Hi!

This is just a quick note to reassure folks that I'm still around, but that I've been far busier than I ever imagined. Good things, in the long run, but definitely things that take away from this.

More to follow soon, and I hope to get some notes up shortly. I, um, kinda have a backlog.

Failing Better, Celebrating Best: March Madness End-Of-Month Check-In #WIPmadness

Welcome to the final check-in for the 2014 March Madness Challenge! Before we get started on the celebrations, I've been informed by our fearless leader Denise that we still have a few prizes left.

The final winners for March Madness are...

Elderfox!
Akoss!

Jeanne Ryan!

Kristin Butcher!
Congratulations! Stop by our goal-setting post, and choose your prize from those still listed (first come, first serve). Email Denise at d(at)denisejaden(dot)com with your choice and we'll get it out to you as soon as possible.

If you’ve won a prize this month, I hope you enjoy it! If not, keep checking in throughout the year, as many of our weekly hosts offer up prizes from time to time.

* * *

So, here we are at the end of another month, another year, of absolute madness. Now it's time to weigh in about how the entire month went for you. Dearest Mad Marchers, how did you do?

Did you meet your goals? Congratulations!

Did you *exceed* them? Wow, go you!

Or did you maybe not quite make them? Could you be feeling a bit disheartened about that? Don't be. Because no matter how much you did manage to accomplish, even if it was only a fraction of what you intended, you're farther than you were when March began.

However your mad month turned out, it's all valid.

This is an important thing to remember. Life often throws challenges our way. And yes, the platitudes about how "it's not the destination, it's the journey" can feel a bit wearing when we don't get to where we want to be in the time we originally planned. But it's really true. Take, for example, how my month turned out.

Confession time: *I* didn't meet the goals I set back at the start of March. Me, one of the hosts, who should be leading the charge by setting a good example to everyone involved in March WIPmadness. And yet, if I wanted to be negative about it, I could say that I failed:

1. I completely ignored my goals this weekend while throwing my energy into an out of town convention.
    
2. I set aside the urban fantasy I was planning to work on in favour of outlining another YA project I'm not even going to *start* writing this month.
    
3. And then I failed at finishing *that* because I hit a major plot hole I couldn't seem to climb out of.

Yep, that's a total fail. Right?

Not the way I see it. And here's why:

1. I took the time this convention to explore some of the writing panels that were offered. (And wow, there were some great ones.) I didn't devote my entire convention time to this, especially because a lot of them conflicted with other events I really wanted to be at, but I did make it to four. And I came away with more notes to share with everyone, which I totally hadn't expected.
   
   
2. My goals change wasn't a cop-out. The project I'm now outlining was something I'd been avoiding because I hadn't felt ready to approach it, and didn't know how I could. Suddenly, that changed. So being able to actually finally sink my teeth into it was a relief, and for me, an even larger challenge. I'd been worried I wouldn't be able to.
   
   
3. Fixing that plot hole now, before I started writing the story, was also rewarding. Maybe it took longer to figure out than I'd intended, but the solution I came up with stays much more true to my character than what I originally came up with. It has ramifications throughout the entire story. Not only is this going to save me major headaches later, but the novel feels stronger for it. And I'm just getting started!

My point is this: maybe my month wasn't what I'd originally planned. Maybe I didn't get quite as much achieved in a quantitative sense. But the quality of my month was absolutely astounding, and I am really happy with how it all turned out. And no matter what you managed to achieve with your goals, you should feel the same.

Most importantly, this is just one month. The goals don't have to end here. Keep going! And you don't have to do it alone, either. Most months, we gather once a week on one of our members' blogs to check in officially. On top of that, the community meets year-round on Twitter, under the #WIPmadness hashtag.  Feel free to check in with the progress you're making on all of your creative goals. We'll all be there to support each other.


Edit: Charlie Holmberg has offered to host the Monday check-ins for April at her blog, http://myselfaswritten.blogspot.ca/. Come join us!

The madness never stops. Onward, Wipsters! Let's embrace this crazy together.

So, ready to weigh in on how your month went, Mad Marchers? Let's hear it!

I Hate Salads (or, Resistance ain't Fertile) - March Madness Check-In, Day 24 #WIPmadness

Happy Monday, Mad Marchers! Still hanging in there? I am ... but I'll admit it hasn't been easy. I've hit a few bumps in the road to outlining this new novel, but I think I'm back on track now. How about you?

Today I wanted to talk about something near and dear to me: food.

The past few years for me, it hasn't been super fun, because I was gluten intolerant. Spoiler: it went away a few months ago. Great for my sanity, not so much for my waistline. Sometimes, these things happen, which is awesome, but don't ask me to explain the whys behind it all. I'm not a doctor. But let me say one thing: trying to eat out when one has dietary restrictions can be very frustrating. Even more frustrating was the question I was asked, almost without fail:

"Can't you just have a salad?"

Within weeks I was ready to bite the head off of anyone who dared suggest such a thing. Maintaining my calm, my nostrils would flare, my expression would flatten and I would growl, in a voice two octaves lower than usual,

"NO."

(Forget that I sacrificed five years of my teens and very early twenties to a certain fast food chain and was even in charge of *making* the salads on some mornings, so I know how much is just bland iceberg lettuce with some flavourful toppings and a pack of salty-sugary-fatty dressing for extra disguise. So I wasn't exactly a cheerleader for the things. But I digress.)

After awhile, people stopped asking. And I went on my merry way, trying to figure out creative adaptations of fast food and restaurant menus without resorting to gluten, which at the time was giving me trouble.

But one thing I did start to like was spinach. That was healthy and I could take it in my lunch without dressing. And then after that, in 2012, I was in Vegas as a bridesmaid for my best friend's wedding, and we went out for dinner and the menu's pickings were slim, but they did have this really nice ... you guessed it ... salad. Except that it was "chicken, mandarins, walnuts and raspberries on a bed of spinach". No lettuce to speak of. And that got me to thinking, wait a minute. I could totally try it if there was spinach involved. Spinach, at least, was reasonably healthy.

So I tried it. And it was delicious.

And when I got home, I started re-thinking what the word "salad" meant to me. Yes, it was still something I'd only be interested in when the days are warm, but trying out *my* variation, using ingredients that *I* liked, changed everything.

And suddenly I was enjoying salads.

 
So, what does this have to do with writing?

More than you'd think. Because one thing I've learned about myself is that the things I resist the hardest are the things I should give some consideration. Especially when it applies to critical feedback and my work.

I've told the story before about how when I wrote the novel I'm currently shopping around, I used first person present tense, and thought that because that's how the novel first came to me that I should keep it that way. It's a great example. So many people tried to tell me to change the tense to past, but I was so stuck on the idea that this was how my main character had spoken to me, had told the story, that I refused to listen to reason.

Luckily I have an awesome CP who found a way to get through to me and make me re-think this resistance that was really holding me back. As a result, I was able to discover my voice and make the story, IMHO, sing.

Have you ever had such an experience? Where you keep saying "no" to an idea or change, or perhaps a manuscript revision, only to realize that, "Wow, that's so much better!"? It's happened to me more than once. (I'll save the story about why I had to cut the man-eating lizards chapter for another day.) Each time, I resist. But each time, after some grumbling, I notice an improvement.

Even if it's just in my lunch.

* * *

So, how are you faring with your goals, Mad Wipsters?

Newcomers: Don't know about March Madness for Writers? I know it's fairly late in the game, but if this is the first you've heard of this crazyfun approach to achieving goals, it's still not too late to get a full week's worth of work in! Just sign up here. We've got a great community that hangs out at #WIPmadness year-round, and we always have room for more. Check us out!

And of course, don't forget to check out Shari's blog tomorrow!

p.s. The recipe, as such:
- Baby spinach base
- 1/2 cup slivered almonds
- 1/2 cup grated cheddar
- frozen raspberries
- frozen strawberries
- mandarin wedges (from a Dole jar)
- Dressing: 2 tbsp FINI Modena Basalmic Reduction, mixed well with the juice of the thawed/jarred fruit on top  

Writing Diversity (SIWC 2013 Notes)

  
Wow, it's hard to believe that SIWC was over two weeks ago. I had a fantastic time, made a lot of great connections, and came away feeling absolutely energized. Which was a good thing, because after I'd sent off everything that had been requested from me during the pitches, it was all of a sudden November. And that means NaNoWriMo.

(Can I just say how much I love the Greater Vancouver community? There are multiple meetings taking place every day across the Lower Mainland, and being there is like stepping into a maelstrom of creative energy. Flourishing. Vibrant. Absolutely incredible.)

Back to SIWC. One of the highlights for me at this year's conference was the opportunity I had to meet fantasy author Jim C. Hines, who you may recognize from his Gender Swapped Cover Poses. His keynote speech was well-deserving of the standing ovation it received. His class, Writing Diversity, felt like a great complement to the PAX Prime 2013 panel, "Everything We Know is Sexist. Now What?" that examined the lack of diversity in video games. In both cases, it boils down to the writing. And that means us.
 
* * *  
Writing Diversity
Jim C. Hines
This is about creating more realistic and honest diversity. About the danger of stereotypes and token writing.

First, the obvious question – Why is this middle class straight white dude lecturing about diversity?
-    It’s important.
-    It’s a problem.
-    It’s something he cares about.
-    It’s something he’s tried to listen, learn, and talk about for years.
-    Not all of these ideas are his, but these are his words.
-    What he’s learned from listening to other people.
-    He’s in a position to address it, to bring attention to it.

