Jozette's Desk

Describing Place and Character

 

I know I have more or less dwelled on this subject before, but it is so important to grab the reader right on the first page of your story. Would the following grab your interest?

 

Molly wore a white dress with tiny little purple carnations all over it. The dress had little gold filigree buttons running the length of the front. A tight purple band of a collar wrapped around her neck.  Molly’s eyes were deep blue, her hair was auburn. She wore high-heeled red shoes. One of her lower middle teeth was missing. She was five foot four inches tall and weighed 145 pounds. A plumpy face and too large ears did her no favor.

 

Isn’t that boring reading?

 

Consider the following: Remember, this is the first page of your novel.

 

A tear slowly fought its way from Molly’s soft blue-green eyes and found its way down her face. Most people remarked about her beautiful eyes, but it was because it was the only thing that made her stand out among the mostly dark eyed people in her small town.

As she pulled the only half-decent dress she owned over her head, Molly choked a bit and uttered an uncontrollable sob. Who else at the graduation ceremony would be wearing a hand-me-down dress from another era? She was well aware everyone would be snickering at her attempt to dress up for the occasion, but she had little choice. As Molly dropped down in the chair to pull on the faded red imitation leather shoes, she could control herself no longer and cried aloud. “Mama! Why’d you go and die and leave me all alone? What am I goin’ ta do, mama? Nobody likes me cause I’m so ugly and fat!”

 

You see, with this intro to your story’s main character, you learn that she is poorly dressed, less than pretty except for her pretty eyes and she is all alone in some desperate situation. You have partially described her and partially described her situation.

 

Again, consider the following:

 

The land lay forever flat before him, like something from a sci-fi movie. Little waves of heat shimmered off the few rocks and the endless sand, obscuring the horizon to the point of making him wonder if he had somehow been transported to another world or into another dimension. Turning in a full circle, his hand covering his eyes except for an open slit between his fingers, Tim saw a nothingness that surely went on forever. Not a blade of grass, no sort of desert plant, nothing. Nothing but more and more of nothing!  When he began his trek across this desert Tim knew he was already dead. No way for anyone to walk across this hell to safety on the other side, but he had no choice. He knew the chopper must have traveled a hundred miles into this hell before hovering and throwing him out onto the hot sand, but he had to keep moving. The only thing that might keep him alive was his rage against and total desire to kill the bastard that did this to him.

 

I believe this might create enough interest to get the reader to turn the page, even though you know practically nothing of this character. Is he the good guy or bad guy? Who did this to him and why?  Creating questions in the reader’s mind make him or her turn the page and that is of the utmost importance.

 

 

 

Creating and keeping tabs on your characters.

The type stories I write require quite a few different characters.  I can usually keep a pretty good track of who is who and what they are doing, but if you do not work on a story every day for some time, it is very easy to forget what a character was doing last, or where he or she was etc.

One of the easy ways to go back and look at a particular character is to create most of your characters before you start writing. But, remember, your reader likes surprises. Without sudden changes and new info about a character, or without introducing a new character into the story, the reading can be boring, or at best, average.  I know what works for one person might not work for another, but I thought I’d tell you what works for me.  I create mostly in my mind where the story is going to go, but never commit to any particular end to the story or any particular need for a character to remain in the story for long.

When I first envision a story, I think about the story and characters I might want to use for some time.  I enjoy writing short stories and I believe it is a good way to create your characters for a novel.  If I have a main character in mind, let’s say a CIA agent, I might write a short story about him getting the best of the bad guy, or perhaps the story will end with the bad guy still on the loose, but his original ploy foiled.  I might turn around and write a short story with the bad guy as the main character, so I can get to know him – how he looks, how he thinks, what he plans to do etc.  Even though this method isn’t necessary, it can be fun and you will definitely know your characters pretty well before you begin your novel. And, you can always refer back to these stories as you write your big book.

As I said, if your character comes in and out of the story, it is sometimes hard to remember what the last scene was in which he appeared and where it is in your story. The other thing I usually do is create a symbol for each character.  For example, Sam Lord is a ♥ His good buddy Jonathan is a ☺ his main lover, Leslie is a ♫. In my novel, Sam Lord, King of Hearts, There are many, many characters, some major and some minor, so it is important that I can easily go back to where I left a character.

