A horse with no name

I’ve been playing with the idea of self-publishing "Honest, the Martian Ate Your Dog" again. In considering the process and what needed to be done, I also thought about doing the cover myself. Of course, me being the kind of person I am, thinking about doing the cover meant that I went overboard on the whole idea and started collecting 3D objects and images and meshes and what not even before I had actually figured out what I was going to do.

In the middle of all of this (and learning about various 3D software to boot), I thought, "Hey, why not do a comic strip about Normal and Johnny?" In case you’re wondering, Normal and Johnny are two of the characters from "Honest" :p There was only one problem, I hadn’t really gotten everything together for doing the comic yet. Being the impatient type, I wasn’t going to let that stop me. So instead of a comic about Normal and Johnny, I came up with a cartoon which involved (of all things) a crash test dummy and a scorpion 🙂

I made two versions of the cartoon – one for Simon Haynes, because he’s such a great guy, about his Hal Spacejock and the other my original idea for the cartoon. As to whether it’s any good, you can judge for yourself :p

[pg-image src="http://farook.org/images/Desert1.jpg" caption="Cartoon – Hal Spacejock version"] [pg-image src="http://farook.org/images/Desert2.jpg" caption="Cartoon – original version"]

Hal Spacejock Support Crew

Simon Haynes (yes, the same guy I’ve talked about a couple of times before :p) has got a rather nifty marketing idea over on his blog 🙂 Given that he’s already given me one of his books for free (join his contests) and I’m in the running for a copy of his other book(s), I figured I might as well join the support crew – you know what they say, if you can’t get your own book published, help somebody else market theirs :p

Critical eye for the writer guy

As many a publisher’s site will tell you, if you are done with your manuscript, then you should consider working with an online critique group to further polish your manuscript. But does a critique group actually help you? Personally, I believe that depends on the kind of critter that you are lucky (or unlucky) enough to get.

When Laurie first suggested that I try a crit group, we both looked around a bit and settled on one. They suggested that you read the Turkey City Lexicon. We both did that. And then we started critting. Our first critting experience came from the work we did on that particular crit group. However, we left soon after because we didn’t agree with their particular methodology.

Since then, I’ve been critting manuscripts for different people on a one-on-one basis. I’ve slowly been formulating my own ideas about crits and what is useful to me personally and what is not. I’ve also seen the critting styles of various people and have come to formulate some theories as to the different styles out there.

One thing I’ve come to notice is that there are a lot of "professional" critters out there – people who seem to soullessly follow the "rules" of writing and look for adherence to the rules or the breaking of the rules. The story does not matter to them. What matters to them are these amorphous rules. The problem is, most of these rules, while good rules if followed with a smidgen of common sense, become an albatross around your neck (and on the figurative neck of your work) if you stick to them mindlessly. For instance, I had a critter tell me that I should take a chunk of backstory which comes out in a conversation between two characters and have that whole backstory be the start of my story because the conversation was "telling" and he wanted me to "show" the whole thing. Personally, I don’t think it would have added any value to my story whatsoever to do it that way – sure, it would have made the story about forty pages longer but it would have started at a point where nothing much was happening and would have made for a much less interesting opening.

There, I believe the critter was simply looking for an excuse to pinpoint the "show don’t tell" rule – he wasn’t looking at the overall story. This is the problem with some critters. I’ve come to appreciate those critters who love the story. They will read your book not out of a sense of obligation but because they enjoy the story. If they don’t enjoy it, they tell you "hey, I don’t like this one" and that is fine – that at least lets you know what you’re doing wrong.

Face it, the reader is not going to be reading your novel looking to see if you tell instead of show, or if you use too many adverbs or if you head hop. (Mind you, I’m not saying that these rules aren’t important – they are and you should look out for these things when you’re writing) But when I look for crits, what’s important to me is to know if the story and the characters grab the reader, if they keep you engaged and what points in the story draw you out of the story. This is what is most important to me. Of course, what you want might be totally different. I guess the bottomline is, find critters who can give you the kind of feedback you need, not ones who just crit for the sake of critting 🙂

Time flies and fruit flies :p

I thought I had not updated this blog only for a couple of days but it turns out that it’s been almost a week! Man, how time flies :p