It’s hard to write the other, because it’s not our lived experience. How do we do this?
-    Fear of screwing up is prevalent.
-    Lots of others speak about this, so don’t listen to only him.
-    Sometimes this stuff doesn’t occur to us because it’s not something we’ve experienced. (But that was the problem.)
-    We need to have someone come along and say, “Yes, it’s great you have these books, but I don’t. My kind of people die in the first chapter, are the sidekick, fill a narrow range of characters.”
-    We can do more than that.

Statistics
-    The current state of publishing: The Cooperative Children’s Book Centre sampled 3600 different YA/Children’s books. Found “The total number of books about people of colour, regardless of accuracy, was less than 8 percent  of the total published.”
-    Melinda Low: looked at YA novels for 2011. Of all of them, less than 1% had LGBT characters.
-    Cover art: Men on cover are usually portrayed as their character in book. Active. Women on cover of book – odd poses that flaunt their bodies, the weapon is an accessory, boobs are pretty, let’s look at them. Narrow, uncool.
-    This is not about meeting quotas. No one is saying when writing a book you must have this diversity. The only time quotas come up is from people trying to shut down these conversations. No, this about trying to undo quotas, the unspoken quota that 90% of books must be about white men.

Diversity
-    All of this stuff we talk about here is a reflection of our society – the prejudices, the oversights, get reinforced every day. We see it so much that we stop seeing it. It’s become normal. It’s why he participated in the cover pose calendar.
-    Diversity is many things: Gender, sex, sexual orientation, religion, disability, age, cultural heritage, colour of skin, English not second language
-    Throne of the Crescent Moon: about a crotchety middle aged guy. So many protagonists typically mid-20s or teens (for YA).

Why this matters
-    Writing’s hard enough, so why add one more layer of stuff?
-    Getting an email that says thank you for this character, or this is the first time I’ve seen this character treated respectfully, is awesome.
-    If you have spent most of your life being invisible, and you see this author saying you exist, it’s important.
-    Stories teach us a lot. They’re the most important thing of anything. How we relate to the world, understand things, why history classes suck because they destroy the story and give you dates and facts. We learn from stories. So if we learn that the world is dominated by 25-year-old handsome white men, that sinks in. If we learn that black people exist but mostly in the background and to die in the second act, that sinks in.
-    Stories are powerful. And no, it’s not necessarily our job to approach with “how can I change the world today” but it is to recognize that when we write stories with all white folks, that’s not okay. We’re choosing to exclude most of the world from our stories, and that’s not okay.
-    “…When we exclude—intentionally or otherwise—characters of color from our work, we do send a billboard message to readers. We tell them that people of color aren’t there, aren’t important, aren’t worthy of our stories. That they don’t deserve to be part of the conversation of our books. That reading isn’t for them. That they don’t matter. That they don’t even register on our radar.”—Sarah Ockler.
-    This stuff matters. And yes, you can have a successful career never doing this. But your stories will be much weaker, and they will be lies.

Recommended Book: Writing the Other by Nissi Shaw and Cynthia Ward

So how do we do this?
-    Writing about a person respectfully, not just cultural appropriation.
-    Cultural appropriation: “Oh look, shiny. I’ll take this.” (e.g. Washington Redskins, Atlanta Braves. Sexy Halloween costumes for women.
-    Surface level stuff.
-    Gypsies. Big in Fantasy. Shiny stuff, free lives, travel everywhere. The term gets used unintentionally. Yet for many, gypsy is a racial slur.
-    We do it unintentionally because we haven’t stopped to look deeper.
-    If you’re just taking shiny bits out of the culture, you’re going to fail. People will leave nasty notes. If you’re going to write about anyone, you must do it respectfully. These characters need a background and a history and a culture. Talk to people. LISTEN to them. Learn from them.

How do you borrow without stepping on toes?
-    Borrowing pieces from existing culture: he asked, Why did the culture evolve this way? Why is this a cultural norm? Does this make sense? (e.g. In the 3rd princess book, Sleeping Beauty is described as dark-skinned and from a desert culture. The culture evolved around the desert’s harsh environment.)
-    Also, do enough research to know when you are getting into very sensitive areas. One thing to look at taboo of turning away a stranger, different thing to dig up sacred religious ritual and steal it.
-    How to handle religion when opinions within a religion means different things? Just like any other character, try to do it respectfully. Do it so they’re not a caricature, have reasons for believing things. Remember, every character is the hero of his or her own story. This is part of who they are, what they grow up with, this is what’s important to them. Go beyond the one dimension.
-    Shepherd Book: the only representation of religion in Firefly.
-    Avatar: the cartoon, not the movie that doesn’t exist – Heavily influenced by eastern cultures, and not in a shiny bits way. The animators spent lots of time studying these cultures and learning about them. Affects the story. Good example.
-    Bottom line: it comes down to research. Find these people. Listen to them. It’s easy to make the effort to find people “not like you”. Still not about quota. Broaden yourself. Find people who disagree with you.
-    Remember that listening to people doesn’t mean agreeing with them. If it doesn’t work for you, that’s fine.

Description: How to describe these characters
-    Without description, there’s an assumption from readers that a character is straight and white.
-    Some people skim read and make assumptions (like the mistaken assumption that Rue in The Hunger Games was white and people got mad that she was cast in the movie as black).
-    When doing description, it’s okay to be blunt, to have a character say, “she looked Indian in appearance”. Avoid the chocolate skin and almond eyes, the cliché and purple prose, because that can be offensive. Find other ways to say it.
-    Are there other options than comparing people to food? Yes, wood, for example. Find other things that are brown, dig deep for comparisons.
-    Don’t overthink it.
-    Be aware of drawing examples between nonwhite skintone and things that have come from exploited races (e.g. coffee, chocolate).
-    Be true to the character. Just because the bisexual character chooses someone that matches with heterosexuality, or that choosing means that you’re either heterosexual or gay, doesn’t mean you’re making a statement about those issues. When you address it in text so that if someone complains, you can say, “no, I know what I’m doing.”
-    Take away the tokenism. Have more than one character like that. So the burden doesn’t weigh down on them all by themselves. As you’re writing, keep this in mind. If there’s just the one, pay very close attention to what baggage you put on them, because people will react.
-    Beware of assumptions and stereotypes. For example, just because a character is autistic does not always mean that they are a math genius who counts cards and amasses rocks.
-    A lesson learned: In his Princess Series: Sleeping Beauty is dark-skinned, a lesbian, and a rape survivor. She’s the only one of these things you know in book 2. She’s also the only tough, kick-your-ass character. But that was a problem because she took the burden of representing all. He was asked why. His answer was, “Because that’s her character. That’s her backstory.” But it doesn’t change the fact that this one character falls in many problematic areas and he realizes now that he could have taken steps to fix that.

Writing Dialogue
-    Do it carefully.
-    English as a second language is often portrayed as very stupid, filling a stereotype.
-    One or two examples sprinkled throughout is very effective.
-    Consider idiom and vocabulary. Idiom’s the last thing we learn – “eg. it’s raining cats and dogs”. You can do a lot to show the character is intelligent but communicating from a very different context.
-    Some use English, but use their language for sentence structure.
-    Words they’ve learned from reading only, but they can’t necessarily pronounce.
-    Puns are hard to translate because they depend on the language.
-    Give them really bad jokes that make no sense in our language, but are hilarious to them.

Don’t immediately kill off your own non-white character.
-    Be aware of secondary characters.
-    When you put these supporting roles in there. And why you put them in there.
-    No sassy gay best friend, the Asian dragon lady or martial artist, the native American vision-quest person
-    Stories are powerful. We’ve seen these very narrow stories. If that’s what goes in, that’s what comes out. We’ve absorbed that. So, step back and ask, Who is this character? Not just the gay character. The gay jewish computer programmer who lieks to brew his own beer.
-    “Colour doesn’t matter” – yes it does. We still have the prejudices. This still affects how we grow up, our values, who we become. Who are characters are. But it does not DEFINE or limit them. All things should not be dictated by their characteristics. It is dishonest to say that’s the only thing that affects this character. It’s equally dishonest to say that it doesn’t affect this character’s choices.
-    A lot of time we start these stories and write them as issue stories. Autistic character means all about autism, gay character is all about them coming out. As if it’s the only story about them. Identity is layered and complex and messy. Seeing other cultures in stories can be frustrating if they only see one piece of them.

“Why did you choose to make this character [insert minority]”?
-    This is a stupid question. Valid, but the stupid comes in that we only ask one side of it. If the character is a straight, white male, there should be a reason for it, too. Depending on the setting, culture, and time period, that will affect what kinds of characters you can bring in. But be careful about what history has erased, too.

Writing 21st Century Fiction (SIWC 2012 Master Class Notes)

Wow, it's October. And while I'd love for my excuse this time to be that I was off partying or traveling or away at a conference again, nope, this time I just caught a really bad cold.

(Okay, there was this one bachelorette party that involved attending the local Theatre Sports event last weekend, and I may have been called up on stage and had the chance to, among other things, play a helmet, dressage trophy, and horse, but hey, the bride was entertained, and I was sick before that, honest!)

The of-course-I've-been-querying-too aside, I've also been plotting and planning my next novel, because I am a firm believer in having an outline. And the magic system for this new book needed serious work. Dang, it feels good to be working on something besides the book I'm trying to sell!

Anyway. Back to my original point: it's October, and the end of the month is one of my favourite events: the Surrey International Writers' Conference. While I still have some notes left to share from ConCarolinas, I just discovered a few gems from last year's SIWC that hadn't been posted. So here's the first one, and to make up for my absence, it's a doozy: the Master Class with amazing literary agent Donald Maass.

