Candles, moonlight, and...yawn

True confession. I feel like I ought to like reading romances. I generally prefer a happy ending to a sad one. But each time I've tried one--especially the Kindle First offerings to Prime members--I've been disappointed.

The romance plot model has become so entrenched, it no longer allows room for any genuine surprises. I know there will be some dumb thing that separates heroine and hero at roughly the midpoint and that dumb thing will clear up in a matter of chapters. I know the heroine will be beautiful, as will the hero, though one or both will be clueless about this or insecure in some way. If one of them has a deep, dark secret, the counterpart will have a corresponding one. Even in the hands of a great wordsmith, the formula clunks along as usual, boring me to tears.

I'd love to know if there are established writers out there who have earned a free pass to write plots that don't follow the predictable formula of boy-meets-girl, boy-loses-girl, boy-wins-girl-back-again. I'd like to see some heroines who aren't the usual healthy, educated, white, and beautiful. How about a blind protagonist, or one with a learning disability, or someone biracial or average looking but brainy, or even disfigured (say an amputee veteran)? You find characters like this in literary fiction, women's fiction, romantic comedy, YA and MG. It would be great to see their love stories, and have a departure from the same-old, same-old.


Is there a genre you've tried but just can't connect to? Why do you think that is? 

Is there a romance author doing something unique I might actually enjoy? Do tell. 

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Thanks, Will: idioms from Shakespeare you're probably misspelling

image by http://wallpaper222.com/

William Shakespeare is considered a key transforming force in the English language. There are hundreds of words and phrases, particularly colorful idioms, he is believed to have coined. While scholars may squabble over which terms he invented and which ones were simply the slang of his day that he recorded for the first time, there's no doubt that his plays have hugely influenced our language.

Ask a teen to read Shakespeare, and they'll say his work is full of cliches, mostly because terms he first penned continue to be used so widely today. "Break the ice," "fancy-free," "in a pickle," "live long day," "neither rhyme nor reason," "night owl," "play fast and loose," "primrose path,"  "seen better days," "set my teeth on edge," "tongue-tied" are but a small sample of idioms we now use every day thanks to Shakespeare. (A comprehensive list is available here.)

But there are a number of his famous idioms that linger in our language with meanings and spellings that aren't particularly obvious in 2015, because they include archaic words one never hears outside these Shakespearean phrases. With each term, I give  the "eggcorn" version, a misheard or misunderstood incorrect variation. (For more on eggcorns, see The Eggcorn Database.) I also explain the phrase's meaning, giving special attention to the odd word you are likely to misspell.

bated breath (eggcorn: baited breath)
To hold one's breath in anticipation. Bated is a form of abate, to diminish or reduce.

much ado about nothing (eggcorn: much adieu)
Fuss, overreaction to something unimportant.

one fell swoop (eggcorn: one foul swoop)
Quickly arriving doom. Fell is an archaic term meaning deadly. The image is of a bird of prey attacking.

short shrift (eggcorn: short shift)
To make quick work of something or have little regard for it. Shrift is an archaic term that comes from shrive, to serve penance. The image is of being given an easy task to atone for sin, like reciting the Lord's Prayer once.

shuffle off this mortal coil (eggcorn: mortal toil)
To die.  Coil/coyle in this era meant trouble, strife. The image is of drifting away from the struggles of life.

Other archaic idioms you might be misspelling

Shakespeare was neither the first nor the last to give us lasting idioms that include archaic words. Here are some others to be aware of, some first appearing as early as Chaucer (1343-1400), some only a century and a half ago.

damp squib (eggcorn version damp squid)
Something that flops or fails to work as expected. Literally, a dud firework because it got wet.

derring do (eggcorn: daring do)
Heroic daring.
Possibly coined by Chaucer. More on origins here

high dudgeon (eggcorn: high dungeon)
Resentment.
Might come from Welsh, or might derive from the term for a knife handle first recorded decades before Shakespeare's plays. More on origins here.

on tenterhooks (eggcorn: on tenderhooks)
In suspense. The image is of woolen cloth stretched on a special rack (tenter) after washing to prevent shrinkage.

vale of tears (eggcorn: veil of tears)
Deep suffering. Vale is a derivative of valley.