Now, if I need to go back and see what Jonathan was doing when last I wrote about him, I just go to the beginning of the story and do a search for ☺ I also put his symbol at the end of the passage where he is the main figure.  This way, I can quickly scan through to the end of his last scene and know where it stops. As I said, what works for one person might not be for another, but this method of keeping track of your characters is very easy to use.

If there are a goodly number of people in your story, you might want to create a short profile of each character and include such things as physical description, personality type, where they grew up, any idiosyncrasies they might have, where they will fit into your story,… well, you get the idea.  I have never worked with an outline or chapter-by-chapter plan of any kind.  There are good things and bad things about using a complete story outline. The detrimental thing about an outline is it tends to subconsciously tie you to the story as outlined.  This is fine if you are absolutely positive about your story, but it leaves little room for surprises.  And, a surprise for your readers is an exciting thing.  I prefer a mini-outline if an outline at all. Just notes about the story, with no particular place for each of the things listed to happen.  For some, it is hard to write without an outline and, for them, it is fine.  I like to be surprised by an idea that pops into my head as I’m writing a scene.  It is like a story or a movie, where all the way through you know who the good guy is and you love him. BUT! All of a sudden, you find he is the bad guy.

I watched a movie on HBO the other night I loved.  Even though, because I am a writer, I saw the change coming, it was great when the girl one guy was supposed to marry, even though he loved another, fell in love with his brother.  The girl he really loved was supposed to marry someone else, but at the last minute, she realized she loved the main character, so everyone except a lawyer jerk was happy in the end.  It was a well-written story, turned into a movie. If it had been about a man and a woman in love and they do get married, even though they had fallen out of love with one another, then what?  Would they live unhappily ever after?  (Lousy story.)

So, know who your main character or characters are before you write, but don’t tie yourself down!  Good writing to you…

 

 

 

 

 
Do You Have to Follow Rules?

           by Bill MacWithey 

Do you remember all the rules you were taught in English class?  Do you follow them?  Should you?  I worked on a dissertation for a PhD a while back and the rules you have to use in writing your dissertation are unbelievably complicated.  Not that the committee approving or disapproving your dissertation gives a darn to a large extent, but it is just the way it is.  Rule after rule after rule.  If I had to write non-fiction the rest of my life, I’d end it right here and now.

Rules are made to be broken when writing fiction and, being one who enjoys traveling his own path and not being tied to the same old path day after day, I say RULES be damned!

Of course, I do not mean to throw the rule book out the window.  After all, we should know where a comma is needed and where it should be eliminated in any sort of writing.  Why?  Because we want our readers to read right through a sentence, a paragraph, a chapter and our entire book without ever having to go back and read a sentence twice to figure out what we are say.  I believe I have mentioned before that the easy way to tell if your sentences are readable and understandable the first time it is read is to read your work aloud.  If you never stutter on a sentence or have to stop and read it over, you have conquered one big problem.  But that is not the rule I want to write about.

It seems there are all these rules about point of view etc that are not only sometimes hard to understand, but even harder to follow.  If the story is written from the view of a person involved in the story, they are telling the story.  But, how does that person tell parts of the story when they are not present?  “In the first person” can be hard to write.  We are told we should never change the point of view.  WHAT?  Guess what?  Tom Clancy could never have written a single book.  He writes from what I call the author’s point of view.  The person writing the story is omnipotent. He/She is in charge!

In most of my writing, the scene changes over and over from place to place, with different characters speaking etc.  Sure, I have a main character or two, or three, but they can’t be everywhere at once.  I usually have so many characters enter into my stories that I have to make a list of their names and who they are etc.  But think about this; while it might take me three months to write a 450 page novel and a month to clean it up with editing and rewriting, the reader will spend but a few hours reading it.  The reader can remember all the characters for that long; who they are and what they are about, the good guys, the bad guys.  As writers, we sometimes tend to keep the cast of characters to a minimum so as not to confuse ourselves.

Personally, I like a larger cast of characters in the stories I read.  If you have abut an antagonist and a protagonist in a story and the reader isn’t sold on one or the other of them, well…they go to the net book on the shelf.  But, the larger the cast, the more you have to break the rules.