The class was called "Writing 21st Century Fiction" and is based on his book of the same title that came out last year. (And speaking as one who owns the book, these notes are just a snapshot of that, because he elaborates on all of what I'm about to share there.) This was an incredible class, and even just editing these notes for posting reminded me of how valuable it was. Enjoy ... and definitely check out the book!


* * *

Writing 21st Century Fiction
Donald Maass
Purpose: To dig into new dimensions of fiction writing.
New book: Writing 21st Century Fiction
- Observed changes in the NYT bestseller list: in recent yrs (during a recession at that when the book industry has struggled) – The hardcover bestseller list looks as usual – lots of thrillers, brand name authors; but the duration numbers have dropped (7 or 8 at the most) – an indication that sales are very front-ended, but Trade paperbacks are different: Trades have extended shelflife – groups of books that have been running for 1 to 2 years, with one exception – and some of them are literary fiction – there’s something odd about this – why are literary fiction selling in such numbers, for such lengths of time? Not just because they’re lit lite, but they’re selling incredibly well week after week. Some have been made into movies, but only long after the book was successful.

What makes them big? What’s between the covers. The stories and what makes them interesting.
E.g. Nancy Picard, Laura Litman both left category fiction and started writing in a different way as writers of standalone fiction. So what makes them so powerful? What are they doing?

1.    Telling terrific stories.
2.    Telling them beautifully.

Great storytelling and beautiful writing are the perfect combination.

So how do you do it? What’s different? How can you write a great story beautifully?

Literary Writers vs. Genre Writers
- The literary world looks at commercial fiction with a sneer – plot is gimmicky, cheap.
- Plot can be gimmicky, contrived, but not always. Likewise, literary fiction isn’t always just pretty words.
- Depends on the writer you are, too – identify yourself as the kind of writer you are.
- Do you identify as a genre writer? Nothing wrong with that. BUT if you work in a particular genre, whether you like it or not you’re putting yourself in a box and will reach for genre tropes, specific character types and language, default choices, stereotypical choices that make that box smaller, familiar.
- Literary writers tend to think they’re original but it’s not the case. There are just as many stereotypes that are true about them, too.
- Basically, you will think and identify in certain kinds of ways depending on what kind of writer you are.
- If you think of yourself as not a novelist but a storyteller, then you probably look at lit world and think “That’s nice, but that doesn’t have anything to do with me”.
- Literary writer trying to capture something that is true, realistic, fresh, you look at the genre world and think: “That’s crap. That’s not real writing.”

Plotters vs. Pantsers
- Other dichotomies in the kinds of writers we are that we need to think about. e.g. are you a Plotter, a Pantser, or somewhere in between?
- Outline writers will have certain advantages in crafting fiction, but certain shortcomings. By following a map you’ll miss detours; by intuiting your way through you might get distracted by the detours and wander too much; exploring is sometimes a way of not focusing. (This is why I'm a huge fan of organic plotting. Best of both worlds!)

Warm Temperature vs. Cold Temperature
- Are you a warm temperature writer or a cold temperature writer?
- Jane Austen vs Ernest Hemingway
- Austen: warm temperature writer: Austen plumbed the depths of the human soul and experience—rich emotional stew, immersion in point of view, the life and times of feelings on the page

- Hemingway: cold temperature writer—evokes feelings on the page with coldness

How Attached Are You?
- Authors who love to be edited, love revisions—that’s where writing really happens
- Others who have such an emotional attachment it makes it difficult for them to see the need for changes
- Agents love authors who love to be edited, who follow directions. (*raises hand* Me-me-me! Yes! The good of the story is what matters!)
- Waiting for agent/editor feedback is about getting their feedback, to see if you managed to accomplish what you intended to do. If you’re looking for a checklist of things to do, that’s wrong.
- If your book is your baby—it’s wise to stand up for your story, but not just “That’s not how I see it” or “My character would never do that”—you put up barriers to your own story, and the perfect story that is in you.

So, we need to delve into these dimensions that we don’t do first, naturally, or well.

The Inner Journey
- Goes hand in hand with the Hero’s Journey.
- The arc of change, how the character grows from one story to another.
- Stories far more powerful when the character transforms.
- Work through the journey that takes character from one place to another
- Story needs to be grounded in the character’s inner struggle.


The Emotional Landscape


Exercise: Emotional Landscape

1. Start with the emotional landscape of the writer. Character feels, is going through something. So whatever your style is, it can work with that.
- Take a deep breath, close your eyes. Just be with yourself in the moment. Then, think: what is too fearful, what is too inappropriate, to messy, to out of bounds, to angry, too trite, too personal with your story?

2. Next, write how it’s going to happen in your story, how you can put it to use. How’s it going to get on the page? What’s the moment when the reader will feel what you feel, be afraid, will experience what you’ve experienced, will go “holy crap”? What’s that moment that you’ll make such a mess you won’t know how to get out? You want the readers to feel that, heighten the “how is this character going to get out of it?" feeling for the reader?
- This begins to open the emotional landscape, the feeling of authentic experience.
- When you write what you think you should write, you are thinking in a box. You are preventing yourself from doing things that will make your story your story. You have to get inside of you.

3. Next: What’s an emotion that’s new in your life and experience? Something in the last year that you’ve felt that came upon you and was new, a revelation? Death of anger, a specific kind of hope, sth you discovered about yourself? What new understanding or insight? In what way are you new?

4. Next: When is your character going to have that same feeling, of being new, of understanding one’s self, a death or depth of a familiar emotion?
- Here we’re thinking about what we feel. The point? To bring to our fiction an emotional life and richness. That depth of righteous anger, that outrage we feel. We need characterss who feel strongly about things.

5. What’s the last scene you were working on in your WIP? Or that you seriously revised? Write down the strongest emotion your character feels in that scene.
- Write down two other things that s/he also feels.
- Out of these two, pick the one that’s most interesting.
- Take a look at this feeling. Why is it a good feeling to have right now? Or, why is it a bad, unhelpful feeling to have? How does it lead your protagonist down the wrong path? Or, how does it point your character in the right direction? Do they feel glad or not? Why? What is good or bad about this feeling?
- How does your character own the feeling, or how are they avoiding it? Why does your character have a right to this feeling? Or, why do they not have  a right to this feeling or feeling this way? If this is an emotion your character would normally suppress, write down why. If this is a feeling your character feels too easily, then why do they feel entitled or ashamed of going to this emotional place so readily? Why is it a weakness?
- What colour is this emotion? What hue, what shade?
- Give yourself some space for a few minutes to write about the emotion you’ve identified. This secondary, also-felt emotion. Describe what is good or bad or both? Why it’s an entitlement or shame. Is it welcome or abhorrent – what does it make your character felt? How do you make this character feel this? Then write a paragraph about how this emotion, this experience is conveyed. What happens?
- Is this passage just about the feeling? Do you like what you wrote? Does it have a place on the page, in this scene? Is this not your style?
- What if you did this exercise in twelve scenes? What if you had twelve passages like this where the rich, nuanced, deep and yet not necessarily obvious that you’re blowing up and pulling out?
- Why did we pick a secondary emotion? Because the primary emotions are the neon emotions.

6. Write down: rage, fear, desire, joy, grief, happiness, anguish, gut, twisted, (or phrase guts twisted).
- Why these words? Because they’re obvious emotions. Neon emotions – it’s not that we don’t feel these, it’s that on the page these are obvious emotions, easy emotions. To get your reader to feel something, they need to be surprised. So the character needs to be surprised by the emotions. So you’ve got to surprise yourself.
- Find something that’s true but less expected. Magnify it, and make it a predominant emotion, so your reader will feel something that is new, surprising, fresh, and it will grab their heart in a way that “rage” will not because it’s lost its teeth.
- Work with this rich emotional landscape.

Why is it that we would bother to work on this at all? Isn’t stuff like this on the page the stuff they tell you to cut because it doesn’t move the action along, is extra wallowy self-indulgent unnecessary stuff that drags the pace of the novel down?
- No, it adds depth. Depth of emotion, depth of character.

What do we mean by depth?
- The unique, nuanced, experience of the character that immerses us in the world and the point of view and the feelings they have – we’re drawing the reader into it.
- Mile-a-minute action isn’t what hooks us. What hooks us is what we feel.
- The emotional experience of the characters is as important as the action they undergo, the themes of the book, the world they find themselves in and what they see there. The issues in play in the story. Even their own feelings.
- What we feel is fascinating to us (and not just to women). It’s deeply absorbing and we want our readers to feel that. Replace the neon words with secondary emotions. Give your characters feelings about anything.


Exercise: Objects and Feelings

1. Pick say, 6 scenes.

2. In each scene, pick an object in the environment in the scene and write a paragraph about character’s feelings about that object) – part of storytelling is creating the world in which our character is in. What feelings do they have about this thing? How does it reflect on their lives? What does it make them think about? The protagonist’s feelings about all of these things are part of that world, they’re important, they need to be on the page.

3. If you found this exercise difficult, there are other ways to work with the emotional life of our characters. So write this down:

In the story as a whole, what is the predominant feeling that your protagonist has? The dominant, unshakable feeling that drives them through the story?


Exercise: Showing Your Character

1. Make your main character mute. They cannot speak. What is the one thing they must do or can do that he or she feels this way, that would show everybody exactly what is in his or her heart? Either tear something down or build something up. Take up arms or lay them down. Give a gift or an act of retribution.

2. What you just wrote, is it in the manuscript already? If not, what are you waiting for? Put it in. Why aren’t they doing that thing? Do it! Your story will be so much better.

