilitude.

After you've exhausted your own material, phone up a police crime lab, they will tell you all sorts of grizzly stories. Don't be shy about contacting folks and asking them to talk to you about their experience.

Remember, rule number one is: Write what you know.

Well, that was a lot shorter! I guess I was exhausted after all my note taking from Robert Wiersema's workshop.

Hmmm, should I continue on and post my notes from Don Maass's workshop, "The Inner Journey"? I'm turning the pages of my notebook -- I had left my notebook in my luggage but by this time I'd retrieved it -- and I think there's too much material here to post right now so I'll save it for Wednesday. (I'm writing this at 11:30 pm Tuesday. I'll set this post to be automatically published early Wednesday.)

Till then. :)

Earlier posts in this series:
SiWC 2011 Day One, Part One: Don't Flinch: Robert Wiersema
SiWC 2011 Day One, Part Two: Don't Flinch: Robert Wiersema

NaNoWriMo: Why write a 50,000 word manuscript in a month?

Why go through the insanity of NaNoWriMo? Here are the answers according the MuseInks:

1. It's invigorating.
It gets you out of the not-so-creative rut you may be in.

2. It's just what the doctor ordered. You know that manuscript? The sick one? The one you've been meaning to make some chicken soup for, take to ER, and rub its back till it feels better? NaNo gives you a whole month to indulge the headachy, snot-filled, fever-ridden work-in-progress. After 30 days of caregiving, you'll know beyond the shadow of a doubt whether or not the patient can be saved.

3. It will force you to look at things from a new vantage point. With NaNo, there's precious little time for second-guessing. Or editing. Or proofreading, for that matter. It's a write-like-your-life-depends-upon-it undertaking. Which makes you overlook things that may have slowed you down in the past. Every new NaNo day marks uncharted territory. There is no time to revisit what you did yesterday. Get ready to be bumped out of your comfort zone!

4. Try something daring. Has your writing become rote? Complacent? ~ahem~ By-the-book (pardon the pun)? NaNo gives you permission to throw away your crutches and safety nets. Try something you'd never normally do. Go ahead: it won't kill you!

5. You discover your personal writer's work ethic. No matter how supportive your cheerleaders, no one can write your book for you. (Technically, that's not true. Ghostwriters can. But that kind of negates the whole "I'm going to write a novel this month" thing...) NaNo shows you exactly what it takes to shoulder the book-writing load and git 'r done.

Sounds good to me! :) Read the entire post here: Top 5 Reasons You Should Do NaNoWriMo This Year. The original post has wonderful photos; I love the one of the dog trying to eat water.

SiWC 2011 Day One, Part Two: Don't Flinch: Robert Wiersema

Sorry for the fractured nature of this post (you can read part one here). I don't work for a few hours, so let's do this!

The first workshop I attended was Don't Flinch and was taught by Robert Wiersema.

Now, when a writer goes to a workshop it's a good idea, a really good idea, to have something to write on. But in the confusion of registering I had left my notebook in my luggage and of course I'd checked that in at the hotel!

A little thing like not having anything proper to write on never stopped a writer. During registration I'd been given a folder containing sheets printed on only one side.

(For those of you interested in what folks were given, here's a list: a detailed itinerary of workshops (one for each day), the etiquette of conferences, information about the silent action, information about the blue pencil sessions and editor appointments, an advertisement for a writers' retreat, a double-sided two page sheet with short bios of all the editors, agents and presenters. The rules of the silly writing contest, an article welcoming us to the convention and last--but certainly not least--a map.)

Armed with my unconventional writing material I took notes, and more notes, and still more, until I'd gone through all the backs of the handouts and, in desperation, began to write on the back of my folder! This was fine, but for the rest of the conference I felt a bit like the killer in Seven, carrying around a manilla folder covered with close scribbling.

Okay, the class. Here's what Robert Wiersema said was the key to building suspense: You take a bunch of characters, make your readers care about them, set monsters loose on them and then don't flinch. You need to let horrible things happen to them.

(Important disclaimer: These are my notes so I could be mistaken about what Robert Wiersema said, so don't blame him if you read something startling or something that makes no sense, that's me. :)

You want a gun in the first act, this creates an implicit promise. This creates questions. When will the gun go off? Why will it go off? Who will pull the trigger? Where will it go off? This is true for any kind of genre. If you're writing a romance then the question is: When will they get together? Why will they get together? Where will they get together, etc. The techniques of building suspense, of building elevated tension, are the same.