Which of these idioms have plagued you most? Do you try to coin idioms in your work? Any favorite Shakespeare quote you'd like to share? 

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The good of bad reviews: writing tips from the meanies

Photo credit: JulesInKY from morguefile.com

I have a somewhat embarrassing habit when it comes to using Goodreads. I really love to read negative reviews of books that are extremely popular. At first I focused on classics, because their haters are quite hilarious. Then I began branching out to books others raved about that just didn't do it for me. It was gratifying to hear others describe problem after problem.

It's also a bit small minded to be wasting time hunting for another dose of schadenfreude. So I've been looking for ways to reform this vice into something more constructive.

One thing that's pretty clear--you can learn quite a lot about what story elements drive readers batty by listening to their harsher critiques. Some comments will, of course, tell you a lot more about an individual reviewer's biases and hobby horses than about general reader expectations, but others can be quite educational. If you write genre fiction, it can be especially helpful to know what elements readers are sick to death of, or feel cheated if they aren't there.

Here are some writing tips I've gleaned from insightful "mean" readers of popular young adult books:

Characterization no-nos

Protagonist who is

• Whiny 
• Self-serving
• Mean-spirited
• Indecisive and dithering
• Thoughtless
• Foolhardy
• Bland
• Flawless
• Skilled only at being attractive
• Instantly in love after one smoldering glance
• Unchanged by the story events

Sidekick who is

• Only comic relief
• Hateful
• Jealous
• Clone of protagonist
• An ethnic or racial "type"
• Deeply stupid
• Foolhardy
• Disloyal

Love interest who is

• Instantly in love after one smoldering glance
• Narcissistic
• Abusive
• Stalker-ish
• Controlling
• Prone to jealous rages
• Boring
• Too dependent
• Lacking personal goals
• Lacking outside interests
• Flawless
• Constantly pursued by rivals

Other hated character tropes

• Cheerleader mean girls
• Athlete bullies
• Self-absorbed, uninvolved or dead parents
• Love triangles with bland, flat love interests
• Romance based only on physical attraction

Plot no-nos

• Pacing that drags
• Pacing that races
• Abruptly dropped subplots
• Actions aren't motivated
• Actions aren't realistic
• Episodic plots
• Repetitious actions
• Melodramatic responses

World building no-nos

• Bland small towns with no character
• Cookie-cutter suburban settings with no diversity
• Unrealistic, movie-set settings
• No clear origins for a society
• No sense of how society is organized
• Unclear social strata 
• Unclear economic system
• Unclear food sources
• No one seems to do essential jobs
• Unexplained divisions among groups
• Lack of age diversity

Look at another genre, you'd likely gather a different list. But there's no doubt that you can learn a lot about reader expectation by taking a gander at some less than glowing reviews. Just resist the urge to gloat. Instead, use the information to grow.

 What writerly foibles drive you batty? Have you even gleaned writing lessons from online reviews?

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Reclaim lost hours developing your emotions repertoire

Every season comes with special challenges for writers. In summer, it's often kids home from school, friends and family visiting, and time away for family vacation that can destroy your writing routine.

But what if time away from the keyboard could be as useful to your craft as the hours of "butt in chair"? The hours you spend out in the world can indeed be a creative gift to you, putting you in new places with access to new experiences. In particular, you have wonderful access to the laboratory of human emotion. You just have to pay attention.

People-watching is the best way to gain an understanding of how real people express their feelings. Observe and record, and you'll never be at a loss for how to represent your characters in your fiction-- without resorting to tired cliches.

Do this haphazardly, however, and it won't be as useful an exercise. Organization is truly key.