3. You can also adapt this. For those of you who are cool-temperature writers and have trouble exploring emotions, pick six other scenes, find out what the strongest emotion this character feels in this scene, and don’t have them say it internally or externally but the reader will pick up on it and it will be very obvious by what they do. Then go back and look at that scene. There may be some talking and exposition you can take out. Probably also some gesture or action the character can do that will show the reader what we need to know.


Strengthen Your Weak Spots

All of this is about working on the things we aren’t good at. What we don’t do naturally and well. The hope is that the writing blends action and rich landscape. When you blend all of this together seamlessly in a story, that’s what the experience want the reader to have when they read. Great fiction gives us that.

We’re really only just beginning here, to approach the inner journey, the transformative arc. The experience needs to go somewhere. We need our characters to change over the story, to grapple with things.


Exercise: Bad Habits

1. What is your protagonist’s worst habit, weakness, or blind spot? Why aren’t they able to control that?
- Example: are they compassionate to a fault, or so quick to blame others? Why? Where does that habit come from?
- Maybe it’s because to see people as they really are would be unbearable, because there is so much negativity in the world? Does your sunshine character have a black hole inside? Terrible fear, terrible anger, comes from somewhere.

2. What’s the first time in the chronology of the story that the character surrenders to it, cannot control though they wants to? What’s a very inconvenient moement? What’s the first moment thtat it would be important for character *not* to indulge in this bad habit or weakness?

3. What’s the second moment they give in to or surrenders control to bad habit or weakness? Who notices? Who sees? Who winces? Who’s disappointed? How will we know that another character has seen something of the bad or weak side of the protagonist?
- Who is the worst person to notice or see this?
- Who is the last person your protagonist wants to disappoint?

4. What’s the third moment your protagonist gives into this flaw, and this time it costs him or her? Hurts them how? What can they lose? Whose good opinion is destroyed? Who is let down maybe for the last time? Is there something you can take away from your protagonist in this moment? (In crime novels this is the “You’re off the case” moment.)

5. What’s the worst mistake your protagonist can make, when this blind spot or bad habit or weakness on their part really bites them? When does your protagonist fail themself, because they have this flaw or weakness?
- Having shamed themselves, what does your character realize? Why? Where does this flaw come from?
- What’s the hidden emotion? What’s been repressed?
- Having bottomed out, having faced themself, what is the first thing they do that shows he or she has changed? What do they need to do? To whom do they need to say something? An apology, a truth, a confession, just something humble? Maybe something as simple as “I have a problem, I’m sorry.”

We often think of change as an upward rising curve, but it can also be from failing, not just from succeeding.

If we’ve anchored the protagonist properly in the beginning, if the reader’s connected to the character, we can put them through a heck of a lot and the reader will keep reading.

The part we’re not necessarily conscious of is “I’m so glad the author did that” even though we’re thinking “I wish the author hadn’t done that”. Because it means the author has done a good job.


Transformitive Arcs

There are lots of ways to put a character through an arc of change, of transformation. The problem Maass sees the most is that he doesn’t see enough steps, doesn’t see that inner struggle.


Exercises: Deepen the Inner Journey

Consider the following: 
- What is it that your protagonist has never told anyone?
- What was his or her worst mistake (betrayal, etc)?
- What secret is your main character keeping. Or if they don’t have a secret to keep, make one up.
- What would be painful for you protagonist to be concealing?
- What would be the kind of thing that your protagonist would hope he or she would never do, or have on his or her conscience?
- What is your character or protagonist the most ashamed of?
- What is something that other people would never guess about your main character? What is he or she hiding?
- Who does your protagonist never ever want to let down?
- Whom does your protagonist find impossible to forgive?
- Whom does your protagonist hate? The kind of hatred that is pleasure? The kind of hatred that is defining, shaping, that makes it part of who you are, defines who you are?

Secrets and shame, grudges and resentments, mistakes … all are rich material, so helpful for storytelling. So let’s do some things with it.

1. What’s the greatest length that your protagonist goes to keep the secret, conceal the shame, nurture the hatred, avoid a truth? What’s the most extreme thing that they can or will do because they’re carrying it around inside?

2. Who in the story has a vested interest in digging out of your protagonist what they’re hiding? The secret, the shame?

3. Who would like the protagonist to change? Who needs forgiveness? Who needs the protagonist to forgive?

4. What’s the biggest way this secret or shame or resentment or whatever it is is weighing down your protagonist?

5. In what way does it hurt your protagonist the most? In what way does it cost your protag? In what is it getting in the way?

6. Why does the secret need to come out, the shame be confessed? What would change? Can I make this more critical, more vital, in at least one way?
- If there’s someone your protagonist doesn’t want to let down, then disappoint them. It costs more if it hurts more.
- E.g. build up the high regard the other character has for protagonist,  so that the let down is a bigger let down. Can your protagonist be a hero to someone else, so that the let down for that person is so very much?
- What breaks open this lock, what causes the secret to come out, the shame to be exposed, the disappointment to occur, the grudge to reach its critical mass? The hatred to explode? What brings it to a head, whatever is simmering inside your protagonist? How can you make that event bigger, more ill-timed, inconvenient, more painful? How can you make the catharsis hurt more?
7. Along with this, is there something your protagonist can learn that he or she didn’t know before? Who in the story can tell your protagonist something eh or she did not know before? Who already knows your protagonist’s secret or shame? Who has made a similar or worse mistake than your protagonist?  What does your protagonist know about him or herself about what happened about who is involved that they can now reveal?

Note: What we’re looking to do is take what’s secret or painful and make it deeper. Effects that this secret or shame has on other people, on the protagonist (how are they suffering), who they’ll disappoint, how they can make this more dramatic, worse?
- If the protagonist is nurturing a hatred, for example, what was the episode that created this hatred, this resentment? What was done wrong, done to your protagonist, that hurt them, that planted a seed of darkness or anger? Find one way to make what happened more unjust, more undeserved, more cruel, more unforgivable.

8. What was the worst thing about this worst thing that happened to the protagonist that makes it exquisitely more awful? The timing, the context? How can you recall or echo that event, that worst thing about the worst thing, in one or two places in the other story? How can something similar be said? Or what are two things that trigger that old hatred, that old injustice, in your protagonist?

9. Then write down one thing your protagonist doesn’t know about the person that hurt them. Explanatory, perhaps, or at least unknown or human? Something unseen in this other person. If your protagonist needs to forgive something, who sees that need in your protagonist before they do? Who can say that before they want to hear it?

10. What triggers the deepest injury towards the end of the story that will cause protagonist to bring his or her hatred/anger to a head? When is he or she the angriest, most wounded, injured, hurt? How can your character explode at that moment and what’s the worst, biggest thing that can happen? How can you create a big, messy, catharsis? How does your protagonist act out?

11. Having done all that, who can deliver to your protagonist what he or she didn’t know? This would be a good moment to release that information.

12. How does your protagonist know that he or she has changed inside, that they’re ready to change, that something been has let go? What’s the most dramatic way your protagonist can use to forgive the unforgivable?
- Change is hard but in story terms it’s only hard if we make it hard. So let’s make it hard (for the character).
- Every character is different. All of these things are good, durable, useful, transformative – you can
- At the end of this story what’s the hardest action your character will have to physically do, the most painful, truthful thing they’ll have to say?

13. Now, go back to the beginning of the story so that it’s something the protagonist has sworn he or she will never do or say. Find a way in the story to test that conviction twice, and have your character succeed. We know this is part of who they are, a defining characteristic, until they *do* do or say it at the end.
- What causes your character to change is important too.
- What provokes them? Make it bigger.
- How much will it take to provoke them? Make it even more.

14. What’s the most important thing the protagonist needs to know about themself? What is he or she trying to understand?
- Come up with reasons why they don’t care, why it’s not of interest or significance, think others can deal with it. Then you can tear those reasons, those excuses down, so that each of those excuses can be ruined. This is what other characters are for – to force on your protagonist what they’re avoiding. Who can force on your character what they’re avoiding, make hard decisions, make impossible decisions they must make? Why does it become critical, unavoidable?

15. What is a truth that your protagonist clings to that she or he believes absolutely, a truth, a principle that is rock solid for your protag? Reinforce it three times, tis truth, this understanding or conviction – show it to be true three times. Then destroy it. How will your protagonist discover, know, understand that what she or he believed was wrong (dead wrong)? How can you shatter that truth? Take away from your protagonist that which he or she beieves, has had faith in – how can you remove that? And what replaces it?

16. What’s your protagonist’s gratest hope, dream? Where do they want to get to? What do they want to create, bring about? How can you make that hope more necessary, more beautiful? Who shares that hope, dreams that dream, is persuaded by that protagonist, can enforce that hope (yes you’re right, you’ll get there, don’t give up)? Write down how it is that your protagonist’s hope is naïve, that what she or he dreams of can never be, that the place he or she wants to get to doesn’t exist – not exactly. It’s flawed, it’s wrong, or it simply can’t be. Shatter the hope, shoot that dream out of the sky. It’s naïve. Childish. And what replaces it?


Change is Good

When your protagonist learns something or has his or her eyes opened, finds a different way, a better, stronger, more mature way of looking at things, a deeper understanding – that is growth. That is change. Good change.
- Bad setbacks and disasters lead to positive change and necessary growth.
- The worst things that happen to us are the best things that happen to us. Every mistake and disappointment has made us better or stronger, something we’re glad for.

Growth is good, but growth comes at a cost. It comes from hard experience, from growing up, from disappointments. These are ways of looking at how to bring your character through change.
- Change in relationships, outlook, the way they regard themselves, understanding, all these things can change.
- Change is good, change is story. Change is emotional, change is dramatic.