What does "not flinching" mean?
1) HOOK. You have, at most, two pages to grab a reader. You have to grab them in the first scene, in the first sentence. How do you do this? You create a question in the readers mind. The reader must answer the question to understand the sentence. This is like foreshadowing, but it is less blunt/obvious. A hook is implicit foreshadowing.

2) PLOT. How does the plot build suspense? Imagine you're driving down the road and you see a car in the ditch. What is going to happen? That's right, everyone will slow down to look at the car and they'll wonder: What happened? It is part of our nature.

3) CONFLICT & CHARACTER = SUSPENSE
- frustrate your character. Which newspaper headline would arrest/grab your attention: "Man on the run" or "Man captured"?
- Have reversals. Character should be frustrated at most turns. Here's the trick: the plot should be inevitable but not predictable. The plot should not be the same thing you and your readers have seen dozens of times. How do you avoid this?
- THE KEY: The reader should always know slightly more than the character. Let the reader know an event is coming before the character does.
- In order to create suspense, the readers' expectations must be both met and undermined. What we are talking about here is shameless manipulation. You are telling people lies in order to get the response you want. This is blatant audience manipulation.

Writers who are great at audience manipulation: Nicholas Sparks and Dan Brown. These writers are good storytellers and their pacing is good. They have good pacing within each sentence, within each paragraph, within each chapter of their stories.

How can you affect the pacing of your writing?
- Short fast sentences increase tension.
- Description, long words, long sentences, lower tension.
Your story is like a pot of soup, you don't want it to boil and you don't want it cold. You have to keep adjusting the temperature to get it just right. This means introducing stretches of increasing, and then decreasing, tension.

Elmore Leonard was the writer he said: Leave out the stuff people don't read. Leave out the boring bits.

CUE YOUR READERS
- The rhythm of your story is dictated by what you need your story to do. Use the pace to cue readers as to what their reaction should be. Don't treat your readers dishonorably. Cue the reader, tell them what you want them to feel. For instance, if you want them to feel heightened tension then use short sentences and raise the tension.
- The sorts of things that increase tension: Showing as opposed to telling and dialogues.
- The sorts of things that lower tension: Telling as opposed to showing, description, long sentences, etc.

If you're going to focus on something, focus on it for a reason. Use it. You must only focus on what is important to the story.

CHARACTERIZATION
- The stereotype is that thrillers are plot machines. Story arises naturally out of characters. Plot is artificial. Everything: the story, the tension, etc., should come out of the characters. In order for this to happen your characters needs flaws and scars. For instance a classic flaw was pride. Pride is a great flaw to fuel tension and suspense.

Examples:
- Dr. Richard Kimble in The Fugitive. Kimble was arrogant. He was a surgeon. When he was falsely accused of his wife's murder that was the first situation in his life he wouldn't control. He doesn't plot his escape, it happens to him. Kimble needs to become innocent to reclaim his place in society. Throughout the movie he works to get back what he has lost.
- Hitchcock: Hitchcock was a master at using a person's flaws against them to drive a plot. He used suspense to drive a plot. Vertigo is an excellent example of this. Right from the beginning you know that the Jimmy Steward character is scared of heights and that he'll struggle with this fear at the end. You know this, but knowing it doesn't make the movie less interesting, it builds suspense. It increases tension. Rear Window was like this as well.

Protagonists and Antagonists
The reader must be swept along through the story because of their kinship with the protagonist. The antagonist must be as strong as the protagonist. The antagonist is the hero of their story.

Example: Silence of the Lambs. Hannibal Lector is the antagonist not Buffalo Bill, even though Buffalo Bill (aka Captain Stottlemeyer to all you Monk fans) is the murderer. (The instructor asked the class to name the murderer in Silence of the Lambs but it took a minute or two for any of us to come up with the answer.) We remember the Lector character because that character is well developed. We have questions. Hannibal was the protagonist in Hannibal. So, what I'm saying is: Make all your antagonists the heroes of their own story. The antagonist is the physicalization of the negative force.

Load up on your archetypes
People are afraid of the same things. They fear disease, the dark, public shame, loss of a child, death, injury, maiming. These are only a few of the things that make every single one of us shake in our boots. These are the things, the events, that populate our nightmares. Dr. Kimble in The Fugitive was being pursued. That's the fear. The fear of being caught, the fear of footsteps in the dark.

