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Posts from the ‘Craft’ Category

Oct 17

A premise sentence can keep your writing on track

Ever heard the saying, “Ideas are a dime a dozen?” While it’s true that ideas can be found everywhere we look, it’s not true that every idea is worthy of a story or can sustain an entire novel. That’s why I like to write in a variety of mediums: poetry, short story, novels, even songs. Most of my ideas can find a home in one of these genres.

But how do you know if your idea can sustain a novel?  One way to do this is by writing a logline or a premise statement. Whatever you want to call it, this is a one- to two-sentence summary of your story that includes the protagonist or hero (including a type of person and an adjective that describes him), his goal, the antagonist, the main conflict, and action (plot).

In “Outlining Your Novel: Map Your Way to Success,” K.M. Weiland calls her one-liner the premise sentence. Here’s her premise sentence for her novel Dreamlander: Read more

Oct 16

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How to reveal character personality through speech

Your characters’ speech reveals volumes about their education, personality, and where they grew up. A character who was reared in the deep South will speak with a different accent and use different slang than one who grew up in the Midwest. When it comes to creating distinct characters in the readers’ minds, using slang — without overdoing it — can help form a character’s personality.

My friends and family have lived in a variety of places, so I’ve picked up on slang from the West and southern United States, as well as British slang from my friends who hail from the United Kingdom. My Midwestern friends say hot dish while my family in the Western U.S. call it casserole. Depending on where you’re from, you might say “pop” where others say, “soda” or “soda pop.” Some of my friends say sofa and others couch.

Here are several examples. Interestingly, I’ve noticed that slang can migrate as people move from one part of the country to another.

Here’s what my southern friends say:

Fit to be tied — frustrated, angry, agitated

Fixin’ – about or getting ready. “I’m fixin’ to go to school.”

Hunkey Dorey — everything is fine.

Hankerin’ for – a desire/craving for where my British friends might say they “fancied” something.

My British friends have been known to use these expressions: Read more

Oct 15

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What should you write? How about writing your favorite novel?

When starting a new novel or story, it’s a good idea to know what genre you’re writing in. That’s pretty obvious. What may not be so obvious are all the nuances within your genre. What kind of story, exactly, are you telling?

One way to discover this is to ask yourself: What are some of your favorite novels or movies and why do you like them? What makes them stand out above the others?

Below I listed a few of my favorites and why I like them. My “why” may be different than yours.

Books:

Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold.

Why: original pov (from dead girl), lovely prose, deeply creepy antagonist, unique setting: heaven.

Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd Read more

Oct 9

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Learn how outlining techniques can help you find your story (and have fun)

I just finished reading one of the most helpful books on writing I’ve ever read—and that’s saying a lot considering how many titles decorate my shelves.

But I hesitate to tell you the title. You might faint. You might freak out. You might jump back from your computer screen or iPhone or whatever device you’re reading this on and chuck it out the nearest window.

One word, in particular, in this book’s title is generally known to make writers quake in their pink bunny slippers as if they are witnessing a wolf spider crawl up the bathtub drain. Read more

Oct 8

Add depth to your novel or memoir with this structural technique, Part 2

In my last blog post, I wrote about how author Elizabeth Rosner used a structural technique to add subtext to her novel. In today’s post, I share an example from a memoir.

In Lisa Dale Norton’s memoir Hawk Flies Above: Journey to the Heart of the Sandhills, she wrote 12 sections called “Notebooks” that created connections between chapters. Norton’s idyllic childhood ended when her parents divorced when Norton was 12. After 13 years of drifting, attending college, and surviving a rape where she was left for dead, Norton returned to Ericson, Nebraska. She began writing stories intertwined with threads of the landscape and its impact on her imagination and identity.

Norton weaves natural images of plants, wildlife and the landscape of her childhood summer home in Nebraska with an account of her search for self as she returns to the Sandhills, her childhood home.

“By lying close to the land, skin to sand, bone to wind, I believed I could merge with the grasses, with the hills. I believed I could become whole again. I did not know this on a conscious level.” Read more

Oct 7

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Rhetorical devices: Your secret writing weapon

When a book instantly grabs me and draws me in, I like to go back later and analyze why. Sometimes, it’s the subject matter. Sometimes, it’s the narrator’s voice. Sometimes, it’s a simile or metaphor that hooks me. Always, it’s the strong writing. Strong writing means that the arrangement of words on the page “works.” Strong writing is an art that we can learn.

Many award-winning, best-selling authors have a secret weapon that helps them produce strong writing. That secret success weapon is the use of rhetorical devices.

Award-winning poet and author Jack Remick discusses his use of rhetorical devices in his interview with Joel Chafetz. He says that the devices all conspire to create a certain cadence in his work. He goes on to say:

…”it’s not enough to put the words down, that’s information. You have to make the words dance and rhetoric can make your words dance. Most people dismiss rhetoric but rhetoric cannot be dismissed. Rhetoric can give you rhythm, rhetoric can give you cadence, rhetoric can give your writing new life. So the writing in Blood is thick with rhetorical devices. And that’s what you’re picking up—the poetry of violence couched in rhetorical devices driving images at full speed so the story spins out ahead of you, drawing you along with each one.”

I’ve used rhetorical devices in my poetry for years–alliteration, assonance, similes, metaphors, etc. These are some of the more common devices with their definitions below: Read more

Sep 30

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Frustrate your characters to keep readers turning pages

As writers, our job is to frustrate our characters. This job can be hard on us because we usually like our protagonist, maybe even feel she is a part of us. But when we write, we are forced to act more like her antagonist than best friend. That’s because, in order to keep our reader turning pages, we need to create conflict for our characters.

Even in fiction that doesn’t feature car crashes, bombs, or airplanes falling from the sky, we need to have some amount of conflict or tension. We need to create frustrated characters. So how do we keep the stakes high even in a cozy romance or literary novel? Read more

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