Change of Seasons--Visioning Time for Your Book?

Today it is wet outside, the start of our fall rains.  Everything looks saturated with September sun and now the moisture of this gentle rain, and it's a good day for sitting still. Something I don't do very often, but which my books crave at this time of year, as the heat of summer downshifts into colder weather.

Today I'm giving myself the gift of visioning.  Simply listening, and waiting.  Visioning brings

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What Makes a Chapter? What Makes a Scene?

A common question in my book-writing classes is the difference between chapters and scenes.  Both are pathways, bridges between one moment and the next.  But what makes a chapter work?  What makes a collection of scenes warrant it

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My Love (Hate) Affair with Storyboards

Storyboards, the visual map that filmmakers use, save my books. They are my primary pathway through my piles of material.  They are my best tool for organizing and structuring my novels, nonfiction books, and memoirs so that a reader can make sense of the story.

I love them. I couldn't make publishable books without them.

I also hate storyboards. They are like bossy mother-in-laws, telling me what I'm doing wrong. They point out exactly what I don't want to look at about my book-in-progress: where I have too much blah-blah-blah, where I've skipped a juicy opportunity for conflict, where I've stayed on track or gone on a tangent.

Essentially, it becomes clear as day where my book isn't yet working.

I teach storyboards, I have several hanging on my office walls, and I barely tolerate their linear know-it-all attitude. But I think they're gold.

The Golden Opportunity of Storyboards
A big question as you begin your book is this:  How are you going to know if your story flows when it's outside of your own inner worlds?

You can craft a draft, of course.  Get it typed out and printed, read through it.  But it's still hard to see if the idea you presented on page 31 will thread through to page 231 in a way your reader will track.

Some writers make long lists.  I do this too.  Facts to check, threads to follow.  The lists on my desk are as numerous as my printed drafts, after a while, and I start to go crazy under all that paper.  Here's where storyboards present a golden opportunity, like a good map out of a swamp.

A writer needs to know the structure of her story flow, the placement in time and space of each idea or plot point.  It's not just enough to churn out the words. The sequence matters, a sequence that readers can follow, and you need some method to clearly see sequence. Filmmakers use storyboards to provide this.

What's a storyboard look like?  Check out  this video where I demonstrate a storyboard.  

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Making Time for Your Writing--How Many Plates Are You Spinning?

Each choice we make, each change we bring into our lives, requires a certain level of attention.  Normal activities that are in a groove require a different kind of attention, because they are on a maintenance level.

But if we're tackling something new, like health or family changes, a shift in job responsibilities, a new exercise plan, new financial goals, it becomes like

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Vote for My New Book--NH Literary Award Finalist!

My new book, Your Book Starts Here, is now a finalist for the New Hampshire Literary Awards in the nonfiction category.  Pretty thrilling!
It's also up for a People's Choice award.  If you'd like to help me out by voting for Your Book Starts Here, please feel free to click here.   

Why Bad Decisions Make Good Stories--A Cure for Writer's Block

I'm on a writing sabbatical this week so I'm rerunning a favorite post from December 2009--hope you enjoy it!

Still life--may be nice to look at but not the stuff good stories are made of.

Bad decisions? Ah, there you have my interest.  Friction and fracas--they are the real meat of the plotting craft.  Is enough happening in your book?  Are you stuck in a "still life" that's beautiful but not going anywhere?

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The Image List : A Great Way to Get Your Creativity Juiced

In mid-summer, my writing often takes a dive.  I feel the laziness of summertime and don't really want to work on anything, much less do the hard work it takes to be a dedicated book author.

I set myself a schedule, I set a timer, and still the stuff doesn't come out on the page.  Maybe

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Transitioning to the Image Brain: Write a Poem about Your Book

Novelist and short-story writer Stuart Dybek (Coast of Chicago) was interviewed in Novel Voices about unique approaches to writing a book.

A most intriguing idea he presented was this

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That Tricky Balance of Show and Tell in Your Writing--How Do You Work with It?

One of my favorite quotes about showing versus telling comes from Anton Chekhov, who wrote, “Don’t tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.”  This seems to sum it up.  Readers get emotionally engaged in writing that demonstrates rather than delivers.

Not sure you agree?  Think of a book you may have read recently.  Did you skim any of it, skip some sections?  Go back and look at those pages, and perhaps you'll notice that the author went into her head a bit, perhaps.  Maybe she decided it was a good time to get on a small soapbox and explain something.  You lost interest, as a reader.  That's because telling contains less emotional charge, so we're less involved in the images of the story.

Showing brings image to the page.  It's a demonstration of scene through specific details. Most books need to have more showing than telling nowadays, partly because of our fast-moving culture.  We have a shorter attention span.  Even movies are changing to adapt to the new ways our brains work. 

That's not to say that telling isn't important too.  Once something is framed on the page by shown details, a small bit of telling can deepen the meaning, the understanding a reader gets from the scene.

This week I've been teaching a retreat with 11 writers from all over the world.  We're at Madeline Island School of the Arts, a beautiful art school located on restored farm on one of the Apostle Islands in Lake Superior near Bayfield, Wisconsin.  During class this week we were reading an excerpt from William Trevor's Cheating at Canasta, a short story about a woman who has Alzheimer's.  In this scene, the woman is playing cards with her husband, and although she can't really play cards anymore, he loves her so much that he helps her win.  After a page of showing this sad and beautiful relationship they have, Trevor ends with a line of "telling" that always knocks my socks off:  "I cheated at Canasta, and she won."  Because the telling is framed by earlier shown detail, we totally get it. 

So while telling at its worst brings an almost intellectual assessment of what happened, and showing at its best relies instead on sensory detail (smells, sights, sounds), telling is important. Telling lets us back away from the moment, giving us brief perspective on what's been shown.  While showing places the reader squarely in the moment, telling gives distance.

The key to showing is to demonstrate. This means not interpreting the things you are placing in front of us.

Robert Olen Butler, author of many wonderful stories and novels and instructor at this writing at Florida State University’s MFA program, talks about this in his book From Where You Dream. To learn how to show better, I like to pass along these tips from Butler's book.  They help me deliver emotion in its purest form.

Most important:  don’t dilute your moment with interpretation.

Butler observed that emotion can be delivered to a reader (shown, versus told) generally in five ways. Here is my translation of his terms:

• what I am feeling inside my body (goosebumps on my arm, itchy foot, tight throat)

• what I am observing in your gestures and movements (tearing a small paper napkin into bits, jiggling foot)

• specific memory

• fear, anticipation, desire (projections into future)

• sense selectivity (during moments of extreme emotion, all but one sense goes away)

During the developing stage of book writing, whenever I need to change a scene to more “showing,” I will go through Butler’s list and ask myself how I can bring in one of these.

Your Weekly Writing Exercise
This week, translate a passage that "tells" into one that "shows," using one of the above techniques. What happened?

Creating the Most Engaging Environment--Working the "Container" of Your Story

Writing teachers often cite the trio of event, character, and setting:  major elements to keep track of in your manuscript.  This trio is key to any genre, memoir, fiction, or nonfiction.

All books have something happening, illustrated by scene or anecdote.  That's event.

There's always someone this event happens to, be it fictional character, real-life narrator, or reader.

And there's always

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