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Jun 30

A revision lesson from actress Natalie Portman

I was inspired to think about revising my writing when I watched Golden Globe winner Natalie Portman accept her award for best actress in a motion picture.

As she thanked Black Swan director Darren Aronofsky at the 2011 show, she spoke about what it was like to work with him. “Every time we’d finish our takes, he’d say, ‘Now do this one for yourself.’”

That was Aronofsky’s way of recognizing Portman’s ability and opportunity to take her craft to the next level.

Some writers dread the revision part of writing. Others love it. I maintain that the rewrite is where the writing actually happens. We are the ultimate owners of the final product. So once you’ve written your first draft, then revised and revised…. and revised. Do one more revision — this time for yourself. Try these scene editing and rewriting techniques for your next “take.”

Jun 29

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Masters of emotion: five books that show how to convey character emotions

Recently, I wrote a post about character emotions and how to write about the body. Below are five books from my reading library that show different ways of conveying character emotions:

1. Bastard out of Carolina by Dorothy Allison. Note her use of specific detail, imagery, and metaphor to show bodily feelings and her characters’ emotions.

2. The Road by Cormac McCarthy. Notice how his spare language conveys the post-apocalyptic world of his setting and characters.

3. Elegy for Iris by John Bayley. The author writes about his wife Iris Murdoch, a well-known author, and her decent into Alzheimer’s disease. Notice the way he describes both her emotional state and his own through specific details.

4. Road Dogs by Elmore Leonard. Notice how the characters’ dialogue so effectively conveys their emotions and shows us who they are.

5. The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende. Allende is a passionate Chilean writer. Notice how her passion underlies every sentence of her work and how it pulls you into the story.

I hope you enjoy these! Please share some of your favorite books that are good examples of how to describe character emotions.

Jun 28

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Character emotions: two ways to write about the body

When we experience different emotions, our bodies have physiological reactions. When we’re afraid our heart rate increases, when we’re angry our blood pressure rises, when we’re in love our body releases certain chemicals. As a writer, it might seem natural to describe our characters’ emotions by writing about how their body feels.

The problem is that these descriptions can quickly become overused and clichéd. Beginning writers, especially, make these mistakes, but I’ve also seen far too much published work that reaches for the quick cliché.

Unfortunately, I’m no exception. I wrote poetry for years before I began writing stories. A natural at imagery and metaphor, I had no idea how to do so many other things—like write about the body. I’ll share some of my early examples as long as you don’t “roll your eyes:” Read more

Jun 27

Find writing rhythm by going into revision mode

As a journalist, I discovered a good way to revise copy is this two-step method. First I print out the pages (sorry trees) and read them to myself. Then I read them out loud.

Sure, I make edits when I read copy on my computer monitor, but when I print my pages, it’s as if I’m telling my brain to go into revision mode. I “see” things in a new way. And when I read my work aloud, I hear how the writing sounds — it helps me test the consistency of the narrative voice and hear how the sentences flow.

Our brains are exceedingly proficient at compensating for how something should read, making it easy for us to gloss over a typo or wrong word. This explains why you can ask five people to read your manuscript and still find that an error or three slipped through.

Read your printed copy out loud and to yourself for these benefits: Read more

Jun 24

Seven tips for designing meaningful dialogue

As writers, we’re extremely lucky to be able to engage in behaviors others might find a bit abnormal.

We get to listen to the “voices” in our heads, and we get to make imaginary people talk to other imaginary people. All of this in the pursuit of our “craft.”

I was thinking about this recently while considering what makes good dialogue. Here are a few tips that might help you as you write your own dialogue.

  1. Build your knowledge of your characters. Just as you invent your characters, you must create their conversations and interactions. The more you understand your characters, the easier it will be to invent their dialogue. Read more

Jun 23

It’s raining concrete: the #1 rule of writing, Part 2 of 2

Over the years, I’d trained myself to be an observer of life’s details and to use those concrete details in my writing. (I do have an MFA in people watching). But I’d never done the opposite—never thought about turning details into abstractions as Ayn Rand suggests we do in her book The Art of Fiction.

I’m sure at some unconscious level, the details and abstractions ran parallel lives in my mind but I wasn’t consciously aware of them. I never thought, “What do the moles on my mother’s neck represent?”

While on vacation earlier this year, I sat on a white sand beach on the island of Kauai and thought about Rand’s advice. She suggests we practice seeing the abstractions within the concrete details in order to make our minds supple and easily able to notice both the abstractions or premises in our work and how to show them through details. Read more

Jun 22

It’s raining concrete: the #1 rule of writing, Part 1 of 2

I didn’t discover I was a writer until college when I fell in love with poetry. Fortunately for me, my first poetry professor was big on concrete. No, he didn’t have a weekend job laying sidewalks or foundations. But he did pound it into us that our effusive abstractions needed to be transformed into concrete images.

Some of my first poems were pure mush and raw emotion. When I blathered on about feeling lonely in a foreign country, he asked, “What color is lonely? What does lonely smell like? Was there a specific place or location or city where you felt the most lonely?” He explained that through the right details I could evoke those feelings in my reader.

I can still remember the rush of satisfaction when I finally captured the essence of that poem into specifics. Read more

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