Two of the most emotional moments in any story: the moments of saying goodbye, letting something go  and  “hello, welcome home” (forgiveness) – healing, reconciliation – these are story at its best. Get your reader to feel these things and you’ve got a good story.

Sometimes to get where you want to go quicker, you’ve got to spend more time getting there.


The Business of Writing Beautifully

There are ways in which to tell a story and work with a story that go beyond mere imagery. Terrific metaphors and sparkling moments, capturing a moment with crystal clarity, bringing something vividly alive – skillful and artful writing, but there are a lot of ways in which we can give our stories resonance, meaning, beauty.


Exercise: Parallels

1. Pick any one event that happens in your story that is done to your protagonist or that they witness, do, provoke (something we can visualize, not just an internal journey) and then find one other way or place in the story where the same thing can happen in a smaller or bigger way. When in the story can the same thing happen (maybe not in as dramatic a way, or more, but nevertheless)? How many other times do similar things happen? Look for parallel ways in which the same thing can happen. Make a list of things that are analogous to, similar to, what you wrote down – come up with two or three, maybe more. How can you echo these images?
- Building up parallels to something that happens enrichens the story.
2. Think about the climax of your story, the high point in your novel – think about where it happens, the environment of climactic events. Take a look around at where this action is actually happening. Pick out one object. What’s there? Find at least three other places where we can see that object or something like it tree or four other times in the story.

3. What is the meaning of this image? Then plant it in other places, build up the symbolic value of that image. That symbol has resonance, carries meaning. It creates connections. Parallels, associativeness – called resonance. Echoes, ripples, mirrors … we can make those things. Not necessarily an accident. Something we can engineer into our story.
- What matters is that the association is made.

Exercise: Flash Symbols

Pick any scene in your book. What’s the most essential change that happens in that scene? What’s different? Pick something visual in that scene that reflects the change. Something small that represents that.
- E.g. Summer Sottage by Susan Wiggs – the half-finished house, the car fishtails (loses its way), the mailbox knocked over as she leaves (also the fluid doesn’t squirt, the windshield – can’t see, etc). The scene is so effective. She uses symbols like that through the novel. More symbolism throughout.

You cannot overdo these symbols and parallels. They feel contrived, and most readers don’t pick up on them, but they work. These connections enrich, resonate, even if the reader isn’t writing a term paper, it’s there, working on the reader.


Exercise: Parallels

In your story is there someone whose fortunes fall? Romance becomes impossible, healing becomes out of reach, seems to be increasing difficulty or failure? Is there a journey toward failure that someone has? Well, whose fortunes can rise? They succeed at something they’ve never been good at, meet the man of their dreams, get somewhere or get something that the’ve  been struggling with? Can someone find an elusive faith?
- Sometimes parallels are the same thing happening in a different way, sometimes it’s a reversal.

- E.g. If something is lost, can something else be found? If someone dies, can someone be born?

Parallels and symbols – all part of beautiful writing, don’t require a gift with words. If you dthat, the Novel can become more resonant, more shapely, more brautifully crafted, more meaningful, more powerful.


Beautiful writing can also be …


Exercise: Milleu

Think about the milleu of your story. What kind of world does your story take place in? A small town, a fantasy realm, a time and place in history, the world of particle physics? Write down two or three things that protagonist sees about this world, place, time that no one else does.

What is one thing that the protagonist finds ironic about this world?

What is the one thing supremely beautiful, delicious about this world, that your character finds? Craft beer? Bread? What’s not to like about this world?

What’s one thing that is unbearable about this world? How can we possibly stand to live in a world in which ___ is present?

Think about the landscape, the environment, the surroundings? What is one unchanging feature that is always there, has been there, for aeons, or at least a long time? What meaning does your protagonist see in this thing that other people do not?

What is the place of fear, the dark place, the place you don’t go, the place you get warned about, the place where terrible things happen, the place of death? What is the cellar, the cave, the place of deepest fears? And when is your protagonist going to go there? And what happens, or doesn’t? What does she discover, or not? What secret is hiding there, is deepened?
- e.g. The Virgin of Small Plains – Nancy Picard – past mystery that comes to the forefront, secrets will come out, etc – gravesite becomes a place of events happening there, and a tornado sweeps through town – so many interconnections. (this book is the source of his class, “The Tornado Effect”) – A catharctic scene that seems like it’ll be the climax of the story, but then tops it with an even stronger climax


In Conclusion

The world of the story – more importantly, the protagonist’s experience of the world she sees and feels and inhabits.

Throw “Description” out of the writer’s toolbox. Often it’s flat, something that readers skim. Nothing dynamic about it. The tool you need is Point of View Description – the unique way in which your point of view characters appropriate, experience, notice, infer about the world around them. The solid world we can see, the sounds, the temperature – the tangible world around us – but *also* the intangible things that we can see, taste, smell, touch, feel – the cruelty of the ATM machine that eats your plastic card because it’s expired and you needed $60. The irrational exhuberance and the horrible beastiality of Canucks Fans. Even the feeling in a crowd. If the character experiences that tangibility, then you’re recreating the world around us. We each experience it in different ways. We need the way our characters experience things on the page. Feelings, ironies, etc. We’re not just describing a place, we’re capturing a world. That’s beautiful writing.

Writing 21st Century Fiction is packed with prompts, tools, to help you develop and get more out of the story to try to draw something out, make it more powerful, give it greater impact.

Everything We Know is Sexist. Now What? (PAX Prime 2013 Panel Notes)

 

August was a fun month of weddings, traveling, and general mayhem. I sent off some queries to agents for the novel I'm trying to sell; did a *lot* of reading in my subgenre (YA High Fantasy); and got ready for Penny Arcade Expo in Seattle, where I, as usual, had a blast. I didn't catch con crud, thankfully, but I went back to the dayjob on Wednesday and am still catching up on sleep. Regardless, the convention was worth it. So many good things happened. It made stuff like receiving rejections on queries while *at* PAX just a tiny bit easier. I even took some notes!

And that's what I have to share today.

Before we go any further, yes, I am aware of the recent kerfuffle. (Understatement? Perhaps. But I like to keep things polite here.) As for how I feel about it? Let's just say that M.C. Frontalot, brilliant nerdcore hiphop artist and someone I have admired since meeting him at PAX '09, said it best.

So with that in mind, let's talk about non-standard representation in video games. Or rather, the lack thereof...

Everything We Know is Sexist. Now What?

Regina Buenaobra (Community Manager, ArenaNet); Jessica Price (Project Manager, Paizo Publishing); John Sutherland (Writer, VidGameStory), Anna Megill (Narrative Designer, Airtight Games), Matthew Moore (Game Designer, ArenaNet, Cameron Harris (Editor & Story Consultant, Freelance), Tom Abernathy (Writer & Narrative Designer, Freelance) 

Note: Matthew Moore was kind enough to give me a copy of the slides from the presentation, so the following notes include those, but also include a lot of the elaboration that happened at the panel. I was delighted that all of the panelists encouraged me to share this. 

Note from the Panelists: We are about to present opinions that are our own and not necessarily those of our employers (even when they probably should be)

What’s the problem?
-    Sexism, for one …
-    Though we’re also talking about issues of race, sexual orientation, etc.

Problem:
-    The 2012 game player gender (market) is 55% male, 45% female.
-    The gender of protagonists in games from 2012, however, is 51% male, 45% choice, and only 4% female. (This number is closer to the number of people working in the game industry.)
-    The potential game player market in the US is 51% male, 49% female.

Human beings have a tendency to do their creative work from their own thoughts, needs, and life experience.

When recently creating a game, one panelist sought ideas for vignettes for NPCs, and every suggestion was sexist. The people making the suggestions resorted to stereotypical situations without even being aware of it.

Why do we care? Why should we?
-    Lack of diversity in general.
-    There’s a creative side to it as well: new takes make it more interesting.
-    Creative consequences of the same old stuff: boredom, lack of expansive information. Not unrelated.
-    Who’s making these games really has an impact on how they get made and the broadness of the vision.
-    We don’t want to read and see and experience the same thing again and again and again. That won’t happen if we keep relying on our tropes.
-    Hollywood is telling fresh perspectives of stories.
-    Stories about a straight, white, male are getting old.
-    The gender of protagonists in movies from 2012: 65% male, 19% female, and 16% mixed ensemble.
-    The gender of protagonists in books from 2012 is much better: 43% male, 41% female, and 16% mixed ensemble.
-    The TV market is getting better, splintering, targeting small groups and bringing those to life. And they’re reaching wide audiences because of it.

Why else we should care: Video game dollar sales are slightly, steadily down from 2010.
-    Not growing.
-    Not reaching out to new audiences.
-    Probably because they’re not trying new things.
-    We don’t want video games to become a niche medium.

Furthermore: Lack of diversity in viewpoints, characterizations, plots, story structure, etc. limits the potential of games as an art form.
-    Game consumers are artistically malnourished.
-    Art that gives its power to  move us is commonality, but also diverse experiences.
-    Sexism hurts everyone.
-    It hurts men too, because the typical male protagonist presented is a man who’s physically strong, the ideal man. Marketing executives point to and justify how much money that stuff makes and assume the game will sell better with it.
-    On a professional level: Paternity leave, child care issues; sometimes men have issues that are perceived as falling in the female realm that aren’t extended to them because they’re men and not women.
-    We need more interesting characters with diverse backgrounds. It doesn’t make it easier to make them if we stick to the tropes.
-    If you like shooters, they are still making them. The number of action and shooter games offered at the launch of each new X-Box has increased.
-    Most importantly: Making more types of games doesn’t mean less of games people already like (the core game types) will decrease. Just that it makes more options available to consumers.