STUPID MISTAKES
- Unbelievability. Tension needs to be believable within the world you create. A good example of BELIEVABILITY is the universe Jim Butcher created for his series, the Dresden Files. This is a universe filled with wizards and vampires and witches and all manner of fantasy characters, but it reads like a matter-of-fact account of the day-to-day happenings of Chicago. How is this achieved?

a. Don't have characters do what you have established they wouldn't do. For instance, if the character is scared of crowds then when they escape through a crowd at the end of your book show that this isn't an easy thing for them to do, don't have them do it blithely.
b. Continuity and logic problems make a story unbelievable.
c. Don't treat your character or reader as stupid. Your questions, your situations, shouldn't have an easy answer that the character doesn't think of. That's the sort of plotting that makes a book airborne -- readers will hurl it against the wall and stop reading.

Example: In Hitchcock's Psycho there's a beautiful young girl who comes to a creepy hotel and, instead of taking one look at it and the macabre Norman Bates and making a run for it, she checks in and takes a shower! Would you do this? No! What makes it believable that she would? Well, she's just stolen some money and is on the run. This cuts her off from any help society could provide. Also, she is to meet her boyfriend at the hotel and they didn't have cell phones in those days, so she has to stay put.

d. Don't resolve the central question of your story too soon.
e. Don't cheat the reader. You want them to read your next book. If you cheat them -- for example if a chance meeting at the end of the book resolves the tension -- then your readers will loose interest.

Not making stupid mistakes, creating the right pace, etc., all these things are skills, we learn them by going through the process of creating and writing stories. Everything that I've said today about what makes a story good, you know this already.

Here's what I want you to do. If you've found a book that has kept you reading far past your bedtime then read it again. As I said before Dan Brown is great at this. Read and watch movies (movie soundtracks are shamelessly manipulative).

Another thing you can do to improve your writing is, when you give your story to readers, ask them to put a mark in the margin where they began to lose interest.

Point Of View
You can have more than one first person POV character, you can even have POV characters that have different points of view (e.g., first and third). Do what works for your story.

Stakes
Suspense is always a matter of stakes. You want to let the reader know, early on, what the stakes are. Kill or maim someone adorable early on. For example, The Firm with Tom Cruise. What are the stakes for Cruise? If he stays with the firm and the feds show it's connected to the mob then Cruise looses everything: his money, his job, his freedom. On the other hand, if he cooperates with the feds then he won't go to jail, but sooner or later the mob will catch up with him and he'll be dead. Nice choice!
- You can know the outcome and still create suspense. There was a movie where the story was told by a drowned person. You know the narrator dies at the end, but the stakes were still raised.

Summing Up
Stakes, consequences. You've created a situation with potentially tragic results. There will come a time when you will want to save your character, to protect them. Don't. Don't flinch.

This moment is terrifying. If we were decent people we would protect our characters. You want a happy ending, but you can't cheat to get it.

You've created characters with flaws and turned the monsters loose on them. You have to be brave and unflinching. You have to do horrible things to nice people.

You don't need to beat your reader over the head with gore and lots of ugly details. You can leave these implicit. Readers have great imaginations, they will fill in the details.

If you do it right then it will hurt. It hurts us to hurt our characters, it hurts us to manipulate the reader. One thing you must realize: We also manipulate ourselves. Ultimately, we do all this manipulation because we are building truth.

We must have courage and strength and you must realize that, yes, you are cruel but here's the real truth: truth hurts and it is crucial that you don't flinch.

So, those are my notes! I had no idea this post would be so long. Yikes! I must be able to scribble pretty quickly.

I guess I'm not going to be able to get to the other Friday workshops today, "The Psychology of Plotting" by Michale Slade and "The Inner Journey" by Donald Maass.

Stay tuned!

The Secrets of Good Blogging

From Jim C. Hines:

Here’s the thing. Blogging is basically self-publishing, with all of the advantages and disadvantages that come with it.

. . . .

So how do you stand out? Just as with self-publishing, it can help if you’ve already got an audience. When Frederick Pohl began blogging, a lot of people immediately added that blog to their reading lists, because … well, he’s Frederick Freaking Pohl. But for the rest of us, the secret seems to come down to two words:

Be interesting.

Just as with fiction, you can get away with almost anything, as long as it keeps readers interested.

A lot of people have said they aren’t very good at blogging, that it feels awkward or uncomfortable or unnatural or whatever. And that’s fine. I don’t personally feel like writers have to do this.

But I also think blogging is a learned, practiced skill, just like fiction. My first short stories bit the waxed tadpole. So did my first blog posts. In both cases, I had to learn what I was doing. I had to practice, to study other examples, and to write a lot of crap. (I like to think that neither my fiction nor my blogging bite as much waxed tadpole these days, but I’ll leave it to others to judge whether that practice paid off.)