But, you must be careful how you break the rules.  Here is an example of what not to do;

John looked at Mary and thought about how great a time they had last night.  Mary was thinking about how dissatisfied she was with John’s performance.  Who in the heck’s point of view is it?  In two sentences, we are inside the head of two characters, as if they were the main point of view.  Better to be written; John look at Mary and thought about what a great time they had last night and wondered if she really had a good time.  From the smile on her face, he thought she did, but he had no way to know she thought it was a terrible evening the night before.

But suppose Mary is talking to her friend about her evening with John.  Now, whose point of view have you written?  That’s why I like to write in the third person.  It is my point of view and I can go wherever I like, have characters thinking or speaking in any place they happen to be and change to other characters, other scenes and other locations.

Mary smiled at him and he would have been surprised to know what she was thinking. That was one of the most boring dates I have ever had.

If you write in the first person, you are stuck with beginning too many sentences with “I” and you have to write everything from an “I” point of view.

Change of subject; there are many ways to break the rules established by our English lessons without going too far out in left field.  The actual thing you put into your page can be quite distracting to the reader.  Using a funky font is one.  Using underlining for emphasis is another.  Using all capitals to show yelling or screaming is bad.  Italicizing a person’s thoughts is good.  Once the reader sees a character’s thoughts in italics, they know through the rest of the book that italics means it is the thoughts of the person and not speech.  The use of the same word to start many sentences is boring and poor writing unless the reader understands it.  In dialogue, starting a number of sentences with the same word can be effective; “I don’t give a damned!  I want you out of here!  I don’t ever want to see you again!  I hate you!”

Formatting of your work is a major item.  You can have an excellent story, very effective writing, but if you have it formatted in a strange manner no one will look at it.  I have received work that was so badly formatted it would drive you up the wall.  Like, change of margins from page to page – change of font from page to page – bold words here and there for emphasis – I could go on and on.  The very best thing to do as far as formatting, font, margins etc is to look at a published book off the shelf of a book store.  Try to make your formatting etc as close to that as you can.

Which brings me to answer a question many people have asked me in regards to publishing their book for them; “My manuscript is double spaced and 420 pages.  How many pages will that be in your 6x9 paper back book?”  Here is an easy way to find out and a tip on formatting you might not know.  First, change it to single spacing.  Then, put your cursor at the bottom left corner of a page with the arrow showing as your cursor.  Double left click and a window will appear.  In that window, change the margins to 2 inches on both sides, top margin 1 ½ inches and bottom margin to 3 inches. Then click okay and your manuscript will be changed to those parameters automatically.  It will take a few seconds for it to change all the way to the last page, but you can then see how many pages you have.  That will be real close to the number of pages in a finished book.

If you would like to know what your finished book will cost to have printed, send me an email with the info on that number of pages and I can give you an exact quote.

Until next time, check out my websites at http://www.booksbybill.com and http://www.acclaimpublishers.com   And, good writing!

 

 

Words Through the Time Machine

By Bill MacWithey

 
The following is an excerpt from a book I am creating titled: A Funny Thing Happened on The Way to Adulthood. Why this excerpt? If you are writing a novel set back in the years of WWII, or the years following (forties, fifties, sixties) and you are not of an advanced age, this short excerpt might give you a bit more insight into that era.

 

I wonder how many people who might read this remember any or all of the following: fender skirts. This term, along with many, many others has disappeared from our vocabulary, mostly because they no longer exist except as they might apply to someone restoring a vehicle or something of that sort from the past. How many of you know what curb feelers are? How about love knobs, also known as knuckle busters? These were those knobs that turn and were mounted on a steering wheel to accommodate driving with your right arm around your lover’s shoulder, so you only had one hand free to steer. Many younger folks even moved the gearshift from the right side of the steering column to the left side for the same reason. Of course, now the shifting pattern was opposite of what it used to be and could confuse the hell out of someone not used to using the left hand shifter. What a boon to lovers when the automatic transmission became the most used mode for shifting gears!

Anyone remember continental kits? They fastened to the rear bumper and covered a spare tire. When you slapped one of these on the back of your buggy, it was supposed to make it look like the wealthy folks’ Lincoln Continental.