So, what should we do?

1.  Check our assumptions and our perceptions.
-    Look around at the crowd in this room, at the number of people here. How many are women? Turns out that there were 3 men for every 2 women were present at this panel. (Even though most attendees thought there were either more women, or that it was a 50-50 split.)
-    This is important because our perceptions of what is fair are now off.
-    Geena Davis Institute: “We just heard a fascinating and disturbing study, where they looked at the ratio of men and women in groups. And they found that if there’s 17 percent women, the men in the group think it’s 50-50. And if there’s 33 percent women, the men perceive that as there being more women in the room than men.”
-    In games, even when the lines were divided equally, the men had the more important lines. That’s the first step you have to take.
-    Use the Bechdel Test: Find a movie with two women talking and if it’s not about a man, then that passes the test. Observation. How many of them actually pass? Games pass it even less. Think about this test. Do you have women in it, do they have names, do they talk to each other? Is it about a man, a relationship, parenting, shopping? This is a good rule of thumb, the lowest bar you can clear, when dealing with diversity in video games.

2.  Read, watch, and play things made by people who aren’t like us.
-    The canon English literature: almost all of it is by men. Shapes how we write. This becomes problematic because even women learn how to write women from men because our perception has been shaped by male writers. Literary voices have been shaped by male writers. It’s been changing. The best way you can learn to write those characters is if you learn from the horse’s mouth. So, read people who aren’t like you.

3.  Learn to recognize tropes.
-    Trope: A literary or narrative device.
-    Cultures have common sets of tropes. Tropes have baggage.
-    A trope is not evil or bad. They can be useful. Just use them mindfully.
-    Do it in a way that subverts the trope, or defend to your league so they know why you’re using the trope as is.
-    Marketing wants quick story hooks.
-    The more you know what a trope is, the better you can put it into a game and sell it and make your vision happen.

4.  Ask ourselves why we like the things we like.
-    Rather than just mindlessly liking them.
-    What is it that you actually like about it? Can you get things without mindlessly importing all the details (like with pulp)?
-    The presenters aren’t saying these stories can’t be told, just that we need to think about this stuff.
-    And think about who the perceived audience is. Who is the character designed to appeal to?
-    (Aside: Google “Lawrence Croft”)
-    (Aside: Google “100 Sexiest Men Alive”. Turns out they’re not the muscle-bound men we see in video games.)

5.  Improve our work!
-    Try to be inclusive (even when we are afraid we’ll suck at it.)
-    Look over your work. Does everyone have to be (straight, white, male, etc?)
-    Make sure you interrogate yourself while you do your craft.
-    Practice “flipping” exercises with gender, orientation, race, etc. What happens if this character is a man / woman / different race / gay / trans / etc?
-    This has often resulted in stories that are more moving, more interesting.
-    Experiment with trope subversion.
-    Constantly ask yourself, is this what I want it to be, or is this just intellctiual comfort zone stuff, tropes too well worn, or The Unexpected Choice? That moment you take readers/customers in a direction where they think they know you’re going, then change trajectory: it’s important. If you do that, you’ll constantly be surprising people. And the more you do it, the less you’ll find yourselves having to revise your choices.
-    Show your work to people from different groups to critique.
-    Friends, family, people you trust. Generally you can recognize the broad strokes. But words have baggage. E.g. Calling a woman “frigid”, or an African American person “articulate”.
-    Don’t let “perfect” be the enemy of “good”.
-    Complaint from male writers who don’t know how to write women so they don’t bother trying
-    Writing anything is this: trying to make something knew, exploring the scary white page and trying to fill it up with stuff.
-    If you are not secure expressing the experience of those you don’t know much about, get to know them.

6. Address issues.
-    Support inclusivity; be an ally to undeserved groups and those who are working for change.
-    If you see it,  you don’t have to be the person being victimized to take that issue on.
-    Speak up when something is troubling.
-    Listen to the people who are telling you it’s a problem, and do something about it.
-    Address the issue vs. trying to appease the people coming to you. Not “Should I put in more women characters”, but “Fix the dialogue.”
-    Be aware. If you’re the creator, it’s hard to step back and look at what you’re doing, but it’s worth it.

When a Change Really Does You(r Story) Good (March Madness Check-In, Day 25) #WIPmadness

"Maybe you weren't ready for that ... but your kids are going to love it."

- Marty McFly, Back to the Future, Part I

I've been enjoying all of the Back to the Future references this month. Kudos to whoever came up with the idea first because it's been a lot of fun. Michael J. Fox has a special place in my heart because he's from my city, and there's even a few buildings around here with his name on it. Little known fact: did you know I have a poster of a young MJF circa 1987, urging kids to read? I think it was part of a series the American Library Association put out back then. The public library I was working at was throwing it out finally in 2007 because they had newer, shinier posters, so they let me take it. It now adorns one corner of my office, and it kind of broke my heart on Friday when two techs came by to install a new scanner and one of them said, "Who's Marty McFly?" Sigh.

So, before anything can happen to tinker with our timeline, I'd better announce another March Madness winner:

Carol Garvin!

Congratulations, Carol!

Now, back to the regularly scheduled madness. ^__^

One of the other awesome actors I had the fortune to see at Emerald City Comicon was none other than Christopher Lloyd, a.k.a. Doc Brown. He was fun to listen to. Before he began the Q&A, he mentioned something that neither me nor my husband knew: that before Michael J. Fox was chosen to play the role of Marty McFly, a significant chunk of the film was shot with a completely different actor.

Whoa. Really? That's a huge change to make for a major motion picture that far into production. But it looks like the decision paid off, because can you imagine the movies any other way?

Okay, so think about that. Have you ever made such a significant change to a writing project that you hadn't expected you'd ever make? Perhaps something that was there from the start that you'd started to ignore in revisions because it was so ingrained into the fibre of your work? Or have you began a project with one premise driving the story only to realize that no, the story needs to go somewhere else, and this thing you started with needs the boot?

One that really sticks out for me, one for the list of amusing tales later on in my writing career, is the fact that I started out writing the manuscript I'm sending to agents soon in an unsuitable POV: First-person present tense. To the point where writing in present tense came naturally to me, felt natural, and felt right. *shudders* I've learned my lesson now. This is not to say that it might work for others (case in point: Hunger Games) but it definitely wasn't meant to be for me. Turns out my characters function much better in the past tense. Realizing that mistake and fixing it was vital, because it helped me rediscover my real voice, not the voice I'd been adopting for all that time.

It was an eye-opener, but I feel so much better for it, and even more confident about my voice. Even though I basically did the equivalent with POV as was done with the actor for Marty McFly.

Marty: "Doc... what if we don't succeed?"
Doc Brown: "We must succeed."

And we will.

That's my two cents madness for the week. How about you? Thanks for checking in here, folks! Now don't forget to stop by Shari's blog tomorrow.

Nothing is Sacred

"Im ready to go wif U. I pakt mai pilla to sleep on, mai toy mice, sum string,
da rings offa da milk jugz, an two ded bugz."

 
Quick aside: Later this week I'm headed cross-continent to ConCarolinas again, which from its schedule looks to have many awesome offerings as far as writing panels go. My passport is valid this time, so getting there should be less of an issue this year. I shall return with more notes! And happy memories of seeing many of my Magical Words friends and mentors, of course. I'm sooo excited right now!

Now, onto the rest of the post.

* * *

So I've been revising. Still. Bit by bit, honestly. I'm going slowly partly because I want to be sure I properly address the issues that I've realized must be addressed, and partly because I keep learning new ways to make the story stronger. (In particular, I'm enjoying Faith Hunter's "Top Ten (Okay Eleven) Things You Should Know About Your Own Book" series. Such a wealth of information that has changed my story for the better.)

And since I've been revising seriously since the end of October (NaNoWriMo excepted), one truth keeps coming back to me.

Nothing is sacred.

I'm serious. I think I've hinted at this before, but I'm going to say it again, here, just to make the lesson clear: when it comes to revising, nothing is sacred. Nothing escapes the chopping block if it needs to go.

It's easy to get attached to a certain turn of phrase, a style that seems important, a particular course of events. It's even easier to assume during revisions that these things are SET IN STONE. They can't be changed! It has to be like that, right?

Hahahahano.

The only thing that *is* sacred is the story's soul. Its heartsong. The essence that makes it the story it is. All else is negotiable. Characters, writing style, events, you name it—they don't *have* to be there. Or if they do, they don't have to be exactly as you originally imagined them.

I'm not gonna lie here: chances are, your beautiful shiny manuscript bubble will be popped, repeatedly, by well-meaning beta-readers. Usually they'll have excellent feedback. Often they'll suggest changes that make sense. They may seem like big changes. You may get frustrated. You may want to scream and rage (hopefully privately) about the feedback that rankles you. Sure, get angry. I sometimes do (privately. only privately, people).  I've heard revisions compared to the Five Stages of Grief, and rightly so.

Perhaps this post isn't very helpful, except to let you know that if you're frustrated with rewrites, you're not alone. But for me, at least, realizing that I can tell a better story if I let go and open myself up to the possibilities before me has made this stage easier to deal with. Even if, at first, it really doesn't seem like it.

Take a deep breath. It's going to be okay. Sure, it's frustrating. But if it makes for a stronger story, then isn't it worth it?

Master Class: Impossible to Put Down: Mastering the Three Levels of Story (SIWC 2011 notes)

 Last but not least, the final set of notes from the 2011 Surrey International Writer's Conference.