Be interesting. Be you. I’ve never met an uninteresting person. The trick, as I see it, is learning your own strengths. Your expertise, your passions, your experiences.

. . . .

To quote Neil Gaiman, “Use your blog to connect. Use it as you. Don’t ‘network’ or ‘promote.’ Just talk.”

It takes time. Like any self-published author, you’re probably not going to get 10,000 daily readers in your first month. Or even your first year. But if blogging is something you want to do, then trust yourself. Don’t worry about being Neil Gaiman. Be you. Because believe it or not, you’re every bit as interesting as Gaiman. (Okay, maybe you don’t have the accent, but that doesn’t come through online anyway.)

And try to have a little fun while you’re at it.
- Jim C. Hines, Science Fiction & Fantasy Novelists

Here is a link to Jim's blog post: The Secrets of Good Blogging. Thanks to @jazz2midnight for the link.

SiWC 2011 Day One, Part One: Don't Flinch: Robert Wiersema

I've decided to go through my experience at the writers' conference day by day, beginning on the first day, Friday.

Of course I was excited to be at the Surrey International Writers' Conference. This was my second time at the SiWC. The first time was last year and Robert Dugoni (see pic, above) sent us all off into the world with his rousing adaptation of Aragorn's speech at the Black Gate entitled: Today we WRITE!

Best. Speech. Ever.

Usually writers aren't the most demonstrative folks but we didn't just give him a standing ovation, we stamped our feet, we hooted and cheered. The speech was amazing. It was so good, in fact, it was so inspiring, that the organizers took Dugoni's speech as the theme for this year's conference.

Anyhow, that was last year, but it gives the background of our collective expectations, out thoughts. The mood of the conference.

For my first workshop I was going to attend, "The Military for Writers" by Bob Mayer but a friend mentioned "Don't Flinch" so I read the handout:

"Robert Wiersema, whose Bedtime Story is described as an exquisitely plotted blend of supernatural thriller and domestic drama, guides you though building suspense and raising the states when ANYTHING can happen."

I ask you, after reading a description like that, how could I not go?

I just looked at the time, ack! The rest of this post will have to wait till I get back from work. I want to write about the workshop and what Wiersema had to say about not flinching and tell you something about the other two courses I attended that day. Stay tuned!

The Surrey International Writers' Conference

The conference has ended and I've just settled down in front of a computer. I have one word for you: Wow! To call the conference awesome would be to slight it. It was amazing and stupendous!

This year friends and I reserved rooms at the Sheraton hotel so we could stay for late night events such as Michael Slade's Shock Theatre (the photo, above, is of Michael Slade, but it wasn't taken at the conference. I have a GREAT video for you from the conference, stay tuned ;). Saturday night we went to our rooms early, opened a bottle of wine, and talked about writing.

I want to tell you all about the great workshops I took, all the wonderful things I've leaned, but I need to unpack, do laundry, and catch up on my email. My deepest apologizes to the folks who emailed me and I haven't gotten back to you yet. I want to and I will sometime in the next couple of days.

The conference was great, but it's good to be back. :)

Using speach to text software for writing

I've tweeted about this article, but it is so good I wanted to post about it too. Here are Karen Ranney's tips for using Dragon Naturally Speaking:

Buy the best microphone you can afford. (I’m currently using a Plantronics DSP400 Foldable Multimedia Headset which is soft, comfy, lightweight, and folds up and fits in a pouch.)

Always back up your User Profile. I’ve had to restore mine twice, even with this new version of Dragon.

If you’re having a problem with Dragon recognizing your speech, and you’ve used the tools under Audio, create a new user profile. Make sure you select the available accents if they’re applicable.

Train Dragon for words that are uncommon. For example, I write both Scottish historical romance and murder mysteries, and have a varied vocabulary for each. I use the Vocabulary/Import List of Words and Phrases command, which also allows me to train Dragon.

Train Dragon for your writing style by going back and having it analyze documents you’ve already written (Vocabulary/Learn from Specific Documents.)

Dragon is a tool, one that I’ve found to be very helpful for three reasons:

I’ve never had the dreaded blank page syndrome with Dragon. I’m forced to start talking about the book and before I know it, I’m writing it. (Besides, if I remain quiet for too long it picks up the sound of my breathing.)

It also enables me to maximize time. Granted, there are places I can’t use Dragon – for example, standing in line somewhere. But there are more places where I can use it, and I take advantage of those.

Using a speech to text program forces me to know what I’m about to say/write. Dragon helps me stay on target.

And, yes, this was dictated on Dragon.