Somewhere along the line, the names of things change. Emergency brakes gave way to parking brake. The very term emergency brake meant it was to be used in the event your regular breaks didn’t hold when you tried to stop. You could grab the emergency brake and pull it in the hopes that it would stop you before you hit your dad’s mailbox or some other important structure, person, place or thing. That made the term more exciting: “Holy turd buckets, Batman...the brakes went out! What’ll I do???”

Okay, so perhaps that is a bit melodramatic. But, when did the gas pedal or sometimes foot pedal become the accelerator? Heck, you can’t even legally say, “Put the pedal to the metal” anymore, because there is carpet two inches thick covering the darned metal. Can’t you just hear the Lone Ranger saying, “Hey, there, Tonto, my faithful Indian companion, put the accelerator to the carpet?”

How many have heard about a running board? Cars and trucks all used to have a running board. This has been replaced by a little strip of plastic that resides under the car door to cover the edge of that two inch thick carpet. It was great fun as a young teenager to stand on the running board of a fast moving truck, hanging on for dear life, just to prove you had guts.

But, enough about cars. A very common phrase in the old days was store-bought. Store bought had a ring of wealth and luxury to it, because most working folks made a lot of what they needed: home-made bread, home-made clothes, home-made candy, and home-made ice cream. The list could go on and on, but suffice it to say, there are very few things that aren’t store bought these days.

Back in the good old days coast-to-coast had a special meaning: something was all the way across our country! Wow! That was an unimaginable distance!  Today, we go to the moon and beyond. Enough said.

Wall-to-wall was another exciting term used as people became more affluent and could throw out the worn out old throw rugs and cover the wooden floors all the way from one wall to the other with carpet! Today, you find people ripping out that old wall-to-wall carpeting and restoring the beauty of those solid wood floors.

On the human level, there are many things we used to say that are phrases seldom used these days.  In a family way....today, we use a term that was almost considered vulgar in past times: PREGNANT. Or, among many young people, they get knocked up. I’ve never really understood that term and wonder who first coined it and why. Of course, in the good old days we spoke mainly of an upcoming visit by the stork.

Also having to do with the human body, brassiere has mostly been replaced with bra. We called most ladies underwear the Unmentionables. Today, a younger person would think you were speaking of a TV show. “Hey, have you watched that new show, The Unmentionables?”

We used to go to the picture show to see a movie. Today, we are just going to the movies. I suppose we’ll see a picture show there.

Do you know what a percolator is? Coffee once was brewed by putting coffee grounds and water in a pan and boiling it. Because that pan (or pot) became so stained and coated with the oil that comes from coffee beans, it was called the coffee pot. Then, someone many years ago invented the percolator. When you say it or read it slowly, it seems a funny sort of word. Most multiple syllable words can be taken apart to figure out what it means, but percolator? That old fashioned coffee pot you had to put on a burner was the first percolator. Then, along came another genius, who put a tiny electric stove right on the bottom of the darned percolator and it soon became known as a coffee pot once more. In most homes, we now have a Bunn coffee maker, or a Mister Coffee. Mine not only makes coffee with that tiny built in electric stove, but it turns itself on and off all by itself. Of course, if you forget to put the water in its little reservoir, as I sometimes do, forget your morning coffee. You’ll have to wait a whole five minutes for it to brew. Horrible! But, I suppose it beats having to get up, build a wood fire in a cook stove and wait for it to get burning well, go outside in freezing weather and pump water from a well into the coffee pot, put the coffee in the metal basket and wait twenty minutes for it to “perk.”

Do you remember many of the advertising gimmicks? How about DynaFlow, Buick’s term for their early automatic transmissions? The only vacuum cleaner around was the Electrolux. (used to clean that wonderful new wall-to-wall carpeting, which covered up those beautiful wood floors. “Jimmy, you cannot go driving dad’s car with that DyanFlow transmission and the knuckle buster on the wheel until you Electrolux this wall-to-wall carpet!”

Has anyone heard about Lumbago recently? Did a telethon, or perhaps a radiothon raise enough money to rid us of that horrible lumbago, or do they call it something different today?

Well, I have diddled around with all this just for fun and hope you enjoy reading of “stuff” from the “good old days” as much as I enjoyed writing it.