At this point, I'm going to add the obvious disclaimer: these notes are what *I* came away from the workshop with. They are in *no* way a substitute for the real class; you had to have been there, and being there was *so* worth it. Donald Maass is a fantastic teacher and I can't say enough about how much SIWC has done for me. That being said, this was a three-hour workshop in which I took a LOT of notes, so this is a longer-than-usual post. Enjoy!

* * *

Impossible to Put Down: Mastering the Three Levels of Story

Donald Maass

Getting published for the first time today is no more difficult than it was years ago.

But our stories need to be bigger, deeper, stronger.

Stories have inside them an iron skeleton, the essential conflict, the large problem around which the novel is built.

With that iron skeleton, the book won’t collapse.

Scene structure: scenes need to do something. There’s a goal in each scene that is either met or not. Strong scenes carry story forward.

Fiction that keeps us enthralled works on three different levels at once: the macroplot, the scene structure, and the line-by-line tension. A throbbing beat that keeps us dancing/reading, enthralled.



The First Level of Storytelling: Macro-Structure

Often Under-developed:
-    The premise – When powerfully constructed, will demand that there will be a complex and multifold story that carries everything forward.
-    The middles are woefully malnourished. – Not enough happening.
-    The setting

Whatever story you’re working on, whatever it is, think of the main protagonist of your story. What is the tough problem that your protagonist has to solve?

What would make this problem not just tough to solve, but impossible to solve? What is so enormous, so disastrous, so unsolvable that at the end your protagonist would actually fail?

What if this problem happened right away? What if the problem were impossible to solve from the outset? What if the conditions of the story were so that this was impossible for the character to fix it?
-    Coming of age: is the person in power moveable?
-    Plot driven story: when the big disaster happens – how close to the disaster can you put the opening of the story? How inevitable can you make the disaster, when there is no way to stop it?
-    Romance – all the reasons they can’t be together
-    Murder Mystery – impossible to catch the killer
-    What if you started that way?
-    Irresolvable conflict. Problems that cannot be solved. Conflicts with no solution.

Take all the characters in your story, and put them into two parties/camps. One is pro-protagonist, one is anti-protagonist.
-    What kind of history do they have? What will put them at war forever? What kind of injustice was done?
-    What grief or grievance can be so deep that it lasts for generations?
-    Those who work for your protagonist and those who work against them
-    Can you create a hatred between those who are on the side of your protagonist, and those who are not?
-    What could the protagonist have done that is unforgivable? OR, what grievance does the protagonist have that is fundamental to how they look at life? What is the ONE thing they will not stand for, that the other side has done?

The world of your story itself: What kind of world is it set in? What time/place/setting? The world of your story. People in ANY world are driven by ideas. They hold ideas dear. What are two opposing, conflicting, irreconcilable principles or ideas present in your story? What do people stand for, and how are some of those ideas in powerful conflict with each other? Tensions they can’t escape because they are where they are and in the time they find themselves? What two ideas are in conflict?
-    E.g. the Occupy meetings: being angry
-    They don’t make demands, because they hate the entire system.
-    Who’s powerfully against something? How is each camp right? Even the Germans had grievances in the 1930’s.
-    Who in the story stands solidly on each side? Who will not be moved? Who is a true believer? Who knows that they’re right? Who *is* right?
-    When you build in an irresolvable conflict, you have the premises for a lot of story.

What’s the worst thing that happens to your protagonist currently in the story? What’s the biggest setback?
-    Every bad thing that happens has a personal cost, does damage, takes something out of the character. What’s the cost to the protagonist? What does the protagonist lose?
-    Even just “belief that the world is good” or “assurance that things will turn out okay”
-    Something that gets shot to bits when bad things happen.
-    Your protagonist has therfore somehow become unhappy. What’s made them unhappy? Can you make it in some way the foundation, the very core of your protagonist’s happiness in life, that they lose?
-    What one, two or three ways can what is lost become the most important thing for your protagonist?
-    Lost: The affection of a family member? These two characters mattered to each other. How could they matter more? What is the airtight, unbreakable bond between them? What did one do for the other that could never be forgotten?
-    Lost: Piece of self/soul? Can it become a treasure, the deepest part of the character’s identity? The one part of them that will never change? What can be lost when things go wrong?
-    Have it cost the protagonist everything.
-    Need to build up whatever will be lost.
-    The terrible thing that happens: what’s the worst way that it can happen? What will twist the knife in deeper? How can it be even more devastating? Who can it affect? What’s the worst possible time for it to happen? The most public, the most humiliating, the most downright evil time/place this could happen? How can you compound this event? Can  you bring it closer to other terrible events?
-    “You like your protagonist, right? Get over that.”
-    Betrayals: Who can betray your character in the story? Are you resisting that idea? Yes, you want to do it. Who is the worst person, the one who your character thinks will never betray them? How can they betray them in the worst way?
-    Give yourself time to work out and plant the seeds of betrayal earlier in the story, so that your the reader doesn’t see it coming. Come up with three reasons why this character would betray the protagonist. How craftily can you disguise this so that when the betrayal itself happens the reader goes “Oh, of course” and the penny drops.

What’s your protagonist’s worst mistake/goof-up? Have another character for whom this mistake is unforgivable.
-    For whom would this be the breaking point, the thing that cannot be tolerated? What relationship will be broken?
-    Now you have more groundwork to lay for the middle of your book.

Is there a love in your novel that is forbidden? Or is there some way, some pair of people who love each other when they shouldn’t? Make that love impossible if you can. Not just forbidden, but impossible. What does that mean? Write it down and make it happen.

Kill someone. Whom can you kill that is not already dead? There is always room for more death. Who can die? Once you’ve picked that character, work backwards. How can you make this character more beloved, wise, warm, sweet, generous? What kind of spirit does this character bring to the world that others see and feel? What’s the best thing this character does before you kill them?

What death/disaster/misfortune has boxed your character in for life? What haunts your protagonist, has a grip on them? Write down 2-3 reasons why it’s impossible for your character to let that go, get over it. What makes that injury more personal, more inescapable, more excruciating? What keeps them up at night and makes them lose sleep? What thought will not go away for your protagonist at 2 am?

Or is there somebody else that could be cast under a spell? Why is that spell in place? Why will it never be broken? What is it about that spell? How can it be broken? Who carries a grudge? Why can’t they forget a past wrong? Can you make them a central character, impossible to avoid dealing with?

Or is their something wrong in the world, something broken, something dark and evil, something that’s cast a pall over everybody? Write it down. When you have, write down the names of more people who can be sucked into the vortex, who can be affected and particularly how. Get specific about who and how. Then write down the names of several additional characters and the ways that they, too, will be affected by the darkness in the heart of your story.

So, you’ve done some lousy things to your protagonist. Of all of the bad things you’ve come up with in the last 45 minutes or so, what’s the one thing you haven’t thought of yet? What atomic bomb can you throw on your protagonist or blows them off the map, what unimaginable thing, what mindfuck can you throw at them? Something your protagonist hasn’t seen coming. What is it? If you feel bad about doing this to your protagonist, remember: Your protagonist is not real. Ultimately it’s going to come out okay (maybe)

Regardless of what you’re writing, what is it that your character wants to become? What do they aspire to? What is unfinished, undone? What gets in the way? Now, what else can get in the way?
Janni: wants to be a healer, not a queen falls in love with Brennant

Then, write down what they’re going to do when they find out that they’re not going to become the person they want to be. What relationships change? What goals change?

The story’s going somewhere. Close down that road. Close it off. They can’t get where they’re trying to go, period. When does your protagonist want to explode, lose it, freak out, say what’s really on their mind, does what they really want to do? Rant and rage and tell the truth to somebody’s face? What does this mean for your protagonist?
1.    What are the consequences?
2.    How do you set up the explosion?

Somewhere in the story does your character face a terrible choice, a moral dilemma?
-    Moral choice: choice between two wrongs, or two rights
-    Something has to be lost either way.
-    If you don’t have this, can you invent that choice?
-    How can you box in your protagonist, make the choice more important?
-    How can you make the consequences even bigger? Devastating to someone?
-    How can you force the choice on your protagonist? Who’s going to force them into it and how is time going to force them into it?

Imagine someone writing a story like yours, same plot, same themes. Imagine there’s a more fearless writer than you. What would this writer do with your story? What truth, what turn, what emotionally-charged event isn’t in that story yet? Write it down, because it’s going in that story now.

The big, important parts of the story, that drive the story, that have the consequences, are the foundations of the premise – now you have a story that demands that things occur.

No one expects that you’ll come to this conference with a manuscript that’s not going to change. Else what are you doing here?


The Second Level of Storytelling: The Scene

Shift focus now: to the scene.

Most novels are built of scenes. Scenes are the most powerful units. Discrete units of time when something happens.
-    Unskilled writers will write scenes sequentially.
-    It’s possible to create passages that carry the protagonists that transition the story well.

Start at a particular moment, end at a particular moment; between those two points is the scene.
Typically one point of view character.
Start somewhere, end somewhere, something happens.

Pick a scene from the middle of your novel that sucks.
-    Is there a travel scene where not much happens?
-    Is there an interview scene not very much happens?
-    Traditional fantasy: is there a stage of the journey that you wonder whether or not it should be there?
-    That blah scene that’s been there since the first draft that you’re not that sure about

Think about that scene. What circumstances actually change? What’s different at the end than was true at the beginning? A cliffhanger? Something physical? What has shifted? You wrote it because there was something you were trying to get there. What changes in that scene? Even if it’s something intangible, like a sense of progress or an understanding of self, of someone else?