Here's a link to Karen Ranney's article as it appears on The Passive Voice blog.

Indie writers and Internet dependency

I am internet-less. I have been without Internet access for coming up on 24 hours. 

I'm sitting in a coffee shop an hour before i have to work peck-typing on my iPad. (Have I mentioned lately that I love my iPad?) 

Having had constant access to the Internet for years I was completely unprepared for ... Well, for the silence. It may seem odd, but I'm experiencing a sense of dislocation. I know that's an exaggeration, but I wasn't able to blog last night, or schedule tweets, and my personal emails lie in my inbox neglected and unsent. It is like my life is in stasis -- on hold  -- until I get my connectivity back.

An image just flashed through my head: a member severed from the Borg collective. I shudder. Surely not.

Has anyone else gone without the Internet for a significant period of time?

Edit: Problem fixed! Turns out my router was dead. Ah well.

10 ways to get more views and traffic to your blog

I found a great post over on Wordpress.com called, "Getting more views and Traffic". The author's points are what my Grams would have called common sense, but I find I occasionally need reminding.

1. Tell people in your social networks about your new post.
Dead obvious, but I don't do this. I post a link on Twitter and leave it at that.

2. Make your content visible to search engines
Fortunately, sites like Blogger and Wordpress do this if you've made your site visible to the public (look at your privacy settings if you want to check whether your site is visible).

3. Pay for traffic to your site
Apparently you can get visitors through StumbleUpon for the (I hear the deep base of the announcers voice) for the low, low, price of $0.05 per visit.

I can understand the utility of this, but the offer leaves me feeling indignant. I feel myself wanting to say: I don't pay for views!

4. Bug your real-life friends
I disagree with this one. I think it's common sense NOT to bug your real-life friends. It's easy to alienate people. You know that guy everyone pokes fun at, the one who is always trying to show his home movies? Yea, you don't want to be that guy.

My real life friends know I blog and if they want to read my posts they will. If they don't, that's okay too.

5. Use appropriate tags
Definitely a must. I've begun looking at the topics that are trending over at Twitter and mulling over whether I could do a blog post about one of those topics.

6. Read and comment on other blogs
Excellent idea, and something I do. Or try to do. It nelps grow your blog, but I've also met some mighty nice people that way.

7. Link to other blogs
I do this, but should do it more. It would be a good idea to put up a 'Best Of The Writing Blogs' list and include those blogs I read every day, the blogs I use as touchstones, that help encourage me and anchor me.

8. Let people know about your blog entries
Once I wrote a blog post that was inspired by a conversation I'd had with someone I had just met on Twitter. I tweeted him about the post I'd made. It worked out well, he posted a comment and retweeted my link to the article, but -- obviously -- one needs to be careful when doing this, I could see this going horribly wrong. Stephen King wrong.

9. Relax, it takes time
True, very true, but I want results NOW, dagmabbit!

10. Size doesn't matter
This is what the original blog post said: "Finally, remember that it's not the size of your audience, it's how much you care about them and they care about you."

I'm trying to think of a tactful way of putting this.

Nope, just cant.

If you're trying to sell your books and, hopefully, sell enough to to allow you to quit your day job, it is about the numbers. That's not to say that I don't get a special thrill when someone tells me they read my book, and I am humbly grateful to all those wonderful folks who reviewed my book, but for anyone who is hoping to use their blog to help them sell books, the size of their platform does matter.


A good 10 points, even if I didn't agree with all of them. Besides, if we agreed with one another all time, time wouldn't life be boring?

Here is a link to the original article: Getting More Views and Traffic

Making a Vlog

For months I have been thinking about making a vlog post. What prevented me? I had absolutely no idea how to go about it. I knew I had to have some sort of camera and I had to get the footage onto a website, but that was the extent of my hazy idea. I've found out a bit more, thanks to a few vlogs I discovered, and I thought you good folks might be interested.

First, a video by Myles Dyer who has been video blogging since 2006.

Second, a video Hank Green: How to Vlog: From the Vlogbrothers.

Looks simple? I thought so, until I watched Hank Green's video on how his "How to Vlog" video was edited descriptively entitled: An Hour of Me Editing a Vlog. He also put up a copy of the script he used here: As Part of a Project.

I've used my iPad to shoot some video of me rambling about something or other and I'm currently editing it using Adobe Premiere Elements 9. I'll put up the grainy footage on YouTube when it's ready and you all can chuckle. ;)

btw, found an interesting article on the top five vlogs: The Top 5 YouTube Vloggers And Why People Love Them.

Cheers!