With these issues in mind, I created a tool that writers of any genre can use to develop their own "emotions bible" in their own authorial voice. It is based on an exercise used by method actors: observing and journaling expression, gesture, carriage, stance, motion in order to better embody it on stage.

Emotions in the Wild: A Writer's Observational Journal contains over 200 pages of guided journaling exercises to help you record your observations of how real people express thirty nine different emotions. Once completed, the journal can serve as your go-to source for creating realistic dialogue and facial and body language that is uniquely yours.  You can use it again and again on any fiction project.

Tuck the journal in your bag and make use of any and every opportunity to observe emotion, whether you're stuck in line at the grocery store, waiting for your child at swim lessons, sitting in a doctor's waiting room, or lounging on the beach or at the pool. Watch your emotional vocabulary grow, you productivity soar, and your reliance on cliches fade away,

Add it on Goodreads
Purchase the paperback from CreateSpace / Amazon (US) / Amazon (UK)

Where will summer take you? How might your writing benefit from observation research?

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Avoiding insta-love part 1

During my blogging hiatus, I went on a big reading binge, gobbling up six books in under three weeks. I largely was catching up on recommendations and newer books by favorite authors including: Catching Fire (Suzanne Collins), Where She Went (Gayle Forman), Code Name Verity (Elizabeth Wein), The Story of Us (Deb Caletti), Eleanor and Park (Rainbow Rowell), and The Future of Us (Jay Asher and Carolyn Mackler).

image by paulabflat, morguefile.com

These books had some love triangles, some shaken long-term relationships and some beginning tingles, but happily no insta-love. You know what I mean by that term, don't you? It's an overwhelming die-for-you passion ignited by a single glance. I'll spare you a rant on why it makes me crazy. Suffice it to say it's not only an emotionally unhealthy way to approach romantic attachment, but also poor storytelling. 

Giving characters instant whammo-connection cuts in half the size of your emotional arc. There's little room for the characters to change and grow over the course of the story. Just like with conflict, romance needs space to escalate as the story progresses. (For more on this idea of escalation, see my post Emotional Arcs: the teaspoon problem.) Without escalation, the romance plot will be largely static. You'll be tempted to throw a lot of melodrama at the couple just to keep yourself from becoming entirely bored with them.  

There are a number of techniques one can use to widen that arc. In the coming weeks I'll share some of the best tips for slow-build romance I picked up from analyzing works that did it well.

What are your thoughts on insta-love? What are some of your favorite stories with dynamic romances?

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Too many adverbs and clichés in your writing? I've got just the fix for you.

Hi Friends! I am still in the UK, so I've asked the multi-talented Jessica Bell to swing by and talk about her latest writing resource book. I think it's so wonderfully helpful I wrote the endorsement for back cover! Onto our guest post...

by Jessica Bell

Writers constantly have rules thrown at them left, right, and center. Show, don’t tell! Stop using so many dialogue tags! More sensory detail! More tension! Speed up the pace! Yada yada yada ... it can become overwhelming, yes? I used to feel overwhelmed by it all too. In fact, I still do sometimes. It’s hard enough to get the words on the page, let alone consider how to put them there.

In Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird, she says that in order not to be overwhelmed, a writer needs to focus on short assignments. She refers to the one-inch picture frame on her desk and how that little picture frame reminds her to focus on bite-sized pieces of the whole story. Basically, if you focus on one small thing at a time, the story will eventually come together to create a whole. I believe the same applies to learning the craft of writing. If writers focus on one aspect of the craft at a time, the process will seem less daunting and piece by piece it will come together.

My name’s Jessica Bell, and my own struggles with feeling overwhelmed inspired me to write the Writing in a Nutshell Series of pocket-sized writing guides. So you can learn to hone your craft in bite-sized, manageable pieces. In the first book of the series, I focused on demonstrating how to transition “telling” into “showing.” In Adverbs and Clichés in a Nutshell: Demonstrated Subversions of Adverbs and Clichés into Gourmet Imagery, I deal with another of the most common criticisms aspiring writers face: to absolutely avoid adverbs and clichés like the plague. But see, right now, I just used one of each. I also used a couple in the first two paragraphs of this post because they come naturally, and we utilize them frequently in everyday speech. But in fiction, too many adverbs and clichés weaken your prose. It’s considered “lazy writing,” because it means we don’t have to show what’s happening.