Unfortunately, I’ve not been doing much in the way of writing the last week or so. It’s been working on one computer project after another with not much time devoted to writing or reading about writing. The good thing is that I’m hoping that I’ll come out of this period away from writing and be more refreshed to continue work on my current novel. But then again, the break might just serve to do the opposite, make me so lazy that I won’t want to write. You never know :p

One good thing did happen to me recently – I won something! I never ever win stuff – except of course for the scams where you always win something and then find that you have to pay for it :p But Simon Haynes has been running a bunch of contests over at his Hal Spacejock blog, giving away copies of books in his Hal Spacejock series. I’ve been fascinated by Simon and his road to publication ever since I stumbled across his site a while back. He seems to be doing really great with his Hal series and I’m really happy for him. But what made me even happier was snagging a copy of Hal book one in one of his contests! I’m over the moon actually :p I believe Simon is planning to give more books away in the future and so you might want to keep an eye on his blog – besides, it’s a good read 🙂

Voint of pew – the spew

So continuing on from yesterday, let us delve further into point of view (POV) when writing and editing a novel. I mentioned yesterday that a story could get a bit stale if written in first person POV because you see everything through one person’s eyes, your impressions of the world that the character inhabits are formed based on the POV characters impressions and opinions. This could lead to a slightly one-sided story. According to "Self-Editing for Fiction Writers", some writers get around this by having their novel be first-person POV but have several different characters tell the story over the course of the book. Another gimmick (and one which is probably financially lucrative) is to tell the same story through the eyes of different characters as several different books :p

I thought that one classic example of this would be Piers Anthony‘s Incarnations of Immortality series since I seemed to recall that this was the same story told through different characters. However, on looking it up, it appears as if I might have been mistaken. Another example that I can vouch for is Gordon R. Dickson‘s "Final Encyclopedia" and its counterparts, "Young Bleys" and "Other". The latter two novels show basically the same events that took place in "Final Encyclopedia" but from the perspective of the antagonist of the main character in "Final Encyclopedia". While events do tend to repeat, you still find yourself fascinated because of the completely opposite viewpoint of events and people 🙂

Of course, there are also other reasons for using (or not using) first-person POV. If you write in first-person, all your reader can see and know comes from what the POV character knows. This is a good way to do a whodunnit for instance because the reader is kept in the dark till the main character discovers the mastermind behind the murder.

One thing that goes hand in hand with POV is language. Depending on the POV that you’re using, you have to be very careful about the language that you use. Is your POV character an illiterate villager who has just arrived in the big city? If so, you can’t have him describing the things that he sees in the city (when you’re in his viewpoint) with precision and in four or five syllabic sentences. Each characters language and mode of speech is shaped by their background, upbringing and history. So you have to think about how that particular person would speak when you start writing in their viewpoint.

POV is probably one of the most complex (and sometimes hard to pin down) parts of successfully writing a novel/story. There is a lot more that I can talk about with regards to POV but I know that "Self-Editing for Fiction Writers" comes back to the same topic from different angles in various other topics in the book. So we’ll probably come back to this topic again 🙂

Voint of pew

It’s back to "Self-Editing for Fiction Writers" today and we take a look at "Point of View" – or rather, what I learnt about point of view from the book 🙂 So let’s plunge in …

When I first wrote "Honest, the Martian Ate Your Dog", I had a real problem with point of view :p I’d have one scene where things would switch between the viewpoints of two different characters. This concept, called head-hopping, is illustrated with a rather compelling example from Larry McMurtry’s "Lonesome Dove" in the opening to the chapter on point of view (POV) in "Self-Editing for Fiction Writers". Since I don’t know if I can reproduce even excerpts from other writers’ works (I don’t believe I can – not without permission …) I will have to rely on a much less effective method to illustrate the point. Basically, I will have to tell you how it works rather than show you (remember show vs. tell? :p)

But I guess I should draw back for a moment and get into the whole point of view thing first (even though anybody who’s a writer already knows all of this to begin with :p). Basically, point of view deals with the viewpoint that you present to the reader. Is the story told from the viewpoint of a particular character as the action unfolds? If so, this would be first-person POV as opposed to a story told from an external perspective looking in on the action taking place, which would be third-person POV. Even in third-person POV, you have to have one point of view character but the POV character can change from scene to scene. When the POV character switches from person to person within a given scene, that’s when head hopping takes place.