Write down the precise second in that scene when the change occurs. What is it that we can see that actually shifts things for your POV character? What new information arrives? What new perception arrives? When is their insight, understanding, fear, new worry? When does the bell go ding? What is that marking event? If we could not hear their thoughts, if we could not know what they think or feel, if an objective observer was watching a videotape of that scene and could point out where things turn/go wrong/change, this is the turning point in the scene. The reason the scene is here.

So let’s fix that moment and start to do some things with it. The event, the objective thing that anyone could see or hear, how can it be made stronger, more dramatic? How can you make this turning point more unmissable?

Now imagine that there’s a chronometer running. Stop that videotape at that point and wind it back ten minutes. Now, write how this character sees themself. Who are they right now? How are things with them? What’s going on with them? What is their self-perception ten minutes before this scene happens?

If you’re stuck: write down what this character doesn’t want to tell anyone right now. What’s the thing this character would most like to fix? What is the character proud of, satisfied with about themselves? Specifically, how? In what way? Write down the one-word descriptor that your character would say to sum themselves up. Survivor? Loser? Healer?

Take the self-perception of your character 10 minutes before. Now wind the tape 10 minutes after. Ask them the same question: who are they? How do they see themself? How are they, right now, after that turning point? What has changed?

Is there a difference in self-perception for your character? What’s the inner turning point? What not just changes, but your character changes, is now different in some way?

When a scene both changes and changes the point of view character, that’s dynamic movement. It moves the character a step along in their journey/character arc/character transformation. What we’re getting at is why this scene is really here. If you can bring onto the page both the change (and make it clear) and how the character is also transforming in the course of the scene, then you have a scene that is necessary to the story, that doesn’t need to be cut, that is doing more work than before.

Scene structure: one of the most common ways in which we hear things discussed: the POV character wants something/has a goal. At this moment in time (at the scene’s start), what is your POV characer hoping for (or hoping to avoid) What do they wish will happen now, is afraid will happen now? “If I do nothing in the next [whatever the duration of the scene is], I will become/discover __”. New info & questions are good. What is your character seeking right now? What does the character want to feel? What is the goal?

Now write down three things that will suggest to the reader that the character’s wish will come about or not come about. Then write down the opposite: what’s actually going to occur.

Now, how much else can you eliminate from the scene? (4 pgs = good, 6-7 pgs is average length) Does your scene go for too long? Can you cut everything else, and pare it down to the essentials that happen? Extreme, but what if you did? A lot of what you have on those extra pages is not that essential stuff.

Basically, what a scene does to move along can be done in a fairly tight space. There is not much that is needed. Everything good that we can add to this scene is diluting the scene (atmosphere, dialogue, a clear beginning and end), but we don’t need as much.

Set the scene and bring it alive.

Flat description, even when it’s good and involves the 5 senses, can often be skipped. Readers skim those parts.

What they don’t skip is where it is set. The physical location, the time of day/year, etc. Where and when is  your scene set?

Take a look around the environment, the room, the place, and write down 3 details only your POV character would notice, that everyone else would miss.

Now write down something else: At the outset of the scene, as your charater arrives (unless you’re crafty enough to not let your character arrive) – AS THE SCENE BEGINS, take a moment to let your character soak in the environment. The place itself, minus the people. How does the place itself make this character feel right now?

How does the color of the place, the quality of the light, the shape of the place, make your character feel? Do they like it or not? Is there a conflicted answer? Is it possible that at the end of the scene, your character can feel the opposite? If not, how can they feel differently about the place (not the people, but the place)?

Write a passage conveying the sense of this place from the POV of this character.

This isn’t about setting. It’s about how the scene comes alive in the writer’s imagination. Flat description doesn’t quite work. Even descriptiveness can have a dynamic, evolving effect for the reader. You can do that even with a place. Description never has to be flat; it can be lively, create tension on the page. Explore the POV character’s perception of things and how this character experiences this place. 


Dialogue in the Scene

Imagine the most essential piece of dialogue that needs to be in the scene. With just quotation marks, no more than six or seven words per dialogue. No attibutives or incidental action, the dialogue snapping back (rattatatt dialogue).

Now this lean dialogue: is it doing the job? Is it getting the information accross, the essential exchange between the two characters? Do you really need the attributives, the twirl-the-pen action? Very often, you don’t. In fact, very often you need fewer words spoken than you might think. Very often in weak scenes, the dialogue is a mess, buried in non-dialogue.

Dialogue can do a lot of work, can move a scene along rapidly and efficiently, be a powerful tool if you need it to be.

Here’s how to work on it: take out everything you don’t need. Take a passage of exposition, thoughts and feelings, turn it into dialogue. Take it out of the character’s head.

Write a single sentence that summarizes what happens in this scene.

If in an outline, write it in the present tense. If in the present tense, write in the presnt tense, in the past then write in the past – summarize this scene in the same tense you write it in.

In the actual manuscript, could you subsitute the sentence you just wrote for the scene? If you can,  your scene isn’t doing enough yet. If it’s really that blah, sometimes you can just cut it and summarize it or make it a transition. Sometimes when we’re having trouble with a scene, we just don’t need it. If too much else is going on in that scene, then yay! You have a functional scene.

Sometimes, revision means revolution.


The Third Level of Storytelling: Microtension

Line-by-line tension. What makes the book a page-turner. What makes it impossible to put down because we’re reading everything.

Doesn’t work every time in every line on every page, but can be useful to put it into

Quiet tension, simmering tension, under-the-surface tension

Principles to keep in mind:
-    In dialogue: how can  you make the two speakers more hostile to each other, even if they’re friends and on the same team? How can you ratchet up the friction, the uneasiness, the hostility, the worry, even if they love each other? Once you’ve decided what at this moment has these two in conflict with each other, push it up another degree: how can that tension/hostility/worry/anger/need/resistance get into what they’re saying to each other? How can we feel it through the way they’re using the words they’re speaking to each other?
-    Try rewriting that ratattatt dialogue as an exchange of insults. There is no exchange of dialogue that cannot become more insulting. Insults are the easiest way to get friction going with each other. Have you ever been snide with a good friend of each other? If it’s out of character, well, it’s in character now. There’s friction in how they’re talking to each other. Not from the incidental action or the adjectives. Have the characters take things more personally. The same thing is being said, not violating or adding anything new to the characters, but we’re adding tension. Make the reader unsure of what’s going to happen, the next thing on the page.
-    What is one piece of action that occurs in this blah scene? Some kind of action in this scene if it’s worth keeping. Look at this action: write out the action, as it’s going to occur. It doesn’t need to be big or dramatic, it could be as simple as walking across the room – something physical we can see happening, moving.
-    How can we add more tension to this action?
-    Tension is what creates uncertainty/uneasiness/discomfort/a question/mild apprehension/off-balance in the mind of the reader. What creates tension? What makes the reader want to know what happens next?
-    All that has to happen is the movement. Add tension words to the movement, but even that doesn’t help. The action itself, whatever it is, does not create tension, nor does ramping up the action or the descriptor words. BUT, what does the POV character feel about that action? What does the character think? Can you have a reversal, create a shift in the thinking, a disconnect, a change, a contradiction to what the POV character felt before? Create dissonance in the mind of the reader. That dissonance is the uncertainty in the mind of the reader, and the reader reads it so fast and feels it before they can articulate it and are on the next thing on the page. There is a conflict that needs resolution. Only way to get it? Read the next thing on the page.
-    Thoughts and feelings on the page don’t necessarily create tension. Restating the obvious doesnt make it richer. It only turns it over again.
-    Exposition creates tension when it creates conflicting feelings at war with each other.
-    Pick up an old favorite novel, or something you haven’t read yet, and read it with an eye to how the author’s creating tension. Pay attention to where you read avidly, where you skip, etc. Where you read is not guns, glamour, it’s the tension created between people and inside them that is what keeps the reader reading.
-    Trend: 3rd person is becoming more limited, seeing as the character does. Passages of authorial writing are becoming increasingly rare. Tension really resides in conflicting and contrasting emotion.
-    “guts twisted in regret” is primary emotion; “picked a rose and paid for it, knowing he would never give it to someone” is more subtle.

Tension exercise: Throw your manuscript in the air so it’s truly out of order, then put it in the drawer for two months, then re-read the random pages so there’s truly tension on every page.

“A Reliable Wife” – First chapter involves the character just standing on a train station platform. But the inner conflict, the tension, is what drives the character. “hardly a damn thing happens, but the book is so rife with tension”.

What drives your character? How can you build a character and story so rife with tension that it drives the reader?

These are the three levels of tension that make the novel engrossing, gripping, powerful.

Character development, character arcs. “The inner journey” later this conference. [Note from Laura: Unfortunately, I missed this class. I think I was occupied pitching SOTS to an agent.]

Lastly, 5 senses is a bit of an outdated recommendation: don’t just go for flat description. Go for dissonance and tension and not purple prose. Go for subtle. Create tension internally in the character.

* * *

Donald Maass has a new book out very soon: Writing 21st Century Fiction (writing about the death of genre, or at least the death of genre thinking and that genre crutches will be thrown away, about the conjunction of literary fiction and commercial fiction, how the NYT bestseller list has changed yet again, about books that have been selling well for weeks and weeks on end and every one of them is published originally as literary fiction, and what is wrong with this picture? Because they marry the best of what commercial fiction does and the best of what literary fiction does. Each group has something the other group needs. He’s reframing “plot” for literary writers and “lovely writing” for genre writers/storytellers; about the marriage of great storytelling and beautiful writing).