If your manuscript has too many adverbs and clichés, it most likely means that the emotion you felt while writing it is not going to translate to the reader in the same way. So how exactly can we approach the subversion of adverbs and clichés? For starters, play around with simile and metaphor when you’re trying to convey emotion, and for action, use strong verbs to show it happening in real time.

The key? Think smaller details rather than the bigger picture.

Need some help and inspiration?

In Adverbs and Clichés in a Nutshell: Demonstrated Subversions of Adverbs and Clichés into Gourmet Imagery, you will find thirty-four examples of prose which clearly demonstrate how to turn those pesky adverbs and clichés into vivid and unique imagery. Dispersed throughout are blank pages to craft your own unique examples. Extra writing prompts are also provided at the back of the book.

“Jessica Bell's latest pocket guide, Adverbs and Clichés in a Nutshell, will inspire you to leave bland behind and pursue your creative best. With force and clarity, she demonstrates how adverbs and clichés hobble vibrant writing. She then marks a course toward unique expression and provides workouts that will help writers at every level develop a distinctive voice.”  ~Laurel Garver, freelance editor, author of Never Gone and Muddy-Fingered Midnights

Purchase links:
Amazon US | Amazon UK | Amazon Ca | Kobo


Bio: The Australian-native contemporary fiction author and poet, Jessica Bell, also makes a living as an editor and writer for global ELT publishers (English Language Teaching), such as Pearson Education, HarperCollins, Macmillan Education, Education First and Cengage Learning.

She is the co-publishing editor of Vine Leaves Literary Journal, and the director of the Homeric Writers’ Retreat and Workshop on the Greek island of Ithaca.

For more information about Jessica please visit:
Website | Blog | Twitter | Facebook

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Market fit

I write contemporary YA and have been reading heavily in the genre for years--the humorous, the romance-driven, the heavy-hitting "issue" books, the lyrical coming of age. There's a lot of diversity. There's also (may I say it?) a lot of sameness. As Blake Snyder notes about "salable work" in Save the Cat, "give us more of the same, only different."

A few of things I noticed aren't being published in contemporary mainstream YA--cross-generational relationships, grieving someone other than a peer, characters struggling to mature in a faith tradition and make it their own (rather than rebel against it).

I looked at Christian-market YA and didn't see anyone coming from mainline or reformed Protestantism. Apparently all fictional Christians are low church evangelicals or Amish, despite the fact that among the billions of Christians worldwide, they're a minority (in the case of the Amish, a tiny one; see the numbers here). The characters are almost never urban, except for the African-Americans. They don't interact with Christians from other countries except in missions contexts.

I realized my novel didn't fit many of the cliches/tropes publishers seem to want. I have an Anglican teen from NYC who has lost a parent. Her relationships with extended family are are as important to her healing as her relationships with her peers. She's not another secular/non-denom suburbanite who loses a best friend/sibling and heals by hooking up with dream boy. (Sorry if that sounds snarky--I've seen this formula quite a bit.)

I realized I could abandon the story, spin it in ways more palatable for one market or the other. Or I could go it alone.

When you write outside the box, there's risk. But there's also opportunity. Because outside-the-box stories have the potential to build a readership among those tired of or bored with current cliches/tropes. The trend-setting books are often ones no one saw coming.

And when traditional publishing isn't willing to take the risk, you now have other options.

Have you assessed the market fit of your work? Do you like to read outside-the-box stories that push against reigning tropes in a genre?

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Research or interference?

In her nonfiction book on writing, Escaping into the Open, Elizabeth Berg makes an interesting assertion I'd never seen anywhere else:

While drafting, avoid reading books on the same topic as yours.