Then there is the omniscient POV, which is a whole another ballgame. I don’t think I want to get into that for the moment 🙂 Some books/authorities on writing get into a whole list of POVs. I believe I read somewhere that certain books list twenty-six different flavours of POV. But I believe if you break it all down, the basics come down to first-person, third-person or omniscient.

Of the above, first-person is probably the easiest one to write because it goes something like "I did this, I did that". I believe the one example that sticks most prominently in my mind for first-person POV is R. D. Blackmore’s "Lorna Doone" – that book has such a strong first-person voice that I still remember the voice even after about thirty years of first reading it 🙂 Another very popular example is of course, the Sherlock Holmes novels and stories which are all told in the POV of Dr. Watson.

The advantage to first-person POV? It’s the fact that the narrative voice is very intimate – it’s somebody telling their story to you personally. Third-person POV by comparison feels a lot more distant but the problem with first-person is the fact that you have to sustain the viewpoint character for the length of an entire novel. The character has to be strong and memorable and the reader has to be able to identify with the character enough to keep reading. With third-person, this becomes easier because you can draw on several different characters to provide viewpoints as you go along and there is a bigger pool of story tellers that you can get your reader involved with 🙂 The main thing to watch out for with third-person is head-hopping. Even in third person, readers feel more comfortable going through a scene with one POV character. When you start showing the thoughts and emotions of multiple characters in a third-person POV scene, people are unsure as to which characters eyes they’re witnessing the scene and this in turn tends to draw them out of the story.

There is much more on the subject of point of view but probably one entry is not going to be enough to cover it all. So I will try to continue on the same topic tomorrow 🙂

Building character

In our second foray into the lessons learnt from "Self-Editing for Fiction Writers" let us look at what chapter two, "Characterization and Exposition" taught me so that in turn, perhaps you can glean something too 🙂

A good story needs good characters. People that you can relate to, or sympathize with or just be plain curious about. The trick however is in creating a good character and breathing life into them so that they actually become interesting enough to grab (and hold) your attention. This is where characterization comes in 🙂 The problem of course is in the "how".

You can start with a long narrative description which describes your character from the tiniest hair follicle on their head and down to the gum stuck to their shoe, but is that going to make a character believable? More importantly, is all of that necessary to the story? Does it make the reader like your character more?

Most of the time, the long narrative descriptions just bore a reader to tears and takes them out of the story. Besides, while all that information is certainly dumped, not much of it might get picked up unless written well. The whole process goes much better if you go back to basics and show what the person is like rather than telling the reader. Make the reader work to understand the character. Get him/her involved in the character from the get go. Don’t treat the reader as if they were somebody who needed to be spoonfed every last bit of information and they will reward you by sticking with you 🙂

So how do you do that? One of the best methods is to bring out the character’s character gradually, through a succession of scenes. Is your character a slob? Then don’t say that s/he is a slob, show it through a scene where his/her mother comes calling and is appalled at the dishes stacked up to the ceiling in the kitchen and the pile of dirty laundry that she has to push out of the way before she can even get into the apartment. It works better and it also humanizes your character 🙂

The writer’s show

As I mentioned yesterday, I decided to write down, in my own words, what I learnt from "Self-Editing for Fiction Writers" so that the ideas become much better solidified in my own mind and also helps somebody else who might not be so clear about these core concepts. In that vein, let’s tackle the first one, "show, don’t tell".

This was a concept which used to frequently confuse me. When I said a character "looked confused", I’d think that I was showing it because I could immediately start picturing somebody looking confused :p However, I realized that I was getting entangled in semantics and that the concept of "show, don’t tell" was about not telling how somebody felt or looked or acted but rather, letting the reader draw a mental picture which leads them to conclude how the character feels by way of description. While it may sound like an advertisement, I have to add that I came to this realization only after reading "Self-Editing for Fiction Writers" :p

The technique to employ is rather easy and it makes sense too 🙂 Instead of spoon-feeding your reader every drop of information in long narrative passages where you basically describe a person, a situation or a society, you use conversation or interaction amongst a few people to bring out the same information but not directly. For instance, you can have a long passage about how wan and ill Katy looked and go into minute detail about the translucence of her skin, the way her body was racked by coughs etc. Or, you could have a couple of Katy’s friends talking in concern about Katy and how she hasn’t been looking too well lately. The latter technique might end up being slightly longer but it also gives you a much better sense of immediacy of being in the room with the friends while they discuss Katy and her health problems. Basically, it draws you into the story and that’s what we all want as writers, right? 🙂

The cut and chop of fiction

When I first began writing my novel, I thought editing consisted merely of going back through the manuscript afterwards and catching typos and tightening up the phrasing a bit here and there. Shows how much I knew :p I believe I did only that on my first pass over my novel. But then again, that was right after I’d finished writing the novel. I then laid it aside for a couple of months and went back to it and discovered that there was a lot more that needed doing. So I made another pass. I then thought, "This is it, I’m done".

But recently, about a year after the first novel and about 10,000 words into my second novel, I’ve been considering doing a third pass. As I write the second novel, I begin to see what was wrong in the way certain things were done on the first. I want to tighten up the plot, change viewpoints and eliminate some of the really convoluted sentences that I’m prone to. So, I began reading a book which would help me, "Self-Editing for Fiction Writers" by Renni Browne and Dave King.

Actually, Laurie discovered the book and got it. I simply began reading it after she got it :p I wasn’t sure how much the book would help me at first. I am only at the fifth or sixth chapter at the moment but I’m sold now 🙂 The biggest plus point I see to the book is that it doesn’t deal with abstracts. It doesn’t say this is how you should edit and leave it to you to find the specifics. Instead, it deals with concrete examples in almost every page. Not only that, at the end of each chapter, it has a checklist which might be useful to you when going through your own book. Adding to that are the exercises at the end of each chapter which tests what you’ve just learnt.

So far, I’ve learnt about show and tell, characterization and exposition, point of view, proportion and dialogue mechanics. Sure, if you write, you’ve probably heard of all of this (or at least some of this) at one time or another. I had heard about these too. But the book actually made me aware of them as entities/concepts instead of abstracts 🙂 For instance, I’ve always been told "show, don’t tell" but when writing, I’d sometimes be a bit confused as to what was showing and what was telling. I realized about the confusion and how the confusion came to be when I read the chapter on "show and tell" as well as "dialogue mechanics". In fact, just a few chapters into the book, I’m already planning a lot more extensive edits to my first novel than I’d originally planned :p

I find the book so useful that I’m wondering if I should perhaps write a few blog entries outlining what I’ve learnt from the book. It will help me solidify the concepts better in my own mind and perhaps it might help somebody else too. I’ll have to think about it …

Styles and stances

Just what I feared has come to pass and that too without me even noticing it :p The gaps between my blog entries are growing longer again. Of course, I’ve been rather busy the last few days. I’m now in the process of doing two crits of two different novels, editing "Honest" as and when necessary (though not doing the major re-write that I’m beginning to think is inevitable) and also working on my new novel, "The Hunt for ‘Read October’". Weird name? Yeah, it is but it’s an even weirder story :p

In fact, "Hunt" is actually proceeding along fairly well. I get about 2-3 pages a day done and since the biggest challenge in writing is to apply yourself consistently, I’ve been very careful to be sure that I meet my daily quota. When I wrote "Honest", I stuck to a kind of artificial limitation – I wanted to ensure that a scene was at least 8 pages long – at this point, I’m not really sure why :p I think it had something to do with Gordon R. Dickson and "The Final Encyclopedia" where, if I’m not mistaken, he stuck to 8 or 10 pages per chapter consistently, chapter after chapter. And it was a huge book too!

Of course, trying to ensure that a scene is a particular length imposes more strain on you when trying to write because then you have to constantly watch yourself or start thinking about how to make a scene longer if it turns out to be too short. With "Hunt" I simply went with the flow. The scenes are actually much shorter and I write them as they come and move on. I’ve found that things flow much more smoothly this way. I might even have chapter breaks on this one after I’m done, I’m not sure yet. Of course, there are like ten scenes to a chapter and the chapters will be about 20-30 pages long and so I’m not sure if chapters are the best way to go but at least, this book is beginning to have better structure than the last one 🙂