(Notice she says topic, not genre. I don't think she'd pooh-pooh knowing your wider genre well.)

Her reasoning? "...no matter how aware or sophisticated or experienced you are, no matter how determined to write your own story, there's a very real danger that you will start to copy. It may be unconscious, but it can happen. And if that happens, it's a shame...because it denies the reading public the pleasure of your originality."

My initial thought was WHAT? If I don't know how others have tackled this, how do I know if my ideas are original? How do I avoid just repeating what has been said before if I'm ignorant of it? How do I not end up leaning on tired clichés?

Berg seems to argue here that clichés crop up because you read others' takes on your topic. Huh. It hadn't occurred to me that this might be an actual danger. Berg would call me naive, I suppose.

I kind of get what she's saying, and agree somewhat. However, my reasoning is different. Knowing how others have treated a topic might constrain me to try too hard to take a new direction in order to seem original. In so doing, I risk creating an inauthentic experience with inauthentic emotion. Some overlap is simply natural, especially when it comes to universal truths.

What do you think? Should you avoid reading books on your story's topic? Why or why not?

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Trope versus cliché

My Tuesday post, "No Mary Sues: operating at maximum capacity," was intended to get you all thinking about ways to keep your characters perpetually striving towards goals, or at least pondering them, worrying them, feeling strongly about them--rather than letting characters give up and walk away too quickly when conflicts arise.

I'd used the term "Mary Sue" in my title, believing this to be the proper term for the coddled character. I linked THIS "Mary Sue litmus test" which seemed to take the term in a somewhat different direction. The testmakers identified Mary Sue as a "wish fulfillment character" who is not only coddled, but also too precious by half--too much fantasy, not enough reality.

Turns out this link was only very peripherally connected to my point, but it did generate some intriguing concerns and questions in your comments.

Susan Kaye Quinn @ Ink Spells said:

"I think you have to be a little careful with the Mary Sue generalization (like any sweeping definition, especially one with so many requirements). It is undeniably true that Mary Sue characters exist, just like any stereotype. But just because your character may have a "Mary Sue" type characteristic doesn't make them an egregious thing that must be banished from the face of the earth (I think the authors of the test even say this).

Ex:
Question 1.e. Does your character's name ...
Involve a noun or verb not usually used as a name, spelled normally or not?

Tally - MC in Scott Westerfeld's Uglies. Um, that's a verb (and a noun) normally not used as a name. It's a FANTASTIC name. Also a best selling series.

Question 54: Does your character have the ability to shapeshift?

Never mind that this rules out any story about werewolves, but Modo from The Dark Deeps is a a shape shifting quasimodo character in a steampunk setting. TOTALLY original, fun, and one of the most sympathetic characters I've seen in a while.

So.

The Mary Sue phenom is real, but also a trope itself...."

I think Susan brings up a very helpful distinction--trope versus cliché.

Here's a useful definition:

"Tropes are devices and conventions that a writer can reasonably rely on as being present in the audience members' minds and expectations. On the whole, tropes are not clichés. The word clichéd means 'stereotyped and trite.' In other words, dull and uninteresting."
--TV Tropes wiki homepage

Think of a trope as a genre rule. An element your audience expects to be present to make your work a fit for the genre.

For example, it is a trope for YA novels to feature a teenaged main character. No one would dream of calling it cliché to have your protagonist be 16, even if ten million other YA books do. Make your protagonist 47, however, and you're going to have problems convincing anyone your story is YA.

I think one could easily go through the "Mary Sue litmus test" and find some aspects that the testmakers labeled "Mary Sue" traits are actually EXPECTED in some genres. To not include these tropes would put your work out of synch with the genre and make it harder to sell.

What do you think? Which elements labeled "Mary Sue" in the test would you argue are viable tropes and for which genres?

Are elements of wish fulfillment part of audience expectation for your genre? How so?

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